A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

Gave right under her.

  And the man with greying hair and dark eyes was there to catch her, and she knew that these would be the last hands she ever felt, that his expression - something understanding, patient, almost sympathetic, almost compassionate - would be the very last way that anyone ever looked at her . . .

  Thought of Chloe down the hall.

  Thought of the very last thing she’d ever said to the father of her only child . . . a child that would now be raised an orphan, a child that would skip down the hallway in less than an hour from this moment, skip down the hall from Esme’s place, and knock on the door, and finding it locked would go right back to Esme, and Esme would come herself, and she would feel that strange intuition that tells you that something’s wrong, and you don’t know what, couldn’t possibly imagine . . . But something about the human mind, about the very way we are, tells you automatically, without even thinking for a second, that whatever has happened is bad . . .

  That kind of something.

  And Esme would turn the handle and feel it resist her, and she’d beat on the door with her frail fist, and getting nothing at all, not a single solitary sound, she would back up, turn to her left, and go down the hall to Mr and Mrs Ducatto’s place. And Mr Ducatto, overweight, Italian, a good guy in his heart but a mouth like a railway tunnel, loud and dirty, would smile with some sense of understanding, trying his damnedest to be patient for the sake of the little black girl Esme had in tow, and he would go back with them and try the door, and suggest they call the supervisor, and Esme would tell him that the supervisor was out for a little while and he would just have to open the door himself, and yes, she would take complete responsibility for any damage that might be done to the door, and that he should charge right at it because there was something wrong, something awful wrong . . .

  Broke the door in he did.

  Bust that son-of-a-bitch door wide open with his broad shoulder, and it fell inward as the jamb snapped like kindling. Told the old woman and the kid to stay right where they were, and he went in there, and he checked the place out, and he figured he’d come right back and tell them that everything was fine, that Natasha Joyce had fallen asleep . . .

  But she wasn’t sleeping.

  She was in bed alright, no question about it, or not so much in bed as on top of the bed, and she was on her back, her arms wide, her head to one side as if waiting for her lover; as if she’d been expecting someone to come right on through that bedroom door and find her . . .

  Natasha Joyce was strangled and beaten and covered in bruises, and there were burst blood vessels in her eyes that made her look like something out of some L.A. straight-to-video sex-killer slasher movie, and the way her shoulder was twisted made it seem as if her arm had been wrenched out of its socket, which it had, and when Marilyn Hemmings snapped on her latex gloves at approximately two-fifteen, afternoon of Wednesday the 15th of November - realizing then that it had only been four days since she’d delved into the corpse of Catherine Sheridan - there was a certain sense of finality to the way in which Natasha Joyce had been beaten and strangled.

  ‘It is what it is,’ she would tell Robert Miller.

  But that was Wednesday.

  That was later.

  In the moment that Natasha Joyce felt everything inside her give way, as she felt the weight of her entire body making its way slowly to the floor of the kitchen, there was really only one thought she had, one simple question - the answer to which would now evade her for ever - What happened to Darryl?

  And the presence of that question was such that she even voiced it - her words faint, almost unintelligible, as the man with the greying hair and the soft-soled sneakers reached down and pressed the balls of his thumbs into the sockets of her eyes.

  ‘Wha-what happened . . . what happened to Da-Darryl?’

  The man didn’t answer her. He did not hear her clearly. But had he heard, he would not have been able to help her. He did not know the answer. More importantly, the manner in which he’d been taught precluded any possibility of pausing to deal with anything the subject said.

  That would have been a violation of protocol.

  As straightforward and simple as that.

  The pain and pressure in her eyes caused her to black out. And then he lifted her gently, almost as one would lift a child, and he carried her through to the small bedroom where her only child had been conceived.

  And he laid her on the bed.

  He steepled his fingers and popped his joints.

  He got to work.

  The president directs the Company. The Company follows orders.

  If you know what the Company is doing, then you know what the president wants done.

