by Tim Stevens
If there was a pattern to the choice of victims, it was such an obscure one he’d need a miracle to crack it.
A miracle, but possibly also Fil Vidal, his computer guy.
Venn looked at his watch. Almost five o’clock. No, there was no point calling Fil now. He’d do so in a few hours.
*
Harmony Jones was down at her Crown Vic before she’d even finished pulling her jacket on.
She lived in a three-bedroom apartment which she shared with her sister Monica and Monica’s eight-year-old son. She could probably afford her own place – her position with the Division of Special Projects meant her pay was a cut above that of other detectives of her rank – but that would mean living alone, something she’d never gotten used to. It would also mean leaving Monica and Harry to fend for themselves, and she couldn’t do that. Monica worked a day job as a secretary, and while she wasn’t exactly on the poverty line, she’d struggled to make ends meet until three years ago, when her big sister had suggested they share the rent on a place.
Right now, though, Harmony wasn’t thinking about Monica. She wasn’t even thinking about the Sigma case, as she’d started thinking of it as, though she’d felt the familiar stirring in her blood when Venn had called and told her another body had been found.
Rather, what Harmony was thinking about as she gunned the Crown Vic’s engine more dramatically than was strictly necessary, especially at this hour of the morning, was her father.
Clarence Jones was currently a patient at Revere Hospital in Lower Manhattan, the hospital Venn’s Beth worked at. He’d been there eight days now, and showing no signs of being ready for discharge. His health insurance would cover another week or so, but Harmony was prepared to dip into her savings to keep him there a little longer if necessary.
Clarence – Harmony had always called him that, never Dad, even as a small kid – suffered from heart failure and diabetes. He’d been thus afflicted for the last fifteen years, and now, at the age of seventy-two, the twin conditions had wrecked his body to the point where the doctors were talking about amputating three of his toes, maybe even his whole left foot. He couldn’t sleep flat on his back, and even propped up on a bunch of pillows, the gurgling from his chest made him sound like a deep-sea diver with an aqualung. He was almost completely blind. His blood pressure stayed under control for a couple of days at a time, if he was lucky, before skyrocketing again.
If he was lucky... Harmony didn’t smile at her own expression. Luck had nothing to do with the state he was in. Well, maybe a little. She’d read up bout heart failure and about diabetes and had come to the conclusion that sometimes people got diseases without deserving it. Shit happened, and you took the knocks life handed you. But there was resistance in the face of adversity, and then there was opening the door to adversity and rolling out the red carpet to welcome it. Which was exactly what Clarence Jones had done over the last decade and a half.
He was a crotchety old bastard, and he was damned if any doctor was going to tell him what to eat, when to exercise, and generally how to live his own life. The pills the medical profession threw at him were all poisonous, and designed to do nothing but keep the pharma companies in profit. Doctor were all overpaid assholes – Clarence’s actual words – and who wanted to live forever anyhow, especially in a world as screwed up and shitty as this one?
Harmony tried a compassionate approach at first, something that didn’t come naturally to her. She’d pointed out how much Clarence had to live for, how devastated she and Monica and their brother Jacob would be if he passed prematurely.
Clarence wasn’t having any of it. “You young folk have inherited the earth,” he’d say. “My time here is almost over. It’s the natural cycle of things.”
Harmony had tried appealing to the old man’s supposed religious faith – he was a weekly attender at the local Pentecostal Church. “God tells you to take care of yourself,” she’d said lamely. When Clarence had demanded to know which piece of scripture she was referring to, she had to admit she didn’t know.
Finally, Harmony had lost her temper, after weeks of listening to the old curmudgeon’s excuses and self-righteousness. “Start taking care of yourself or we’ll cut you out of our goddamn lives,” she yelled during one particularly fiery row. And he’d simply snorted, rolled his eyes as if to say: what can you expect from your kids?, and ordered her out of his apartment.
She hadn’t spoken to him for almost six months after that. Then she’d gotten the call one day, from the nurse at the ER. Was she the next of kin of Clarence Jones? Harmony had closed her eyes, thinking he was dead. Fighting to ignore the feelings rising within her, feelings that shamed her. But the nurse told her that her father had been admitted in severe cardiac failure, and that she needed to come to the hospital right away.
Clarence had received her not with the arrogance and dismissiveness she’d been expecting, but with the frightened eyes and pathetic gratitude of a child. And Harmony had felt a twist in her heart.
Of course she couldn’t abandon him.
So she’d been visiting near enough every day for the last week and a half, calling on her phone when she couldn’t make it, and had made a pain in the ass of herself with the doctors and nurses, demanding updates on her father’s condition and arguing with them about what was best for him. The most infuriating part of it was that, after he’d been pulled back from the brink of death to a place a few feet shy, Clarence’s old obstinacy had reasserted itself. He’d become truculent, uncooperative, refusing his meds when he thought he was being too many pills or ones of the wrong color, complaining loudly and vocally about the quality and quantity of the hospital food, and causing more than one fellow patient to demand an immediate transfer to a different ward. The resident in charge took Harmony aside one day and told her as tactfully as he could that if this continued, they’d be forced to discharge her father and try to manage him as an outpatient. Harmony had responded by tearing Clarence a new one, warning him that this was his last chance, that if he wanted her to continue visiting and bringing him stuff he needed to change his ways. He’d relented a fraction, but she knew it wouldn’t last.
