I wrapped up what case work I had left when I got back to the city, then put out a memo to our core clients explaining that Joe and I were stepping aside from field investigations. I referred them to other people in town, brushed aside inquiries, and waited for the outcry of disappointment and anger. It never came. Perry and Pritchard Investigations wasn’t the community institution I’d believed it to be, evidently.
I listened to Ken’s message daily for a while. Then, a month after he’d been killed, the voice mail informed me the message would be deleted from the system. It had been there too long, evidently. You couldn’t keep it forever. Eventually the computer decided that the time elapsed required the message to go away even if I didn’t want it to. By the next morning, it was gone.
I invested thirty thousand dollars into new equipment for the gym. I paid for a larger phone-book ad and hired a friend of Amy’s to create a Web site. I did most of the work on the gym by myself, largely because it kept me busy. When I wasn’t working on it, I was working out in it. That summer I took thirty seconds off my time in the mile and added forty pounds to my bench press, got it back up to a max of three hundred and ten pounds, my all-time high and a mark I’d set when I was a rookie. My attention to diet changed, and I started taking amino acids and fish oils and any number of other things that were rumored to have some sort of health benefit. By August, if I wasn’t in the best shape of my life, I was damn close to it. My workouts had become feverish, almost obsessive. Do one more rep, Lincoln, run one more mile, take one more pill. You’ll be stronger, leaner, faster. You’ll have no vulnerability. None.
I’d been spending more and more nights at Amy’s apartment, and one evening I felt her eyes on me and turned to see her watching me with a frown from across the room.
“What have I done?”
“Quit your job,” she said.
“This is an unemployment lecture?”
“That gym won’t be enough for you.”
“You don’t know that. I could make plenty of money—”
“Not money, Lincoln. It won’t be enough for you. Don’t you get that?”
“You’re enough for me,” I said.
“Romantically speaking? I sure as shit better be. If I’m not, then you’re a cheating bastard. If you mean I’m enough, period, all you need . . . that’s not true.”
“Actually, it is.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. You’re not enough for me.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Gee, thanks. You’re a sweetheart tonight.”
“I’m serious. I love you, but you don’t define my entire existence, either. You wouldn’t want to be around me if you did. So to sit there and tell me that I’m enough for you, that’s a lot of pressure, and when you finally realize it’s not the truth, I don’t want to be the one who gets hurt.”
“I’m not sure I follow your logic there, but I don’t intend to hurt you, Amy.”
She came over and kissed me, then leaned back and stood with her hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.
“You just removed a large piece of yourself, and now you’re pretending that it was never there. It’s been a hell of a thing to watch, trust me. Impressive at times. You’re a master of denial, Lincoln, an absolute master—but I’m scared of where it’s going to take you.”
She kissed me again then and walked out of the room. I sat and watched her go and thought that I should follow and say more. I didn’t know what I would say, though. I really didn’t.
At the end of August, Graham called again, this time to tell me that he finally had his lab results on Joshua Cantrell’s grave. The backlog had loosened up, and he’d used Ken’s murder as a means to bump his request higher in priority.
“We got nothing,” he said. “No DNA results. Nothing that connects to Harrison, or anybody else. The only DNA they could find was Cantrell’s.”
I felt defeat sweep through me, realized just how much hope I’d been holding out.
“What next?” I said.
Graham was quiet.
“You’re done?”
“I’m not done, Linc, but it’s a cold case, and without new—”
“Ken Merriman was murdered in May, Graham. That’s not a cold case.”
“That’s also not my case. Talk to your boys in Cleveland on that one. I’m sitting here in Pennsylvania with a full caseload and a bunch of supervisors who don’t want me spending time in Cleveland. Look, nobody’s more disappointed about this than me. I come to a case with one goal—to close it. I haven’t done that on this one. I won’t deny that, but I also won’t bullshit you. My focus has to be out here, where I’m paid to work. I’d love to take Sanabria down, love to take Harrison down, but I can’t.”
“Somebody will,” I said. “In time.”
“Right,” he said, and then neither of us was comfortable with the other’s silence, so we said a hurried goodbye and hung up.
32
__________
The same day Graham gave me the news about the lack of lab results from the grave, he gave it to John Dunbar, who, evidently, had continued his regular calls asking for updates and offering his help. I hadn’t heard from Dunbar since I’d asked him to leave my apartment, but at noon on the day after Graham’s call he showed up again.
I was on a ladder in the gym, applying paint to a band around the ceiling I’d decided to make a different color than the rest of the wall. It was an aesthetic effect, completely unnecessary, but I’d decided to do it anyhow, because it was good to stay busy. I was finding all sorts of ways to stay busy.
Grace told him where to find me, and he came and stood quietly beneath the ladder and watched me paint until I felt his presence and turned and looked down.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Wanted to buy you a beer.”
“I don’t drink in the middle of the day.”
“A cup of coffee, then.”
“I’m off caffeine.”
“A bottle of water.”
