MURS. Reed stopped typing and rubbed the side of his head. What was it that drifter had said before he disappeared after the fire? Reed dug out the hastily stuffed-away files from the bottom drawer of his desk and started sifting through them for the witness statement. That guy who talked to The Blaze right before he disappeared. It took him ten minutes of searching but Reed found what he was looking for: “He said he was going to Mars. Can you believe that?” Mars. MURS. Reed tried saying the two words under his breath, testing them out. Could work. You cops disappeared him, Bertie had said. The Blaze didn’t run. He had help.
Reed pawed through the file and his notes until he found The Blaze’s real name: Earl Stanfield. Then he looked up the number for the MURS field office, and ducked into an empty office to make the phone call. Within minutes, he was speaking with a nice woman by the name of Jennifer Teagarden. She was very sorry, but she couldn’t be handing out information on previous clients over the phone, not even to the FBI, not even if it had been a quarter century since the client in question might have utilized their services. Reed would need a warrant.
“How about,” Reed said, trying for his most charming voice, “how about if you could just tell me whether MURS was involved with the arson investigation in 1988 in any capacity? Could you do that for me?”
“I would love to help you,” Ms. Teagarden replied. “I would. But I’m afraid I couldn’t even look that up if I tried. We don’t code our cases by associated criminal investigation.”
“What about the referring officer? Is that part of your record?”
“Yes.” Her tone was wary now.
Reed stood at the office door, the phone pressed tight against his ear. He could hear McGreevy’s voice out in the hallway, talking to someone. If you hang up now, he told himself, you’re always going to wonder. “Could you check if Russell McGreevy might have referred a client?” he asked tightly, his eyes screwed shut. His stomach felt like lead.
He heard her click-clack at some computer keys. “Russell McGreevy has referred several clients to us over the years,” she replied. “I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.”
“Was one in 1988?”
“Sir, I’ve told you all I—”
“Was one of them in April of 1988?” He was almost shouting now, his voice hoarse with desperation. Please say no, he thought. Just say no. It would almost be easier if she refused him.
Ms. Teagarden said nothing for a long moment. He could hear her breathing on the other end. He felt her tension and knew he could break it with just the slightest nudge.
“Please,” he said, softer this time. “There is a man’s life at stake here.”
Still she hesitated. Reed felt his heart cage-dancing against his ribs.
“April 29, 1988,” she said in a rush, and then she hung up the phone.
Reed kept his phone to his ear long past the point where the connection went dead. McGreevy’s footsteps were coming closer now, his voice getting louder. “Markham?” The door handle rattled, making Reed jump. “Markham? Where are you? We need to talk.”
11
Ellery had a list of eleven very bad men and no way to watch all of them at once. She’d started with Victor Cruz. He was big and strong looking and she could imagine him climbing through someone’s window with a knife. Fifteen years ago, Cruz had been a high-school dropout living with his mother and his mother’s shih tzu. One day, he’d locked the dog in the basement and suckered a fourteen-year-old neighbor girl to help him look for it. Then he’d trapped the girl and sodomized her in his childhood bedroom to the point that she’d needed corrective surgery afterward. Cruz had been sentenced to thirty years for the crime but was out in only eight. He’d been arrested only once since then, for public intoxication. Ellery tailed him for three days and nights. Cruz spent his mornings panhandling in Downtown Crossing and his afternoons drinking the profits away in his rented room on Elm Street. His home was a poor cousin to the one the rape victims tended to live in: a stand-alone duplex with cheap siding, mismatched front doors, and a black mailbox with a warped lid. There were no grand porches and balconies to be found here; only chipped concrete steps, a rickety fire escape, and a chain-link fence. Ellery had sat in her freezing rental car for six hours each night, rationing the sips of tea from her thermos, watching the blue flickering light of the TV that came from Cruz’s bedroom. He’d never stepped outside.
