Only Child

by Andrew Vachss

  “The Hillside Stranglings weren’t spontaneous,” I told her. “Those two maggots had spent a lot of time together, mixing their juices, before they blended into a sex-kill unit. Felonious gestalt. Like Leopold and Loeb.”

  “Could have been the same thing here,” Wolfe said, stubbornly. “There isn’t enough information to even guess from.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to maneuver her back to where I needed her to be. “Let’s work with what we have.”

  Wolfe leaned back a little, cast her eyes up as if the grungy basement ceiling had some answers. “The victim was stabbed and slashed,” she said. “The same weapon could have inflicted all the wounds, if it was configured that way. Or it could have been more than one.”

  “Defensives?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Her hands were clean. Wrists, too. Maybe the first thrust brought her down...? I hope so.”

  I didn’t say anything, the silence between us ugly with the thought we shared. Sure, it would be better if the first plunge had been right into her heart, so she wouldn’t have died in pain and terror. But if Vonni had even so much as scratched one of them, maybe there’d have been some DNA under her fingernails.

  “You see anything in the county-line thing?” I asked her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, the deep contempt acid in her mouth. “There’s jurisdictions known to be soft spots. A DA in charge who cares so much about a perfect conviction rate that he won’t move on anything less than a signed confession.

  “Rapists read the papers, especially when they’re Inside, marinating in their own hate. For the child molesters, all the more so. Especially the ‘boy lovers’—they’ve got a real underground wire, pass along information like they do photographs.

  “What any freak’s really looking for, with soft prosecutors, is a deal. You get a DA who’s afraid of taking a case to trial, you can get him to give away the courthouse.” She pulled on her cigarette, let the smoke float out her nose, ground out the butt on the side of the file cabinet, dropped it on the floor. “But that’s for sex crimes,” she went on. “For this, I don’t see the logic. Doesn’t matter how spineless the DA is—homicide like this’s a guaranteed life-top, no matter where you do it.”

  “So the cops don’t have a clue...whether it was a panic-dump, or part of a plan?”

  “They don’t even know where it happened. It’s not possible she was just hanging out in the place where they found the body. She had to have been brought there. But that could have been from any direction. Maybe right after it was done, maybe a week later—nothing points either way, so far.”

  “How early can they pinpoint her, on the day she disappeared?”

  “They can’t pinpoint her at all,” Wolfe said. “She walked out of her house and that was it. Nobody saw her. Nobody talked to her on the phone, and she didn’t leave any answering-machine messages, either. Nobody got an e-mail from her. She didn’t page anyone. She didn’t have a cell phone. No letter she mailed that date...or after...ever came to anyone. Plus, not a single sighting from the minute she walked out of her house until the body was found.”

  “Somebody was supposed to meet her. She was being picked up.”

  “That’s what she told her mother, sure.”

  “It seems likely to me,” I said. “She didn’t have a car. And the bus service around there is lousy at that hour.”

  “It’s not so much lousy as lightly used,” Wolfe corrected me, rapidly leafing through the paper until she found the document she wanted. “The police were all over that the very next morning,” she said, tapping the paper for emphasis. “The driver was emphatic—no one close to the girl’s description got on during his route. And, yes,” she said, anticipating me, “there were already passengers on the bus by the time it got to her stop.” She gave me a level look, waiting. When I didn’t speak, she said, “They checked every car service, too. It’s not like here—cabs don’t cruise, you have to call them.”

  Wolfe held out her pack of smokes to me. I took one, fired a wooden match, lit her up first. Neither of us said anything for a while.

  “I don’t like this as a random,” I told her. “The girl told her mother she had an appointment. And plans for the whole day, deep into the night. But, unless one or more of them’s lying, none of her friends knew anything about it.”

  “People lie.”

  “That’s what all those years as a prosecutor taught you. Thing is, they also tell the truth. And if someone she knew is lying, then either they’re the person she met, or they know who it is. Doesn’t sound random to me.”

  “The liar could be the girl herself.”

  “I thought of that. Off on an adventure, and she didn’t know the territory. Sure. But teenagers, they don’t usually go on adventures by themselves. Runaways, yeah. But you didn’t see a shred in all that stuff you brought about a reason for the kid to run, did you?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “I know,” I said. “The mother didn’t have a boyfriend?”

  “There’s no evidence she even dated. Why are you so big on that one?”

  “I was in a case once. Mother’s boyfriend, a few years younger than her, he was going at the daughter for years, since the kid was about nine or ten. Girl gets to be thirteen, she disappears one night while the mother is at work. During a big snowstorm. Boyfriend said he had a few beers watching TV, fell asleep, never saw her leave. They find the kid’s body in a vacant lot, day or so later. The same snow that covered the kid covered whatever tracks there might have been.

  “The cops find the girl’s diary in her school locker. She thought she was having an ‘affair’ with the boyfriend. They were going to get married as soon as she became of age. She didn’t want to wait.”

  “What did the boyfriend get?” she asked, eyes cold.

  “Get? He never got arrested. They questioned him, but he was smart. Kept it very simple. Didn’t admit anything. He had a prior—exact same MO, but no homicide. And he knew they couldn’t even make out the stat rape without his confession, much less a killing, so he lawyered up immediately. Forensics were useless; they had lived in the same house.”

