Carnage (5 page)

The Pontiac skidded about in the snow, the back of the vehicle slewing across the road, forcing Lamar to slow right down in order to regain control of the car.

Snowflakes continued to fall by the million.

The roads were by now entirely fleece-lined and every building wore a white cap. Lamar called Doris back.

‘Doris, I need your help,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘Meet me at 158 East 122nd Street, quick as you can. I think I’ve found our man.’

‘Huh? What are you saying?’

‘The kid who was in the closet with Russell Rod. It’s him, Doris.’

‘Him what? Calm down and tell me what’s going on.’

‘He lied. He said he saw Russell Rod come in and shoot himself just before the door swung shut. It’s not true. DeRoy is a troubled kid, he’s been to five different schools
and been expelled from all of them. And three of those schools are where the attacks have taken place! It was him – he was the gunman every time! Russell Rod, the boy from Queens and Mike Simmons, all of them were victims, not the killers!’

‘What? You mean he was the one … But how?’

‘The hood, Doris! All three gunmen were wearing hoods to hide their faces. The handful of witnesses who thought they recognised them based it on their clothes every time. But it was DeRoy wearing their clothes! That’s why the supposed gunmen shot themselves out of view of everyone else.’

Lamar braked suddenly, spotting a red light at the last minute. The Pontiac skidded off course again, sliding into the middle of the intersection. Two vans started honking their horns. Lamar carried on explaining his theory, while slowly reversing back behind the line.

‘Chris DeRoy may be crazy, but he’s smart too. He played the victim so he could mow down his classmates and teachers, then he snuck off to where the guy whose identity he’d stolen was waiting for him. They changed clothes, and then he shot him through the head.’

‘I guess that makes sense …’

‘Of course it does! The first time, at the Harlem high school, he arrived early in the morning with Russell Rod. He made him go into the closet while he went around shooting at everybody, wearing Russell’s clothes. When
he was done, he went back into the closet and swapped the clothes back, which is why it was a couple of minutes before the gun went off.’

‘Machiavellian …’

‘Doris, come meet me as quick as you can. I don’t want to call the local cops. You never know how a kid like DeRoy might react if he sees a heap of police cars screeching up to his door.’

‘I’m on my way, Lamar.’

The windscreen wipers cleared the layer of snow that was slowly building up on the Pontiac’s windscreen. For ten minutes, Lamar had been sitting outside the three-storey building where Chris DeRoy and his parents lived.

Doris walked along the pavement towards him, accompanied by a stocky Puerto Rican-looking man sporting a bushy moustache. Lamar got out of the car to meet them.

‘D’Amato was twiddling his thumbs so I brought him along,’ explained Doris.

‘It’s the house across the road there. Doris, come with me, we’ll take the front door. D’Amato, you go round the back, in case he tries to get out that way. We’ll give you a couple of minutes to get in position.’

D’Amato nodded and jogged away, leaving deep
footprints along the snow-covered pavement.

While they waited, Doris tried to pick holes in her colleague’s line of argument, though she had to admit it was pretty convincing.

‘How could Chris DeRoy have gotten Russell Rod to come to school early and follow him into this closet then later gotten Mike Simmons to follow him down to that underground room?’

‘He could have told them anything. That he had a surprise for them, or wanted them in on a joke or some trick he was going to play – who knows?’

‘But nothing came up in the toxicology reports, so he can’t have drugged them to get them to stay put while he went out shooting his classmates. There were no marks found on their wrists to indicate they’d been tied up either.’

Lamar stared back at his partner. He put two fingers together in the shape of a gun and mimed shooting himself in the head. He’d thought of everything. And for every question he’d asked himself, he’d come up with a logical answer.

‘First off he hit them over the head to knock them out,’ he replied. ‘Then he took off wearing their clothes and went on a killing spree. He picked these guys out because they were loners, which made them easy targets, but also because they had a similar build to him. When he came back, he shot them with a large-calibre bullet in the same place he’d struck them earlier, to cover up the evidence.

