Bleeders Read online

  “Gene! Drop it! Move away from her!”

  The woman stepped into the kitchen, and he thought he was hallucinating. This doughy housekeeper had Trisha’s face and Trisha’s voice. And she had a gun. She also had something dangling from her pinky. A wig?

  “Back away from Adele and drop the weapon! Right now! Pete! Get in here!”

  It was Trisha. His emotions did an abrupt u-turn. She was the one he wanted, not Adele. He wanted Trisha so much he could have cried.

  He heard footsteps coming fast. Who’s this Pete she’d called to? How many more people were here? He dropped the rolling pin on the tile floor, and it hit with a sharp crack. He ran full tilt at Trisha.

  “Stop!” she shouted.

  But he didn’t stop. He shoved her aside, knocking her into the door frame.

  “Stop! I’ll shoot!” she yelled at his back.

  But he didn’t stop and she didn’t shoot. He ran around the dining room table and whipped open one of the sliding patio doors. He could see the shape of a large man coming up fast. He rushed outside and slammed the door behind him.

  “Police! Stop!” The man’s words were muffled behind the glass. “Police!”

  Lassiter ran through the darkness, the only light coming from inside the apartment. He rushed to the edge of the patio and looked down at the street thirty stories below. He dug his fingers under his lapels, feeling for the plastic tube and needle. He yanked out the apparatus and flung it into the night.

  “Put your hands on your head! Get down on your knees!”

  The man was on the patio now. Outdoor floodlights flashed on revealing his beefy frame in black slacks and a white shirt, heavy black glasses, a big black gun in his hands.

  Lassiter glanced into the void and thought about jumping head first and ending it all. But suicide was only for those who had run out of options. He always made sure he had options.

  The man with the gun inched closer. He held it in both hands and kept it leveled on Lassiter’s chest.

  “Hands up! Higher!” the man barked. “Higher! On your knees!”

  Lassiter’s arms felt as if they weighed a ton. He could barely raise them.

  Trisha in that ugly yellow housecoat emerged from the glare, moving in on his left, the big man on his right. “Get down, Gene!” she yelled. “Get down now!”

  The sound of her voice, harsh yet tinged with emotion, brought uncontrollable tears to his eyes. He dropped to his knees with the force of gravity, but the only pain he felt was his longing for her.

  “On your belly!” the man yelled, but he didn’t wait for Lassiter to comply on his own. He came up from behind and pushed him forward with his foot. “Hands on top of your head! Do not move! Do not move!” The man kneeled on his back. Lassiter felt the gun barrel on his neck.

  He winced as the man wrenched his right arm behind his back. He turned his head, his cheek on rough concrete. His eyes sought out hers. “Trisha,” he whispered. “Trisha.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Trisha kept her gun trained on him as Pete cuffed him. She was stunned. Could Gene really be Drac? He had attacked Adele. He was a perp now, but it was hard to believe.

  Pete patted him down—torso, arms, legs—then rolled him over and checked his front. Gene’s face was wet with tears. He craned his neck to see around Pete, looking for her.

  Trisha shifted her position to keep her gun trained on him.

  Pete sat him up and stood over him as he spoke into his police radio. “This is Detective Warwick. Ten-twelve. Repeat, ten-twelve. I’ve got a homicide suspect in custody. I need backup now. Repeat, I need backup now.” He gave the dispatcher the address.

  Adele came up behind Trisha. “Oh, my God! What are you doing?”

  “Go back inside, Adele. Please. For your own safety.”

  “But is he…? Is he…?” Her eyes bulged as she looked down at Gene.

  “Adele, listen to me. Officers are on the way. I need you to go let them in. Do you understand?”

  Adele nodded in a daze as she walked toward the sliding doors. “I’ll let them in,” she mumbled. She couldn’t believe it. Neither could Trisha.

  Pete took Gene by the arm and hauled him up into a patio chair. He pulled up a chair for himself.

