by Tim Weaver
‘The recognition thing,’ McKenzie said. ‘That’ll be because you probably saw me in a newspaper or on the evening news, talking about police work.’
And that was when Rebekah put it together: McKenzie was a cop too – but much higher up the chain. She remembered seeing her photo. As if she’d second-guessed her, McKenzie said, ‘I’m chief of detectives.’
They were all in on this.
Every level.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Rebekah asked.
Her voice betrayed her.
‘This is a nice place,’ McKenzie replied, looking around the kitchen as if the question hadn’t even registered. ‘Me and Axel – Daniel, I guess you knew him as – we shared an apartment back in our twenties that was about the size of this entire kitchen.’
Foley had been this woman’s partner.
Another missing piece snapped into place.
‘I remember the first thing Axel did was buy himself this big leather recliner,’ McKenzie continued, forcing a smile that was flat and inexpressive. ‘He could be a selfish prick like that, but I loved him and, back then, I either didn’t notice, or I just wilfully ignored the warning signs.’
Her eyes came back to Rebekah.
The warning signs.
‘Believe it or not,’ she said, ‘Axel had a comic’s sense of timing.’
‘No, he didn’t. Your boyfriend was a rapist.’
‘He wasn’t my boyfriend, sweetheart,’ McKenzie responded. ‘You think I’d be doing all of this for a guy I was sleeping with? If it was as simple as that, I’d have just got him –’ she waved a hand at Hain ‘– to pull the trigger on Axel the night Louise Mason died. There’s no boyfriend, no husband, worth this.’
Rebekah frowned. ‘Then who was he to you?’
‘Let me tell you about some of the people I work with first. They think I’m a lesbian. They call me “The Dyke” behind my back. They do it for two reasons. One is that it’s a defence mechanism among a certain category of male officer who can’t accept that women aren’t barefoot and pregnant at home. They think “lesbian” will hurt me, or degrade me in some way. I mean, that’s the calibre of some of the morons I’m dealing with in that place.’
She looked around the kitchen again and her gaze stopped on the shelf next to the window. She was looking at Johnny’s snowglobe. For a moment, as absurd as the idea was, it was like she knew how important it was to Rebekah.
‘The other reason that people think I’m a lesbian,’ she said, ‘is because they know nothing about my private life. They see me hiring women and don’t see me with men. The reason I hire women is because I trust them more. And the reason people don’t know anything about my private life is down to Axel.’
She ripped her eyes away from the snowglobe.
McKenzie’s shoulders rose as she sucked in a long, protracted breath. ‘You were right about the rapist part. He was very definitely that. But it didn’t stop him having this almost comical ability to ruin things. Take Louise Mason. I only got promoted to chief of detectives just under a year ago, so when she died, I’d had my feet under the desk for five months. Five months, and twenty years of trying to get there because I was unlucky enough to be born with a pair of tits. When Louise died, I’d finally started building the team around me that I wanted. I’d got rid of all the assholes, the misogynists, the racists, the pieces of shit eating away at the department, like a cancer, so you know what? I turned up at that fundraiser pretty pleased with how things were going. And do you know what Axel was doing at the same time as I was arriving at that party?’ McKenzie traced a painted nail along a fine gouge in the kitchen table. ‘He was smashing Louise Mason’s skull to a pulp.’
Her words were like an earthquake.
It was the first time anyone had admitted the truth, the first time that someone who knew Daniel Foley had confirmed it.
McKenzie seemed to realize as much. ‘You may as well know how we got to this point,’ she said, the rest of her sentence hanging there between them, unstated but understood: because when we leave here you’ll be dead. ‘So, no,’ she continued, ‘Axel wasn’t my boyfriend. You can always replace the man you’re having sex with.’
She looked up from the table.
‘But family …’ She sighed. ‘You and I both know that’s different.’
Family
‘You got family, Frank?’