It all fits. The first time, here in Harlem, he arrived early with Russell Rod and led him into the closet. He hit him once, maybe more, on the back of the head with the butt of the gun, in exactly the spot where he’d later put a bullet through his brain. Then he went all the way downstairs, waiting for the place to fill up before heading back up on a trail of destruction. Once he’d done the job, he hid in the corner where I found him, shitting himself to make it look like he was terrified.’

Doris shook her head.

‘Seems a bit much to me. Would a seventeen-year-old kid really do something that twisted?’

Lamar leant towards her.

‘Don’t forget he’s been kicked out of school four times! He’s a … troubled character. He’s been plotting his revenge for months, figuring out a way to get back at the schools until he came up with this screwed-up plan.’

Lamar glanced down at his watch.

‘OK, we’re good to go – D’Amato must be in position now.’

They walked up the front steps to the row of mail boxes. A label on one of them read ‘DeRoy’. First-floor apartment.

They crept quietly up to the only door off the first-floor landing. Lamar pounded on the door before stepping
aside. Doris positioned herself on the other side of the door frame.

A woman’s voice called out from inside, ‘Who is it?’

Doris signalled to Lamar that she would do the talking.

‘Police, ma’am!’ she replied. ‘Open up right away.’

The door opened a crack, held back with a chain. A puffy face appeared in the opening. Doris held up her police badge, while Lamar kept his hand behind his back, ready to pull out his weapon if necessary.

‘We need to talk to Chris urgently.’

The woman’s round face creased with worry.

‘What’s he done?’

‘Is he there, ma’am?’ Doris pressed.

She shook her head.

‘He went out twenty minutes ago.’

‘He tell you where he was going?’

‘No, that’s not his style. He took a big bag with him, told me he wouldn’t be back tonight.’

Lamar stepped in.

‘Isn’t he supposed to be recovering from his traumatic experience?’

The mother spat back, ‘Sure, it shook him up! But he’s allowed to leave the house, isn’t he? He’s gotta get some air sometimes, buck himself up.’

Lamar moved closer and looked the plump woman in the eye.

‘Can I come in and take a look at his room?’

She was shaking with rage.

‘No, no you cannot! This is my home!’

Lamar let it go, turning to Doris and taking her aside.

‘Go tell D’Amato what’s going on and get me a search warrant,’ he told her. ‘Explain everything to the judge, get him a copy of Chris DeRoy’s school records and tell him to put a warning out to the mayor’s office and the NYPD. We need to keep a watch on the two other schools before he strikes again.’

Doris nodded and hurried back downstairs.

Lamar turned back to the half-open door.

‘I’m going to wait here until the warrant arrives,’ he announced, pointing to the stairs.

The teenager’s mother frowned, paused for a moment and then shut the door.

Ten minutes later, she flung the door wide open and stood there, dressed in a dirty tracksuit.

‘You’d better come in then, since you will anyway when your damned piece of paper arrives.’

Lamar stood up and followed her into the apartment. It was a wreck, with wallpaper hanging off the walls. The only thing that had had any money spent on it was a large TV set, perched on a wobbly table in front of a worn-out sofa. An eighties soap was on with the sound turned off.

‘His room’s down the end of the hall. You can look, but don’t touch anything. He’d give me hell if he knew.’

Lamar resisted telling her it was very unlikely her son would be coming back to lay into her. He walked down a dark corridor to reach a door covered in a Slayer poster.

The narrow room looked just like the rest of the apartment: filthy and messy. The duvet had been thrown on the floor, surrounded by music magazines and pirated CDs. Lamar scanned the room, stopping in front of an open closet. T-shirts had been pulled out and flung on the floor. Lamar knelt down to get a closer look at something shining at the bottom of the closet.

When he realised what it was, his heart started thumping.

He gulped.

They would have to expect the worst.

Several boxes were crammed in side by side. They had been emptied in a hurry, a few bullets left nestling among the clothes. Lamar picked up a 9mm cartridge.

Chris DeRoy had gone out carrying enough ammunition to shoot half of Harlem. How had he got hold of it all?

‘Mrs DeRoy!’ the detective called.

She skulked into the room.

‘Yeah?’

‘Were you aware that your son was keeping boxes full of bullets in his bedroom?’

She looked at him, as if hoping he would provide the answer.

