Synopsis: The Holy Kiss
A Novel
By James Smiley Wightman
© 2006
Move over Clarice! Silence Of The Lambs meets Seven as Detective Shantelle “Stevie” Sanchez wonders why, at age 33, she’s in Jersey City, why she’s a cop, why the bad dream won’t go away… and why do men kill women? Further complicating her life is the fact that the only man that doesn’t repulse her is older, married, and a computer cop.
Project-born in Jersey City, Stevie is a streetwise mix of Latina, Glades Indian and African-American. Her tough, profane persona conceals a damaged psyche that enters the fray when four African-American women are discovered dead, nude, and dangling “likes sides of beef” in the 100-year-old subway tubes under the Hudson River where stainless steel trains dart to Manhattan. Each has a lip shape and cross burned into her torso.
Stevie barters away her lawsuit against the City to join the Task Force investigating the murders. She immediately clashes with its head, Port Authority Chief Henry Kulik. A cautious computer expert, Kulik’s coolness masks a soul warped by the tunnels in Vietnam. Stevie is frustrated with Kulik’s careful ways but finds herself attracted to him. FBI serial profiler James Chandler, smooth and ambitious, and NYPD detective Aaron Rosenthal, a mole for NY Police Commissioner, complete the Task Force.
In a clammy August heat, the work of the conflicted Task Force --- involving history, computer analysis, forensics, profiling, intuition and betrayal --- comes together to center on two suspects, Amsel Hamilton and Terrance Summer. The two are like brothers. Amsel is a successful businessman whose troublesome past includes life in the same projects as Stevie. There he was abused by Stevie’s gang as well as by his mother. Terrance, a distant relative of Amsel’s wife, is a southerner and a charming but dangerous womanizer. Amsel is shattered when a fire take his wife and child. He returns to roaming the train tubes under the Hudson where he had retreated as a child with an old subway maintenance worker, Mr. Parks, a black man who raised him after his mother was committed. Terrance joins Amsel in the tunnels and the two men draw close until Terrance’s drug addiction abruptly drives the two men apart.
The Task Force implodes when an African princess visiting with Nelson Mandela suspiciously disappears after Terrance is arrested and released. Stevie places herself in peril when she impulsively enters the menacing tunnels to find her. Kulik, overcoming his fears, follows her. In the subterranean dankness beneath Manhattan, they confront their own frailties as they face the killer’s “Holy Kiss” of death in a taunt, tingling and unpredictable climax amidst the 600-volt “hot” rails. |
