by Daniel Cole
She had made a call.
It had been the first time that Curtis had ever discharged her weapon in the field. Ever the overachiever, she had fired a single shot, a single bullet that had claimed the lives of two people as it passed through the base of Glenn Arnolds’s skull, killing him instantly, only to embed itself in the back of his victim’s.
If she had just aimed a few millimeters higher . . .
When she had so desperately needed friendship and reassurance, Rouche had told her that she had made the wrong decision, that she had killed their investigation, that she should have just let him die. For some reason, his reaction had upset her more than anything else.
With tears prickling her eyes, she took out her phone and called the number that anybody else would have labeled “Home.” The words “Curtis residence” flashed up on the screen.
“Please be Mom,” she whispered.
“Senator Tobias Curtis,” a deep voice answered brusquely.
Curtis remained silent. She considered hanging up.
“Elliot? Is that you?” asked the senator. “Elliot?”
“Yes, sir. I was actually hoping to speak to Mom.”
“So you don’t want to speak to me, then?” he asked.
“No . . . I do. I just . . .”
“Well, which is it? You either do or you don’t.”
Tears were escaping Curtis’s eyes now. She just needed someone to talk to.
“Well?”
“I’d like to talk to Mom, please,” she said.
“Well, you can’t. I don’t want your mother involved. Do you think I don’t know what’s happened? Lennox called me the moment she found out. As you should have done.”
Curtis felt a fleeting moment of relief: he already knew. She turned the corner onto a street that she actually recognized and swapped to the other ear to give her frozen hand a respite from the cold.
“I killed someone, Daddy . . . Sorry. Sir.”
“The victim’s dead?” the senator asked quietly.
“Yes.” She burst into tears.
“Jesus Christ, Elliot!” he bellowed. “How could you be so careless? Do you have any idea what this is going to do to me when the press get hold of it?”
“I-I . . .” stammered Curtis. Even she was shocked by his utter disregard for her well-being.
“I can see the headlines now: ‘Idiot Daughter of United States Senator Guns Down Innocent.’ I’m finished. You know that, don’t you? You’ve finished me.”
Curtis was so upset by his words she could barely walk. She slumped onto an icy step and wept into the phone.
“Pull yourself together, for God’s sake,” he barked before sighing and swapping to as gentle tone as he could muster: “I’m sorry. Elliot?”
“Yes?”
“I apologize. This has all come as quite a shock and perhaps I overreacted.”
“It’s OK. Sorry if I disappointed you.”
“Let’s not worry about that. Let’s worry about what to do next. Lennox will take you through exactly what to say to minimize the damage to the FBI, to me, and to whatever is left of your career.”
“What about the man I killed?”
“Well, the damage is done there,” said the senator dismissively, as if leaving him off the Christmas-card list. “You do and say whatever Lennox tells you, and if your team makes any advances or arrests in connection to this ‘Puppet’ nonsense, you need to be the one making them and looking like the hero. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
“I love you.”
The line disconnected. He must not have heard her.
It was someone’s birthday. It was always someone’s birthday. The day on which someone became a temporary department-wide celebrity, pressured by social etiquette into spending the best part of a day’s wages on Krispy Kremes.
Edmunds sat back down at his desk, obligatory doughnut in hand, exploding whatever had been concealed inside all over his keyboard as he bit into it. He could feel his shirt pulling uncomfortably as he reached for the bin. He had put on almost a stone since transferring back to Fraud. Although his gangly frame could never look overweight, he could feel the extra pounds there in everything he did.
He stared at the screen of foreign bank accounts in front of him until his eyes glazed over. He had not done a jot of work for almost an hour while watching the early night settle over the city outside. He was distracted. He knew that Baxter had sent him the files on the first three killers that morning, which he’d not even had a chance to look at, due to a teething one-year-old, a sleep-deprived wife, and the ever-inconvenient demands of full-time employment. He found himself wishing away the hours until he could settle back down in his shed and focus on the investigation.
After a quick scan of the office to locate his boss, he opened up the BBC News website, which was updating with reports from Grand Central Terminal. He stole a look at his mobile phone again, surprised not to have heard anything from Baxter. As he read through the horrific eyewitness accounts, he had to remind himself how the press latched on to these stories, exaggerating and inventing as they went. Having said that, even if there was only an element of truth to any of it, it was still undoubtedly one of the most disturbing things he had ever heard.
Unable to resist any longer, he opened up his email, downloaded the attachments to Baxter’s garbled message, and set to work.
Rouche had remained behind at Grand Central while Curtis and Baxter accompanied the casualty attached to Glenn Arnolds’s corpse in the back of the ambulance. Following his near-death experience, all Rouche had wanted was to hear his wife’s voice. He knew that he had behaved abysmally toward Curtis in his haste to leave the crime scene and make his phone call. He owed her more than an apology.
He had made his way to the medical center on foot and met Baxter outside the main entrance. Within minutes they had crossed FDR Drive and found a bench looking out over the East River.
“If this is about how I acted towards Curtis, I know,” started Rouche. “I’m an arse. I’ll get dinner tonight to apologize.”
