by Caleb Carr
Mike, fascinated by all he’d heard and seen—for I think even he was drawing the connection, now, between Donovan’s behavior and Ambyr’s—asked, “And the ‘glass ceiling’ we keep getting told about? How’d you break that?”
But Donovan only scoffed. “The ‘glass ceiling’…Let me tell you something, Dr. Li: the glass ceiling exists only for women who insist on playing by men’s rules. And they’re idiots. The ceiling isn’t glass, it’s steel; and if you don’t know by the end of high school that you’re going to have to go around and not through it, well…you deserve whatever happens to you.”
It was a stunning explanation of her behavior; but I needed specifics. “So—and I ask this question purely academically, because we are prepared to accept your bargain, but—are you saying that this entire method of suppressing the throwaway-child crisis in this state was of your contrivance?”
“I’m not saying any such thing,” she answered, causing me momentary disappointment; but then she added, “I had help. Whatever help I wanted, really. But I knew that the smaller the operation, the better the chance for security—and for success. Your girlfriend came in handy: she was idealistic enough to think that she could help these kids, and herself, too. She never realized until I came along just how the game works, and by then it was too late. It wasn’t really bred into her. Which made her and that idiot Meisner kid the perfect fall guys, though they never suspected it. I was so honest with them, so concerned for these children that get abandoned by their families. All bullshit, of course. We just needed it to go away.”
I paused before asking, “And do you really imagine it will? Given the way things are, in this state and this country right now—do you really think that other parents won’t opt for leaving their kids, or one of their kids, or their only kid, behind, and simply starting over? That this little operation of yours can suddenly restructure what’s happening to our society, to our economy?”
She positively beamed. “Not only don’t I think so, Dr. Jones, I don’t give a shit. I was tasked to solve this crisis. And I did, cleanly; or it would have been clean, if you two had just kept to your teaching, and that pain-in-the-ass brother of Ambyr’s hadn’t given you so many breakthroughs. But hey, who knew the kid had a gift for this kind of thing? Who could’ve known you’d take the insane step of including him in your investigation? Not me, certainly; but we countered it, and very effectively. It meant certain complications, of course. I didn’t know that Dr. Li, there, had a history with Grace Chang, for one; but we even used that to confuse you, for a while.”
“And Derek Franco?” Mike asked.
“Derek?” she asked in return; and for a moment the barest flutter of regret passed across her features. “Yeah…I was sorry about him. He was useful, too. But so goddamned retarded. I never thought he’d try to put my back to the wall.” She rallied. “And I certainly never imagined that that little idiot Kolmback actually had a conscience. He could’ve had Nancy Grimes’ job, one day, but…”
I could only remember Mangold’s words: “But he wasn’t prepared to ‘advance by blood,’ was he?” Cathy Donovan just shook her head. Maybe she realized she’d already told us an awful lot; or maybe somewhere in the primitive parts of her brain there still existed the trace of a human conscience; but she was close to being done with us. Yet I pressed one last time: “So there’s no way we can induce you to tell us just who these ‘higher powers’ are that ordered the operation you ran?”
She smiled coyly and laughed lightly, never having looked quite so alluring. “Dr. Jones,” she said indulgently. “You’re not serious. Isn’t it enough for me to say that there isn’t a thing the two of you can do that will either induce me to provide that information, or stop the shitstorm that’ll descend on you and everybody associated with you, if you don’t agree to my offer?”
I sat there silently. I was satisfied with all I’d heard, now, yet there was no happiness in that satisfaction; so, I simply leaned back toward her office door, clicked the pen in my pocket again, and said, “Yes. I suppose it’s enough.” Calling out loud, I said, “How about it, Frank? Is it enough?”
And suddenly, Frank Mangold burst through the door. He stood there, sweating a bit and looking particularly bloodthirsty. “Well, Doc,” he said, catching his breath. “I didn’t exactly get the first part, though I got the gist. I was a little busy…” He held the door open, allowing us to see the two guards from the hallway nearly unconscious on the outer office floor, each bleeding from a blow to the head. Donovan’s face went pale, and she immediately pulled her jacket back on. “Don’t worry, Cathy,” Mangold continued, taking out a handkerchief and wiping blood off his Glock before he holstered it. “I didn’t hurt ’em too much, and they won’t have more than a fat pair of headaches when they wake up.”
“Frank!” Donovan shouted. “Do you have any idea of what you’re doing?”
“Yep.” Mangold pulled a set of handcuffs out of a case on the back of his belt. “I’m arresting you. And your flunkies. Those that’re still alive, anyway. I already killed Shea”—as he spoke, Mangold moved over and slapped the cuffs onto Donovan’s hands behind her back—“but he gave us a nice, fat confession, just like yours, before he went.”
“You’re—arresting me?” Cathy said in disbelief. “On what possible charge?”
“You just gave us the charge,” I said, pulling the pen from my pocket. “Conspiracy, Cathy. It’s all recorded on this simple little device.”
