She is alone.
She steps through the door, locks it, eases her way to the stairwell, cringing at the sound of the squeaky hinge. A few moments later she steps into the small, deserted Cain Manor apartment lobby. Earlier, she had come home to find a pair of men working on the front doors. They told her that, due to the recent murder in Cain Park, they were putting in new, high security locks. The thought had made her feel a little better, but only a very little.
Now it no longer matters.
She glances around the empty lobby, then floats silently down the corridor and out into the rear parking lot.
The first thing she notices is the deep lavender moonlight on the snow. As she approaches her parking space, the light on her car returns a greenish cast to her eye, a color that makes her pause for a moment, disoriented, thinking it may not be her car. A glance at the license plate. It is her yellow Honda. Right where it is supposed to be. Then why is She stops in the middle of the thought, her mind tripping over an image that her heart doesn’t seem to want to process. She cannot understand why someone is sitting in the passenger seat of her car. She cannot understand why this person looks so familiar.
She cannot understand why Isabella is sitting in the passenger seat of her car.
It is Bella’s tam-o’-shanter, her round face, her dark curly hair. Yet, although most of her daughter’s face is obscured by shadow, one thing is clear to Mary, and that is this:
Her daughter is not moving.
“Bella!”
Mary sprints to the car, slipping on the ice, fumbling with the keys, a spike of raw terror in her heart. It seems like a full minute before she can get the key in the frozen lock, the frosted window now clouding with her breath, concealing her daughter’s tiny form.
She whips open the door and grabs her child from the front seat. Too hard, too light, not a child not a child not Isabella not Isabella The world stops. Relief washes over her in a huge hot wave, taking her legs out from under her. She falls to her knees.
It is not her daughter.
It is Astrid, her daughter’s big doll, the one she herself had sent by UPS for Isabella’s last birthday. Astrid wearing Isabella’s old clothes.
Release, first. Then confusion.
Then, a reprise of her fear.
Because there, in the plum-colored moonlight, pinned to the doll’s coat, is a directive that Mary has no trouble at all understanding, a square of white paper bearing a simple message:
Go back.
60
The blue Saturn turns the corner for the third time. It has the look of a car well maintained, the imperious sheen of a vehicle that is the very first automobile ever purchased off a showroom floor after a series of beaters. And, although things like road salt, cinders, slush, and goopy carbon by-products abound on such a winter night, as the blue Saturn passes I can see the occasional streetlamp reflected off its smooth, muscular lines in starry patterns.
The woman at the wheel looks left and right, left and right, searching for a parking space, a block or so south of Carnegie on East Eighty-fifth Street. She finds one, squeezes the Saturn in expertly, then exits the car, moves to the trunk, opens it. As I approach I see her reach inside and remove a camera case. She is wearing a long double-breasted coat, a knitted red scarf.
She has courage. I will give her that. By the way she is skulking around, I can tell she isn’t supposed to be here. I guarantee that Jack Paris has told her not to come to his apartment.
I have no hatred for her, but she will certainly get in my way.
At the last second, the crunch of snow beneath my feet alerts her to my presence. She spins around, looks into my eyes. And remembers.
Just like a reporter.
“Hola, chica!” I say. “Buy you a fruity cocktail?”
61
As soon as Bobby said the word midnight, Paris knew that it was not going to be enough time. He also knew that it was a favor he would probably never be able to repay, one for which he had not even presumed to ask. Bobby Dietricht and Greg Ebersole are both in possession of conclusive forensic evidence in a capital murder case and are willfully delaying the submission of these facts to their superior officer. This is obstruction of justice at the very least, not to mention the violation of a truckload of other laws.
Serious jail time.
At midnight, Bobby Dietricht will have no choice but to place the file on Randall Elliott’s desk. And at that time, Captain Elliott will have no choice but to issue a warrant for the arrest of John Salvatore Paris.
“You all right with this?” Paris asks.
“Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” Bobby Dietricht says. Greg just nods.