“It’s not.”
“So it’s about me going out there unarmed to speak to him?”
“Do you want to die, Rouche?” Baxter asked bluntly.
“Excuse me?” He laughed. He looked bewildered.
“I’m being serious.”
“What? No! Look, someone had to go out there and—”
“I’m not talking about that.”
“You mean me telling them not to shoot him? We needed him alive. I so nearly got a name out of—”
“I’m not talking about that either,” Baxter interrupted.
The conversation paused as a homeless man, wheeling a cart, passed behind them.
“I wasn’t with Curtis when she stepped out to save you. I was along the side wall behind the Puppet-man . . . facing you.”
Rouche waited for her to elaborate.
“I saw you smile.”
“Smile?”
“When that first shot didn’t take him down and he raised the gun at you. You closed your eyes . . . and you smiled.”
“Trapped wind?” tried Rouche.
“I know what I saw.” She looked at him, waiting for an explanation.
“I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t remember smiling. I don’t really see what I would have had to be smiling about. But no. I assure you that I don’t want to die . . . Promise.”
“OK,” said Baxter. “But from personal experience, when someone starts being reckless with their own life, it tends to be everyone around them who ends up getting hurt.”
After a moment’s silence, a pigeon abandoned its branch on the monochrome tree behind them. They both watched it soar toward Roosevelt Island and the Queensboro Bridge beyond.
“I screwed up today,” said Rouche, still staring out at the river. “I should’ve known that man was alive sooner. A few more seconds could have made all the difference.”
“How could you ever have known that?” asked Baxter.
“He was bleeding.”
“Bleeding?”
“Bright red and streaming out of him.” Rouche shook his head, frustrated with himself. He turned to face her. “The dead don’t bleed.”
“I’ll be sure to remember that,” she assured her intense colleague.
“Come on,” said Rouche. “We’ve got work to do.”
“What work? Arnolds didn’t tell us anything.”
“Sure he did. He told us that he didn’t choose to do it, that he had been instructed to, manipulated. It raises questions about our other killers, doesn’t it? Perhaps none of them are devoted members of some imagined secret cult—perhaps they’re all just being manipulated into doing these things by a single person.”
“He,” said Baxter, remembering what she’d heard while eavesdropping in on the tinny speakerphone conversation.
“He.” Rouche nodded. “We’ve been going about this all wrong. I think there is a link between our killers: they all had a vulnerability, something to blackmail, someone to threaten. If we can work out what those things were, we’ll be able to work out who might be in a position to exploit them.”
“So where do we start?”
“The team searching Arnolds’s apartment found an appointment card. He was seeing a psychiatrist.”
“He did seem to have a few . . . issues,” said Baxter tactfully.
“And who better to tell us what those issues were than his shrink?”
Chapter 13
Saturday, 12 December 2015
2:15 P.M.
Curtis had not been at the field office when Baxter and Rouche stopped by. Neither had she returned any of their calls. Unsure whether she had just taken an extended lunch to clear her head or, quite understandably, stood down for the remainder of the day, they decided to press on without her.
The address of the practice, scrawled across the back of Rouche’s hand, had led them to a grand building on East 20th Street overlooking Gramercy Park. They climbed the steps between the imposing columns of the ornate portico.
Baxter felt a little underdressed as they crossed an impressive reception area and were instructed to take a seat. Overwhelmed by the number of buttons on the coffee machine, she poured herself a glass of water and sat down opposite Rouche, classical music softening the silence.
“We’ll catch up with Curtis at the hotel,” Rouche told her, more for his own benefit, seeing as Baxter had not spoken a word in over five minutes. “She probably needs a bit more time.”
“She might need more than that,” said Baxter, looking pointedly around at where they were.
“Hmmm.”
“What? It might help.”
“They’ll suggest it, no doubt.”
“Do you have a problem with that?” asked Baxter, a little defensively.
After the dust had settled on the Ragdoll case, and she was able to stop long enough to actually process what had happened, she had been to talk to someone. She had always considered it a provision for weaker people than her, for people unable to cope with the trials of everyday life, but she had been wrong. It had been far easier to express her feelings to a complete stranger than to anybody who knew her, who might judge her, who expected more from her. Over several sessions, she had gradually come to terms with the death of one of her closest friends: Benjamin Chambers, a man who had been more of a father figure to her than a colleague.
“I have no problem with other people doing it,” answered Rouche, “but it’s certainly not anything I’d ever consider.”
“Yeah, you’re just too strong a person to have any issues, aren’t you?” snapped Baxter, aware that she was revealing something deeply personal with the outburst. “You are perfect.”
“I am far from perfect,” said Rouche calmly.
“You think? Ordering your colleagues to let you die. Screaming at the friend who killed an innocent man to save you. Smiling as some nutjob points a gun at you.”
“Not this again.”
“I’m just saying, if anybody needs to talk through some of their shit . . . it’s you.”
“You done?” asked Rouche.
Baxter kept quiet, suspecting that she had perhaps crossed a line. They sat in silence for a moment until the scowling receptionist lost interest.
