by R.J. Ellory
'And how did your interviews go?'
'As expected. We've done a little more than half. There's another twenty and then the supervisor himself, and we'll deal with those on Monday.' Parrish nodded at the phone in Valderas's hand. 'That would be good, you know? If you can get someone in Tech to download the card and tell us who she was calling.'
Valderas looked at his watch. 'Honestly? I don't think we'll even get a look in until Monday morning.'
'Whatever you can do,' Parrish said. He held up the stack of paperwork from South Two. 'Going to start running backgrounds on these guys, see if anything turns up.'
It was nearly eight by the time Parrish sat at his desk and spread the interview notes out in front of him. He typed in every name - all twenty-six of them, twenty-seven including Lavelle; dates of birth, Social Security numbers, the bare minimum that was needed to get the process started. He let the computer start working, and left for the upstairs canteen.
Seated at a corner table, cup of coffee between his hands, he looked out through the window to the street below. Saturday night. Fulton Street busy with traffic, people heading somewhere other than where they'd been for the week. Himself? Not a hope. He was where he'd always been, perhaps where he always would be. He smiled to himself. Today, sitting there listening to the South Two employees tell their little stories, he had noticed
Jimmy Radick - how he looked, his mannerisms, his expressions. He had started to show the signs of wear. You could see his vocation in his eyes: eyes that looked for meaning in shadows. It would not be long, and then the line between who he'd been and what he'd become would blur and disappear. It was the effect that dead teenage girls in trash cans had on you. That was all it was.
An hour later - Parrish surprised at the amount of time he had spent thinking of very little at all - he returned to his desk to check progress on the backgrounds.
Two of them were flagged. The first was Andrew King. The face was there on the screen, but Parrish didn't recognize him from that afternoon's interviews until he realized that the assault charge that had put King in the system dated back to March of '95. It was then that Parrish recalled the man - thirty-four years old, suited, clean shaven, polite, and presentable for any occasion. The picture on file was of a long-haired, unshaven twenty- one-year-old. Appeared that King had gotten into a fight with a grocery store clerk who'd accused him of stealing something. King had hit the guy twice in the face and run, leaving behind his wallet and his groceries. King had turned himself in within half an hour, perhaps to ensure that he got his wallet back. He was arrested, arraigned and brought up. Judge gave him a community order, sent him back to the grocery store to work it off.
And then there was Richard McKee. Appeared that McKee had been handed a caution for violation of a City Building Ordinance. He'd applied for a permit to convert his roof space but began work before the permit arrived. The permit was approved and, in the end, no-one pursued the case, but it was still there in the paperwork.
And that was all he had. Two people. Two bits of paperwork. Nothing substantive, nothing incriminating. But what had he expected?
He ran a search on Lester Young, found four of them - three DUIs and a GTA. They all had work records on the system, and none of them were registered as having been employed by the City in any capacity. So the Lester Young they were after had never been arrested. That was all the system could tell him.
Parrish called it quits. He packed everything up and put the files and reports back in his desk.
Once again he thought of trying to speak with Caitlin, but it was Saturday night. She would more than likely be out with her friends, and if she was not, then she'd have made the definite decision to have a quiet night at home. If either was the case then Parrish would have found himself superfluous or unwanted. He took the subway to DeKalb and walked home. He bought a fifth on the way. He knew he ought to eat something, but he had little appetite. He would have a good breakfast tomorrow. That's what he would do. It would be Sunday, and Sundays were a good day for breakfast.
FORTY-NINE
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2008
The dreams woke him again, but this time he did not get up. He lay amidst a tangle of sweat-dampened sheets and wondered if Marie Griffin would now term him an obsessive.
The girls had been there. Pale blue skin. No eyes, or rather there were eyes, but no whites, no pupils, no color. Black hollows, sunken and shadowed, like small vacuums into which every ounce of light and shade had been absorbed. Everything in some sort of stilted monochrome apart from the fingernails. Red like new blood. But even as he looked at the hand that reached out towards him, he saw that they possessed no prints. Smooth, perfectly smooth, front and back. We are no-one, it said. We have no identity. We were here, and then we were gone, and we are now remembered only by you - Frank Parrish. Only you.
