A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘Some kind of code,’ Miller said. ‘A cipher perhaps . . .’

  ‘Letters also,’ Riehl said. ‘I’ve got a coupla letters marked on page one here, and then I get a sequence of six numbers, then I get another coupla letters, then a sequence of five.’

  ‘Just write them down,’ Miller said. ‘Write them down in the sequence you find them.’

  Miller did the same. Page One: ‘In the Oceania wing of the Louvre I saw it: the totem.’

  A mark above the a in Oceania, and then on the seventh line, ‘Except the infant was only a head, grotesquely large and round’, a mark above the q.

  Miller noted these, and then found a mark above page numbers: the 1 in 10, the 2 in 12, the 5 in 15, the 9 in 19, lastly the 8 in 28.

  He wrote them down in sequence: a q 1 2 5 9 8.

  The sequence started again, this time g j6 6 9 9, and again b d 7 14 99.

  ‘Dates,’ Miller said. ‘They’re fucking dates aren’t they?’ He looked at Roth. ‘Got three here . . . December 5th, 1998, then June 6th, 1999, next is July 14th, 1999 . . .’

  ‘And the letters?’ Roth asked.

  ‘Initials, what the fuck d’you bet they’re initials,’ Riehl said.

  ‘Jesus,’ Miller exhaled quietly. ‘Names and dates. They’re goddamned names and dates . . .’

  ‘Don’t miss one, for God’s sake,’ Roth said. ‘Miss one and the whole thing goes awry.’

  ‘Everyone complete the book they’re on,’ Miller said. ‘Mark every letter and number in sequence, and then pass the book along. We cross-check to make sure we’re right.’

  Roth looked at him, raised his eyebrows, slowly shook his head. ‘This is just so fucking beyond me . . .’ His voice trailed away into silence. He looked down, focused on what he was doing, started writing again.

  Carl Oliver called the precinct from his car, told them to get Miller and Roth out to Robey’s place. It looked like John Robey was on his way home.

  Oliver exited his car and crossed the street. The man he’d seen had passed the junction, turned left, was now approaching the stairwell that led up to Robey’s apartment. Oliver stayed close to the façade of the adjacent building. He did not need to try and look inconspicuous. Inconspicuousness was in his nature.

  Oliver did not see the man’s face. All he knew of Robey was the image from the treated photographs, the basic height and build Miller had told him. Oliver waited for him to reach the stairwell, and then he followed.

  ‘Thirty-six,’ Roth said. ‘Thirty-six separate sequences . . .’ He paused, looked across at Miller. ‘You see them, right?’

  Miller nodded. A slow-dawning realization had blanched the color from his face.

  ‘What?’ Littman asked. ‘See what?’

  Miller turned the page around and pointed to a sequence of three:m m 3 6 6

  a r 7 1 9 6

  b l 8 2 2 6

  ‘And they mean what?’ Littman asked.

  ‘Margaret Mosley, March 6th, 2006, Ann Rayner, July 19th and Barbara Lee on August 2nd . . . the three women this year before Catherine Sheridan.’

  Feshbach frowned, leaned forward. ‘So what? So you’re telling me that there’s thirty-six murders here . . . that this woman had information about thirty-six murders? You can’t be fucking serious!’

  Miller opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by the telephone to his left. Roth picked it up, was getting out of his chair even as he acknowledged and hung up. ‘Someone at the Robey apartment,’ he said.

  ‘Robey?’ Miller asked.

  Roth shook his head. ‘Don’t know. Oliver called the desk, said he was checking it out.’

  Miller got up, tugged his jacket from the back of his chair, turned to the three seated detectives as he reached the door. ‘Put a search through the Washington system for those dates. See if there’s missing persons or homicides that match the initials for those dates. Check our newspaper records, anything you can think of, okay?’

  And then he was out the door behind Roth, the two of them hurrying down the corridor toward the stairwell. Roth called the car pool from his cell, told them to have a vehicle ready. A siren was the only thing that would get them through the early evening traffic.

