Moonlight Falls (A Dick Moonlight PI Series Book 1)

by Vincent Zandri

  “It’s pretty amazing what you can do with one of these,” he said, holding up a scalpel with his right hand. Even in the rain and the dark, I could easily make out its smooth black, Teflon-coated surface—a surface as sharp as the smile planted on George’s face.

  “You might have pulled the key from off the garage wall,” I told him.

  “Where the hell’s the fun in that, Moon?” he grinned. “Besides, the maintenance people around here are smarter than they were in our day.”

  “No key, huh?”

  He pocketed the scalpel into the leather sheath attached to his belt and pulled back on the lever that raised the bucket high.

  By the light of both the van and the backhoe, the whole exhumation took just fifty minutes from start to finish. Managing a quick and efficient exhumation isn’t exactly like riding a bike. But then we hadn’t lost our touch. I actually got the feeling that the old man was watching our backs.

  Staring up at George seated in that little black chair like a cowboy atop a mechanical dinosaur, I sensed that, to him, exhumation was about as much fun as you could have with your clothes on. We’d shared a lot of laughs all those years ago working side by side in the dark of a warm summer night, music playing from a transistor radio, one of George’s perpetually burning joints keeping our spirits sky high.

  He operated the separate handles of the machine like a pro, gingerly tickling the sticks until he got the bucket to dig precisely where he wanted, all the time his eyes filled with rain water, but still glued to the open plot.

  We weren’t in any real danger of being caught. Relatively speaking, that is. Ryan’s plot was well out of the way of the main road (Route 378). To a group of innocent kids looking for a quiet spooky place to smoke pot and drink beers, I knew we’d just appear to be another night-shift in action.

  We located the chain in the cab of the backhoe. Having attached it to the backhoe bucket claws, we were able to support the weight of the casket while carefully sliding it into the van’s storage bay, to the left of the stacked Montana cadavers and the bags of dry ice preserving them. A few minutes later we had the hole filled back in, the sod replaced and the backhoe parked back inside the brick maintenance shed.

  In a matter of hours, it would be daylight.

  Ryan’s remains would be autopsied and his illegally harvested body revealed, the proof I needed to nail Cain.

  65

  I rode in the back of the van while George drove.

  I sat on the metal pan floor and sensed the weight of the bodies beside me. There was the motion of the vehicle as it sped south along the Thruway towards Poughkeepsie. Minute after grueling minute of doing nothing but taking slow, steady breaths with bruised lungs and ribs, listening to my heart throb inside my temples.

  Luck was with us.

  We encountered only one security checkpoint along the way, just before exiting Route 90 onto the north-south Thruway. And even then we weren’t ordered to stop. We were merely waved on by the presiding state troopers, or so George told me later.

  This is what else he told me: that he had yet another friend who owed him yet another favor. That this friend was also a pathologist. That he would allow us one full hour inside the autopsy room of the Saint Paul’s Medical Center not a mile down the main road from Marist College. One hour, no more. This person would be there to greet us at the door. He would ensure that no one would disturb us. But after one hour, we were to leave the same way we came. Don’t ask questions, don’t bother with cleanup, don’t so much as take the time to pee. Just get the hell out.

  Once inside the Saint Paul’s basement morgue, we wheeled the mud-strewn casket into the Decomposed Room, which was located down the hall from the much larger Autopsy Room. The windowless space was specially ventilated not only because of the horrific odor an exhumed body gives off once the casket lid is cracked, but also because of the contagious diseases it might carry.

  Located in the center of the room were two steel tables. Each table had hand-held spigots attached to its edges that provided running water for the pathologist and his deceased patient. Stored inside the wall- to-wall glass cabinets were dozens of jars with screw-on lids, all of which contained body parts of one kind or another. There were eyes, ears, livers, appendixes, hearts and even one jar that held an entire premature human fetus. . . a boy.

  The whole place looked like some sanitized version of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. But then, this was a place where the dead did some real talking to the living.

  George had set up the facility’s video camera on a tripod and slipped in a fresh tape. From its position in the far corner of the room, it would easily capture the entire procedure he was about to perform. Once we both put on our green gowns, protective eye shields, and respiration masks, he hit the RECORD switch on the remote control that was set on the stainless steel instrument tray by his right-hand side. When the little red light lit up on the camera, I felt my stomach began to quiver, my whole body start to tingle.

  Because it had been laid inside an air and watertight cement vault, the casket had been perfectly preserved. The same could be said for the body. Maybe I had held my breath while George cranked open the lid, but I breathed a sigh of relief when I caught my first glimpse of Kevin. Despite the mold that covered his face (a common fungal reaction that I knew from experience, occurring in most air-tight compartments), the flesh and bones were completely intact. Even the navy-blue suit his parents had buried him in was still in good shape, as was the somewhat withered single red rose clasped between the folded fingers of his right hand.

  It didn’t take long to hit the jackpot.

  Once the suit jacket, shirt, and undershirt were removed, we could plainly view the hasty incisions that had been made over the places where the organs were harvested. There was one on the right side of the upper pelvis and two more on the left side. And if we could plainly make out the incisions so too could the video camera.

