by Tom Barber
Jazz piano music filtered through from the lobby as Vargas listened to the end of a report on the phone and ended the call. She took a sip of the whiskey then leaned back and looked at Sarah, who Vargas had told about the events of the morning before the call came through. ‘Last day of service for one of those officers.’
‘This year?’ Sarah asked.
‘For good. He’s permanently blinded. The acid went straight into his eyes. The other’s gonna be out of action for a while, but at least he keeps his sight.’
Sarah looked shocked. ‘What about the rest of the police team?’
‘One’s dead, the rest of them all seriously injured. This man McGuinness had cut holes into the walls of each room and plastered back over them after hiding a shrapnel bomb inside. Apparently they were triggered when someone went into the master bedroom.’
‘How so? Automatic?’
‘There was a motion sensor on a timer in the bedroom where they found a couple of blades in a nightstand, and another in the basement hidden in the knife locker. The places he most cared about, I guess. Must’ve triggered a countdown when we jacked open the door. He guessed police would come calling at some point. Or he had a pathological hatred of break-ins.’ She drained her whiskey and signalled to a waitress nearby with her fingers that she’d like another single, who nodded and went to the bartender to get the order. Vargas wasn’t a heavy drinker, but after this week, she needed something to take the edge off.
‘How did the acid not melt the sprinkler system?’
‘Specially-designed, poly-organic large holding tank. And the pipes were reinforced on the inside with plastic. Oh, this son of a bitch was prepared.’
‘But he went to all that trouble on the off-chance? Just in case an intruder went into his basement?’
‘This guy’s a first for all of us,’ Vargas replied quietly. ‘And we think he’s killed a lot of people. He knew there was a good chance police would knock his front door down at some point. Prepared his own brand of welcome.’
‘Where’s my brother right now?’
‘Louisiana. He’s trying to find out exactly who this man McGuinness is.’
‘Why there?’
‘Couple reasons. He got a feeling our suspect worked in carnivals and spent time in south Texas. Bunch of kids went missing at the boardwalk in Galveston some years ago; only reported permanent disappearances at amusement sites in the southern US for the last twenty years and it was at the same time McGuinness was employed there. Trail’s taken him east to Louisiana.’
Sarah sipped her glass of wine then leaned back in her wheelchair, looking at Vargas worriedly. ‘He’s getting mixed up with a man throwing knives into people’s throats, abducting children and trying to melt police teams with acid sprinkler systems? Jesus. That man.’
‘Issy is- was- his main target.’ She smiled wryly. ‘But you know your brother. He’s not gonna let little things like you just described hold him back.’
The waitress brought over the refill of whiskey. Vargas thanked her, then looked at her ex-boyfriend’s sibling with interest. Although she’d been with Sam for over two years, she’d never met Sarah before. She was two years older than her brother and there was a strong family likeness, although Sarah’s features were softer, her eyes a less intense blue. She was also a wheelchair user, having lost the use of her legs when she was eighteen, but was now happily married with two children and a successful lawyer. She’d never allowed her disability to hold her back.
‘I’m so sorry your girl was hit,’ Sarah said.
Vargas nodded but didn’t meet her gaze. ‘Thanks, but I can’t talk about it, right now. Let’s change the subject.’
‘Yes, I apologise. Just wanted to say it.’
‘Thank you for coming here to meet me. Sam said he heard you were doing a lot of work in the city recently. I figured I’d give you a call.’ Vargas glanced around. ‘Good recommendation for a place to stay. I also, kinda didn’t want to be alone right now,’ she admitted after a slight pause.
‘Who could blame you. And I’m glad to finally meet you.’ She took another sip of wine.
‘When’s the last time you two spoke?’ Vargas asked.
‘Other than formalities? It’s been a while,’ Sarah said. ‘He thinks I hold a grudge.’
Vargas looked at her. Do you, she thought.