They were still waiting in a queue for coffee. Travis looked out of the window, wondering where Amy Houser had got to, and then he turned his attention back to Katherine McKenzie. He smiled at her, thought again how attractive she was when she did the same, and said, ‘Yeah. I’ve got two kids. A son and a daughter. Mark, he lives out in LA and does something I don’t fully understand with video games. Gaby’s in her final year at Midwestern.’
‘Chicago?’
‘Correct.’
‘That’s nice,’ McKenzie said. ‘You see them much?’
He shrugged. ‘Not as much as I’d like.’
‘Doesn’t help that you’re working your ass off at the NYPD, even when you’re supposed to be retired. How’s all that Rebekah Murphy stuff going?’
‘Getting there, I think. It’s pretty complicated.’
McKenzie nodded.
The queue still didn’t move.
‘What about you?’ Travis said. ‘Have you got kids?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I missed the boat on that.’ Travis didn’t know how to respond. ‘Would have been nice,’ she added, as if she thought she’d made him uncomfortable. ‘I just never found the right man …’
Her eyes stayed on him, flashing briefly in the light from the window, and Travis felt a momentary buzz. It had been so long since he’d found any woman attractive, and they’d appeared to find him attractive in return, that he didn’t know what to do. And then, for some reason, he thought about Naomi, all the things she’d said to him over the years, and that was when gravity started to pull at him: McKenzie was chief of detectives; she was probably ten years younger than he was; she was good-looking and industrious. He was old and directionless.
Why would she ever be interested in someone like him?
McKenzie started talking about being married to the job, and maybe sometimes regretting it, and then Travis mentioned Naomi and how it was hard to strike a balance. Eventually, at the front of the queue, Travis offered to pay for McKenzie’s drink, but she refused and said his black coffee was the least the NYPD owed him after all he’d done.
When they were waiting at the end of the counter, she smiled at him again, and said, ‘You’re easy to talk to, Frank, you know that?’
‘Are you serious?’
She seemed surprised by the comeback. ‘Of course I’m serious. Haven’t you heard the rumours? “The Dyke” is physically incapable of opening up.’
Travis grimaced.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The name doesn’t bother me.’
‘At all?’
‘There are other things to worry about.’ The traces of something drifted across her expression. Before Travis could work out what it was, she said, ‘Anyway, I meant it. You’re easy to talk to.’
‘My ex-wife would’ve disagreed.’
‘Well, she’s wrong.’
She seemed to mean what she was saying, to enjoy his company, and as he thought of Amy Houser again, for the first time in days his initial thought wasn’t about the call he’d picked up at Amy’s desk, or his doubts about his friend. Instead it was about what Amy had said to him when they’d come out of the meeting with McKenzie: McKenzie liked Travis.
‘Family can be hard sometimes.’
Travis tuned back in. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I was just thinking,’ McKenzie said. Her eyes were on the windows of the coffee shop, but she wasn’t looking at the sidewalk, at the street, at the crosswalks and traffic lights, she was caught somewhere else. It was almost as if she’d let her guard down without knowing it. ‘You talking about your ex, about being so far away
from your children. Family is hard sometimes.’
Travis studied her. ‘Do you have family close by?’
She rocked her head from side to side, like the answer wasn’t an easy one. ‘Sort of. I grew up in a shitty house in Staten Island. I loved my mom, I truly did, but she had her own problems – mental-health issues, I guess you’d call it these days – and my father was a waste of oxygen.’ She blinked a couple of times, and it seemed to break the spell. ‘Way to bring the mood down, Katherine. This is what I mean, Frank. You reel people in just by being so damn nice. You must have been a hell of an interviewer.’
‘I had my moments,’ he said.
‘I had a half-brother,’ she said finally, her face different this time, Travis unable to quite decipher it. ‘That’s where I was going with that. He was the product of one of my dad’s many affairs – and when his mother died, he came to live with us. My dad refused to adopt him, we never fostered him. In terms of the system, he just kind of fell through the cracks. That wouldn’t happen these days – maybe shouldn’t have happened back in the seventies, but it did.’
