by Blake Banner
“Somebody who was waiting for us to leave.”
“And somebody who is skilled and experienced with a gun…”
“Who is very cold and very ruthless. Who does that suggest to you?”
She puffed out her cheeks and blew a long stream of dense vapor out into the dark. “Well, not Cyril Browne, for a start!” She sighed again and gathered her thoughts. “OK, a Dodge Charger, two men in suits, efficient killers… sure! It could be the Mob. Tony.”
“For what purpose?”
“We don’t know. That’s just the thing, Stone. We don’t know. We don’t know a goddamn thing.”
“Keep it together, Dehan.”
“Is this even the same case? Is Cyril dead? He has a twin now?” She stretched out her arm toward California. “Not in the photos! Not in the articles! Not according to Father Cohen! What is he? A long lost twin come back from the goddamn Amazon? What? Are we in Dynasty land now? In some damn Mexican soap?”
She thrust her hands in her pockets and stood bending her knees and bouncing, staring across the road. After a while, she said, “Sorry.”
“Forget it. I understand.”
Another siren sounded in the freezing night and a patrol car turned in from Patterson Avenue and pulled up. The inspector climbed out and approached, clapping his gloved hands. Before he could speak, I said, “Clay and Santos are both dead. Shot in the head with a 9mm. Dehan will fill you in, sir. I need to make a phone call.”
I took a walk down the road and phoned my friend Bernie at the Bureau.
“Stone. How’s married life? You still owe me those beers. I have the tally right here. It stands at three thousand, five hundred and sixty four.”
“Make it sixty five. I need an urgent favor. I could go through the PD, but you guys are faster because you cheat.”
“That’s true. It’s the only way to get things done.”
I told him what I wanted, he told me he’d call me back in five minutes and hung up. I was on the corner of Taylor and Patterson, looking west, down the dark, snowing tunnel of the street, with the ineffectual light of the streetlamps obscured by the twisted black branches of the plane trees. At the end of the tunnel, there was only more darkness, but I knew it was Soundview Park, and the freezing, inky Bronx river.
I made my way back toward Giorgio’s house with my toes going numb. Dehan was walking to meet me and behind her I could see the inspector talking on the telephone. As we came together, Dehan said, “He’s organizing a manhunt. Every car in the city, choppers, I think he’s even getting dogs out to search Soundview Park.”
I listened to her, then said, “He’s dead.”
“What?”
“Giorgio. He’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. I might be wrong. But, you know, I’m not. It’s logical. But we need to find him before…”
She was frowning like I was crazy. “Before what, Stone?”
I stood chewing my lip. I stared at her face for a moment, seeing only the movies playing out in my mind. I said, “The logical place would be where the party was. Come…”
I half ran, trying not to slip and fall, up the stairs and into his house, calling to every available uniform to follow me: “I want you to tear this house apart. Check every room, every cupboard, every wardrobe. Check the attic and the cellar if there is one. You and you, check the garage, check the trunk of his car. Check for hollow walls and loose floorboards. There might be a body hidden in this house. If there is, find it!”
It took two hours. Eventually they brought in a dog. We checked every corner of the building, every nook and every cranny. We even knocked on the nooks and crannies to see if they were hollow. Giorgio Gonzalez was not in the house where the Halloween party had been. That house was empty.
Finally the officers and the dog departed, to join the city-wide search for the Charger. The house was locked up and the inspector went home, advising us we should do the same. He climbed in the patrol car, the door clunked and the driver pulled away. As they carefully negotiated the corner, we could hear the choppers over Soundview Park describing their grid-pattern search, growing louder, then dimmer, with their powerful spots trained on the dark, desolate, frozen ground below. They would be using heat sensors too. But they would be useless in finding a corpse, especially in this weather.
In any case, the corpse would not be in the park. That would not make any sense. Everything this killer did had a meaning. And the only thing that made sense—that had meaning—was for the corpse to be where the Halloween party had been.
But it wasn’t there.
Eighteen
Dehan took my arm in both of hers. “C’mon, Stone. There’s nothing more we can do tonight. Let’s go get some rest. I could use a fire, a meal and a drink.”
I looked down into her face. Her brown, woolen hat was pulled low, almost to her eyes, and her nose was red from the cold. “A fire, a meal and a drink,” I said.
“Yeah.” She narrowed her eyes and gave me a thin smile.
I said, “Home.”
