A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  He watched the darkness through the window until it was once again light, the memory of how he had felt in his office ever present. Like being watched. The same way Natasha Joyce had been watched.

  Miller showered, shaved, dressed, and by seven-fifteen he was back in his kitchen. After a piece of dry toast and half a cup of black coffee, he returned to the Second as if it was his spiritual home.

  He collected the pictures for the patrolmen - half a dozen to a set, a hundred sets in all. The patrols would go out in squad cars, and those squad cars would fan out across this sector of the city, and the men in the passenger seats would keep their eyes wide. There would be calls, there would be false alarms, there would be people who knew with absolute certainty the name and address of the man in the picture. And the patrolmen would follow up, and they would find that the man looked nothing at all like the picture, and they would thank everyone for their diligence and apologize for any inconvenience caused, and they would return to the precinct in the certain belief that Catherine Sheridan had visited Darryl King accompanied by a ghost. Such was the way of the world within which Robert Miller existed. It was not NYPD Blue or CSI or Law and Order. It did not begin and end within an episode. Life was not like that. Life was laborious and exhausting, it stretched patience and nerves, and results were obtained through diligence and industry and tireless perseverance. And sometimes, despite all those efforts, they found nothing.

  He would brief Oliver and Metz, Riehl and Feshbach. He would tell them to respond to every call as if it was the only one they’d get. He knew there were no guarantees, no foolproof systems that could be employed; knew that there would always be someone who knew something but did not call, or reached the point of dialling the number only to have reservations and hang up, or hated the police and decided that assisting them in their investigation would be a betrayal of their principles. Or they were scared. That more than anything.

  Miller went out for coffee. He carried it back and sat in the meeting room until Roth arrived at eight forty-five.

  ‘You been here all night?’ Roth asked.

  Miller smiled, shook his head. ‘You’re s’posed to be a detective, right? I have a different color shirt on.’

  ‘You don’t look like you went home.’

  ‘I sent my body,’ Miller replied. ‘I stayed here trying to work this thing out and I sent my body home without me.’

  Roth frowned. ‘I’m starting to worry about you.’

  Miller opened his mouth to retort with a wisecrack, but a knock at the door stopped him.

  Carl Oliver and Chris Metz came in.

  ‘We’re in here for this briefing, right?’ Oliver asked.

  ‘We sure are,’ Roth said. ‘Take a seat.’

  Metz glanced at his watch. ‘Time we starting?’

  ‘Nine, officially.’

  ‘Gonna go get a smoke and a cup of coffee before we kick off. You guys want anything?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘I’m good.’

  ‘Get me a latte,’ Roth said.

  Metz frowned. ‘Sure as fuck I ain’t gonna get you anything of the sort. Black or white, that’s your choice.’

  Roth waved his hand. ‘Get whatever.’

  Metz turned to leave.

  ‘I’m gonna have a semi-skinny hot wet decaf cappuccino with a hint of almond essence and a parasol on the top,’ Oliver said, following after Metz.

  ‘Screw you,’ Roth called after them.

  ‘This is what we have,’ Miller said. ‘This is who’s gonna find the Ribbon Killer.’

  Roth shook his head. ‘Who the fuck comes up with these names, that’s what I wanna know. The Ribbon Killer. Jesus, it’s all so goddam melodramatic. The Ribbon Killer. Half the problem we have with these things is we create a legend around these people—’

  Miller raised his hand to stop him. ‘I got a headache, Al. I can’t take any more.’

  Roth nodded understandingly. ‘You need to get laid.’

  ‘I need a lot of things . . . and right now that comes round about fifteenth on my list of priorities. First thing is get this meeting done and get these pictures out. Don’t know about you, but I want to get down to the administrations unit and find this Frances Gray woman.’

  ‘Sure,’ Roth said, ‘and then we check out whoever Natasha spoke to at the Fourth.’

  The sound of voices from the corridor, the hubbub and commotion of men gathering.

  ‘Lock an’ load,’ Roth said. ‘We’re up.’

  The first handful of men came in through the door and started to take seats. Miller stood at the front of the room, to his right a table laden with the photo packs.

  Lassiter appeared in the second wave, behind him Oliver and Metz. Everyone quietened down. Lassiter indicated the back of the room with a nod of the head. He was there for added authority, to remind them of the gravity of the situation.

  Eight minutes past nine the last of the attendees was seated.

  Miller cleared his throat, picked up one of the photo packs, withdrew one of the images.

  ‘This man,’ Miller started, ‘is someone we need to talk to as a matter of extreme urgency.’

  Perhaps something preternatural, perhaps merely a figment of my own imagination or paranoia, but I believe they are nearly here.

  Wednesday morning. November 15th. I stand before a class of students, and there is a moment of silence. Possibly they imagine I have forgotten what I intended to say. Possibly they do not care. They could never know that within those brief seconds I visualized and remembered a conversation about balance, a conversation that now seems to belong to someone else’s life.

  ‘You have balance,’ he said, as if of some rare and extraordinary thing. A thing of beauty. A thing to be guarded and preserved.

