by Caleb Carr
Shaking myself hard, I remembered the two calls that it was necessary for me to make at that juncture. Both were crucial to the plot that had already hatched in my head, that I knew Mike was quickly anticipating, and that Pete would have to sign off on, if he didn’t want the sheriff’s office, which meant Steve Spinetti and himself personally, to get a rather serious black eye for failing to find the mummified boy’s body, and if he wanted further to take some revenge on the BCI for even attempting to place them in such a spot. It was a risky plan, certainly; but by this point, such amounted only to a slightly twisted sign that we were on the right track.
{vii.}
The first call went to Clarissa: waking her was like baiting a tiger, but she needed to know what had happened, in order to get her, in turn, to call her lawyer, the indomitable Paul O’Brien, Esq., and tell him to get over to BCI headquarters in Albany as soon as he could and start screaming about the rights of even penniless sex offenders to counsel. The national disease of allowing impoverished suspects, in almost any kind of case, to go without their constitutional right to such representation had become a pandemic, in New York, particularly under our current governor, a man who knew as little about what it meant to be poor and/or truly vulnerable as almost anyone alive; and I was convinced that O’Brien, an old-school, capital-P Progressive, would charge right into the Patrick case, fee be damned, and begin to put matters right immediately.
The next call was somewhat more delicate: after telling Pete to come upstairs while Mike continued his work, I suggested that we both call, on speakerphone, a pathologist that we knew and trusted at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the city of Troy, the seat of Rensselaer County. Despite all that we had learned and decided about the mummified boy, I pointed out to Pete, we had yet to address our chief problem: in order to prevent the framing of the Patricks (and by extension the sheriff’s office), we had to get the unknown deceased’s body out of the arrested couple’s house. Once it was gone, the BCI could hardly claim to know that it had ever been there (especially if Steve and Pete said that they had never seen it) without admitting their culpability in the affair. But that left the ticklish problem of who might be willing to take the body off our hands, and how. Mike, listening from the basement, shouted up to point out that we could take the remains and bury them high on the mountain behind Shiloh—“since you’re always fucking bragging about how you could kill somebody and bury them on the mountain and nobody would ever find them, L.T.!”—but I replied that, while I still believed this theory to be true, I did not want to run the risk of implicating Clarissa in that kind of skullduggery unless we absolutely had to; and I didn’t think we had to, yet.
Not, that is, if we could bring on board Dr. William “Indian Bill” Johnson, so nicknamed because he was directly descended from the original Sir William Johnson, Baronet. Godfather of Montgomery County in the pre-Revolutionary era, and the first truly great ambassador of the British crown to the Mohawk tribe and the Iroquois nation more generally, Sir William had founded a virtual kingdom west of the Hudson, which he was able to maintain peacefully because of the enormous (and validated) trust that the Iroquois placed in him. This trust grew not only out of his honoring commercial and alliance obligations, but also out of such personal details as his taking a Mohawk woman (some say a princess) to be his consort after the death of his first wife, and then fathering a series of children with her. From one of these, it was rumored, Dr. Bill Johnson’s branch of the family was descended. Like many of the most brilliant and important figures in all categories of “British” history, Sir William Johnson had actually been an Irishman, by birth; and his descendant, Dr. Bill Johnson, shared his ancestor’s love of making the system work whatever way it had to in order to see justice done. I therefore felt that there was at least an even chance that we could tell him honestly what was happening, and that he would devise some way to see our scheme through.
I was not disappointed. My iPhone gave out its characteristically loud cry, over the speaker, and after four or five rings, Bill answered:
“Yeah, what do you want?” he asked, with well-practiced but theatrical irascibility.
“Bill? Trajan Jones, up in Burgoyne County.”
“I know who the hell it is, I saw your name, for God’s sake—now what the hell do you want?”