The trouble was, Ellery knew, these creatures could play dead for a long time. In Chicago there’d been an old man who liked to sit on the stoop of his building, two blocks from where Ellery lived. His name was Simon and the kids called him “Simple Simon” behind his back. He’d had missing teeth and a cane and moved like molasses, but his eyes were always on the children. Hey, there, girl, he’d call when they passed. Come over here! Do you want a piece of candy? He’d take a Jolly Rancher from his pocket and hold it out in his twisted, clawlike hand. Ellery’s mother had told her to stay away from Simon because he liked to “do stuff” to little kids, and Ellery had been happy to comply as she’d just thought Simon was completely gross, with his saggy skin and gap-toothed grin. Some of the older kids, especially the boys, had liked to toy with Simon. They’d play along and take his candy, then run away cackling. Suck on this, old man! No one was ever really scared, not until the time when Ellery was in high school and a seven-year-old girl with pretty beaded braids and a gap-toothed smile of her own had disappeared. She’d turned up dead in Simon’s apartment only hours later. The police had known right where to look. Simon hadn’t touched a child in decades, at least that anyone could prove, but the cops hadn’t been fooled for an instant because they’d known the truth: he had never really changed.
So Ellery knew better than to think these eleven men had been rehabilitated. She followed them one by one, shadowing their lives and watching for any sign that might indicate they were active again. They blended back into their communities surprisingly well, disappearing into these rocky, difficult neighborhoods that had forged them. Victor Cruz barely left his one square block. She’d become bored with him after a few days of flat-out nothing, and she’d switched to Archie Freeman. Freeman commuted by the T each day to work as a fry cook at a greasy spoon in the heart of Mattapan—or, as it was known to the cops, Murderpan. The array of buildings told a familiar story: a liquor store next to a check cashing joint next to a bail bondsman; grim concrete facades and a coating of graffiti over all of it. The Christmas decorations here were faded from years gone by, tinsel thin and drooping. But Ellery saw beyond the surroundings to the hardworking people who lived here, like the middle-aged waitress in the diner where Archie worked, busting her ass during the lunch rush, or the school bus driver who waited at each stop to make sure each of his charges safely reached the sidewalk. Archie, meanwhile, was a rat among them. He was short and scrawny, older than the other men on her list, face wizened by age. He’d done twelve years for a rape he’d committed back in the 1990s, when an unsuspecting woman hailed his cab and he’d decided not to drive her home. Ellery concluded fairly quickly that he was not the man who’d attacked Wendy Mendoza; he did not fit the description of a large, powerful man. Still, she hated to leave him there unattended, smoking cigarettes in back of the restaurant, his cold, hard gaze tracking the schoolkids as they walked on by.
Reluctantly, she’d shifted her attention to Michael “Mick” Murphy, who looked like a reasonable suspect on paper. He’d done two stints for aggravated rape, and his weapon of choice was a switchblade, rather similar to the kind of knife that Wendy remembered from her attack. Problem was, Ellery had yet to lay eyes on the guy. She’d been parked in view of his listed address—a brick tenement building in the slice of Cambridge between MIT and Harvard—for the better part of two days and hadn’t seen a trace of Murphy. The rich biotech companies had built up enormous glass facilities that cast shadows over some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, so now billionaire CEOs were shopping at the same 7-Eleven as the hookers and the pimps. Ellery had av
ailed herself of it twice yesterday to pick up a sandwich and some bottles of Coke, dashing back to her car as soon as possible to make sure Murphy hadn’t slipped out of his hidey-hole in the meantime. It grew dark, then darker still, as the commuters emptied out of the surrounding area, leaving only the folks who had to live there.
Ellery’s phone trilled in her pocket, making her jump. No one ever called her. She fished it out and saw the ID flash across the screen: Markham, Reed. She hesitated for a second, her finger poised above the screen. She’d been ducking most of his texts because she didn’t want to lie to him about what she was doing. If they weren’t talking, then technically she wasn’t lying. Reed had apparently stepped up his game and now was daring her to ignore the phone call, too. She considered answering, but then a tall guy with broad shoulders came loping up the street toward Murphy’s building. Could be him, but she was too far away to see his face in the dark. She dismissed Reed’s call and jumped out of her SUV to hurry after the guy.
