Passion Flower

By S.R. Palumbo

Detective Frank Gienna, a burnt out, ex-Vietnam veteran on the downside of a recent divorce where his wife left him for another man while he was recovering from gunshot wounds inflicted during a drug bust. He is assigned to a task force tracking down a serial killer whose only clue is an act of defiance he scrawls on the walls of all his victims: END OF THE LINE/ NO VALENTINES/ NO LOITERING.
During this chaotic search he meets the love of his life and in the course of their love affair she reveals she is psychically endowed and has had dreams involving the killers identity!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499061857

S.R. Palumbo

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Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by S.R. Palumbo.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2014914485

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-6186-4

                Softcover        978-1-4990-6187-1

                eBook             978-1-4990-6185-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/12/2014

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I t was one of those cold, blustery days before the holiday season, when if you were depressed, you would get even more depressed, and if you were angry, it was dangerous even to think about it, let alone feel the depth of it, and anyway, there was no room for anger or depth in the New York City Police Department—or at least that was the operative stance passed down from generation to generation of public officials and bureaucratic bullshit talk called protocol , the official word they also liked to shove up your ass along with the wind that was blowing that winter from dawn to dawn—and Gienna and Bernstein were not in the mood for any more official words coming down on them.

I don’t mind chasing my tail around the Sinatra city that never sleeps, Bernstein bitched, but whatever’s left of my kishkes are freezing.

You shouldn’t take it so personal, Bernie, Gienna wisecracked solemnly. At least when it’s cold, you don’t smell the garbage.

No, just the smell of death in the air.

It had been three months since the latest serial murder victim was found in her apartment (the Super having blundered in to repair a leak, or it might have lain there indefinitely), so decomposed and mutilated, the men who had arrived at the scene had to gag themselves in order to keep from throwing up—her left breast was severed completely, burn marks charred craters of the moon where her face used to be, and she was spread-eagled in the ultimate frieze of rigor mortis—a wooden stake rammed halfway up the orifice of her vaginal tract as the crowning touch of obscenity.

And for Gienna and Bernstein, it was chasing down leads that led absolutely nowhere at all, having another day of unsuspecting winter mayhem, and questioning people who always pretended to not know what you were talking about or who were either in shock or so frightened at the thought of having lived in the same proximity as the murder victim. The backwash of their foul-smelling fear was in many ways more repellant than the homicides under investigation.

These people act like they’re all retarded. Nobody knows a goddamn thing. I’m sick of this shit.

It was Bernstein, running his anger outside and fighting against the bone-chilling wind that blew him back with each step he took inside the shell of his overturned collar.

Where the hell did we park the car?

He was slightly balding and so sparsely built and underweight, he in no way resembled the part he had assigned to himself after flunking out of business school and turning down his preordained role in the family’s kosher catering business (One step removed from idiocy was Bernstein’s only comment on that), but he was sharp as they come in other respects, having worked his way to first-grade detective in homicide after only five years of having to eating his humble pie of one-part crud to three-parts bias on the regular force, since Jews didn’t get promoted so easily, especially those who looked like they would be blown away by the first strong wind that came along.

Come on, Frank, let’s get in the car before I freeze my ass off out here.

But Gienna paused to glance up at the building again. A sleek-looking high-rise on East Sixty-Eighth Street and York Avenue. No one here was supposed to die of unnatural causes.

I take back what I said before about not being able to smell the garbage.

All I smell is your shaving lotion. What are you wearing, Ben Gay?

Yeah, my whole fucking body is falling apart.

He was forty years old but prematurely gray on top, with partially immobilized facial muscles that looked like the discarded remains of somebody else’s half-assed grin (since he couldn’t control the movements there), and all the grisly reasons why were tracked along the side of his jaw and down his neck in a fading crescent of Vietnam.

The other source of disfiguration was much more recent, coincidental with his wife’s departure a year ago, when she ran for the hills with somebody big in corporate management. Someone that she had met through friends while he spent a week in the hospital for gunshot wounds that luckily hit below his groin, while his wife aimed more effectively a few inches higher.

So much for love and fidelity.

"The only way we’re ever going to catch this guy is by pure blind luck—when he’s ready to get caught. The rest is just bullshit and paperwork."

What makes you say a thing like that?

The way he picks out all his victims. All of them loners, Gienna observed. He only kills women who seem to live in isolation and keep to themselves, so with all the hunting down we do, there’s no one can put a finger on him or single him out in any way.

Bernstein raced up Second Avenue, mulling it over, picking out little island traces of smutch-stained windshield as though it were part of some esoteric configuration as readily apt and meaningful as anything Gienna was now putting forth from the other side of his own little perch in nowheresville.

So why does he write on all the walls, ‘End of the line. No valentines. No loitering’?