‘Are you two close?’
‘We were,’ she said. ‘Very. He was two years older than me, and I’d always wanted a brother. But, I don’t know, there was … something in him.’
Travis frowned. ‘In him?’
‘He could be weird. He got into some trouble at school. My dad was a major-league asshole and the two of them went off like fireworks at home. When your father tells you he never wanted you, over and over, that tends to screw you up. So my brother, he started acting out. It began in his teens. He did some stupid things: vandalism, petty theft …’ She was eyeing Travis as if unsure whether to form into words whatever picture was in her head. ‘He used to hurt things sometimes. People. Animals. I remember my father lost his shit one night when he found out next door’s cat had crapped in our yard and, the next day, the cat’s got a broken leg.’
They just stared at each other.
‘He was just trying to please my father,’ she said softly, but Travis saw an echo in her face, a hint of doubt perhaps, and he wondered if that was just an excuse. Maybe her brother hadn’t hurt that cat to please a father who didn’t want him.
Maybe he just liked to hurt things.
Just then, their coffees were put at the end of the counter, and – like a light being switched on – McKenzie broke into a smile. ‘Shit, I don’t know why I’m saying this.’
Except, for some reason, Travis wasn’t sure that was true.
It was like she’d been holding her breath: she’d never been able to tell anyone about her brother, yet had always wanted to; to her, he was a ghost that needed exorcizing. But now Travis was wondering why she’d chosen this moment to let the breath go. Why, of all people, did she tell him? Why would she let her guard down in front of a guy she barely knew? She’d built an entire career out of never giving an inch. Even if, as she’d said, Travis was easy to talk to, it still felt like something was amiss.
She looked at the third cup of coffee waiting for them on the bar, the side marked with the name ‘Amy’, and said, ‘You waiting here for Houser?’
‘I’m supposed to be.’
McKenzie nodded. ‘That’s a shame. I wanted to show you something.’
He was thrown by the statement.
‘It’s in my car,’ she said, and looked at her watch.
‘Your car?’
‘It might be pertinent to what you’re working on.’
Travis frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’d rather not discuss it here,’ she said, looking around.
Did she mean the cold cases that Houser had given him?
Or did she mean Louise Mason?
Or Rebekah, Travis thought, glancing out of the window.
Still no sign of Houser.
‘It’ll make sense when we get there,’ McKenzie assured him.
Intrigued, Travis said, ‘Sure, okay. Let’s go take a look.’
79
‘Axel was my brother,’ McKenzie said quietly. ‘Maybe not in the way that the law recognizes, but in every way that mattered. A lot of the time, growing up, he was all I had.’ Her eyes had returned to the snowglobe. ‘But Axel, he was …’ She stopped. ‘Uncontrollable.’ Then she sniffed, almost shuddered, as if escaping a riptide, and Rebekah remembered something: the morning she woke up in Foley’s apartment, he hadn’t actually said he was married, he’d said, I feel I need to be honest … I do have someone else in my life. I don’t think I’m going to tell her.
‘He was in that hotel bar and he put something in Louise’s drink. She looked like she was wasted. He told her he was going to drive her home – not that she was probably in any state to argue – but where he really planned to go was the same place he took you: that Retrigram apartment. The publicity team handled the booking system there – and guess who in the publicity team took it upon themselves to be the first point of contact? The role he had over there, it should have been an assistant’s job.’ She leaned in, elbows on the table. ‘But Axel liked to know when that apartment was free.’
