It was like he just manifested there, in the road. Swift could still see him, a shape in the falling snow.
Swift began to descend into sleep, and as he did, he saw the boy turn, and Swift found himself right there, out in the road, just a dozen yards away from the teenaged Braxton Simpkins.
And the boy looked at him through the white flakes, and raised his arms out to either side, and there was a sound in Swift’s ears, something like a chiming, a ringing in the background, a kind of radiation, and the taste of metal on his tongue, not unpleasant, but somehow clean, like blood.
They stood like that in the snow, and then the boy’s mouth opened, and he spoke to Swift as he dreamed, and showed him things.
He showed him everything.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Kady was a mild-mannered dog; she seldom barked. Swift sat up and rubbed at his face and blinked and looked to where Kady usually lay sleeping on the floor beside his bed, but she wasn’t there. He groaned and got up, swinging his legs out and groping the floor with his feet for his slippers, not finding them, not bothering to look further. He stood, the bed springs squeaking, relieved of his weight.
“Kady!” he snapped, more irritably than he wanted to. Then, in a more friendly tone, “Kady? Huh, girl?”
He grabbed the long black Maglite from his bedside table along with his sidearm, still in the holster. With these items in hand he walked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.
Kady continued to bark. She was standing by the back door, her nose raised towards the knob, her tail down between her hind legs, her golden hair iridescent in the gloom.
“Kade. Kady-girl.”
She briefly jerked her neck around to look at him and her tongue came out for a moment, pant-pant. She turned her head back to the door and started yapping again.
“Okay, okay,” Swift said. He approached her, bent low, his hand out, and as he reached her, smoothed his hand alongside of her and patted her soft stomach. She reacted with a jump, gave him a quick kiss with her moist tongue, and licked her chops. “Shh, shh,” he told her. “Still.” Now that he was beside her, her tail started to wag, whacking against the back of his legs. He was wearing pajama pants, no shirt. The woodstove in the living room was still cranking and the house was warm. The digital clock above the stove read that it was just after four a.m. He’d been asleep for barely three hours. He stood at the back door and unfurled to his full height, feeling the joints of his spine clicking in protest, and leaned toward the window to look out.
The rear door of the kitchen looked onto the back of the property. There was one lamp post about ten yards from the house that stayed on all night, glowing a Halloween orange. The night was still, showing no snow, only the crystal glints of the powder that had fallen that day, unbroken in drifts and ridges.
Kady barked again. “Shh. Shh. What?” He saw nothing but the snow and the sky, a smudge of jagged treeline in the distance, the humps of the foaling shed, the dilapidated barn, and beyond these, the edge of the outbuilding.
He set the flashlight down on the shelf next to the kitchen door and used both hands to remove his pistol from his holster. He set the holster on the shelf and took the flashlight. He clicked on the light, shone the beam towards the glass, which only succeeded in reflecting a bright supernova of light back at him. He set the gun on the shelf, unlatched the door, took the gun and put his hands together; one holding the light, the other aiming the gun where the light shone.
The door swung inward with a gust of wind and banged against the radiator behind it. Kady barked again and took several steps backward. Swift stepped through the kitchen door.
The kitchen was up a few rickety steps from the ground; in the spring the concrete blocks beneath the subfloor were visible until the perennials his grandmother had planted years before bloomed into life. The steps were now covered in snow. Swift was in his bare feet, the bitter cold knifing into him, clamping around his legs and ankles and arms. He did a sweep from right to left, the light beam playing over the buildings, the old post-rail fence greyed by the sun and listing with age. Behind him, Kady was silent. Right to left he swept, then back the other way.
“Kady,” he said softly. “What is it?”
When he turned to look back at his dog, she wasn’t there. Instead, she was a few feet away on the other side of the kitchen floor, drinking from her water bowl.
Swift lowered the flashlight and the gun and stepped back inside. He set the light and the weapon down on the shelf and closed the door. A few moments outside and the cold had gone right through him. He looked across the parquet floor at his golden retriever. “Hello? You with us, there, watchdog?”
Kady’s head came up, water dripping from her black gums, and then she ducked back to the bowl and resumed lapping up the water for another few seconds before trotting into the living room where she lay down in front of the woodstove.
Swift watched her affectionately, and then, taking his cue from the pooch, went to warm himself by the woodstove beside her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“He was dragged.”
“He was dragged?”
Swift sat across from Janine Poehler. He had invited Brittney Silas to join them, and she had her evidence folder with her and a laptop. They were meeting at Poehler’s office. It was going on noon, approximately thirty-three hours since the estimated time of Braxton Simpkins’s death.
Janine Poehler nodded and took a sip of her black coffee. There were croissants and bagels on the table, but no one was eating. This could have been partly due to the photographs Poehler was displaying on her desktop computer.
She pressed play on her digital voice recorder.
“. . . Following removal of the shirt, various scars were observed along the left forearm that suggest potential cutting and at least one mark from ligature. It’s as if the victim’s wrists were bound together at one point. A second ligature mark, which will be known throughout this report as Ligature B, was observed on the decedent’s neck. The mark is a dark red ligature and encircles the neck, crossing the anterior midline of the neck just below the laryngeal prominence.”
