by R.J. Ellory
'We think - we know - someone has killed a teenage girl,'
Parrish replied, 'and we believe that it might be someone connected directly or indirectly to Family Welfare. Like I said, and this is no bullshit, we're talking to everyone, we're following every line, we're tracking dirt across everyone's carpet, you know? This isn't something we can fuck about with, Carole. This isn't something that you can talk to your kids about, or call Richard on, and you can never, never bring it up when he comes over to get Sarah and Alex—'
'Well, I'll tell you something right now, he is not coming over to get Sarah and Alex, not this weekend, not any fucking weekend—'
'That's the point right there, Carole,' Parrish said. 'That's what we cannot do. You can't assume that he has anything to do with this, and we can't afford to have you give anything away. You cannot let him know that we spoke to you, and you cannot give him the impression that you are aware of us speaking to him at his workplace. If he brings it up, then just treat it as irrelevant. Show whatever level of interest you would ordinarily show, and no more. I really need you to work with me on this point, okay? We might be right off-track on this, you know? We might be looking in completely the wrong direction. Like I said before, we're going with everything we can, but we're treading careful because this is a big case and - potentially - something that could go very very wrong if we make a mess of it. You say the wrong thing then, if he is guilty of something, well then that would seriously hamper any chances we might have of bringing him in.'
Carole Paretski sighed audibly. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes for a moment. 'You're telling me that my ex- husband might be a child-killer but, regardless, you want me to let him come over on Saturday and take the kids off me for two days.'
'It's this coming weekend that he has them for both days, right?'
'Yes, it is.'
'Well, yes, that's what I want you to do, and I want you to do it just like always. We find anything else then he might be a guest of ours this weekend and you won't have anything to worry about.'
'Okay . . . okay . . .'
'So back to the question. Do you think that your husband possesses the capability and potential to harm or hurt another human being?'
Again she closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them they were flint-hard. 'Hurt another human being?' she echoed. 'I'll tell you something, Detective Parrish, most murderers are fucking cowards. They're liars and they're cowards. Well, Richard McKee is a liar and a coward, and I think if it came down to it, if it meant the difference between self-preservation or not, then yes, 1 believe he could hurt another human being.'
Parrish was silent for a moment, and then he leaned back in his chair and nodded his head. He wondered whether he was hearing something of substance, or simply the bitter resentment of a betrayed ex-wife. Wouldn't Clare say precisely the same thing about him? Obsessive, married to the job, capable of lying, of hurting people, neglectful? Of course she would, and she would say worse.
'I thought that's what you might say,' he replied. 'I really didn't want to hear you say it, but that's what I believed you were going to say.'
'So what now?' she said. 'You want to look at his porn collection?'
'You what?'
'I have them. The magazines and DVDs. Boxes of the shit in the garage. I told him I was going to get it destroyed, but I didn't. I don't really know why ... I just didn't know what the fuck to do with it.'
'We absolutely do want to see it,' Parrish said.
Carole Paretski got up. 'So you can save me a trip to the waste dump. You can come get it from the house right now.'
They left together. Radick called Crime Scene and told them to meet them at the Paretski address. They needed photos of the boxes in situ before they took them away.
FIFTY-FIVE
Parrish was disappointed. The boxes of pornography turned out to be two, not twelve or fifteen or twenty. The magazines were magazines, the DVDs were DVDs. It was the kind of thing that Joel Erickson would call 'lightweight'. It was not difficult to see that many of them were well in excess of eighteen years of age, and yet dressed and photographed in such a way as to make them appear younger. It was impossible to know - as with all such photographs - how many were there consensually or there against their will; how many were drugged or drunk or stoned or threatened; how many were being blackmailed or prostituted, or how many had been convinced that if they didn't do what they were told and make like they were enjoying it, then something dreadful would happen to them, their loved ones, their friends . . .
It was impossible to know anything except that Richard McKee was a man who possessed a predilection for young-looking girls. This was not the dark world that Parrish had hoped he would uncover.
Parrish and Radick stood in the corner of Carole Paretski's garage on Steuben Street. Crime Scene had been and gone, pictures had been taken. They had been given clearance to examine the contents of the boxes, and they did so while Carole Paretski hovered by the connecting door to ensure that Sarah and Alex didn't wander through to see what was going on.
'I told the kids you were bug people. Said that we might have a roach infestation and you were going to check it out. I told them to stay in the house until after you'd gone.'
'Where did he hide these when you were together?' Parrish asked her.
'In the crawl space up here,' she replied, and indicated the passageway that ran from the garage to the roof of the kitchen. 'You can access it through a trap over in the corner.'
Parrish noted the trap, wondered if there was anything else up there that would be of interest. He remembered the permit, the citation from the City for Ordinance Violation.
'I went up there,' Carole Paretski said, anticipating his next question. 'I had a real good look, and there isn't anything else.'
'Are there any other places in the house where he could have hidden things?'
'I'm sure there are. You want to have a look?'
