SURVIVORS (crime thriller books)

by T. J. Brearton

  “About that. I took the job in Oneida two summers ago. So a little over two years.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Dutko went to the closet a third time. He pulled out a duffel bag of Argon’s. Brendan had seen all of this stuff in the closet – he’d been through it four or five times already. It struck Brendan that Dutko seemed to know just where to look for everything. Dutko opened the bag and put the shoes in.

  “You ever hear about that case in Ohio? Baby was found in the back of a trunk at an automotive shop. The car had been there for two days, and then the mechanic goes to work on it. Smells something he thinks might be a dead animal. It’s coming from the trunk. So he goes and opens the trunk and sees the remains of this tiny little infant,” said Dutko.

  Dutko was now going through Argon’s drawers. He found a chain with a crucifix and put it in the bag.

  “The baby was inside a shoebox. That’s where they put the kid. The mother, who was seventeen. The father, also seventeen.”

  Dutko paused and looked Brendan in the eye. “Know what happened to those two kids who put their baby in the trunk to die?”

  “Probably counseling, lots of intervention.”

  Dutko’s face grew a shade darker, it seemed, as if filling with a rush of blood. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened to them.”

  “They’re minors,” Brendan said. He wasn’t for a moment condoning their behavior, but he was curious to see where Dutko would go with this.

  The big cop just laughed. It was a humorless sound, a rise and fall of the shoulders and a disdainful exhalation. “Minors.”

  Brendan’s mind raced for a second. Then he hit on what he was looking for. “You know about Argon’s history, I’m sure. With the baby he found in the storm drain.”

  “Everyone knows.” Dutko zipped up the bag. He’d put in the shoes, a wristwatch, the crucifix, and the picture Brendan had found of a younger Argon.

  “Did Argon do anything else like that?”

  Another severe look from Dutko.

  “Like what?”

  “Like in the line of duty, or even off the record – was Argon involved in anything like that again – maybe missing kids, or discarded babies – something like that? You make me ask because you just brought up the Ohio story.”

  “I brought up the Ohio story because you asked about the cruiser and whether it was impounded and you made me remember the Ohio thing.”

  Brendan smirked at the circles they seemed to find themselves in. “That’s quite the association.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The tension was rising in the small bedroom. Brendan could feel his skin tingling as his body temperature started to climb.

  “What I mean is, I ask about a police officer’s car, and you bring up something about a baby in a trunk. I’m just wondering if . . .”

  Dutko leaned forward, surprisingly quickly for a big man. His nose was inches from Brendan’s. “That’s because it’s fucking disgusting,” he said. “The whole thing. The whole world we live in where people put babies in the trunk of a car to die.”

  “I agree with you,” Brendan said, keeping calm. “Trust me. I feel the same way. Just sit down with me for a minute, alright? Let’s go into the living room.”

  Dutko was like a snarling dog, but he blinked and withdrew his face from Brendan’s. He picked up the duffel in one hand and the suit in the other and walked out of the room, with Brendan stepping back against the wall to let him pass.

  He followed Dutko down the hallway and into the living room. Dutko stopped in the middle of the room and turned around. Brendan watched him. Dutko’s gaze drifted along the bookshelves for a moment. Then his eyes locked on Brendan again.

  “Typically, going by the book, you can’t see the vehicle. You’re a civilian. You’re not family. Cushing told me about you. Your P.I. license is for Wyoming, not New York. You gotta take whatever you find, on your own, and let us know about it. That’s augmenting the investigation.” He spoke with an edge to his voice, but some of the aggression seemed to have subsided.

  “I’ve been here a day,” said Brendan. “I’ve met a lot of people already. Like you said, Argon was the best. No one has a bad word to say about him. But no one can seem to give me a straight answer about how he died. What happened to Carrera?”

  Dutko twitched his massive mustache. “You tell me.”

  “Me? I don’t know. All I do is bump into walls. Every time I try to lift the lid on Argon, there’s just more questions.” Brendan could hear the frustration edging into his own voice.

