1975 - Night of the Juggler by William P. McGivern Read Free Book Online Page A

Prima’s report again, aware of the deliberate beat of his heart. Subject, Caucasian, early thirties, six-three, two-twenty, fast and strong . . . thick blond hair . . . bulging forehead . . . brown sweater, denims, Wellingtons . . . yellow leather cap. Staring at the young girls in the children’s zoo. Weirdo. . . .
    Again Gypsy Tonnelli felt the slow stroke of his heart. Some instinct, a premonition, a dark complex of Sicilian superstitions, or simple gut cop instinct, warned Tonnelli that he was close to the Juggler now, so close that he could almost see him and hear him and smell him; he could never explain these almost mystical convictions or calibrate them in any fashion remotely approaching scientific accuracy. But he believed (or wanted to believe) they had been given a sudden glimpse of their quarry, and as that belief grew firm and solid, he could almost feel the Juggler’s thick, corded neck within the grasp of his own big hands.
    Gypsy Tonnelli glanced from Max Prima’s neatly written report to the large photographs of the Juggler’s young victims, whose fresh and innocent faces were graced with hope and excitement and bore no shadow of the fates in store for them.
    Encarna Garcia. Fourteen, black hair, sparkling eyes, smiling confidently, innocently at the camera. Obviously proud of her frilly new dress, which had been a birthday gift from her father. Reported missing five P.M., October 15, five years ago. Found nine P.M. the same day in a condemned two-story dwelling near Eighty-seventh Street and Broadway. Rope burns on wrists and ankles. Four fingers of the left hand broken. Sexually assaulted, throat slashed.
    Bonnie Jean Howell. Thirteen, black. Pigtails, wide grin, white, healthy teeth. Father a Pullman porter. Mother a dentist’s receptionist in Harlem. Bonnie Jean was found in a tool shed on a school playground near 129th Street and Lenox Avenue. Bonnie Jean had been reported missing at six thirty P.M., October 15, four years ago. The coroner’s report was pure Grand Guignol. Both arms broken, left kneecap shattered, burns on abdomen and small of back. Two of those fine healthy teeth broken. Sexually assaulted.
    Throat slashed.
    Trixie Atkins. Fourteen. White. Lived with her mother, a hooker, in an apartment on West Forty-seventh Street. Trixie was blond, with lively eyes and a big grin for the world. Her mother had gone off with a customer to Detroit, and Trixie wasn’t reported missing until a week after she had failed to show up for school. Then the police got a call on October 22 complaining of an odor stemming from an empty loft in a Greenwich Village apartment building. That’s where they found Trixie Atkins. Rope burns on her thighs, three fingers on her right hand broken, the blood dried and hardened on the gaping wound on her throat.
    Jenny Goldman. Thirteen. Pale, red-haired, solemn as a mouse in her eighth-grade graduation picture. Father a doctor, mother a commercial model. Sexually assaulted, throat slashed, October 15, one year ago.
    Looking at Jenny Goldman’s grave little face, with her oddly wise and wistful eyes, hurt Tonnelli so much that it almost made him physically ill, because he and Rusty Boyle had come within minutes of saving Jenny Goldman’s life.
    Last year they had almost nailed the Juggler. . . .
    They had been cruising on Thirty-ninth between Lexington and Third when a pair of excited kids waved their squad down. “He got Jenny, took her into the basement,” a frightened little Irisher had yelled at them.
    Tonnelli and Boyle had stormed into the basement of a brownstone but had arrived too late to save Jenny Goldman her interval of monstrous anguish. She had suffered and died minutes before they had kicked open a bolted door that led to a furnace room thick and blurred with shadows.
    In the darkness, they had had only an impression of motion, of fetid air stirring, and then the heavy, powerful figure of a man had smashed them aside, charging with an animal like