Gardened of the Damned

by Blake Banner

  “Did you see Paul Harrison at any point?”

  “No, but I assumed you did when he attacked you at the door.”

  “Uh-uh. I didn’t see him. I thought I recognized his voice, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “You told the captain…”

  I shrugged. “I’m pretty sure it was him, and I wanted the captain motivated in his manhunt. I figured he would be more motivated hunting a mole in the FBI than just a Mafia goon. But I couldn’t swear in court that it was Harrison. So I thought I’d cover my bases.”

  “So you asked Vincenzo a fake question…”

  “So he would confirm Harrison was there. Yup.”

  She ate in silence for a bit and drank her coffee while I struggled left-handed. Then, she said, “Vincenzo lawyered up and he says he wants a deal.”

  “What did the captain say?”

  “He says he wants to know your opinion. Vincenzo says he can give us the New Jersey family, plus new evidence to convict Pro, and Harrison.”

  “We already got Harrison.” I shrugged. “Let’s see what Sean had, then we can talk to Vincenzo about a deal.”

  Arnav Singh was as good as his word. He arrived at the precinct at ten to three. I had arrived there with Dehan at twelve and been debriefed by the captain. We had discussed how to approach a deal with Vincenzo and, after much talk, reached the conclusion I had already reached that morning over breakfast. That we should first see what evidence Sean had collected.

  We didn’t waste time. Singh had the key to the bank deposit box and we took my car. Dehan drove. The United Commercial Bank was on the corner of Fletcher Street and Pearl. We found space to park on John Street around the corner and walked the hundred yards to the bank.

  Inside, we crossed the cold, green marble floor under cavernous, echoing ceilings to a highly polished desk, where Singh showed a card and his ID to a nervous man who kept pushing eyeglasses that were too heavy back up a nose that was too short.

  “I’d like to withdraw the contents of this box.”

  “Of course, please follow me.”

  He led us through a security door, down a long carpeted passage, through another security door into an anteroom, and finally into a concrete vault with ranks of impregnable steel boxes. The clerk identified the box in question and discreetly stepped outside to wait.

  Singh opened the box and pulled out a blue file that was at least four inches thick. He placed it on a table and opened it.

  “I know he was ready to go to the cops, or to the Feds. His only worry was that he knew Father O’Neil had bent connections, but I think what he collected here will be enough for a conviction.”

  I glanced at Dehan. I knew she was thinking the same as me, there was practically nobody left to convict. Just Harrison, and he had only been marginally involved. I leafed through it. There were more pictures of the girls, others of boys. There were copies of bank statements, emails, telephone records with numbers highlighted, CDs, and DVDs. It was too much to take in, but it looked detailed. Very detailed.

  I nodded at Singh. “It looks good. I need to go through it in detail, but it looks good, Singh. Thanks for coming forward.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “It will be a relief to put it behind me. It has been a weight on my conscience for all these years. What I will never be able to shake is the fact that I didn’t act sooner.”

  Dehan picked up the file. “We were all too late to save the kids, Singh. At least now we can lay them to rest in peace, and close the case.”

  “Yuh, thanks.”

  The clerk led us back along the carpeted corridor and out into the vast, echoing marble hall. Singh pushed his way through the revolving glass doors. Dehan was just behind him. I watched him come out onto the sidewalk and stop to wait for her as I pushed with my left hand. Through the glass, I saw Paul Harrison jogging across the road, through the traffic. Dehan hadn’t seen him. I shouted, but the glass was too thick and she didn’t hear. I roared and heaved with all my weight, but it was like I was pushing through cold treacle.

  Dehan looked at him as he came up on the sidewalk. He stuck out his arm, rigid and straight. He had a silenced 9 mm Sig Sauer 226 in his hand. It bucked twice and a plume of blood erupted from Arnav’s head. It was just a couple of seconds. I was still screaming and heaving on the door. I watched as his rigid arm swung round. I saw the perfect black circle of the muzzle pointing directly at Dehan’s head. I saw the file fall to the sidewalk, and then Dehan moved like a striking viper.

  Her left hand had the muzzle of the automatic. Her right smashed into his wrist and she levered the gun out of his fingers. In less than a second, he was disarmed. Her right foot lashed out in a blinding kick, but he was already dodging, dropping.

  As I exploded from the revolving doors, he was scooping up the file and running, half stumbling, weaving through the crowds. Dehan was screaming, “Freeze! Stop! Stop!” But there was no way she could shoot in the crowded street. I didn’t pause. I ripped off my sling as I ran and bolted after him, shouting, “Call for back up!”

  He was ten years younger than me, and an athlete, plus he was pretty much running for his life. I was ten years older, bruised and injured, and my lungs were threatening to explode, but I would be damned sooner than see him get away. Also, the crowds were not allowing him to get into his stride.

  He dodged into John Street and bolted across the road. Brakes squealed and angry drivers bellowed at him. I stayed with him as he ran into Front Street and headed for the covered market. He plowed through the terraced cafes there, sending deck chairs and tables flying. It slowed him down, but my lungs were screaming and I knew I couldn’t keep going much longer.

