by Blake Banner
NINE
The door opened and a uniformed sergeant leaned his head in.
“Detective, you have a call from the lab. He has been trying to reach you on your cell.”
“Thanks, Sanchez. I’ll call him back.”
I dialed Frank’s number and put it on speaker.
“Stone, I’ve been trying to reach you. It’s about the computer.”
“What have you got, Frank?”
“Not much, I’m afraid. Twelve years is a long time, but we managed to salvage a couple of emails and what appears to be part of a list. Some of the names had deteriorated beyond salvaging, but I’ve left two that were partly intact because they had recognizable letters remaining. I’ve sent the files to you. The emails are interesting, you’ll see why straight away, but I’m not sure how useful they’ll be.”
“Thanks. Any word on the photos?”
“Yes, the word is, I am not Harry Potter. I’ll have something for you as soon as I can get to them.”
“Thanks, Frank. I did mention it was child prostitution, didn’t I?”
There was a pause.
“I’ll get onto it straight away.”
“Good. I’m sending something else over to you for comparison.”
While I was talking, Dehan had left the room. I caught up with her at the desk, she was printing the emails and the list. She handed me copies of each and dropped into her chair. I sat and started to read.
The first was short, but it was a bombshell.
Sean, Darling, let’s not let this thing get out of hand. I have made up my mind. You are the man for me and I do not plan to let you go. You know what I am like when I make up my mind…
Sonia
The sender’s name and email address were at the foot: Sonia Vincenzo. Dehan whistled. I looked up. We stared at each other.
“You thought it was interesting because of his haircut? Stone, this case is Pandora’s Box. What’s next? Love letters from the White House?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Sean O’Conor in bed—literally, not figuratively—with the capo of the New Jersey Mob’s only niece? That is a serious plot twist.”
She was scanning the next sheet. She said, “Keep reading.”
I flipped it over and read:
Listen, you sad piece of shit, if you think you can climb in these pants and then just walk away with a kiss and a wink, think again! Your Irish fucking charm don’t cut no ice with me or with my uncle. I hope you got your knees insured, Sean, because you are going to need all the fucking medical attention you can get when Dino and his pals get through with you, you fucking Mick bastard. You are dead!
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. If that’s how she felt about Sean, how do you think she felt about Alicia?”
I spread the third sheet on my desk and looked at it. It was just a short list of names.
Padraig O’Neil
Sadiq Khan
Robert Bellini
Dehan dropped the paper on the desk.
“Who is Robert Bellini?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
“Sonia Vincenzo is an attorney, isn’t she?”
“Yeah. And she works for her uncle. Talking to her is going to be about as useful as talking to the wall.” I gazed out at the gathering dusk. “Unless…”
Dehan spoke my thoughts, “Unless you can lure her into trying to incriminate Sean.” I nodded and she went on. “Sean is dead, but the legend of the saint lives on, and once the press gets hold of this, he will become a martyr. However, if she can be induced to talk, his memory might be ruined forever.”
“Yup, and once she starts talking, maybe I can catch her in a lie. It’s worth a try. I don’t want you to come along.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Any reason?”
“Yup. She’ll open up to a man, the minute you give her a taste of your attitude, she’ll clam up.”
She grinned. “Fair point. What do you want me to do?”
“I want a name for every single one of those kids in that photograph and I want to know what happened to them and where they are today. If we are going to get any real evidence, it will be from them. Talk to the Captain, see if he’ll allocate us some help tracing those kids.”
She nodded and went upstairs. I found Sonia Vincenzo’s firm, called, and made an appointment for the following morning at ten. I was yawning and stretching when Dehan came back down. She looked drawn and tired. I realized she’d been about thirty-six hours without sleep. I got to my feet.
“Come on, kiddo, that’s enough for one day. I’m taking you home.”
She stood nodding, lots, like she really agreed with me, but gazing at the floor like she couldn’t make up her mind about something.