The cold wind stung her eyes and she buried her face in her scarf, partly for warmth and partly to protect her identity. The man reached the building and used a key to get inside. By the time Ellery reached the stoop, he had disappeared. She cupped her hands against the glass door and peered inside, but she saw only a dimly lit corridor with no one in it. She bit back a curse and looked around, but there was no one else nearby. She was forced to lurk around the corner in a shadowed parking lot, her back against a fence. It took the better part of an hour of standing there, shifting back and forth until she was so cold her toes were frozen, but finally a heavyset woman carrying a bag of groceries came huffing up the sidewalk toward the building. Ellery fell into step behind her like she belonged there, and the woman didn’t seem to notice.
“Here, let me get that,” Ellery said when the woman unlocked the door. The woman barely grunted a response, but she allowed Ellery to hold the door for her as she hauled her groceries inside. Ellery cased the mailboxes first, looking for Murphy’s name, but the boxes had only numbers on them. She knew he was supposed to be in apartment 217, so she pushed into the stairwell and started to climb. A flickering fluorescent bulb revealed peeling gray paint and various initials and sayings carved into the wall. Ellery opened the door onto the second floor and looked up and down the empty hall. Her heart rate picked up as she set foot into the corridor. Thus far, she’d tailed the men only from afar, making sure she stayed on her own turf. She gave her gun a reassuring pat from the outside of her leather jacket as she started down the hall toward apartment 217.
There was no name on the door, either. She cocked her head to listen for a moment but couldn’t make out any signs of life from inside. She knelt down and looked at the crack at the bottom of the door; all was dark.
“You lookin’ for something?”
Ellery shot to her feet at the sound of a male voice behind her. A large African-American man had materialized from the apartment across the hall and one door down, and he did not look pleased to see her. “Uh, I heard this was Mick Murphy’s place,” she said, nodding at 217.
“Used to be.”
He didn’t elaborate and he was still standing between her and the exit. Ellery licked her lips and tried again. “You know where I can find him?”
The guy smirked. “I look like some kind of secretary? He was here, now he ain’t. As long as he took his trashy Celtic punk-ass music with him, I don’t give a damn where he went.”
Ah, so that’s how it is, Ellery thought. This guy liked information, or he wouldn’t be a self-appointed hall monitor, and he didn’t like Mick Murphy. “Thing is, Mick owes me some money,” she said.
“Yeah?” He didn’t seem all that interested yet.
“Knocked me up,” she said, and this did get the man’s attention. “Told me to get rid of the problem. Only he was supposed to pay half. Now I got the clinic leaning on me to pay the bills, and I don’t have all the money, you know what I’m saying?”
“Fuck that shit,” the man said with a glower. “His idea to get rid of it, then he’s gotta pay. Cheaper now than if you had a kid.”
“Yeah,” she said with relief. “It’s only fair.”
“I heard he couldn’t pay the rent. Went to live with his cousin a few blocks over, but I don’t know where. Prolly you can find him drinking down at Sully’s place.” He shook his head with disgust. “They sell four-dollar beers on Wednesday nights and play his shitty music all the time.”
“Thanks,” Ellery said. “I owe you one.”
He chuckled without humor as he moved out of her way. “Good luck gettin’ your money. I don’t think the landlord ever saw a penny.”
Ellery took the steps two at a time back down to the front door and out again into the freezing night air. She already had her phone out so she could look up the location of Sully’s pub, and she saw it was just two blocks to the west. After a moment of internal debate, she left her car parked where it was and headed toward the bar on foot, jogging lightly through the dark streets. Her phone rang again in her hand, showing Reed’s name, and she hushed it this time by setting it to silent. She could call him when it was over, when she could share the good news: we got him.
