Jack studied the woman in front of him. He took his time—it was his colleague Carl Santiago’s case, and he was just along to help out. “So, are you a nun?” he asked.
The woman nodded. Very calm. Calmer than she should be if she had been close to the victim. Maybe the monk had been new to the center?
“How long did you know”—he glanced down at his notepad—“Andrew Steinberg?” The members of the center referred to the victim as Gen Kelsang Thubten. That seemed to be the style here: The clergy had an extra handle, like Brooklyn homeboys with their street names.
“He has been with our center for the past four years.” Another surprise: The woman had a rather stuffy British accent.
“Would you say that you were close?”
“I would. He was one of my senior students before he was ordained, and we’ve worked together ever since.”
“Would you say that you liked him?” It wasn’t a professional question, really, but Jack found himself wanting to shake up the nun’s unnerving composure, just on the off-chance that she had some hidden reason for staying so calm…
“I would say that I loved him,” the nun replied evenly. “Almost like I love my own children.”
Jack’s eyes widened; he couldn’t help it. “You have children?”
The woman smiled slightly, as though she was aware of his uncharitable assumptions, yet was not disturbed by them. “I used to be what you would call a housewife. I became a nun twelve years ago.”
Jack’s curiosity was piqued, but he didn’t follow up—so far as he knew, this woman’s former life had nothing to do with the matter at hand. He needed to get started with the usual drill: What was the victim’s schedule; Had he had run-ins with neighborhood kids before?…Still, something didn’t feel right. Just because the woman was a nun didn’t mean she was free of any connection to her young colleague’s death. Jack wanted to get underneath her serene exterior, to probe around a little.
He knew just how to ruffle her. “What’s your real name?” he asked. Clearly she had invested a lot in her religious authority, and would bridle at having it challenged.
“Charlotte Colson,” she replied without hesitation or irritation.
“Where were you at the time of the incident?”
“I was at home.”
Jack had to admit that he had no reason to challenge her answer. Unless something unexpected popped up, he was pretty sure how the case would shake out: The kids who had done the crime would get nervous, and one of them would rat the others out.
He leaned back in his chair. “You seem very calm today.”
The nun didn’t stir. “I don’t think that getting agitated will help the situation.”
Jack’s eyebrows went up again. “A little grief would be normal.”
The woman seemed to wrestle a bit with her answer. “I don’t…perhaps we have a way of dealing with things that might be a bit different than you’re used to.”
Jack glanced around the room. “What? This Buddhist thing? How’s that different? Your friend’s gonna come back in another life, or something?”
The woman seemed to consider a response, but she refrained. “I’m sure you didn’t come here for a lecture on Buddhism.”
Jack frowned. Maybe he hadn’t gone to a fancy college, but he had completed his own rigorous course of study: Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, Toxicology, Forensic Psychology…and he could certainly detect a little intellectual condescension when it came his way.
“Try me,” he said curtly.
The nun frowned. “You must be very busy.”
“I’ve got time.”
The nun considered him frankly. Then she looked away, as if hoping that if she gave him a minute of silence, he might decide to go away. But he didn’t. He had all day.
The nun finally spoke. “All right. Everybody suffers. But a great deal of our suffering comes from believing that things should never change. I’ve gotten married, so my spouse should love me for the rest of my life. I need my parents, so they must never die…We’re continually shocked and disappointed when life doesn’t go the way we think it should.”
Jack sat back and waited to see where this was going.
“In reality,” the nun continued, “everything is in a constant state of flux. The seasons change, plants and animals die. We’ll all die, one way or another. I would think that in your job you must see how impermanent things actually are.”
Jack shifted in his chair. “So, what: We’re not supposed to feel sad when someone gets killed?”
“Of course we feel sad. Pain is inevitable in this world. How much we suffer, though—that’s up to us.”
Jack probed a corner of his eye with a fingertip. He was not impressed.
Tenzin Pemo rose to the challenge. She plucked a blue paperback book off of her desk. “Let me ask you a question, detective. Do you think this book has an independent existence outside your mind?”
He made a face. “Of course it does. My mind has nothing to do with it.”
The nun set the book down in front of him. “How do you know it’s real?”
Jack shrugged. “I just heard it thump onto the desk. I can pick it up. I can flip through the pages…”
The nun nodded. “Of course. You deal in evidence. You can see the book. You can hear it. You can touch it. But your whole experience of this book is coming to you through your senses, and exists only in your mind.”
Jack snorted. “That’s nuts. The book’s sitting right there. If I drop dead right now, it’ll still be there.”
“How do you know?” The nun pulled her robe a little higher up on her bare shoulder. “Everything you ‘know’ is something that you learned about through your senses. I’ll tell you what: Name one thing that you know about some other way.”
Jack pondered the question. Every time he thought of something—classroom teachings, things he had heard about, evidence photos, proof he had seen for himself—he realized that they were all things he had perceived. “So, what are you saying?” he finally said. “This book doesn’t exist?”