“I left my car at your place.”
“You okay to drive?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, but let me stop off at a supermarket on the way. Okay?”
“Sure.”
We stopped at Kmart on Bruckner Boulevard. She jumped out and said, “Two minutes!” as she slammed the door. She ran across the parking lot and I smiled at how long her legs were. Not many women could get away with legs that long and slim, but she had all the elegance and grace supermodels pretended to have. Only, with Dehan, it was real.
I frowned at myself and changed my train of thought. I thought about Sean and Conor, and Father O’Neil, the photographs, and now Sonia Vincenzo. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces. The picture was already pretty much complete, so what the hell do you do with the extra pieces? I drummed on the wheel. Granted, there were uncomfortable questions, but how did the photographs, and the niece of the New Jersey Capo, explain Sean being dressed as a tramp, and Alicia’s disappearance?
I rubbed my face with my palms and told myself, enough. Dehan was walking back toward the car with a paper bag. She had a nice swing to her hips and she was smiling. She climbed in the car and slammed the door.
“Okay, let’s go.”
I looked at the bag as I turned the key. There was a bottle of wine poking out and a few other bits and pieces. I smiled and pulled away.
“You got a date?”
She laughed a bit too loud. “Yeah. This guy I’ve been seeing.”
I was surprised. “Really? Is it serious?”
She stared out the side window. “You kidding? It’s like we’re married.”
I pulled onto the Boulevard. “Wow! That good, huh? How come you didn’t tell me?”
She looked at me a moment with an odd expression.
“I didn’t say it was good. I said it was like we were married.”
I laughed and said no more, wondering why I felt suddenly tired and irritable instead of just tired.
I pulled in behind her car and we both climbed out. She stood staring at me over the roof as I locked the Jag. She spoke suddenly. “What are you having for dinner?”
I raised my eyebrows and made a ‘pfffff!’ noise. “I hadn’t thought about it really. Cheese on toast?”
She held up the bag and smiled. It was an odd expression, timid, apologetic, hopeful, almost pleading. “I got sirloin. I also got bacon, and eggs, to replace the stuff I keep eating.”
She caught me off guard and I didn’t know what to say. After a moment, I laughed. “Sure! That’s great! You didn’t have to, but I’m glad you did.”
She didn’t move, just stood staring at me. “You sure you don’t mind?”
“Yeah! Of course I don’t. Come on, let’s go inside.” I took a step, but she didn’t move. “Carmen, are you okay?”
“Stone?”
“Yeah?”
The pale amber glow from the street lamp was touching her face in the growing darkness. I saw the wet gleam of a tear on her cheek. She looked scared.
“I need to talk to you.”
“What about, Carmen?”
“Promise me…”
I took a step toward her. “Promise you what, Dehan?”
“Promise me you’ll keep me as your partner.
Promise me you won’t dump me or request a transfer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Promise me!”
“Of course I won’t, Dehan! What’s this about?”
“I am going to tell you the truth… The truth about me.”
TEN
A soft breeze moved her hair across her face. It seemed to be the only movement in the world at that moment. I nodded once, said, “okay,” and turned and walked to the door. I opened it and went in, leaving it open behind me. I switched on the kitchen light, proceeding to turn on the living room lamps and pull the drapes. I heard the door close behind me.
She was in the kitchen, putting her bag down on the side. She took a plate from the draining board and dropped the steaks on it, still wrapped in paper. I approached the breakfast bar and stood watching her a moment unpacking the bag and opening the wine. She spoke without looking at me.
“Young Jewish man has been shot, he’s bleeding to death. He manages to stagger home to his parents’ house, where he rings the bell and falls to his knees. His mother opens the door and he says to her, ‘Mamma, I’m dying!’ She puts her hands on her hips and says, ‘You’ll die, but foist you’ll eat!’”
I smiled. “You told me that one already, but you told me it was your aunt.”