  We call it plausible deniability; the non-affirmative affirmation, the non-denial denial. We call it that for the sake of the president. Everything we do is one step removed. The president never gives a direct order. He suggests something to someone, and that someone takes it upon themselves to execute an order that was never officially an order. That someone takes the fall, at least in the press, but in truth he is rewarded with a handsome property in Martha’s Vineyard, a seat on the board of an international banking corporation, a very generous pension.

  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once explained the passive-aggressive nature of the CIA: ‘It has battered child syndrome’, she said.

  It has been estimated that in excess of forty percent of the CIA’s intelligence gathering activities are concentrated within the United States itself, something that is prohibited by law. December 1974, Richard Helms - at the time ambassador to Iran, later to become the director of the CIA - was recalled from the Middle East to brief Gerald Ford on the extent of the nightmare that they faced if the press or the public became aware of the actual working operations of the Company. Ford was told that Robert Kennedy’s personal management of the assassination attempts on Castro was merely the tip of a very big iceberg. The iceberg went down for fathoms - unmapped, uncharted, ultimately unknown.

  By the latter part of January 1981 I had already begun to believe that we were doing the right thing, at least more than fifty percent of the time. More than fifty percent made everything good. More than fifty percent was more good than harm.

  I was also in love with someone who felt the same way.

  End of January 1981 I had started to consider the possibility that Catherine Sheridan and I could make a difference. I still had not asked her out. I still had managed no more than three or four en passant conversations with her.

  February 1981 we started to learn some of the basics. Photo interpretation, agent handling, debrief protocol, analysis of military hardware and economic trends, liaison with congressional oversight committees, the comings and goings of a routine day in any field office anywhere in the world. Chiefs of station for Istanbul, Morocco, Tangier, Kabul, Vienna, Warsaw, London, Paris . . . their lives, their names, their procedures and histories. We talked about the reality of what we were doing and why. We talked about national currency fluctuation, the intentional downsizing of gross national product, the destabilization of a political ethos by gradual dissemination of counter-intelligence and propaganda. We talked about Coca-Cola opening the door for the Company. Later it would be McDonalds and KFC.

  In the last week of February I volunteered for field work. The field office I chose was understaffed. I was twenty-one years old, and I had a big hard-on for the world that Lawrence Matthews and Don Carvalho had sold me.

  Three times I was present when Catherine Sheridan spoke of what was happening in South America, and each time she confirmed my certainty that she was the one who should go with me.

  Fourth day of March I spoke to her.

  We left a meeting together, almost collided at the door, and I asked her where she was going.

  She frowned, shook her head. ‘Have someone to meet,’ she said coldly. ‘Why?’

  ‘Wanted to ask you something . . . no, not ask, I wanted to talk with you about this thing we’ve been discu
ssing.’

  Half smiled, shook her head. ‘What’s there to say? The opposition is there. We back the rebels, pay for their training and military support . . . seems to me to make sense, closing the line between South American communism and Mexico, you know?’

  I shrugged nonchalantly. My hands were sweating. I carried a weight of books and I felt them slipping awkwardly. ‘On the face of it yes,’ I said. Relaxed, unhurried. Trying to forget that I was holding her up, preventing her from meeting whoever it was that she’d arranged to meet. A boyfriend perhaps?

  ‘On the face of it? What are you talking about?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘You’re busy,’ I said. ‘You’re going somewhere, meeting someone . . .’

  ‘Not that important,’ she replied.

  I shifted the weight of books from my right to my left. ‘I have to go do something,’ I said. ‘I just wondered if you’d have time to talk about it . . . I’ve been looking at the possibility of going out there—’

  She laughed suddenly. ‘Me too. Jesus . . . well yes, of course I’d like to talk about it. Later. What are you doing later?’

  ‘Tied up now until late tomorrow,’ I lied. ‘I’ll see you at the next meeting . . . we’ll sort out a time that’s convenient for both of us.’ I smiled, but not too much. Maintained that expression of studious detachment. I was interested in her opinion, nothing more than that.

