A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

Miller found Ann Rayner without difficulty. As soon as he found Rayner he found Lee and Mosley. Catherine Sheridan had her own little collection of pictures to the furthest right-hand edge of the wall, her own memorial shrine - a good eight or ten pictures, all of them showing her at different points in her life. In amongst them was an exact duplicate of one of the pictures that had been found beneath Catherine Sheridan’s bed.

  Miller turned and looked at Lassiter. Lassiter was no more than three or four feet behind him. On his face was an expression of both disbelief and realization.

  ‘Robert,’ Roth said.

  Miller turned.

  Roth raised his hand and indicated one of the photographs pinned to the wall. ‘Alan Quinn, December 5th.’

  Miller was nodding. He knew who these people were. He knew their names and the dates on each photograph would compare precisely with the initials and numbers marked on the pages of Catherine Sheridan’s books. Whatever had happened between these people was bigger than anyone in the police department could have imagined. John Robey and Catherine Sheridan knew something, and whatever they knew went all the way back to however many years ago, and he and Al Roth, Frank Lassiter and Nanci Cohen - they stood there facing a wall of photographs, more than thirty of them, that said everything that needed to be said without any words at all.

  There were a lot of dead people. They had been murdered, every single one. They had been murdered for some reason unknown. Perhaps by Robey, perhaps by Robey and Sheridan. Perhaps by someone else entirely, and Robey had merely recorded these events, collected evidence, and then drawn Miller right into its web.

  ‘He knew,’ Miller said at some point, turning toward Roth, toward Lassiter and Cohen. ‘He knew about all these people . . .’

  Roth reached forward, and with his latex-gloved hand he carefully took one of the lower pictures off the wall. He held it for a moment, and then turned it so Miller could see.

  ‘Natasha Joyce,’ he said quietly. ‘She won’t be in the books.’

  ‘Whatever this is, it’s gone back I don’t know how many years,’ Miller said. ‘I think they’re all the same . . . I think we’re gonna find that all of them have been security screened at some point in their life, and then we’ll find that their name stops somewhere, or their social security number isn’t right, or they’ll have a bank account that was supposed to receive some money but the money never arrived . . .’

  ‘I have one man for this,’ Lassiter said. ‘John Robey. And right now he’s the only name and face we have for this thing. He goes on the TV.’ Lassiter turned and looked at Nanci Cohen. ‘We have a state-wide manhunt to organize,’ he said. ‘We have a dead police officer . . . and thank God that he wasn’t married and didn’t have kids, that’s all I can say. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s dead, and right now the only one who could have done this thing as far as I’m concerned is John Robey—’

  ‘I don’t think it’s Robey,’ Miller said, matter-of-fact.

  ‘You don’t think what is Robey?’

  ‘Who killed these people . . . I don’t think Robey killed the people on this wall. I don’t think he killed Natasha Joyce. I think he knows who killed them and he’s trying to help us—’

  ‘You what?’ Lassiter exploded. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? Everything about this says Robey. Right now we have the most successful serial killer in the history of the human race, or near as goddammit. Jesus, I can’t believe you’re telling me this—’

  ‘I’m saying it because I believe it,’ Miller replied. ‘I think he knows the truth, and he’s been trying to tell us the truth and we haven’t been listening—’

  ‘Well listen to this,’ Lassiter interjected. ‘We have a suspect on the run, and right now I don’t give a fuck what his real name might be or whether or not he’s our guy or the Archangel fucking Gabriel come down to guide us to the truth. I need him found. I need TV coverage. I need a press conference organized. Whatever the hell we did on the APB before I now need for every patrolman in the state. I need people at the airport, the docks. I need car hire firms, the bus stations, train stations . . . everything goes into finding John Robey. That’s what we’re doing right now. We’re finding this guy. We need to speak to him in relation to the murder of a Washington Police Department detective. That’s the line we take. We don’t go with the serial killer thing. We take this public. We get them behind us. We might piss them off completely with the parking citations and whatever, but they sure as shit don’t like it when people start killing us, know what I mean?’