And all through this, Harmony had carried on doing her job as best she could, trying to keep up a brave face, while dealing with the heady mixture of anger and resentment and guilt and fear churning inside her. She wasn’t surprised when Venn, detective that he was, noticed she was crabbier than usual.
Why hadn’t she told Venn? Harmony wondered, as she cruised the nighttime streets toward Brooklyn. He’d be sympathetic, she knew. He always was. She couldn’t complain about him as a boss. Nor as a friend. In fact, she’d defend Venn to the death, not just his physical person but his honor as well. She had to admit that she often felt... well, no. She couldn’t admit that.
But if she told Venn, it would mean letting her image slip. Her image of tough, don’t-give-a-damn nonchalance. It was something Venn had told her he’d admired in her from the start, and it had been one of the qualities that had led him to hire her in the first place. If she started to tell him about her father, with his bloody-mindedness and his terrible physical health and his demands, she’d risk letting out a genie that she’d never be able to force back in the lamp. She might, God forbid, break down in tears. And if that happened, however supportive Venn was of her, he’d never quite see her in the same way again. Something between them would be changed, forever. And she didn’t know if she could carry on working for him in that situation.
The Manhattan bridge loomed large though her windshield. On the other side, she saw the blue-red-white flicker of the flashers.
It was time to focus, dammit. Put her personal crap to one side and do the job she was hired to do.
The job she loved more than anything else in the world.
*
Harmony saw Venn’s tall figure first, made even bulkier than usual by the coat he was wearing. Next to him were the FBI pair, Teller and that harpy Rickenbacker.
Sh
e parked the Crown Vic and emerged. Venn raised a hand.
“Take a look,” he said. “Fresh pair of eyes and all that.”
Harmony leaned on the rail, thinking that if she held on too long her palms might freeze to the metal, and gazed down.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She squinted. Her eyes were streaming with the cold, and she wasn’t seeing clearly.
She vaulted over the rail and almost lost her footing on the slippery concrete, sliding down half on her butt until she reached the bottom. The crime scene techs looked up suspiciously. Harmony knew she didn’t look like most people’s idea of a cop, but for once the prejudice neither riled nor amused her.
She dropped into a crouch beside the body. Stared into the waxen face with its neither open nor closed eyes.
She scurried round so that she wasn’t looking at the face upside down.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“What?” said a voice. Probably one of the techs’.
Alice.
Harmony rose to an upright position. Whether it was the slickness of the ground, or something else, she couldn’t keep her balance and dropped to her knees once more.
She kept staring at the face. Was dimly aware of Venn scrambling down the slope and huddling beside her.
“Harm?” he said. “What is it?”
“Alice Peters,” she whispered again.
“What?”
She turned to Venn. Something in her face must have made him flinch.
“This woman’s name is Alice Peters,” Harmony said. “She’s my cousin.”
Chapter 14
Frank was waiting for Sally-Jo when she got back to her Gramercy Park apartment. It was after six p.m., and the darkness had long ago descended on the city like a shroud, brining with it a chill that was rapidly deepening into the kind of cold that seeped through into the marrow and made it hard to keep even tolerably warm outdoors.
She felt the ache in her arms and her shoulders. Alice Peters might have been a mere slip of a woman, but carrying her dead weight around for a prolonged period had taken its toll on muscles Sally-Jo wasn’t accustomed to using.
“Everything go smoothly?” Frank asked.
Sally-Jo nodded, her face bright but wary. Yes, everything had gone smoothly. Well, as far as you could use the word smoothly when referring to the act of lugging a body from the woods into the trunk of a car, driving around until a secluded spot could be found, and then hauling said body out and dumping it in the water.
After she’d killed Peters, Sally-Jo had dragged the body further into the woods on the edge of the park and buried it as thoroughly as she could under a pile of dead leaves and branches. It wasn’t much of a hiding place, and she prayed that a nosey dog wouldn’t come by and alert its owner. But she needed one hour. One hour to get back to Manhattan and her apartment, collect her car, and drive back.
As it happened, there was no cluster of people, cops or otherwise, in the park when she returned. The day was waning but the sun was still up, struggling to make its presence known through the cloud cover. It would have been better to dispose of the body under cover of darkness, of course, but that would mean waiting an unacceptably long time, which would increase the risk of discovery.
Sally-Jo didn’t mind the body being discovered. In fact, she positively willed it. What she needed was for all traces of her that might have lingered on the woman to be removed comprehensively. A prolonged soak in a body of water would do it.
So she’d pulled a heavy-duty canvas sack around Peters’ still-warm frame and tied it securely at the top and dragged it further through the woods to the perimeter wall. On the other side was a quiet street where she’d parked her car. The street was lined mostly with the backs of houses, and Sally-Jo knew that while it was possible somebody would be looking through the rear windows of their home, it was a risk she’d have to take. She’d heaved the sack over the wall, climbed down after it and slung it in the trunk of her car.