  Both kidneys and the liver had been extracted.

  Whoever had performed the butcher job had not even bothered to fill in the hollow places left behind where the organs had once filled them out. Just a cursory needle and thread job.

  Even the devil has more respect for the dead.

  It dawned on me that whoever prepared him for burial might not have questioned his condition. It led me to believe that it was possible that more people were in on Cain and Montana’s black market operation than I initially believed.

  George worked fast, precisely describing the details of the post-burial autopsy as if it had it been officially commissioned by the state. With the procedure concluded, and the two of us certain beyond any doubt that someone somehow had cut out the kid’s organ’s immediately after death and without the necessary notification from the family, we dressed Kevin back up and laid him once more inside his casket. Securing the lid, we then rolled him back out to the van, slipping him inside with the other two bodies. That accomplished, we went back inside to remove our scrubs and to retrieve the videotape. The entire process took only forty-five minutes from start to finish.

  Heading back out to the car, I made a mental note of the accumulated evidence.

  I had the Montana cadavers and I had the exhumed body of Kevin Ryan plus his recorded postmortem examination. There was the Swiss bank account and there was the paper trail in my possession that described victims I’d rubber-stamped for Cain—each one of them organ donors.

  There was the film of Cain entering and leaving a downtown Saratoga Russian restaurant and there was Dr. Miner’s toxicology report that had picked up on the curare, not to mention evidence that proved Scarlet had been drugged way beyond the possibility of committing suicide with a knife.

  There was taped testimony from Lynn suggesting that Cain was sleeping with Scarlet. If what she told me was true, Albany’s newest police captain could be nabbed with murder and the motive with which to execute it.

  Then there was George’s testimony and mine. Not that it would count for much.


  I felt all the air inside my lungs escape like suddenly deflated balloons. I reached out with both hands, balancing myself against the van.

  “You ready to do this, little brother?” George shouted, grabbing hold of my shoulders.

  “Yeah,” I lied, my voice hardly more than a whisper. “Yeah.”

  Climbing inside the back of the van, I laid myself down beside the dead.

  66

  Once past the Thruway checkpoint just south of Albany, George pulled over onto the shoulder and killed the lights. The danger gone, he helped me out of the back bay. Then I joined him inside the cab. He reached into the pocket of his black trench coat and handed me a cell phone.

  “Thought you didn’t believe much in modern technology?” I said.

  “It came with the haircut,” he explained just as he pulled back out onto the highway, hitting the gas.

  The traffic was light. The checked line-stripes zipped past the white headlights like machinegun tracers. Hypnotic and quick. It was one o’clock in the morning. My job wasn’t finished. I decided to get right back to work.

  I dialed Cain’s cell phone. There was a quick pick-up. Cain wasn’t sleeping well these days. Who the hell was?

  He barked out his name.

  “What ever happened to a polite hello?” I asked.

  Dead air told me he was trying to swallow a brick. “Tell me where you are, Moonlight. I can come get you. No cops, no press. Just you and me.”

  Not a word about Joy. Not a word about the albino man. Could it be Cain hadn’t found them yet? I was counting on it.

  “I know everything about everything,” I told him. “About you, Jake and Joy running the body parts. About Scarlet threatening to go public with it. About you killing her even though you were fucking her. I know she was being fed heroin from some albino Russian, and I know about a grief-stricken Jake going turncoat on you. I know you killed him to shut him up. I know you tried to burn up all trace evidence along with his house.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said. I remembered Lynn saying the same thing.

  “You pinned the whole thing on me because you had my signatures on all those case reports; because you found a beer bottle with my prints and spit on it up in Scarlet’s bedroom; because you might have proof that Scarlet and me were occasional lovers.”

  There was a shuffling noise. I heard the pop-top on his Zippo lighter. It told me he was firing up a smoke. I pictured the top cop sitting at his A.P.D. desk, bottle of scotch by his side, shirt sleeves rolled up, with only the white bulb of his desk lamp to light up the blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “And I suppose you can prove all of this.”

  “The evidence I have at my disposal is indisputable and irrefutable,” I said. “Would you like me to give you an accounting?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Call a press conference with the powers that be,” I told him. “Internal Affairs, O’Connor, the mayor, the fucking governor, for Christ’s sakes. Call it for noon today so that the local news broadcasts it live and uncut.”

  Straight ahead of me lay dark, open road. On the cell phone, the sound of Cain breathing and smoking.

  “You announce that your department, along with the DA, have made a grave mistake in accusing me of the Montana murders. You tell all of Albany that I am now a free man, that I need not find myself in legal jeopardy any longer.”

  “What am I supposed to tell the press when they ask me for a new suspect?”

  “That’s your call,” I said. “I just wanna live out whatever life I got left.”

  I glanced over at a smiling George. He pulled his right hand off the wheel, made a thumbs up.

  “Second request,” I said. “You and Lynn draw up a letter transferring primary custody of my son to me. I want you to fax it immediately to Stanley Rose’s office.”

  Nothing on the line but silence.

  “What if I say a big fuck you to all of this?”