‘Well, er … I’m not surprised,’ she finally admitted. ‘He loves guns. He reads tons of books about them.’

Lamar looked around, shifting the magazines strewn over the floor with his foot.

‘Can’t see any here. Did he get them from a library?’

‘Now that I couldn’t tell you. You’d have to ask him. Why do you want to know, anyway? What’s he been up to? Will you just tell me—’

‘Does your son own any firearms?’

‘How should I know?’

‘You don’t know if Christian has a gun?’

She was flustered.

‘No … I mean, I know he’s into that stuff, that’s all. I don’t think he has a gun, but I couldn’t say for sure, with the kind of people he hangs out with …’

‘What people?’

She waved her arms about.

‘I don’t know their names! But you can tell by looking at them they’re no good.’

Lamar paused.

‘Do you mean …’ he began, ‘they’re black kids? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘No! Not at all. The opposite, actually. They’re all white, and proud of it, you know? Some kind of militants, you might say. They don’t come up here, but they sometimes hang out in the cellar downstairs.’

‘There’s a cellar here?’

‘Oh, just a little one. Chris likes to go down there when he has people over.’

‘Do you have the key?’

She scowled, before nodding.

‘This way.’

She handed him two brown keys and told him how to get down there. Lamar went out of the building and found a door under the front steps, which he opened with the first key.

The steps quickly descended into darkness. Lamar fumbled about until he found the light switch. A bare bulb lit a long, damp corridor, with four padlocked doors leading off it. Lamar found the right one and walked closer, gripping his Walther P99. Though the air was cool below ground, Lamar could feel sweat dripping down his back.

The padlock was fastened. Christian DeRoy couldn’t be inside.

The detective unlocked the door and walked into the musty cellar. He took the small torch out of his coat pocket and turned it on, sweeping its narrow beam over the gloom.

The first thing he saw was a pile of wooden crates, which had been used to make a table and stools. Candles
had been left to melt down, spilling their wax over the table. There were stacks of back issues of gun-enthusiast magazines on the floor.

The beam picked out empty beer bottles and cigarette stubs.

Lamar bent his wrist to tilt the shaft of light upwards.

It flashed over a poster with the slogan ‘Black and Hispanic scum out!’.

He had to step back to get a proper look at what he saw next. A huge flag hanging on the opposite wall.

An enormous blood-red banner. With a white circle in the middle. And a swastika turning at its centre.

Newton Capparel got out of his car and made a beeline for Lamar. It was dark at six o’clock and the glow of the streetlamps stained the snow, making it look as though the whole neighbourhood were covered in orange peel.

‘I got your message,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

The detective stood back to let D’Amato walk past carrying a box filled with items taken from Christian DeRoy’s bedroom. A stream of people went in and out, searching the scene and sorting through anything of significance.

Lamar replied calmly, ‘The three high-school massacres were a set-up. It’s like I said on the phone: Chris DeRoy’s our man in all three cases.’

‘But he’s just a kid.’

‘Yes, but he’s also an extremist. A fascist, a neo-Nazi. And I don’t think he’s alone either. Seems there’s a whole bunch of them. I just hope he hasn’t signed them all up for his next rampage.’

Capparel nodded towards the three detectives busily searching the apartment.

‘Before you took the liberty of giving the order to search the premises, I’d have appreciated a call, Gallineo. And I would have warned you against it. We should have staked the place out and waited for the kid to come home, instead of taking over the whole neighbourhood. He’ll turn and run the minute he sees all this!’

Lamar pointed to both ends of the road.

‘Maddox and Rod are in position at either end of the street, keeping lookout. They’ve got photos of Christian. It’s dark and, with all this snow, he isn’t going to see us before we spot him.’

‘So there’s six of you here! Jeez. The two of us need to talk once we’ve wound this up. Instead of sending detectives out to waste their time, I’m going to have a photograph of this kid circulated to all the cops on patrol in the area. That’ll be a damn sight more useful.’

With that, he turned on his heel and left before Lamar could respond, jumping into his car and driving off angrily.

This semi-success had not been Newton Capparel’s idea, and Lamar could see it pissed him off.