The nun shook her head. “That’s not the issue here. The point is that our entire experience of the world exists only in our minds.” She leaned forward. “Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re sitting in the subway on your way to work. Can you imagine that?”
Jack nodded. Today he could imagine it all too well.
“Okay. Now let’s say that someone sits down next to you, and they’re talking loudly, or trimming their fingernails, or doing something you find very annoying.”
Jack thought of the young woman popping her gum on the train this morning, and he smiled despite himself.
The nun steepled her hands together. “Now, you would likely say to yourself, ‘Oh, look at this external problem that has suddenly intruded into my life.’ You might try to tell the person to stop doing what they’re doing, but this is New York City—you don’t know if they’re going to get angry with you, start a fight, maybe even pull out a gun. So you sit there in silence, getting angrier and angrier.”
Jack crossed his arms. “All right, so what would you do?”
The nun shrugged. “I wouldn’t have to do anything. Instead of seeing the person as an external problem I can’t control, I could just think about the situation differently. I could say to myself, ‘What a blessing! Here I am trying to develop more patience in my life, and here’s a wonderful opportunity to practice!’ Notice that the external situation didn’t change at all; all that happened is that I changed my way of thinking about it.”
Jack thought for a moment. “I guess I can buy that. But we’re not talking about some jerk clipping their nails on the subway. This is a human being who was cold-bloodedly murdered. Are you saying that isn’t a real problem?”
The nun leaned toward him. “I’m saying that if we can train our minds to deal with small difficulties, we can train them to deal with big ones.”
Jack frowned. “So, what: You just don’t care?”
&
nbsp; “Of course I do. But I have to accept that this thing has happened. I could get angry at the children who did this, or I could crumple up in grief, but that wouldn’t help Kelsang Thubten. Suffering is not something that exists out in the world. It’s only in our minds. And that means that we can do something about it.” The nun stood up. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Actually,” Jack said, “I would, but I wouldn’t think you people would be allowed to drink the stuff. I mean, isn’t it kind of a drug?”
The woman smiled sadly. “I’m a nun, not a saint.” She went out.
Jack sat mulling over what he had just heard. He noticed a banner stretched across one wall of the small, tidy office. If you can do something about the problem, you don’t have to worry. If you can’t do something about the problem, you don’t have to worry. Either way, you don’t have to worry.
Easy to say. He thought of how Michelle was going to react when he told her he’d be working a double tour at Christmas. And he thought of the way his investigation into the boy in the box was getting bogged down at every turn. He had plenty to worry about.
He heard a sound behind him and turned to see Carl Santiago standing in the doorway. His colleague came in and sat on a chair in the corner. “So how did it go in here?”
Jack sighed. “I don’t know. I just got a crash course in Buddhism.” All of the petty aggravations of the day had added up to give him a headache. He leaned back and rubbed his tired eyes. “The nun seems pretty calm about this whole thing. Too calm, if you ask me.”
“Uh, Jack…” Santiago said.
Jack ignored him. “I don’t know, this all just seems like some blissed-out Hare Krishna crap…”
“Jack,” Santiago said again.
Jack opened his eyes to find Tenzin Pemo standing in the doorway.
Calmly.
“Here’s your coffee, detective. If there’s anything else I can do to help you, please let me know.”
CHAPTER sixteen
THANKS FOR SHOWING ME this,” Jack told Ray Hillhouse as he handed back the forensic report. Ordinarily, the words would have rolled off his tongue with some difficulty—showing gratitude to a fed—but it was hard to begrudge this FBI man.
Hillhouse tucked the report back into an inside pocket of his trench coat; a brisk breeze was blowing up from the water, over the esplanade, whipping across Governors Island. The FBI man smiled. “It’s nice to share.”
Jack chuckled. “Maybe you didn’t read the directive. The one that says that feds and cops are on opposite teams…”
Hillhouse wrinkled his broad nose. “I don’t have time for that crap. My father was a detective with the Philly PD.”
“What did he think when you went off to work for the FBI?”
Hillhouse shrugged. “He was proud of me. There weren’t exactly a lot of black folks in the Bureau when I was coming up.” He patted his coat pocket. “So what do you think?”
Jack rested his forearms on the railing and stared out at the Red Hook shore. It was one of his days off, but he was glad to be on the island. Michelle was at work. What else was he gonna do, watch TV? “This confirms at least one of my hunches. The stuff about industrial solvents and sawdust embedded in the clothes the guy left behind…Looking at that homemade coffin, I was thinking he maybe did some kind of carpentry-related work. I’m sorry we didn’t get any hits on all those fingerprints, though. I guess we’re not dealing with a career criminal—or at least one who’s ever been caught.”
Hillhouse pulled a package of pistachio nuts out of another coat pocket. “Want some?”
“Why not?” Jack took a small handful and started cracking them open. “I hate to say this, but I don’t think we’re dealing with a local. If he lived in the area, what was he doing camping out over here?”
Hillhouse nodded thoughtfully. “He could be from anywhere.” The chill wind flapped his coattails and the FBI man grimaced. “You wanna take a little walk, warm up a little?”