“Hey, Doc, that’s the high-end model,” Frank protested with a smile. “Had to make sure you got every single word, in case those two gave me more of a fight than I figured. But they didn’t.” He lifted his head, holding on to Donovan’s arm, and let out a piercing whistle with just his teeth and lips. At the sound, several BCI men stormed in from the hallway. “Cuff those two, then take this garbage down to the van in the parking lot. And don’t fucking listen to a word she says.”
As he turned Donovan around, she said bitterly, yet still without losing her proud demeanor, “Frank, trust me, you have absolutely no idea who and what you’re screwing with, here, except your own career. Just uncuff me, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”
“I don’t know, Cathy,” Frank said, sending her into the hands of his subordinates. “It’s quite a story to forget, just like that. Okay, fellas—out they all go…”
And it was no more or less complicated than that. Cathy Donovan, bathed in hubris, had fallen for a gimmick that she would certainly have expected, if Mike and I had been crooks, cops, or lawyers. But we were just a pair of seemingly defenseless independent criminal investigators and teachers, at least one of us an advocate of methods that seemed to have gone out of style, but which had, in the end, induced her to fall into traps that her cunning mind would ordinarily have detected at their outset.
After the outer door of her office closed with that same hissing sound, Mike, Frank Mangold, and I just stood there in that eerie green glow for a few seconds, Mike looking amazed that things had finally, apparently, been tied up, myself feeling just numb, and Mangold brushing at his hair and clothes. “Shit,” he mumbled. “I think one of those pricks bled on my suit…” Then he moved over to the window behind Donovan’s desk and looked down. “Hey—Jones,” he called. “Come here, will you? Something I think you ought to see.” Both Mike and I started toward the window, but Mangold waved my partner off. “Won’t interest you, Li. Just the profiler, here…”
I had assumed that he wanted me to see Cathy Donovan entering the BCI wagon that would take her down to Albany for processing and interrogation (and wouldn’t Mangold just love that session?). And, looking into the street, I did see his men emerge from the courthouse, where they attracted the attention of those local officers who had earlier been dispatched to North Fraser but who’d stuck around, evidently fascinated to see what was going to happen inside. Watching in amazement, this group included Steve and Pete, whose faces broadened with smiles of confused happiness, after which they looked up t
o the window where we were standing and gave thumbs-up gestures. But then a State Police cruiser that I recognized as Mitch’s pulled into the lot and up to the van, and suddenly neither Pete nor Steve looked very happy, anymore:
They had already seen what I had not. Mitch, emerging from the cruiser, opened the back door as another trooper got out of his passenger seat and stood guard. And from the cage in the back of the vehicle emerged Ambyr and Kevin, both, like Donovan, cuffed behind the back. It was hard to make out any actual words, but it was nonetheless clear that Ambyr was playing her part to the end: she tearfully insisted on something, looking inside the cruiser, and Mitch’s subordinate eventually went in and got her white cane, carrying it as he took her to the same van into which Donovan had already disappeared. I could just make out her final protest—“But I don’t understand!”—before a female BCI officer guided her into the van from within and the doors banged closed on them all. Kevin Meisner, meanwhile, was taken quickly over to Frank Mangold’s own cruiser and shoved roughly into its back seat, two of his men standing guard as they waited for their boss.
I spun on Frank, suddenly enraged and feeling as if, despite all we’d been through that day, he was the swine I’d always pegged him for. Noting my expression, as well as the balling up of my right fist, he nodded, smiled just slightly, and said, “You want to take a poke at me, Jones? Go ahead. I can take a punch, and something tells me yours won’t be the worst I’ve felt. But you needed to see that.”
“Why, Frank?” I seethed. “What possible good could come of it, of taking away any last shred of illusion I might have about her?”
“Just exactly that,” he answered; and I began to get his point. “Listen, profiler,” he went on, “you think you’re the first guy in an investigation that it’s happened to? You think we all haven’t fallen for somebody on the wrong side of a case, at some point? I’ll admit, most guys don’t fall for it when they’ve gotten to your age, but that’s just poor, dumb luck.”
“You saying it happened to you, Frank?” Mike asked, having put together enough of what I’d witnessed without himself needing to have done so.
“Me?” Frank chuckled, brushing his grey buzz-cut. “Ah, shit, Li, you don’t wanna know. When I was coming up, back in the city, there was this chick, this bartender…” For a moment an almost gentle memory seemed to soften that sallow, chiseled face. “But, yeah. She was dirty, all right. Played me like a fuckin’ harp. And it helped me, seeing her get carted off. Seeing her like she really was.” He shook the moment off: “Anyway—just thought I’d return the favor. You boys take care of yourselves, and for God’s sake—” He grabbed his recording pen from my hand and headed back to the outer office door. “Stay the hell out of official investigations, will you, from now on?”
“Oh,” I said, looking back out the window with Mike. “Absolutely.”
“Yeah,” Mangold laughed. “That’s what I figured. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Mike and I watched the dispersing scene in the lot and across the street. Steve and Pete were still glancing up at us, both with expressions, less of confusion, now, than of sympathy. But when, just before Steve got into his cruiser to head off to North Fraser, he lifted his shoulders to ask what could possibly have happened, and then Pete made a similar gesture as he got into his car, I could make no move. Mike, on the other hand, made the universal sign of a telephone receiver with his right hand, and the sheriff and his deputy both nodded, finally feeling free to take care of their own business. Mangold had emerged to take the wheel of his own unmarked car, a downcast Kevin Meisner barely visible in the back seat, and with a squeal of his tires he headed off in the direction of Route 4, which would carry him down to 787 and, from there, to Albany.