There were flickering images - children broken, children tortured, children abused.
Parrish did not sleep again. Perhaps he dozed for a handful of minutes here and there, but all he could recall when he finally stood beneath the shower was how he had wrestled with the sheets and the pillow, doing all he could to find comfort and finding none.
Whatever thoughts regarding breakfast he might have possessed the night before were now well forgotten. He made coffee, he craved cigarettes, he considered calling Radick and meeting with him to discuss any ideas he might have had regarding the case. If Monday's interviews proved to be as non-productive as those they had already held, then they were going to need another direction in which to take this thing real soon. He thought about walking over to Clare's. Check if Robert was home, see if he had plans. Parrish could hardly remember when he had last seen his son. That was not a good sign. He needed to do something about it.
But Frank Parrish did none of these things. He merely left his apartment and started walking, at first nowhere in particular, but as he crossed the corner of DeKalb and Washington he felt an irresistible need to go back to the location of Kelly's body. He took the long way around Brooklyn Hospital, this time thinking nothing of how he could convince Caitlin to work there, his mind focused on Kelly, the simple fact that she had been strangled and left in a cardboard box.
In the alleyway itself there were no signs that such a thing had ever taken place. There were no shreds of crime scene tape on the handles of the nearby dumpsters. There were no chalk marks on the ground, nothing that would indicate the significance of what had happened only five days before. They were operating on the basis that Kelly had been put in the box and delivered here. That would not have been done in a car. A flatbed, a pickup maybe - something sizeable for sure. And whoever drove it wouldn't have wanted to attract undue attention. A utility vehicle - phone companies, repairmen, something of this nature? Or simply an SUV with a tailgate or a wide rear door.
Did anyone at South Two own such a vehicle?
Parrish thought about the people they had interviewed. Lavelle, Kinnear, King, McKee . . . the others whose names and faces were now a blur. He tried to picture any one of them doing something like this. Did they actually have anything on any of them? And as for Lester Young . . . Hell, as it stood right now, they couldn't even find Lester Young. One fragment of hearsay from Lavelle about McKee, the fact that Andrew King was capable of physical violence, then nothing. On the face of it, McKee seemed the most caring and dedicated of the lot. He'd worked in Welfare South before South Two. He'd known of Jennifer Baumann, but beyond that appeared to have no direct connection to any of the girls. But then no-one in such a position would have been dumb enough to drug and rape and kill his own charges. It all came down to two things: firstly, was the perpetrator an employee of Family Welfare, and secondly, was it a case of direct involvement? Was the South Two employee the killer, or was he passing on details of potential victims to someone outside the employ of the city? That raised one further possibility. If details were being passed out of the system to an external perpetrator, then was the inside man perhaps really a woman?<
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This last question was so anathema to Parrish that he didn't want even to consider it; not until all avenues had been exhausted with the male employees. Until Monday he had no-one.
And it was with that thought that Parrish headed back to his office to see if some further details could maybe be gleaned from different sources.
Using the internal system, he patched into DMV. DMV gave up the drivers' license details for all of the interviewees. There were no outstanding and prior traffic violations, no DUIs - a rarity in itself. King did not have a drivers' license it seemed, and though McKee did, there was no indication that he currently owned a vehicle. That, however, did not preclude the possibility that he did. Unfortunately the system did not work backwards. If Parrish had had a license plate he could have confirmed the registered driver. The database didn't list submissions by name, and thus he could not determine the license plate of a vehicle McKee might have owned. It would be a matter of sitting across the street, waiting for McKee to leave his house, and then following him to see if he walked to a car parked elsewhere. Either that, or ask the man on Monday. But why was he focusing on McKee? Why not Lavelle? There was nothing to tie any of them to any of this. The strongest connection - and this simply because his name had arisen twice - was Lester Young. They had to find him, if only to eliminate him from the investigation.
