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To those most special,
Patti, Rachael, Roger, and Billy,
and to the memories of my legendary mentors,
District Attorney Frank S. Hogan and Henry Robbins
Prologue
Then…
T WENTY - EIGHT - YEAR - OLD L IZ T YLER WOKE IN THE DARK moments before her alarm clock would have chimed. Reaching over to the nightstand, she turned it off. She lingered for a moment, enjoying the warmth of her husband, who slept soundly next to her, half hoping that he’d wake up and make love to her.
She’d never been more in love with him in their seven years of marriage. There’d been a rough spot three years earlier—a meaningless fling with the cliché tennis instructor to get even with her husband for his workaholic hours as a stockbroker—but he’d forgiven her and understood that he’d played a role in her infidelity. Wading through a flood of tears and self-recriminations, they’d reached a new level in their relationship and were stronger and more loving as a result. They’d conceived a baby, Rhiannon, named in memory of their first meeting at a Fleetwood Mac concert, and the child, now two, had cemented them to each other still further.
Sighing but getting no response, Liz decided to move on. This was her favorite time of day—just before the dawn, a precious few minutes to be alone with her thoughts before the demands of mommyhood and domestic engineering drove all other considerations from her mind until after the last bedtime story.
Liz slid from bed and into a sports bra, baggy sweatshirt, running shorts, socks, and running shoes. She walked around to his side of the bed and leaned over to kiss his cheek, rough with a day’s growth of beard.
“Going running?” he mumbled, finding and stroking her long muscular leg with the hand that hung off the bed.
“Yeah, lazybones, want to join me?” She didn’t really want him to go—this was her time—and knew he wouldn’t but it was polite to ask.
“Maybe next time.” He sounded more than half asleep, but his hand had continued to explore up her leg until it was reaching suggestive levels.
She moved away from his fingers, raising a muffled complaint. “You missed your chance five minutes ago, tiger,” she said, laughing. “I’m up, dressed, and off to the beach. I’ll be back before you go.”
Leaving the bedroom, she’d tiptoed into her daughter’s room and peeked over the rail of the crib. Rhiannon lay on her stomach, a thumb stuck in her mouth. She was dreaming, judging by the small sounds of discovery and joy she made in between sucks. Liz leaned over until her nose was less than an inch from her toddler’s neck and inhaled deeply the sweet and sour smells of childhood.
With an effort, she straightened and left her daughter’s room. Time to start or you’re going to miss the sunrise, she thought, grabbing the lanyard, with the whistle on it, off the coatrack and heading out of her Brighton Beach apartment.
She quickly made her way over to the boardwalk and down the steps to the beach. Crossing the loose sand over to the shoreline where it was harder and more compact, she then headed up the beach toward Coney Island. She could just make out her destination in the growing gray of the dawn—a big insectlike pier a mile away.
Liz liked running in sand. It gave her a better workout and was largely responsible for her shedding the twenty extra pounds she’d gained during pregnancy. Only five foot six, she was down to a lithe, trim 110 pounds with just enough breast to give her cleavage. She was proud of how she treated her body and had adopted a tan, athletic look with short, spiky black hair that framed her green, almond-shaped eyes nicely.
Pounding up the beach, scattering the seagulls, who complained obscenely about the intrusion, she was mostly alone. She could see the occasional beachcomber in the distance and the early riser or two along the boardwalk, but this stretch of beach was all hers. It gave her a chance to think about an issue that was troubling her—whether to return to work.
She didn’t like the idea of leaving Rhiannon with a babysitter. But on the other hand, she’d had a career she enjoyed before she got pregnant—working as a florist after getting an associate’s degree in horticulture at Brooklyn Community College. She missed the work and she missed getting to socialize with adults during the day. But that just made her feel even more guilty, like she was being a bad mother.
The dilemma consumed her so much that as she approached the pier, she didn’t notice the shadows moving beneath the weathered, barnacle-encrusted pylons. That was unusual, because she really didn’t like to run beneath the hulking structure. As a little girl, she’d been afraid of dark places—those spaces beneath the bed, in closets, and down in basements where monsters were said to hide.
The dark places beneath the pier frightened her as an adult. But she always forced herself to finish this half of the run by racing beneath its beams, timing the sprint to match the waves receding enough to allow her a clear shot to the other side. In part, the idea was to conquer a childhood fear, but it was also similar to the reason people enjoy watching horror movies—they like being scared.
Liz was so caught up in the internal debate over going back to work that she didn’t see the real monsters until she was halfway under the pier and one jumped out at her and yelled, “Boo!”
She veered and tried to sprint away but stumbled, giving him time to cut in front of her again. He wasn’t horrible-looking for a monster, just a tall, gangly black teenager with mocha skin, nice, white teeth, and hazel-colored eyes. But he talked like a monster. “Say, where you going, bitch? Me and the homeboys was partyin’ and thought maybe you should join us.”