“I pray,” said Rouche, back to his amiable self. “That’s where I went while you were at the hospital. That’s where I talk through my ‘shit’ every single day because I fear I might have more than anybody.”
Something in Rouche’s tone told Baxter that he meant it.
“You misunderstand my misgivings,” he continued. “I pass no judgment on the person looking for help; we all are. It’s the person paid to listen that I don’t trust. Because the idea of someone out there knowing everything about me that I try so hard to hide away terrifies me—as it should everyone else. No one should have that much power over you.”
Baxter had never thought about it like that before, projecting a certain professional detachment onto the authoritative doctor. Had she been fooling herself into believing that someone in such a profession was bound by a set of laws and decorum more stringent than those that Baxter flaunted so regularly within her own? Had she tried to ignore that the woman had a mouth located just a few inches below her greedy ears just like everybody else?
She had just begun dissecting each and every conversation that she had had with the counselor when they were invited in to see Dr. Arun. His luxurious office was a more relaxed take on the reception area, with a tree standing watch beside the window. He offered them seats at his tidy desk. A thick file sat atop, labeled with Glenn Arnolds’s name.
“May I see some identification before we start?” asked the doctor firmly but politely. He raised his eyebrows on reading Baxter’s Metropolitan Police–issued card but did not question it.
“So I believe you require some information on one of my patients. I presume there is no need to tell you that most of what is documented here is protected by doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“He’s dead,” blurted Baxter.
“Oh!” said Dr. Arun. “I’m very sorry to hear that. But it does not change the fact that—”
“He murdered someone,” Baxter continued. It was not technically true but was far simpler than the actual story.
“I see.”
“In quite possibly the darkest and most disturbing way that either of us has ever seen.”
“Right,” said the doctor, his mind immediately jumping to the horrific reports coming out of Grand Central Terminal. “OK. What do you need?”
Glenn Arnolds had been diagnosed with acute schizoaffective disorder at the age of ten, attributed to the untimely death of his twin brother the previous year: a blood clot in the brain. Glenn had gone through life expecting to suffer the same fate at any given moment, not helped any by his propensity for severe headaches. He had lived his life literally waiting to die while mourning the death of his twin. This had led to him becoming increasingly reclusive and depressed, and had prompted a tendency to regard life as cheap and fleeting, just as his brother’s had been.
He had transferred to the Gramercy Practice three years earlier, had a flawless attendance record, and had been making significant progress in both one-on-one and group sessions. With the exception of mild depressive episodes, his psychotic symptoms had been kept at bay by prescription meds. In summary, he had never shown the slightest indication of violence toward anybody.
“How was he paying for the pleasure of your company?” Rouche asked the doctor.
Baxter wondered whether he had phrased the question intentionally to make the psychiatrist sound like a prostitute.
“Doesn’t look like you guys come cheap,” he added.
“Health insurance,” answered Dr. Arun with just a hint of injustice in his voice. “Very good health insurance. I believe that when his twin died, his parents signed him up for the best they could afford. Since
the mental illness was diagnosed afterwards . . .” The doctor finished his sentence with a shrug.
“And in your ‘professional opinion’ . . .”
Baxter glared at him.
“. . . how did Glenn seem to you over the past couple of weeks?” asked Rouche.
“I’m sorry?”
“Did he present any indication that he might have relapsed? Or could he have stopped taking his meds?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know,” said Dr. Arun in confusion. “I have never met him.”
“What?” asked Baxter.
“We had our first session scheduled for next week. I’m sorry. I thought you knew. I’ve taken over Dr. Bantham’s client list. He left the practice last Friday.”
Baxter and Rouche looked at one another.
“Last Friday?” she asked. “Was this a planned resignation?”
“Oh yes. I was interviewed for the role a good two months ago.”
Baxter sighed, having thought they were onto something.
“We’re still going to need to talk to him,” Rouche told the doctor. “Think you could find us some contact details?”
There had been no answer on either phone number supplied by the scary receptionist. She had printed off a home address for Dr. Bantham in Westchester County, approximately a fifty-minute drive from Manhattan. With the FBI still attempting to identify Glenn Arnolds’s victim, Glenn Arnolds’s body somewhere between the hospital morgue and the forensic lab, and Curtis ignoring them, they elected to risk a wasted journey up to Rye to pay the doctor a visit.
Baxter didn’t have high expectations as she read the directions out to Rouche:
“With the golf course on the left, we should cross over Beaver Swamp Brook any second, then it’s the next right turn off Locust Avenue.”
“Lovely.”
They pulled into an idyllic cul-de-sac. It had clearly been snowing heavily north of the city. Inches of powder balanced on the beautifully pruned hedges lining the sweeping driveways, which had been brushed clear to reveal the wet gravel beneath. Perfect snowmen stood proudly in generous gardens, surrounded by sets of small footprints. Wood siding of various hues adorned each home, giving the wintry scene a Scandinavian edge. It was hard to picture the pandemonium of Times Square less than an hour’s drive away.