  “Then I happily go public with the bodies of evidence.”

  “The Montanas,” he said. “You took the bodies.”

  “I’ll do you one better. You remember that kid Ryan you pinned with a suicidal hanging a while back? Seems his liver and his kidneys showed up missing during our post-burial autopsy.”

  “We,” Cain said. “As in you and Phillips.”

  “And did I mention the footage we shot of you going in and out of The Russo Restaurant in Saratoga long before the lunch or dinner hour? Either you’ve acquired a taste for Russian cuisine or you’ve got Russian mob buddies who partake in the illegal heroin and body parts trade with Albany’s best. You want more?”

  “You, blackmailing me,” he said. “Go figure.”

  “What goes around comes around,” I replied. “And, by the way, what’s with this fascination with sloppy seconds on every woman I sleep with?”

  Beside me, George was driving, grinning, trying not to burst out laughing.

  Cain growled. “In the end, it’ll be your word against mine, Moonlight. The fugitive versus the new chief detective.”

  “Correction,” I chanced. “Your word against mine and Nicky Joy’s.”

  Dead air for a beat. “Joy is with you?”

  There, I thought. He said it. Exactly what I needed him to say.

  “Let’s just say he’s very safe and very sorry for the crimes he’s assisted you with committing against humanity.”

  “Sorry for himself,” he said, “or sorry for you?”

  “Sorry for you, actually,” I told him, “and the hard time you’re gonna be doing when all this is exposed.”

  Cain’s tight face seething, veins popping through the skin on his brow— I could see it so vividly in my head I could almost reach out and touch it.

  “I’ll call for the conference,” he said. “But how do I know I can trust you? How do I know you won’t turn yourself and your so-called evidence in to the FBI?”

  “Send the letter of custody out tonight and go through with your conference tomorrow,” I explained. “Then we’ll decide what to do about my evidence.”

  “How do I get in touch with you?” he asked.

  “You don’t,” I said, cutting the connection.

  67

  We turned off the highway, pulling onto the main rural road that would lead us back into the heart of Albany.

  George was no longer grinning. Nor was he saying a single word about anything. As for me, the maybes were beginning to pile up in my brain like a multiple car wreck.

  Maybe I should have been heading straight for the FBI. Maybe I should have been on the horn with Stanley. But then, maybe Stanley wanted nothing more to do with me now that I’d become a fugitive on the run from a crime I “supposedly” did not commit. Maybe he’d prefer that I throw myself at the mercy of Judge Hughes. Maybe he’d decided to ditch me now that I had no way of producing the deed to my house.

  I felt my stomach going sour on me, my head pounding in its core. I knew that if I started thinking too hard again, I’d risk another seizure. Goddamned nerves. Or should I say paranoia?

  I stared out the van window at the yellow road signs that flew past, illuminated for just a split second in the van’s high beams. I listened to the swipe-swipe-swipe of the windshield wipers and for a second I glanced at George’s newly groomed image.

  If it were possible to stop the world and jump the hell off I would have done it in a heartbeat. Instead, I’d have to content myself with stopping something else.

  “Stop the van, George.”

  He turned to me. “What do you mean stop—”

  “Just stop the fucking van!” I shouted.

  He pulled off to the side, killed the lights but kept the engine and the wipers running.

  “We’re not going to Albany?”

  “Who the hell are we fooling?” I asked. “There’s nowhere for us to go, no place to hide.”

  “I know some people—”

  I shook my head. “Hear me out,” I said. “Cain h
as no intention of calling for a conference.”

  “You think he just told you what you wanted to hear?”

  “I know Cain,” I told him. “I think he’s going to stall me. I think he has no intention of letting me off the hook for this thing any more than he intends to transfer custody of my kid.”

  “You’re thinking like a detective again,” he commented. “Nice and logical, without the usual crippling effects.”

  “Cain thinks Joy is working with me now,” I said. “If he believes the kid is siding with me, he’s going to go looking for him. He’ll try and kill him to shut him up. Just like Scarlet; just like Jake.”

  “Impossible,” George said. “Joy’s already dead.”

  “But Cain doesn’t know that. He probably just assumes that Joy is lying low until this thing somehow blows over.”

  George nodded his head. Steel blue eyes told me he knew where I was going with this.

  “He’ll start looking in the most obvious place,” he said. “The kid’s house.”

  “If I know Cain, he’s opening up the trunk of his prized Beamer and setting a container or two of embalming fluid inside it. He’s getting into the car and setting out to Joy’s house right now.”

  “Why don’t you call him back, save him the trouble?”

  The rain strafed the hood and the trunk. The wipers swished. My heart beat, my belly caved.

  “Because no matter who’s dead, Cain’s not about to deal with me.”

  “There’s not gonna be any conferences,” he agreed. “No admittance by the A.P.D. or the prosecutor of making a mistake.”

  “Instead, there’s going to be another murder,” I said. “And it’s going to happen now. . . this very night.”

  “Joy is going to die twice,” George surmised.

  “And if Cain has his way,” I continued, “the kid’s blood will be on my hands. But if I have my way, I’ll catch him in the act.”