  Carl Oliver stood on the lowest rung of the stairwell leading to John Robey’s apartment. He unholstered his gun, chambered a round, set the safety and returned it to the holster. He held his breath for a moment, reached for the handrail, and then started up the risers.

  Miller drove, pulled the car out onto New York Avenue.

  ‘Don’t take Fifth,’ Roth said. ‘Back up there.’ He indicated over his shoulder and through the rear window. ‘Take Fourth, take a right onto M, and then take New Jersey at the Morgan Street junction . . .’

  Miller followed Roth’s advice, and within a minute was hitting gridlock at the New York Avenue turning.

  ‘Radio Oliver,’ he told Roth. ‘Tell him to keep an eye on whoever but not to go up there until we arrive.’

  ‘You think it’s Robey?’ Roth asked as he reached for the handset.

  Miller shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think it’s—’

  ‘Then who?’

  Miller leaned on the horn as a car swerved from the left and cut him up. ‘Asshole!’ he hissed, and then looked back at Roth. ‘Who is it? Jesus, I don’t fucking know who it is,’ he said. ‘Don’t even know that I want to know.’

  Roth pressed the handset button and waited for someone at the Second to pick up.

  At the top of the stairwell Oliver paused. This was the shit he didn’t like. Some guys got a rush for this stuff, went looking for it, but not him. He had a leaning towards the methodical stuff, the questioning, the interrogations. In-your-face heroics was for other people.

  He leaned against the edge of the wall and eased around the corner. The walkway to Robey’s apartment door was clear. He stepped back toward the top riser and hesitated before moving again. A moment’s consideration of whether he should wait. He didn’t want to go into the apartment. Then again, he didn’t want to be the guy who was too scared to act. Rock and a hard place. He wondered whether he should take out his gun, hold it down by his side. Knew that if something happened fast he might react, and in reacting he might shoot someone who didn’t need to get shot. A sweat had broken out down the middle of his back. He reached up and ran his finger around the inside of his collar. He decided, for no other reason than to end the indecision. What harm could be done by checking it out? He had to check it out. It was a situation without choice. This was police work. You went looking for trouble, you checked things out, you were the other side of the crime scene tape and you knew exactly what had happened.

  Carl Oliver took a deep breath, put his hand on the grip of his holstered gun, and started down the walkway to John Robey’s apartment.

  ‘Can’t reach him,’ Roth said. ‘He can’t be in his car. They’re patching through to his radio but he’s not answering.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Miller said. He swerved around a car as it pulled out, and he flipped the siren. The junction of O Street to their left, P Street up ahead, then Franklin. Miller hammered the heels of his hands on the steering wheel. Every way they turned they’d been stopped. Everything had been an almost-answer, an almost-truth, something that led to something that led to something else. And they were all just small parts of some greater picture, a picture that Miller felt he was beginning to see. He did not want to assume what it might be; he did not want to let his imagination run with it. He felt that it would only serve to complicate something that was already too complicated. He wanted to get to Robey’s apartment, find out if anyone was in there or if Oliver had made a mistake. He wanted Cohen and Metz to return with the warrant so they could take a look inside. He wanted the books to give up their ghosts, the things that Catherine Sheridan wanted the world to know, and then he wanted it all to end.

  That most of all: he wanted the nightmare to end.

  A stream of traffic seemed suddenly to run to
their left down Franklin. The road ahead cleared.

  ‘Go!’ Roth said, and Miller put his foot down to cover the last two hundred and fifty yards to their destination.

  Standing at Robey’s apartment door, Carl Oliver closed his eyes for a second and then raised his hand slowly. He knocked once, stepped back, rested the palm of his hand on the butt of his sidearm. No mistaking: his heart was running ahead of itself, his pulse trying to catch up.

  He gave it a good thirty seconds. There was nothing. Not a sound from inside.

