"What do you know?"
"I know what it feels like when you do it on the other side of caring, and let me tell you, it leaves you haunted."
"Old man."
"You got that right, but my hair turned gray a long time ago."
Ramirez looked at Henderson and for the first time saw the hurt in his eyes. Something had happened to him, something had damaged him badly. And all this time he'd been trying to protect her from the same fate. Someday she'd get the story, she was a detective, after all, someday she'd wring it out from him, but not this day. This day she was just glad he was by her side.
"Detectives," came a voice from the hallway, "can I get the hell out of here? I've been here way too long already, and this shirt is getting ripe."
It was Byrne. Ramirez offered a quick and uneasy smile to Henderson in thanks, and then she stepped away from the man she had killed and out of the room where she had killed him.
"Didn't we tell all of you just to stay put?" said Ramirez as she and Henderson approached Byrne. Byrne's jacket was off, his tie loose, but he looked calm, as if he'd already gotten over the violence that had burst about him just an hour ago.
"Yes, you did," said Kyle Byrne. "But the senator was whisked out with his lawyer before the news trucks showed up, and Mrs. Truscott did that little fainting thing that got her a quick trip to the hospital, which leaves just me."
"And you're lonely, is that it?"
Kyle smiled. "Actually, yes. So I wanted to know if I can get out of here, too."
"Do we have anything we can hold this boy on?" she said to Henderson.
"Extortion?" said Henderson.
"I don't know," said Ramirez, staring at Kyle with a critical eye, as if he were a painting, or a horse. "From what we heard over the radio frequency he gave us, he wasn't trying to trade the file for money."
"Arson?"
"Based on the burns on Spangler's skin, I'd put the arson on him."
"How about theft of a valuable file?"
"Taking his dead father's file from his own former home? That won't stick."
"Obstruction of justice?"
"Maybe," said Ramirez. "But we wouldn't have found Spangler without him."
"Abject stupidity?"
"Well, there you go," said Ramirez. "We're just going to have to hold him over on the grounds of abject stupidity. Because who else but an idiot would put himself in the middle of this craziness for no apparent purpose?"
"If stupidity was a crime," said Kyle, "I'd have been locked up long ago."
"Answer one question and we'll let you go," said Ramirez. "Who was in the car?"
"What car? The rental thing?"
"Yeah, the rental thing."
"Nobody."
"Did you hear that, Henderson?"
"I heard," said Henderson. "Now we got him for lying to a police officer."
"It's a shame," said Ramirez. "He was almost in the clear. Have you seen your father lately, Byrne?"
"My father?" said Kyle. "Are you kidding me? You didn't believe that maniac, did you?"
"He seemed to know what he was talking about."
"He also drew his eyebrows in with a Sharpie."
"Someone was taping the whole scene," said Henderson. "That someone took the tape. To clean things up, we'll need it back."
"Let me get out of here and I'll see what I can do about getting you that tape."
Ramirez looked at Henderson, Henderson blew out a cheek and then shrugged.
"Okay," said Ramirez. "If the techs are done with your car, you can get the hell out of here. But tomorrow you're going to have to go on up and talk to an inspector named Demerit with the Haverford Police Department about the fire at your house."
"Deal," said Kyle. He stepped toward Ramirez and lowered his voice. "Now that this is over, can you see me?"
"I can see you fine."
He glanced at Henderson and then gently took hold of her arm and pulled her into a corner. Henderson turned his back and pretended to read something.
"You know what I mean," said Byrne. "Look, let's say tomorrow night at eight, at the same bar where you found me this afternoon. We'll have a few beers, have some laughs, talk about something that has nothing to do with any of this."
"I might be busy."
He leaned forward, scratched his lower lip. Instinctively she licked her own lip with her tongue. He leaned farther forward, and she was surprised that this soon after the death and the blood something inside her was able to open up so quickly and urgently. She was surprised even more at the disappointment she felt when he pulled away without kissing her.