  His name was Dennis Powers. He had a wide face, his lanternjawline almost caricature, and he smiled with too many teeth. He was a training instructor, and though he stood a good three or four inches taller than me there was something compact and tight and wired about him. There was something about Dennis that frightened me. He made me feel as if I had to be ready for anything, the likelihood being that it would not be good.

  ‘He’s a good guy,’ Catherine had told me the day before. She had on the hat again, that turquoise beret, and she was on her way somewhere, and she was carrying books under her arm, and the whole scenario could have been something from some East Coast university campus. That’s what we were; we were students, but what we were studying would not be found on any Ivy League curriculum. Geopolitics and World Affairs; War Against Communist Infiltration; Subversion, Military Coups, Assassination . . .

  It was April of 1981, three months or so before my twenty-second birthday, and I already believed it. It was indoctrination, brainwashing, propaganda - whatever the hell you wanted to call it - but it was subtle, and it worked. By the time Catherine and I really got to know one another we were in deep. By the time they asked us to go into the field we were affiliated and registered, enrolled, signed up, stamped and passed and printed. By July of the same year, even as we boarded the plane together, the belief that we were doing the right thing was in our blood.

  ‘There has to be something inside of you,’ someone told me many years later. ‘Something inside of you that fundamentally agrees with the crazy fucking shit they do out there to be involved in the first place. The shepherds, the readers, the trainers . . . they all know how to look for it, and they can see it in you like you have a lit-up sign on your goddam forehead.’

  Later I would understand, but to this day I cannot tell what it was they saw in me. Perhaps the fundamental disagreement with the way life had been thrown at me. Perhaps the death of my parents - or, more, the circumstances of their deaths - and the indirect way in which I had been involved. Perhaps the fact that what my father did was crazy, but at the same time I understood why he did it, and perhaps it was this that they saw in me because that Sunday, the day I met Dennis Powers for the first time, he looked right at me, dead squa
re in the eye, and he told me I had balance.

  ‘You need balance,’ he said, and then he smiled, and I guessed he was somewhere around forty-five or fifty years old, but later he told me how young he was when he went out to Vietnam in 1967 . . .

  ‘I was all of twenty in 1967, younger than you are now.’

  Dennis Powers was born in 1947. When I met him in April of 1981 he was thirty-four years old. The fact that he carried so many more years scared me. It looked like three or four lives had been jammed handful-over-handful into his skin.

  ‘I can tell you a little of what I’ve seen, but I don’t wanna tell you,’ he said. ‘You don’t wanna hear about the things I have seen, believe me.’

  I looked up, raised an eyebrow.

  Dennis smiled. ‘Now you’re gonna tell me that you do wanna hear some stories, right? You wanna hear about all the horrors I have witnessed, and that will help put everything in perspective. You’re gonna tell me that, aren’t you?’

  He didn’t give me time to respond.

  ‘Not gonna tell you that shit,’ he said, ‘but I will tell you one thing. What I’ve seen out there—’ He nodded his head toward the perimeter of the Langley facility as if everything beyond belonged to some strange and faraway world. ‘Out there is fucking madness, ’ he said quietly. He was relaying universal truths, passing them on generation to generation. ‘Out there you have the beginning of a world you wouldn’t even wanna be part of. World that’s coming is not something that you’d ever want to bring children into. People don’t give a fuck about the planet. They don’t give a fuck about anything but money and sex and drugs and more money and more sex. People need to wake the fuck up, you know? But with TV, and whatever the hell else they can get to keep their minds shut down, they ain’t never gonna open their eyes and see what the hell is going on around them. You understand what I’m saying?’

  I nodded.

  ‘The hell you do,’ he said.

  We were in an annexe to one of the main compound buildings. Out through the window I could see people walking by.

  ‘You’re part of it, my friend,’ Dennis Powers said. ’Until you’ve been out there and seen some of the things human beings are capable of doing to one another . . . hell, you haven’t even got a clue.’

  I stayed silent.

  ‘I give you a gun,’ Dennis said. ‘I give you a gun and send you all the way back to somewhere in the 1920s, right? You’re somewhere in Europe - Austria, Germany maybe - and I point you in the direction of a bar someplace. I tell you there’s a man sitting at the bar and you gotta walk right in and take your gun and shoot the motherfucker in the head right where he’s sitting drinking his beer.’ Dennis paused and looked at me. ‘I tell you to do that and you’re gonna go and do that for me, right?’

  I laughed nervously. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not gonna do that.’

  ‘So I tell you the guy sitting in the bar is Adolf Hitler, and you walk on in there and see him sitting there drinking his beer, and you have a .38 in your pocket . . . what the fuck you gonna do then?’

  I smiled, nodded my head. ‘I’m gonna walk right up to him and shoot him in the head.’

  ‘No question?’

  I shook my head. ‘No question at all.’

  ‘Why?’