She shrugged. She still wouldn’t look at me. “It might have been. Kind of thing she would have said.” I drew breath and she raised a finger. “Don’t ask. I’ll tell you in my own time.”
“I was going to say I could peel some potatoes.”
She nodded. The cork popped and she poured two glasses. “It needs to breathe. I got a good one.”
I pulled a bag of potatoes from the vegetable trolley. “You hungry?” I wasn’t.
I was too tired to be hungry, but Dehan said, “Starving.”
I chose four big ones and started peeling. She started making a large salad.
“That’s what my dad was like: ‘You’ll die, but foist you’ll eat.’ He was gentle, the true meaning of a gentleman. He was generous, and kind. But he was strong, what we call a mensch. And his family was everything to him.”
I smiled at the potato as I cut it into strips. “Were you a daddy’s girl?”
“You bet. When does a stereotype become an archetype, Stone?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
“It was the kind of question my dad was always asking. And he had an answer for all of them. A stereotype is always consistent. An archetype is full of contradictions.” She took the chopped potatoes and dropped them into the oil. They hissed loudly. “He was talking about himself.” She imitated his voice, “‘If I had been a stereotypic Jew, I would not have married your mother. But as a Jewish archetype, I had to marry your mother!’”
I smiled again. “An intelligent man.”
“Part of the archetype.”
I nodded. “I guess.”
She was quiet for a while, watching the potatoes fry. She said suddenly, “Why is north up? Why are the French rude? Why does the Earth wobble? Why are Africans black? You name it, he asked it, and had an answer. It was like he was trying to get inside the mind of God, and explain it.”
She tested one of the French fries. Then she put the griddle on to heat with a bit of oil and sprinkled coarse salt over the meat. When the griddle was smoking, she threw the steaks on. They hissed and flames leapt up around them.
“But there are no answers, Stone, no explanations. All you can do is describe, you can’t explain.”
“Isn’t that a little fatalistic, Carmen?”
She shrugged and flipped the steaks. “Maybe. You want to put the fries on the plates?”
We sat and ate in silence for a while. The steaks were good, so was the wine. After a bit, she said, “The fifteenth of January, 2005, was a Saturday.”
I sat back. Sean O’Conor’s body had been found on the Sunday morning, on the sixteenth.
“Mom and Dad had closed the café. We’d had dinner and I was eighteen. They had rented a movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. My dad loved that kind of thing, he was such a dreamer. Mom said she loved it, but we knew that after ten minutes she’d go make a cup of tea, start washing up, clean the windows…” She smiled, focused on my face, then my plate. “You’re not eating.”
She sipped. I couldn’t eat, but I forced myself. I cut a slice of meat and stuffed it in my mouth.
“It was nine o’clock. We heard hammering on the door. My dad went down to see who it was. We heard voices, my dad trying to reason with somebody. The other voice was…” She was searching for the word. “Sneering, contemptuous, amused, overpowering. It scared me. Then we heard feet on the stairs.”
“Who was it?”
She cut savagely into her steak. “I should tell you first that for a few weeks he had been coming on to my mom. He didn’t like me; I was ‘too Jewish’, but my mom was real pretty, even at forty she was trim and cute. She went to see Father O’Neil for advice because she didn’t know what to do. My dad was strong, in his mind and in his personality, but physically he didn’t stand a chance.”
“Against who, Dehan?”
“So Father O’Neil tells her…” She laughed a dry, sick laugh. “He tells her to pray, this was his guidance. From a church that sacked the wealth of the western world, that marched to war against the most powerful warriors and empires in history, his advice is, accept the fate that God has decreed for you, and don’t forget to pray. Pray for forgiveness. And now the time had come, there in our living room, with the TV on, and my father standing there shaking, and I felt so sick I was going to throw up right there on the floor. He was there, drunk, stinking of whiskey, to claim what he said was his.”
“Father O’Neil?”