"Tomorrow," he said with a smile before he turned and headed out of the house.
"And tomorrow and tomorrow," said Henderson. "What the hell is that?"
"Shakespeare," said Henderson.
"Don't give me that Shakespeare crap, like you're some student of fine literature. We got reports to write, a case to close, an IAD shooting investigation to deal with. We've got ourselves a mess to clean up."
"Yes, we do," said Henderson.
"So let's keep our eyes on the ball," she said.
"Absolutely. But he's a pretty interesting kid, isn't he?"
"Don't even," said Ramirez.
"Pretty damn interesting," said Henderson, laughing. And Ramirez couldn't help but laugh with him.
CHAPTER 58
IN THE MIDDLE of the night, lying awake in the sagging bed in that fetid motel room, still waiting for his father to reappear, Kyle Byrne gradually grew more and more certain that his father had never returned, that his father's body had fully and truly been rendered unto ash fourteen years ago, that the whole renewed relationship was a piece of wishful thinking hatched in the fevered recesses of Kyle's own deranged brain.
The evidence of Liam Byrne's phoenix-like rise was less than scant. When Kyle quickly searched the rental car outside the Truscott mansion, his father's luggage was gone, along with the cassette tape that he was recording off Kyle's wire. When Kyle drove rings around the Truscott neighborhood shortly thereafter, he saw nothing on the dark streets but police cars. When he returned to the New Jersey motel room, there was no hard evidence that his father had ever been there, no toothbrush or strange pair of socks or discarded bottle of aftershave, only a few empty bottles of scotch and the light, lingering scent of cigarettes and Aqua Velva. But maybe he had drunk the scotch himself, and maybe the scents emanated from the guy in the room next door.
Oh, things had happened in the last few nights, he knew that. His house had burned down, his car had burned with it, he had recovered one of his father's old files, and that file had led him to the bloody events at the Truscott house. And that it had all turned out pretty well for him in the end maybe meant that the spirit of his father had been looking out for him, just as it might have been the spirit of his father that had frightened Tiny Tony Sorrentino off his case. In a way it was a comforting thought, because it was considerably less crazy than what had passed for reality the last few days.
Kyle sat up in bed and took a deep breath. He wanted proof, he needed proof, and he knew where he might get it. The door to the motel's office was locked, the lights off, but that didn't stop Kyle from banging on the door like an escaped lunatic.
A pimply-faced kid, whose hair was sticking out wildly, as if he'd just been dosed with static electricity, straggled out of the back room and flicked on the light. He scratched the top of his head, scrunched up his face, opened the door.
"Yeah?" he said, eyes bleary and drool slipping down his slack mouth.
"Did an old man come by and leave a message for room 207?" said Kyle.
The kid looked at Kyle with an uncomprehending stare, as if he weren't sure which of the two of them was the idiot here. "No," he said, having finally decided it was Kyle before starting to close the door.
Kyle stuck his foot in the gap and pushed the door open, shoving the kid back into the office at the same time.
"Do me a favor," said Kyle, "and let
me see the registration card for room 207."
"I'm not really allowed," said the clerk with a yawn.
"Dude, it's my room. I've got the key, and I'm staying the night. Let me see the damn card."
"There are rules."
"But if I happened to slip you a twenty?"
The clerk's eyes brightened. "Well, you know, there are always exceptions."
"Good, so here's the way it's going to work. I'm not going to slip you a twenty. But if you show me the card, I also won't grab your nose in my fist and kick you in the head either."
"Just a second, sir," the clerk said as he made his way behind the desk with surprising alacrity.
The room was registered to a Byrne, all right, but to a Kyle Byrne, with the signature suspiciously like Kyle's own, and paid for in cash. The son of a bitch hadn't used his real name. If indeed the son of a bitch had signed the card, as opposed to Kyle himself in a fit of psychotic self-identity theft.
Back in the room, Kyle grabbed the little chair from the desk, put it on the cement walkway outside the door, and sat down facing the parking lot and the Target beyond that and the McDonald's beyond that. He leaned back, propped his feet on the railing, tried to make sense of things.