He never blinked, just stood with his hands in his pockets and an even stare on his face, watching me. I gave it a moment, and then I sighed and came down off the ladder.
“Let me rinse out the brush.”
We walked up the street to an Irish pub that had gone in on the corner. Neither of us spoke. Once inside, I went to a table across from the bar and ordered a beer.
“Thought you didn’t drink in the middle of the day,” Dunbar said.
I didn’t answer.
“So you’re not happy to see me,” he said. “I get it.”
“I just don’t know why you came. Why you’re not willing to make phone calls instead of personal visits, at least.”
“Tougher to blow me off in person,” he said. It was a line straight out of Joe’s mouth, one of his guiding principles for detective work—you wore out shoe leather before you burned up the phone lines.
“I’ll give you that much,” I said.
They brought my beer, and he asked for a Jameson and water, and we waited while they poured that and brought it over.
“I talked to Graham,” he said after taking an experimental sip.
“As did I.”
“Pretty disappointing news.”
“It was.”
“It’ll go back to where it was twelve years ago now,” he said. “Go back to nobody looking or even thinking about looking. It’ll be unsolved, and forgotten.”
I drank some beer.
“Ken Merriman’s case is open,” he said. “You talked to anybody on that?”
“Not lately.”
“I have. I was calling a couple times a week. Guy I’ve talked to down there got tired of it, though. Asked me to stop. Said he’d let me know if they got an update. So in my professional opinion, that one’s moving along about as well as the Cantrell investigation. Which is to say, it’s not.”
“That could be an unfair assessment.”
“You think?”
“The rangers aren’t bad at what they
do, Dunbar. Give them time.”
“Time.” He nodded and turned the glass with his fingers. “Twelve years of time, that’s what we’ve had on Cantrell. I don’t want to see Ken Merriman’s case go another twelve.”
“I know it.”
“But you’re not doing anything to help,” he said, “and I don’t understand that. Somebody else, sure, they’d feel hopeless and useless and I’d get that. I’ve read about you though. I’ve talked to people. Your reputation as a detective is extraordinary, Perry. Good instincts, they tell me, good experience, a real natural—but what people talk about most? It’s how damned dogged you’ve been. How determined. How relentless.”
I blew out a breath, looked away.
“I see you’ve closed your office,” he said, “and now it’s the middle of the week and you’re in the gym, painting. Is that the new you?”
“What if it is?”
“I’d say that’s a shame. I’d say that’s as much of a shame as anything I’ve heard in a long time, because the world is full of evil, and there aren’t enough people who can do something about it.”
He paused. “Dominic Sanabria is a killer. He has gone unpunished for that. He sits around in his fancy house drinking afternoon cocktails and smiling about it. I cannot let that last.”
When I didn’t answer, a glow of anger came into his face, and he took a deep breath and looked away, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of me.
“You remember the kid Sanabria killed, Lamarca?” he said after a while. “I told you about him. It’s the case we had him for at the motel if the son of a bitch had only rented his own room.”
“I remember.”
“The reason he was killed? Sanabria thought the kid was talking to an informant. Thought he was. In truth, he wasn’t, but that didn’t matter to Sanabria. When Joseph Lamarca’s body was found, seven of his fingers were broken. Smashed. Bone showing.”
It was quiet. He said, “That’s what he did to someone he thought betrayed him, Perry. Then Joshua Cantrell. Then Ken Merriman. It all goes back to the same place, every single one of those bodies goes back to the damned motel room that he didn’t rent. It’s about atonement. You bet your ass I’m looking for it, buddy. You better believe it.”
I finished my beer, and we sat in silence for a while and watched the TV without really seeing it. Then I ordered another beer and asked if he wanted a second whiskey, and he shook his head. Most of his first was still in the glass.
“I got upset the last time I talked with you,” he said eventually, voice soft. “I thought you were being a bastard, to be honest. You said some very cutting things.”
“I was having a bad day.”
“That doesn’t matter. The things you said were cutting, but I know that’s because they were true. I screwed that situation up, Perry, I screwed it up bad, and a man died. A man was murdered, and I have that blood on my hands. Do you understand that? His blood is on my hands.”
His eyes were red, and his voice sounded thin.
“I’ve got to live with that,” he said, “and all I can do, the only way I know to cope with it, is by looking for atonement. Because while his blood might be on my hands, I didn’t kill him—and if I can see that whoever did kill him is punished? Perry, that’s the closest thing I’ve got to redemption.”
I’d lost my taste for the beer now.
“I know Joshua Cantrell doesn’t mean anything to you,” he said, “but Ken Merriman should. So think of him, and help me. Let’s see it through.”
“What Ken Merriman means to me,” I said, “is that it’s time for me to walk away. What you’re asking for, I just cannot do. I’m tired of being in the game. Tired of having to spend my days immersed in some filthy, foolish crime, trying to determine what son of a bitch killed a good man and dumped his body in a park where children play. It’s not for me anymore. I’m sorry.”
