His most recent job was in the city, as an audio engineer. According to his coworkers at The Jam Factory, a music studio housed in a renovated jellies cannery, Grace was a quiet, talented technician with an uncanny ear for production and editing. He’d apparently memorized the studio’s vast engineering consoles with dead-certain precision, manipulating hundreds of knobs and dials by touch alone. He also did some studio work as a keyboardist, the reports said. One employee called Grace “the forbidden love child of Stevie Wonder and Ronnie Milsap.”
I actually chuckled at that.
Grace had worked at The Jam Factory for the same three years that he’d lived in Brooklyn. He was tremendously gifted, but remained aloof toward his coworkers. He was described as “cool” and “distant” and “off in his own world.”
I flipped forward to the psychologists’ verdict.
This is where the shit got weird.
Martin Grace had been blind for only two years. Stranger still, he wasn’t physically blind at all. His diagnosis was “conversion disorder,” something the rest of the world calls psychosomatic blindness. The man’s eyes were perfectly healthy, according to an ophthalmologist hired by the city. Grace himself… or rather, Grace’s mind… had simply turned his eyes off. I wasn’t an expert in conversion disorders, but I knew that they could represent unresolved psychological conflicts, or a broken mind’s way of willfully ignoring conflicts.
I pulled over my satchel and unzipped its main pouch. Out came my well-worn Moleskine sketchpad. I flipped to a fresh page and wrote.
PSYCHOSOMATIC = PAST CONFLICT? KEY?
I gazed at the words, rolling the Berol with my fingertips.
RESOLVING CONFLICT = SIGHT. HE NEEDS TO SEE TO TELL HIS STORY.
I flipped the pencil in my hand, the rubber eraser now facing the desk. I tapped out a beat on the metal as I continued to read. I made it a half-sentence before I realized what I was drumming: “Love Is Blindness” from U2’s Achtung Baby.
Love is blindness, I don’t want to see… Won’t you wrap the night around me?
Odd. I’d always preferred the cover version by The Devlins.
I kept tapping out the rhythm, kept reading. Martin Grace was a suspect in a dozen deaths, dating back at least ten years. More than half had been horrific homicides; the others, previously ruled as suicides or accidental deaths. But a pattern began to emerge. That’s what happens to serial killers; at least that’s what the movies say. They get lazy. They fall prey to routine, just like the rest of us.
The victims had a common connection: Martin Grace. One of the vics had been a lover, but the rest had been Grace’s colleagues and friends, along with some strangers. According to these papers, Grace was practically a traveling salesman of death, bebopping from one city to the next in New York state, leaving a body (or sometimes two) in the rearview mirror.
He’d been running, that much was clear. But from what? Himself?
I scratched this into my notebook, then resumed drumming.
There was another twist: Grace seemed to have airtight alibis. Dinners with friends, drinks with the boss… hell, even manning the cotton candy stand at a church fish fry. It didn’t make any sense. Why did the cops have a hard-on for this guy? Did Grace simply have bad luck picking friends? Was he moving from city to city to start anew, get past the grief?
I flipped the page.
No.
The hairs on my arms spiked as icy gooseflesh rippled across my skin. Martin Grace had seen things, the report said. Seen things before they’d happened. Visions of death. According to recent interviews, at least a third of the victims’ families said that Grace had told the victims that they were going to die before they actually did. And he didn’t just tell them they were going to die. He told them how they were going to die.
And he was right.
Martin Grace would soon stand trial for the rape and murder of vocalist Tanya Gold, once a rising star in New York’s hip-hop scene. According to the police report, Tanya Gold met Grace once—and only once—at Screamin’ Soundz Studioz, a production house where Grace worked five years ago. There, Tanya recorded her contribution to a guest appearance on another artist’s record. After the session, a panicked Grace pulled the woman aside, warned her that she was in danger… that she would soon be “raped and ripped to shreds.”
Understandably, the singer reported this to the police as a threat on her life. Motivated by pressure from Tanya Gold’s headline-making manager (and whatever incentive he may have provided), New York’s finest issued a restraining order and monitored both Gold’s and Grace’s residence that evening. Martin Grace went to bed at around 10:30. Tanya Gold turned in a few hours later.
Per their orders, cops attempted to contact Gold the next morning. When she didn’t answer her apartment door, officers entered and found a sight in the living room so freakish, one of the cops later reported that he thought it was “a reality show gag.”
It wasn’t.
Tanya Gold—a twenty-one-year-old who was as business-savvy and beautiful as she was talented—had been torn literally limb from limb. Ropes had been tied to her wrists and ankles. Those ropes had been looped through metal hoops in the living room’s four corners… hoops presumably bolted to the walls the night before. Either man or machine—Forensics was as baffled as the reporting cops—had pulled these ropes tauter and tauter, until Tanya Gold’s body was ripped apart.
Coroner reports confirmed that Tanya Gold had been raped. Blood spatter analysis and the position of Tanya’s torso (which had remained connected to her left leg, sweet Jesus) implied the rape likely occurred after the rending.
Martin Grace was arrested in his apartment that morning as he was dressing for work. He was questioned, mercilessly. There was no evidence that he’d left the apartment the night before, and—aside from his warning to the singer—no evidence linked him to Tanya Gold’s murder.
From what I could surmise from other reports, it was Grace’s town-hopping trail of terror that empowered the district attorney’s office to prosecute the Tanya Gold case five years after the fact. The “visions” of death Grace experienced were numerous—and, according to the prosecution, damning.
He didn’t just inform twenty-four-year-old musician Rosemary Chapel of Rochester that she’d hang herself. He told her which belt she’d use—her favorite, silver-studded black leather. Three hours later, those metal studs tore Rosemary’s throat open as her legs kicked and twitched in space, suspended in her parents’ garage.
Conquest resident Jerome Stringer was warned he’d lose not just a finger but a hand on his woodshop saw, and would pass out from the shock before he could call an ambulance. It happened three days later.
Robbery gone wrong. Car accident. A horrifying (and preposterous, were it not true) homicide involving javelins. Martin Grace had precognitively seen them all, the families said. And in Grace’s last interview with a psychologist at Rockland a month ago, the man finally corroborated this.
“Patient states he has a lifelong ‘preternatural disposition’ for clairvoyance, which recently transformed into precognitive ‘visions’ of victims’ deaths,” wrote the last doctor to work with Grace. “Likely suffers from delusions of reference/schizotypal personality disorder. Paradoxically, patient insists he did not kill these people, but is nonetheless personally responsible for their deaths. He calls himself an unwitting psychic sniper, ‘the crosshairs for Death. For the dark.’”
My mouth went dry. I took a quick pull from my mug and read on, not blinking.