She clicked it off. Brittney Silas was looking through her own photographic log of the crime scene, clicking through a slide show of photos and squinting at the screen. Now she looked up at Poehler.
Swift was looking over Brittney’s shoulder at pictures of route 9N. “You think he was tied up and dragged? By the car?”
“My report shows that the victim died from ligature strangulation. That is an asphyxia caused by closure of the blood vessels — hence the petechial spotting — and closing of the air passages by external pressure on the neck. My conclusion is dragging. The mark is sloping, indicating that the ligature was pulled upward from behind, and the position is high up at the level of the hyoid bone. I see evidence of violent compression and constriction of the neck. This was obtained from the presence of bruising and ecchymosis about the marks on the neck, hemorrhages in the strap muscles, under the skin, in the sides of the tissues around the trachea and larynx, in the larynx and in the laryngeal structures themselves. The ligature mark alone is not diagnostic, it’s more indistinct, suggesting a soft material used.”
Brittney spoke up. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something tensile enough to create the compression without snapping.”
“A garrote,” Swift said.
Poehler raised her eyebrows, perhaps appraisingly. “Precisely.”
Brittney frowned. “What’s a garrote?”
“It was first used in Spain,” Swift said. “It’s where convicts were tied to a wooden stake and a rope was looped around the neck. A wooden stick was slipped down the back of the neck between the cord and the skin and twisted.”
“Jesus,” said Brittney. She grimaced. Janine Poehler sipped her coffee and watched Swift, who went on.
“So then other countries got into it. Garrotes have been used as a stealthy way to eliminate sentries and enemy personnel
. They also teach it to special forces now, how to improvise garrotes and make special ones suited to particular tasks.” Swift finished speaking and rubbed his jaw absently, looking off.
“But not a rope,” Janine said. “There were no fibers of any kind and the ligature marks for both A and B are more consistent with a softer material.”
“Well, we’re not looking for a woman’s silk scarf,” Brittney countered.
“I would say no, not exactly. I think you’re looking for a cord. Something higher end, not any cheap extension cord, which could leave traces of rubber embedded in the skin. Something strong, but elastic.”
Swift continued to rub and itch his jawline.
Poehler looked at him. “Growing a beard?”
Swift’s eyes seem to find focus again and he looked at her. “Too lazy to shave.”
Brittney looked back and forth between the two of them. Swift knew she was tough and as a CSI had seen her share of horrors no doubt, but death by strangulation was hard to take. And they now had to reconcile the possibility that the body had been dragged, with a crime scene which had been scraped over by a highway department plow just ten minutes before Braxton’s time of death, according to the timeline, and then covered in snow which had accumulated that night at a variable rate of around four inches per hour. There had been no evidence to show a body had been dragged behind a car. No way to obtain casts of tire tracks either. But, Swift remembered, and it concurred with Brittney’s observation that night — she had found no footprints left by the victim.
“This kind of thing — the garrote — has even made its way into the mainstream by way of movies,” Swift said. “Ever see James Bond in The World Is Not Enough?”
Ever since meeting with Darring he’d found himself referencing movies.
Poehler shook her head, and then fixed Swift with her green eyes.
“It’s in The Godfather, too,” she said.
“That’s right. That’s exactly right.” He drifted away again after that, putting something together in his mind.
Brittney interjected. “So what are we talking about here? In layman’s terms.”
Poehler nodded and pushed back the swivel chair, rotating to face the two of them more directly. She demonstrated with gestures as she spoke.
“The victim was tied at the left wrist and around the neck by a sash cord of some kind that left no fibers behind. This cord was then likely attached to the back of something powerful, probably a car. And he was dragged. There are minor abrasions consistent with a dragging. At first I thought they were cutting marks. Which is, sad to say, because I’ve seen a lot of that in my pediatric work. It was a gut reaction. Now I see those marks as drag marks. So, I think he was towed like this, dragged like this behind the car. The hemorrhaging isn’t severe. There was very little putrefaction — I was able to see that, aside from the petechial markings, the bursting of the capillaries in the eyes was moderate. It’s possible to conclude that, yes, asphyxia, or even hypoxia, is the official cause of death, but there is also the massive dose of cortisol, adrenaline . . .”
“Fear,” said Swift.
“Yes. Fear, the cold, the exposure. All of these things contributed.”
No one spoke for a few moments. Then Brittney finally broke the silence.
“There was no cord found in the car, or at the scene. What do we do, Swift, do we go back and sweep the woods again?”
“Absolutely. I take full responsibility for pulling us out of there.”
“What about the car?”
“Now that we’ve got it, officially, we can take a close look at the rear bumper. There’s no hitch — it’s a Hyundai, for chrissakes — so there’s got to be somewhere they tied that cord on. We need that cord.”
Poehler asked, “Where are they now?”
“Two are gone. Let go this morning. One is processed and sitting in county jail. It’s his vehicle, so it stays with us. Mathis laid charges on thick, but they won’t stick without the cord, or some weapon.”
“He didn’t lawyer up?”