He sighed and looked around for Doris. She had just loaded another crate into the van.

‘Doris, I need your help again.’

‘At your service, boss.’

He turned and gestured to the apartments looking onto the street.

‘We need to talk to the neighbours. Teenagers, especially. Do they know Chris DeRoy? What can they tell us about him? And, most importantly, can they give us the names of anybody he hangs out with? Anybody at all.’

She nodded, looking a little downbeat.

‘It’ll be a lot of work.’

‘Ask D’Amato to give you a hand. I think we’re first in line this time.’

‘What are you going to do? You must have some kind of plan if you’re getting out of here.’

Lamar smiled.

‘I’m going to sink into a white world,’ he said, holding his hands out in front of him to catch the snow. ‘A spotless universe for “the pure”.’

Lamar headed back to base and sat down beside the phone, rubbing his hands together to warm them up. There were a few things he needed to check out.

His theory of a single killer in the shape of Chris DeRoy was looking more and more likely, but he needed to be sure
he could apply it to all three attacks. As far as the Harlem high school was concerned, he was satisfied it all added up.

He took out the file on the Queens massacre.

The killer had worn a hood that covered his face, but several students thought they recognised him as one of their classmates by his distinctive clothes. Up to that point, it tallied with Harlem.

The gunman had fled after the attack. The police had identified him an hour later, based on the statements of a few witnesses who thought they recognised the denim jacket, plastered in heavy-metal badges. He’d ‘committed suicide’ with a bullet through the head.

So that was how Christian DeRoy had got close to his victim: they shared the same taste in music. The police would have to be careful not to generalise in order to avoid a media storm railing against the influence of goth culture and heavy-metal bands. Rap had been under the spotlight in the eighties, and the press always liked to find a new scapegoat, or at least tar a whole group of people with the same brush.

After the Queens shooting, Chris DeRoy had rushed back to his waiting victim, who probably lay unconscious. He had swapped the clothes back as usual, before killing him, making it look like suicide.

The third massacre had proceeded along the same lines before DeRoy had gone down into that underground room, where Mike Simmons was no doubt already in place.

Lamar remembered the door with the broken chain and padlock. A city worker had turned up later to explain it was a way down to the sewers, for maintenance. That was written in one of the reports Lamar had read. The padlock and chain had been sent off for analysis, but the results hadn’t come back yet.

Lamar picked up the receiver and dialled the number of the Manhattan forensic unit. He was put through to two different people before eventually getting hold of Kathy Osbom. The pair had known each other for twelve years, having joined the NYPD at the same time.

It turned out Kathy knew all about the padlock and chain. Although her team wasn’t involved in the investigation, she was following the case as it evolved. So far they had only tested for fingerprints, which hadn’t revealed anything. The next stage would take some time, but Kathy didn’t hold out much hope of uncovering vital clues.

Lamar asked her if it was possible for someone to have escaped through the exit, slipping their hand back round the door to pull the chain across behind them. Kathy had to admit she wasn’t sure. It sounded plausible, but they would need to test the idea out to be certain.

Lamar thanked her, dialling the number for the FBI right after he’d hung up. He got straight through to one of his contacts at the Bureau, and was pleased to find him still at work at dinner time.

Lamar explained he needed to take a look at the Bureau’s
reports on neo-Nazi activists in New York. He knew the FBI kept a close eye on these sorts of militants as part of the fight against terrorism, especially since the Timothy McVeigh case. For some time, the FBI had been criticised for focusing only on Islamist extremism, seeming to forget the threat posed by the far right, in spite of the damage it had already caused. The truth, as Lamar knew, was that the Bureau was still adding to its files on a regular basis.

The agent, Clark Fenton, agreed to send over everything he had as soon as he could, and urged Lamar to put a call out to all the precincts in New York since most of the FBI’s intelligence came from police officers on the ground.

Lamar spent the next two hours trying to put out a request for information through his superiors at the NYPD. He was held back not by refusals but by the fact that most of them had gone home. It was almost nine.

The detective was polishing off a burrito when the fax machine started spitting out paper. It was a circular, instructing members of every precinct to contact Lamar Gallineo immediately should they have any recent intelligence on persons or groups suspected of involvement in neo-Nazi or similar activities, or of sharing such ideologies.

