by James Tucker
She doesn’t understand, he thought. She’s just focused on the money.
As one of the surviving family members who owned Brook Instruments, the orphaned Ben had inherited several billion dollars. That money, Buddy thought, is a curse and the only reason Judge Miles would award custody of Ben to his aunt and uncle, two cold-as-fish liars who have no love for the boy. They were the ones who wanted Ben’s money. Buddy didn’t give a damn about it. He and Mei had told Judge Miles they’d keep the money in trust and would use it only for Ben’s school tuition and college, and that Mei had family money. Yet Buddy wasn’t certain the judge believed them.
His cell phone rang again. He glanced over at Mei and saw her shake her head. So he pulled the phone from the left breast pocket of his suit coat and prepared to mute it. But when he checked the screen and saw the number, he experienced the usual thrill at the main number of the New York City Police Department. His blood quickened as he thought that maybe, just maybe, he’d been brought back on active duty and been given a case. He hit the talk button. “Lock here.”
“Hey, Buddy. It’s Jackson. Got a call from a crank. Some fisherman on Long Island reported an old man and woman caught up in his nets. He was . . . let me find it here . . . thirty-two miles offshore when he found them. Says he’ll talk only to you.”
Buddy thought about the bodies found out in the Atlantic. Where exactly had the fisherman found them? And in what condition? And why were they in the ocean when nobody went boating, not this time of year, during an unexpectedly frigid January? He thought they might be suicides. But that didn’t make sense to him. People rarely drowned themselves. It was too unpleasant and took too long. No, something else had happened in the waters off Long Island.
As Jackson continued talking, now about how Buddy’s recent television interviews made everyone else look bad, Buddy paced back and forth from the door to Judge Miles’s chambers to the dirty beige wall at the far end of the hallway. He thought about Long Island—far beyond his jurisdiction. Forcing himself to breathe deeply, he reached the end of the hallway, turned, and headed back.
“Buddy?” It was Mei, not Jackson. She’d stood and was watching him, her beautiful face showing concern. “Is everything all right?”
He held the phone against his chest. “Yeah. I’ve got a case. Catch up with you and Ben tonight?”
Her forehead wrinkled briefly. She’d wanted his help in taking Ben to school and handling the emotional turmoil from the boy’s interview with Judge Miles. But she understood him. She said, “You’ll be home for dinner?”
He nodded briefly, kissed her cheek, and walked toward the other end of the hallway. He looked up at the pale fluorescent lights and thought of ways to be reinstated in short order. This was a major obstacle. He might be able to swing it if Chief Malone were in his corner. Or Mayor Blenheim, for that matter. But as of this moment, he couldn’t do anything. He remained on administrative leave due to his being part of an officer-involved shooting three weeks earlier—the shooting that had brought the murders of Ben’s family members to a close. Today, he had no badge or service weapon. He couldn’t investigate. Couldn’t work at all.
But he would work. That was how he was made. That’s why he rarely took vacation. Because he was a detective first grade with the NYPD, and that meant a hell of a lot to him. For more than twenty years, his job had been his anchor. He’d built his life around being a detective, and in return, he’d received pride, honor, purpose, and a way to fight off the demons of his past. An essential trade, because without the NYPD, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with his life—not during the day when Ben was at school and Mei at Porter Gallery.
He turned at the end of the hallway and began walking toward the elevator. He thought of the bodies found thirty-two miles from shore.
An accident? he wondered. Or something else?
Into the phone he said, “The fisherman out on Long Island. What’s his number?”
4
Late morning, Buddy stood on the dock next to Mack Berringer’s forty-foot trawler, the Salty Lady. He was trying to follow Mack’s explanation of the currents off the coast of New York City and Long Island.
Ignoring the bitter wind coming off the water, Mack pointed in a southerly direction. “So they come up from the Jersey Shore, and then they’re like a slingshot out along Fire Island and the Hamptons. At that point”—Mack started rotating his swollen and weathered hands—“they gather force off the coast and swing out to the real depths where I fish.”
Buddy nodded, but he didn’t know exactly what Mack was telling him. He glanced around. The air around the docks smelled acrid with brine and the strong, almost overpowering smell of fish, raw and pungent with decay.
The continuous sounds of rigging clanging lightly against metal. The cawing of gulls that wheeled overhead or stood on the tops of the dock posts yards away, waiting for the men to leave so they could search for scraps on the deck of Mack’s boat. Buddy saw these pretty vultures and how they relied on others to do their killing for them. A beneficial arrangement, as long as the killers did what they were supposed to do. He turned to the blue-painted trawler to his right, touching its cold fiberglass hull and finding it slick with seawater. He rubbed his hands together to dry them; Mack Berringer seemed not to notice.
“So,” Mack concluded, “that’s why they didn’t enter the water from shore—not from any shore, right?”
Buddy hesitated, cocked his head. He said, “Because any current would have taken them out into the deep, eventually, but to get from any point on shore to where you found them, they’d have been in the water for days.”
