by C A Devine
I forced myself on, stuck one arm in and hauled it back, then another, and another – water hit my face the whole time, stinging my eyes, burning my nostrils. It surged into my mouth and down my throat. I started coughing, choking; I was struggling for breath. A wave crashed down on me. I was forced under. I was sinking and in desperate need of air. I kicked up. I don’t know whether I didn’t move, or up was too far, but I wasn’t reaching the surface. I had to get to Max. I needed to reach her, but I was drowning. My lungs were on fire. The reflex to breathe was fighting a raging war with my mind. I needed air. I needed to get to the surface. I was out of options. I hit the inflation on my life jacket and shot up.
God must have been looking down on me because I thundered straight into the underside of Max. I didn’t check if she was okay, or even breathing. I just grabbed her life jacket and used the survival rage powering through me to haul us both, arm after arm, back along the line to the boat.
I threw her arms up onto the swimming platform, ducked down and sprung back, shouldering the rest of her body up onto the deck. She disappeared as the stern lifted high into the air; the bow plunging down a violent wave. I was sucked under the hull. I started to swim away. I pulled hard through the water; my arm muscles screamed. I was gaining ground. I could see the rudder bearing down on me, I pulled harder. It was nearly down, but I was almost clear. Slam! The hull clipped my left shoulder. Pain knifed through me and I sucked in water as I tried to scream. I went under and shot straight back out as the air in my life jacket reacted to the pressure.
I was choking, trying to drag in air. I pulled along the line again, but it was stuck under the water. I yanked, but it wouldn’t pull free. That could only mean it was wrapped around the rudder, or God forbid the propeller.
I lay back, sucking in air; the stabbing pain in my shoulder keeping me alert. How had it all come to me dying, out here, in the ocean? Hallucinations are common with my condition. And at this moment I wished that’s all she had been.
Shut it down, Ryan, block it out, focus on the task. I deflated my life jacket, sucked in one breath, two, three, and dived under, using my good arm to pull me down.
The line was wrapped around the rudder. I grabbed the side attached to the boat and wrapped it around my wrist. My lungs were starting to burn again. I didn’t have long. I untied the other end from my jacket. I pulled gently on the tied end, using only my wrist. The trick was to ease it out, not pull it in tighter. A delicate balance of enough freedom to float loose and enough tension for it to be pulled clear. I coiled the rope foot by foot, my lungs screaming for me to hurry. I ignored them. Coil, twist, coil, twist, coil, twist, I chanted it out in my head. I could see the end now, floating towards me, teasing me. I grabbed it.
I kicked up, pulling on the end still attached to the deck. I surfaced into the storm, a wave crashed down on me and I lost the line.
I grappled out for it, but couldn’t feel it. I peered, it was just out of reach. I crawled two strokes, my shoulder protesting. It floated further away. I threw my good arm forward and pulled, and again. I needed to keep going, but the gap between me and the boat was widening. Another wave crashed down. I was under again. The pain in my shoulder was nauseating. Exhaustion threatened to shut me down. It was excruciating just to kick upwards. I needed to rest – for a minute, just for a minute. I needed some air. I needed to rest. Just for a minute. Then I would kick up and drink some air. Just for a minute. Rest. Just for a minute.
I felt a dull thud on my neck. I was floating, drifting, flowing. And I was breathing. I was floating and breathing. Thud! My head banged off something solid. A ladder dropped down beside me; hands pulled me to it – Max’s hands. The pain in my shoulder screamed as she hauled me up. I kicked out, trying to get footing on the rungs. The stern battered off the ocean again. I swung left, then right, but she had a firm hold on me. She dragged me forward onto the deck. I slumped onto my front and just lay there. Max kicked the engine into gear and adjusted our angle to the wind. All cool; all calm.
She came back, hauled me up and shoved me to the main hatch. I pushed it back, threw my legs over the washboard and slid down the steps, collapsing onto the floor of the main cabin. Max was right behind me.
I rounded on her as soon as she closed the hatch. ‘What the fucking hell were you doing?’ Rage seethed in me.