  “He was a private person.”

  “You’re not kidding. What about the second driver? You know anything about that? Was he cleared? Arrested? Drunk? Anything?”

  “You see anything in the papers about him?”

  “No, nothing. But there was barely any coverage on Argon, either.”

  “I don’t know anything about the second driver. I’m day shift. I was sleeping when it happened, woke up, went to work, and that’s when I found out – Cushing debriefed us at oh-eight-hundred. Said Argon was killed in the line of duty. Random traffic collision.”

  “He used that word? Random?” Brendan was sure Cushing had said “random” during their earlier conversation, too. It was an adjective being tossed around a bit.

  “Yeah. Cushing’s an idiot.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “No one does. But, he didn’t say anything about the second driver, and I didn’t think to ask.”

  “Nobody asked? Room full of cops, one of their best goes down in the middle of the night, no one has a hankering to know about the fucking guy who ran into him and caused fatal injuries?”

  Dutko had been calming down before, but was immediately furious again. “You better watch your mouth. You already look like you got a bad habit of poking your shit where it don’t belong, limping like that, your face and hand all loused up. Who do you think you are?”

  “Why am I the bad guy? I’m trying to figure out what happened to my friend – your friend – and all I get is this hostility.”

  “Hostility?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, motherfucker, no one asked about the other guy because . . .”

  “Because what?”

  “Because Argon had been tipping them back again lately, okay? Goddammit.”

  Dutko looked like he didn’t know whether to smash Brendan in the face or to sit down and cry. The news hit Brendan hard. But he couldn’t believe it. Or, he didn’t want to.

  “No way.”

  Dutko’s gaze challenged Brendan’s assertion. Yes way.

  “I went to a meeting last night with Argon’s sponsor. Half a dozen people who saw him regularly. No one said anything.”

  Now Dutko seemed to deflate. He stood holding Argon’s stuff, stooping over. “They didn’t know.”

  “Then how did you know? Or any of the others?”

  Dutko frowned. “Come on. These people saw Argon once a week maybe. When you work with a guy, you know.”

  * * *

  Brendan swept the room with his eyes, taking stock of this new information.

  “I don’t buy it,” he said. “There’s got to be more than that.”

  Dutko’s eyes were like quivering, shining stones. His upper lip twitched beneath his mustache. “Oh yeah? How about the flask in the front seat?”

  “Argon had a flask in the front seat?”

  “That’s what Cushing said. That’s why no one else questioned it, big shot.”

  Brendan filed this away from the moment and decided to start on a new tack. He looked at the kitchen table, where Argon’s notepad still rested. “What does the name Philip Largo mean to you?”

  Something flickered across Dutko’s dark face. “You kidding? He’s the horn-dog in Albany who hired prostitutes.”

  “So I’ve heard. But why would Argon have his name written down?”

  “Why? Probably was just committing it to memory. Argon knew all of them.”


  “All of who?” Brendan thought of Santos saying He had his sights set, man.

  Dutko presented a level gaze. “Every twisted one of them. Every politician, every bond trader, investor, banker, CEO, lawyer, you name it.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like who? Where the fuck have you been, under a rock? You some Obama nut? They’re everywhere you goddamn look. Matuso, Barre, Kilroy, Hazeltine, Bianco, Stark, Dillon, Winston, Good, Lewalt, Milton, Rellendiz, Fernandez, Finkle, Cross – and those are just the B-team. You’ve got your Elliot Spitzers, your Bobbie McDees, your Terry McAuliffes. Governors as dirty as a dustbin lid. You’ve got . . .”

  “And you and Argon talked about these politicians. What did you say about them?”

  “Not just politicians. You’re missing the point. I thought Argon called you ‘The PhD Policeman.’”

  “I studied neurobiology, not political science.”