Standing as a wave came ashore and soaked her running shoes, Liz noticed that she was surrounded by a half-dozen teenagers—some of them leering, others looking uncomfortable. “Leave me alone!” she said forcefully as she’d been taught in a rape-prevention course she’d once taken at the YMCA, but the teenagers just laughed and smirked.
Liz tried to push her way past her tormentors. She could see the light on the other side of the pier and thought if she could just get there, she would be safe. She almost got through them, too, but then one of the boys, who seemed to be their leader, grabbed her by the arm and spun her around.
Terrified, she reached out and clawed his face. He looked at her with surprise and then rage. He lifted his hand, which held a piece of steel bar, and struck her on the side of the head. It felt as if someone set off a big firecracker inside her skull. There was a flash of white light accompanied by a searing red pain, and she sank to her knees.
“Fucking ho,” the boy snarled and grabbed her by the hair. He began dragging her up the beach, farther into the shadows beneath the pier.
The pain of being pulled by her hair and her fear of what would happen in the dark brought Liz partly to her senses. She stuck the whistle in her mouth and blew as she lunged up, scratching for his eyes.
She saw fear in his eyes and even dared to hope that she might fight her way to freedom. But then someone kicked her in the back, crushing the wind out of her and sending her sprawling headfirst into the sand. She pushed herself back up on her hands and knees. Then another firecracker went off in her head.
The next thing she knew she had been turned over on her back and someone was yanking her shorts off. “No, please,” she begged. She coul
dn’t see out of her right eye and her left caught only a blur of images as her dazed mind tried to reject what was happening to her.
“Hold her,” the first boy shouted. Hands grabbed her shoulders and legs, pinning her to the ground as he got between her legs. She felt him trying to penetrate her and willed her mind to some other place where the world was still safe and good. The sun shone on a field as her daughter ran toward her laughing and her husband looked on.
The firecracker went off again. Then again. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Faces appeared. Some angry. Some frightened. Voices taunted her and urged each other to…violate her. “Yo, Des, your turn.” Their voices sounded like crows in the cornfields of Iowa, where she’d grown up before she’d moved to New York to become a writer, fell in love at a Fleetwood Mac concert, married, had a baby, and named her Rhiannon.
“Fuck her, homes, ain’t you a man?” There was a terrible pain on her right breast. She heard herself scream, but it sounded as if it was coming from some other woman.
There was a moment’s respite. Then the first boy spoke again. “Hey, ratface, you want some of this bitch?”
Another voice entered her head. An evil voice, laced with malice. “Show you boys how to treat these bitches,” the voice said. “If you want to teach them a real lesson, you got to fuck them dirty.”
A man with a pockmarked face and foul, rotting breath leaned over and grinned in her face. Someone rolled her over. She felt the cool sand on her shattered face; it felt good and she wondered if these boys would now allow her to die. But the nightmare wasn’t over. She felt herself penetrated again, ashamed to be used so horribly. Filthy, dirty, so much shame that she welcomed the new blows to her head, hoping that they would put her out of her misery. Die, she told herself.
In the distance, sirens wailed. The boys shouted words of alarm, indistinguishable from the screams of the seagulls and the whispering condolences of the waves.
Then the monsters were gone. She felt their running footsteps recede across the sand as she waited for death to release her from the humiliation and pain. But death was not so kind.
Slowly, painfully, she rose to her knees, then to her feet. She couldn’t see much, just a light and a green moving field she knew was the water. Dirty. Filthy. She had only one desire—to cleanse herself before she let the sea take her.
They found her standing in the water up to her waist, scrubbing furiously between her legs, trying to wash away the shame of what the monsters had done to her. Someone summoned a police officer, who waded into the water to escort her back to shore.
When he got close, he had to look away for a moment to compose himself. Her face was covered by a sheet of blood, her left eye swollen shut, her right eye hanging half out of its socket. Her lips were split, a black hole where her front teeth had been.
She screamed when he first reached out for her arm and pulled away from him. “Please, ma’am, let me help you to someplace safe.”
Turning a sightless face toward the officer, she’d cried, “Don’t you know, there’s no such place!”
1
Friday, December 10
HUGH LOUIS SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY IN THE CHAIR NEXTto the desk of the television talk-show host. He’d once played tight end for the semipro New Jersey Packers football team as he worked his way through law school. But those days were more than twenty years under the bridge, and the chair complained like a bitter housewife beneath his bulk.
As he waited for the taping to begin, Louis mopped away with a handkerchief at the interlocking streams and tributaries of sweat that coursed over his broad face. The stage crew bustled around, including an intent young woman who dabbed away at his host, Natalie Fitz, with last-minute applications of makeup to disguise encroaching wrinkles and a chronic fatigue that had settled in when she realized some years before that her chances of anchoring network news were slim and none.
Unless, she thought with a glance toward Louis, making nice with this fat shyster gets me an Emmy. Then who knows, maybe not the evening spot but one of the news magazines or a morning show. She turned up the wattage on her smile when Louis caught her looking. He returned it with the same show of teeth and lack of sincerity.
