Saints Of New York

by R.J. Ellory

  He did not wish to be caught stepping on anyone's toes, least of all another homicide detective from an entirely different precinct.

  Parrish took the subway at Myrtle and headed back to Brooklyn.

  As far he could recall, the Records Archives Division of New York County Child Services was over on Manhattan. Whether they were open on a Saturday or not he wasn't certain, but if they were he wanted to get there before they closed.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The offices of the Records Archives Division was open, and would be until four-thirty that afternoon. Access to what he wanted was easy and swift. He showed his ID, he told them what was needed, and they came through with files on both Karen Pulaski and Rebecca Lange.

  Karen had been a McDermott at birth, her parents unmarried. The father was the victim of an apparent hit-and-run when Karen was four, the mother had overdosed when the child was six. A year or so later David and Elizabeth Pulaski - registered as potential adoptive parents with the County Adoption Agency for three years - took delivery of their new daughter, a recalcitrant and difficult seven-year-old who had started out with two strikes against her.

  CAA and Child Services visits were monthly for the first six months, quarterly for the next twelve, and then once a year, those visits finally becoming a formality. Mr and Mrs Pulaski, according to the reports on file, had done a remarkable job with their adopted daughter. Karen had become a happy, well- balanced, socially-oriented girl, and had stayed that way until someone strangled her with a cable and pushed her body into a dumpster.

  Parrish turned to Rebecca. It seemed from a number of notes in her file that Child Services were well aware of Helen Jarvis, and understood that she was really the one who would be taking care of Rebecca. On paper Danny was the guardian; in reality he had little to do with the girl until she began visiting him in Brooklyn.

  On the face of it, there seemed to be no connection between the girls aside from the fact that they'd lost their parents early and had been adopted - officially in Karen's case, unofficially in Rebecca's.

  Cross-referencing the files, Parrish found no common denominator in assigned officer or supervisor, either from the CAA or Child Services. One hailed from South Brooklyn, the other from Williamsburg, but CAA and Child Services also dealt with Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ridgewood, their jurisdiction stretching as far north-west as Brooklyn Heights, as far south as Gowanus and Red Hook. If there was a connection then Parrish could not see it, which left it open to coincidence. And Coincidence did not sit well. It never had. Coincidence defied Frank Parrish's natural sense of order and prediction. Then there was the short skirt, the halter-neck, the high-heeled shoes and, in Rebecca's case, the haircut and the nail varnish. Again a coincidence, the fact that in both cases the perp was a re-clother?

  What now interested Parrish was the possibility that there might be others. Missing girls, re-clothed, hair cut, fingers and toes painted, perhaps wearing clothes that were out-of-character. Girls overlooked in the general manner of investigation because they were never seen as anything other than isolated cases, but - as had been said so many times - once was happenstance, twice was coincidence, but a third time was conspiracy.

  Notwithstanding the possibility that the cases were isolated, unrelated, completely devoid of connection, it was Rebecca's face that still haunted Parrish. He remembered his own daughter at sixteen, and that simple image reminded him that Rebecca had been someone's child, and if he didn't pursue the truth of her death then who else would? Danny? Danny was dead. Helen Jarvis? Hardly . . .

  It was four o'clock by the time he once again sat behind his desk in the 126th Precinct. Radick had left a note. Shooting Range, it read. Call me if you need me, otherwise see you tomorrow. Parrish had eaten no lunch, but whatever hunger he should have felt was absent. A drink, though ... a drink would have been good.

  He accessed Divisional Records on his own system, ran a search for missing persons and homicides, limiting it to the previous twenty-four months, age range between fifteen and twenty. Girls only. He fetched some coffee while the machine did its work.

  When he came back he had seventeen names on the screen. Only one of them was his. January 2007, a nineteen-year-old called Angela Ross. Parrish remembered the case. Originally filed as a Missing Person, Angela had been found the following morning. She'd been stabbed eleven times - three times in the neck, twice in the side of the head, the remaining wounds to the upper torso. The perp had never been found, and the reason for her murder had remained completely unknown, never so much as guessed at. Parrish knew from his own investigation of the case that there was no connection to Child Services. Both Angela's parents had been blood; Angela had been the youngest of four children.

  He looked through the other sixteen cases. Five had been assigned to Hayes and Wheland, three of them closed; seven to Rhodes and Pagliaro, six of them closed; finally four to Engel and West, two of them closed. That gave Parrish five unsolved and still extant cases, three of them Missing Persons, two of them straight homicides, all females between fifteen and twenty, all of them from within the 126th Precinct's jurisdictional territory. He jotted down their names and the case numbers, and headed down to Records to pull the relevant files.