  “You don’t need to. It’s everywhere you look. Stockbrokers, CEOs screwing over their clients, investors running from emerging markets the second things get risky, central banks unable to stem the slides. The currencies in foreign countries are dropping like rocks. Investors are confronting the reality of the end of the Fed’s bond-buying. When the dollar dies, it’s going to be total chaos. And that time is coming quicker than people think. Shit is bad, Healy.”

  “Did Argon keep some sort of list? Something with contact information? Something that. . .”

  Dutko was tapping the side of his head. “Up here. He kept it all up here.”

  Brendan nodded. It explained why he hadn’t found anything along those lines in his search of the house. “Well, I keep coming back to why he would write down Largo’s name. That’s inconsistent with him keeping it all in his head. Think he wanted someone to find it?”

  “I don’t know why he would. Argon knew them all by heart. He carried it all with him. The good and the bad. In the end I bet that’s why he picked up the bottle again.”

  “Maybe he didn’t, Dutko. Maybe it was meant to look like he did.”

  Dutko considered this.

  “I don’t know. What I know is that Argon saw the world for what it was, and that can be rough. Real rough.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell you? Okay. Private banks aren’t going anywhere; shit’s only going to get worse with inflation and wealth disparity. The Fed isn’t really going anywhere either. It’s baked into the fucking country. You try to control money, it goes underground. You outlaw something, whatever it is, it goes underground, too. Same system applies to Washington as it does to drug cartels in Juarez, Mexico as it does to black markets right here in New York.”

  Brendan nodded. “I’m trying to put it all together – bear with me. But I’m still stuck on how a sinking Dow Jones or the political or economic woes of foreign countries has to do with babies in trunks. Sorry, but you put that image in my head, and now I can’t get it out.”

  “Really? You don’t see?”

  Maybe, thought Brendan. Maybe I do. Maybe I have been feeling it for a long time, thinking it for a long time. Maybe I’ve been obsessed with Titan because something happened to me during the Heilshorn case, a moment where I thought I saw something, felt something, some field that surrounded and bound all of this together. Some moment of dark nirvana when I understood.

  “Illuminate me,” Brendan said.

  “There’s a group of us, cops and probation officers and some criminal lawyers, and we see it. We’re awakening.”

  “Awakening.”

  “Yes, Healy. Fucking awakening. To see that all this shit, it’s all related. What’s the answer in ninety-nine out of a hundred crimes? Money. The common denominator. And I’m talking crimes from petty larceny all the way up to presidential assassinations. Big coal right now? Other carbon-based energy companies? They’re talking about a ‘utility death spiral.’ Solar is on the rise and getting cheaper and their market is getting frozen up; it’s not liquid. That’s just one example. Things are bad; people are losing money and getting desperate.”

  Brendan suddenly wanted a cigarette. Dutko was calmer, but something had changed. Brendan thought he was about to pass a point of no return.

  “Argon was my mentor. With him, everything was equal,” continued Dutko.

  Made sense why Dutko knew his way around the house so well.

  “He knew what this country was coming to. Argon – he was Scottish, off the boat, but he loved his country. Don’t think for a second that he wasn’t a patriot. Because patriots question their government, they don’t go blithely along. The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. So said Tom Jefferson.”

  “Jefferson also had slaves.”

  Dutko waved his hand in the air. “That’s cultural. It changed. Our forebears used to beat their wives and burn witches, too. What’s critical is that we were warned about central banking and big business. Listen, we just, you know, we can’t sit by anymore. Cops on the take, that’s one thing. Officeholders in Washington and in every capitol and in every city and town in our country, the Fed controlling the money supply, and now they’re backing down reducing the bond-buying program by billions each week with this quantitative-easing bullshit? You have any idea what that’s going to do to the economy? Like I said, it’s gotten bad. It’s gotten real bad. And the ones who get it the worst? The innocents.”

  “The children.”

  “Fucking right the children. Because it all rains down. People who don’t see that are scared – they’re in denial. Kids are killed in India by their mothers. Strangled, right after birth. Put to death if they’re girls, because girls don’t make the family any money, and they’re dirt poor. See? Money. That same shit is now happening in our country. Just last spring some mother was arrested for killing six of her babies and putting them in cardboard boxes in the garage. Six, Healy. In cardboard boxes.”

