A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  Door opened behind him and Roth appeared. Face red like it was cold outside. Miller hadn’t noticed. Had barely noticed anything on the drive over. Attention focused, channelled right into Catherine Sheridan’s universe, the world she’d occupied during that last handful of hours. The world that Miller seemed unable to enter.

  ‘So where we at?’ Roth asked. ‘You had coffee?’

  Miller nodded toward a Starbucks cup on on his desk. It was just after nine; he’d been awake since six or thereabouts.

  ‘You didn’t sleep so good,’ Roth said, rhetorical.

  Miller shrugged.

  ‘Amanda says hi . . . asked what you were doing for Thanksgiving.’

  ‘Invitation or being polite?’

  ‘Being polite I figure,’ Roth said.

  ‘Be a pain in the ass if I showed up, right? You got family over?’

  ‘Isn’t a family. Jews don’t do families. We do dynasties.’

  ‘Tell her I’m fixed. Tell her my girlfriend’s folks invited me.’

  ‘You don’t have a fucking girlfriend.’

  ‘It’ll stop your wife worrying about me.’

  ‘I’m not telling her that, for God’s sake. I’ll get the third fucking degree until I finally confess you’re bullshitting.’

  ‘Tell her whatever’s gonna work, Al. I’m not gonna come over there and be a fifth wheel at your fucking Thanksgiving Dinner.’

  Roth waved his hand nonchalantly. ‘I’ll tell her something. ’

  ‘So, we gotta find out who this Sheridan woman is.’

  ‘What we got?’

  ‘Nada, don’t even know what she did for a living. You know what she did for a living?’

  Roth shook his head.

  ‘What is it we do for a living?’ Miller asked sarcastically. He reached for the Sheridan file, pushed aside the stack of files relating to Mosley, Rayner and Lee. ‘Went through this earlier . . . there’s nothing about her job. Checked the social security number on our system and it comes up with a Puerto Rican woman named Isabella Cordillera like Marilyn said. You put Isabella Cordillera through the system and learn that she died in a car accident in June 2003. You try and access the details of the car accident and it comes up blank.’

  Roth reached for the file, leafed through it as if there might have been something overlooked by Miller.

  ‘That’s not the only surprise waiting for us in this lot,’ Miller said. ‘There are social security numbers for the other three, and they look fine on the surface. They check out alright until you start to go back a little further.’

  Roth frowned, tossed the Sheridan file onto the desk and leaned forward. ‘Those files were made up before,’ he said. ‘Those files carry the better part of eight months of investigation reports.’

  ‘The investigation reports are fine. I don’t have a problem with the reports, Al, I have a problem with the women themselves.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m missing something on this.’

  ‘They were looking for common denominators amongst these women, right? The previous detectives . . . that’s what they were doing.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Sure. That’s what I would have done.’

  ‘Same here,’ Miller said. ‘But I started to look at it from a different angle. We’re looking for common denominators between them as murder victims, when we should be looking for common denominators between them as people.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘First of all they’re all single. Secondly, they had few friends . . . I mean, really no close friends at all that we’ve found. All the statements come from neighbors, work colleagues, but there’s nothing in there from the boyfriend, the best girlfriend, the one they went shopping with, went to the gym with, that kind of stuff. Like Amanda, right? She has girlfriends, doesn’t she? The ones she spends God knows how long on the phone to every other day.’

  ‘Sure she does.’

  ‘But not this lot,’ Miller said. ‘None of them have a single report from someone who claimed to be a close friend.’

  ‘That can’t be right. Everyone has—’

  ‘Apparently not,’ Miller interjected. ‘Apparently not everyone does.’

  ‘So where from here?’ asked Roth.

  ‘So they’re all single. They have few friends. I’ve got Metz and Oliver chasing up everything they can find out about their homes . . . lease and mortgage details, where their personal effects went, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I figure he selects loners . . . watches them, follows them . . .’