  It was the photographs that did it. For some considerable time he did nothing but sit there, the pictures laid out before him. Two homicides, three apparent runaways. Five girls, all young, two of them at the end of their lives before those lives had even begun. In one instance - seventeen-year-old Jennifer Baumann - the body had been laid out carefully on a motel room bed, restful almost, as if a consensual sacrifice. There were signs of bruising and restraint on the wrists and ankles, and the motel room had been confirmed as the secondary crime scene. Jennifer had not been murdered there, simply left there for someone to find her. Another - Nicole Benedict, also seventeen - was found dead in a mattress bag on an apartment block stairwell. Her head had been twisted back at an extraordinarily sharp angle. Parrish stared at the picture for quite some time, the image jarring and unsettling. It seemed physically impossible that such a thing could be done to a young girl, but it had been, and the photographs were there to prove it.

  Parrish gathered up the files and returned to his office. After an hour he had found only one reference to Child Services - merely a footnote that Hayes had made, inconclusive, as to whether Jennifer Baumann had been in the care of Child Services, or she had a friend in care who needed to be questioned. Parrish did not intend to pursue the question with Hayes. His decision - certainly contravening protocol if not procedure - was to say nothing about his interest in these cases.

  He put the files in a lower drawer, the two homicides uppermost, and before he left he took one more look at the face of Jennifer Baumann. Her eyes were just sadness personified, a sadness so deep it made Parrish feel hollow. He now had four dead girls - Rebecca, Karen, Jennifer and Nicole, perhaps unrelated, perhaps entirely irrelevant, but it would do no harm to keep hold of them for a while. The dead ones seemed important. The runaways? Well, they could be dead too, but right now they weren't, at least not on paper.

  At six-thirty Parrish was seated in a corner booth in Clay's Tavern. He couldn't take his mind off Caitlin. He knew there was no reason to be more worried about her welfare today than any other day, but the pictures he had looked at had disturbed him enough to exacerbate that worry. She resented even the slightest attempt on his part to give advice or interfere with her life, and he needed to learn to leave the girl alone. He needed to let her go. She was old enough to sink or swim by herself.

  Parrish didn't worry about his son anything like as much. With Robert it was different, as was always the way with sons. Robert challenged and argued and debated and raised issues. Parrish had even told Robert about Eve, and Robert thought it was most cool that his cop dad had a relationship with a hooker. Both Robert and Caitlin had a key to his apartment, but Robert was the only one who'd ever shown up unannounced and unexpected. Frank knew his son had a little more devil-may
-care in him than his daughter, but with Robert it had never been a question of his physical welfare and safety. But Caitlin . . .

  Parrish let go of the thought. Caitlin was fine. It was just the case that had got to him, he told himself. The photographs, the consideration of dead girls in motel rooms, on stairwells, girl with handprints on their necks . . .

  He bought another drink. The money he'd taken from Danny Lange was burning a hole in his pocket. He'd forgotten to drop i off, would take a walk back the way he'd come and deliver it before he went home for the evening.

  Within an hour he was joined by a regular - ex-police Lieutenant Victor Merrett, old-school, old-time, a veteran of the day. He sat down with Frank, they talked of nothing in particular for a while, and then Merrett mentioned Frank's father.

  'Have to be honest with you, Frank,' Merrett said, 'and meaning no disrespect to his memory, but I never did see eye-to-eye with your father.'

  'Well, Victor, I can tell you that what people saw and what really was . . . hell, let's not even go there eh?'

  'Don't get me wrong, Frank, I'm not saying he wasn't a good cop. He was as good as they get—'

  Parrish smiled wryly. 'You on the books, Victor? Were you ever on the books down here?'

  'On the books?'

  'Taking an income from my father's crew, you know?'

  Merrett frowned. 'What the hell you asking me that for, Frank! What kinda question is that?'

  'A straight question, Victor. A straight fucking question. You can't answer a straight question?'

  'You're drunk, Frank. Jesus, I come here to be sociable, come to say hi, how ya doing, and you give me this shit. What the fuck is wrong with you?'

  'Ain't nothing wrong with me, Victor. Something wrong with a whole bunch of other people though, and I just wondered if you were one of them.'

  Merrett got up. He looked down at Frank and shook his head. 'Think you should go home,' he said. 'Get whatever the hell is going on with you slept off.'

  Parrish leaned forward and picked up his glass. 'Well, before you go, Victor, let me tell you something about my father. The only people he ever saw eye-to-eye with were the ones who were taking money off of him, the people he had something over, right? If you weren't on his side, then you were an enemy.'

  'But his reputation—'

  'Bullshit reputation, Victor. John Parrish was as crooked as they come and that's the truth.'

  Merrett looked alarmed. 'I don't think that's something you should go shouting your mouth off about, especially in the state you're in—'

  'Why? Why shouldn't I say what the fuck I like? It's the truth, Victor, the fucking truth. He was a bullshit artist just like the rest of them. He didn't do anything but stick his hand deep in the honey pot and take just whatever the hell he wanted for the whole of his working life. And you can't tell me that people didn't know. You can't ever convince me that the people who were above him didn't know what he was doing. But they let it slide, Victor, they tolerated it because he brought in enough small fishes to keep the net heavy. That's what he did. And even those guys, even the ones he brought in, he didn't bust them, Victor. He didn't do the work. Those guys were given to him by the Mob, and he wheeled them in and his superiors were happy, and the Mob was happy, and everyone slapped everyone on the fucking back and went home with their skims and kickbacks. That's the way it was, Victor, and that's the way it will always be.'

