by Chris Jordan
A small fist smacks him in the jaw. Not enough to loosen his teeth, but a pretty strong punch.
“Got me good,” says Cutter, touching his lip. “Go on, take another punch. I won’t hit you. Free punch, kid, now’s your chance.”
The small fist connects again, not as hard this time, and Cutter grunts. “Ow,” he says. “Let’s stop hitting, shall we? Let me see your face.”
Small brown eye peeking through fingers. The boy would kill him if he knew how, that’s what his eyes reveal. Cutter closes his hands over the boy’s fists, pulls them away from the hidden face.
“Took a pretty good shot to the nose,” Cutter says. “Might be broken. I can fix that, once the bleeding stops.”
The boy jerks his head away, turns it to the wall, defiant.
“I’m going away for a while. Ten, fifteen minutes. Then I’ll be back with warm water and soap. Clean you up. Check you out. Fix what needs fixing.”
“Fuck you,” says the boy, speaking to the wall.
“That guy you hit with the drawer? You fucked him up good. He deserved it. You know why he deserved it? Because he’s a dumb asshole.”
“You’re an asshole,” the boy says. Turns to look at him, meeting his eyes. Showing his courage, his strength, his defiance.
“Yes,” Cutter agrees. “But I’m on your side. And that’s a good thing.”
27
sine pari
Shane’s place is not what I expected. Having envisioned an unkempt bachelor pad inhabited by a man who never sleeps, complete with duct-taped recliner, big-screen TV and empty refrigerator. There were sure to be stacks of empty pizza boxes, the moldy walls would be decorated with old swimsuit calendars, and the floor littered with unopened junk mail.
So much for women’s intuition.
To my surprise, the modest, one-story ranch in New Rochelle feels like an actual home. Elegant but comfortable-looking furniture, accented with a hint of oiled teak. Glowing cherry floors, recently refinished, with several lovely oriental rugs that could be collectable. No swimsuit calendars on the off-white walls; instead, there are museum-quality reproductions of watercolors by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, each piece illuminated by soft cove lighting. Custom-made bookcases line most of the walls, and the books themselves look not only well read, but well dusted.
My first impression is that great care has been taken to preserve order in this place. Second impression is that with the exception of the coffeemaker, the kitchen has a seldom-used look to it. For all his domestic talents, evident in the home he has created, Randall Shane spends very little time preparing food. Something in me wants to spill flour on the neatly trimmed countertops, which have never, from the look of them, been appropriately christened.
Obviously there are no women in Shane’s life, or if there are, none that cook.
We’ve come here to view the promised surveillance tape, since my motel room lacks a VCR, and because Shane’s place, unlike Ms. Savalo’s Westport waterfront condo, is thus far free from media intrusion.
“Be it ever so humble,” says Shane as we enter. “Coffee?”
“Not for me,” says Savalo. “I’m high on life.”
“I’ve got ‘SleepyTime Tea’ if you can’t hack the caffeine.”
The attorney shakes her head, bemused, apparently, by this domestic version of Shane.
“Mrs. Bickford?”
“Coffee, please.”
Mostly I want to urge him to hurry up and show us the tape, see if there’s anything on it that will connect us to finding my son. But Shane is acting purposeful and deliberate and it’s clear he’ll get to the viewing in his own time, and not before playing gracious host. I also get the impression he rarely has visitors and isn’t quite sure how to behave, which may explain his oddly formal manner. The man has gray in his beard, and the years of sleep disorder show in his watery blue eyes, but at home he has the energetic mannerisms of a much younger man.
Savalo and I glance at each other while our host, humming contentedly to himself, brews a pot of coffee. The petite attorney rolls her eyes, makes a point of looking at her watch.
“I saw that,” says Shane. “Someday your eyes are going to get stuck. Didn’t your mother warn you about that?”
“Mom-warnings were mostly about men. Guys with clean houses and Mr. Coffee machines were not to be trusted.”
“You’d rather I lived in a dump?” asks Shane, sounding amused.