  ‘Not realistic,’ Miller said. ‘He’d have to know them all to one degree or another or it would be the most remarkably random job. Find a woman, start following her, learn her movements, find out something about her work, who she hangs out with, and the moment she looks like she has some kind of personal life you drop her and go find someone else who seems a better candidate. Doesn’t work for me.’

  ‘You said something about their social security numbers—’

  ‘Yes, the first three. On the face of it all fine, no problem at all. Any kind of routine and cursory check, no more or less than we would ordinarily do, and everything holds together. If Catherine Sheridan’s number checked out the same way I would never have looked further.’

  ‘But it didn’t, right?’

  ‘Right. So I start to dig. I go back five years, start to look at drivers’ licenses, traffic citations, club and organization memberships, bank account details, anything I can think of, and I see a pattern.’

  ‘Kinda pattern?’ Roth asked, leaning, forward, intent.

  ‘There’s something about every one of them that doesn’t hang together.’ Miller stood up, reached for a yellow legal pad on his desk, and sat down beside Roth. He used his pen to point at lines he’d written on the page. ‘Margaret Mosley, thirty-seven years old, date of birth on her driver’s license is June 1969. Go back to June 1969 and there is no record with the city of anyone named Margaret Mosley registered in Births.’

  ‘So she wasn’t born here,’ Roth said.

  ‘Social Security file gives her place of birth as Washington.’

  ‘So there’s an error somewhere.’

  Miller smiled knowingly. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet, my friend. Second one, Ann Rayner, forty years old, date of birth given as January 3rd, 1966. Social security file gives no place of birth so we can’t even find out if her birth was recorded.’

  ‘Social security file has to register her place of birth.’

  Miller nodded. ‘Just like every healthcare practitioner and medical facility has to register a patient who comes for treatment, right?’

  ‘And the third one?’

  ‘Third one looks an awful lot better,’ Miller said. ‘Barbara Lee, twenty-nine years old. Date of birth is February 24th, 1977. Social security file gives her place of birth as Washington, D.C. Records at the city registry confirm that there was a Barbara Caroline Lee born in Washington on the 24th of February 1977, but Deaths records that the same Barbara Caroline Lee died on February 27th of the same year.’

  ‘Three days?’ Roth asked.

  ‘Place of death is University Hospital. Whoever Barbara Lee was she never made it out of maternity ICU, let alone to twenty-nine years old and working in a florist’s.’

  ‘You’ve been busy this morning . . . God, I wished I’d stayed home.’

  ‘It’s all bullshit,’ Miller said. He rose from the chair and once again walked back to the window. ‘The common denominator isn’t in these people as victims, it’s with them as people. And you wanna know what I think?’

  Roth raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I think that we need to find out what the Sheridan woman did for a living, who she knew, if she knew anyone at all. I want to look into what happened to this Darryl King guy, and then we need to find out who went with Catherine Sheridan to see him.’

  ‘You want to find out the deal with this cop McCullough as well?’ Roth asked.

  ‘All of them,’ Miller said. ‘I want to fi
nd out who they all are.’

  ‘I’ll have someone check all the McCulloughs in Washington, ’ Roth said.

  ‘So right now we go get these pictures from Reid, and then back to the Sheridan place,’ Miller said. ‘We go through everything until we find out who she was.’

  Roth rose from his chair. ‘And the first three? What about them?’

  ‘This one I want to know about first . . . we’ll start on the other three when we get some of this information from Metz and Oliver,’ Miller replied. He reached for his jacket. ‘The guy phoned for pizza. Appears he used the Darryl King case number. We know for sure that McCullough would have had that number. Maybe it’s a cop we’re looking for. A retired one sure, but a cop all the same. And then there’s the newspaper clipping, the photographs beneath the bed . . . maybe something, maybe not, but there’s more here than with the first three. I think he’s telling us to find him, Al . . . I think he wants us to find him.’

  Downstairs at the desk Roth left a request with the sergeant to run a trace on Michael McCullough.

