Carnage by Maxime Chattam Page A

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 surehe 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