“Just repeating what Mom said. But hey, she’s on her third husband, what does she know?”
Handing me a mug of black coffee, Shane leads us to a room he calls “the workshop.” Looks to me like an artist’s studio, and at least part of it serves as exactly that, complete with easel and a small, wheeled table loaded with brushes and tubes of watercolors. A piece of muslin is draped over the easel, hiding whatever it is he’s working on.
“Sunday painter,” he says dismissively. “I’m terrible.”
Somehow I doubt that—whatever he is, Randall Shane is not a hobbyist—but I don’t do the polite thing and beg him to show us an example of his work because I’m focused on seeing the surveillance tape.
About half of the room is taken up by a long, sturdily built bench filled with computer gear. There are several impressive-looking hard-drive stacks, a couple of monitors, VHS and DVD recorders and players, and black boxes that may or may not be cable and satellite modems. My son, Tommy, would know exactly what they are, but my own computer expertise is pretty much limited to e-mail and online shopping. The wall above the bench is festooned with shelves and wire baskets holding various techie gadgets, whose functions can’t even be guessed by the likes of me.
Shane has already alluded to utilizing the internet for research, and for hunting down suspects. I recall him saying that as an FBI agent his expertise had to do with software—was it fingerprint-identification software?—and this bench is obviously where he does most of his in-house work.
“Welcome to Geek City,” he says. “Who wants the chair?”
There’s only one chair at the bench, so rather than fight over it we all opt to stand. Shane slips a tape into a player, keys a control panel and switches on a flat-screen monitor.
“First tape is taken from inside the parking garage,” he tells us.
The image on the screen is in black and white but very sharply focused on the entrance to the garage, from an angle inside the structure. Beyond the gate, the image brightens and flattens out into white static, as if overwhelmed by daylight.
“Here he comes,” Shane announces in a hushed voice.
Sure enough, a silhouetted figure emerges from the wash of daylight and then rapidly comes into focus as he advances in the direction of the camera. A man wearing a baseball cap, a long-sleeved shirt, jeans and running shoes. He seems to be looking down at his feet as he walks, so that the visor of the cap completely obscures his face. He’s carrying something in his right hand, but I can’t make out what, exactly. Not a gun, though. An object small enough to be almost obscured by his hand.
Just as the figure is about to pass directly under the surveillance camera, something happens and the image is suddenly blurred.
“What did he do?” I want to know.
“Sprayed the lens with some sort of oil. Probably WD-40, available in palm-size cans in any hardware store.”
“Why oil and not paint?” I want to know. “In the movies the bank robbers always spray the surveillance cameras with paint.”
Shane nods. “Paint works. But oil is better if there’s a chance that someone is checking the monitors from a remote location. The lens just looks like it’s out of focus. No reason to assume foul play.”
As we watch, the now-blurred figure walks back out toward the entrance and is swallowed up by the wash of light and static.
“Bruce?” Shane asks me.
I nod. “That’s the man I saw in the garage. That’s what seemed familiar, the way he walks. Plus, he was dressed the same way. You can’t really tell on the tape, but
he moves like a very powerful, confident man. An athlete. Maybe a soldier. Someone who’s used to being in charge.”
Shane nods with satisfaction. “That’s what I’m picking up, too. Military bearing. Even with his head down, he’s keeping his shoulders back.”
“Right!” I say excitedly. “Like I told you, he talks like a soldier, too. The way he puts words together.”
“As identifications go, it’s not exactly a courtroom certainty,” Savalo points out.
“We’re not in a courtroom,” I insist. “This is the guy.”
“I’m going with Mrs. Bickford,” Shane says. “Not only for the physical ID, but because he accosted her.”
“Pointing a finger isn’t accosting,” says Savalo, playing devil’s advocate.
Shane gives me an abashed look. “If I thought he’d be in that garage, I’d never have sent you out alone,” he says. “I assumed he’d fled the scene.”
“He didn’t follow us there,” I point out. “He was waiting.”
“That’s what the time log shows.”