‘You weren’t supposed to follow!’
‘No shit. Who the fuck do you think you are? Trying to kill yourself in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!’ I roared at her. ‘What the fuck is that going to solve?’
‘What do you know? You don’t know anything about me.’
‘So you’ll leave me alone out here. You’ll kill us both because I don’t know anything about you,’ I mimicked her with petulance.
‘You’re not the one who’s scarred and damaged,’ she screamed at me, chest out, arms back, sliding around on the wet floor.
‘Do you think you have the exclusive on damaged?’ I bit back, pushing to my feet. I pulled myself up big and tall, into my best intimidating stance. I fought easily against the rolling. Aggression flowed through me, injecting me with new energy. ‘Do you think it’s normal for a New York cop to hang out in Spain all summer? Did it never occur to your fucking self-absorbed ass that not everything is about you?’ I stepped towards her, the muscles in my jaw and neck taught. ‘Some people don’t have the choice. Some people have the choice stolen from them. Children grow up without mothers. Husbands grow old without wives. And you. Things get tough and you do what? You just give up on everything. You just give up on me,’ I thumped my chest. ‘And you,’ I took another step, I was bearing down on her, ‘you spoiled little … little Mata Hari. You have a life. At least the chance of a life again and you throw it away because of what?’ I growled. ‘Because of what?’ She cowered back, her face wide with fear. ‘You …’ What was I doing? What was I doing to her? I needed to tell her, to let her know. Not scream at her. Not scare her. God, what was I doing? I was going to make her run away; I had blown it. It was going to happen again. My chest tightened. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …’ I scuttled back. What was I doing? I had to explain, I had to try. ‘Y-You are the only good thing that has happened to me in a very long time,’ I was shaking. ‘Please. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean. Please don’t take that away from me. Please,’ my voice cracked. I slumped to the floor as the energy spike subsided and my body started to give into the exhaustion. Every cell in my body ached. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t know me; I’m not who you think I am,’ her voice had quietened.
‘No, you are,’ the tears came now, flowing down my face, ‘you are.’
She shook her head, ‘You don’t know what I’ve done.’ She said again, but she stepped towards me.
‘I do know you. I don’t care what you’ve done. Please don’t go away, please don’t. I love you so very much.’ All my reserve was gone and I was pleading. ‘Don’t go away. We can fix it. No matter what it is, we can fix it. Please. Promise me you’ll stay, please.’
I knelt in my wet gear on the cabin floor and begged her. ‘Don’t go away, please. I need you so much. I need you more than you can possibly know. I can’t begin to understand how hard it is for you. But you are the one good thing in my miserable life in a very long time. You disappeared once already. I don’t know if I could lose you again.’ I was sobbing and begging and falling to pieces and rolling forward and pitching back as the boat was buffeted around. ‘Please, Max, please,’ I choked.
She took another step forwards, then another, then another and fell onto me, wrapping her arms around me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered into my ear and gripped tighter. ‘I’m sorry, it’ll be alright now. I promise. I won’t go away again. Everything will be okay.’ And this time she shushed and rocked me.
*
We crawled into bed that night as the storm was subsiding. She lay on her side with her arms still around me. I was burrowed into her and never wanted to let go. She had dragged me out of
my soaking clothes, forced painkillers down me for my shoulder and ushered me into the bunk. Then she climbed in beside me. She drew her hand through my hair in a slow rhythm. ‘What happened, New York?’
27
The Four Women and The Baron
Bright yellow crime scene tape glared out from the cordoned area as we pulled up at the kerb. My partner, Detective Yolanda Brown, a three-year homicide veteran, took the lead as we stepped out of the car and ducked under the barrier. I had the rank, but I was the one on the learning curve and I was willing to follow.
Freezing February rain was flowing down the back of my neck as we stepped into the dank narrow alley, but the smell of decay was still ripe. The victim was short and heavy, the hair long and mousy, the skin was grey and pasty with death. Her long skirt had been pulled up, exposing her genital region and identifying her as female. My eyes were drawn there first and I tried to block the conclusions I was drawing in my mind. You had to work with the evidence, not what it looked like. I ran my eyes along the length of the body until I reached the head.