To break our balls.

Why you don’t think it has any meaning?

No, it’s like saying to all of us, ‘Fuck you, babe, this is all you’re going to get from me, so wrack your brains.’

I don’t agree.

Since when do we ever agree with each other?

I think it’s more of a dare to us.

A dare of what?

Of tracking it down to something that relates to his background. Sort of like a code that has to be broken down.

This is not a fucking spy movie, Bernie. Don’t make it any more than it is.

I know there’s some kind of link up here.

"Yeah, end of the line for all the women he tortured to death—no valentines!—and he certainly didn’t loiter with them so’s anyone else could possibly notice, Gienna scored. The fucker is thumbing his nose at us and making it a thing with himself, his trademark now."

But Bernstein didn’t answer him.

Hey, Bernie, you awake or what?

I’m awake, all right, and seeing double on three hours’ sleep.

You want me to take over?

No, it’s more fun driving two cars this way.

Then aim for the middle.

The middle?

Yeah—where all the other cars are hiding.

Gienna never felt comfortable when Bernstein was driving and probed along the uneven ridge of his scar-tracked jaw as though he could smooth it out again or batten down his own growing sense of impotence, which threatened him now at every turn.

You, all right, Frank?

Yeah, just ease up on the gas a bit.

Bernstein slowed and shifted lanes and gave out one of those sheepish, self-effacing grins that made him look like Simon and Garfunkel—one of those guys that Gienna always got mixed up—the one with the nose and sandy hair who always looked like they wouldn’t believe he was innocent.

So you think he’s playing a game with us?

"I think he’s drilling us good and hard while we sit here with our teeth in our mouth and chase our tails… and argue about what we don’t even know what we’re talking about!"

He’s got us going in circles, all right.

And the weird part is that nobody in that entire building knew the victim well enough to give us even one little shred of vital background information.

Except for the fact that she always walked her dog at night.

Yeah, we’ll sink our teeth into that one, right?

I’m surprised he didn’t kill the dog.

So is Monahan, and that’s the reason he’s always taking cheap shots at us… that fat ass, fucking elephant cocksucker!

Don’t get yourself in an uproar again.

Ah-h-h, bullshit, Bernie—! Gienna pumped out a cigarette from a crumpled pack and swallowed in a sullen, gray view of Second Avenue. Everything was turning to shit and corruption, along with the struggle to do his job after nineteen years of trying to keep a lid on things. It was bad enough having to deal with morons all day long, but to have one as your reigning guru and mastodon?

No, the thing that really gets me about him is all these meaningless briefings we have after every murder. Gienna frowned. As though everything that’s being repeated is happening for the very first time.

Well, all the heat’s coming down on him after—how long now?

Almost twenty months and four victims later.

Four victims, Bernstein portioned out, in twenty months… and even though you say they were loners, none of these women put up a struggle or any kind of resistance at all, no signs of forcible entry either, which means this guy was no stranger to them.

No, only to us.

And aside from what he writes on all the walls of his victims, and all the other bloody shit that he does to them, we don’t have a clue as to who he is or where the hell he’s coming from—

"Watch for the truck!"

Bernstein swerved and rubbed his eyes.

This case is gonna bury me yet.

Well, just make sure it’s not both of us.

T he serial killer task force (twenty stalwart men whose collective efforts since being assembled eight months ago could best be measured by mounds of empty pizza cartons) was assembled in the briefing room for a lecture by the department shrink and chargé d’affaires of all psychological counseling and consultant work, Dr. Milford Wertheimer, one of perhaps a handful of experts in the entire world who happened to bear a striking resemblance to Boris Karloff—with facial tics.

Gentlemen, I’ve been asked here today to review with you a general profile of the psychopath, or at least to attempt a brief sketch of the sort of person most likely to be responsible for the serial murders currently under investigation.

Gienna sighed and Bernstein coughed and chairs began to creak in discomfort as Dr. Wertheimer paused in mid–therapeutic prayer by the scowling hulk of Chief Inspector Monahan, who ranged by his side in the overheated, smoke-filled room, with shotgun looks at all of them—his fat arms folded menacingly, and one eye cocked in the range sight of a pug-nosed face, flushed red to the chops, and he poised there like the buttressing prow of some overbloated ship of state, with Wertheimer prancing back and forth, doing tugboat duty.

I think it’s very important to know the dynamics of the sex-murder act. Dr. Wertheimer paused in prayer again, then carefully explained that the sex act of the psychopath who murders for sex is never clearly delineated or dependent upon any normal means of achieving orgasm. No, he stressed. For him, the act of murder itself is the psychopath’s way of achieving the sort of sexual completion he cannot derive through normal means.

In other words, he can’t get a hard-on unless he goes out and kills somebody?