  He raised his hand and knocked again, louder this time, gave it ten seconds and then shouted, ‘Police! Open up, Sir!’

  This time there was something, definitely a sound from inside the apartment.

  Oliver felt his heart stop. Thus far it had been assumption: that someone had returned, that someone had found their way into the apartment, that he would knock on the door and there would be a response. Now it was more than assumption. Now the situation created an entirely different range of emotions and thoughts.

  Oliver stepped back a pace, wondered if he should stand to the side of the door. He was not familiar with such scenarios. Movies he had seen yes, and at the academy they went through some brief explanations of how one handled such situations. But no amount of training with other rookies could prepare you for what you felt at such a time. This was something that could not be compared to anything else he’d experienced. He was not a veteran cop or an ex-soldier. He had not done two tours of duty in Iraq. He did not know how to deal with the feelings he was experiencing. He only knew that if he screwed this up another woman could die. Maybe two. Maybe more.

  He sensed that whoever was inside was now close to the door, and then Oliver heard the man’s voice.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Police, sir. It’s the police. I need you to open up the door.’

  ‘Why? What do you want?’

  ‘Is that you, Mr Robey?’

  Silence.

  ‘Gonna ask you to identify yourself there, sir. This is the apartment of Mr John Robey. Are you John Robey?’

  Again there was silence.

  Oliver felt his heart in his throat. This was where it went one way or the other. This was where he’d get a reprimand for not waiting for back-up. This was where the voice command drills only served so much purpose.

  ‘Sir . . . gonna have to ask you one more time to open the door—’

  ‘Okay, okay, okay . . . chill the fuck out for God’s sake will you?’

  The sound of the lock snapping back. Oliver felt himself tense up inside.

  The door handle turned, the door started to open. Oliver took a step to the left. Put himself out of any direct line of fire. He wondered what on earth he believed might happen. There was someone inside. Right now they were cooperating. They would open the door and everything would be fine. It would be someone who was supposed to be there . . . Robey’s brother with a spare key come to visit . . . a friend from down the block come to feed the cat at Robey’s request. They would identify themselves, and there would be a moment of awkwardness as Oliver realized that some kind of mistake had been made.

  Everything was going to be fine. Everything was going to be just fine . . .

  The door opened.

  The man who looked back at Detective Carl Oliver was not identifiable, because he held a scarf over the lower half of his face.

  ‘John Robey?’ Carl Oliver said, and it was the very last thing he would say, because the man took one step back, raised his hand, and with a silenced .22 he put a neat punctuation mark in the middle of Oliver’s forehead. With insufficient force to make it through the cranium and out the other side, that .22 would ricochet back and forth inside Oliver’s skull for a good eight or nine seconds.

  Oliver stood there, his mouth slightly open, a crooked smile on his face as if a joke had been played on him, some kind of prank, and it was registering slowly, dawning on him that he’d been taken for a fool, and even now people were laughing, and he was going to start laughing too, and he was going to be a good sport, he was going to take it well, be one of the crew, and everyone would have forgotten about it by tomorrow . . .

  But he didn’t start laughing, and nor did the man in the apartment. The man just waited until a thin line of blood oozed like a tear from the corner of Oliver’s eye and ran down his cheek, waited a moment more until Carl Oliver dropped like deadweight to the floor, and then he closed the apartment door quietly behind him.

  He made his way quickly and quietly toward the back of the apartment, collected a few things that he could manage to carry unaided, and then he went out of the window.

  Robert Miller and Al Roth found Carl Oliver four minutes later, and by that time whoever had shot him had disappeared.

  Disappeared but good . . . like he was never there.