  'Christ Jesus, Frank, I never heard you talk like this. What the hell has gotten into you?'

  Parrish smiled enthusiastically. He was drunk and he didn't give a fuck. 'Therapy,' he said. 'I've been having therapy.'

  'Well, Frank, I have to say here and now, that I think it might be a good idea if you got another therapist. Doesn't seem the one you've got is doing you much good.'

  Merrett started towards the door.

  'You're leaving?' Parrish asked.

  'I have to make a move, Frank, yes.' 'Well, seems to me the least you can fucking do is buy me a drink before you go.'

  Merrett stood there for a moment looking down at Frank Parrish. 'Think maybe you've had enough,' he said quietly, and then he turned his back and walked away.

  TWENTY-TWO

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

  Frank Parrish woke late Sunday morning. He could remember little of the night before.

  On the kitchen counter was a half-opened can of chili. He had never gotten as far as putting it in a pan to warm up.

  He made some coffee, sat for a while in the kitchen, looked through the window at nothing in particular. He thought to call Caitlin, decided against it. He wondered whether he should have Radick check up on her. He thought of the dead girls, and when he pictured their faces he saw nothing but their naivety, their vulnerability, the utter pointlessness of their deaths. Caitlin wasn't so much older. She traveled back and forth to work, sometimes late at night, alone and in the dark. How much distance was there between her and a dumpster? Very little, in all honesty. And was it always opportunist? Was it always just random - the way these guys just snatched girls from the street, used them for whatever purpose they saw fit, and then disposed of them? Parrish did not believe so. He believed that the files in his desk drawer would provide him with something more than just dead and missing girls. Besides Rebecca and Karen, if even one of them had been adopted, had been processed through the County Adoption Agency or Child Services, then he was going to pursue it. He would speak to no-one. He would employ his own energies, his own contacts, his own resources, and if it came to nothing then nothing would have been lost.

  But now it was Sunday, and he would not be going to the office. He would go and see Robert, perhaps Caitlin, and he would try and get through the evening without a bottle of Bushmills. The likelihood was slim, but he would try.

  He took a straight route to his old house, the one where the bitter ghosts of his marriage still resided, stopping en route to spend a handful of minutes in St. Michael's church. He spoke to nobody, merely walked the length of the aisle, deposited the remainder of Danny Lange's money in the donation box, and then left.

  Arriving in front of the house where so much of his life had been spent, he paused on the sidewalk and hesitated before climbing the steps and banging on the door.

  'You don't look so good,' were her first words.

  'Hi, Clare. How are you? How have things been? You know something, it must be the better part of three weeks since I last saw you, and you're looking pretty damned good, Clare, even though it pains me to say it. . . you're looking pretty hot.'

  'Fuck off, Frank.'

  Parrish smiled. He went back down the steps and stood on the sidewalk. He buried his hands in his overcoat pockets and looked left.

  'You gonna ask me in,' he said, 'or are you going to stand there and watch while I come in anyway?'

  'What do you want, Frank?'

  'I came to see Robert.'

  'He's not here.'

  'You know where he is?'

  'He's gone for the day. He has a girl now, but you wouldn't know that because you don't give a crap about what's happening with him, do you?

  Frank didn't rise to the bait.

  'So he's not here and I don't know when he'll be back, and if and when he does come back I'll tell him that you called for him, okay?'

  'That's very good of you, Clare.'

  'I know.'

  She slammed the door and Frank Parrish stood there until he could no longer hear her footsteps.

  It was always the same tune, the same exhausting aggression and bitterness. He couldn't understand why she held onto it with such ferocity. Surely now, after all this time, they could converse without the tension and angst and melodrama?

  Frank Parrish walked back to the subway.

  Today was not turning out as planned.

  An hour later he stood in the hallway outside Caitlin's apartment and knocked for the third time. She was not in. He knew that now, but he had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. He waited patiently, fool t
hat he was, and then he knocked once more. Finally he conceded defeat.

  He arrived home mid-afternoon. He called Eve and it went direct to her answer phone. She was with clients, or she was out, or maybe she was visiting her mother upstate. Eve's mother believed that her daughter was a Human Resources Manager for Hewlett Packard. She would go on believing that until she died. Whether she suspected that your average Hewlett Packard HR manager did not look like her daughter no-one would ever know; and if she did, it would never go further than suspicion. There were some things it was better not to know, even when you knew them.

  Frank Parrish turned on the TV, sat patiently for fifteen minutes, and then he could take no more.

  He put his coat back on, headed out of the apartment, and made for Clay's. At least there were people down there. At least there was Tom Waits on the jukebox. At least there was a bottle of Bushmills and a clean glass, and no-one to tell him he couldn't.

  TWENTY-THREE

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

  'It's just a feeling, nothing more.'

  I 'Don't you trust your feelings?'

  'As a cop no, not really. They talk about hunches, about intuition sure, but I don't give a great deal of credence to such stuff.'