When she reached Sully’s, she had to wrestle with a heavy wooden door that had been warped by weather and time. It pulled free at last and she staggered over the threshold, only to realize she’d made a terrible mistake: she was the lone woman in the joint. One by one, the men all turned to stare. Ellery could either turn tail and run or pretend like she meant to be here, so she avoided all eye contact and made her way to an open stool. Sully’s was one narrow room dominated by a long wooden bar that had seen better days. The low ceiling trapped the scent of alcohol, wet boots, and fried food. The bartender, a bald man with an extensive waistline, bellied up to her on the other side of the bar. “What are you having?” he asked.
“Sam Adams, whatever’s on tap,” she said, acutely aware of all the eyes on her. She risked a glance around and spotted her quarry at the opposite end of the bar. Mick Murphy was big even sitting down, with broad shoulders that stretched the wool of his black peacoat. The shot glass all but disappeared in his large hand. He looked up to catch her staring, and she ducked her head so fast she got dizzy.
“Here you go, miss.” The beer sloshed slightly as he put it in front of her. No dainty napkin for this place. His emphasis on the word “miss” bore a trace of malevolence, or maybe it was the way he didn’t move away after serving her. “Ain’t seen you in here before,” he said, looming over her.
“Just passing through.” She took a couple of sips of beer. “It’s good, thank you,” she added, hoping he would take the hint and leave her alone.
“You like that? I can buy you another.” The man to her right slid over one stool so that they were almost rubbing elbows. He had lank hair and crooked front teeth. His bloodshot eyes suggested he’d been here early and often. “Better yet, try something harder. Hey, Ryan, get the lady some of that Three Ships. That’s good shit, right there.”
“No, thank you,” Ellery said, leaning away from him as he pushed into her personal space. “I just came for one beer.”
“One? Aw, honey. No one stops at just one.”
“Sam’s right,” said another guy, who materialized behind her. He took the stool on her left. “Two’s always better than one.” This guy was older, mid-forties, with a double chin and a thick plaid shirt with a rip in the sleeve. She could see what looked like a homemade tattoo sticking out underneath it. He slung a heavy arm over Ellery’s shoulders. “I bet we could all have some real fun together.”
“I’m not looking for fun,” she said, shrugging him off.
“Ooh, she’s feisty! I like it when they fight a little, don’t you, Sam?”
“You know it.”
They were talking like she wasn’t even there as they both pressed closer, surrounding her on either side. She glanced across the room and saw Murphy watching with naked interest. Predatory men. A vulnerable woman
. He couldn’t have ordered up a better show on Pay-Per-View. She’d bet he was stroking himself under the bar right now. Anger flared up in her, and she shoved the closest guy aside. “I said back off.”
He held up his hands in mock innocence. “Aw, we were just havin’ a little fun. What’s the matter, honey? Don’t you like fun?”
Ellery pulled out her wallet and tossed a ten on the bar. “Keep the change.”
“What’s your hurry? Come on, stay a while…”
The one called Sam grabbed her arm when she tried to leave. She went rigid and looked down at where he held her. “You don’t want to do that,” she said evenly.
“You don’t know what I want.” He licked his lips and smiled. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Let me go.”
“After you agree that I can buy you a drink.”
Her heart was pounding. She’d been so focused on the power-hungry, stalker rapist that she’d forgotten the rest of them: the lazier ones who simply seized upon an opportunity. “I said no,” she repeated, enunciating every word. She let her jacket fall open to reveal her gun. “Now let me go.”
No one was watching the Celtics game on the TV anymore. They had all turned toward her and Sam. He was considering his options and he didn’t like what he found. Temper flashed in his eyes, and he squeezed her arm painfully one time before releasing her with a flourish, like a magician conjuring a bouquet. “Like I care,” he said. “You ain’t so special.”
The bartender gave her a level stare. “You’d best get out of here,” he growled. “And don’t come back.”
Ellery escaped back into the night and ran down the block, stopping only when she was around the corner and out of sight of the bar. She bent over at the waist, gasping for air, struck anew by how stupid she had been. She was not on the job. She had no backup. She wanted to flee back to her safe, high-rise apartment, lock the doors, and never worry about Mick Murphy or any of the others again. Manganelli would investigate them all eventually on his own time. She could be like Reed and just go home.
No Mercy--A Mystery Page 19
