A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘Amanda okay?’

  Roth smiled. ‘Amanda’s always okay.’

  ‘She okay with you?’

  Roth shrugged. ‘She wants a vacation.’

  ‘Don’t blame her.’

  ‘I told her maybe . . . maybe when this thing is done we could look at it.’

  Miller glanced at his watch: it was four minutes to six. ‘She’ll be getting in now,’ he said. ‘Audrey.’

  ‘You want to go down there?’

  Miller didn’t respond, seemed to be considering the possibility. ‘We look how we look,’ he said eventually. ‘We can’t change the way we look. People see us they know we’re cops. This guy happens to see us inside he’s gonna make a run for it.’

  ‘If he has something to hide he’ll make a run for it.’

  ‘I don’t want to risk it,’ Miller said.

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘You want some coffee?’

  ‘From the machine?’ Roth shook his head. ‘God no. I could go get some?’

  ‘No, leave it.’

  ‘You hear anything from Littman or Riehl?’

  ‘They’re not gonna do anything unless there’s something happening,’ Miller said.

  ‘So we wait.’

  ‘We wait.’

  Roth was silent for a while, seemed elsewhere, and then he looked up at Miller. ‘You ever been on something like this before?’ he asked.

  ‘A multiple? No. Was on a double murder one time. Hispanic guy killed his wife and her mother. That was a couple of years before I made detective. Messy fucking thing.’ Miller closed his eyes, could see the images more vividly so opened them again. Two women - the younger in her early twenties, the mother in her mid-forties. Shotgun killing in the kitchen of their house. Forensics said there wasn’t a great deal of either of them left. Husband just stood there reloading, reloading, reloading. Forty-seven shell cases they found. Hispanic mystery meat, the forensics guy said, and then said that most of what evidence they needed was in the treads of his shoes. He smiled like he was out for a ball game. Seemed people were hardened to such things. Miller was not, and though he could walk in on something like Catherine Sheridan or Natasha Joyce without needing to heave, it was never easy.

  ‘You ever get any kind of an understanding of what kind of person does this?’ Roth asked. ‘You know, beat the living hell out of someone, strangle them, whatever else he did?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘Makes no fucking sense to me. I don’t go with all this abused childhood shit that the psychs keep feeding us. I’ve met a whole lot of people that had a really rough time, and they sure as shit aren’t driving around the place thinking about whose skin they’re gonna wear.’

  Miller tried to focus. This was now as good as it got. They had something, the first lead of any significance throughout the whole investigation. It was the sense of responsibility that worried at him. If he didn’t get it right, someone else might die. If he didn’t figure this thing out then someone somewhere would wake up to find a man standing over them, his latex-gloved hands around their throat, his mind already set on doing what he had to do. And did they have a hope? Factually, no. Miller’s mind turned to who the next one might be. Where was she now? What was her name? Did she have a job, a family, people who relied on her? How many lives would be affected by her death? Washington was big enough to absorb it. Washington would swallow the magnitude of this thing, and it would become just another part of its history. But individuals? And himself? Miller wondered whether he would survive this thing intact.

  He had heard stories. Cops ravaged by the life they’d led, their hearts broken, their minds turned. Left with a handful of difficult years in an apartment somewhere, daily trips to some local bar where they would hang out with other retired cops. Old times, old stories, endless banter about the things they’d seen. The sense of longing, the endless promise of something that would never come close to the rush and buzz and madness of the life they’d lived. And then it all broke down. They came apart at the seams. They cleaned their service revolver, loaded it, drank a glass or two, and ended the dream. No-one spoke of them again.

  Was that the future?

  What would happen if they never found the guy . . . if the Ribbon Killer was no-one at all? A ghost, a haunting, a thing that was, and then was not.

  Robert Miller wished for something better. Perhaps he even invoked a handful of words from some half-forgotten prayer. Let it not be the way I fear it will be. Let it be something else.