  Dutko set down the bag and gingerly draped the suit over the easy chair. Brendan was struck by the care this big, angry cop took. When Dutko resumed talking, he was quieter, as if the laying down of the suit had soothed him.

  “Something started in Argon that day he found baby Sloane. You know what I mean? Something started in him and he got on a path. Argon started to see the world differently.”

  “How so?”

  “As a battleground,” Dutko said. It was a plaintive, matter-of-fact statement.

  “And so what did he do?”

  “More than you, pal. More than me. Argon started to live a different sort of life. And he saw things in other people. I guess he saw things in you.” Dutko laughed again in that grunty way, meaning not that I see anything in you myself.

  Brendan considered the implications of Argon putting some sort of group together and the question surfaced which had been burning in him since the previous morning. “You think he made enemies?”

  “Of course he made enemies.”

  “How did he effect change?”

  “What?”

  “What did he do? How did he work towards winning the battle?”

  Dutko looked at Brendan as if he were an idiot. Or, at least, an outsider. Someone who just didn’t get it. “You’re asking the wrong questions,” Dutko said.

  “Ok. Do you think someone killed him?”

  Dutko stared back. His lips were pursed. His hands hung at his sides.

  “Do you think he was killed in a traffic accident in the line of duty, or do you think someone might have arranged that, or tried to make it look like that, even planted a flask in his car – someone who he might have been getting ready to expose, or someone he had been getting too close to?” asked Brendan.

  Dutko tilted his head a little, again reminding Brendan of a dog. Not in a derogatory way; Dutko was exactly that – Argon’s loyal dog. Smart, fierce, devoted.

  “You got to be careful now, Healy.”

  “You’re not answering me.”

  “Yes. Fucking yes, Detective, I think he was killed. It’s right u
nder your nose; it’s right under everyone’s nose.”

  Brendan sighed. He leaned back against the wall. He felt like this was a major breakthrough, just getting someone else to confirm it at last. But instead of feeling relieved, or lighter, he felt heavier, more burdened. If it was “under everyone’s nose,” then why wasn’t Cushing up front about it? Why wasn’t anyone saying anything? Because they believed Argon had been drinking again? Maybe that was enough incentive to keep quiet so as not to trash the career of a hero cop. But Brendan thought maybe, too, it was because they were out of their depth. Or they were being coerced.

  There were channels for this, up the ranks. And that was probably what was happening – Argon’s records were probably taken by agents, like the nurse at Westchester Medical Center had assumed. And Cushing was playing it close to his chest because it was a federal investigation – he’d probably been told to keep it quiet, to lie if necessary. No one could talk to anyone and the information stayed bottled up, ready to explode. Welcome to the justice system.

  “Thank you, Leonard.”

  Dutko looked down at the living room carpet. “Look at this old shag shit.”

  “Leonard.”

  Dutko looked up. He looked sad now, as if some of his life had just drained away.

  “Please, just tell me, in your own words, what you think is happening,” said Brendan.

  Dutko thought for a second. Then he picked up the uniform and the duffel bag again.

  “I think we’re going to go bury our friend. Funeral service is tomorrow; calling hours are eight until three. Body will be buried in Valhalla at three tomorrow afternoon.”

  Whatever had turned on inside Dutko was now shut off. He looked around, as if taking in the place one last time, some essence of Argon that the outdated bachelor home preserved, and then he turned on his heel and headed for the door.

  * * *

  Brendan followed Leonard Dutko outside. In the driveway, he sparked a cigarette. Dutko stopped before he reached the cruiser.

  Dutko turned around. He took a few steps closer to Brendan, and when he spoke, his voice was low, and his breath spilled in white vapor from the corners of his mouth.

  “I can’t go any further. I’ve got a wife and two little ones.”