“But how did he know we were going to talk to Vargas?”
Shane shrugs. “We can’t be sure. But I think he’s covering his tracks. Anticipating that any investigator would likely want to talk to the attorney who filed the paternity suit. Which meant Vargas had to be silenced.”
“’Scuse me,” I manage, before clamping hand to mouth and hurrying from the room in a panic, gorge suddenly rising.
Shane rushes ahead of me, opens a door and flips up a toilet lid. Just in time. After the nauseating act is over, he makes me sit on the closed lid and hands me a cold, wet towel. “Hold it to your forehead.”
“Sorry,” I gasp. Thinking, Great. First you dissolve into a crying mess, now you’re throwing up. Wonderful day you’re having, Kate. What’s next? A full-scale nervous breakdown?
“Perfectly all right,” Shane is saying, looking at me with deep concern. “It’s my fault. Loads of tension, combined with the fact that you haven’t eaten all day. I have a bad habit of not remembering that people have to eat.”
Savalo makes an appearance, peering sideways around Shane because she’s not tall enough to see above his shoulder. “You okay?” she wants to know.
“Fine,” I say, despite the vile taste that lingers in my mouth. Nothing solid came up, just a few specks of bile.
“She hasn’t eaten,” Shane explains.
“Not that,” I tell them, fighting to calm myself. “Bruce. He scares me sick.”
“Of course he does,” Maria Savalo says sympathetically. She crouches at the commode, pats my clenched hands. “He scares me and I never, uh, met him,” she adds carefully.
A moment later Shane is guiding me out to the kitchen. He rummages through the cabinets until he locates an unopened box of Ritz crackers. He puts a few crackers on a plate, pours milk into a tumbler. “Here you go,” he says. “Force it down if you have to. You need to put something in your stomach.”
“Do you have any peanut butter?”
“I think so. Let me check.”
When I was a little girl, that’s how my mother treated an upset tummy. Crackers with a dab of peanut butter. Comfort food. I’m not the least bit hungry, but the food tastes good and the cold milk seems to make my heart stop hammering. And then, of course, I’m reminded of Tommy with his chocolate milk and Fig Newtons and I have to fight back the tears.
Not going there again. Have to keep going forward or I’ll lose my balance and fall into the abyss.
“Better?”
“Better,” I agree, and take a deep breath that helps to clear my head, if not my heart. “Now, what about the second tape? There’s something on it, isn’t there? Something useful?”
“I can take you back to the motel,” Savalo suggests. “You need to rest.”
I shake off the suggestion. “I’ll rest when we’ve got Tommy back. What about the second tape?”
The look in Shane’s eyes convinces me he’s been saving the best for last. That he’s found something we can act on, beyond the certainty that the man in the mask has been covering his tracks. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s do it,” and we follow him back into the workshop.
My attorney insists that I take the chair this time, and I sink into it gratefully, my knees much weaker than I’ve been letting on. Weak not only from the residual fear of the man in the mask, but from anticipatory excitement.
Let this be something important. Let this be a way to find my son.
Shane produces a smaller cassette—not the VHS format—and fits it into a different machine.
“Okay, a little background,” he begins. “Over the last few years the city has installed several thousand wide-angle cameras at busy intersections. Part of the Homeland Security precautions, with federal funds attached. So far they haven’t caught a terrorist on camera, but the cameras been very useful in a number of criminal investigations. Needless to say, the department discourages publicity about the ‘spy cams,’ if only to discourage vandalism.”
We’re looking at an image of the intersection on the same block as the parking garage. I can make out a line of vehicles waiting for the light to turn, and the ghostlike images of pedestrians.
“Takes a little getting used to,” Shane explains. “The spy cams run at sixty frames per minute. One frame per second. That’s so they can store seven days’ worth of images on each cassette. I synced to the time log of the primary tape. That’s Bruce, exiting the garage.”
It’s hard to make out on the small screen, but sure enough, a silver Ford Explorer is nosing out the parking garage, waiting to merge into traffic on Queens Boulevard.