  It was half past six. Traffic was on the streets. Squad cars were pulling out of the underground car park and heading away from the precinct. He watched one disappear down New York Avenue toward Mount Vernon Square and Carnegie Library. Remembering the library reminded him of Catherine Sheridan’s last hours. The unanswered questions: Where did she go? Who saw her? And Natasha Joyce’s visit to the Police Department Administrations Unit. Was this Frances Gray a figment of Natasha’s paranoid imagination, or was there something altogether more suspicious? And Michael McCullough . . . Had he even existed, or was he an invention, like Isabella Cordillera, a woman named after a Nicaraguan mountain range?

  For a moment Miller felt overwhelmed, as if the weight of these things was more than sufficient to crush him right where he stood.

  He looked at his watch: six thirty-eight. The diner would be open. Audrey would have made coffee, put on the hotplate, perhaps started frying bacon and eggs, hash browns. Regulars would be making their way toward her from various parts of the neighborhood. People she knew by name, by face, by breakfast order. Take-outs, eat-ins, coffee to go, triple shot, half and half, Sweet ’n’ Low. Early morning banter, wisecracks . . . And then he would come. Perhaps. He would come, and she would feel what she felt, and what she felt might be concern, or worry; and there might be something in her expression that gave it away. People had been to see her. Police detectives. Two of them. They had talked to her, and people had come after them and fitted a buzzer beneath the edge of the counter, and there might be something in her eyes - despite her cheery smile, her air of nonchalance - that he could read as clear as daylight, because there was something about this man that was special, different, peculiar; something about him that made the cops very nervous about whether or not they were going to have a chance to speak with him . . .

  She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. But he would be able to see right through her, and she would never get a chance to hit the buzzer, and she would be too afraid to tell the police that she’d seen him, and he would know that she’d tried to betray him, and when it suited him he would come down and—

  Miller tried not to think of what someone would do to Audrey.

  At twenty minutes after seven the phone rang. Roth snatched it from the desk. ‘Yes?’ he barked, and in his eyes was a spark of something, and then the spark died. ‘Oh, for God’s sake . . .’ he said, and he dropped the receiver into its cradle noisily. ‘Wanted the other office,’ he said.

  Miller decided there were few things worse than waiting. The combination of boredom and anxiety. The two emotions playing one against the other. The eventual belief that whatever might lie behind the door, whatever might lurk inside the warehouse, whatever your imagination could conjure for you had to be better than the vague and insubstantial nothingness that waiting had to offer. And then something would happen, and it was like being kick-started, and no-one save those in the emergency services - the firemen, the medics, the ER and triage nurses - would have any comprehension of how it felt when such things happened. Hours of silence, motionlessness, a stagnant nothing of anything at all, and then mayhem breaking loose. Sirens, flashing lights, people running and shouting, ambulances, fire engines, bleeding arteries, people leaping from windows, from bridges, pile-ups on the highway, the smell of burning rubber and the incendiary crump of gas tanks igniting, and the sound of people hollering blue murder as greenstick fractures and splintered bones protruded from open wounds. And not a moment to even think about what might have happene
d, or what might happen beyond this, because every ounce of adrenaline, every nerve and sinew, every impulse that the brain could generate was driving your body forward against the natural impulse to withdraw, to run, to hide, to pretend to yourself that the world you were seeing and the world you inhabited were not the same thing . . .

  Miller looked up at the clock: three minutes after eight. He rose from his chair, paced back and forth between the door and the window. ‘So where do we go if we get nothing?’ he asked, almost to himself.

  ‘If we get nothing from him, or if he doesn’t show?’

  ‘Either which way,’ Miller replied. ‘He turns up, we speak to him, there’s nothing he can tell us, or he doesn’t show at all. The whole thing’s a dead end and we’re back where we started. What the fuck then, eh?’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t know. I try not to think about that. This is the only solid lead we have right now.’

  ‘Solid as fucking air.’

  ‘Sure, I know that . . . Jesus Christ, you know what I’m talking about, Robert. This guy could be someone—’

  ‘Or he could be no-one.’