Once again, Parrish was chasing vague and indistinct shadows, trying to read signs when no signs were present. It had been foolish not to ask all of them when he'd had the chance. And do you drive? You do? What vehicle do you own at the moment? But this was the way such things happened. This was police work. As the investigation progressed and other circumstances were taken into account, new questions needed to be asked. Going back was difficult, especially with such informal interviews. The subject had cooperated, he had answered all questions asked of him, and to go back a second or third time could be construed as harassment. And if the subject was a perp then you were merely putting him on the alert. Now he knew the threads that were being followed. All of a sudden the car has been extensively valeted, every inch of the vehicle washed, polished, wiped, vacuumed and dusted. It was a matter of trying to determine what was needed without making such a thing completely obvious. Perhaps in his professional capacity alone Parrish was capable of subtlety and discretion. With everything else he was clumsy and insensitive. Like in his marriage. Like with his daughter.
Without a warrant he could not run a search on anyone's credit cards to ascertain whether or not they might have hired an SUV or a pickup. As already established, the box itself had given them nothing.
Parrish sat for a while in silence, eyes closed, breathing as slow as he could manage. If one of the South Two employees had killed these girls, assuming that they were all the same perp, then why would he have changed his MO? Say Melissa was the first: why pack her into a trash can and wire the lid shut? Why try to hide her? Then later, confidence increasing perhaps, he decides not to hide them at all? One in a mattress bag, another in a motel room, a third in her brother's apartment. No attempt to hide the bodies. So did that exclude Melissa from the serial, or did it make her the beginning of an evolving pattern? The broken neck was an index, but there was no way now to determine if her fingernails had been painted like the others.
Parrish tried to quell his frustration. He tried to focus on something, anything, that would make these things gel. Six dead. Six ghosts. And where were the girls killed? Rohypnol played its part, certainly with some of them, more than likely with them all. They were kidnapped - or lured somewhere - and drugged. Their hair was cut, their fingernails painted. They had sexual intercourse, quite probably unaware of that, and then they were strangled. Snuff movies? Was that it? He recalled the conversations with Swede and Larry Temple. Such people as these were too small for this. Gonzo porn, underage stuff yes, but serial killing for snuff movies? It was not in their repertoire. He thought about who he knew, what lowlifes might have slid across his desk in earlier years. Had he ever run a snuff case? Had he ever heard of one in the Precinct? He couldn't recall one.
This was something new, something out of the regular ballpark.
Parrish rose and walked to the narrow window that looked down into the street. He was unable to define how he felt. Adrift? Without an anchor? Certainly disturbed by the seeming lack of anything substantial throughout this entire case. Yes, he was assuming they were all linked, but not without reason. Yes, he was working on stale cases that had long since been dropped by the original investigating officers. Yes, he had included a case that was way out of precinct jurisdiction, and yet bore all the hallmarks of the same perpetrators.
It was intuition, gut feeling, something so basic and fundamental to this business that it gave substance to his certainty. Like a blind man with an astonishingly acute sense of hearing, Parrish believed that all cops - certainly those that dealt with homicide - cultivated an extended sensory catalog. They sacrificed personal stability for intuition; exchanged marital comfort for an innate conviction that someone had lied; let go of parental skills to make way for the unrelenting persistence necessary to watch someone for three months before they made a move. It was a trade-off, always a trade-off, and though the faculties gained were redundant once your work was over, they were still as much a part of you as your memories of better times.
It was this, and this alone, that gave Parrish the resolve to keep on looking, to keep on asking questions, to do everything he could to bring the girls' murderer to a small and airless interrogation room in the basement of the 126th Precinct. Either that, or to see him dead.
FIFTY
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2008
'I'm reassured that you came.'
'Reassured about what?'
'About you, Frank . . . you have more staying power than I gave you credit for.'
'I figured you'd get DTs if I didn't show up.'
'So we're talking again?'
'We were never not talking. You were the one who said you didn't want me to come anymore. You were the one who was going to give up on me.'
