"I didn't realize she was that open about it," Mike said, reaching down to pick up a rock. He pulled back his arm and heaved it into the ocean. "And it was actually gonna happen, if you can believe it."
"Val used to-"
"Don't say it. I don't want to talk about her now."
"You have to talk about her, Mike. That's one thing you can still do for her. Talk about her and think about her every day of your life, from now on for as long as you live."
He turned and started walking back down the beach away from me, weaving from exhaustion as he moved. "It's too rough. I'd rather-"
"Of course it's rough. That's why you have to make yourself do it. Out loud-to people like me and like Mercer, who know what you meant to her."
"I think of the fucking mutts I have to deal with every day of the week. People who kill and steal and maim for no reason at all. Scumbags who'd just as soon shoot you between the eyes as turn the other cheek. Bastards who'd rob and rape their own mothers without thinking twice. Assholes who skin cats and shoot dogs for sport. Any of them ever die young, Coop?" Mike was shouting now, trying to make himself heard over the breaking surf. "Nope. They'll outlive every guy you ever met in a white hat, every living soul who ever did a good deed for someone else. They've got something in their genes that not only produces an absolutely pure strain of evil, but also lets 'em thrive till they're a hundred and fifty."
Mike stood in frigid water up to his ankles and threw another couple of rocks far out into the waves. "That's what consumes me sometimes. All of these shitbirds who don't deserve to live, they're gonna be here long after we're gone. And that sweet, smart, strong kid I fell in love with didn't stand a fucking chance from the get-go."
"You can't-"
"If you're gonna give me 'life isn't fair,' Coop, don't even open your mouth," he said, reversing his trail. "They're giving heart transplants to prison inmates now, you know that? Did you ever hear of anything more fucking stupid than that? You need a liver or a kidney or a new pair of eyeballs, you could be up for sainthood alongside Mother Teresa but you still gotta get in line behind some serial killer in San Quentin or a pedophile up in Attica."
He leaned over to pick up a piece of driftwood and began to trace something in the sand. It was a building, a childlike imitation of a skyscraper. "Can you imagine what it is to leave a legacy like that, something that you've built from nothing but your imagination and raw talent? I'd stand in front of these-these magnificent structures-things that Val had conceived from a drawing on a piece of paper and then seen through to the final construction. Do you know how much joy it gave her to create things like that, things that people will look at and live in and enjoy for generations?
"Me? I run around locking up bad guys like it makes a difference to anybody. Like there isn't gonna be another son of a bitch to come along to fill the vacuum before I even have the cuffs on tight. Then one of your cowardly colleagues gives 'em cheap pleas and they're back on the sidewalk a few years later, sticking needles in their arms and killing anybody that looks at ' em cross-eyed. Why do we bother? Why do we keep on doing it?"
He knew the answers as well as I did. There was no reason for me to speak.
Mike turned and climbed up to the top of the dune, sitting down in the middle of the path that led down the other side. He stared out at the distant horizon, the seamless line between the ocean and the sky. "I understand why you come back to this place."
I slowly moved up toward him, trying to get a foothold in the shifting sand.
"I used to look at you, back when we first started working together," Mike said. "I'd heard about-about what happened to Adam from the guy you shared an office with. I used to look at you and wonder how you handled the grief at that young age, when you seemed to have everything else going for you. I used to try to figure out how you got up in the morning and got on with your life. I didn't know why you gave a damn about all the needy derelicts who showed up on your doorstep, why you cared about helping any of them when you could have slammed the door behind you and walked away from it all."
"You think I didn't wallow in my own self-pity for months? You think the thoughts I had were any different than what you're going through this very minute?"
I reached out my hand and Mike extended his, to pull me up next to him.
"You didn't want to close your eyes in the hospital because you were afraid of your dreams, your nightmares," he said. "Me? I wouldn't mind dreaming. The dreaming's gonna be all I have left. It's knowing that every time I wake up and open my eyes, my first thought will be Val, my first image will be that broken little body that fought so hard to make it."