  Through the window Miller watched the city go about its business. Traffic filled the streets, people crowded the side-walks, all of them walking safe in the knowledge that whatever might be happening to someone else was not happening to them. He wondered if there was a time for people to die. If your death possessed a day, an hour, a minute, a second . . . If such things were already pre-ordained then the man standing at the junction up ahead, who might be awaiting news of his pregnant wife’s check-up or just learned that he’d gotten a raise or that his father had responded to chemo and was on a fast-track to recovery . . . he might step out into the street and find himself on the receiving end of a pick up driven by a drunk, or an engine on its way to a fire, or an ambulance on the way to his wife who’d just called the hospital to say her waters had broken . . .

  Life was like that. Perhaps dying was the same.

  Miller stretched his arms above his head. He yawned, and yawned again.

  Roth caught the bug and yawned too.

  As Miller turned and walked back to the desk, the sound of feet hammering up the stairwell assaulted the silence.

  The desk sergeant came charging through the door, stood for a second trying to catch his breath. He glanced at the desk where the receiver was tilted slightly off the cradle.

  ‘God’s sake!’ he said. ‘God all-fucking-mighty, I can’t reach you guys. Littman called. The guy’s in the diner . . . the guy’s in the fucking diner . . .’

  He was nearly knocked off his feet as Robert Miller and Albert Roth hurtled out of the office and started down the stairs.

  THIRTY

  Audrey, whose surname was Forrester, whose husband had died and left her a diner named Donovan’s on Massachusetts Avenue, would remember that morning for quite some time to come. The crowd of early-morning regulars, however, would remain oblivious. People like Gary Vogel - tail-end of his third divorce, forty-two years old and still dating the twenty-six-year-old girl he’d been fucking when his wife walked in on him; Lewis Burch, gas system repair technician, fifty-three, whose eldest son had just let everyone know he was gay, living with someone named Simon, and if the family didn’t accept it he would never come home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, Easter, understand?; Jennifer Mayhew, thirty-seven, first week of a new job, loving every minute of it, couldn’t understand why she’d spent so many years afraid of change, and dinner this evening with a great guy - okay, so she’d only met him on the subway, but they’d traveled together so many mornings, and he seemed really genuine, and she felt life really had turned a corner; Maurice Froom, a man who’d somehow survived forty-eight years without becoming Morry, and was a minor celebrity in his own right, responsible for the voice on more than two hundred and thirty radio ads aired during the previous decade . . . These people. Ordinary people. People with wives and husbands and children, with cats and dogs and mortgage payments; people who’d managed to evade the edges that lurked unseen, those edges where others crossed the line and watched helplessly as their lives irretrievably changed for the worse. The dark edges of things that people like Al Roth and Robert Miller dealt with each and every day.

  That Thursday morning those dark edges were hidden to all but Audrey Forrester and, at eight twenty-two a.m. - there, on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue - a man crossed the threshold of Donovan’s diner and brought a little darkness with him. He was recognized immediately by Audrey and, recognizing him, she smiled, acknowledged his presence, and then she busied herself along the counter, refilling a coffee cup that was obviously left behind, and the man who had entered smiled to himself like he knew something was happening, perhaps more than anyone else.

  His name was John, just as Audrey Forrester had told the detectives who’d come, and John surveyed the people at the counter - Gary Vogel, Lewis Burch, Jennifer Mayhew, Maurice Froom, others whose names he also did not know, would never know, did not care to know.

  And looking back at him, these strangers saw nothing but a smartly dressed middle-aged man, late forties perhaps, something about him that made it difficult to place his age exactly. They saw his dark suit, his blue shirt, the brown leather briefcase he carried, the overcoat folded across his arm. They saw his collar-length greying hair, his face - perhaps handsome, perhaps not, but certainly a face of character - the face of a man who had lived a life, a man who carried stories inside him, and all of them the kind of stories that would provoke an emotional reaction. He looked like a successful property developer, maybe. Or he looked like a scriptwriter, a poet, an author of dense and intellectual novels about human relationships that few people would understand, but those that did would consider him a genius, a man of insight, of wisdom and fortitude. Or perhaps he was no-one at all. A person just like them. A normal guy, a regular guy, a nine-to-five, fetch-some-coffee-on-the-way-to-work kind of guy.