Paris had told them everything. Rebecca. Mike Ryan. Jeremiah Cross. Demetrius Salters. It had come out in a steady stream, the tension with it. He could deal with someone setting him up.
But, by midnight?
The problem is that they could not get a search warrant for Rebecca’s apartment without cause, and cause could not be established until the lab reports were submitted. Besides, there is nothing physical tying her to the jacket. To search Rebecca’s apartment, legally, would be to implicate Paris.
Bobby Dietricht and Greg Ebersole will work Rebecca D’Angelo’s apartment on their own time. Starting right now.
Bobby adds: “Besides, I’m married, Jack. I ain’t fuckin’ dead. I saw her at the Cleveland League party. You don’t have to explain a damn thing.”
“You don’t think I-”
Bobby holds up his gloved hand, stopping him. “I don’t know a cop in this city who would.”
Paris immediately regrets every negative thought he’d ever had about Detective Robert Dietricht. “I don’t know how to thank you two.”
“Three,” Greg says.
“Three?”
“Yeah,” Greg says with a wink. “I guarantee you Mike Ryan’s working this detail.”
Paris heads upstairs, opens his apartment door, sees a FedEx envelope on the floor. “Do Not Bend: Photos” a label says on the outside. The photographs Mercedes’s brother took. Paris is not exactly in the mood to look at himself. He tosses the envelope on the table, pours himself coffee, gulps a cup. Twenty minutes until he has to be at the Westwood Road house. Bobby and Greg are off to the Heights.
How could he have been so fucking stupid? How could he have thought, even for a minute, that a woman like Rebecca-or whatever the hell her name is-would be the slightest bit interested in him?
She is good though, he thinks. Jesus Christ she is good.
But why is she doing this? Could he have been that wrong when he looked into her eyes? Or does the killer have something on her?
Regardless, he does not relish the idea of her on a witness stand. He grabs his keys, his Kevlar vest from the dining room table. Manny perks for a moment, but soon senses he isn’t involved. He rolls over on the couch.
Paris is almost out the door when the phone rings.
“Paris.”
“Jack, Tonya Grimes.”
“What do you have?”
“I have half. I have a listing of a homicide victim named Anthony C. del Blanco. The funny thing is, that’s all I have.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, all I have is a stat. There’s no paper.”
Paris’s heart sinks.
Mikey.
No.
“Nothing at all?” Paris asks.
“Not a shred. No interviews, no photos, no autopsy reports. Zip. I looked under other spellings, just in case it was misfiled, but nothing turned up. Just a computer entry listing him as a vic. Weird, huh?”
“Yeah,” Paris says, absently. “Thanks, Tonya.”
“Listen, I’m getting a fax right now. It may be about this Jeremiah Cross. Let me call you right back.”
“Okay.” Paris hangs up the phone, his mind beginning to connect the dots between Mike Ryan and Sarah Weiss. It is then that he notices the blinking message light on his answering machine. He pours a ha
lf-cup of coffee from his Thermos, glances at his watch. He has time. He hits Playback.
“Hi… it’s Mercedes… ’bout nine-thirty… I was wondering… what’s the penalty for killing a little brother in Ohio?… can’t be much… probably like a fine or something, right?… anyway… I know you’re not there… you’re off to the big raid I’m not allowed to attend and all… kidding… anyway… I just talked to my brother Julian and, after enduring much threat, he confessed that he never showed up to take your picture, so whoever you met that day was definitely not my brother… anyway, seeing as he’s only fifteen and can’t exactly drive over there tonight, especially with my foot up his ass, I’m going to get in my car right now and drive over myself and wait for you… sorry again… you can’t trust Puerto Rican/Irish people… what can I tell you… good luck… okay… bye… happy new year… bye.”
Fifteen, Paris thinks. What the hell is she talking about? Her brother Julian is only fifteen? Who the fuck was it at the Justice Center that day, then? And who the fuck was it in the parking lot at the Cleveland League party?