Frank said: “Sloppy. And you took too many risks.”
She said nothing, biting her lip. Was he going to fly into one of his rages? She didn’t know if she could handle that. Not now.
“It didn’t work,” he said quietly.
Sally-Jo felt numbness creep up inside her belly to her chest. She hadn’t paused to think about it. But she realized she’d known he was right. All along, ever since the life had faded from Alice Peters’ eyes.
“No,” she breathed.
Frank said matter-of-factly, “No biggie. You’ll just have to do it again.”
“Yes.” He understood. He wasn’t angry. Sally-Jo felt a rush of relief, and of warm gratitude.
“Wait a while, though,” said Frank. When he was like this, he was the sweetest man in the world. “There’s no point rushing into it. Take a few days to relax. Recalibrate yourself.”
She nodded again.
Frank moved close, his presence overwhelming her. He murmured: “Hold firm, Sally-Jo. You’ll get there. Sooner or later, somebody will understand. And then you’ll be free. Free to stop doing this. Free to move on with your life. And I’ll be gone.”
“No!” She felt a rush of panic. Of grief, even, which was absurd. Though she’d heard of people who had relatives with a terminal illness, and who began to experience grief even before the loved one died.
Frank said, gently, “It has to be that way, Sally-Jo. By the time you’re through this, you won’t need me any longer. If I’m still around, it’ll mean you haven’t succeeded yet.”
Her throat felt choked. She wouldn’t have been able to get the words out even if she’d known what to say.
Frank made his exit then, and Sally-Jo was left alone in the apartment. She wished he’d stay the night, like he used to, but he was becoming ever more distant from her.
She supposed he was right. It was for the best that they gradually separated from one another.
She sat in the shadows of her living room, the only light coming from a table lamp, and felt the tears well in her eyes and creep slowly down her cheeks.
Chapter 15
They tried to get Harmony to sit down, Venn and Teller, but she paced the office like a caged and starved animal. On the table, the cup of coffee Venn had poured her sat untouched.
“Harm,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you to relax. But let’s channel what you’re feeling. We can use it.”
She stopped for the first time, glared at him. He understood what some of the criminals she’d caught felt when she was in full cry.
“Don’t you say that, Venn,” she spat. “Don’t you dare talk about what I’m feeling. You have no goddamn idea.”
“Hey,” he said, allowing his own anger to come through. “It’s written all over you. Don’t smart-mouth me.”
It worked, better than touchy-feely sympathy might have on anybody else. Harmony still glowered, but some of the defiance faded from her eyes.
Teller watched, saying nothing, allowing Venn to handle things. Rickenbacker lounged against the wall by the door. Her fingers came up now and again to her mouth, as if she’d forgotten she was back in the FBI office and no longer held a cigarette. She’d said nothing since they’d gotten back to the office.
Venn tipped his head at the chairs around the table. “Come on. Let’s go through this again. We gotta strike now, while it’s all fresh.”
Harmony balled her hands into fists. But she dropped into one of the chairs. Venn and teller followed suit. Rickenbacker stayed against the wall, arms folded.
Teller caught Venn’s glance of irritation and beckoned Rickenbacker with a small movement of his head. Taking her time, she came over and sat down too.
“Okay,” said Venn.
Harmony drew a few breaths, as if about to speak but then thinking better of it. Her gaze was leveled at the table top.
Finally she said: “Alice is my second cousin. My mom’s brother’s ex-wife’s kid. We’re not – we weren’t – close. I last saw her maybe at Chr
istmas. But we got on okay.”
Venn waited, giving her time.
“She’s something of a celebrity in certain circles,” Harmony continued. “She was headed nowhere as a kid. Drugs, hooking, petty crime. When I was a rookie cop, ten years ago, I tried to get her out of the life. For my brother’s sake. I didn’t like her much then, thought she was a lost cause. Also an obnoxious, snot-nosed brat, even though she was a couple years older than me. She spat at me, told me to get lost. Eventually I gave up.”
There was a tap on the door. One of the other FBI agents, Abbot, came in and handed Teller a note. He read it, nodded.
“Alice Peters failed to show up to a couple of appointments yesterday afternoon and evening,” he said. “Nobody’s been able to get hold of her. It’s unlike her, so people were getting worried. But she hasn’t been filed as a missing person yet.”
Venn indicated for Harmony to continue.
“She’s a classic story of turning your life around. She busted out, got cleaned up, went back to school. Now she teaches retarded kids, and helps young people in the same situation she was in to free themselves and make something of their lives. She’s done good, Venn. Better than I ever could have managed.”
And you feel rotten because you quit on her, Venn thought.
“Where did she live?” he asked.
“Harlem, off Lexington. She was alone. I think she preferred it that way, having her own space, after years of living in a damn whorehouse.” Harmony glanced away from the table, at the wall. “Maybe she’d have got married one day. Had kids.”
Teller said: “I’ve sent King and Leonard to her apartment. They got the address from the manager of the community center she was supposed to be speaking at in Brooklyn yesterday, when she never showed up.”
Venn said, “Okay. We need a map of her movements yesterday. As detailed as we can get. What time was she supposed to be in Brooklyn?”