Chapter 11 #3
Crosby really was efficient running point.
Fifteen minutes after they were on their way to Bed-Stuy, he was back with coordinates.
Garcia and Pearson had picked up their victims’ scent at a diamond store, because somebody had seen a customer she’d remembered with two teenaged girls, both of them seeming “a little freaked out.” The woman had looked up the customer’s name and address—five blocks down the street from the diamond store and within walking distance of Adventure Park.
There was a construction site with a sand pit next door.
He lived in the basement of a walkup, and by the time Chadwick squealed his SUV to a halt and Joey found his stomach and his eyebrows, the other two units were in place.
Denison took point, Harding at her heels, while Pearson and Garcia took the back.
It was Chadwick, with his wandering eyes and amusement park brain that glanced up.
“Oh shit,” he said softly. “Oh shit.”
The girls, both of them, naked except for white cotton granny briefs with little flowers on them, were on the third-story ledge of the apartment building, backs against the wall, both of them terrified.
“Tell them to stay there,” Joey muttered.
“You tell them,” Chadwick snapped before giving his badge number and location to the local fire department.
So smart, Joey thought, before spotting his hand- and footholds, taking a running jump, and climbing the side of the crumbling building like a rock wall he just hadn’t had the chance to practice on yet.
GIDEON TRIED to remember his words as he communicated with the fire department.
Joey Carlyle in action was something special.
His hard, fit body scaled that wall like a lizard’s might, sinuous as a gecko, fluid muscle attaching itself to the nooks and crannies of the crumbling mortar and broken siding like he had claws instead of fingers.
A sound from the ground floor broke his trance, and he heard Denison call, “Watch him, he’s going out the side!”
Gideon sprinted into position as a wriggling body slithered through the window from the underground apartment, small and slender and naked in the late fall chill.
This isn’t the perp, he thought. This is another victim.
Still, he needed to stabilize the situation. He called out, “Law enforcement! Freeze!” as the figure ran through the narrow alley between buildings, helpless sobs issuing from a throat that sounded shredded with screaming.
“It’s not the perp!” Gideon shouted. “Talia, it’s a vic!”
“Got her!” Gail called, sprinting up alongside that shivering adolescent figure and—instead of tackling, placing her body between the shaking victim and Garcia, who was coming up behind.
“Fire department and EMTs are on the way,” Gideon called, and then, inexorably, his vision was called up. “Denison, Harding, our girls are on the ledge…. Fuck!”
That last was because as he’d looked up, he’d seen Joey scrabbling onto the ledge with the girls on it to find his footing just as another figure, fiftyish or so, male, in a cardigan and corduroy pants, of all things, fell halfway out of the once-sealed window that the girls had crawled out of.
Gideon couldn’t hear much from the three-story distance, but he could almost make out shouting, ranting, spittle flicking from the attacker’s lips as the girls huddled on their ledge, unable to move farther away because of a crenelation they couldn’t step around, and so close to the attacker they could probably smell his breath.
Joey was edging on the ledge from the other side as the fire department, sirens down like Gideon had demanded, pulled onto the street.
They couldn’t use the ladder, Gideon thought, because their attacker was up there, a knife in his hand, lashing out toward the girls.
Joey shouted something, and the man glanced at him but kept his focus on the two victims, seemingly too crazed to recognize a threat.
And then, while Gideon watched, horrified, Joey ceased to be a threat.
The ledge under his feet broke off, and he lunged for the window as he fell, seizing on it with one hard hand and dangling like a heroine in a Stallone movie.
Now he had their perpetrator’s attention.
Gideon had his weapon out before the man could bring the knife down on Joey’s head, and the shot rang out before he knew he’d aimed.
Overbalanced, the body toppled over and out the window, landing on the pavement with a sick sort of thud/crackle/plop as firefighters setting up the emergency airbag dodged out of the way.
Gideon was the one who broke the stunned silence by shouting, “They’re still up there! Fuck the body and get that thing out!”
It took minutes to position but only seconds to inflate, and Gideon looked up and shouted, “Tasha! Arietty! Hold on! Carlyle, hold on!”
But the ledge wasn’t that strong to begin with, and the smaller of the two girls, the one closest to Joey, lost her footing as the mortar crumbled.