Mack nodded. “Yes, sir. And now we’ll take a look at them, and you can tell me if you think they’ve been in water for days or for hours.”
Buddy followed Mack up the ladder on the side of the trawler. He said, “I’m not a medical examiner.”
“Me neither,” Mack called back to him. “But I’m not stupid.”
On the deck, Buddy kept his feet wide apart. He didn’t want to fall onto the deck that was greasy with the remnants of fish. He watched as Mack knelt down, took hold of an olive-green tarpaulin, and pulled back the waterproof fabric, revealing two corpses. At once the trawler, the gulls, and Mack faded away. He was alone, not so much thinking as observing, absorbing.
He noticed both bodies were bruised, but only one side of the woman, and the man’s limbs. Pulling out the latex exam gloves he kept with him at all times, he squatted down and looked at the woman’s hands, touching them, feeling the stiffness of rigor mortis. The fourth finger on the woman’s left hand showed signs of two rings.
Mack Berringer said, “Detective Lock. Here they are.”
At the edge of his vision, he saw the flash of metal under the gray skies. He turned over his hand, and Mack set an engagement ring and a wedding band in his palm. He studied the engagement ring. A sizable square-cut diamond that flashed white and blue under the clouds. On the inside of the ring were markings. Bringing it closer to his eyes, he read an inscription in cursive: for L.
He looked up at the fisherman. He was beginning to trust Mack Berringer. Mack stared back at him, his face inscrutable. Buddy again studied the ring before pulling out his cell phone and taking several photographs of it.
When he’d finished, he asked, “You found the bodies thirty miles from shore?”
Mack said, “Thirty-two.”
Buddy had observed their condition, had made the same mental calculations that Mack Berringer had. Given their state of decay and their susceptibility to the teeth of fish and sharks, he knew they couldn’t have been in the water more than a few hours. Maybe even less. He didn’t know the ocean and its tides and currents as Mack did, but he knew he’d heard a wrong note.
Buddy said, “Any other jewelry?”
Mack Berringer reached into the bib pocket of his work pants and handed Buddy a black medallion on a leather string.
Buddy tilted his head. Turned the medallion around in hi
s hand. It was heavier than he’d expected. One side was smooth black stone. On the other side, the image of a white flower on the black background, and in the middle of the flower petals, a slightly yellowish bulb. He didn’t remember the names of flower parts. Maybe the yellowish part was called the pistil. But maybe not. He guessed the black was onyx or synthetic. The white and yellow parts seemed to be ivory and gold inlay. Below the image of the flower was a symbol carved into the black stone. The symbol looked like Chinese lettering, but to his untrained eye, it could be Korean or Japanese or another language that used symbols. He held the medallion close to his eyes. He thought it might be old, but maybe it was only made to look that way. He didn’t recognize the flower. Given the ethnicity of the dead man and woman, he guessed it was Chinese or, at any rate, Asian, but he didn’t know. He said, “Know what it is?”
Mack Berringer shook his head. “Some kind of flower, maybe.”
A second time, Buddy pulled out his phone and took a few photographs of the medallion. Once he’d put it in the right side pocket of his parka, together with the wedding band and the diamond ring, he zipped up the pocket and patted down the woman, followed by the man.
He found nothing.
Mack Berringer said, “No ID. I checked when we picked them up.”
Buddy nodded slowly, then stood and looked over the transom to the frigid water of the inlet. This time of year—late January—you’d last a few minutes if you were lucky. He thought these people might have been dead before they got wet. He breathed in the wind as it screamed toward the land and froze his ears.
Mack Berringer called from behind him, “Need me for anything else?”
It took a few moments for Buddy to hear the older man. When he did, he shook his head but didn’t turn from the ocean. He said, “I’ll have people come for them.”
He sensed rather than heard Mack Berringer leave the boat. The starboard side dipped and rose as the fisherman stepped off. A more intense quiet enveloped Buddy even in the midst of the howling wind.
Buddy was thinking about the dead couple and how they’d been found more than thirty miles off Long Island in a snowless winter gale. His experience and training had taught him to see patterns and to expect and even to know with certainty what the next note would be. Long before he’d flubbed his senior recital at Juilliard and given up the piano, he’d been a child prodigy. Since he was three years old, his mind had been trained to observe at a freakish level of detail. For a long time, he’d succeeded.
Before turning fourteen, he’d performed in London, Paris, Milan, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna. His mind absorbed structure and pattern in a way few others did. And because he saw patterns that others couldn’t, he saw exactly where patterns failed. He saw the wrong note among a hundred or a thousand right ones. Even more, he was interested in discovering why the note was wrong. He obsessed about the wrong note and making it right. It was this obsession that led to his relentlessness. He couldn’t help himself. He always felt like he must figure it out. He couldn’t stop his work until he understood what was wrong and had tried to fix it. Tried, using all tools available to a first-grade detective.
The badge. The full force and power of the NYPD. Search warrants. If necessary, his fists and his gun: tools of aggression and violence just this side of legal.
And sometimes beyond.
5
But he had no jurisdiction over this case.