At first it was only a spark of recognition; people look so different in death. I stared harder, trying to place it, then I wished to God I hadn’t. ‘Oh no, Siouxsie Sioux,’ I blurted it out.
‘What?’ Yolanda’s head snapped around to me.
‘Susan Sidle,’ I gasped, ‘we were best friends in high school.’ We thought we were so cool because we knew who Siouxsie and the Banshees were. Mac Ryan and Siouxsie Sidle, the coolest of the cool. We ran in the same crowd as Marcus, but, at the time, it was Siouxsie and I who were tight.
‘You know her?’
‘Knew her, I haven’t seen her in fifteen years.’ We didn’t fall out, we just drifted apart in the way that school friends do as lives veer in different directions. I swanned off to college then the academy, then the force. Siouxsie moved to Queens, got married, had two kids, then got divorced.
A shudder wracked through me. ‘Oh God poor Siouxsie.’ My head filled with images of how she had suffered. My breath caught in my throat. I gasped, but I couldn’t swallow it down.
‘Okay, you need to step back,’ Yolanda grabbed me by the saturated coat and dragged me away.
‘What?’ Cold sweat oozed from me.
‘It won’t do you any good to look,’ she shoved me to the side of the alley, behind a dumpster. It was embarrassing, but Yolanda stood in front of me, cutting off the view of the boss losing his lunch. I didn’t deserve any loyalty, or looking after, but since the moment I had arrived in homicide and partnered up, Yolanda had been watching my back.
The delectable Yolanda was chasing my heels in the rising star rankings. My higher rank deserved respect, but loyalty had to be earned. I hadn’t earned it, but for some reason she gave it. She was close to ten years my junior, but had the air and confidence of someone twice her age. She was brash, mouthy and totally reliable to watch your back in a jam. After her sister was killed by an IED in Afghanistan, she had spent a year on secondment, working on my mom’s intelligence taskforce. She couldn’t face the bodies. My mom had the highest regard for her. And I suspected Detective Brown was looking after me out of respect for her former captain.
The nausea was passing. I pulled myself up tall and strolled with Yolanda back towards the body, blocking the fact that it was Siouxsie from my mind. A woman in a crime scene vest approached us. ‘Hi Kate,’ Yolanda greeted her by name.
‘Kate Byron,’ she stuck out a latexed hand. I didn’t move. She glanced down, ‘Sorry,’ and snapped off the glove. I shook her right hand, but my eyes were drawn to the contents of her left. She was holding a clear plastic evidence bag. ‘We found this under the body,’ she handed it to me. Inside was another clear plastic bag. And inside that? A sheet of white copy paper with one line printed in large black italics.
I will rape and kill all your whores.
‘I love the communicative ones,’ Kate said.
‘I guess it’s safe to assume that since he says all, he’s planning for there to be more,’ Yolanda said. ‘Who is you? I will kill and rape all your whores. Who is the you, the city, a person, her boyfriends? It could be personal.’
‘Let’s find the men she’s connected to,’ I said.
Siouxsie had been missing for three days. She had disappeared on the way to pick up her six and eight-year-old boys from school. The autopsy revealed the cause of death as water inhalation. Drowning. Bruises on her shoulders suggested she had been forced underwater and her lungs revealed evidence it had taken maybe five or six attempts to do it. It was a horrific death.
She had been killed somewhere else and then her body had been dumped in the alley, in my precinct. And despite the note, she hadn’t been raped.
There was no DNA evidence. No-one had seen her being snatched. No-one had seen her being dumped. She had no enemies. Her divorce was no more bitter than most. And she had dated no-one since she joined the single life. The investigation went nowhere.
After a couple of weeks, other cases took over. Siouxsie’s murder was still unsolved and the lack of progress was eating me up. But as the lieutenant in charge of homicide, I had to make the decision to move the priority on to something else. It was the start of an irrecoverable downward spiral.