I couldn’t help but smile: I could readily imagine him toiling away, even and especially at that late hour, in the basement morgue’s examination room (Indian Bill’s own version of his ancestor and namesake’s private kingdom), his six-foot, agile frame surmounted by fair features and coal-black hair that hung down to the midway point of his neck in sheets. “Nice to hear your voice, too, Bill,” I said. “Listen, I’ve got Pete Steinbrecher, here—”
“Hey, Dr. Johnson,” Pete said.
“Pete!” Bill called back, more amiably this time. “Good to hear your voice—haven’t seen you in a bit.”
“And also nearby,” I went on, “but busy at this second, is—”
“Indian Bill!” Mike cut in, shouting up from the basement at a volume that was more than loud enough to be heard.
“Mike Li, you conniving Chinaman!” Johnson answered, matching Mike’s volume. “You still owe me a hundred bucks from that poker game in the morgue last month—you were dealing seconds and you know it! God damn it, I think you people must come out of the womb knowing how to cheat at cards. What the hell’s going on, Li, you sound like you’re trapped in the Forbidden City.”
“I am not Chinese, you scalp-hunting savage!” Mike hollered back.
Bill laughed, heartily and genuinely. “Funny you should mention that! I am at this moment peeling back the scalp of an unfortunate—well, let’s just say dead—man from Latham, whose wife apparently got tired of being kicked around by a drunk and hit him in the head with a Louisville Slugger. Or so our pal Dr. Weaver believes. Looks to me more like the idiot did what the woman claims, stumbled and hit his head on a steam pipe while he was trying to get hold of her. Tell me, Trajan, why the hell did you have to save Weaver’s life, anyway?”
“Ah,” I replied. “Saw that little item, did you?”
“Uh—yeah. Me, the rest of the state, and half the country. Made it all the way to CNN. So how come you didn’t just let the kid put a few slugs in him?”
“Unfortunately, it turned out the kid never actually had a gun,” I explained ruefully. “Weaver was imagining a cell phone to be a .38, though that part of the story didn’t reach the media, I gather.”
“Ha! That’s Weaver, all right, the fat bastard. Well, then, couldn’t you have shot him yourself? Maybe claimed that he came at you in some kind of a disoriented rush?”
“Listen, Johnson—” I was trying hard, and failing, to keep us on point. “We’ve got kind of an exceptional situation over here in Heinsdale. Are you alone in the exam room, right now?”
“I am. As usual. Now, I trust you know that I haven’t got a racist bone in my body—”
“Of course not, you’re an Indian!” Mike tossed in.
“Shut up, Li, I’m trying to make a serious point, here!” Bill took a steadying breath, and I could hear the distinctively wet yet adhesive sound of scalp lifting from skull. “Which is, that I’m no racist, I just think it’s a little weird that the only native-born American in this hospital—”
“Only Native American in that hospital!” Mike blurted again.
“God damn it, Li, I’ll scalp your damned ass if you don’t shut up! Anyway—” Bill’s voice sped up to avoid further interruption: “I’m the only native-born American in this hospital, but I get stuck working alone in the basement all the time. There. I said it. Hmm, yeah…” He returned to his work momentarily. “This skull depression was not made by any damned baseball bat—not even close. That fucking Weaver…”
I picked up my phone. “Okay, Bill, if you’re alone, I’m going to call you back on this FaceTime thing. That all right? I’ve got something I think you need to see.”
“Like what?” ca
me Johnson’s immediate and anxious query.
“Well—I guess you’ve heard about the arrest of Jimmy and Jeanette Patrick over here, for the deaths of those four kids?”
“Of course. BCI’s working pretty hard to get it played up all over the local news.”