“I understand that you’re tired,” he said, “but I’m trying to tell you that you can’t afford to be. Because there are too many people saying they’re tired. The whole world is tired now, the whole damn world doesn’t have the energy to set anything right. We want to wait on somebody else to do it, and yeah, maybe we believe that it should be done, but we just don’t have it in us to try anymore. We’re a sideline species these days, Perry. We turn the news on and see some tragedy or crisis and shake our heads and say, ‘Boy, hope somebody gets to that. It is just outrageous that nobody’s addressed that one yet.’ Then we put on American Idol and go to bed.”
“You watch American Idol?” I said.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
It was quiet then, and he waited a while, and eventually I said, “Dunbar, good luck. Really and truly—good luck—but I’m out.”
His face fell and he looked away from me. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a bill and dropped it on the table. He got to his feet and shook my hand silently, and then he went to the door and stepped out into the wind, shoulders hunched and head down and alone.
33
__________
I couldn’t sleep the night after Dunbar’s visit. I’d worked out for two hours that afternoon, then gone to the Hideaway and caught up with Scott Draper for a few beers while we watched the Indians game. They were on a losing streak. I knew the feeling.
It was midnight when I got back to my apartment, and I went right to bed, hoping that the lingering effects of the alcohol would take care of the rest, put me to sleep quickly. They didn’t. Two hours passed, then three, then four. I stared at the ceiling, wandered out to the couch, went back to bed, turned the TV on, turned it off, tried to read, tried to control my breathing, tried damn near everything I could think of and still couldn’t find sleep.
I gave up around five, dressed in workout clothes, and went downstairs, thinking I’d punish my body for refusing sleep by going for yet another run. Break its will before it broke mine. By the time I got outside, though, I knew I didn’t have it in me. I stretched out in the parking lot in the dark, breathing in the last cool air of night, another hot and humid day ready to replace it. If not a run, maybe a drive. That seemed better. I could drive to Edgewater Park before the traffic started, watch the sun rise over the lake and the city. I hadn’t done that in years. Or maybe go down to the West Side Market, hang around and watch as the vendors arrived and set up their wares before the doors opened. I used to do that when I was a patrol officer, come off a night shift and head down to the market, a place that always felt like a step back in time.
There were plenty of possibilities, and they all sounded good. How I found myself in Old Brooklyn, then, parked across the street from Parker Harrison’s apartment building, I really couldn’t say.
He left the house just before six, exactly as he had the last time I’d seen him. He walked out of the apartment, turned and locked the door carefully with his key, then tested it once to be sure before he headed to his truck. It was a Chevy S-10, at least fifteen years old, and for a second as he drove out of the lot he was facing directly toward me. Then he made the turn and pulled away and I started the Silverado and followed. I wanted to watch him. That was all. Didn’t want another confrontation, didn’t want to say a word to him, just wanted to watch him.
He drove to Riverside Cemetery, and I passed the entrance when he turned in, knowing it was too early in the morning not to attract attention by following him in. I gave it fifteen minutes, then circled back around and entered the cemetery, which was one of the city’s oldest and largest. It was a beautiful place, really. More than a hundred acres of rolling green valley and flowering trees and marble monuments and the dead. There were plenty of them at Riverside.
I drove through the cemetery until I found Harrison’s truck, parked in front of the maintenance building, empty. I’d missed him. I drove back up to the chapel, where I assumed my truck would be less noticeable, parked, and set out on foot. It was a huge place, and it would take a while to find him. I had the time.
I left the road and walked
through the grounds, my shoes soon soaked by the dew. After a pass along the south side without any luck, I looped around and headed toward the north, away from the maintenance building. I was not alone in the cemetery. During the walk I saw two people beside graves, paying early-morning respects. I thought that it had been a long time since I’d been to see my mother and father’s stones.
I was approaching the northeast bend of the road, ready to head west and walk back toward the entrance, when I heard the buzz of a weed trimmer. A few minutes later I found Harrison trimming the base of a monument, head bowed.
For a moment I just stood there, unsure of what to do. He was at work, and that’s all he’d be doing for the rest of the day. No need to watch him tend the grass and weeds in a graveyard. If I really wanted to begin surveillance on him, I could come back in the afternoon, wait for him to get off work, and see where he went. That was what mattered, surely. This did not.
I couldn’t leave, though. Now that I’d found him, I wanted to watch just a little bit longer. Just a few minutes. I retreated across the grounds, looking for someplace where I could sit unnoticed and keep an eye on him. Sitting was key. I was suddenly feeling the groggy, mind-numbing weariness of an entirely sleepless night.
About a hundred yards from where Harrison was working, I found an enormous monument with a granite lion resting on top. The lion was lying down with its front paws stretched forward, its head up. The carving job was exquisite. I couldn’t imagine how long something like that took. The name on the stone read simply DAYKIN. No first name, no dates. It was probably a family monument, I decided as I looked around the other stones and saw the Daykin name repeatedly. The patriarch making his claim.
The Silent Hour lp-4 Page 22