The other reason for Louis’s prodigious amount of sweat was that he always started producing it when he was preparing to lie. It didn’t matter that he lied all the time and, in fact, had made it the hallmark of his legal career. But his body never had gotten used to going along with what his mouth was saying. He guessed it had something to do with the strict Baptist upbringing his dear departed mother had beat into him while he was growing up poor and black in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
“Damn, it’s hot in here. You folks never hear of air-conditioning?” he said to Fitz, adding a chuckle just to let her know he meant it in a friendly way. Like hell I do, he thought. Bitch probably had them turn up the heat to put me in my place. Well, won’t be long, and I won’t need the skinny old bag. Then we’ll see who turns up the heat.
Louis never worried about the ethics of lying. He’d hated his mother and despised her for working at menial jobs—and for being dark as roasted coffee beans, whereas he’d inherited the milk-chocolate complexion of the father he’d never met.
As a kid, he’d dreamed of the day he could leave Bed-Stuy and his mother. Fortunately, his size and an early athleticism had been enough to get him a football scholarship at a small Virginia college. He’d hoped for an NFL career but an affection for fast food had buried whatever slim chance he had beneath rolls of fat. So he’d accepted his “wink and a nod” diploma given to less-than-deserving athletes at the school and moved on to Plan B. His mother had wanted him to join the ministry. “Like hell I will,” he told her. “I’m going for where the jack is; I’m going to be a lawyer.”
Subsequently, he’d been turned down by the finest law schools in the land. But a small, nondescript institution in New Jersey that faced probation with the national law school accreditation board had happily accepted him under its “nontraditional students” program and had even given him a partial scholarship. The Packers (regrettably not the team in Wisconsin) had paid him enough to handle the rest. He’d graduated with a law degree mostly by cheating and plagiarizing. But he’d already developed a reputation for playing the race card when things weren’t going his way, so none of his professors were about to challenge him lest they find themselves defending a lawsuit instead of teaching about them.
Louis had perfected the art of sliding through holes to advance himself. He took and passed his bar exam in New York under a program that allowed for a certain amount of leniency for minority students, “recognizing that these tests have certain cultural biases that preclude such students from a fair opportunity.”
His luck continued when he was snapped up by a mid-Manhattan white-shoe firm looking to enhance its positioning in the black community. He’d put in his time, taking advantage of his status as one of three young lawyers of color to work half as much as the young white attorneys, and for that matter, the other two minority colleagues. But then he’d noticed that while his color bought him a certain favoritism among the peons, he wasn’t going to go much farther up the totem pole. The firm had only one black partner—an older, quiet, Harvard-educated tax attorney named Harvey Adams, who was about as black, in terms of how even he viewed himself, as Donald Trump.
Adams had been added to the partners list the same year that Louis was born. It dawned on Louis that he might be Adams’s age before the next black would gain that distinction, so he’d quit to hang his shingle in Harlem and took his constituency with him.
When the firm’s partners complained that he’d signed a no-competition contract and therefore had to return their clients to the firm’s fold, Louis had gone to the newspapers and cried racism. The big white bully—who by the way had a glass ceiling when it came to minority partners—was trying to prevent the oppressed, young black victim from succeeding. It was his first experience with cultivatin
g the media, which loved a race baiter nearly as much as it loved serial killers, adulterous politicians, and dirty cops. He rather enjoyed the experience and promised himself to employ the technique whenever necessary to achieve his ends.
Louis did not particularly believe that The Man was holding down his people. In fact, he thought a large percentage of his people were too stupid to walk their dogs. He much preferred the company of the fawning white liberals who peed all over themselves to coax him into accepting invitations to their parties—living proof that they weren’t racists like those Nazis in the Republican Party. His monthly quota of invitations doubled after he started getting involved in politics and quickly made himself one of the top power brokers of the black vote.
Early on, he’d found it advantageous to keep a cadre of young black thugs on his payroll who could be counted on to show up at any staged event and work their way in front of the television cameras. They’d angrily denounce whatever Louis had decided and shout slogans and look for all the world like the beginning of a race riot, until Louis showed up to calm them down and bring peace to the situation. The white liberals, who feared unruly blacks the same way the antebellum South used to view a slave uprising, would then breathe a sigh of relief and extend their invitations so they could tell him in person that they were relieved they could count on his “voice of reason” when all looked lost. Their hearts spilling over with gratitude, they’d ask what could be done to prevent such further uprisings, which was his cue to suggest that they contribute to various charitable organizations in the black community. He didn’t bother to tell them that most of these were controlled by his employees, who were adept at siphoning off the biggest share for his private bank accounts. Of course, a small number of “good works,” as his hated mother used to say, served to keep up appearances but these were mostly used whenever the media needed a feel-good feature with some black faces in the photographs and videos.
Fury (The Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi Series Book 17) Page 1