  She seemed surprised for just a moment, then she smiled. Bright eyes, dark hair cut long and tied back, wooden barette that held it up on one side; kind of tilted smile - made her look perpetually curious about something unspoken. Catherine Sheridan looked a little like Cybill Shepherd in Bogdanovich’s Picture Show movie, but brunette, her features a little more sculpted, a little more aquiline. When she smiled at me it was like being kicked sideways into something beautiful.

  Nodded an agreement to speak tomorrow, turned and walked away.

  ‘John?’ she called after me, surprised me, because I had not expected her to remember my name.

  I turned back.

  She opened her mouth to say something; she did that awkward and curious smile again, and then she shook her head and laughed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’

  I shrugged. Inside I smiled. Wondered if she was playing the same cat-and-mouse game as me.

  I walked back to my apartment, sat up most of the night figuring out what to say to Catherine Sheridan, and the following day - despite so many hours of concentration - I found that what I had planned to say didn’t matter at all.

  SEVENTEEN

  The call came from Lassiter. It was a little after half past four. Miller was brief in his responses, put down the receiver and gathered up his files, other notes and paperwork.

  Roth rose from his chair and started toward the door, Miller right behind him.

  One flight of stairs, down to the end of the corridor, Lassiter already standing there waiting, hands on his hips. Looked like Bradlee at the Washington Post.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he started. ‘I don’t know what the goddamn is going on with you people . . . Jesus, anyone’d think this was some kind of R and R gig.’

  Roth and Miller stepped into the room, Lassiter followed them, closed the door.

  Miller started to speak but Lassiter raised his hand and silenced him. ‘Start from scratch,’ he said. ‘Everything from the point that the Sheridan woman was found . . . got your report, but fuck, you guys can’t type worth shit.’

  ‘The newspaper clipping,’ Miller said. ‘You got that, right?’

  Lassiter waved his hand in a dismissive fashion. ‘Doesn’t mean anything—’

  ‘Didn’t until we found that the name Catherine Sheridan’s social security number tracks back to is actually the name of a South American mountain range.’

  Lassiter shook his head. ‘Tell me what you actually have . . . tell me what you figure this thing is.’

  ‘Serial,’ Miller said. ‘No question. Sheridan doesn’t exist, at least not as Catherine Sheridan. We backtracked and there’s questionable aspects about all of them. We get the newspaper clipping, we find this double connection to South America, and then there’s the thing with the girl in the projects.’

  ‘The Joyce woman, right?’ Lassiter asked.

  ‘The Joyce woman. The phone number given to the pizza delivery people is the case number of her now dead boyfriend, Darryl King. We go back to the Sheridan house, we find some pictures under the carpet . . . Sheridan and some guy. We take the pictures to Natasha Joyce and she confirms that the guy in the pictures is the same guy that went down there to speak with Darryl King a couple of weeks before his death in 2001.’

  ‘And you’re going where with this?’

  ‘Track down the original arresting officer, name’s Michael McCullough. Seems that King was some kind of CI or something, ended up on a warehouse raid and got himself shot. God knows what he was doing there. And then we have the Sheridan woman herself. Things there that don’t make sense. Need to find out what this United Trust thing was where her money came from . . .’

  ‘So we have some connection to a retired cop who worked with this girl’s boyfriend five years ago, and some social security numbers that don’t tie up. That’s what we got?’

  ‘And we have photos of a guy we’d be very interested in talking to,’ Roth interjected.

  ‘Which are how old?’ Lassiter asked.

  Miller shook his head. ‘Natasha saw the guy five years ago, and she said the pictures were unquestionably him, but when he was younger. I’m gonna have forensics run that program on them where they can make someone look five, ten, fifteen years older . . . give him a beard, a mustache, grey hair, whatever. Get a half dozen images together and put out an APB, see if we can’t track him down.’

  ‘Needle and haystack in the same sentence,’ Lassiter said matter-of-factly.