  He was just turning the corner to sprint toward Beekman Street and I was asking myself where the hell Dehan and her back up were, when a blur flashed past my left shoulder and I saw Dehan, doing an Olympic sprint, streak across the corner and launch herself into a flying tackle. She flung her arms around his legs, like they were a long lost lover, and he slammed face first into the sidewalk. The file skidded ahead of him and I hobbled after it.

  She got to her feet and stuck the Sig against his head.

  “Get up, you motherfucker!” She was panting hard and her face was flushed. He slowly got up, his nose gushing blood. He turned to look at her. He was out of breath, too, but not much.

  A Black Audi 8 came around the corner at speed and skidded to a halt. The back door flew open, but nobody got out. Harrison didn’t say anything. He just looked at Dehan, and walked toward the car. She looked stunned.

  “Freeze!”

  “It had two rounds in it. You’re empty.” He climbed in the car and closed the door. It took off at speed.

  “What the fuck?” She looked at me. “What the fuck, Stone?”

  I held up the file.

  “He has friends in high places, and he is obviously still useful to somebody, but we have the file. Come on. Let’s go close this goddamn case.”

  EPILOGUE

  She had her hair tied in a knot behind her head. She had her sleeves rolled up above her elbows and she was perspiring. She had finished turning over the soil and was now making holes about four inches across, five or six inches deep. The sun was warm, but gentle, declining in the west towards a sweet, mid-April evening. The church was closed, pending the naming of a new priest, but the parish had given us permission to dedicate a garden to the children.

  Dehan had had the sign made and she’d brought along her own masonry drill to fix it to the church wall. It was in brass so, as she said, it would never fade and never be forgotten. It said simply, ‘The Garden of the Orphaned Children’. Now she was planting flowers and small trees. She had twenty-four of them, two for each child who had been buried there. I had offered to help, one-handed, but she had refused. It was something, she said, she had to do herself. I guess I understood.

  She was on her knees now, with the evening sun on her, and a few strands of hair falling across her face, pressing the earth around a small
rose bush.

  “Your job,” she said, “when I have finished, is to take me on a date, to eat a damn good steak that I can get intense about.”

  “You expect me to do that one-handed?”

  “You’re such a wimp. Here, hand me those azaleas.”

  I passed them over to her. She was quiet while she set the small bush in the ground and packed it with dirt. Then, she said, “Will we ever get Harrison?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll never stop trying, but I think the Bureau have a better chance than us. He could be anywhere.”

  She nodded. “A strange case, Stone. Did we solve it? Did we close it? The only survivor got away. All the others died, but nobody was brought to justice.”

  I shrugged. “What can I tell you, I’m not one for philosophizing, Carmen, but sometimes life has a justice all its own. Our justice is just overlaid, on top of it.”

  She made a face, reached out her hand and said, “The orange tree.” I handed it over and she went on, “You talking about a god?”

  “No.” I thought about it a moment, then said, “It just seems sometimes that things have a way of working out. Not always, but sometimes, it works out right.”

  She still didn’t look at me, but she smiled. She stood and dusted the soil from her hands, then wiped them on her jeans, looking down at the small garden. “There,” she said. “Give it a couple of weeks, it will look nice.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  She linked her arm through mine and we stood in silence for a minute, then she gathered up her things and we walked slowly back toward the car. She put her stuff in the trunk, and as I closed it, she said, “Did we do the right thing?”

  I rested my ass against the old Jaguar and gingerly crossed my arms. “If we’d cut a deal with Vincenzo, sure, we would have trawled up ten or twenty of his lieutenants, maybe even a few people from the Manhattan families. We’ll never know. But the man responsible, the man who made the decisions, would have lived the rest of his life in comfort, like Pro, without ever paying for what he did, keeping his hand in here and there. I couldn’t rest easy with that. We’ll get the others, in time.” I shook my head. “We can’t catch everybody, but those we do catch, let’s make them pay.”

  She nodded, “Okay. Answer me something, who killed Father O’Neil? I’m still not clear about that.”

  “It wasn’t Vincenzo. He didn’t know yet that Father O’Neil had screwed him, and it wasn’t Hagan for the same reason. It had to be Bellini. When we started digging up his churchyard, word got to Bellini of what was happening, and he sent somebody to silence him. Maybe he called on Vincenzo for a couple of hit men. I guess we may never find out for sure.”

  She nodded. “And how did Harrison know about the file? Arnav said we were the only people who knew about that.”

  I wondered about that. Then I realized, when Mick killed Sean, Harrison must have burgled his house and wiped his computer. “There must have been a reference in his diary, or his papers, to the file he gave Arnav.”

  “Do you think Sean died here, in this church?”

  I nodded. “I think so. He died on his knees. The only way I can see that happening is if he was praying. Mick shot him while he was in prayer, dressed him as a vagrant, knowing he could make the case go cold that way, and threw him in the dumpster. Then he and Khan and Bellini murdered the girls.”

  She was silent a while. “I guess so. A strange case,” she said again, and then, looking back into the churchyard, “We dug up the garden of the damned, and replanted it with oranges and azaleas.”