She would have fallen on top of the laboring firemen, but Carlyle caught her with his free hand, and for a perilous moment they dangled, while Gideon’s heart threatened to freeze in his chest.
There was a whoomp! Almost as loud as an explosion, and the airbag was in place.
As Gideon stared up at the third floor, spots swimming in front of his eyes, he felt rather than saw the others drawing near.
Pearson had handed off her victim to the EMTs to be checked over and given aid for shock and, God, everything else, and together, he and his team stood, eyes glued to the spectacle in fear.
But the airbag was the climax. With some coaching, Joey flung the girl holding on to his hand out and then let her go.
She fell onto her back, like she was supposed to, after windmilling her limbs.
Arietty was pulled off the bag, and then Tasha went, a simple jump, her descent more controlled and less panicked.
Carlyle struggled for another handhold, found it, and then pushed off the wall, executing a neat back flip before landing solidly on his backside, limbs extended.
Next to him, Gideon heard Clint muttering, “Fucking show-off,” and Natalia say, “I’ll fucking kill him.”
Garcia said, “Righteous!” and Gail said, “Not one of you tell Crosby about that. Not one.”
And Gideon almost passed out, because Carlyle was getting helped off the bag, and suddenly he could breathe again, and the oxygen made him dizzy.
DEbrIEFING THE victims at the hospital was painful.
Gideon could see them reliving that moment on the bus, when they went from “happy and excited” for something as simple as a school dance—one where they’d be welcomed and feel as though they belonged—to the absolute simplicity of terror.
Crosby had sent them footage of one Morten Donald Johns thrusting a knife against Tasha’s ribs and whispering in Arietty’s ear.
“What did he say to you there?” Natalia asked softly. “We just need to know what the threat was.”
“He said,” Arietty whispered, “that he’d gut her. He’d stick the knife through her ribs to her heart.”
“That’s really scary,” Natalia told her, and Gideon could see the mom in her coming out for this. “You were really brave.”
“Is Greta all right?” Arietty asked, her voice breaking. “She was there before us… she was in a bad way. He’d… he’d killed her friend, and she was… we had to keep her from… from….”
“Hurting herself?” Gail asked. Both the women had seen their roles and moved in quickly, surrounding the girls with nonthreatening energy and genuine kindness.
“Yeah.” Tasha started to cry then, and she and Arietty clung together for a moment while the nurses and a trained psychologist moved in.
Their unit met outside the glass and briefly discussed what Crosby had turned up, as well as what they knew about the new victim.
Morten D. Johns had been, until two months earlier, a mild-mannered accountant who lived with his mother.
The old woman, by all accounts, was a piece of work—bitter, vitriolic, prone to homo- and trans-phobic outbursts on the regular.
Morten was heard to echo her while at the same time accessing porn on the internet that was…
well, contrary to her beliefs was one way to put it.
“Hot tranny on tranny action” was how the internet site put it, and while Gideon wasn’t one to kink-shame, he knew an unhealthy fixation on something forbidden when he saw it.
And then Morten’s mother had died. He had been left alone, which was apparently a bad thing.
All that repressed self-loathing, all that screaming id, none of the social skills that some decent parenting might have given him, and Morten was abducting his favorite candy from buses and—now that the nearly vacant walkup was all his—he was doing with them what he wanted.
Greta was the nearly naked victim who had escaped from an impossibly small window, gone screaming into the alley, and—fortunately for her—straight into Gail Pearson’s arms. She’d needed sedation and clothes and to be treated for everything from dehydration to the consequences of being violently assaulted for several weeks without aftercare.
She was currently on twenty-four-hour watch, with a seasoned rape counselor crocheting in her room and another one prepared to take her shift.
Maybe in a couple of weeks, the SCTF would interview her to finish their paperwork, but that was going to wait until she was well enough to talk.
When she was, they’d tell her what they’d told Tasha and Arietty when they’d asked about the fate of one Morten D. Johns.
Gideon’s shot to Johns’s forehead had killed him immediately, but even if it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have survived the three-story headfirst fall.
And even if he had, when the airbag had been deployed on top of the body, it had broken every bone he possessed in the series of mini explosions that activated the giant airbag in seconds.