He turned from the water and the sharp wind, and again observed the dead bodies of the older Asian man and woman, the docks and the other fishing boats behind them, and behind these, the shore and the low-slung commercial buildings, gray and weathered from years of a harsh climate in all seasons.
He thought the case properly belonged with the police on Long Island. He’d have to pull some strings if he wanted to work it. And he did want to work it.
He pulled out his mobile phone, his exposed hand burning from the cold, the wind, the fine icy spray coming over the gunwale. After dialing, he held the phone to his right ear and listened over the whistling wind.
He waited for the ringing. He thought about what he’d say in order to grab the case. He thought he could do something with it. His mind had begun circling it. He felt a sort of compulsion to figure it out—the what, the who, the why. Once, late at night, he’d admitted to Mei that he couldn’t control the need.
Her head had been on his chest, her silky black hair smooth against his skin. She’d reached up with her warm hand and touched the line of his jaw, soothing him. “Yes,” she’d whispered, “I know.”
“You aren’t angry?” he’d asked.
“No.”
“Then you’d be the first woman I’ve dated who isn’t.”
“Shhh,” she’d said, placing an index finger over his lips. “As long as you need me more than your job, I can’t find any fault.”
In response he’d rubbed her back, bent his head, and kissed her hair.
She’d lifted her head and looked at him faintly in the darkness. “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you need me more than you need your job?”
He’d smiled, although she couldn’t see him. Laughed and said, “Yes. Yes, I need you more than anything.”
She’d slid off him, kissed his chest, reached down, slowly, below his navel, and touched him. Softly at first. Then she used her fingernail with just enough pressure to cause pain and surprising pleasure. She’d said, “Show me how much you need me.”
He’d waited a moment, to be sure she meant it. His reaction to the pressure of her hand told him he could do it again if she were sincere, even if they’d made love twice over the past hour. He’d said, “Again?”
“Do you want me to beg?”
“No. I just didn’t think you wanted more.”
“Well, I want more. Now.”
Then he’d taken control. He’d moved. His large body against her slender one.
Standing on the deck of the fishing boat, listening to the phone line ringing, he knew that he wouldn’t do anything to put what he had with Mei in danger. What he had with Ben. He wanted a normal case that he could work eight-to-five and not bring home with him. This one seemed to fit the bill. It was old-fashioned detective work that had no connection to Mei and Ben. In no event would he take a case that might bring death or worse to the two people he loved. Not after the case regarding Ben’s family that he’d resolved less than a month ago.
If I take this case, he thought, they’ll be safe.
6
At the security checkpoint, the guards recognized Buddy. Nobody smiled, but they watched him carefully.
It was past three in the afternoon when he walked into One Police Plaza, the large red brick building that was home to the NYPD. He was the only detective, other than Mike Malone, chief of detectives, who’d been a regular on television after solving two high-profile serial murder cases over the past couple of years. After the very public events of three weeks earlier, the guards knew he was on mandatory administrative leave.
Standing before the scanning machine, he removed a Glock 26 from his IWB—inside-the-waistband—holster and set it in a plastic container to be examined by one of the guards. This “baby Glock,” his personal weapon for which he had a specially issued permit from Police Commissioner Quinn, didn’t raise anyone’s alarms. Without being asked, he took out his permit and held it up for the guard on the other side of the conveyor belt. The guard glanced at it, nodded, and Buddy walked through the metal detector. On the other side, the guard passed the Glock to him, and he put it back in the IWB holster.
He visited One Police only when necessary. He didn’t like oversight and avoided management whenever possible, although he trusted Chief Malone. Investigating was his thing, not politicking. But today his pulse jumped. This was the heart of the NYPD, and he belonged here. Today, he wanted something.
After depositing with the property clerk in room 208 the wedding band and the engagement ring that Mack Berringer h
ad pulled off the dead woman, he took the elevator upstairs. In the front pocket of his trousers, he kept the medallion he’d taken from the John Doe. Despite regulations requiring him to leave all evidence with the clerk, he thought mere photographs of it wouldn’t be enough.
In Malone’s office, the chief of detectives’ domed forehead shone in the overhead fluorescent lights. His red-rimmed eyes showed fatigue but also amusement. He said, “Why are you here? Did you miss me?”
Buddy didn’t answer or sit down. In Chief Malone’s large office with the tired furniture, the framed photographs of Malone with the governor and with Mayor Blenheim and with two presidents of the United States of America, he hesitated, but only to impress upon the chief the right amount of gravity. Finally, he told Malone of the bodies found early that morning off the coast of Long Island: two sixtysomething Asians, no ID, far out from shore but physically intact. While he was still speaking, Malone picked up his desk phone, punched in an extension, and said, “My office.” Then he hung up the phone and watched Buddy.
Buddy finished describing what he’d found. “Chief, would you give me a month?”
Malone scowled. “We have enough cases in the city. Why bring in a Long Island case that’s got nothing to do with us?”
Buddy said, “It’s connected.”
Malone laughed heartily, clearly enjoying himself. “Connected to what?”
“To the city.”