  He approached the counter. And when Audrey Forrester smiled at him for the second time, he knew. He knew when he saw the brief flash of anxiety in her eyes. He knew when he glanced out through the window, out to the sedan parked against the curb, out to the street where he sensed something was happening . . . merely a perception, an intuitive thing, but it was all there, right there in front of him, and he knew . . .

  ‘Take out?’ Audrey asked.

  John smiled. He shook his head. ‘It’s okay, Audrey,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’ll wait for them here.’

  And it was all Audrey could do to conceal her surprise, the sense of unease it created within her, because she already had a paper cup ready, the plastic snap-on lid with the imprinted message - The beverage you’re about to enjoy is HOT! - and she was walking toward the jug of coffee on the hotplate . . .

  And John said, ‘I’ll wait for them here’, and this caused her a second thought, and she set down the paper cup, and she reached for the regular cups, and she wondered how many seconds it had been since she’d pushed the damn buzzer, and already she felt scared, and the cup seemed to weigh an awful lot in her hand, and when she stood near the coffee jug she looked in the bright shining chrome surround of the espresso machine to her left, and in the chrome fascia she could see John’s reflection, and there was something different about him . . .

  Was it her imagination?

  Did he seem relaxed?

  How many seconds since she’d pushed that damn buzzer?

  She wondered what the hell was taking these people so long, and then she wondered if maybe the buzzer wasn’t working. The thing was wireless, and it worked on the basis of radio waves or some such thing. There was a girl standing at the counter with a cell phone, and perhaps the cell phone was cutting the wavelength or creating some kind of interference, and maybe the buzzer hadn’t worked and the police weren’t coming . . .

  She thought of Robert Miller and his partner. She filled a cup for John and took a small porcelain jug of cream from the refrigerator. She carried the cup and the jug back ac
ross to him, and she set them down in front of him, and she said, trying to sound breezy and unimportant and nonchalant, ‘Not to go today?’ and he said the strangest thing. He smiled at her, right at her, the kind of smile you give someone when you’re really pleased to see them, and he kind of half-closed his eyes - reminded her of a lizard sunbathing on a rock in Mexico . . . in a small town she’d visited with her husband when they went on their honeymoon, a small town named . . . and for the life of her she couldn’t think what that place was named . . . and then it came to her, suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, and she remembered that lizard on a rock right there near the sidewalk, and the town was named Ixtapalapa, whatever the hell that might have meant, and for a second John looked like that sunbathing lizard, and Audrey smiled - not at John, but at the memory of her husband and how in love she’d been with him - and then John said the other thing, and the thing was, ‘I’m waiting,’ and then he shook his head resignedly, and added ‘For someone, you know? I’m waiting for someone.’

  And Audrey thought, who is he waiting for? Like John was the sort of person who would never wait for anyone. People would wait for him - that’s how he seemed. People would wait for John, and he might show, or he might not show, and people would never be pissed off at him because John was the kind of guy people would be fortunate to know, and if he didn’t come when he said he was going to then it could only be because there was something an awful lot more important . . .

  Audrey looked away from him. Realized she’d been staring even as the thoughts ran through her mind.

  ‘Sugar?’ she asked.

  John shook his head. ‘I don’t take sugar, Audrey, you know that.’

  And in that second she knew she was done for, and if they didn’t come, if the detectives didn’t come right now, he was going to leave, and he would know that something was wrong, and he would know that Audrey had somehow betrayed him, and he wouldn’t come again, not for a while, and then one night, out back in the yard as she carried the trash bags to the dumpster, she would hear a sound, and she would feel a chill down her spine, and she would turn slowly, fear rising in her chest, and she would see John standing there with that half-smile, eyes kind of closed, lizard sunbathing on a rock in Ixtapalapa, and she would know . . .