  It was obvious. ‘Maybe twenty, thirty million people are not gonna die if I kill Adolf Hitler,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Powers nodded slowly. ‘Okay, okay, okay, so now we have a benchmark for this kind of thing. Adolf Hitler, no question, okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And Stalin, what about him?’

  ‘Same, no question.’

  ‘Genghis Khan, Caligula, Nero, Kaiser Wilhelm?’

  ‘God knows, yes . . . Jesus, all of them I suppose.’

  ‘And Churchill?’

  ‘Winston Churchill? No, of course not,’ I replied.

  ‘In 1914 he was known as “The Butcher of Belfast”,’ Powers said. ’He put the Third Battle Squadron on station off Ulster. Churchill put warships in the harbor and he resorted to bombing the city . . .’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re taking a number of negative incidents over a considerably greater number of positive incidents.’

  ‘So you’re saying that one should view the actions of such people in light of history, then you can evaluate whether they did more good than harm, and if they did more harm—’

  I smiled. ‘Then it’s too late to do anything about it anyway.’

  ‘Right,’ Powers said. ‘Which raises a question of who makes the decision about such things, and when do they make it.’

  ‘If there are such decisions to be made at all,’ I replied.

  Powers looked toward the window for a moment, and before he turned back he spoke in a quiet voice. ‘There are such decisions,’ he said. ‘There are indeed such decisions, and there are also the people that make them, and right now those kinds of decisions are being made about three hundred yards from where you’re sitting, and once they’re made people will be despatched to deal with the consequences of those decisions . . . and I’ll tell you something now, John . . .’ Powers turned and looked at me directly. ‘Those people are very interested in the part you might play in such consequences.’

  ‘The part I might play? What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’re not a fool,’ Powers said. ’You know what’s been happening here over the past few weeks. People you came in with have disappeared, right? You see them one day, the next day they’re gone, they didn’t make it. But you’ve made it through this far, and right now you’re faced with me, and I’m gonna be asking you to make a decision, and the way this goes is gonna be the most important decision you ever made. You go one way, and your life is gonna be something worth remembering, and if you go the other way . . . well, if you go the other way your life is gonna be whatever you decide to make of it, but it sure as hell won’t be comparable to what it could have been.’

  He paused, and then smiled understandingly. ‘That girl you hang around with . . . what’s her name?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Oh come on, man,’ Powers said. ’You think there’s anything that goes on around here that we don’t know about? Her name’s Catherine Sheridan.’

  ‘If you knew why’d you ask me?’

  Powers laughed. ‘You’ve got to bring some of the walls down, my friend. You’ve got to learn to trust someone. You trust Lawrence Matthews, right?’

  ‘Sure I do,’ I replied.

  ‘And Don?’

  ‘Don Carvalho . . . yes, I trust him. I don’t know that I agree with everything he says but—’

  ‘Trust isn’t about agreement. This isn’t about all of us having the same view about the world. Jesus, what the hell kind of shit would that be, everybody agreeing with everyone else? No, we’re not talking about having the same attitude about things, we’re talking about having enough of the same attitude to be able to make a decision about something, and then going and doing something about it.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Okay, okay, now we’re gonna get somewhere. Such as South America, that’s what.’

  ‘South America?’

  ‘Sure, why the fuck not? It’s a helluva place. Fucking war zone at the moment, but nice countryside all the same.’

  ‘So what about it?’

  ‘That’s where your girlfriend is going in July.’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend.’

  ‘Okay, so that’s where Catherine Sheridan who you wish was your fucking girlfriend is going in July.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we need her to go.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To set some things straight. To play her part in the game. To make as much difference as she can. But the basic reason she’s going is because she really wants to.’

  ‘And you’re telling me this because?’

  ‘Because I think you should go with her.’


  ‘What the fuck would I want to go to South America for?’ I asked, challenging him, simply because his tone inspired in me the desire to challenge.

  ‘What would you want to go to South America for?’ Dennis Powers smiled knowingly. ‘To kill Adolf fucking Hitler, that’s what for.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ Miller said, ‘at approximately 4.45 in the afternoon, a young woman named Natasha Joyce was found murdered in her apartment in the projects between Landover Hills and Glenarden. She was twenty-nine years old, had a daughter of nine named Chloe. There was no husband, no known current boyfriend, and the father of her child, a heroin addict named Darryl King, was killed in October 2001.’

  Miller looked at the men before him. Weatherworn veterans, without exception inured to such things. Nothing new here. Someone got killed. Black woman in the projects, single mother, dead father, no-one to look out for her, no-one to take care, and more than likely no-one but her daughter to attend the funeral.

  Miller cleared his throat. ‘And this follows close on the heels of the murder of Catherine Sheridan four days ago. Found dead in her house on Columbia North West. As you already know the papers have given this guy a name, dubbed him the Ribbon Killer. He leaves a ribbon tied around the neck of each victim. He beats them savagely, strangles them, leaves the ribbon. With this last one there was no ribbon, but she was directly connected to the investigation. The fact that we were questioning her may have alerted the killer to her whereabouts.’

  A patrolman raised his hand. ‘Any known connection between the victims?’