Taking a deep breath, Mike murmured, “Well? You okay, L.T.?”
And, strangely enough—all the stranger because my reaction was in keeping with Mangold’s intention—I found myself, if not okay, something like it. “Getting there, Mike,” I said, leaning on my cane and starting out of the office. Then I stopped once, when I saw a small framed photograph of Cathy Donovan as she had been in what must have been high school or her undergraduate days: picking it up, I saw a beautiful girl surrounded by unremarkable but handsome young men, all of whose attention was focused on her; but her eyes were locked onto the camera. “Advancement by blood,” I said quietly. “The easy way out…”
“Yeah, what the fuck was that all about?” Mike asked.
“I’ll explain it to you on the way home,” I answered, replacing the picture and then leaning on Mike’s shoulder with my left arm.
“Easy, L.T., for crying out loud!” Mike said; but he didn’t shirk the weight. “I got shot, remember?”
“Sorry,” I said, taking my arm off. “Come on, let’s get home. I need to see how Marcianna’s doing, and I think we could both use a drink. Maybe we can dig up a couple of bottles of Talisker along the way.”
“Hunh,” Mike grunted. “Don’t you bet on it, kid…”
Within just a few days, Marcianna regained strength enough to get up and wander, if not yet run, around her enclosure, which she patrolled with great diligence; and by that third day I even ventured to take her on our usual afternoon walk down to the stream beyond the hollow road, from which she drank heavily, still feeling a thirst that I could empathize with only too readily: the thirst that comes from recovery after an extreme insult to the body, whether that insult be surgery or getting shot. Her vet didn’t believe that her wound held any long-term implications for her leukemia; although he suggested a couple of follow-up blood tests, just to make sure of that opinion. For the moment, however, on that afternoon of that day, there was nothing to do but sit on one of the rocks by the stream as she pressed her head into my arms and chest, moaning in frustration about her inability to play our usual game of chasing the little puppet on a string.
And then, suddenly, she caught a scent in the air, and turned to see, before I could detect as much, that Lucas was approaching. It was a welcome sight, and then some: other than taking several shifts watching over Marcianna as she recovered, during which he spoke only of her condition, he had remained silent since his sister’s arrest. He had finally abandoned the master bedroom—indeed, he started avoiding it—and returned to his own room next door; though there were nights, when I returned very late from the enclosure, that I heard a knocking sound coming from within, and went into the master bedroom to realize that he was rapping his fist against the wall that divided them. Perhaps he was asleep when he did it, or perhaps it was just a desperate desire to hear his sister knock back, I don’t know; and I left it alone, as we left him alone, to eat his meals silently in the kitchen, to walk the grounds of the farmhouse, and to try to come to terms with all that had happened. Yet he would never be able to perform that task entirely on his own; and so when I saw him finally making what seemed an attempt to interact, not only with Marcianna but with me, down by the water’s edge, I became hopeful.
As he approached, Marcianna let out her happiest chirrup, raising the paw on her right side alone to welcome him: she could not yet jump, and certainly couldn’t get up to the kind of roughhousing that she and Lucas had been used to. But he engaged with her, to the extent that they both were able, and finally sat down and held his head and arms out, so that she could get a kick out of toying lightly with at least those parts of his body.
“Hey, you,” Lucas said to her, almost sounding like his old self. “Don’t go biting my head off, that isn’t fair.” Nevertheless, Marcianna kept rubbing the sides of her fangs against Lucas’ hair and scalp. “Hey!” he laughed. “Come on, girl, that doesn’t exactly tickle, you know! And I just washed my hair, damn it! L.T.!”
It was, of course, a slightly orchestrated way to establish contact with me, on the kid’s part; but at that point, I’d take it, and gladly: “Come on, Lucas,” I said. “She does it to me all the time, it doesn’t hurt.”
“Yeah, but it’s fucking scary!” he replied;
and the vulgarity, too, was a good sign.
“Well, you got her started, and you can stop her,” I laughed. “Just give it a shot.”
Lucas pulled his head up and pointed a finger at Marcianna. “Okay: we’re stopping now. Got it?” Marcianna did indeed stop, simply staring at Lucas and releasing another merry chirrup. The kid sat back, slightly surprised. “Well—whatta you know?”
“See?” I said. “Not so tough to take your head out of the wild beast’s mouth.”
Lucas scratched at the particularly disheveled, sandy mop on his head, as he walked over to sit on a rock next to me. “Yeah,” he droned. “I get the point. I’m not that dumb.”
“What point?”
“It’s a—a whattaya call it, a metaphor, right? You’re trying to tell me I can get over Derek dying and Ambyr lying to me, not to mention my parents’ disappearing.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Was I really doing all of that?”
“Yeah, you did, asshole.” He caught himself quickly. “Sorry. Professor. Doctor. Whatever you’re being right now.”