'I have to apologize for that, Frank. It was actually unprofessional of me to say that to you. Sometimes you deal with someone and it becomes so much more than the job. You know what I mean, right?'
'Sure.'
'So we start over. A clean slate. I know you want this to work, Frank, and I think that the only way that will happen is if we make it work.'
'I still don't really understand what we're trying to accomplish here.'
'But you understand enough to know that it might help.'
'Maybe. Yes, sure . . . whatever, you know?'
'So we have talked about your daughter. We've talked some about the case you're working on. The thing we talked most about was your father, and I don't think we ever really came to a conclusion about that.'
'How d'you mean - conclusion?'
'Your conclusion, Frank. Whether or not you feel you have attained some sense of closure about who he was and the effect he had on your life.'
'Closure? That's such a bullshit word, don't you think? What does that even mean?'
it means simply that you feel you have come to terms with something. That you have reconciled yourself to something—'
'I'm not the sort of person who reconciles himself to things easily.'
'So perhaps we need to talk more about him.'
'I don't know what else to tell you.'
'I have a question . . . just something that I was considering over the weekend.'
'Go for it.'
'Do you think you are how you are as some sort of revolt against him?'
'In what way?'
'The apparency. He appeared to be the model cop, but he was actually a very destructive and corrupt man. You appear to be destructive—'
'That would make sense if I was all good inside, but I'm not, believe me.'
'You don't think you're a good man?'
'I don't know what I am, but I know I have a habit of fucking
things up. I mean, just look at what happened with Radick and Caitlin.'
'It's not uncommon for people undergoing counselling to start letting go of some of the feelings they have been suppressing, Frank. Not uncommon at all. Your outburst towards your daughter represented not only a desire and an impulse to protect her, but also has to be viewed in light of the fact that right now she is the only person in your family that you feel you can still affect.'
'I'm trying to help her.'
'I know you are, Frank.'
'So how comes it ends up harming?'
'I can't answer that, Frank, only you can.'
'God almighty, are you never allowed to just state an opinion? Why do you have to be so goddamned careful about everything you say?'
'Because our conversations are not about what I think, they're not about my opinions. They're about yours.'
'So you want to know my opinion?'
'That's why we're here, Frank.'
'On anything in particular?'
'Your opinion about your job for starters. Tell me your opinion about what you think you're doing, and why. Tell me your opinion about the people you have to contend with, the victims and the perpetrators.'
'My opinion? My opinion is that everyone has the capacity for evil. It isn't genes and chromosomes, for God's sake. It's situational dynamics, it's environment, and maybe it's even mental illness, and I don't think anyone even has a glimpse into the truth of that. Maybe it's just that some people are naturally destructive, and maybe some have the capacity to withhold themselves and some don't. I think psychiatry and psychology are little more than guesswork. I think they blur the lines. Hell, it used to be easy to tell the difference between the perps and the vics. Then these people, people who were supposed to be authorities on the subject, came along and started to tell us that these assholes were just as much victims themselves. Victims of society, victims of parental abuse, victims of neglect. Christ, if everyone who'd been mistreated as a child wound up a serial killer then there'd be nobody fucking left. Well, as far as I'm concerned these supposed authorities did accomplish something. They convinced us that assholes do bad shit to people not because they're just assholes, but because of the terrible fucking things that were done to them when they were kids. They're telling us it's not their fault, that they're a product of the society we've created. And all the lawyers get on the bandwagon. Prosecutors become defenders. Expert ; witnesses testify on behalf of whoever writes the largest checks. They even contradict their own testimonials and says it's because there's been further research, and then you find out it's because the defense attorneys just put another zero onto their fee. It all ended up about money. It stopped being about guilt and innocence, and started being about the skill with which lawyers could manipulate juries. Used to be that theories would fall apart in the face of facts. Now the facts have become fluid. The facts can be altered, at least the way that people are given the facts. And thisjob? What we do? You have no idea how frustrating this can be. We are fighting a losing battle. The harder we work to bring justice back to the law, the harder the law fights to make real justice unattainable for most.'