'Most definitely,' Parrish said, 'but I'd have to get a warrant and I'd have to arrange to get it done while the kids were away. I also wouldn't want to leave any indications that we'd been here.'
if I give you permission you don't need a warrant, right?'
'That's right, yes.'
'So you have my permission, and the kids are away all day tomorrow. You have some people that can do this, then let's get it done.'
'Thank you, Carole. That's much appreciated,' Parrish said.
She didn't say a word in response. She hesitated for a moment, almost as if she wanted to look once more through that dark and narrow window into her husband's soul, and then she turned and closed the garage door behind her.
Parrish and Radick went through the magazines and DVDs. Barely Legal. Just Eighteen. Teen Dreams. All the material possessed that same consistent thread, yet none of it was any worse than the usual fare one found on the shelves of drugstores and supermarkets all across the country. Perhaps that was the saddest thing of all - the fact that such material was now nothing more than routine. Girls subjected to the degrading parodies of sex that were so prevalent in such publications. Anal, oral, double penetration, undertones of bondage and SM; some of them dressed as schoolgirls, as cheerleaders, some of them displaying that flash of fear or anxiety that they would have been forced to hide with wide eyes and false smiles. No, no, no . . . look like you're enjoying yourself!
'This is not what I wanted to find,' Radick commented.
'Same here,' Parrish replied. 'The more I see, the more I think we might be dealing with an external connection, someone outside of Welfare. Whoever got Rebecca killed Danny, remember? I don't get that McKee is capable of shooting someone in the head with a .22, but if there's someone in the porn business he's working with then there'll be no shortage of people capable of that.'
'You figure a lot of these girls wind up dead?'
'Dead, or addicts, maybe in the porn business for real, or working as hookers. They all wind up the same way eventually. Very r
are to find anyone who makes it out, and if they do they're badly broken.'
'So we go through the rest of the house tomorrow, and then what?'
'We have to find something more than this tomorrow or we have to drop him.' Parrish held up one of the magazines. 'This shit I can buy at the drugstore.' He threw the magazine back into the box. 'This gets us nothing aside from the fact that he likes to read porn. We could never prove that he knowingly purchased magazines featuring underage girls. The fact that he works at Family Welfare is circumstantial; so is the fact that he drives an SUV. In all honesty, we still have nothing.'
'But do you think he's the guy? Do you think there's even the slightest possibility that he might be the guy?'
Parrish closed his eyes for a moment. He then turned and looked upwards, up to the trapdoor, the crawl space within which Richard McKee had hidden his boxes of porn, and he said, 'I can't get away from the fact that it has to be someone at South Two, and right now I have no-one else who even comes close. We've lost Lester Young. Now I want McKee to be the guy. That's all I can say. I really want him to be the fucking guy.'
'And for tonight?' Radick asked.
'I'll get Ms Paretski to sign something that turns this over to us. I'll put it in evidence lock-up. You go home, I'll wrap up here. I'll get Valderas to give us three or four uniforms for the morning and we come back and go through this place in detail. I want to see if there's anything beyond circumstantial that connects him.'
'I'll come back to the Precinct with you,' Radick said. 'I havenowhere important to go tonight.'
*
Carole Paretski seemed relieved at the disappearance of the boxes in the garage.
'What time do the kids leave for school?' Parrish asked her.
'Eight-thirty. Leave it until nine if you can.'
'And you don't have to go to work?'
'I won't go tomorrow,' she said. 'I'll call in. They won't have a problem.'
'I wish everyone we dealt with was as co-operative as you,' Radick said.
She shook her head. She hesitated as the sound of one of the kids running across the upper landing interrupted her. Whichever one it was, they didn't come down the stairs.
'It's like the end of something,' she said. 'I've struggled with this for a long time. I don't know what to think about it now. I try to make sense of it. He worked, he paid for the things that he needed to pay for, but there was always that distance. I thought it was me. You always think it's you, right?'
Parrish started to agree but Carole Paretski wasn't waiting for an answer to her question.
'It's almost like I'm trying to do everything to get rid of that part of my life.'
'And the kids?' Parrish asked.
She shrugged. 'I don't know what to think about them. They don't ask me about him. They never talk about the divorce. They go with him when he comes to take them. They do whatever they do - Chinese meals, movies, going to the mall, and they come back with stuff that he's bought them. Father's day they send cards. They ask me for money to buy him stuff for his birthday and for Christmas. They see what they want to see and they don't look for anything else.'
'And if something comes of this? If we learn that he might have been indirectly involved in something that—'
Carole Paretski raised her hand to silence Parrish. 'We jump off those bridges when we get there/ she said. 'Before that I don't want to know, and I'm not going to ask, okay?'
'Okay,' Parrish replied. 'We'll get out of here now. Weil be back in the morning. Jimmy here will come with some uniforms atnine, and I'll be here a little later.'
*
Parrish and Radick made their way back to the Precinct in silence. They delivered the boxes to Evidence, where they were bagged and tagged. They divided the paperwork between them, and then Parrish went looking for Valderas.