Jack nodded and the two men set off between a couple of the officers’ houses, across the Nolan Park quadrangle, into the interior of the island, dropping pistachio shells as they went. A ferry horn tooted somewhere out in the harbor, and then things returned to their normal deep silence.
“I’ve been based in downtown Manhattan for five years,” the FBI man said. “But I never paid any attention to this place.”
After lapsing into a couple of minutes of companionable silence, they came to a grass-filled moat in front of the old fort. A fierce stone eagle guarded an arched entry. They walked in, beyond the massive walls, and found themselves inside another quadrangle, surrounded on all sides by rows of white-columned brick buildings. A deserted little playground stood in the middle of the center lawn, with two forlorn metal ponies waiting for riders. Jack brushed away some peeling paint and sat down on one. “You know, what strikes me the most here is that this guy didn’t just happen to pass by. If he didn’t come over on the ferry—and that doesn’t seem likely, considering all the crap he had with him—then he had to go to a lot of trouble to get here.”
Hillhouse nodded. “And it’s not exactly the most convenient place to hide out. No stores, no running water…He had to bring food, drinks, toilet paper…”
“So the question is, why go through all that trouble when he could have just holed up in some comfy little motel on the mainland?”
“Not only that,” Hillhouse said, pulling a piece of paper out of yet another coat pocket. He unfolded it to reveal an aerial photo of the island. From above it had the shape of an ice cream cone, with the ferry slip at the top. “He could have hid out down near the southern end, which is apparently even more deserted than the rest of the place. So why would he want to be so close to the ferry, to the only place where people arrive every day? It was a lot riskier…”
Jack frowned. “I don’t think it was the ferry. Maybe he wanted to be in Nolan Park.”
Hillhouse nodded. “I’ve been thinking along the same lines. Maybe he had some personal connection to the place.”
“Ex-Coastie?” Jack brightened. “Hey, do you think they had fingerprints on file?”
Hillhouse grinned. “We’ll soon find out.”
CHAPTER seventeen
PULLING ON A KEVLAR vest before an op always quickened the blood a little, but Jack, who had taken a bullet not long before, was glad that it covered most of his sweat-damp shirt.
The usual mundane atmosphere of the Seven-six squad room was stirred up by the excitement of the hunt. The detectives, wired on caffeine and adrenaline, were suiting up. Confronting an armed suspect was obviously one of the most dangerous parts of the job, so why did they look happy and excited as athletes in a locker room before a big game? Despite their decades of experience, they still didn’t quite understand that taking a bullet was not like it was in the movies, where you just clutched your bloody shoulder and ran on. When no one was looking, Jack swallowed a couple of Turns to calm his stomach.
Linda Vargas popped a fresh clip into her Glock and then sat back and glanced around the busy room. The detective grinned. “I love the smell of fresh testosterone in the morning.”
Tommy Balfa came in with a box of donuts and offered them around. The precinct detective was riding high. Of all people, he was the one who had found the next break in the case. (The Coast Guard connection had not done the trick—no fingerprint matches.) No, it was an anonymous call, followed up by Balfa, which had led to this special Saturday morning convocation.
Ray Hillhouse came in to join the team; Jack almost didn’t recognize the man in jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. Jack introduced him around, then invited Balfa over to brief him.
The precinct detective cast a somewhat wary eye on the stranger, but his excitement overcame his initial coldness. “I’ve been listening to the calls that came in over our hotline about the kid who washed up in Red Hook,” he explained. He rolled his eyes. “Most of it was the usual aluminum-hat crazies, the lonelies, the conspiracy nuts…But
there was one anonymous tip, a woman who said we should check out a guy named Darren Chapman who lives and works down in Vinegar Hill. I did a little legwork, and it turns out he’s some kind of artist or sculptor or something. He works in wood and metal, stuff that could definitely match your forensic results. And he has a sheet: He was indicted for child abuse, though the case got thrown out of court on some technicality. He’s divorced, but he’s got a ten-year-old son.”
Hillhouse raised his eyebrows, impressed. “This sounds pretty good. Does his boy match the description of your body?”
Balfa shook his head. “No—his kid’s alive and well. At least, he showed up for school this week.”
Hillhouse shrugged. “The guy still sounds promising. Have you talked to him?”
Sergeant Tanney swaggered over. He seemed the most pumped-up of all the team. The detectives had done the heavy lifting to find a suspect; now their supervisor was all set to tapdance in the spotlight. “We understand the man might be armed,” he said, “so we’re not taking any chances. We’ll talk to him when he’s face down, on the ground.”
The sergeant asked for any final questions or comments, then actually said, “Let’s move out,” as if he was John Wayne in some old war flick.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER THE detectives were parked in two unmarked cars outside Darren Chapman’s residence in Vinegar Hill, a tiny neighborhood of scruffy little houses sandwiched between the base of the Manhattan Bridge, a power plant, and the Navy Yard.
The Graving Dock Page 10