  “This isn’t anything like that.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “I’m sure the mother wasn’t hiding a boyfriend in the basement, yeah. But it could have been a similar scenario...one of her teachers, maybe.”

  “Maybe. Whatever happened to that...case you had?”

  “I told you, he never even got arrested.”

  “So that filthy freak and the girl’s mother lived happily ever after?”

  “Far as I know,” I lied.

  “Giovanni Antrelli has three arrests,” Wolfe said, a half-hour later. “None in the past fifteen years. No convictions. He’s a family man; this you knew, of course. If he were a doctor, he’d be a general practitioner. Gambling, loan sharking, bust-out schemes, labor racketeering. Supposed to be a real comer. Word is, he reports to a capo but he’s actually a higher rank himself. Which means the old men have big plans for him, down the line.”

  “He’s never been Inside?”

  “In the Tombs, overnight, maybe. Or on Rikers for a week, at most. The charges were always dismissed. The court records don’t say why, but I don’t think we have to waste a lot of speculation on it. I guess the bosses always thought highly of him.”

  “Anything about him trafficking?”

  “Funny you should ask,” she said, twisting her mouth as she spoke. “His rep is, he wouldn’t touch drugs. Too risky, he says. And the time is so high, a bust could make anyone in the chain roll over. In fact,” she went on, watching me closely, “the feds did make a little probe of their own, a couple of years ago.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It was almost comical,” she said. “They popped some moke with serious weight, turned him right at the scene. What they wanted was what they always want: the man
at the top. A headline-size fish. But what they got was this genius running around trying to make new cases for them. He was wired when he approached Antrelli—on his own, the memo says—and tried to get him to go into business.”

  “And you think Giovanni made him?’”

  “I didn’t hear the tape,” Wolfe said. “Just read the transcript. What Antrelli told him was, and I quote, ‘Drugs isn’t a game for white men. Let the spear-chuckers and the banana brains have it. The money never sticks to their hands, anyway. We always get it back from them, one way or the other.’”

  “The guy the feds have, is he still under?”

  “That’s not part of our deal,” she said, no-argument cold. “You want to protect your pal Giovanni, hire on as a bodyguard.”

  “I wasn’t looking to...Never mind.”

  “Right. Now, Felix Encarnación, this one is another story entirely. He’s never been arrested in America, but Interpol has him on file as an assassin for a Colombian cartel. Supposed to have done a half-dozen very professional jobs, two of them in Europe.”

  “Supposed to...?”

  “All of this was a long time ago. He was held—I wouldn’t say ‘arrested,’ not with the system they have there—in Peru a while back. Held for about two years, until he was released. Ransomed out, that’s what I’m told.”

  “By the Colombians?”

  “Could be. Nobody’s sure. Encarnación himself’s not Colombian. Or Peruvian, either. Guatemala is what the money’s on, but even that’s just an educated guess.”

  “Then we know two things about him for sure,” I said. “He can do very hard time and not give anyone up. So he’s got a lot of trust going for him. And a sure pipeline to pure.”

  “Yeah. The rest is all gossip-level. Antrelli’s supposed to have no temper. Pure ice. Never loses control. An old man’s head, that’s what they say about him.”

  “And Felix?”

  “What they say is, he can never go back down south. And that, to him, a gun’s like a hammer to a carpenter.”

  I spent the next three days in my place, sifting and straining the information in Wolfe’s paper through every filter I had, adding to my charts until I could see bits and pieces of Vonni’s life in every room.

  When I ran dry, I went out to see what I could find of her death.

  I started where they’d discovered the corpse. A culvert off an unpaved lane in the swampland between Jamaica Bay and JFK Airport. I could feel the hackles that must have gone up on Giovanni’s neck when he’d first been told. The area’s a big favorite of mob guys who have a recurring need for unmarked graves.

  As I slowed to a stop, my shoulders tightened and my nostrils flared, taking the pulse of the place. It was way too long after the murder for the cops still to be staking out the dumping ground; but I’m an old dog, and sniffing for danger is an old habit.

  Her body had been found wrapped in heavy plastic sheeting, secured with baling wire. “Like a slab of meat, ready for the freezer,” one cop’s notes had said.

  You’d think that would rule out a Lovers Lane encounter that had gone wrong. What kind of man carries plastic sheeting and baling wire in his trunk?

  I knew the answer to that question, so I spent an hour crisscrossing the area. But there was nothing resembling a regular spot for car sex. About the only dry land was where the body had been dropped off.

  Dropped off, not buried. That meant something. Maybe the killer was in a hurry.

  Or maybe he was a psycho, making a statement. Those kind never write their messages in invisible ink.

  One look around was enough to show me that the site was outside New York’s special two-tier recycling system. You want to get rid of something in Manhattan, you just leave it out at the curb. It doesn’t matter if the Sanitation Department takes a pass. Between the scrap-metal scavengers, the flea-market restockers, and the homeless guys pushing their pirated shopping carts, nothing worth a nickel survives.

