A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  Roth nodded.

  ‘McCullough was one of them. Normal world you’d have him put away somewhere quiet so he didn’t harm anyone; sugar paper and red crayolas, you know? But he had a good record as far as I know, and when he did that gig in September everyone was all over the place saying what a fucking hero he was. Me? I didn’t know what to make of him. Too intense for me altogether.’

  ‘That was the coke?’ Metz said.

  ‘Yes. Some high-quality shit that was.’

  ‘And it went out of lock-up?’

  ‘In a heartbeat,’ Tannahill said. ‘IAD was into everything within seconds. They questioned McCullough, but he could’ve eaten three or four IAD guys for snacks and still sat down for dinner. It was a real fucking circus. What really happened no-one knew. No-one got busted because there was no-one to bust. Guy on lock-up was as trustworthy as they come, had been doing it for about three hundred years. It was ghost fucking cocaine, I tell you.’

  ‘You think McCullough took it out?’ Roth asked.

  ‘Course he did,’ Tannahill replied without hesitation. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if the guy went into lock-up and hoovered it out the bag right then and there.’

  ‘You figure him for a user?’

  ‘I couldn’t figure him for anything. Drugs. Crazy. On the take. Hookers. Running some sort of sideline in stolen goods. God knows, man, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that the shit went down with the coke vanishing, IAD came in and out like a wet whirlwind, and then it went quiet until October.’

  ‘The drugs raid,’ Roth said.

  ‘Raid?’ Tannahill said, and smiled. ‘Who called it a raid? Was a fucking fiasco. CI got himself killed, McCullough was wounded. Whoever the fuck they might have been after got clean away—’

  ‘You saying it wasn’t a raid?’ Metz asked. ‘McCullough went out on his own?’

  ‘He sure did.’

  ‘But that’s not what the newspaper reports said . . .’

  ‘PR department,’ Tannahill said. ‘A raid gone wrong looks an awful lot better than a renegade cop and his CI trying to change the world on their own.’

  Roth was quiet for a moment, trying to take this in.

  ‘McCullough was on his way out, you see,’ Tannahill went on. ‘After the September thing he started fucking things up. He was late all the time. He got his ass chewed by Bill Young more times than I care to recall. Far as I know, Young was looking at instigating disciplinary proceedings, and then we get this tip-off that McCullough has another sting going on like the September thing, but this time it’s a lot bigger. Everyone’s ready for some kind of operation briefing . . . we’re all wired up to get this thing going, and then before we know it we hear that McCullough went on his own with some black guy, the black guy got himself killed, and McCullough is once again in the firing line with IAD and God only knows who else.’

  ‘But IAD didn’t get a chance to do a full investigation, or so I understood from Bill Young,’ Roth said.

  ‘McCullough vanished, just like the coke in September. Disappeared, never to be heard of again.’

  Roth was quiet. He looked at Metz. Metz was expressionless.

  Tannahill shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s as good as it gets really,’ he said. ‘I don’t know that there’s anything else I can tell you.’

  ‘One thing,’ Roth said. ‘We have not been able to find a picture of him. The ID card that he used to open a bank account was the old style without the picture.’

  ‘Fuck, I don’t know,’ Tannahill said. ‘His folder went off with IAD way back when. They don’t store records here now. They’re all centralized somewhere near the Eleventh. You could go see them . . .’ Tannahill stopped for a moment. He paused in thought, and then shook his head. ‘Unless . . .’

  ‘What?’ Roth asked.

  ‘The evaluation,’ Tannahill said. ‘We had a precinct evaluation right after the September bust.’

  Roth nodded his head, started smiling. ‘Evaluation pictures, right. You have them here?’

  ‘Sure we do,’ Tannahill said. ‘I can go check now if you wanna wait.’

  ‘Definitely,’ Roth said. ‘Here?’

  Tannahill got up from his chair. ‘Fuck it, it’s only upstairs . . . might as well come and help me look through the files.’

  Roth and Metz followed Tannahill out of the office and up to the next floor.

