COPS SPIES & PI'S: The Four Novel Box Set

by David Wind

  While there were statutes of limitations on what Conklin had done, he’d been out of New York State long enough for the charges to be effective; because, New York suspends criminal statutes during the times a criminal is out of the state - which for Conklin was the past twenty plus years. Added to that, if proof surfaces that one of the girls he abducted died, he can be tried for murder, for which there is no statute of limitations.

  But for me, nothing has changed. No, that wasn’t quite true. It felt good to have put Conklin away, but I was back to the beginning. Conklin hadn’t murdered Scotty.

  Who? The question was like a plague carrying flea on the back of an infested rat. It spread through me, attacking my senses, forcing me to think, rethink and retrace every step of my twisted journey since the very first day.

  Femalé walked next to me, letting me think without interruption. She had the ability to sense my moods and the good sense to know when to let me think. Everyone with whom I’d had contact with, in the days following Scotty’s murder, paraded through my memory. I still believed the people involved in the play were not involved: the actors and crew had no reason to kill him, nor did the Angels who financially backed the play.

  While Albright’s financial problems had put him on the ‘A’ list, my last conversation with him took him off. Lia Thornton was out as well: Scotty’s death had devastated her to the point where she wanted revenge as much as I did—her reaction the last time we’d spoken was evidence enough.

  Nor was there reason to lay the killing at Rice’s feet, just the opposite, in fact. He was a cold and hard professional. The passion that had taken Scotty’s life would never have come from Rice.

  I’d followed so many avenues and made so many wrong turns. During those excursions into futility, I’d come across gangsters and pimps and slave traders all connected by coincidence.

  No, I didn’t believe coincidence. For every coincidence, there is cause; and, coincidence is created by not understanding or missing the initial source.

  Margaret Ann McNickles’ death had nothing to do with Scotty’s death; it had to do with me running across her and Streeter the night before.

  It had never been coincidence; it had been my ignorance because I’d been looking into Scotty’s death and misread the events following it. When the first phone caller warned me off about going after Margaret Ann, I made the assumption the warning was to stop my investigating Scotty’s death.

  The first ‘coincidence’ was due to Rice’s involvement with Streeter, and not Scotty. Rice and Conklin had nothing to do with Scotty’s death, and they had no reason to think I would look at them. The warnings were to scare me off investigating Margaret Ann’s death.

  The second ‘coincidence’ was when Rice took the opportunity to break into Scotty’s apartment and look for whatever Scotty might have on Conklin. Rice did this because Scotty’s death made it an advantageous move, not because he had killed Scotty.

  However, it all changed when Rice hadn’t found the information. He couldn’t have known if Scotty’s killer had taken it or if Scotty never made the connection to Conklin. My bet was Scotty had never made the connection. If he had, I would have found something.

  Rice was too smart to take the chance of confronting me, so he stuck with event number one, Margaret Ann, and watched it play out.

  The ludicrous part was in how Rice was on the run and Conklin was in jail, not because of Scotty or Elizabeth and the other girls Conklin had destroyed, but because of Margaret Ann McNickles, who had no connection to the others.

  Other apparent ‘coincidences’ had surfaced to further confuse things: Lia Thornton investing in Scotty’s play and their ensuing friendship; the ‘coincidence’ of Jeremy Thornton being Brian Conklin’s uncle—and more—muddied the picture because it wasn’t a coincidence, it was cause and result. Yet, I reminded myself, I needed to work out the Jeremy Thornton factor.

  Was Thornton important any longer? Margaret Ann’s death was avenged as best as possible, while Scotty’s killer was still on the loose.

  “We’re here boss,” Femalé said, her low voice penetrating my thoughts at the same time as she touched my arm.

  I looked up at the statuesque beauty of the Empire State Building. “Hungry?” Neither of us had eaten since breakfast and the four cups of coffee I’d had at Homeland Security were burning inside me.