McKenzie almost smiled, but there was no joy in it. ‘Over the years he’s been with a lot of women, but I think, as he got older, they stopped flirting with him as much, and they definitely drew the line at sleeping with him, and that frustration would have built in him, angered him, made a weak man like Axel feel small and rejected. He was …’ She seemed to be weighing up the right way to say it. ‘He was addicted. Sex was maybe the most important thing of all for him. You see a lot of men like that: all they have to contribute to the discourse is their dick.’ She closed her hands again, nails pressing into her palms. ‘Difference was, Axel wasn’t wired right, so when women stopped giving it to him willingly, he didn’t just accept it – he got some pills and switched tactics. That way, no one ever said no to him. Younger, older, the type of girl – like you – who wouldn’t drop her panties for a stranger, he took them back to that apartment. And the next morning, when they woke up, with no memory of what had happened, there he was, Mr Nice Guy, Mr You Can Trust Me, Mr Isn’t It Crazy We Got So Drunk That We Can’t Remember Anything. Of course, I never knew he was doing any of this shit until the night he killed Louise. That was when it all came out. That was when we found out it wasn’t just one mistake. There were so many he couldn’t even remember their names …’
Rebekah felt something pulse in her throat. She didn’t know if it was anger, or fear, or nausea, or all of them. ‘So – what? One day,’ she said, her voice little more than a tremor, ‘he just decides to become a serial rapist?’
‘No,’ McKenzie said. ‘That side of my brother, that darkness, it existed in him for a long time before then. I saw flashes, on and off, for years. As a cop, the things I saw in him would have set off all sorts of alarms in my head. As a sister, I denied them and pretended not to notice.’ Rebekah’s mind spun back to something McKenzie had said earlier: I wilfully ignored the warning signs. ‘Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. I suppose a part of me always worried that he might screw up my career in some way. That was why I put up a barrier between us early on. He never knew the number of my actual cellphone, just of a burner. He didn’t know it was a burner, but it insulated me. I didn’t call him, I didn’t email him, I tried to limit being seen with him in places I might get recognized. I let him come to my house, but only at night. I told myself that it was fine to be cautious, justified: I was being reasonable in wanting to protect my career. I told myself, “Axel’s got issues, and someone could use them to hurt me.” But that wasn’t the reason I did it, I see that now. That sort of behaviour, it wasn’t ordinary precautions. It was above and beyond. I knew what he was capable of. I’d seen it growing up – so a part of me was always waiting for it to happen again.’
And then Rebekah’s attention switched: Hain had taken a step closer to McKenzie, still silent, but there was something in his face. Was it a message?
‘I’ve wondered a lot in the time s
ince,’ she said, appearing not to notice, ‘why he didn’t just screw these girls in back alleys, or in places where they weren’t going to remember his face, his name or where he lived. In a way, I suppose waking up in his apartment, it made women like you less panicky, less likely to talk about what had happened, or report it, because the “blackout drunk” story would make sense. But knowing Axel, knowing the way he was when he didn’t have this addiction buzzing in his head, how placid, even tender, he could be sometimes, I think he probably wanted there to be more. I think with certain women, like you, after the deed was done – after the buzzing in his head had stopped – he just wanted to feel normal. I think he really did like you in that moment. I think he saw something in you. But he went way too far. That was the problem with Axel. That was why we had no choice but to come after you like we did. He didn’t just tell you his actual name, he told you his nickname, its origins. He told you his surname.’
I think he really did like you, Rebekah.
She thought of her dream, her memory.
I think you should stay, Rebekah.
The whole thing was repellent, but Rebekah hardly had time to process it: Hain had taken another step forward – and, this time, she saw the message.
He was saying, Stop.
This isn’t a confession.
Except for McKenzie maybe it was. Maybe it was a chance to give voice to all that she’d pushed down about her brother, all the hatred she’d felt for the way his choices had almost derailed her life and career. After all, where else would she be able to admit to what her brother had done – and what she herself had kept secret – other than in the closing moments of another woman’s life?
‘We need to get this done and go.’
Hain spoke for the first time.
Rebekah looked at him, his gun, and he looked back – but McKenzie was totally unmoved. ‘You don’t get to tell me that,’ she said, almost whispering it.