“Mick Harragan.”
I went cold. “Mick.”
“He raped her. My dad tried to stop him, but Mick beat him to a pulp. He put him in the hospital and he beat me up too, until I couldn’t move. Then he raped her, right there in front of us. He told us that if we talked, we would all watch each other die, and if he didn’t do it, the Sureños would, or the Jersey Mob.”
I searched for words, but it was like she had said, there were no answers, no explanations. There was nothing I or anybody else could say. I watched her attack her steak with a kind of controlled fury. She chewed, swallowed, sipped her wine.
“He was in hospital for six weeks. He didn’t want to come home. Every time he looked at Mom, his heart was filled with shame and humiliation. Her heart was broken. She had been violated, and her husband, her man, and her daughter had watched it happen. Mick Harragan had not only destroyed them physically, he had broken their souls and destroyed our family. On the twelfth of June, 2005, my dad died. Three weeks later, my mom died. I promised them, I literally swore on their graves, nobody would ever do that to me. Nobody would ever break me or take my soul.”
I sat staring at the half-eaten steak on my plate. My mind was racing, trying to get a grip on all the implications, on what it meant. I said, “Kirk?”
“Downstairs, in the car, keeping watch.”
“That’s why you knew where he lived.”
“I’d been hunting for Harragan for a long time.”
“They are dead now, Dehan, both of them.”
She smiled. “Yeah, I was robbed of that right, but I guess Maria Garcia had earned it.”
“It’s over.”
“Is it?”
“You have to let it go.”
“You promised…”
“I am not going to dump you! We’re partners. We are more than partners. Hell…!” I gestured at the table, the food, and the wine. “But for your own sake, you need to let go. They are dead!”
“On Saturday. the fifteenth of January, 2005, Sean O’Conor was executed, dressed as a tramp and thrown in a dumpster on Lafayette. Just around the corner, just down the road from my parents’ house, Alicia vanishes on the same night. And on that same night, Mick Harragan comes to my parents�
� house and rapes and murders my family. Do you think that is all coincidental?”
“No.”
She reached in her pocket and pulled out some folded A4 papers. As she opened them, I saw they were the emails and the list. She turned to the last page and put it in front of me.
Padraig O’Neil
Sadiq Khan
Robert Bellini
“Do you remember what Father O’Neil said to us just before he left?” I nodded. She went on, “Because I have it branded on my memory, verbatim, ‘…what when it is the police doing the murdering and the raping? Who do you call then?’ He was talking about Harragan, and you know it.”
She was right.
“Harragan is dead, Dehan. So is Kirk.”
She held my eye a long time. Finally, she said, “So are my mom and my dad, and my cousin Alicia, and so probably are those twelve girls in the photo.” She put her finger on the list. “But Father Padraig O’Neil, Sadiq Khan, Robert Bellini and ‘H’ are not.”
ELEVEN
She stayed the night in the guestroom. I didn’t sleep well, and by six I had showered and gone down to make coffee. I found her sitting at the kitchen table staring into a cup of coffee.
“It’s hot. I heard you and made a fresh pot.”
I poured myself a cup and rested my ass against the sink. “No bacon this morning. What’s wrong, you don’t love me anymore?”
She didn’t smile, but seemed to study me for a minute.
“Do I need to regret telling you what I told you last night?” I shook my head and drew breath to answer, but she interrupted me. “Don’t give me a clever, evasive answer, Stone. Be straight with me.”
“Have I ever been anything else?”
“No.”
“I’m not about to start. You don’t need to regret it. I’m not going to ask for you to be transferred, or for a different partner. I like working with you. But I am going to make something real clear, so there is no mistake and no confusion. We are cops, we are not vigilantes, and it is our job to catch suspects, not punish bad guys.” She just kept watching me. She didn’t answer or react. “I am trusting you, Dehan. Don’t betray my trust. Don’t put me in a position of having to choose.”