  “Come on, Carmen, let’s get you cleaned up and go get that steak. And then maybe a few tequilas, purely for their medicinal effect, you understand.”

  She pulled out the keys to my car from her pocket and said, “Oh, I can use some of that medicine, Stone. I can use some of that medicine!”

  And we drove away, across the dark river, leaving the garden of the damned behind us, thinking now of good food, good wine, and home.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

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  EXCERPT OF BOOK FOUR...

  ONE

  Even the mad dogs were panting in the shade, and the Englishmen were mopping their brows and sipping G&Ts. There was a fly on my desk that I was sure had died of heat exhaustion a couple of hours earlier. Every now and then, the electric fan ruffled its wings, but that was all the movement it was capable of. The technicians who’d come in to fix the air-conditioning were too hot to work, so we were trapped in a negative spiral of heat and eventual death by dehydration.

  Dehan, who had her boots on the desk and her hair tied in a knot behind her head to keep her neck cool, said, “Edgar Gonzalez, known member of the Chupa Cabra gang, shot down in a drive-by outside his parents’ house on Irvine Street.”

  She tossed it in the “not now not ever” box. We had unofficially established the criteria for investigating a case as A) having some remote chance of being solved, and B) that the crime was not itself a positive benefit to humanity as a whole.

  I said, “Clive Henderson, on holiday from California, mugged and stabbed on Commonwealth Avenue.” I put it in the “maybe” pile. In this weather, a trip to California was appealing, even though the case hadn’t an ice cube’s chance in a supernova of ever being solved.

  “So, what’s the deal with you, Stone?”

  Dehan was leafing through another file. I reached for one and settled back to read it. I had no intention of answering a question like that, but she persisted.

  “You ever been married? You got a long string of exes? You gay? What gives? Why do I never see you with a woman?”

  I made my eyebrows climb my forehead. “Why do you want to know?”

  “C’mon. We’re partners. I told you all about me. It’s your turn.”

  I sighed. “Meth dealer shot outside the fish market on Food Center Drive.” I threw the file in the “not now not ever” pile. It satisfied both criteria. “I was married,” I said. “Seven years. It was enough.”

  She studied me a moment, then carried on reading. “How long ago?”

  “Five years.”

  “Do you date?”

  I sighed more loudly and said, “Yeah, I date this babe—she’s a lot younger than me, but she has a filthy attitude and she’s too nosy.”

  She chuckled, and the internal phone rang. I picked it up.

  “Stone.”

  “Good afternoon, Stone, it’s the captain. Will you and Detective Dehan please come to my office?”

  I hung up. “Come on, Nosy, get your butt out of that chair—the captain wants us.”

  We climbed the stairs mopping sweat from our brows and knocked on his door. He told us to go in, and we did. His window was open, letting all the warm air in.

  “It’s not the heat,” he said as we sat down. “It’s the humidity.” I’d never heard anybody say that before. As I drew breath to make a wisecrack, he said, “Have you ever heard of Karl Baxter?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  Dehan echoed my shake. “No, sir.”

  “He’s a private investigato
r, operates out of an office on Melrose Avenue.” He pulled a face and made a “so-so” gesture with his hand. “Moderately successful because he’s not too scrupulous about the kind of cases he takes. I’ve been looking into his background because he called me today to ask to have sight of a file on one of our cold cases.”

  I frowned. “Has he turned bounty hunter?”

  The captain shook his head. “No, there is no reward on this case.”

  Dehan went straight to the point. “What’s the case?”

  “Stephen Springfellow. Shot to death in his apartment on 155th Street. As usual, lack of forensic evidence and witnesses led to the case going cold.”

  “We’ll have a look at the file and have a chat with Baxter. I’d like to know why he’s interested in the case.”

  “Precisely. Whether it’s a personal interest, or a client’s interest, it could shed light on the murder.” He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk. I reached for it. It was Baxter’s address. “Normally does ‘wife watching’—” He made the quotation marks sign with his fingers. “—but he has been known to track down missing persons who were trying to keep a low profile. They have somehow tended to wind up in hospital or in the river after he finds them. Not that he does the hit; he’s just the finder. And gets a finder’s fee.”

  Dehan raised an eyebrow. “A rat.”

  He looked at her and smiled. “Yes, Detective Dehan, but try not to beat him up or terrorize him. We need his cooperation.”

  She smiled back. “Who, me?”

  He chuckled without much humor. “All right, Detectives, go and see what you can find out.”

  Back downstairs, Dehan found the file in the box. She dropped into her chair and started reading, while I stood in front of the fan.

  “Stephen Springfellow, white male, thirty-two, found shot through the heart in his apartment on East 155th Street on June 14, 2015.” She pulled a happy face and glanced at me. “Recent. Makes a change. He was tied to a chair and had been badly beaten. He had his wallet in his back pocket with a hundred bucks in it, plus his credit card, ID, and driver’s license. Nothing appeared to be missing from his apartment. The lock had not been forced. The neighbors heard nothing, except that the one who called it in heard two gunshots close together and reported seeing a couple of members of the Sureños gang nearby. However, she then refused to make an official statement, and in any case, it was not enough to make an arrest.”