  Records was the usual confusion of mismatched filing cabinets circumventing the room and numerous tables in the center, many of them buckling beneath the weight of the folders stacked on their surfaces.

  Tannahill smiled wryly. ‘’Scuse the mess . . . cleaner’s on vacation, you know?’

  ‘Where do we begin?’ Roth asked.

  ‘Files over there are precinct records,’ Tannahill said, indicating the right side of the room. He walked toward the corner, Roth and Metz following. Tannahill tugged open the upper drawer of the cabinet nearest the window. ‘1988,’ he said. ‘’88 to ’90.’ He pulled open the upper drawer of the adjacent cabinet. ‘’93 to ’94 here . . . it’s gonna be the fourth or fifth one from that end.’

  Metz opened drawers, Roth too, and within a moment they had found the cabinet that carried files from 2000 through 2002.

  After twenty-five minutes Tannahill resorted to pulling every file out and spreading them on the floor. The three of them went through each one twice, every picture, every document from July 2001 to the end of the year. There was no file for McCullough. No records. No picture.

  ‘Someone must have pulled it,’ Tannahill said. ‘It happens. You know how this shit happens, right?’

  Roth didn’t reply; he was at the end of his tether. He knew that if he said anything he would lose it. He was preparing himself for yet another dead-end, another return to the Second with nothing, when Tannahill looked up suddenly and smiled. ‘Too fucking obvious,’ he said quietly. ‘Shit, this is just too fucking obvious.’

  ‘What?’ Roth asked.

  ‘The annual pictures, they’re downstairs . . . he’ll be small, but he’ll be there.’

  Once again Metz and Roth followed Tannahill as he made his way out of Records, down the stairwell and into the central reception area of the precinct house. Precinct photographs, taken annually, were ordinarily displayed along the corridors, but at the Seventh they had them lining the walls of the canteen and the communal briefing room. Tannahill found 2001 within a moment, stood on a chair to gain sufficient height to bring it down off the wall, and spent a moment scanning the nickel-sized faces of the men pictured there.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said, and pointed to a man, second row from the back, three or four from the end of the line.

  Roth took the picture, Metz peering over his shoulder. Roth frowned, shook his head, and then he started laughing. It was an awkward sound, abrupt, brief, and then he stopped and shook his head.

  ‘What?’ Tannahill asked. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ Metz said.

  ‘What?’ Tannahill repeated.

  Roth said nothing, but he started to feel the sheer weight of it. He started to get some kind of an idea of what they were dealing with, and it unsettled him deeply.

  ‘You know this guy?’ Tannahill asked. ‘You know McCullough?’

  Roth was shaking his head. ‘No, we don’t know McCullough, ’ he said quietly. ‘But we know someone who was using his name.’

  I think it was Matisse who said that a painter should begin by cutting out his own tongue.

  To stop him talking.

  To stop him explaining what he meant with each and every brush stroke.

  To stop him rationalizing and justifying, analyzing, interpreting what he felt at the time. He just expressed what he felt. The feeling was there, and then it was gone. That was art. That was life. Perhaps it was death.

  Perhaps they should have cut our tongues out as well.

  I feel for Miller. I feel for what he will find and what it might do to him.

  I feel for the ed
ge of things, the line that was drawn, and I see a man walking toward that line without ever realizing it was there.

  At Langley, again in Managua, they taught me how to disappear.

  I have never forgotten how to do that, and so I do it again.

  I am gone . . . like I was never even there.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Miller stood at the counter while Julia Gibb gathered together the five books that Catherine Sheridan had returned. He’d already called the Second from his cell phone, told Oliver to get to Robey’s apartment, to call him if Robey showed. But Miller knew that Robey would not go back there. Not yet. Not until something had happened. What that was Miller had no way of knowing, but he was certain Robey was now orchestrating every aspect of this, perhaps had done so from the start.

  Miller felt nothing but a sense of impending horror.

  He did not understand the significance of these books, but he had no choice but to secure them, to take them back to the precinct and pore over them, see if there wasn’t some clue, some message that Catherine Sheridan had left.

