“Which does what?”

“Targets the spouses of soldiers and retired vets. Two basic swindling schemes. You got a soldier overseas. The spouse—usually a wife—is stateside, having a tough time economically. So you get the wife to take out a balloon mortgage on the house. Small initial payments, then the rate resets to what they can’t afford. LFX takes the house, flips it, rakes in the bucks.”

“Legal?”

“Mostly. Except there are special rules about foreclosing on a soldier on active duty that they didn’t follow. That’s where I come in.”

“And the second scheme?”

“LFX would identify the widow of a vet who’s living in a nice house, fully paid off. They’d persuade her to take out a small reverse mortgage. No big deal, done all the time. But then LFX would force a default on the reverse mortgage for some bogus reason: nonpayment of homeowner’s insurance or some other trumped-up or trivial violation of terms. Just enough of an excuse to take the house, sell it, and keep an obscene amount of the proceeds as late fees, fines, interest, penalties, and other jacked-up charges.”

“In other words, these two were the scum of the earth,” said D’Agosta.

“You bet.”

“Must have had a lot of enemies.”

“Yes. In fact, some time back there was a mass shooting in this very building—a soldier who lost his home came in and aired out the place before committing suicide.”

“Oh yeah,” said D’Agosta. “I remember that. So you think the two were killed by a victim seeking revenge?”

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis, and that’s what I thought when I first got the call.”

“But you don’t think so now.”

“No. It seems pretty clear to me it’s the same psycho who did those other three headless people: a vigilante type punishing rich dirtbags. You know, like what the articles in the Post are saying.”

D’Agosta shook his head. As much as he couldn’t stand that bastard Harriman, his theory was looking more and more likely. He glanced at Pendergast and couldn’t help but ask: “What do you think?”

“A great deal.”

D’Agosta waited, but it was soon clear that would be the extent of his comment. “It’s insane. You got two people decapitated in the middle of the day in a busy office building. How’d the killer get past security, how’d he get into the office, how’d he kill them, cut their heads off, and get out—with nobody seeing anything? Seems impossible, like one of those locked-room mysteries by—what’s his name?—Dickson Carr.”

Pendergast nodded. “In my opinion, the important questions are not so much who the victims were, why they were selected, or how the murder was done.”

“What else is there to a murder than the who, why, and how?”

“My dear Vincent, there’s the where.”

33

THE SOUND ENGINEER clipped the lavalier mike to Harriman’s shirt, adjusted it, and then retreated to his station. “Speak a few words, please,” he called over. “In a normal voice.”

“This is Bryce Harriman,” Harriman said. “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…”

“Okay, we’ve got good levels.” The engineer gave the producer a thumbs-up.

Harriman looked around the studio stage. A television studio always amused him: 10 percent of it was done up to look like somebody’s living room, or an anchor’s desk, and the rest of the space was always a huge mess, all concrete floor and hanging lights and green screens and cameras and cable runs and people standing around watching.

This was the third show he’d done this week, and each had been bigger than the one before. It was like a barometer of how successful his article, and its follow-ups, had been. First, there was the local New York station—taped, not live—that had given him a two-minute spot. Next had been an appearance on The Melissa Mason Show, one of the most popular talk shows in the tristate area. But then the news of the double murders had broken—murders that fit his predictions to a T. And now he was appearing on the big kahuna: America’s Morning with Kathee Durant, one of the biggest nationally televised morning shows in the country. And there was Kathee herself, sitting not two feet away from him, getting her face touched up during the commercial break. The Morning set was done up to look like an upscale breakfast nook, with American naive paintings on the fake walls and two wing chairs with doily antimacassars facing each other, a large-screen monitor in between.

“Ten seconds,” said somebody from the dim recesses of the stage. The makeup person ducked away, and Kathee turned toward Harriman. “It’s great to have you here,” she said, flashing her million-dollar smile at him. “It’s such an awesome story. I mean, awesome.”

“Thanks.” Harriman smiled back. He watched as a number counted down on a digital screen, then a red light appeared on one of the three cameras pointed at them.

Kathee turned her dazzling smile toward the camera. “This morning we’re lucky to have with us Bryce Harriman, the Post reporter who—people are saying—has done what the NYPD could not: figure out the motivation of the killer who’s been dubbed ‘the Decapitator.’ And in the wake of the recent double murder—which fits exactly with Mr. Harriman’s theory, first described in an article he published Christmas Day—the story really seems to have touched a nerve. Celebrities, millionaires, rock stars, even mob bosses have begun fleeing the city.”

As she spoke, the monitor between them—which had been displaying the America’s Morning logo—came alive with brief video clips of people getting into limousines; private planes taxiing on runways; familiar faces rushing past paparazzi, surrounded by security entourages. The clips were familiar: Bryce had seen them all before. He’d seen it happening in person, as well. People, powerful people, were deserting Manhattan like rats fleeing a sinking ship. And all because of him. Meanwhile, Joe Q. Public was watching it all unfold with the sick thrill of at last seeing the one percenters get theirs.

Kathee turned to Bryce. “Bryce, welcome to America’s Morning. Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for having me, Kathee,” Harriman said. He shifted slightly, presenting his best profile to the camera.

“Bryce, your story is the talk of the town,” Kathee told him. “How did you happen to figure out what has been eluding the best minds of New York’s finest for what seems like weeks?”

Harriman felt a thrill course through him as he remembered Petowski’s words: Reporters search their entire lives for a story like this. “Oh, I can’t take all the credit,” he said with fake modesty. “Really, I was just building on the groundwork that the police had already laid.”

“But what was the, how can I put it, the lightbulb moment?” With her perky nose and blond wave, she looked just like a Barbie.

“Well, there were a lot of theories flying through the air at the time, you’ll recall,” Bryce said. “I just didn’t buy into the notion that there was more than one murderer at work. Once I’d made that realization, it was just a question of looking for what all the victims had in common.”

She glanced over at a teleprompter, which was scrolling lines from Harriman’s first article. “You said that the victims were all ‘utterly lacking in human decency.’ That ‘the world would be better off if they were dead.’”

Harriman nodded.

“And cutting off their heads is, you believe, a symbolic gesture?”

“That’s right.”

“But I mean, beheading…any chance this is the work of jihadists?”

“No. That doesn’t fit the pattern. This is the work of one man, and he’s using decapitation for reasons that are very much his own. True: this is an ancient punishment, a manifestation of God’s wrath at the sin and depravity so rampant in today’s society. Even the term capital punishment comes from caput, the Latin word for ‘head.’ But this killer is preaching, Kathee: he’s warning New York, and by extension the whole country, that greed, selfishness, and gross materialism will no longer be tolerated. He’s targeting the most predatory of the one percenters who seem to be taking over our city these past few years.”

Kathee nodded vigorously, eyes shining, drinking in his every word. Bryce realized something: with this one story, he had become a celebrity. He’d taken the most high-profile series of murders in many years and, single-handedly, owned it. His follow-up articles, carefully scripted for maximum sensation and to polish his own image, were just icing on the cake. Everyone in New York was hanging on his every word. They wanted, needed him to explain the Decapitator to them.

And he would be only too happy to oblige. This interview was a golden opportunity to fan the flames—and that was just what he would do.