I stood behind him, my hands on his shoulders. He didn't brush them away, so I squatted and began to gently knead them.
"How long, Coop? You got a smart answer for everything. You got an answer for that, for how long it takes?"
"Longer than you can even begin to imagine," I said. I talked to him about emptiness and unfairness and profound unhappiness. I told him about the darkest thoughts I had confronted and the hardest things I ever had to do in the face of my despair.
"And it stops? You're gonna tell me that someday this pain just stops?"
"It's going to be with you forever, Mike. Just like you said. Before your eyes open in the morning-every single morning- you'll be stabbed in the heart by some memory of Val the second you're even conscious. The first moment you have a thought, it's going to be Val," I said, pausing and backing away a bit. "And then one day-maybe eight months, maybe a year from now-you'll wake up one day and you'll think of something you forgot to do the night before, someone you have to call about a case, some problem you promised to take care of for your mother. Some really trivial thing."
I stood up, ready to turn and go. The sun had almost disappeared and the temperature was dropping.
"That's the day you're going to hate yourself most-the first time something sneaks into your consciousness before Val does. You'll be angrier at the world than you are right now. Mad at yourself, too, for letting it creep in there. But then it will happen again, more and more often. And each time it does you'll despise yourself for betraying Val's memory with such insignificant thoughts. Until some very distant day, inconceivable now, when the memories assume a balance of some kind, when they bring pleasure with them almost as often as they cause pain."
"That doesn't seem possible to me," Mike said, standing and brushing the sand off the seat of his jeans. "I don't think I can deal with it."
"Nobody does. Nobody wants to."
"You come out here to be near him, don't you? You feel closer to Adam when you're here."
I didn't answer.
"The heavens, the ocean, sand for as far as the eye can see-and not another person around," he said. "Makes you pretty conscious of your own mortality."
He reached into his pocket, removed a black velvet pouch, and handed it to me.
"Open it. Go ahead."
I untied the drawstring and turned it upside down in my hand. Out slipped a diamond ring-a slim gold band with a small brilliant stone in a classic round setting.
"It's very beautiful," I said, holding it up and watching the gem sparkle, reflecting against the shimmering surface of the water. "Did Val-?"
"Nope. A surprise," Mike said. "Valentine's Day. I had it up on a shelf in her bedroom closet that she couldn't reach."
No wonder he'd been so short of money these past two months.
He took the ring from me and loped down the dune toward the edge of the water. I called out after him but I knew there was no way to stop him. I watched as Mike waded into the frigid surf, drew back his arm, and hurled Val's ring into the riptide that was sucking the waves out to sea.
34
None of us felt much like eating dinner.
More than the landscape and the foliage change when winter comes to Chilmark. Not only the general store closes, but so does every up-island restaurant and inn. No fried clams at The Bite, no lobster rolls at The Galley, n
o shore dinners at The Homeport, no conch fritters at Cornerway, and no harpooned sword from Larsen's. There was always some clam chowder in the freezer, and I defrosted it for the three of us. Mike barely played with it while we tried to distract him with memories of weekends and evenings that all of us had spent together.
Mike stood up from the table, walked to the bar, and opened the liquor cabinet. He closed it and turned to Mercer. "I'm not gonna drink. It's too easy to get through it that way. Feel like a walk?"
They let themselves out the back door and went off in the dark. I took a book into the living room, added some logs to the fire, and poured myself the drink that Mike had rejected. It was almost ten o'clock by the time they returned.
Mike warmed himself in front of the fireplace for a few minutes before telling us he was going to try to get some rest. He and Mercer clasped each other in an embrace and then Mike grabbed the banister and pulled himself up the stairs.
"I think he's worn himself out enough so that he may actually sleep a few hours," Mercer said, joining me with a glass of vodka.
"Did he talk?"