Maybe he had made the whole thing up. Maybe his dead-father mania had grown like a spider to spread its hairy legs into his brain and drive him, finally, insane. Other than that lawyer at Ponzio's, whom Kyle would never be able to find, or Robert Spangler, who now was dead, no one besides Kyle had seen him clearly. And without any physical evidence, to even broach the story to someone, anyone, even that Detective Ramirez, would be a no-win proposition. If he was telling the truth, she would mistakenly think him crazy; if he was relaying the cracked fantasies of a schizophrenic personality, she would correctly think him crazy. No, he'd keep it to himself, tell no one, except maybe Kat, only because he told everything to Kat.
But he wondered if the truth or falsity of his father's reappearance even mattered. As he sat there, in the cool of the early dawn, watching the horizon lighten above the hard landscape of the asphalt parking lot and the cornucopia of crap beyond, waiting for his father to return and prove him sane, the years suddenly contracted like a clap of hands. And here he was, sitting on the porch of his mother's house, waiting for his father. Or on the mound, waiting for his father. Or in a bar or at a softball game or in the heat of the night, waiting for his father. A lifetime spent waiting for his father.
Sitting there now, facing the coming of a new day, Kyle realized, whether the old man was a figment of Kyle's own feverish imagination or a brutal and disappointing reality, that Liam Byrne wasn't coming back. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever. And Kyle was okay with that. Surprisingly. Astonishingly. Okay.
Whatever had happened in these past few days had burned the need right out of him. It was as if the filial relationship he had craved for so long had happened in a matter of hours, moving swiftly from childish love to adolescent rebellion to a sort of blind adult mimicry to a declaration of independence. And he no longer felt deprived, he no longer felt gypped out of some grand paternal presence, he no longer harbored any illusions about how terrific his life might have turned out if his father had only been a father and not some detached presence that died way too soon for Kyle to cope. No, as the bright top of the sun rose above the cement boxes of New Jersey, he felt lucky. Lucky to have had his mother to himself for as long as he had. Lucky to be young and strong, with opportunities to seize and a future to mold. Lucky to be free.
He was certain that would be the end of the father sightings that had plagued him since the funeral fourteen years before, but he was wrong.
CHAPTER 59
SHE WASN'T DETECTIVE RAMIREZ on this night, she was Lucia, her badge and gun worn not on the hip but stashed inside her bag, her hair up, her lips freshly glossed. She was wearing a silk blouse, a pleated skirt, spiky red high heels, and she didn't need any leering Neanderthal to tell her she looked damn good, she knew it already.
Even as she had passed through the administrative and media whirlwind that accompanied the closing of the Laszlo Toth murder case, she couldn't stop herself from thinking of this night with a visceral anticipation. She had imagined something romantic and intimate, something candlelit and soft, something leading to something, leading most definitely to something. And so she was keenly disappointed to find herself vastly overdressed while sitting at a Formica table at Bubba's with Kyle and his motley crew, drinking from pitchers of Rolling Rock and just hanging.
"So is it heavy?" said Kyle's squat friend with all the tattoos, who was named Skitch.
"I'm used to it," said Ramirez.
"Can I see it?"
"No."
"Dude, lighten up," said Kyle.
"I'm just asking to see it. It's not like I want to take out a window or anything."
It was a laid-back gabfest, going nowhere quite slowly, and she was frankly bored. Add to that the way Kyle was back to dressing in his black Chuck Taylors, cargo shorts, and a ringer T-shirt, looking very young and very aimless and very much without the dangerous edge she had found so attractive during the Toth affair, and the whole thing left her wondering what she'd been so hopped up about in the first place. She began checking her watch, wondering when would be a polite time simply to leave.
"Don't mind Skitch," said the bar's owner, that skinny Bubba Jr. "It's not often we have a celebrity with us," he said, hoisting a beer in Ramirez's honor.