It hits him.
What was it that Mercedes had said the day she called him from Deadlines, the day she had told him that her brother might show up to take pictures?
“Well, at the moment, there is a fabulously handsome, ethnically diverse male sitting right next to me, trying to ply me with fruity cocktails…”
Paris dives for the dining room table and the FedEx envelope that contains the photographs. He tears it open to find an eight by ten of himself standing by the window in the Justice Center lobby, a bright red hole drawn in the center of his forehead.
He has seen his face.
Before he can pick up the phone to call in the description, he notices something hanging from the inside of his apartment door. He tries to move toward it, cannot.
As the Amanita muscaria begins to rocket through his veins, he understands.
He understands why no one came out of the back room at Ronnie’s. He understands that every single move he has made in the past week or so has been watched, observed, noted. He understands that the psychopath the entire department is looking for had known he was heading to Ronnie’s for coffee and had made sure that Jack Paris had gotten a special brew, a brew of whatever was in Mike Ryan’s bloodstream the day he died, a brew intended for the entire stakeout team, and Jack Paris suddenly knows that, if the feeling beginning to surge through him now is any indication of where he is going, it will surely end in a dread that is deeper, and colder, than any he has ever known.
62
The boys are ten and eleven. They are supposed to be watching television in their grandmother’s basement, but, instead, they are standing at the corner of Fulton Road and Newark Avenue, across from the St. Rocco’s rectory, passing a Winston Light back and forth, cupping it in hand as they had seen the older kids do.
At a few minutes after ten they see a cop car trolling Fulton, so they work their way down the alley that runs behind the strip of stores that begins with Aldonsa’s Tailors and ends with that heebie-jeebie voodoo place on the corner.
The younger boy looks around the Dumpster for a piece of foil in which to wrap the sacred remains of their last smoke. There is foil all over the place, courtesy of the takeout, but it all seems to be covered in barbecue sauce or spilled Pepsi.
Too short to see inside the Dumpster, the younger boy reaches over the rim, feels around the debris, and feels something wet. Something thick and viscous and sticky.
More barbecue sauce?
“Shit,” the boy says, pulling back his hand. And realizes immediately that it doesn’t smell like barbecue sauce at all. In fact, it smells like shit. Actual shit.
The two boys hoist themselves up to the rim of the Dumpster.
The corpse inside was, at one time, a man. This much is obvious, due to the fact that the man is naked. But there is also a huge hole where the man’s middle used to be. The area from his throat to his groin is cut into a long, flayed crescent, the fat and skin and muscle pulled to the sides in a surprised rictus of a smile, the contents glistening beneath the overhead vapor lights like maroon slabs of liver at the West Side Market.
The boy had reached directly into the man’s lower intestine, into fully digested arroz con pollo.
Although the dead man has rings on every one of his fingers-huge shiny stones that shimmer like multicolored prisms-the boys do not take them. Instead, they run as fast as they can, wind-whipped and mind-shattered, and do not stop until they reach West Forty-first Street and the arms of Jesus in the close, blessed safety of their grandmother’s basement.
Light snow, bitter cold. Ten-fifteen P.M.
The Ochosi task force, eight officers strong, is deployed in two locations, neither more than a block from the Westwood Road house. One team of four SWAT officers is in an unmarked tech van at the corner of Edgerton and Fenwick Roads. The other is in an SUV down the street from the Westwood Road address, at the bottom of the hill, a distance of less than half a mile. Within ninety seconds, both teams could arrive at the scene.
Sergeant Carla Davis sits in an unmarked car a half-mile away, in the Kaufmann’s parking lot, dressed in civilian clothes. The raid is scheduled for midnight, now less than two hours away. The task force has established a scrambled command frequency, so even if someone in the house is monitoring the channels, they will not pick up the task force traffic.
The bad news, on Westwood Road, is that it appears as if every house on the street is having a party. Every few seconds another car passes the tech van’s position, brake lights aglow, looking for a parking space, a space that is becoming harder and harder to find. People seem to be coming and going from every house on the block.