"Enough. You know he was prepared for, well-the worst-a year ago, when Val's treatments weren't going well. With the cancer in remission, this hit him like such a bolt of lightning I'm afraid it's going to set him back twice as hard."
"What time do you want to head home?" I asked.
"Grab a ferry late morning, if we can. Be in the city by six."
"Did you reach Lieutenant Peterson this afternoon?"
"Yeah. You and I have some catching up to do this weekend. We've lost Mike for the rest of this one."
"I've been making a list," I said, ticking off names with each finger of my left hand. "I'm sure Peterson has, too. We've got to sit down with Professor Tormey, now that we know what the Raven Society is. I'm going back at Gino Guidi, whether or not Ellen Gunsher has been able to rework a deal with his lawyer."
"You guys never got to talk to him about Poe, and there he is, a major benefactor of the cottage."
"Well, we didn't know it at the time. And Emily's pal Teddy Kroon still has questions to answer, as far as I'm concerned."
"It's not the right moment to bring this up with Mike," Mercer said, "but you were with him when he went to that retired cop's apartment, weren't you?"
"Aaron Kittredge? Yeah."
"Mike had asked the lieutenant to get his departmental file. The loo filled me in on that today. Kittredge is my first priority when we get back."
"Why?"
"He left the department without a pension. Had to sue to get it reinstated."
"He told us that. You got the back story?"
"Rubber gun squad," Mercer said. "Got dumped to Central Park."
Trigger-happy cops were relieved of their weapons while the shootings they were involved in were investigated. Those who weren't indicted, but who weren't completely exonerated either, wound up flopped into some uniformed assignment where little harm could come to people in their way. Central Park was one such holding zone-very few human residents, with only squirrels and pigeons to endanger.
"Who'd he shoot?" I asked.
"Think of the story that Zeldin and Phelps told us."
"Of course," I said, closing my book. "Ten years ago-the cop on his way into the Botanical Gardens to talk to Zeldin. Shot a neighborhood kid in the back. Why the hell was he going to see Zeldin in the first place? That had to be at least ten years after Kittredge met Emily Upshaw, so what's the connection? What's the renewed interest in Poe, assuming that's what he was going to Zeldin's about?"
"I've been spinning with that one all afternoon. You with me? We'll get to Kittredge first thing Sunday morning."
Mercer said good night and went upstairs to his room. I turned on the television to watch the late news before going to sleep. Mike's devastating loss had taken my mind off what had happened to me yesterday. My headache had been replaced by a dull throb.
I could smell the coffee brewing shortly before 7A.M. I asked Mercer to have the transit department's report from the rapist's MetroCard faxed to the house, so I could play with it on the long car ride home. The three of us moped around before driving to Vineyard Haven to get on the short standby line for the ferry. By one-fifteen, we were on Route 8, headed for I-95.
Stretched out on the rear seat, my ski jacket pillowed under my head, I unfolded the papers from Transit SIB-the Special Investigations Bureau-and began to scan the report.
The MetroCard had been purchased on January 3, a little over a month ago. It was sold at a newsstand on Fifty-ninth Street. Unfortunately for us the buyer paid cash. A credit card imprint might have solved the case nicely.
I leaned a pad against my right knee, to chart the man's movements. Between eight and eight-thirty every weekday morning, he boarded the downtown Lex at Seventy-seventh Street. I drew a star at that intersection, just a few blocks west of the location of all the attacks. In the evenings between six-thirty and seven o'clock, most of the return trips were from the East Fifty-first Street station, a commercial area surrounded by financial institutions as well as offices and stores of every kind.
There were several random rides, some late-evening trips home, where he boarded the train close to midnight. I would have to compare these dates against the crime occurrences, to see whether he was prowling the neighborhood close to the times of the attacks.
There was only one anomaly.
"Hey, Mercer. The snowstorm two weeks ago, do you remember what night it was?"