Ramirez forced a smile and raised her beer in return. She and Henderson had become briefly famous on the local and national news shows for neutralizing the now-infamous Toth murderer as he'd tried to add a U.S. senator to his list of victims.
"You seemed to like being in front of the camera," said Kyle.
"Just part of the job," she said. But she had liked it, and was good at it, and realized during her fourth television interview that the center of attention was exactly where she wanted to be. But hanging at a bar with these losers wasn't helping her get there, that was for sure.
"You know where they make this now?" said the old toothless man, staring sadly at his beer. "New Jersey. It makes me want to puke."
"I feel the same way," said another older man, with a bulbous nose, whom Kyle had introduced as his Uncle Max. "But it's from them pills I take for my back. So what's going to happen to that senator?"
"My guess is not a damn thing," said Ramirez.
Senator Truscott had held a press conference to announce his horror at what his cousin had done. Truscott had promised full cooperation with the ongoing police investigation even as he vowed to continue to vigorously represent the interests of Pennsylvanians in the United States Senate.
"But it's the end of his presidential ambitions at least," said Bubba Jr.
"Don't bet on that," said Ramirez. "He's getting coverage in the national press, he's gaining a celebrity beyond politics. That stuff can be intoxicating."
"And it's not really his decision to run or not, is it?" said Kyle. "His mother has been calling all the shots for him since he was a baby. That's a hard habit to kick."
"It's going to be tough for her to keep doing it from where she is now," said Ramirez. "They put her in an asylum in North Carolina. We've been trying to speak to her, but they claim she's suffering from shock and dementia."
"The only dementia she's suffering from is her own overblown sense of entitlement," said Kyle. "She married a Truscott, her offspring is entitled to the presidency, and there's nothing she won't do to make it happen."
"What a fun gal," said Kat.
"Maybe sometime I'll show the movie we found in Spangler's apartment," said Ramirez. "Puts the old lady in a whole new light." Kyle raised his beer. "Dudes, I have, like, a toast." Cutlery clanked against beer mugs.
"It's been an insane couple of weeks, starting with my wig-out at the ball game—"
"We had that game won, bro," said Skitch.
"Yeah, maybe, though it wasn't exactly Willie Mays in the on-deck circle.
But from the ball game through the violence of last night, I have to say, the whole experience for me wasn't altogether horrible. You might have heard I lost my dad when I was twelve—"
"No, we hadn't," said Bubba Jr. "You ever hear that, Kat?"
"Not in, like"—she checked her watch—"the last ten minutes or so."
"And my mom died last year," continued Kyle, ignoring the sarcasm, "and I've been feeling sorry for myself, abandoned and alone, the poor little orphan boy."
"You're making me cry," said Tommy. "Stop it. No, really, stop it."
"But in the middle of the insanity," said Kyle, "each of you guys came through for me when I needed it. Junior letting me use his bar for the meeting even after giving me the heave-ho, which I fully deserved. Kat getting me out of jail, staying in touch with the police, and keeping me grounded. My Uncle Max, who's like family to me—"
"I am family to you, you putz."
"For giving me his sage advice and his unflinching honesty."
"Does that mean we're good again?"
"No," said Kyle.
"You let me know."
"I also need to thank Lucia, who saved my life not once but twice from a homicidal maniac. And finally Skitch, who stood with me during the entire time and helped out in ways we won't talk about with a cop present."
"He's just talking hypothetically," said Skitch to Ramirez. "What I would have done if it wasn't, you know, against the law."
"You all helped, each of you, except for Tommy, actually, who didn't do a thing except call a United States senator a pussy to his face."
"I was right about him, wasn't I?" said Tommy.
"Yes you were," said Kyle. "So I just wanted to thank you. We all want to know we're not alone in the world, and right now I feel less alone than I've ever felt in my entire life. Which is good, since after Kat kicks me out, I'm going to need a place to stay. So here's to all of you, even to Old Tommy Trapp. Thanks for taking up the slack in my life."
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