  “I could use some food. You want me to pick something up?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll see you upstairs in a few.” she started toward the lobby deli.

  After letting myself in, I saw the FedEx envelope on the desk, picked it up, and looked at the label for the first time. After noting the sender, I brought it into the conference room and set it on the table. Then I looked at the neatly columned names and at the lines connecting one name to another on the white board, seeking some sort of a pattern different from what I’d been following.

  I read each name of the girls Conklin had abducted. What had happened to them? Where had he sent them? When Malcolm found Rice, we would have the answers. Until then, it would remain a mystery.

  My eyes tracked over every name, but nothing clicked. There was no pattern other than the one connecting Conklin with the girls. Then who?

  My frustration turned everything dark. What had started as the perfect day had turned into a black hole. Every time I got close, something else happened and I was put into the cold again.

  I lifted the FedEx envelope, tore the white perforated tab and shook its contents out.

  “What the hell?” I whispered.

  I paged through the papers until I reached the last one. My breath burst out as if I’d been punched. I looked at the whiteboard and made the connection. “You bastards,” I said to the twin visions of Rice and Conklin.

  The discovery shook me to my core: my mind went hazy—just for a moment before my next course of action came to me. Pushing away from the table, I went into my office where I opened my humidor and pulled out two cigars. Next to the humidor lay two Broadway tickets I’d forgotten about. I picked them up and put them in my jacket pocket along with the cigars.

  I left the office, the papers in my hand, and strode to the elevator that Femalé was exiting and went in. “Boss?” she called.

  “I’ll be back.”

  She stuck her hand out and stopped the elevator from closing. “What happened, Gabe?”

  “It’s over. Let the door go.” When she hesitated, I said, “Now.”

  She stepped back, her face flushing. The door started to close when I stuck my hand out to stop it. “Get in.”

  The other people in the elevator stopped any questions and, when we reached the lobby, I pulled my cell and dialed Chris. “I know who it is,” I stated when he answered.

  “Gabe–”

  “Just listen. You remember the place where you and Scotty and I used to hang out when we’d cut classes?”

  “South Street and Battery.”

  “Be there in twenty minutes. Bring Marks.”

  I hung up, took a deep breath and dialed the next number. When the call went through, I said, “Wagner Park, just off Battery Place. You know where it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be there in forty minutes. It’s almost over.”

  Chapter 64

  The ride to the tip of Manhattan took nineteen minutes, despite the sudden rain shower. I had used the time to explain it all to Femalé so when we hit the sidewalk she knew what would be required from her. Chris was already there, sitting in his dark blue unmarked NYPD car. Sonny Marks was in the passenger seat. I got into the back seat while Femalé walked a short distance away.

  “You ready to explain?”

  Like a DVD in fast forward, I took them from the night before Scotty was murdered until twenty minutes ago, when I’d made the discovery. When I finished, and in an emotion-laden voice, Chris said, “How do you want to handle it?”

  “My way—I don’t want you visible. You stay in the car. “You,” I pointed to Son
ny, “pick a spot within hearing range. Keep your back to us until the right time. Femalé will act as another backup, should we need her. No one moves without my say so. Agreed?”

  Chris nodded and Sonny Marks said, “It’s your play.”

  I sat back for a few minutes to get my bearings, as much as to work out my own mental kinks. What was coming would be hard. When I was ready, I left the car and walked to the water’s edge.

  Leaning against the railing, I looked over my shoulder as Sonny Marks went to a bench, and ignoring the wet wood, sat down and stared out at the Statue of Liberty. I spotted Femalé to my left, leaning against another section of railing and pretending to talk on her cell phone.

  I looked back out at the water. The last of the rain shower was making its way out to sea. It’s funny how some people like the rain, and some don’t. I’m one who does. For me, it’s a cleansing agent: It washes away the dirt on the buildings and in the streets of my city. The rain changes the smell of the air, pushing away, if only for a few brief minutes, the acrid scents underlying everything. While the rain falls, the streets get calmer and the frenetic pace of life slows to allow nature to do its job. When the rain stops, and the fresh smell of the air is strong, I can breathe again, like I did when I was a kid—like I did before life got in the way of life—like I’m doing now.