  But now it was different. Now it appeared that Robey was leading him toward something that Catherine had wanted them to know. That could mean that Robey and Sheridan were in collusion, or she had known he was coming for her, and if that was the case then it opened up all manner of possibilities. First and foremost, it indicated that Sheridan knew she was going to die. She returned the books, and then she was murdered. Miller did not believe in coincidence. The pizza number. The Darryl King case records. Visiting Natasha Joyce. Natasha’s murder on Tuesday. Now it was Friday and still there was no complete forensics report. The photographs beneath the bed, those unmistakable images of Robey as a younger man, the pretended alibi, in itself so weak Robey knew they would expose it effortlessly . . . All these things were part of something else.

  Miller’s heart was missing beats. His pulse was erratic. He felt dehydrated and nauseous.

  As Julia Gibb rounded the end of the nearest shelves, her arms laden with books, Miller’s pager went off. He glanced at it. Roth. He silenced it; Roth could wait until he got back to the Second.

  ‘Here we are, detective,’ Julia Gibb said. ‘Fortunately no-one has taken them out since they were returned.’

  Miller thanked her, gathered up the books and started towards the door.

  ‘I presume they will be returned to us,’ she called after him.

  ‘As soon as possible,’ Miller said.

  ‘I’m not so worried about those four, but the Wilcox isn’t in print any more . . . very hard to find, you know?’

  ‘I’ll take care of them,’ Miller said. ‘Bring them back as soon as I can.’

  He almost dropped the books as he maneuvered himself sideways through the door, and then he hurried down the steps. He crossed Seventh and started up New York toward the Second Precinct. No more than two blocks and he was already out of breath, hurrying back toward whatever Roth had to tell him, whatever he might find in the books he carried. He thought of the forensics report from Natasha Joyce’s apartment, the autopsy results, and with that came thoughts of Marilyn Hemmings, of Jennifer Irving and Brandon Thomas . . . All so distant, so far removed from what he was doing, a part of some other life. Everything had moved so fast. Six days since Catherine Sheridan’s death. Less than a week. Reports daily to Lassiter, those reports passed on to Killarney, whoever else might have been interested at the FBI. And what did they have? Proof of Robey’s involvement came from the illegal acquisition of evidence, the use of city staff and facilities to determine the incriminating nature of that evidence. Where did that leave him? More importantly, where did it leave Marilyn Hemmings?

  Miller’s mind reeled at the possibilities and implications.

  He reached the Second and went up the steps and through the doors into reception.

  ‘Roth was after you,’ the desk Sergeant called over. ‘He’s up there now.’

  Miller took the stairs two at a time, hurried along the corridor and entered the office, using his elbow to lever down the handle and move in backwards with the armful of books.

  ‘Miller,’ Lassiter said. ‘Jesus, man, where the hell have you been?’

  Miller turned, surprised to hear Lassiter’s voice, and found Al Roth and Nanci Cohen, Chris Metz, Dan Riehl, Vincent Littman and Jim Feshbach seated in a group on the right side of the room.

  Miller dropped the stack of books on the nearest desk and hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Better come take a look at this,’ Lassiter said. He rose from his chair, took what appeared to be a monochrome photograph from the desk and held it out for Miller to look at.

  ‘What is it?’ Miller asked as he walked toward the assembled group.

  ‘Your friend Sergeant Michael McCullough,’ Lassiter said, ‘or more accurately, the reason we have not been able to locate Sergeant Michael McCullough.’

  Lassiter leaned over, indicated a man standing in the second row from the back, fourth from the end of the line.

  Robert Miller’s heart stopped beating.

  It did not start again for quite some time.

  ‘So what does this mean?’ Lassiter asked.

  Miller could not speak. He stared at the face before him, the uniformed figure of John Robey, the way the man looked back at him, almost smiling in the bright sunlight. A slight frown as if the brightness bothered him, but he was there, standing alongside fellow officers at the Seventh Precinct.

  ‘So?’ Lassiter prompted. ‘What the fuck is this? We’re dealing with a renegade cop here or what?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘I don’t know . . . God, I don’t even know what the fuck to say. This is so—’

  ‘You sent Oliver over to Robey’s apartment,’ Lassiter interjected. ‘Apparently Robey is not there.’

