Tick Tock - James Patterson [50]
As I looked around the empty office, I decided to do something smart. I sat and tried to think of what Emily Parker would do. I decided that she’d take a deep breath and look at the whole thing patiently, clinically, and without frustration. Though it seemed like a pretty impossible task, I decided to give it a shot. I put on a fresh pot of coffee and came back and cleared my desk.
The first thing I did was slip on my reading glasses and go through the files that Emily had compiled for me on copycat killers. One of them stood out prominently, a copycat serial killer in New York City during the early nineties.
His name was Heriberto Seda, and he was a deranged young man from East New York, Brooklyn, who had killed three and wounded four others with homemade zip guns. Notes to the police found near the victims claimed that he was the famous San Francisco Zodiac killer from the sixties transplanted to New York. When he was finally caught, he told police that he identified with the Zodiac because he’d terrorized a city and never been caught.
“I needed attention,” Seda said. “For once in my life, I felt important. I was lonely, in pain. I have no friends.”
With that premise in mind, I got a fresh cup of coffee and laid out the case files for the six incidents. Four of them had been in the mode of George Metesky, the Mad Bomber. Two of them had been approximations of the Son of Sam, and the latest had copied the Brooklyn Vampire, Albert Fish.
Could our guy actually identify with all three? I wondered.
I sipped coffee and sat back in my office chair, staring up at the drop ceiling and thinking about it. It didn’t seem likely. It seemed to me that although all three were violent weirdos, each was deranged in his own special way. The Mad Bomber had been a disgruntled employee of Con Edison, mostly seeming to seek revenge. The Son of Sam was more like Seda, a low-status publicity seeker who killed out of a twisted sense of empowerment, craving fame and attention. Albert Fish was more along the lines of a classic sadistic psychopath, like Ted Bundy, with no real interest in fame and who got off sexually on inflicting pain.
I lifted a pencil and twirled it between my fingers. How could one person not only seek revenge and twisted, freaky peekaboo thrills but also relish inflicting pain all at the same time?
He couldn’t, I thought, as I tried to stick the pencil into the ceiling and missed. It didn’t make any goddamn sense.
Chapter 56
THAT’S WHEN I PULLED the second-smartest move of my morning. Instead of just thinking like Emily Parker, I took out my cell and called the real McCoy.
“Hey, Em. Sorry to call you so early,” I said when she picked up. “I’ve been looking at your notes on that copycat Seda. He ID’d himself with the Zodiac, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Emily said, still groggy.
“Well, if our guy is doing the same thing, how can he feel empathy with all three New York nuts? I mean, one’s an organized technician, and one’s a disorganized catch-me-if-you-can loon. And the third one is a classic violent sadist. How can that be?”
“That is weird,” she agreed. After a yawn she said, “Maybe two of the modes are just a smokescreen for the real one.”
“But which one is real and which are the smoke?” I said.
“The only communication he made with you was about the bombings, right?”
“You’re forgetting the Son of Sam letter he sent me.”
“True, but that was almost a photocopy of Berkowitz’s letter.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Also, since we haven’t even seen any publicity-seeking taunts or manifestos sent to the media, I don’t think his heart is in copying Berkowitz.”
“I’d lean toward Metesky, too,” Emily said. “Our guy is definitely detail-oriented, and not only was the library bomb the first crime, it was the only one that didn’t have a copycat message.”
“It’s revenge,