  FORTY-NINE

  Within thirty minutes the Robey apartment was a confusion of people. Robert Miller stood for some considerable time in the outer walkway ahead of the front door. He felt the same as he had that night of Catherine Sheridan’s murder. He did not know Carl Oliver, not well, not as he knew Al Roth, but the death of a colleague brought an exceptional kind of fear. It was not the man who had been killed, but what it represented. He had been here at the wrong time. That expression had never made sense to Miller. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No. It was either the right place at the wrong time, or vice versa. It was never both. Both didn’t make sense. Robey’s apartment. That’s where Oliver was supposed to have been. Had he been two hours earlier he wouldn’t be dead. Right place, wrong time. That simple.

  But Oliver’s killing meant a great deal more. His killing meant that whoever was involved in this considered themselves above the law. This was now no longer a matter of a few dead women. This was perhaps a matter of more than thirty killings, persons as yet unknown and unidentified, a matter of connections that went back through John Robey and Catherine Sheridan to something far, far greater. Miller believed this, believed it with everything he possessed, but there was no proof, nothing probative to suggest any connection - except a hairbrush that was ten or twenty feet from where he now stood.

  Lassiter appeared, alongside him ADA Cohen and Chris Metz, in his hand the warrant to search the apartment - a warrant that was no longer required. Robey’s apartment was a crime scene; Robey’s apartment was full of photographers and forensics people, and when the crime scene unit showed up it was as if the Second Precinct had moved to New Jersey and Q Street.

  ‘This is just fucked,’ Lassiter kept saying, an edge to his voice that told of all the late night phone calls, the questions he would not be able to answer, the beratings, the criticisms, the threats and innuendoes regarding what would happen to his career if he didn’t . . .

  Miller could not speak. He watched while pictures were taken of Carl Oliver’s body. He watched while he was put on a gurney, as the medics awkwardly maneuvered him down the stairway to the street. Marilyn Hemmings appeared. She raised her hand and smiled at Miller. Miller raised his hand back. He saw her just the once, saw her sign something, and then she went away.

  A slick of blood was all that remained. It was small. It had leaked from Oliver’s mouth. There had been no visible exit wound to his head. He was thirty-four years old. He liked R.E.M. He smoked cigarettes that he rolled himself.

  At one point Miller slid down to his haunches and wrapped his arms around his knees. Al Roth came out of the apartment and stood over him silently. After a minute or two he said, ‘When you’re ready . . . when you’re ready you better come in and take a look at this.’ And then he went back inside and left Miller there, in the outer walkway, with his forehead on his knees and his heart in his mouth.

  By the time Miller got up it was close to eighty-thirty. He stepped into the apartment and waited patiently for someone he recognized to appear inside. It was Lassiter, and though Lassiter looked beaten to hell, though he didn’t really have a great deal of anything to say, Miller could tell fro
m the man’s expression that whatever existed within that apartment had changed his mind about what they were dealing with. Changed it completely.

  The room where Miller had spoken with Robey was the same. The dark carpet, the sofa against the right hand wall, the window on the left overlooking the back of the building, the parchment walls, the line drawings in their stainless steel frames.

  ‘In back,’ Lassiter said. ‘You need to come and see what we’ve found.’

  Nanci Cohen was there, Al Roth and Chris Metz. Metz left when Miller and Lassiter stepped into the room. He looked overwhelmed and exhausted.

  Miller didn’t say anything for a long time. The window overlooking the street had been boarded over, and beneath it was a wide table. Upon the table were two desktop computers, a police receiver, two laptops, a stack of manila folders, some of which had spilled to the ground. There were leads hanging free from the edge of the table.

  ‘We think there was another laptop,’ Roth said. ‘There’s a window back there in the kitchen. Whoever was here went out that way. There’s a fire escape . . .’ His voice disappeared as he realized that Miller was paying no attention at all.

  The wall was ahead of them.

  The wall was what it was all about.

  The wall was a good twelve feet wide, maybe eight or nine feet high, and aside from the maps and sketches, aside from the confusion of multi-colored pins that marked streets and junctions and other unspecified locations, it was the pictures that communicated everything that needed to be said. Some of them photographs, some polaroids, some of them clipped from newspapers and magazines.