"It was a Monday. I don't remember the date but it was my RDO"-police jargon for regular day off-"and I was home after the weekend. Why?"
"Give me a minute."
Mercer's Metro man had followed his usual route in the morning, going back uptown from Fifty-first Street a bit earlier than usual, at five-thirty in the afternoon. An hour later, he got on the southbound train again at Seventy-seventh Street.
At ten that same evening, the rider took his first bus ride using this pass. All his other travel had been in the tube. He boarded the M2 on First Avenue, scanning the MetroCard in at the Forty-fourth Street stop.
All the details began to click into place. The secure residence on the Upper East Side; the physical description of the clean-cut, well-spoken assailant; Annika's good ear-picking out a single word that sounded like the accent of an upper-class British student; a rapist who disappeared from the city-perhaps the country-for four years before returning; a compulsive criminal whose DNA didn't seem to be in any data bank in America; and a MetroCard from the perp's pocket that suggested he entered a bus in front of the only buildings that stand on the east side of First Avenue and Forty-fourth Street.
"John frigging Doe. You want to nail the bastard, Mercer? Call the squad and get somebody over to the United Nations stat. Find out whether there was a reception, a speech, a party-whatever was going on the night of that storm. Get the list of whoever attended-spouses, children, staff. Get the address of every ambassador and delegate who lives in Manhattan."
Mercer was watching me in the rearview mirror, smiling for the first time in two days.
"Take it to the bank, gentlemen. John Doe is the son of an African diplomat."
35
Mike didn't even seem to be listening to me.
Mercer was interested in my idea. "Break it down for me, Alex."
"We're talking about the comfort zone of the perp, right? We've been looking at black men who work on the Upper East Side- restaurants, hospitals, high-rise buildings. Clerical jobs, dishwashers, janitorial staff, and all the other menial positions. Now think about how many of the diplomatic corps and consulate employees associated with the United Nations live in town houses in the exact same neighborhood. Do you have any idea how many African diplomats and their families are living there?"
"The map has changed so many times since I was in college, I'm embarrassed to say I can't even tell you how many countries are in the UN."
"Coop's stretching on this one," Mike said.
/> "Maybe so. Maybe I'm too high up the ladder, but these missions all have big staffs, and most staff members have families here, even U.S. nationals who live in the zone."
"What else?" Mercer said. "I better give our profiler a nudge. See if he's ready with his geographic jeopardy spot, and if your theory works with it."
"This guy is well dressed and carefully groomed. If you trust Annika, he may even have been educated in England, like so many families from the territories of the former British Empire," I said. "That one little word she picked up had me thinking this guy didn't learn English in America. It fits so well with a connection to the UN."
"That could be why his DNA isn't in any data bank in the States."
"I'm figuring it can't be an ambassador or high-ranking diplomat himself, just 'cause the age we're going for is too young for that," I said. "But suppose his father is posted here. The son gets a job as an investment banker-an office on Park that fits with the subway stop on East Fifty-first Street and with hanging out at the bar at Primola with a handful of yuppies, yapping on their cell phones the night Giuliano made him."
Mercer picked up the thread. "Maybe someone on the father's staff got wise to the fact that the kid's got a problem. Maybe even tags his comings and goings to the nights of the attacks, back four years ago when the newspaper coverage was saturating the city. Shows Papa the sketch that was plastered all over the East Side and that convinces the father to send him back to the mother country."
"The rapes stop happening for a few years. The father doesn't have any reason to know the pathology of a rapist. Figures his son has outgrown the problem and decides it's time to ease his way back into town," I said.
"That's a lot of data to read into a few MetroCard entries, but it makes as much sense as every other shadow we've been chasing. I'll get on it tomorrow."
It was after 7P.M. when the guys dropped me at my apartment. We had talked Mike into taking time off, spending a few days with Val's brother when he came into town to close up her apartment at the end of the week. I had never seen him look as lost as he did when the car pulled away from my building, and I wonderd when I would hear from him again.
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