Swift pursed his lips and shook his head. “No. He didn’t. He’s going with a public defender.”
“Huh,” Poehler said.
“Yeah.”
Now they needed to go and find something which their first search had shown just didn’t exist. The crime scene had been as bare as an empty cave.
Swift considered one other place he ought to look.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Mike,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Been a long time, man.”
“I know, man. Totally.”
Mike could hear the sounds of city traffic in the background on Bull Camoine’s end of the conversation. Mike experienced a wave of nostalgia for the city, and his misspent youth.
Bull was born Paul Anthony Camoine to a middle class Italian family on Staten Island. He’d had his name legally changed to ‘Bull’ two days after his eighteenth birthday. There was, as one might predict, a tattoo of a huge, snorting Bos taurus covering the left side of his back, most of it over the shoulder blade, the tattoo a process of needle and patience that Bull had once called “the sweetest pain you’ll ever feel.” He was an ardent libertarian, and a conspiracy nut. He championed an orthodox capitalism, which was pitted against a bloated government that spied, pried, and taxed the holy shit out of every last citizen. They would do this, he believed, until the citizenry had nothing left, in order to render them powerless against a military takeover that the liberals were instituting in order to completely socialize the country, so that no one had to work, no one had to go to church, or stay married, no one had to do anything but hang onto the teats of government while the super-rich got even super-richer.
He was a lot of fun at parties.
Bull never used a cellular phone, only a pager. He switched the number every six months. His parents’ home number, however, was still the same. Bull’s mother, who shared her son’s concerns about over-governing and the secular agenda, guarded it like a sentry. In order to earn her trust, Mike had to remind her of the times when, both eleven years old, he and Bull had eaten brownies in her kitchen after a Cobras football game. When that wasn’t enough, he’d reminded her about her own father, who had played for the Stapletons in 1932 under Coach Hanson. And that her father had arrived from Italy, playing professional football only three months after landing at Ellis Island. All because of a bet he’d made with his brother, who’d remained in the home country.
She’d given out the pager number after that.
“What’s been going on?” Bull asked. There was the characteristic wariness in his voice, but Mike felt it had softened since they last spoke. Bull had gone to work for the MTA, and had actually worked for three years under Mike’s father, who took credit for taking Bull under his wing after Bull’s father had died in a tunnel accident. The boys had originally met at Bull’s father’s funeral, and Bull had been at Mike’s mother’s funeral, many years later, which was the last time the two of them had seen each other. Thus, the two funerals bookended their brief but potent friendship.
“I moved,” Mike said.
“Yeah, I heard.”
“You heard?”
“Linda keeps a Facebook account. No matter how much I tell her it’s just free information for the NSA and the CIA, she keeps it. Thinks I don’t know. But then she comes up with things, like, ‘Oh, Callie and Mike bought a house in upstate,’ and when I ask her how she knows she has to come up with something. It’s a sickness.”
Mike didn’t know whether Bull was referring to his wife’s lying, Facebook, or social media in general. It didn’t matter. Mike wasn’t calling Paul Anthony “Bull” Camoine because of his theories on privacy invasion.
Aside from his doomsday philosophies, Bull was also the person who had physically assaulted more people than anyone Mike knew of, except maybe professional boxers. He’d been in jail at least a dozen times in his thirty-nine years, not to mention all the times he could have got sent up, bu
t the person he’d assaulted was so petrified of retribution they didn’t press charges. Bull’s stay behind bars usually never lasted more than a couple of days; he would be arraigned, his mother would post bail and he would have to pay a fine. None of this seemed to faze him, however. Since the government lacked any legitimacy, he couldn’t see why he should pay his debts. His longest stretch had been a year, and he’d spent it in Sing Sing, a State Correctional Institution. There his doomsday philosophy had really coalesced. Capital, Bull professed, was not paper currency. There was certainly money circulating in prison, but currency was not about dollars. It was about connections. It was strength by ownership. The more guys you owned, the more powerful you were. Bull was a powerful ally to have, and the worst enemy. Plus, he had a lot of guns.
“Yeah, we moved,” said Mike. “And we’ve had some . . .”
“You’ve had some trouble?”
Mike knew Callie hadn’t posted anything public yet about what had happened to their son. He was sure she hadn’t sounded off on any social networks, mostly because she wasn’t ready to break the news to her parents. Bull was just picking up on the tenor of Mike’s voice, and making a guess backed by his usual skepticism.
“Yeah. We’ve had some trouble.”
“Tell me.”
Mike took a breath. He told Bull about losing his job, about his financial straits, about the move towards Callie’s career. He spoke little of Braxton until he mentioned the emails from Tori McAfferty. He told Bull he’d threatened McAfferty.
“Fucking A,” said Bull. “Put that son of a bitch in his place. Up and leaving Callie and his baby like that. That’s not a man.”
This made Mike feel a little better. Just a little. He continued recounting the events, bracing himself for the part where he described Braxton’s death. Surprisingly, he got through the telling without getting choked up, and Bull was silent, listening, some daytime soap on his mother’s TV warbling in the background. By the time Mike was finished, his hands were shaking. But not with sadness; they shook with anger.
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