  ‘It is what it is,’ Miller replied.

  ‘And what it is,’ Lassiter said, ‘is a fucking nightmare. I have a report session with the chief of police tonight. Everything you do I am required to report to this Killarney guy from the FBI. Every report you file, a copy goes to him. A second copy is going to Judge Thorne for some fucking reason. Goddamned political agendas. That’s the way the chief wants this thing, and I don’t know what barrel they’ve got him over but he’s got no fucking choice in the matter. I have four dead women over eight months. That ain’t such a big deal in our books, but just you see if the press don’t jump all over this Ribbon Killer tag. Be selling fucking tee-shirts on the internet before the end of next week. Remember that shit with the sniper for God’s sake?’ Lassiter shook his head. He breathed deeply. ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t have anyone else more qualified to head this thing up. They’re gonna wanna know what we’re doing about it, I’m gonna tell them we’re strenuously exercising all lines of enquiry, the usual shit. Hell, what can I do?’

  ‘Give us more people,’ Miller said. ‘I get these pictures printed up I’m going to need anyone and everyone I can get hold of to ask questions.’

  ‘You’ve got Metz and Oliver on the previous three women. They are giving it whatever time they can spare. That’s the best it’s gonna get. On this one you’re going to get an APB. That I can do. Beyond that I’m stretched every which way I could be. You know the routine as well as I do. Lots of noise in the press, a few questions at the chief’s session, the thing dies down for a little while. Happens twice, the noise gets louder, lasts a few days more. Third time, fourth time, now we’re in the shit. I gotta have something I can give them. You have to get me some kind of statement, something that makes sense to these people. Dead drug dealers and murdered women who don’t have the right social security numbers . . . ? This is not a fucking Christmas present, know what I mean?’

  ‘You know how it is, captain. You did this shit for years,’ Miller said.

  ‘Get your pictures done,’ was Lassiter’s response. ‘Use whatever resources we have down here.
Get these things printed up and get them out in the squad cars. Do whatever you’re doing but do more of it and faster. Call me on my cell if you get anything tonight. Something tonight would be good. I get a call with some forward progress on this thing while I’m meeting with the chief and I’m gonna seem an awful lot smarter than I feel right now.’

  Miller glanced at Roth. Roth shook his head; he had nothing to add.

  ‘So go . . . go do your worst,’ Lassiter said.

  Roth and Miller left the room, closed the door, walked ten feet down the corridor before they spoke.

  Miller paused at the stairwell, reached for his pager as it started to bleep.

  He pressed the button, viewed the message, looked up at his partner and said, ‘Oh fuck . . . oh fuck almighty . . .’

  And what she asked me about was my mother and father, and I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to have to explain it all over again. Seemed to me that I’d spent the last eighteen months explaining my life to everyone I met.

  Catherine was different. I didn’t want her to be part of the past. I wanted her to be the present and the future. I lied to her about my parents, and I did not feel guilty about it.

  So there we were - Thursday the 5th of March, 1981. It was all of twenty-five days before a disc jockey and former Yale student named John Hinckley III, the twenty-five-year-old son of a Denver oil executive, would wait patiently outside a Washington hotel where Ronald Reagan was speaking before a trade union audience. Reagan took a single .22 caliber bullet in the chest. It lodged in his left lung, a little less than three inches from his heart. One of the attending doctors later said that had Hinckley used a .45 it would have blown Reagan away. Reagan’s wife was driven to the hospital, and here Reagan uttered the first of his famous quotes. Taken from a 1930s film, he said, ‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’ To the surgeons inside the hospital, even as he was being anaesthetized, Reagan said, ‘I hope you guys are Republicans.’

  The assassination attempt did Reagan no harm. The assassination attempt gave the American public the first real view of George Bush, Reagan’s Vice-President and former director of the CIA. Little did we know then, but he would play an increasingly significant part in the construction of the new America, the America of the 1980s and ’90s, an America that would be inherited by his own son, George W.