Valderas didn't have a problem giving them three uniforms, but he wanted something in writing from Carole Paretski, witnessed by at least two of the attending officers, stating that she had given permission for the house to be searched.
Parrish said he would type it up before he left.
Radick took off just before ten. It had been a long day, and already they were a considerable number of hours off-shift. Times like this it didn't matter. Times like this it ceased to be a job, ceased to be anything but something that needed to be done.
Parrish sat at his desk alone. He remembered one of the last things that Carole Paretski had said. It's almost like I'm trying to do everything to get rid of that part of my life. Was she co-operating with them because it was a way of getting back at her ex-husband? Was there nothing here at all? A guy who worked too hard, who neglected his family, a guy who liked to read porn, a guy who may or may not have said something to a little girl in a fucking playground however many years before, who happened to own an SUV. A guy who was in the frame for something that had nothing at all to do with him. And was he there simply because there was no-one else? Was he getting too stuck on McKee because that's what happened in this line of work, where desperation for a result could become an obsession?
Parrish thought about how it would be to change things. People did change their lives - sometimes the decision as rapid and definitive as a lightning strike. He had seen it happen. They cut out for some distant state - Wisconsin or Nebraska or somewhere - nothing for miles but storm clouds and the promise of more distance. A house built of rough timber on a foundation of disused sleepers and cinder blocks, the only sound that of the wind, or of the infrequent passage of semis on the interstate. Nothing louder than someone breathing in the next room.
Parrish believed that if he did such a thing he would never forget New York. He had seen veterans - ten years retired, the rush and punch of the hunt nothing more than a vague memory, part of some other life now disowned and un-remembered. Parrish could do such a thing. He could make such a decision. But he knew he would not. He was one of those who would walk away from the building and feel homesick after five blocks.
There was a point where you realized you had done all the changing you were going to do. The person you had become was the person you would always and forever be. In the vast majority of cases such a realization was a disappointment, an anticlimax. In Parrish's case it was a fact and a reality, and he didn't need to avoid it.
For a brief moment he thought to call Eve. He decided against it. He wanted to be alone.
He got up and looked down at the files on his desk. This is what I do, he thought. This is what I will always do. This is my heroin.
FIFTY-SIX
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2008
'We're searching his ex-wife's place now.'
'That's where you took the porn from last night?'
'Yeah, that's right.'
'And she's co-operating with you on this?'
'Couldn't be more co-operative.'
'Does that concern you?'
'What? That she might be helping us to get back at him?'
'They're estranged, aren't they? You said that things hadn't been amicable.'
'When the hell is a divorce ever amicable? Seems an oxymoron to me. An amicable divorce. If they're so fucking amicable why don't they stay together?'
'That sounds a little bitter, Frank?'
'Whatever. Fact of the matter is that Jimmy Radick is over there right now with some uniforms and they're going to see if there's anything even vaguely incriminating.'
'Such as?'
'Well, if he's the perp, if he actually did the girls, then it's not uncommon for such people to keep mementos. Maybe he left something there and hasn't been able to go back and get it. If he's just passing information on to someone outside Family Welfare, then there may be an address book, an old cell phone, something that ties him into this.'
'But the earliest case you have is - when did you say?'
'Earliest one we have on record is October 2006. Melissa. The runaway.'
'But he split with his wife before that, three years ago.' 'Sure he did, but who's
to say that Melissa was the first? And he has been back there many times since.'
'Just to collect the kids for the weekend, right?'
'Sure, but who the hell knows what he might have left there. I know it's the longest of long shots but it's not something I can overlook.'
'You think he's your guy.'
'I hope he's our guy.'
'But do you think he is?'
'Honestly? I have nothing. Not of any substance. I am interested in McKee solely because I feel certain it's someone from Family Welfare, directly or indirectly. It has to be someone from inside the unit itself. And, truth is, I now have no-one else that even raises an eyebrow from me.'
'And there's no doubt it's someone inside Family Welfare?'
'No, no doubt as far as I'm concerned. There's too much circumstantial evidence to indicate it's any other way.'
'So where do you go with it now?'
'We have to find something sufficiently probative to get a warrant for his current place of residence, his car, access to his finance records, whatever we can get to. I'd like a DNA sample, his prints, some of his hair, you know? I want anything I can get on him that can be used to cross-reference against the samples we have from the girls.'
'Does it frustrate you?'
'Of course it frustrates me.'
'Do you ever feel like stepping over the lines to get what you need?'
'Sure I do. Who doesn't? But you don't, do you? You start down that road and you wind up like my father.'
'You believe that's what happened? That he started out doing things for the good, and it all went bad?'
'With my father? No, I shouldn't think so. I figure that he started out bad and it just got worse.'
'Do you feel any need to tell the world what he was really like?'
'I haven't really thought about it since we last spoke of him, so no, maybe not. Maybe I can just let him rot in hell.'
'Do you consider that's progress? Do you consider that you're carrying a little less baggage now?' 'Hell, you know me. I put down one suitcase full of shit I'm just gonna go pick another one up.'