  The sun slid out from behind the clouds to brighten the afternoon. The only thing the rain hadn’t changed was the steamy temperature

  I ran a hand over my jacket and felt the theatre tickets and the cigars I’d picked up at the office: the tickets were to this evening’s benefit performance of Streetcar, the hottest revival on the Great White Way. The cigars—AVO maduro torpedoes—like the show, were the best in the world.

  I planned on smoking the Avo soon, because that was when the fat lady would sing. But all the same, what was going down saddened and disgusted me. When people go bad, it bothers me. I guess I’m old fashioned. But like I’ve been saying all along, I believe in black and white—good and bad—and I don’t like what comes for an excuse in the grey areas because I’d spent too much time in the grey area myself.

  I glanced at my watch: Soon. I looked over to where Chris sat in the unmarked car, watching me from behind sunglasses.

  Clearing my head, I did my best to put everything into perspective. It had been a rough case, and it had hit me harder than almost anything before. It had taken me on a deep and circuitous trip into the bowels of sickness and depravity. I had lost a friend, no, a brother, which made what happened unacceptable.

  The only thing left I needed to know was why.

  Seven minutes later Scotty’s killer opened the cab door and stepped onto the curb, eyes open and searching until they fell on me. I held the gaze, my breath shallow.

  Dressed in blue pants, a pale short sleeve blouse, sunglasses perched atop her hair and a Coach bag swinging from her shoulders, Lia Thornton walked onward.

  When she reached me, she said, “You’ve found him.” Her green eyes darted back and forth over my face. “Who was it?”

  My hands clenched and unclenched. “It almost got by me Lia. I thought I had the killer nailed this morning. I was positive Brian Conklin had killed Scotty. I was so sure I stopped looking at anyone else.”

  “Jeremy’s nephew?”

  Her wide-eyed surprise was good. “I had him and I twisted him and I found out about everything in his sick life. I also found out he didn’t kill Scotty.”

  “But if he didn’t….”

  “It was a her, not a him.”

  “A woman?” she whispered, her brows tugging close in puzzlement.

  “It was a woman who had been abducted when she was eight years old by Brian Conklin. A little girl who was raped and abused and then sent off to the Deep South to live a life of slavery at the hands of another pedophile. A young girl whose mind, body, and who’s very sole, was destroyed by what had been done to her; a child who was given the identity of a dead girl four years older than herself, in Jackson, Mississippi.”

  Lia shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  My anger roared up and I fought hard to push it back. Anger wasn’t the answer. “Stop lying to me! Your elementary school records also had your death certificate.”

  A furrow deepened across her forehead. But her eyes, oh, yes, her eyes spoke the truth even as she said, “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s over—no more games and no protestations that you don’t remember your childhood. The green eyes were the masterstroke! You have blue eyes under the contacts, don’t you, Elizabeth? Why did you kill your brother?”

  The creases smoothed from her forehead as a pretense-shedding smile grew on her lips. She exhaled and a great weight seemed to lift from her. Her smile faded as she reached up and peeled the contact lenses from her eyes, revealing the same blue shade as Scotty’s had been. “At least tell me what happened to Conklin.”

  I gave her every detail up to and including the charges being filed against him by Homeland Security, the FBI and the local state authorities. I finished with, “He will spend the rest of his life in jail.”

  Her eyes had fastened onto mine as I’d spoken, and when I finished, she gave a soft exhalation. “Good.”

  “Good… is that what it is? What the hell is wrong with you? You murdered the man who spent his entire adult life looking for you, trying to find the sister who had been stolen from him. How could you do that?”