Exactly! Wertheimer recognized excitedly, encouraged to see that some of the men were still awake and exhorting them to intervene at any time for any further impromptu remarks or clarification.

"Yes, impotency is a factor here, but also emerging as integral to the larger picture, an outgrowth of it—another dimension equally important to the sex-murder syndrome, and one that involves our serial killer—is mutilation. Wertheimer paused dramatically. For when murder no longer satisfies the psychosexual needs of the killer, it merely becomes the means to a ritualistic end."

Like everyone knew what ritualistic ends and psychosexual sex-murder syndromes were about!

And what is this ritualistic end? Wertheimer gushed out rhetorically when he realized he had suddenly lost a goodly portion of his obtuse-looking audience. "Attack on the mother!"

Incest?

Yes, but incest with an inverted vengeance, the doctor explained, for in order to achieve this end—symbolically speaking—the psychopath must murder his mother by taking it out on someone else, and in this respect, the act of mutilation involved is really an unrecognized fear of feminization—a fear for which his female victims pay the price each time he chooses to purge himself.

"In other words, he’s a faggot?"

"No, a motherfucking faggot!" someone else emended uproariously.

Dr. Wertheimer waved his magic wand of upraised hands and smiled away all vulgar traces of comprehension.

"Of course, the man we’re looking for is not about to parade himself as a stark-raving lunatic foaming away at the mouth for us. No, the psychopath’s day-to-day behavior, other than in the aberrant mode, is usually normal, unfortunately… and is unmatched in giving the impression or appearance of profound sincerity, swearing allegiance to all that is seemingly good and lawful."

This drew murmurs of instant outrage and disbelief.

"This prick is lawful?"

Deviously so, the doctor affirmed. As I said before, most unfortunately, the psychopath also functions on a rational level, and no one who knows him—friends, relatives, colleagues, family—will ever think the worst of him. Or let me put it this way to you: In a clinical sense, he never exhibits any sort of delusional ideas or hallucinations that would mark him off or set him apart from the average neurotic, nor does he exhibit any of the anxiety symptoms so common to the psychoneurotic.

Bernstein finally rose from his seat.

"In other words, this guy could be almost anybody? Your next-door neighbor, the guy who delivers the groceries, or maybe even one of us!"

Not very likely, Monahan interceded at once. These women were all highly educated, sophisticated, culturally involved—so you’re cleared of all suspicion, Bernstein.

This set off another chorus of jeering voices, howling catcalls, everyone laughing with high-five signs as Bernstein backed off sheepishly and Gienna stewed and steamed inside at how easy it was to become a bloody victim yourself when nobody knew what was going on and started taking it out on each other, especially with someone as easily vulnerable as Bernstein was in this dumb-ass display of locker-room bullshit that Gienna resented in all of them, as he had with the same sort of lethal form of mindlessness in Vietnam, when the order was that if nobody knew where the enemy was, then everyone was the enemy and the real killer was that the serial killer had all of them running for cover themselves and wanting to forget about him! Laugh—and the guy wasn’t there anymore. Just Monahan and his partner in crime, the resident genius of half-baked allusions, whose profile projections had not shed a single lead for them in over a year and who looked more deranged than anyone he had described so far.

No, this guy’s not any blue-collar bum by any stretch of the imagination, Monahan put in perspective for them, and most probably—and the doctor concurs—he’s somebody very upper class, very into the things that interest the sort of women he murdered. Now that’s not exactly the bottom line, but at least it gives us something to work on that makes more sense than chasing down mailmen or next-door neighbors.

I get it now, Gienna volunteered, like Charlie the Tuna, this maniac seems to have good taste, but doesn’t taste good.

Only this time nobody laughed at all, and Gienna could feel the uneven breathing of those in the midst of an extraterrestrial.

What kind of stupid remark is that, Gienna? Monahan stared belligerently. What are you trying to get at here with that kind of crap?

Just a moment, Dan, Dr. Wertheimer prayed benevolently. "Let’s put this in a creative perspective for Detective Gienna since that’s where he seems to be coming from, and all we’re really trying to do is establish some sort of rationale for narrowing down all the variables in the absence of anything else to go on, so what we have to look for here is some sort of common denominator… some common link, or hidden agenda, or anything that would tie in this man with all his victims."

Wertheimer waited for interruptions, but Gienna wasn’t about to oblige when the man professed to being creative at Gienna’s expense.

It could be something as inconsequential and commonplace as the fact that they dined at the same place together, were members of the same social group, or shopped in the same department store—

Or supermarket, Gienna threw in. Which doesn’t rule out delivery boys, or waiters in restaurants, or sales help in the department stores—

All right, okay! You had your say and that’s the end of it, Monahan interrupted crudely, motioning back to the other men. "Time is running short over here, so let’s give the doctor a