A half-mile north, Carla Davis tries to reach Jack Paris.
Greg Ebersole’s cell phone rings at ten-twenty-one. He is on Cedar Road, heading to the Cain Manor apartments. Bobby Dietricht is in the car behind him.
“Greg Ebersole.”
“Detective, this is Tonya Grimes.”
“Yeah, what’s up, Tonya?”
“I can’t reach Jack Paris. I talked to him ten minutes ago and now I can’t find him. Is he with you?”
“No. I just left him, though. What do you have?”
“Got one Jeremiah David Cross, attorney at law.”
“I’m listening.”
“Mr. Cross is a Caucasian male, twenty-nine years old, six feet, one-eighty-five, brown over brown. Got his law degree from American University in Mexico City. No wife, no kids, no-”
“Address, Tonya. Address.”
“Mr. Cross lives at 3050 Powell.”
“Where is that exactly?”
“Cleveland Heights. Right near the Cain Towers apartments.”
Five minutes later, Greg Ebersole, Carla Davis, and Robert Dietricht meet at the Lee Road entrance to Cain Park.
All three police officers have something to do before midnight.
63
The first sensation is one of near-weightlessness. Floating an inch or so off the floor. Light head, light arms, light legs. He feels as if his body is suddenly manufactured of smoke, as if he possesses no footsteps, as if a slight breeze might urge him around his apartment, cornice-high, allowing him to cavort along the ceiling for a while, leaving no trace of his presence, no residue of his passing. Light and ethereal and vaporous and…
Invisible.
That’s the feeling. The dream of every adolescent and post-adolescent boy. To have the ability to become invisible and tread where laws and rules and adults and signs do not allow.
As he looks around the mysterious landscape of his own apartment, the sensation becomes amphetamine-like. He had popped a few white crosses in his first year on night duty, a few orange-triangled Benzedrines to ward off those sleep demons, but had never indulged in LSD or mescaline or psilocybin or any other of the hallucinogens along his crazy path through his twenties. As a cop, of course, he had seen way too much collateral carnage to the hard dru
gs like cocaine and heroin to consider them anything but a scourge on urban life.
But this…
He can use this. He suddenly understands everything about everything. He suddenly knows exactly what he needs to know about everything he needs to know about.
This is cop fuel.
Behind him, a door slams. He turns, slowly, and sees a note pinned to the inside of his apartment door.
A note to him? On the inside?
He floats toward it. No, not a note. A notebook. A spiral notebook covered with red and blue hearts. It is nailed to the door with a huge spike.
Soon, the blue hearts begin to caper and swirl and, before Paris can place the image, he hears a noise, a soft footfall on the carpeting behind him. He turns to see a slender woman approaching-black hair, pale skin, almond shaped eyes. She wears a short white skirt, a black leather jacket. She seems to be gliding toward him.
Across his living room.
Paris is unable to respond to her presence in any way. Who is she? Where had he seen her before? She is surely from a dark place in his past, a room currently unavailable to his memory.
She continues toward him. Graceful, confident, like a runway model. She has full lips. The blackest eyes.
She stops in front of him.
And that’s when Paris feels the tap on his shoulder. He turns, dream-slow, to see the familiar face of the man standing behind him, to hear the whoosh of an arm breaking the stillness, to feel his head suddenly detonate into a glittery flourish of Technicolor, a painless implosion of red and orange and yellow sprites. He slumps against the wall, reveling in the ascension of the magic mushroom, reeling with remembrance.
And, before he falls unconscious, knows.
The woman is Sarah Weiss.
64
It was the hardest phone call she had ever made. She had not spoken to her father in more than ten months and was terrified he might answer the phone. But she had no choice. Luckily, her cousin Anita was visiting for the holidays and had answered and told her, with a rather subdued voice, that Isabella was fine, was trying her best to stay awake until midnight.
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