‘Do you?’ she found herself asking. Without the whiskey and stress of the day, she never would have spoken the words out loud.
‘For a while, yes. But now? No. Things…things have been changing.’
Vargas was confused, not sure what the other woman meant. Sarah didn’t seem the overly emotional type, but her voice had faltered. There was an underlying meaning in those words.
She looked at Vargas and smiled. ‘I’ll talk to him when this is over. But it’s good news.’
‘We’re onto this guy McGuinness,’ Vargas replied. ‘If we keep following his trail, we’ll catch up with him at some point. And then someone’s gonna have to confront him.’
She drank from her new glass of whiskey and felt the fire of it burn the back of her throat, reminiscent of the way the acid had burned her hand and arm.
They both had a pretty good idea who that person was likely to be.
In Oxford, Isabel was standing in the doorway of Chalky’s bedroom in the oversized Mets t-shirt Vargas had packed for her.
In a reversal of the other night, he was asleep and she was wide awake.
She was staring at the British policeman’s cell phone plugged into a charger beside his bed. In their time together, she’d watched him carefully each time he’d logged into the device, and had been able to decipher the passcode by observing his fingers as he dialled in the numbers several times throughout the day.
She crept into the room, lifted the cell phone quietly from beside his bed, and took it out into the kitchen, logging herself in. She went to his emails, and saw a fresh one from an account with an NYPD email address
As she scrolled through comments and reports, what caught her attention was a photo of the man who’d come to kill her. She couldn’t remember his face from the theater, not able to recall anything from that incident, but recognised him from the composite drawing from Chalky’s description, the file from somewhere called Kemah Boardwalk.
Apparently his name was Gerald McGuinness. She felt herself start to tremble. She looked back at Chalky lying in the bed, his breathing rhythmic, his handgun with the magazine beside it resting on the nightstand beside him. She’d snuck onto the news yesterday on his I-Pad when he’d passed it to her to play games, and had read all about the doctor’s death in Queens. The reports from the Queens Tribune and New York Post both said that the scene was one of the worst the two papers could recall covering, and they hadn’t printed the gruesome details as they were considered too graphic. She’d heard those two words used repeatedly during the trial of her family’s killers, and knew what they could mean.
Articles concerning the investigation into her ‘death’ at Coney Island were also still in both papers, readers having no idea about the connection between the two stories. In the quiet Summertown apartment, she could hear again the echoes of the screams on the boardwalk an ocean away as she went down, focusing hard on slowing her breathing, telling herself not to move a muscle. Drop like you’re a puppet and someone turned off the power in your brain, Vargas had told her. Don’t throw yourself backwards like in the movies. Isabel didn’t need to be reminded; she knew how bodies reacted when they were shot. She’d seen it happen to most of the people she’d loved.
She also saw images of tributes being placed on the midway for her, mourners who never knew her but who still felt the need to acknowledge the death of an eleven year old girl.
All staged.
Her friends would think she was dead. If they kept doing the play, someone else would take over her part. Don’t be selfish. Think about all these other people. She was putting Chalky in danger, and Archer, and Vargas. All over ag
ain. The man coming after her had almost hurt the kids at school, and had killed three of the guards. Three men who weren’t alive anymore, because of her. Same as the nice marshals from that Harlem ambush in the past and the woman who’d helped them that afternoon.
Ever since that day at the villa, death had followed her like a creeping fog, enveloping people who came into contact with her. She heard Britney’s voice from the cafeteria, the last thing she remembered before the theater attack. Maybe you should just kill yourself and get it over with. A comment that had secretly stung so much it had felt like someone had jabbed a knife in her heart and twisted it.
Perhaps because she knew it was true; if she was dead, it would stop people around her getting hurt.
She looked at the photo of the man on Chalky’s cell phone again, then at the police officer sleeping in the bed. Archer’s best friend. If she was gone, none of these people would be in danger. They’d done so much for her already.
Maybe it was time she did something for them.