  “That’s just perfect. You stand there and vilify me while you hold Scotty up for sainthood? Yes, I killed him. I killed him a thousand times in my head before I had the chance to do it for real. I hated him for what he did to me. Don’t you understand? It was his fault! He let that bastard take me. He let them do all those… things to me. He was supposed to meet me after school but he didn’t and I had to walk home by myself while he stayed to work on the school play. The school play was more important to him than I was! I was eight years old. Eight! What did I know about people? How did I know the nice man who stopped to make sure I wasn’t lost was going to pick me up and throw me into his van?

  How did I know, a day later, he would rape me? How did I know he would rip my insides apart like a rutting animal and destroy any hope I might ever have of being normal—of having a family, or of being… a real woman. He stole my parents from me, my friends.”

  Tears streaked down her cheeks, dripping into the corners of her mouth as she talked. She didn’t hear Sonny Marks walk up behind her or see Chris Bolt and Femalé join him. Her concentration was total: she only had eyes for me.

  “But my years of planning and of working everything out paid off. I spent months planning his death. I knew if I killed him, you would hunt down his murderer. I knew you would find out everything about Conklin and the other man, about what they do to the girls and then you would destroy Conklin because I destroyed Scotty. And you did!”

  “You forgot one thing.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I destroyed you as well.”

  She laughed, loud and clear. When she stopped, she shook her head. “Do you think after all the years I’d spent crawling through the dirt, being the dirt, I care what happens to me now? Of course, I knew you would put everything together. My biggest fear was you would do so too soon.”

  She took a deep breath. “But you didn’t, it went just as I’d planned. Even if you thought you knew, there were too many discrepancies to match Lia Thornton with Elizabeth Granger. Elizabeth had blue eyes. Lia’s eyes are green. Lia is thirty-eight. Elizabeth is thirty-four.”

  “Which was why you were always being dragged in for being underage?”

  Her smile held sad memories. “That was something, wasn’t it? I looked fourteen but my birth certificate said I was eighteen.”

  “You never forgot. They never took your mind did they?” I asked.

  “I remembered everything. I thought about my brother every day.”

  The way she said my brother sickened me, but I stood still, waiting
for her to go on, which she did because she needed me to know everything.

  “I never forgot what he did to me. I never forgot Conklin, not one minute of the two and a half years he kept me buried in a fantasy world he’d built in his basement. No one ever heard me scream or cry. Everything was soundproofed and double and triple locked from the rest of the world. I never saw the outside until he sent me away.”

  She took a ragged breath and wrapped her arms around her waist, hugging herself against the memories spilling out. “Even when I went to my next owner, I never forgot anything. And I was in a hell you can’t even come close to comprehending. I never got used to the beatings and the rapes, but I was able to make myself go away when they happened. Do you want to know where I went?”

  Her eyes challenged me, dared me to say no. I nodded.

  “I went into my own world, a perfect world, where I ruled over everything—a safe place to plan out my brother’s death. Knowing one day, I would make him pay for what he did to me kept me alive and kept me going.

  Do you hate me now? Do you miss Lia now?” She shook her head. “No, you didn’t fall for Lia; you didn’t try to take advantage, to use your strength against her. You’re a good man, Gabe,” she said, nodding.

  “I was good too,” she said after a short pause. “I was so very good that by the time I was twelve I knew how to get what I wanted, and to do whatever was necessary to get it. And anyone who tried to control me, tried to use me, got what they needed.”

  “The man who said he was your father in New Orleans,” I began.

  She cut me off with, “He was the first. I killed him and watched him die. I stood over him until every bit of life drained out of him. It helped, but not a lot.”

  “Your first husband. The drug overdose?”

  “Yes it was. Not his fault though, I’d learned how to mix a great highball…. He died happy.”

  “I don’t need to hear any more,” I said and meant it. I already knew what was coming and every word made me sicker. What hurt the most was because it wasn’t her fault. They may not have stolen her mind, but they’d made her insane none-the-less.