  ‘Where you off to?’ the sergeant asked. ‘Just in case Lassiter asks.’

  ‘Forensics division,’ Roth said. ‘Got some pictures to collect.’

  I was born in July 1959 in Salem Hill, Virginia, on the day that Castro assumed the presidency of Cuba. Salem Hill sits in the fork between U.S. 301 and 360 near Ashland. Our town was nothing more than a wide part in the road. My mother died when I was twenty years old. Thursday, September 13th, 1979. My father died the following day. When I was twenty-one I met Catherine Sheridan, and now she is also dead. Seems to me I know a lot of dead people. More than those who are still alive.

  Tuesday morning I want to call in sick.

  Makes me laugh to think of it. Had I known how this life would go, hell, I would’ve called in sick before I got started.

  These past few days I’ve thought more and more about my father. The kind of man he must have been to do what he did. How that influenced me, ’cause though I thought it, it is only now that I’m really beginning to grasp the import and significance of what happened.

  What kind of person could do something like that? A man of violence or a man of compassion? A man of selfishness, or a man of such profound generosity I could never hope to comprehend it? I am forty-seven years old, and still I don’t fully understand.

  My life has two parts, that much I see. Before. And After.

  The Before:

  ‘Stand here,’ he said. He gave me a piece of wood, thin like the blade of a knife. ‘This is mahogany,’ he said. ‘Hold it up to the light. Look at the grain there.’

  I held it up. I saw the grain.

  ‘Grain in wood is like the fingerprint of time. The grain in a cross-section tells us about weather, about disease, about cycles of growth, about years of drought and humidity, about the passage of seasons, all manner of things. The grain shows us what happened . . . the life that existed in the world around the tree, you understand?’

  I nodded, smiled. I understood.

  He gave me a cloth, a tin of wax. The cloth was soft like down, yellow and smooth.

  ‘Apply the wax in a circular motion,’ he said, ‘a little at a time. Layer after layer. It will take five, six layers, sometimes more.’

  He showed me how I should fold the cloth double, place it over my index finger.

  ‘Smooth your finger along the surface of the wax. Stroke it, don’t dig at it. Dig at it and you’ll take up too much. You want a fine smear on the cloth. Then you work it into the wood, circular, round and round like I said. When the wax is worked into the wood you leave it overnight, and then you come back to it and you do the same thing, a smear of wax, working it into the surface of the wood round and round.’

  He made me show him.

  ‘Slower,’ he said. ‘Slower than that.’

  I circled slower, watched the wood absorb the wax.

  ‘Good,’ he said. He handed me another sliver of wood, six inches long, an inch and a half wide. ‘Now this one,’ he said. ‘And when you’re done with that one there are more over there.’

  ‘What are they for?’ I asked.

  He smiled. Stood over me, the smell of wood and wax and tobacco around him like a mist, and he smiled.

  ‘Wait and see,’ he said. ‘You have to wait and see.’

  I did what he asked. I waited. I saw. Had I known, I never would have believed him.

  And The After:

  I find myself standing in a field, and all of a sudden I realize that everything they told me was a lie, and the lie goes so deep and so far, and the lie went back for so many years that even the liars have started to believe in its profound and unquestionable truth.

  So I am standing in a field. No more than a few years beyond my teens, and I figure I am the most important fucking person in the whole world . . . man, I’ve got a hard-on for how fucking important I am, and I’ve been here no more than a handful of weeks, and suddenly I realize that I’m going to have to start lying to myself mighty fast and mighty thoroughly to keep on doing this thing.

  ‘I hate the way they look at you,’ someone says.

  ‘Who?’ I ask. I look at the man’s face; his skin is like sun-baked leather.

  ‘The kids ... the kids whose parents you just killed.’

  ‘Killed?’ I say, naïvely.

  He looks at me askance. ‘Shit, kid, how long you been here?’

  ‘Came in last month.’