  “I’m going to read you your rights, sir. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” He enunciated every word.

  But Gene wasn’t paying attention. He stared at Trisha, his eyes red and wet.

  Pete recited the Miranda Warning. “Sir, you have the right to remain silent. You have the right…”

  Trisha stared at Gene as hard as he stared at her. He wanted something. It was in his eyes. Then he mouthed something, and her deepest fear gripped her like a giant hand. She told herself he hadn’t said what she’d thought, but then he repeated it, slower, more exaggerated.

  “Trisha,” he mouthed. “I… need… you.”

  Adele called to them from inside the apartment. “The police are here. They’re on their way up.”

  He mouthed it again and again as if it were his private SOS to her. “Trisha… I… need… you.”

  Tears flowed from his eyes.

  She wanted to look away. She wanted to run away. But she couldn’t. She held her gun tighter to stop the trembling. She kept telling herself she had a job to do.

  Chapter 19

  The walls were beige, and nothing hung from them except for a sign that said NO SMOKING in day-glo orange letters. The room was spacious, even with the long white conference table and twelve royal blue plastic chairs, nearly all of them occupied. But to Trisha it felt claustrophobic, as if the walls were closing in. She kept telling herself to calm down before she gave herself a panic attack, but this was the Tombs, the massive lockup in lower Manhattan, where they’d taken Gene Lassiter after his arrest last night. The complex was full of murderers, rapists, sexual deviants and God knows what else, but they weren’t the ones who bothered her. It was the serial killer who upset her. The serial killer who knew her. The serial killer she’d stupidly gone out on a date with. The serial killer who had told her that he needed her. She sat very still and hoped that no one could see what a nervous wreck she was.

  She sat between her boss Barry Krieger and Pete Warwick. Assistant Chief Colleen Franco was near the head of the table. Her boss, Chief Marcus Roberts, a stern-faced black man with a powerful chest and close-cropped, prematurely gray hair, sat at the head. Various police officials—most of them tired-looking, sallow-faced men—took up the other chairs. Trisha had just met them and hadn’t paid attention to their names. She was having a hard time concentrating on anything other than the fact that she was in the same building as the serial killer who might have killed her mother and she didn’t have her gun because she’d had to surrender upon entering. People were talking all around her, but to her it was just white noise. She couldn’t stop thinking about her date with Lassiter—the Cloisters, the restaurant, the long walk home, the brief time in her apartment. She had spent hours with him. He’d had many opportunities to attack her, times when they were alone in secluded places. But he hadn’t. Why? What saved her?

  “Agent McCleery? Agent McCleery? Are you with us?”

  Pete nudged her knee under the table.

  Colleen Franco was waving her manicure at Trisha to get her attention.

  Trisha blushed. “Sorry.”

  “I was saying,” Franco said, making a show of her annoyance, “that I thought I was through with you people.”

  “You people?” Trisha didn’t know what Franco was talking about, but she didn’t like her tone.

  “You FBI people. But Mr. Lassiter seems to be a bit attached to you.”

  Trisha’s heart pounded. “What do you mean?”

  “He wants to talk to you. Only you.”

  Trisha looke
d to Barry who nodded in agreement, his expression grave. A chill ran up her spine.

  “Has anyone talked to him?” she asked.

  “We’ve tried,” a man with a deeply lined face and a shock of white hair said. Trisha didn’t remember his name, but she knew he was an NYPD psychologist. “I spent an hour with him this morning. He’ll talk but not about anything of substance. He’s evasive and seems amused by the whole situation.”

  “Has anyone else talked to him?”

  A rail-thin, caramel-skinned Latino in his forties was just coming into the room. He raised his hand. “I talked to him.” He had a soft seductive voice.

  “Pull up a chair, Detective,” Chief Roberts said. It was an order not an invitation.

  Franco said, “To those of you who don’t know him, this is Detective Diego Soto.”