I had gained too high a profile to stay in narcotics after the big bust, so I had found myself with a promotion and a new job. I had been with homicide two months and being a lieutenant was proving … difficult. My team wanted advice and to be given orders. I had been undercover for over two years with two rules: one, look out for number one; two, don’t get yourself killed today. My people-person days were rooted firmly in the past.
And homicide was too quiet. By that I don’t mean no murders; we had plenty of those. But besides undercover drug dealing, day on day, it felt relatively calm. The work was detailed and intricate: talking to the morgue, communicating with the grieving in tranquil tones, sifting through evidence, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Quiet and unsettling. Years of posturing with scumbags, face to face, had left me with a lot of pent-up aggression and a tendency to look over my shoulder. It was a tough adjustment. My psychiatrist loves the term adrenalin junkie.
Two months after the first. Same MO; different alley. The same note was found and Yolanda asked the same question, ‘Who is the you? And what links this woman to the first? This is personal. We need to work out the who.’
The second victim was a cop, Lainey Lockwood, a detective working out of the Ninth. Again, she didn’t live or work in my precinct, wasn’t killed in the alley, but her body was dumped there. We never found the murder site. She wasn’t drowned this time, but instead she had been forced to stand with her arms dragged up behind her. In that position the victim eventually falls forward, putting pressure on their lungs and they … suffocate.
I was struggling with the new job: the orders, the paperwork, the detail, you name it. I couldn’t solve Siouxsie or Lainey’s case. I suddenly wasn’t the high achiever I had always been. I was supposed to be the star son of the NYPD’s golden couple, but that star was in free fall. To say I was having a crisis of confidence, would be putting it rather mildly. I was in meltdown. So, I did what any self-respecting cop does in that situation. I started drinking.
My partner spent her days pulling me out of holes. I had to downgrade the case to find a guy who was suspected of killing his pregnant girlfriend. When we caught up to him, he ran. I chased him down, tackled him to the ground, and started whaling on him. Yolanda grabbed me around the chest and hauled me off him. She ended up with a fat lip for her trouble. Suffice to say I was on the verge of throwing my glittering career down the toilet. If it wasn’t for Detective Brown, I would have been gone long ago.
We couldn’t find a connection between Siouxsie and Lainey. Lainey was a cop; it had to have something to do with that. That’s what everyone thought. When a cop is murdered no-one rests, but still no-one made the connection.
Lainey and I had dated on and off for six months at t
he academy, never seriously and we had stayed friends afterwards. That was fifteen years ago. It was never a consideration. It had been almost twenty years since Siouxsie and I had really hung out. Never once did my lame brain process a thought that this had anything to do with me. And that was inexcusable.
By Lily, it was staring us in the face so hard a five-year-old could have worked it out. Another two months had gone by and I was in bed with my latest woman, Lisa. I had met her drunk in a nightclub two weeks before, after she strut her stuff around a pole in a stars and stripes bikini and cowboy hat.
I’ve never had any problems picking up women. I was the kid of high-profile cops. I learned to sweet-talk my way out from under the schoolyard bullies early on. They were good lessons for the teenage years and beyond. Keeping them, however, was another matter.
I was on lates. Lisa would finish up around the same time as me. I would pick her up on my way home. So, when I say we dated, I mean we had a lot of sex. By that stage I wasn’t much for talking.
At the door of her club, the bouncer stood aside without asking me for the cover charge in the hopes that I might do him a favour one day. Lisa filled the narrow stage, working the pole while the customers worked her with their eyes. Frankie said relax loudly through the sound system as she did her eighties set in a short peroxide wig. I sat at the bar, ordered a large bourbon and threw it down, burning my throat. It dulled another fruitless day.
I watched Lisa’s show; the cheesy way she tore off her velcroed shoulder pads, guys stuffing dollars in her panties, leering at her chest. Me, feeling superior, convincing myself I wasn’t one of them. When she finished I went out back. She was pulling on jeans, her own short brown hair back in place.
‘You ready?’ I must have slurred it because she grabbed the keys off me. I lurched for them, but she held them out of reach.