Chalky stirred and she held her breath, but he didn’t wake up. Her eyes shifted to the pistol on the nightstand, and silent tears welled up in them as she made her decision.
To protect Archer and Vargas.
I love you guys, she thought.
In Boston, Vargas entered her hotel room and closed the door. Her arm was hurting from the splashes of acid but the two glasses of booze were helping to numb it. If anything, she was on her way to being slightly drunk, the first release in the constant pressure of the past few days and the concern for her adopted daughter, which was a never-ending, constant worry.
Her cell buzzed with a text message, and she saw it was Boston PD, wanting to talk to her first thing in the morning about McGuinness. They might have been disparaging about her suspicions before the warrant was granted and the breach-and-entry began, but now almost their entire Special Operations team had been put in either the hospital or the morgue, they were 100% supportive, saying they’d do anything they could to help catch him.
Sleep it off, then give them everything apart from her escape to England, she thought. They don’t need to know she’s still alive.
She slumped down onto the floor with her back resting against the bed and looked at her cell.
Still alive was the last message received, Issy cheekily responding to Vargas when she’d first arrived at the carnival on Long Island, a running joke between them.
Vargas tapped in a message and pressed Send.
In Oxford, Isabel heard her cell phone ping in her room.
She glanced at Chalky again, but saw it hadn’t woken him.
She hesitated for a moment, then padded through to the bedroom and picked up her phone, seeing a message from Vargas.
Call me when you wake up xx, it said. Issy looked at the phone, not sure what to do. She pressed a key and called her back immediately.
‘Hello?’ she said quietly.
‘Hey honey,’ Vargas said.
‘Hi Mom.’
‘Can’t sleep?’
Issy swallowed. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because I can’t sleep.’ Pause. ‘I love you so much it hurts, you know.’
‘I love you too.’
‘I found out where the tall man lives today. We went to his house. He wasn’t there, but we know who he is now. We’re gonna find him. Police in Boston are helping us out too.’
‘Do they know I’m alive?’
‘Not yet. I won’t tell them until we get the tall man. We’ve been through worse than this. We can get through anything together. You know that too, right?’
Isabel’s lower lip quivered. ‘OK,’ she squeaked.
‘I’ll call you again tomorrow. Send my love to Chalky.’
‘I will.’
‘I love you, kiddo. Remember that.’
‘I will. I love you too.’
Isabel stared at the phone once the call was ended, then looked back at Chalky’s room next door and the gun in her hand.
A couple of minutes later, Chalky woke up with a start. He was disorientated for a second, but then saw his Glock on the nightstand and remembered where he was.
He sat up and pushed himself off the bed, picking up the pistol and walking out of the room. After the attack in the theater, everywhere he went, so did the handgun.
The kitchen was as they’d left it the previous night; he looked through the open door and saw Isabel in her bed, her eyes closed. He watched her for a few moments, satisfied all was well, then went back into his room and collapsed onto the bed, unsure what had woken him.
He glanced down to double check his phone was still plugged in, as a sudden thought occurred to him; didn’t you leave the Glock unloaded? But he was only half-awake and moments later, drifted off to sleep again.
Beside him, the cell’s light came on, saying it was fully charged again.
The time-lock hadn’t kicked in yet and McGuinness’ file photo from Kemah illuminated the room.
TWENTY EIGHT
‘Leonardo, you just brightened my morning,’ a woman with dreadlocks held back by a headscarf said, standing behind the counter in a New Orleans coffee spot. ‘What’s it gonna be today?’
‘Better get one of them teas,’ an African American cop in his early fifties said, taking out his wallet. ‘Doc said I been drinking too much caffeine.’
‘Take your pick.’
‘I’ll go English Breakfast. The others kinda taste like air freshener.’
‘Black tea’s packed with caffeine. You know that, right?’
‘Still better than coffee, I guess.’