  Pete leaned into Trisha’s ear. “They call him ‘The Nutcracker.’ He’s got a rep for getting confessions in the box.”

  Trisha had heard of him. Soto was so good at what he did the department kept him on call to travel wherever in the city he was needed to break the hard cases. From what Trisha had heard, he seduced suspects with a relentlessly smooth, almost submissive demeanor.

  “Fill us in, Detective,” the chief said.

  Soto raised his eyebrows, producing accordion lines across his brow. “Well, we talked for a while. Just getting-acquainted stuff. Then he fell asleep. That’s not unusual for a suspect—it happens a lot. I woke him up, but he fell asleep again. I woke him up, he went back to sleep a third time. Just put his head down on the table and started sawing Zs. When I woke him up again, he apologized and said he couldn’t help it because I was ‘boring.’”

  “Did you get anything at all out of him?” the chief asked.

  Soto shook his head. “Nothing. He’s been in the box since four this morning. Whenever we leave him be, he falls asleep. He’s friendly and polite when he’s awake—almost cheerful—but he acknowledges nothing and tells us nothing.” Soto shook his head, doubt in his expression. “I’ll go another round with him, but I don’t know if it’ll do any good.”

  “Why do you say that?” Barry asked.

  “I’ve been in the box with hundreds of bad guys. The ones who confess all have one thing in common: they need something. Relief, redemption, bragging rights, something. Some need to say to themselves they showed me up, that they’re smarter than me. But this guy Lassiter, he doesn’t need anything. Except for Trisha McCleery. He kept asking about her. He told me he ‘needed’ her. Said it just like that.”

  “Did he say that right from the beginning?” Trisha asked, her legs shaking under the table.

  “Just about. I got here about seven this morning and observed him talking with the doctor, then took my turn around eight-thirty. The first hour was sleepy time, like I said. Then about quarter of ten he said he wanted his phone call, wanted to call his attorney. That was a lie.”

  “What happened?” Trisha said.

  “We brought in a land line and recorded it, of course. He called a cell phone registered to his business. It was a short call.”

  “Do we have a copy of that?” the chief asked.

  One of the sallow-faced men opened a laptop and typed in some commands. Trisha vaguely remembered that his name was Green-something—Greenblatt, Greenberg, Greengrass. The man turned the laptop around so it faced the Chief. A telephone ring sounded through the computer’s speakers, and the flat horizontal line on the screen became jagged.

  The call was answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?” A male voice.

  “Richard?” Lassiter’s voice.

  “Mr. Lassiter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Good morning. Do you remember that thing I wanted you to do? With the cell phone and the number?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “I want you to go ahead and do it.”

  “Okay, I’ll get right on it. Is there anything else you want me to do?’

  “No, that’s all. Just do what I told you and do it as soon as we hang up. Okay?”

  “Yes. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Good.”

  “Will I see you later, Mr. Lassiter?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Oh…”

  “I have to go now, Richard. Good bye.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Lassiter.”

  The sound of the phone being hung up spiked the line on the screen. The dial tone that followed was a constant wobble.

  “Who’s this Richard guy?” the Chief asked.

  “His name is Richard Shugrue,” Franco said. “Twenty-five years old. He’s Lassiter’s assistant.”

  The Chief pointed a finger as long and thick as a Cuban cigar at the laptop. “Any idea what they were talking about?”

  “We’ve picked up Shugrue for questioning,” Franco said. “They’re holding him at the Four. We have him marinating in a cell by himself, letting him think about things. I want Detective Soto to talk to him first.”

  Soto nodded. “I’m going there as soon as we finish up here.”

  “Do you think Mr. Shugrue is an accomplice?” the Chief asked. “Do we know anything else about him?”

  Trisha hesitated before she spoke. She didn’t want to say anything that would reveal her personal connection to Lassiter. It would be a major embarrassment for the Bureau and career suicide for her. But she couldn’t withhold potentially valuable information. “I met Shugrue once,” she said.