  A knowing smile, a nod, a wink. ‘You’ll get the drift soon enough, don’t worry. First time for everything, eh? ’Cept here there ain’t no foreplay before they fuck you.’

  Laughing then. Laughing and walking away.

  And I’m left standing in a field in the middle of some godforsaken shithole on the other side of the world, wondering whether anything they’d told me was the truth.

  Selective blindness. Selective deafness.

  Would wake up the next day. The cold, hard fist of morning . . .

  Welcome to the real world, motherfucker.

  In the years to come, hindsight coloring our memories, Catherine and I talked for a long while. We spoke about the Caribbean and the Pacific. The Mosquito Coast and Bluefields. The volcanoes. The forests. The earthquakes and landslides, the hurricanes, the soil erosion and water pollution, the infant mortality rate, the Alliance for the Republic, the Central American Unionists, the Christian Alternatives, the Independent Liberals . . .

  And us.

  We spoke about us. And what we did. And why we did it.

  Anchor to windward. I would remember that. .22 caliber AR7 rifles. Small caliber bullets that distorted easily upon impact making them difficult to identify. Turning the ankles so the joints popped before you entered a silent house. Dry clean procedure to determine the presence of enemy surveillance equipment. Fumigation to remove it. The forger’s bridge, a simple technique of employing the fingers of one hand to steady the other so as to enable smooth handwriting. Honey traps. Jack-in-the-box dummies to deceive surveillance about how many passengers were in vehicles. Mail covers and music boxes and nightcrawlers and orchestras . . .

  We talked about men of legend, places like Algeria and Salvador, moments of history where political systems that had taken decades to establish were overthrown in an hour. All because oil was found, or gas reserves, or the northernmost corner of one landlocked African state became the safest route to somewhere more significant.

  And the cocktail parties where the most revered seemed to drink the most and leave the earliest. A company of fellows seen as if through some distorted funhouse mirror. They saw themselves as they once were - filled to bursting with certainty and patriotism, that self-righteous ardor - and now knew all too well that such things were lost in some quiet corner of decimated jungle, in the eyes of an orphaned child, in the embers of a burned village.

  They were all there. Watch any of them for long enough and you could tell who was lying to who just by who they were avoiding.

  In most
of those places we got it wrong. Months of preparation and we got it so wrong. Intel gave us a schoolhouse, a meeting of important figures. Thirteen incendiary devices - the type and variety favored by Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigade, the type we taught them to make - and we succeeded in killing eleven schoolkids. Hell, we didn’t so much as kill them as detonate them wholesale into the hereafter. Wounded another thirty. Retaliation against us was swift and decisive. They left twenty-two decapitated heads on the steps of the church in Esteli. Two for each child. We came out of there with our tails between our legs, our hearts in our mouths. Of the eight members of our team six had children.

  We talked about one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries, the external debt, the uprisings, the revolutions, the six hundred and seventy million dollars of reserves against the four and a half billion debt . . .

  About the most successful and profitable trans-shipment point for U.S. cocaine and arms-for-drugs dealing in Central America. At least since the early ’80s - when we got involved. At least since then.

  We talked about the real world.

  Me and Catherine . . . God knows how many times we spoke of these things, and they never got easier. We spent so many years running away from such shadows, only to realize that they were our own.

  But now it has changed, changed so much there’s no going back.

  Now it’s only a matter of time.

  TWELVE

  Eleven a.m. and Natasha Joyce leaves her apartment and heads out of the projects on foot. She catches a bus that will take her along Martin Luther King into Fairmont Heights. East Capitol Street metro station, a half dozen stops, and she walks up to the corner of A Street North East and Sixth. Imposing building, marble and granite all over it. Has on an overcoat, but the day is cold, bitter, a blustery wind that causes her eyes to water. Makes her way up the steps and into the foyer, the grand reception of this almighty Police Department Administrations Unit, staffed by people who don’t call you back. Homage to the white man. All so much bullshit and bravado.