“Yeah, well—” I paused before diving in. “There’s just one problem: it’s a frame. Let me get you on the visual and show you something that I think even you may never have seen before; then listen to the details, and to a little proposition we’ve got for you…”
After calling him back on FaceTime, and seeing that he was in exactly the spot I’d pictured, down in St. Elizabeth’s mortuary lab, hands gloved in latex and covered in blood, lab coat liberally splattered with the same, and his black hair hanging loose around his pale features—a violation of hospital policy that the higher-ups tolerated simply because Johnson was one of the best pathologists in the state, and a small hospital like St. Elizabeth’s, they knew, was very lucky to have him—I began to sketch in the situation as quickly as I could, making my way to the basement stairs again. Bill was clearly intrigued; but it wasn’t until I got down into the basement—“Where the hell are we going? Do you actually have to keep that cheating bastard locked in the cellar, these days?”—and turned the phone around so that he could see Mike at work on the dead boy that the hook really went in.
“Holy Christ,” Bill whispered, the sound still quite loud within the silent basement. “A goddamned mummified corpse…” His sense of professional thrill was immediately mitigated, however, as both Mike’s and mine had been, when he saw the size of the body. “Aw, man—he’s just a kid…”
“Indeed,” I answered. “And thereby—wait a minute. How’d you know it was a ‘he’?”
“Who the hell’s the God damned pathologist here, you or me, Jones?”
“Point taken. Anyway, upon the fact of his being a kid, boy or girl, hangs our tale…”
The final portions of the story of how we believed the nameless boy had come to be placed in the cellar, while it was all still fascinating to Johnson, did not elicit the kind of professional thrill that his first glimpse of the body had: nothing could, if you were staring that mummified corpse in the eye, which I made sure my phone camera was doing. But rage proved as good a motivation as curiosity, and the two together sealed the deal: before I even got to what role we wanted him to play, he was proposing it himself:
“So—here’s what we do…” And as I turned the camera phone away from the body and back toward the steps, a sense of professional challenge began to return to Johnson’s voice; more muted, to be sure, but the man really was a true descendant of some of the greatest adventurers and schemers in the history of the Empire State, as he soon demonstrated: “I get over there in one of our DOA wagons—not an ambulance, just the meat haulers we use to transport known fatalities back to the lab. And on the way, we all cook up some bullshit story about what actually happened to the kid. Only our bullshit, to put it simply, has got to be better than their bullshit. You still there, Pete?”
“Right here, Dr. Johnson.”
“Please, Pete,” Bill answered. “We’ve known each other how long? That ‘Doctor’ shit may fly with your downstate friends, over there, but some of us don’t need it. Anyway, you’ll be waiting to help me with the body, while the other two go off and do whatever it is they’ve got to do?”
“Yep,” Pete said. “Won’t be any problem, for the two of us. It seems to be awful…light.”
“Okay, then.” I half-expected to see smoke rising from my phone, Johnson’s brain was cranking so hard. “Go through your county in your head, and I’ll go through Rensselaer. See if you can come up with an abandoned building—something high, a barn, maybe a silo, but something really shut down, locked up, something the kid would have had to try hard to break into, and where, if he got into trouble, he wouldn’t have been able to signal for any help from.”
“Well, I did think of one place,” Pete said tentatively, much to my own and Bill’s surprise. “You know the big abandoned school in Hoosick Falls? The one on 22, as you go up the hill in the direction of North Hoosick and then Cambridge?”
“Oh, yeah!” Bill’s exclamation was quiet, but no less confirmational: the idea was solid. “Old St. Mary’s, it’s perfect—right in the middle of town, almost, on High Street. Made of brick and stone. But it’s been locked up so long that it’s a fortress, now—they tried renovating it, make it into apartments, but the asbestos is just out of hand. Yeah, an adventurous kid could climb in there; it’d be tough, but he could get to one of the upper floors by climbing the stonework on the ground floor. Then he’d want to get into the tower section—plenty high enough, dry enough, nobody would ever have smelled a thing if he got trapped.”
“What about vermin, Bill?” I asked. “Wouldn’t they have gotten to the body?”
“Not necessarily, Mr. Sorcerer of Death—”
“Oh, my God,” I said, cradling my head in my free hand.