  Eyes widened around the table.

  “Lassiter is my father’s wealth manager. I’ve met him before socially. I ran into him on the street a few weeks ago and Shugrue was with him. Lassiter introduced us, but it was just a hello, nothing more.”

  “Well, what was your impression of him?” the Chief asked. “Speaking as a profiler.”

  “I was with him for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. That’s not much to go on.”

  The Chief’s eyes bored into hers from under the ridge of his brow. He wanted a better answer. “Is Shugrue a likely candidate to be Lassiter’s accomplice? I’m just asking for your impressions, Agent McCleery. I won’t hold you to it.”

  Yeah, I’ve heard that before, Trisha thought. Local cops always want profilers to be magicians who can pull serial killers out of their hats, and they whine like toddlers when they don’t get what they want.

  “You must have some ideas,” Barry said, prompting her to give them something.

  “Well, all I can say is that Shugrue fits the general—and I mean very general—profile of a serial offender. He’s white. He’s in his twenties. He seemed a bit shy, maybe even withdrawn, when I met him. But he was with his boss. I’d say most people hang back a bit when they’re with their superiors.”

  The Chief looked disgruntled, and Franco had contempt in her eyes.

  “I’d be glad to talk to Shugrue and then give you a better evaluation,” Trisha offered.

  “No need,” Franco said. “Detective Soto will handle Shugrue. We need you to talk to Lassiter.”

  Trisha stayed very still. The image of Lassiter holding the rolling pin over his head about to clobber Adele Cardinalli was frozen in her mind. Her fingers were icicles. “He asked specifically for me? No one else?”

  Detective Soto nodded. “He said he’d only talk to you. Said it several times. And for what it’s worth, he started saying it right after he made that phone call.”

  She glanced sideways at Pete, looking for support. He pressed his lips together, acknowledging her predicament.

  “Well,” she said, faking an air of professional neutrality, “I guess I’m going to be talking to him.”

  “Good,” the Chief said.

  “So where is he?” Trisha asked.

 
“We’ve got him in a segregated unit under 24/7 watch,” Franco said. “It’s on the other end of this floor.”

  Trisha froze. For some reason she didn’t expect him to be this close. Did he know she was here?

  “Do you want to see him now?” Franco said.

  No! she thought.

  “Sure,” she said. “No reason to wait.”

  She let out a slow breath and prayed her knees would support her when she stood up.

  The walls in the box were pale green, the fluorescent lighting hard on the eyes. A 4’x 8’ one-way mirror dominated one of the walls; the others were blank. A metal table bolted to the floor took up the middle of the room. Lassiter sat in a metal straight-back chair, fast asleep with his head on his arms. A yellow legal pad and a black felt-tip pen were the only things on the table. His wrists were handcuffed together, and a second set of cuffs tethered him to a heavy-gauge u-bolt screwed into the tabletop. Trisha was about to take the seat opposite him, but first she checked to see if his ankles were shackled. They weren’t. She wished they were.

  She thought he might be pretending to be asleep, but watching his slow rhythmic breathing convinced her that this was for real. She avoided looking into the one-way mirror. Barry, Pete, and Colleen Franco were on the other side along with a burly guard armed with a nightstick and a Taser. Other guards were out in the hallway, just a yell away. Trisha had been in situations like this countless times, locked in a room with a violent offender, interviewing him while being observed, but this was the first time she’d been nervous about being watched.

  She stared at him, hoping her presence would wake him up, but she could sense Franco smoldering on the other side of the glass, tapping her foot, arms crossed, getting more and more impatient. Barry was probably getting impatient, too. Pete had offered to come in with her, but she knew it would be better if she talked to Lassiter one-on-one. But now that she was sitting across from him, she was having second thoughts. She had to remind herself that this was her area of expertise, the reason she was part of this investigation. She had to suck it up and get on with it.