  Miller was silent. He stared at the faces on the wall. Image after image after image. One after the other, seemingly endless. Who were these people? What were their names? What did they do that prompted their deaths? He had a vague thought in the back of his mind. A vague thought that came out of the things that Robey had told him. Nicaragua. The memory of a long-forgotten war that no-one wanted to remember. That’s what Robey talked to him about. That’s what Robey wanted him to understand.

  Lassiter looked at Roth. ‘You’re going with this bullshit too?’

  ‘Give us a minute or two,’ Roth said. ‘Let us deal with what we have here . . . we’ll get the search going. Give us whatever authority we need for this thing and we’ll get the search going.’

  ‘I’m getting the whole fucking department going,’ Lassiter said. ‘Several more departments besides. I’m going to see the chief now. I’ve got a dead cop, for God’s sake—’ He turned mid-sentence as a crime scene unit came through the door. Cameras started flashing.

  ‘Jesus, this is a fucking zoo,’ Lassiter said. He backed up, Nanci Cohen behind him, Roth and Miller behind her. The four of them made their way into the front room where Miller had first spoken with Robey. Miller remembered how Robey had looked. He remembered what he’d felt when he’d stolen the hairbrush and when he’d returned it. The conversations they’d had - Nicaragua, the cocaine trafficking, the CIA, all of it rushing through his thoughts now as he began to confront what Robey had left behind. Because there was no question in Miller’s mind that Robey had created all of it, that he had wanted this apartment searched, that there were things here that he had intended them all to see. John Robey and Catherine Sheridan. Whoever the hell they were, they had created their own world, and now the wider world had been invited to see what they had done.

  ‘You guys stay here,’ Lassiter said. ‘Make sure everything is done by the book. Soon as I have authority for the statewide and the news I’ll call you. You’ll need to be there at the press conference.’ Lassiter glanced at his watch. ‘Ten after nine now . . . expect word by ten, okay?’

  Roth nodded in the affirmative.

  ‘Miller!’ Lassiter barked.

  ‘I got it, I got it,’ Miller said.

  They left together, Lassiter and Cohen; Miller and Roth stood in John Robey’s front room as the procession went back and forth, people with evidence bags, cameras, with armfuls of files and rolls of paper from the back room.

  Miller held his breath for a moment. When he exhaled he seemed to fold in the middle with the pressure of what he was experiencing. He looked back at Roth, opened his mouth to speak, and then a voice called him from the back room.

  Miller hadn’t even realized it, but Greg Reid was heading up the crime scene unit.

  ‘Have something here,’ Reid said. ‘Gonna take it away, but I figured you might want to see it before it goes.’

  The three of them re-entered the room. A desk-top computer was running, on the monitor a frozen frame - Catherine Sheridan looking back at them as if she was right there in the room.

  Reid clicked the mouse and the video started playing.

  ‘Put it down for God’s sake,’ Catherine Sheridan said. She waved her hand at whoever was filming her. There were trees in the background. She had on a turquoise woollen beret, her hair tucked beneath it. She looked no younger than she had appeared in her autopsy photographs.

  ‘This is recent,’ Miller said.

  Cath
erine Sheridan started laughing.

  ‘John, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Put the camera away.’

  And then it ended. A handful of seconds, nothing more. A fraction of Catherine Sheridan’s life.

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ Roth said. ‘John Robey . . . he took that footage, didn’t he?’

  Miller was nodding.

  ‘And he wanted us to see it . . .’

  ‘He wanted us to see what she looked like when she was alive.’

  Ten thirty-one p.m, night of Friday, November 17th, 2006, Captain Frank Lassiter appeared on TV screens in bars and pool halls, in airports, in bus and train station waiting rooms, in houses and apartments across the vast expanse of Washington’s transmission zone. His words were succinct and clear, and back of him was a large image of John Robey’s face, one of the small library of photographs that had been taken when John Robey first appeared at Donovan’s diner. This was how John Robey had looked until now. This was how he had looked when Miller had last seen him. There was no guarantee that this was how John Robey would continue to look.