She laughed, turned and pulled a cup from an upside down stack. On his side of the counter, Detective Leo Bellefonte of the New Orleans Police Department’s Homicide Division took a shrink-wrapped cranberry muffin from the counter and placed it in front of him as part of his order. Torturing yourself, he thought, taking a deep breath as the smell of freshly ground coffee beans assaulted his senses. Prior to this recent shift to tea, he’d been drinking enough joe to break out into cold sweats and feel his heart beating like one of the drills workmen used in the road to crack up concrete.
As the dreadlocked woman poured water into the cup for him, Bellefonte’s eyes wandered over the elaborate stencil artwork on the wall behind her. The drawings depicted people dressed as skeletons, wearing top-hats with skulls perched on top of canes, some of them jiving, others posing. The dancing dead. He enjoyed the style of this place, which was why he was a regular, happy to support the local business. The artwork theme continued on the capped cup the barista placed by the checkout register. He paid and thanked her, then went to the milk and sugar stand, glancing from force of habit at the other customers.
Some of them were focused on their laptops or smartphones, not registering anyone or anything around them. A handsome but tired-looking blond guy with a cup near his hand had his cell charging as he looked at his screen, the device plugged into the outlet at the wall beside him. While Bellefonte tipped some sugar into his drink he also noticed two younger men of college student age, slumped over a table nearby. He smiled; they had gold and black beads around their necks, their faces were pale and their eyes were half-closed, both clearly suffering from a late night on the town. Whatever they’d been drinking last night definitely hadn’t been tea or coffee. Bellefonte filled two cups of water for the kids, walked over and placed them on the table. They both looked up, seeing his NOPD badge and gun on his waistband as he did, and one of them gave a weak ‘Thanks, bro,’ as the other rested his head on his forearms.
The police detective collected his drink then went over to an empty table and checked his watch, wondering when his morning appointment was gonna show up. ‘Got here half an hour ago,’ a voice said, from over his left shoulder, as if he’d read his mind. Bellefonte turned to see the blond man who’d been charging his phone standing there; the stranger lifted the hem of his shirt to reveal an NYPD badge on his belt.
‘You weren’t what I was expecting,’
Bellefonte said.
The man smiled. ‘And what was that?’
‘Just not you. Take a seat.’
‘Saw your detective shield and guessed you were who they sent.’ the blond man replied, joining him at the table. ‘I’m Sam Archer. Heard the lady behind the counter call you Leo.’
They shook hands. ‘Bellefonte. Go with either. You drive through the night?’
‘Most of it.’ Archer looked at the two hungover youngsters and smiled. ‘Looks like a good time.’
‘Too many Hurricanes,’ Bellefonte said, unwrapping then taking a bite of his cranberry muffin. ‘People don’t come down to New Orleans to sleep.’
‘Thanks for coming to meet me.’
‘Don’t thank me yet, brother. They didn’t tell me much. I don’t know if I can help and you’re pulling me away from stacked-up casework. I hope you got something worth my time.’
‘Your Division overstretched?’
‘Three quarters of our cases are going unsolved, and the city’s murder rate is spiralling. Undermanned and underpaid. All that kinda good stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s life, right? You get used to being forgotten, down here.’
‘You from New Orleans?’
He nodded. ‘Been here my whole life. Only time I ever left for longer than two weeks was during the storm.’
‘I’m looking for someone,’ Archer said, getting straight to it. ‘I think he could work at an amusement park here.’
‘Some ride jockey? You asked to meet me for that?’
‘A man this guy used to work with has committed eight homicides in the past week,’ Archer said, electing to add Issy to that list until he could trust Bellefonte further. ‘One of them was my friend’s kid.’
‘We’ve been working through the night,’ Shepherd told Vargas over the speakerphone at the CT Bureau. Marquez, Josh and Ledger had just reconvened there, after snatching a few hours’ sleep in separate shifts; Hendricks and Ethan had also re-joined them. ‘Did you meet with Boston PD yet?’