His computer let out a little beep, alerting him to a new email.

Clark Fenton had got back to him as promised.

‘Synchronicity,’ mumbled Lamar, opening the attachment.

Fenton had sent a summary of all known neo-Nazi activity in the city of New York and surrounding areas.

It named several small cells, but drew particular attention to two larger groups, described as ‘alarming’.

Lamar read through the document, making the occasional note but not convinced any of it was of much use to him.

Three of the smaller clusters were predominantly made up of teenagers, who had usually been manipulated, or ‘recruited’. Two of these operated out of Manhattan: one from the Alphabet City area to the south, the other from the Upper West Side. The first group met in its members’ apartments, but hadn’t actually committed any recorded acts. They used their meetings to exchange opinions and strengthen each other’s views, according to the report’s writer. The second group was harder to pin down; they’d been seen in Central Park after dark and in several disused subway stations, most often the one on 91st Street.

All of them were suspected of trafficking of one sort or another, usually drugs, on a fairly small scale and without much organisation. Occasionally they ventured into firearms, which the report judged to be ‘a more serious issue’.

Lamar leant back in his seat.

Another cop by the name of Arnold was sitting at his desk on the other side of the room, head down, putting together a report.

Lamar rubbed his face slowly, as his ideas crystallised and became more conclusive.

Chris DeRoy often had his ‘friends’ over to the cellar at his place. That suggested they didn’t live far from him. Whether coming from Alphabet City or the Upper West Side, it was a short bus or subway ride to Harlem.

But a trainee fascist living in Harlem? Pretty ironic, given that the neighbourhood had such a strong black identity. No doubt it was his parents, and not him, who had chosen the area.

Lamar looked over at Doris’s empty chair. She hadn’t come back. It was a hell of a lot of work getting statements from all the neighbours and you often had to wait until people came home in the evening to be able to question them all.

The detective checked his watch: nine thirty. Doris would probably be back at her apartment by now, snuggled up watching the wrestling.

There was a noise behind him. As he turned round to see what it was, he caught a glimpse of Newton Capparel charging past. Lamar rushed over to the doorway and saw Capparel hurtling down the stairs.

‘What’s up?’ Lamar called after him.

Newton glanced up at him.

‘An officer on patrol spoke to a guy in a grocery store. He says he saw Christian DeRoy late this afternoon, not far from his apartment.’

‘Is he absolutely sure it was him?’

‘He recognised the kid as soon as he saw the photo!’ Capparel gloated.

It had been his idea to send out patrols with pictures of the suspect. If the tactic led to DeRoy’s arrest, he’d get all the glory, and all the time Lamar had spent raking through the details would be forgotten.

Capparel sprinted off again and was almost out of sight when Lamar leant over the handrail and called down to him,‘What was he doing at the store?’

Capparel waved away the question without looking up.

‘Oh, buying candles or something.’

Lamar froze. Candles. A hint of a smile played across his lips.

It might be nothing, but he had to check it out for himself. With Christian DeRoy carrying enough weapons to wage a war, he couldn’t afford to wait and see.

Doris walked in less than forty minutes later, certain of finding her colleague at his desk even at this late hour. Lamar would sleep in the office if he was working on a particularly pressing case.

She wanted to give him the news herself, face to face. She knew he would leap on it when he heard. But he was nowhere to be seen, and his stuff had gone too.

She noticed Arnold working in his corner and went over.

‘You seen Lamar lately?’

Arnold nodded.

‘He left less than an hour ago. Looked like he was in a hurry.’

‘Know where he went?’

‘No. Do you need him for something?’

Doris put her hands on her hips.

‘Yeah, I do. The kid’s mom talked. She told me her son got a call right before he rushed out.’

Arnold stared vacantly back at her. She carried on, for her own benefit.

‘I’ve just found out where the call was made from.’

Arnold could see now she wasn’t just rambling, but had something on her mind that she desperately needed to share.

‘It came from a telephone in the hall at East Harlem Academy. Just after Lamar left there this afternoon.’