“Hey, hey—take it easy. There’s no hurry. Take your time.”
Butts’s homely face crinkled with concern. “You just fainted,” he said.
“I’m fine,” Lee said, trying again to stand. He was sitting on the floor of the office. They had propped him up against the wall by the radiator.
“Here,” said Chuck, rolling over his own chair, an old but comfortable wooden captain’s chair.
“Thanks,” said Lee, lifting himself into it shakily. “How long was I out?”
“A couple of minutes,” Chuck said. “What happened?”
Lee suddenly remembered he had eaten nothing all day—black coffee in the morning, followed by the trip to the Bronx, and then once the depression seized hold of him, the thought of food was sickening. And then there was the Xanax—usually he took half of a one-milligram tablet, but today he had taken a whole one, spooked by the ferocity of the pain.
“It’s stupid, really,” he said sheepishly. “I haven’t eaten, and I—” He hesitated, unsure whether or not to mention the Xanax. He decided against it. He picked up the photo from Chuck’s desk and held it aloft.
There, her face washed of all color and life, was Ana Watkins.
“I know this girl,” he said. “Her name is Ana Watkins, and she was my patient.” He took a deep breath against the emotion rising in his throat, and continued. “She came to me a few days ago and said she thought she was in danger. I’ve been trying to reach her ever since, so when I saw this—” He clamped his jaw closed, determined not to surrender to his feelings. There would be time to mourn her later, but now what mattered was finding who did this to her.
“Jesus, Lee,” Chuck said. “No wonder it was a shock for you.”
“That’s rough,” Butts agreed. “What kind of danger?”
“She thought someone was following her.”
“Looks like she was right,” Chuck said.
“But what makes you think her death is connected with the first two victims?” Lee asked.
“That’s what we were hoping you would help with,” Butts replied. “We found the same kind of phony suicide note on her. Same thing as before—carefully wrapped so the water wouldn’t ruin it.” He fished around in the stack of photos, pulled one out, and handed it to Lee. It was neatly typed, on eight and a half by eleven paper, and it read, I have been a very bad girl. Bad things happen to bad girls. I should have taken the advice to get thee to a nunnery. Please forgive me.
Lee handed the photo back to Butts. “It’s him, all right,” he said, although up until this moment it had occurred to him that the killer might be a woman. But at the sight of that note, he felt with certainty that the perpetrator was a man.
“It doesn’t make sense, though, does it?” said Butts. “I mean, don’t these guys usually stick to one gender or another?”
“Usually,” said Lee, “but not always. There have been cases of serial killers who killed both men and women—David Berkowitz, for example.”
“Yes, but he killed couples,” Chuck pointed out. “This is a different kind of thing.”
“That’s true,” said Lee. “But he’s just one example—there are others. I think one of the worst mistakes we can make is to try to categorize this offender as fitting one rigid type or another, rather than looking at the specifics of his crimes to see what they tell us about him.”
Chuck rested his trim body against the windowsill and folded his arms, his taut muscles straining against the white cotton of his starched shirt. “Okay, so what do we know about him?”
“Where did they find … Ana?” Lee asked. Her name felt awkward, and he said it reluctantly.
“Up around Spuyten Duyvil,” Chuck said. Spuyten Duyvil (Dutch for “Whirlpool of the Devil,” named when New York was New Amsterdam, and under Dutch rule) was the thin slice of water between the mainland of the South Bronx and the island of Manhattan. The churning currents were notoriously treacherous there, as the waters of the Harlem River rushed to join the Hudson, already flowing south toward New York harbor.
“Who found her?” asked Butts, scratching his chin, where there was evidence of a five o’clock stubble, accentuating his already rumpled appearance.
“A couple of guys on the Columbia rowing crew,” said
Chuck. “They were out practicing when they saw her floating in the water, snagged on some rocks.”
The Columbia boathouse was perched on the bank of the slip of land jutting out into the eddies and fast-running currents of