  Miller and Roth were present, beside them Assistant District Attorney Nanci Cohen and two staff from her office. Washington’s chief of police was not present: at that moment he was in discussion with the mayor of the city. What they discussed was their own business, the significance of these things in the face of popularity polls and reelection schedules.

  Lassiter’s statement was brief and concise. A Washington police department detective had been murdered. The man pictured was needed for questioning in connection with this matter. That was all, just questioning. At this time the police could neither confirm nor deny his involvement in the incident, but regardless it was of the utmost importance that he be located. No reference was made to anything else. Not Catherine Sheridan. Not the Ribbon Killer. Nothing.

  The news statement lasted approximately one minute and eight seconds, and then the cameras were off, and Miller and Roth stood there, their eyes stunned from the brightness of the TV lights, and Lassiter was walking away from the platform with Nanci Cohen, the two of them deep in conversation.

  ‘At least my wife will know where I am,’ Roth said, attempting somehow to make light of the matter.

  Miller smiled resignedly.

  ‘So where to now?’ Roth asked.

  ‘Back to the Second to see what they’ve found in the books.’

  Roth agreed. There was in fact nowhere else to go.

  FIFTY

  ‘Alan Quinn,’ Jim Feshbach said. ‘Hit and run outside his own home just before Christmas ’98. Killed outright.’ He held up the sheet of paper with the initials and dates. ‘We’ve only found a few of them . . . girl here, twenty-six years old, Jacqueline Price. Shot in the head with a .22 in Archbold Park. Early evening, no clues . . . no-one ever arrested.’

  ‘Executions,’ Miller said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Executions, that’s what they were . . . every single one of them.’

  Feshbach, looking puzzled, said, ‘I don’t understand?’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Miller said. ‘There won’t be any common denominators between them, not as such, not on the surface . . . go a little deeper and I can guarantee that every single one of them was security screened at some point—’

  ‘We found your black guy, the CI,’ Vince Littman said.

  ‘Darryl?’ Roth asked.

  ‘That’s your boy,’ Littman replied. ‘Darryl King . . . 7th October 2001. Shot dead in the middle of a drugs raid with your friend Sergeant McCullough supposedly guarding his back. What the fuck he was doing taking some regular joe on a drugs raid—’

  ‘He wasn’t a regular joe,’ Miller said. ‘None of them were regular joes.’

  ‘Then who the fuck were they?’ Littman asked. ‘You said something about witness protection maybe?’

  Miller smiled sardonically. It was almost ironic. ‘Witness protection? I suppose it was kind of witness protection . . . more like witness removal.’

  ‘You think they knew something?’ Roth asked. ‘What could they have known? I mean, for God’s sake, all of them had different jobs . . . you’re talking about killings that go back all of nine or ten years . . .’

  ‘Longer I think,’ Miller said. ‘I don’t think that this is all of them . . . I think this is just the ones that Robey started keeping a record of when he realized what was happening.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Roth said. ‘Realized what was happening?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Miller said, ‘but all of this has been an effort to get us involved. This is something that I figure he tried to handle himself . . .’ Miller shook his head. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and pressed his palms together. ‘I haven’t got it,’ he said quietly. ‘I haven’t got what happens here. He knows that people are being murdered. He keeps a record of them. How does he know which ones are related murders, and which are random killings, the work of hit-and-run joy riders, things like that? How does he know this stuff? Because he has records, or because he can access records. He trawls through newspapers, he finds reports of deaths - murders, killings, unexplained homicides, apparent accidents . . . he crosschecks them somehow. He has computers in his apartment, two or three of them. He has a police receiver. He knew what he was doing, he knew what he was looking for.’ Miller turned to Roth. ‘When did he start working at Mount Vernon?’

  Roth reached for the file, leafed through it. ‘May of 1998,’ he said.