  But, out there, all I could see was dregs nobody would touch, anywhere—a few empty forty-ounce malt liquors, a couple of screw-top wine bottles, a slab of tread from a truck tire, one aluminum leg from a kitchen chair, a crushed pack of Newports, strewn condoms, a torn potato-chip bag....

  I knew the condoms were recent—they would have been the first thing bagged and tagged by the forensics crew if they’d been there when the body had been discovered.

  It was a pretty good spot for people who were too crazy, or too smart, for the homeless shelters. Close enough to the airport to make Dumpster-diving productive, with plenty of natural cover to keep you through the weather with the help of a few artfully rigged plastic garbage bags. The cops would have scoured the area. Not just for traces of the killer’s vehicle, but for any signs of campfires, lean-tos, cans of food...anything to show people were living out there. In the jungle, the birds see everything. Getting them to sing on cue, that’s the tricky part.

  Nothing in Wolfe’s paper showed they had found anyone to talk to, but that didn’t mean nobody had been around at the time the killer had dropped off his garbage. If anyone from a homeless camp had seen a body being dumped, they would have just nomaded on out of there, quick.

  But if the area was inviting enough, maybe some of the old residents would have drifted back over the past few months.... At least that’s what I was hoping for.

  It turned out like most of my hopes.

  In books, the detective stands at the spot where the victim was killed and makes a promise to her—seems like it’s always a woman—that he’ll find the murderer.

  I didn’t feel anything. And I didn’t make any promises.

  “I know street kids,” I told Michelle. “I know where they go, even why they go. I can tell the weekenders from the permanents. I know where they shelter up when they have to. They’re like a...species, I guess. There’s a food chain, predators and prey. They’ve got their own look. Their own mating habits, their own survival systems. I can always find some of them, tap into their communications.”

  Michelle touched one perfect cheek with a long, red-lacquered nail, saying nothing. She’d never seen her son Terry before the night I’d finessed him off a kiddie pimp in Times Square. But she’d adopted the kid in less time than it would take a sperm to merge with an egg. Terry had never seen the pimp again.

  I had.

  “Some things never change, girl. You drop a dope fiend into a strange city, how long’s it going to take him to find a slinger? It’s like that for me with runaways. I was one of them once. It’s easy—too fucking easy, sometimes—for me to put myself right back there, in my mind.”

  “But...?”

  “But there’s no street kids in that town where she came from. I mean, there’s probably the equivalent of some kind, but they’re not on the streets, see?”

  “They’re all in cars?”

  “No. That’s not it. Sure, out there, the cars are the drivers—everyone’s social status rolls on wheels. But that’s got nothing to do with what I mean.”

  “Small towns...”

  “It’s not the size, honey. I’ve been in little towns that make Vegas look like Amish country.”

  “Border towns, I know. But when there’s money...”

  “Not that, either. There’s lots of ways to join the street-kid army, but they’re not all draftees. Where you come from doesn’t matter so much as why you’re there...and what you’re willing to do to hold your place. Plenty of kids of rich families are eating out of garbage cans and selling their bodies.”

  “My bio-parents had money,” Michelle said, saying it all.

  “You see where I’m going with this, then. The kids I could connect with, they’re not still in that town. They’re here. Or out on the coast. What difference? It’s all the same place.”

  “I know, baby,” she said. “You know I do.”

  “But even if there’s any runaways from Vonni’s town here, I couldn’t find them,” I told her.

  “Her mother, she’d know the girl’s
closest friends, right?”

  “Yeah, I think she would. I know when there’s secrets, and I didn’t smell any in that house. But I guess I could try just asking her, if...”

  “If what?”

  “If I can’t figure out a way to bring them to me.”

  “Her friends?”

  “Not just them, Michelle. The whole...environment.”

  “The police...”

  “They’ve been over the ground, sure. But they don’t know how to take soil samples the way we do.”

  “You have any ideas?”

  “Not yet, I don’t. I’ve been...studying them from a distance, I guess you could say. The mother gave me one place I think I could try.”

  “A hangout?”

  “No. A woman. Vonni used to babysit her kid.”

  “What makes you think she knows anything?”

  “Not her. The kid. The way I read Vonni’s mother, no way she’d let her daughter have boys over without supervision. But when the girl was babysitting...”

  “Kids don’t miss much,” Michelle said, agreeing.

  “Hazel said you’d be calling,” the woman said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Then you know what my job is. Would you be willing to talk to me?”

  “If you think it will do any good...”

  “There’s no way to tell without trying,” I said. “Okay?”

  The house was quite a bit downstream the status river from where Vonni had lived—a small, squarish tract house, squatting undistinguished in a tight cluster of identical boxes. The front lawn was a crabgrass-and-dandelion postage stamp. The sidewalk was cracked. A clapped-out once-blue Monte Carlo was parked out front.

  The woman who opened the door was sweet-faced, with a mop of tightly curled hair the color of fresh rust, and lively blue eyes. She was about six inches shorter than me, and ten pounds heavier, wearing a bright-yellow sweatshirt and jeans.

  “Hi!” she said.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. McClellan.”

  “Oh, please! Call me Lottie. Everybody does,” she said, stepping aside to let me in.