  ‘I went to see Robey. He said he wanted to show me something. He walked me back to the Carnegie Library and then he disappeared.’

  Lassiter frowned. ‘He what?’

  ‘He disappeared. I walked with him all the way to Second Street, and then he just ran right into the traffic and disappeared.’

  ‘And the books?’ Lassiter asked.

  ‘They’re the books that Catherine Sheridan returned on the morning of her death. He wanted me to get them from the library—’

  ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . there’s five of them . . . the first letter of each book title spells Robey. They spell his name. I think there’s something in them . . . a message perhaps, I don’t know.’

  Nanci Cohen spoke. ‘So she knew he was going to kill her?’ She stood up, walked toward Miller and picked up one of the books. She opened it, leafed through it, turned it upside down and shook it to see if anything fell out. There was nothing. She did the same with each of them. Roth and Metz joined her, started looking through them also.

  ‘Hang fire here,’ Lassiter said. ‘Back to something that’s a little more pressing right now . . . the fact that this college professor is either a cop, or is someone impersonating a cop. This is just un-fucking-believable.’

  Nanci Cohen put down the last of the books. ‘Thing that amazes me is that you had him, and then you lost him . . .’

  ‘I didn’t have him,’ Miller replied, something of frustration, exasperation, in his tone. ‘You were the one who said we had nothing on him. You were the one who said there was nothing we could do—’

  Lassiter raised his hand and silenced Miller. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘We’re not getting into a firefight here.’ He turned to ADA Cohen. ‘We have sufficient evidence to get a warrant on his apartment?’

  She nodded. ‘Sure we do. Suspicion of impersonating a police officer is good enough for me.’

  Lassiter turned to Metz. ‘Get the paperwork sorted out. Get it done now. I want a warrant tonight. We’re gonna get into that place and find out whatever we can about this guy in the next two fucking hours, okay?’

  Metz started towards the door.

  ‘I’ll come with yo
u,’ Nanci Cohen said. ‘I’ll drive it over to Judge Thorne.’

  Lassiter turned to Miller. ‘Go through these books with Roth and the others. See what you can find. Soon as we have this warrant I want you over at the Robey apartment. Tear the fucking place to pieces. Find out who the fuck this guy is and what he’s doing.’ Lassiter glanced at his watch. ‘I have to go see someone. Be an hour. Call me soon as you have the warrant. If I can I’ll meet you there.’

  Miller watched him go, hesitated for a moment and then sat down heavily.

  It was a few minutes past six. He’d not eaten since breakfast.

  Roth sat facing him. Feshbach, Littman and Riehl stood on the other side of the room, uncertain of what was needed.

  ‘One book each,’ Miller said, and picked up Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Detective Carl Oliver sat in an unmarked sedan on the junction facing New Jersey and Q Street. He did not envy Miller. The thing had smelled bad since day one. He was willing to help, for sure, but help had a limit. There were certain cases that assumed possession of your life for the duration, and this was one of them. Miller had been on the radio. The APB guy, this John Robey, now appeared to be Sergeant McCullough. Seemed a cop had killed the Sheridan woman, or something such as this. It didn’t matter. Ultimately none of it mattered. It was all politics anyway. Serial killers had been big in the ’80s. Serial killers were passé. Now it was simply a matter of closing a case because the chief of police wanted it closed. All he had to do was watch the apartment for a man that would not return. That was easy enough. He could smoke, listen to the radio, whatever he wanted, and watch the street.

  Seemed it was money for nothing, until Carl Oliver turned to the right and saw a man fitting John Robey’s physical description cross the junction up ahead and start toward the end of the block.

  Littman picked it up, the small marks at the bottom of certain pages, like the flick of a pencil above certain numbers. He was holding a copy of Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. As soon as he mentioned it, Feshbach picked up on the same thing. Tiny pencil markings to indicate a number, then another, then another. Scrutinizing each page individually, each of the five detectives listed the sequence as it was noted.