  ‘And the first date we have is what?’ Miller said. ‘May 12th, 1998.’

  ‘Which makes me think that he’s the one doing the killing, ’ Feshbach said. ‘He arrives in Washington and people start dying. Makes sense, right?’

  ‘Makes sense, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here,’ Miller said.

  ‘So the Ribbon Killer thing . . . where does that take us now?’ Riehl asked.

  ‘I’m thinking more than one killer,’ Roth said.

  ‘He knew about the lavender,’ Miller said.

  ‘He what?’

  ‘Robey, he knew about the lavender—’

  ‘How in fuck’s name could he have known that . . . that wasn’t even in the papers.’

  ‘Then Robey must be one of them,’ Riehl said. ‘He must have killed these people if he knew about the lavender. And he probably killed Oliver as well.’

  Miller got up. ‘I don’t see it,’ he said, pacing the room. ‘He knows what’s happening, but I don’t think he’s the one . . .’

  ‘Either he’s in on it, or he’s accessed confidential case records and found details that weren’t made public.’

  The desk phone rang. Feshbach picked it up. ‘Yes,’ he said, held out the receiver towards Roth. ‘Lassiter.’

  Roth took the phone, listened for a moment, acknowledged and hung up.

  ‘Lassiter’s office,’ he said to Miller.

  Miller and Roth headed upstairs to Lassiter’s office.

  ‘Sit down,’ Lassiter said as Miller and Roth entered the room.

  The captain looked beat-to-shit. ADA Cohen, however, still looked good. She was a tough lady, she endured this shit. Miller respected her greatly.

  ‘We have a major fucking situation here,’ Lassiter said. ‘Seems we have created a Frankenstein for ourselves . . .’ He smiled wearily. ‘I got a phone call about fifteen minutes ago from someone named Carol Inchman at the Bancroft Care Home . . .’

  ‘Where Bill Young is,’ Miller said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Lassiter replied. ‘Said that Bill told her to call to let us know that the picture we showed of John Robey was the wrong picture—’

  ‘That it was McCullough, right?’ Roth interjected.

  Lassiter leaned back in his chair. ‘I have some kind of a vague idea of what we have here . . .’ He looked at Nanci Cohen as if for some kind of reassurance. None was forthcoming. ‘You wanna tell them, or shall I?’

  ‘We have a statement,’ ADA Cohen said.

  �
�A statement?’ Miller asked.

  She nodded. ‘A statement.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘The Justice Department,’ she said.

  Miller looked at Roth. Roth looked at Lassiter. Lassiter shook his head resignedly.

  ‘The Justice Department?’

  Cohen nodded. ‘The Justice Department. You know how this works, right?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The command line on this kind of thing.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ Miller asked.

  ‘You have the president. He’s the top of the food chain. You have three bodies beneath him. Legislative, judicial and executive. You’d think that the Justice Department would come under judicial, but it’s right there in the executive branch of the government.’

  ‘CIA is in executive, right?’ Roth asked.

  Cohen nodded. ‘CIA, FBI, State Department, National Security Council . . . all of them. Judicial Department is the U.S. Supreme Court and the chief justices . . . ultimately the people I am answerable to as a lawyer, as an assistant district attorney.’

  ‘So we got a statement from the Justice Department, and . . . ?’

  ‘And they are very careful to confirm that—’ Nanci Cohen paused as Frank Lassiter handed her a slip of paper. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Exactly as transcribed from the telephone call we received about fifteen minutes after Frank’s broadcast.’ She cleared her throat. ‘The Justice Department would like to state that at this time there are no clear indications that John Robey was ever employed in any official capacity by any branch or office of the government of the United States, and that there are no extant records of any criminal proceedings that may have been taken against him. However, considering the nature of the investigation that is now being conducted in the capitol, and that an officer of the Washington Police Department has been murdered, it has been concluded by the Secretary of the Justice Department that this investigation will be turned over to the offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—’

  Miller was up out of his chair. ‘You what? What the fuck-’