“The windows are tinted,” I point out. “Just like I said.”
“Excellent point,” Shane says, as if proud of my powers of observation. “Which means we won’t get a look at his face through the windshield. But we do have something that might be even better than a grainy head shot.”
He clicks through several more frames, until the SUV is almost at the intersection, and therefore at the bottom of the image captured by the spy cam. “Two things of interest,” he says. “First is the license plate. New York tags, which may or may not mean anything, since the vehicle was almost certainly stolen. Second, and this could be our big break, he has the driver’s-side window down. And we have you to thank for that, Mrs. Bickford. If you hadn’t seen him, alerted him to your presence, I very much doubt he’d have the window down.”
“The window down? So what, if we can’t see his face?”
“That pale spot against the window opening?” Shane says. “That’s his elbow.”
His elbow? That’s what all the excitement is about? I feel like the air has been let out of my balloon, but before an involuntary groan of disappointment escapes my lips, Shane clicks to the next frame, and I begin to get a glimmer of what has so excited him.
“There, you see that? Looks like a discoloration on his left forearm, a couple of inches above the wrist? That, ladies and gentlemen—excuse me, ladies and ladies—that is a tattoo. Known in the lingo as a ‘distinguishing characteristic.’”
Standing just behind me, Savalo snorts her approval. “Randall, you are amazing. Had me going there. Thought you were going to ID the guy by the shape of his elbow and really blow me away.”
I’m holding my breath, not quite certain how important it can be—lots of guys have tattoos, lots of women, too, for that matter—but Savalo and Shane both seem so upbeat it fuels me with hope.
“That’s why he’s always wearing long sleeves, even in short-sleeve weather,” Shane explains. “Kate described her attacker as wearing long sleeves, remember? He knows the tattoo is a giveaway. But after his encounter with Kate, he rolls up his sleeves and cocks his arm out the window. Probably wants to feel the wind on his face, remind him he’s all powerful, able to terrify women and children.”
“Is that enough to identify him? A blurry tattoo?”
Shane next produces a CD from his shirt pocket, slips it
into a slot in one of the computer towers. “I made a deal with the homicide boys. They loan me the raw data—the spy-cam download—and I’d do the enhancement work free of charge. It helped that I developed the original tat-recognition software for the FBI.”
“I thought you were into fingerprints,” I say, puzzled.
“Fingerprints, too,” he says. “Anything to do with distinguishing characteristics, as it pertains to the skin. Long story short, this particular tat tells us a lot we didn’t know about Bruce.”
The enhanced, blown-up image on the screen looks, to my uneducated eyes, like a winged angel standing on some sort of pedestal.
“You’re partly right,” Shane corrects me. “Those are, indeed, wings. But the dark area in the center of the wings isn’t an angel, it’s a dagger. An unsheathed dagger. The banner under the dagger reads: Sine Pari.
“I’m a little rusty on my Latin,” Savalo complains.
“‘Without Equal,’” Shane translates. “Bruce is or was a member of the Army Special Operation Forces. Very elite. Can’t be more than a few hundred men in the greater New York area who have that insignia burned into their skin. Probably fewer who fit his particular age group.”
“So this means you can narrow it down?” I ask. “We can find him?”
“Yes,” says Shane. “I believe we can.”
28
bing-bing
Captain Cutter exits the enclosure with a smile on his face. He’s snapping the padlock on the outer door when Wald, feigning casualness, asks, “So? Everything okay?”
“Everything is just dandy, Wald.”
“You’re not pissed?”
“Me? No. But in the future the boy is not to be harmed in any way,” Cutter says, adopting a stern tone. “No puppy slaps. No matter how much you think he might deserve it. Are we clear on that?”
“Yes, sir. Clear.”
“Hinks? Can you breathe?”
Hinks, cloth to his face, grimaces but nods his head. “I’m breeving froo my mouf.”
“Good,” says Cutter. “We’re about to start the next phase and I need you fully functional. You and Wald can stop at the E.R. on the way to your assignment.”