“Yeah, they mentioned that the other night, too, when you were popping your .45 off—dangerously close, I might add, to what looked like certain state and county officials. Funny stuff! Anyway, Trajan, rodents get asbestosis and mesothelioma, too—they just get it slower than we do. But if they’ve been getting it for a long time in that building—and it’s been shut up for years—I bet they’ve abandoned ship, and gone on to more friendly structures. Look, the explanation’s not perfect, but it’s close enough that I can make it stick. Now the question becomes law enforcement—Pete, you know anybody in the Hoosick Falls PD that can help us with this?”
“Yeah,” Pete said with a smile, realizing that the whole scheme just might come off. “I got a couple friends—”
“Don’t worry about that,” I cut in. “Bringing in more people who can be squeezed is too great a risk. Plus, we’ve got an in with a trooper—I’m betting she’ll do it, if the right people ask her.”
“You talking about Cousin Caitlin?” Mike shouted up the basement stairway.
“I am, Mike,” I replied, annoyed. “Although I was trying to keep names and relationships—”
“You mean like how she’s your new heartthrob’s cousin?” Mike needled.
I held my breath for an instant, to avoid a string of expletives. “Yes, Mike. That’s exactly what I meant. And if we keep that kind of thing out of the whole matter, the safer everybody will be.”
“Well,” Mike answered, “I guess I kind of fucked that up.”
“Don’t worry, Mike,” Pete said. “I know who you’re talking about—and Bill will meet her at the scene, anyway.”
“So that’s the last piece of the puzzle,” Bill said. “Except for—hey, Mike, has the kid got any major broken bones? Preferably a leg?”
“I haven’t tried looking yet,” Mike shouted. “Why, need him to?”
“I was just spitballing,” Indian Bill replied. “But now that I think of it, he wouldn’t exactly jump and bust his leg if he’d already been mummified. Skip that.”
“Yeah, let’s just skip that.” Mike took a deep breath and closed his trace kit. “Desecrating children’s corpses is just about where I draw the line…”
“Me too,” Pete said quietly.
When Mike got back up to the ground floor, we sketched out the earlier part of the plan for Johnson, about searching outlying counties, including those in the high Adirondacks, for reports of boys’ bodies being found and going unclaimed; this, however, elicited a long groan from Indian Bill, who said, “Oh, for crying out—Pete? Do me a favor, and don’t listen to those two idiots. You don’t want to look for reports of bodies found, because that means that too many people know about it, already. Look for items about boys who have gone missing and never been found. Frank’s no fool, and he will have jumped in and snatched the body and told whoever did find it to keep quiet or else. Jesus, have you guys been fucking up like this all the way through the case?”
“Absolutely not,” I answered, more indigna
ntly than certainly.
“But Bill’s right about this, Pete,” Mike added. “Look for unsolved missing-child cases—not bodies found. Anybody finds a mummified kid, I don’t care if it’s claimed or not, the local media will have been all over it.”
I considered this point. “Hmm…True. So do it that way, Pete. It’s now going on about—what, eleven-thirty p.m.? Let’s just say we’ll try to bring this whole thing together within the hour, before the BCI gets ideas about coming back. The weather’s working in our favor: it’s starting to look like the end of the world, out there. As for Mike and me, we’ll lurk around on High Street in the a.m., but if it looks like the BCI is already there and involved, maybe we’ll hang back, try not to make things appear any more suspicious than they already will.”
“Or screw them up in some other way,” Bill said, tearing off his gloves.
“Bill?” I said, hoping to sound at least a little in earnest. “Can we please eighty-six the bullshit for just a couple of hours, and get this done?”
“You bet, Sorcerer,” he said, as he began scrubbing his hands in a steel sink; then, with one soapy finger, he reached over toward his phone. “I’ll see you in Hoosick Falls!” And with a touch, he was gone.