“Mm-hm…”
I walked back to the corner of Patterson and Taylor. This time I didn’t look west. I looked across at Bob Smith’s house. I could see slivers of light shining through the edges of his drapes. I turned and looked then at the building where Sue Benedict had had her apartment, with the flight of ten steps running up the outside to her front door. All the windows were dark. Dehan came up beside me. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure. Come.”
I crossed the road to Bob’s house and rang on the bell. After a couple of minutes, he opened the door and smiled at us. He still looked amiably comfortable. “Good heavens!” he said. “You look frozen. Come in, for goodness’ sake! Come in and warm up.”
We followed him through to his living room, where three cats lay in front of a blazing fire, and a fourth lay across the back of his sofa. “Can I offer you a drink to warm you up?”
I shook my head. “We won’t keep you, Mr. Smith. I just have a couple of small questions. The house opposite, where Sue used to live…”
“Yes, on the corner.”
“Do you happen to know who lives there now?”
He raised his eyebrows. “No. In fact, I don’t think anybody lives there. I can’t remember the last person I saw coming in or out. It must be…” He gazed down at the flames, shaking his head slightly. “Oh, at least eight or nine years.”
“Did you notice anybody going in or out today?”
He gave his comfortable chuckle. “We haven’t been in the garden today, with this weather. So no, I haven’t noticed the goings-on in the street, except all the sirens in the last few hours of course.”
I pulled out my phone, dialed and waited. It rang once and Bernie said, “Stone, I’m not quite ready.”
“No, it’s something else. I know you have a family, Bernie, but this is critical.”
“No problem. She wants a divorce anyway.”
I gave him the address. “Who owns this? Also, when Cyril Browne died,” I gave him the details, “Who was the beneficiary of his life insurance?”
“This might take a little longer. I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks.”
I hung up and called the Inspector.
“Stone! Any news?”
“In five minutes. Right now I need a search warrant for Sue Benedict’s apartment.”
“On what grounds, Stone?”
“On the grounds that Giorgio Gonzalez’s body is in there.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because, if I am right, nine years ago, Mary Browne bought Sue Benedict’s house with the money she got from the insurance pay out from Cyril’s death.”
“Are you sure about all of this, John?”
“I wouldn’t be calling if I wasn’t sure, sir. Start drafting, I’ll confirm it in five minutes.”
I hung up and the phone rang. As I answered, I saw Bob coming in from the kitchen with thr
ee mugs of black coffee on a tray. I said, “Bernie.”
Bob put his finger to his lips and laced each mug with whiskey and winked at Dehan. She grinned and handed me a mug. Bernie was saying, “Yes to your first question.”
“Both parts?”
“Yeah, both parts. Outstanding. As regards ownership of the property. It was bought nine years ago by one Mary Browne of Elk Grove, Sacramento, and she is still the sole owner of the property. As to the insurance, she was also the beneficiary of her brother’s life insurance. Three quarters of a million dollars.”
“Bernie, can you email these documents to Deputy Inspector John Newman, at the 43rd?”
“Sure. That’s three more beers you owe me.”
“You got it, Bernie.”
“Them.”
“Yeah, them.”
I hung up, took a long pull of the coffee, smacked my lips and said, “You have to tell me your blend.” Then I called the inspector.
“John, what news?”
“My suspicions were right. Confirmation should be arriving in your email now. Sir, I feel the circumstances constitute probable cause. Have I got your permission to pick the lock? I think a man might be dying in there.”
He hesitated. “No, John. We’ll have a warrant within twenty minutes. Just hold your horses a little longer.”
I sighed. “Yes, sir.”
I hung up and we all three stood in awkward silence, sipping Bob’s excellent laced coffee. After a moment, Bob frowned. Dehan said, “What is it, Bob?”
He cocked his head. “Did you hear that?”
“No…”
I said, “I thought I did, but it may have been the wind.”
He went to his front door and opened it. We all stepped out onto his front lawn. There was no sound but the occasional gusting of the wind and the desultory creak of a branch loaded down with snow.
“There!” he said. “There it was again! Did you hear it? I swear it came from Sue’s house. It was like a muffled cry for help. “There! There it was again!”
I sighed. “You start to enjoy your coffee and something always crops up. We’d better go and have a look, Dehan. Thanks for the coffee, Mr. Smith.”
“Bob.” He winked at me. “You’re with the 43rd. I was forty years with the 45th. Go get your man.”
We crossed the road back to the corner and climbed the steps to her front door. I pulled out my Swiss Army knife but Dehan shook her head and muttered, “Put it away, Sensei, you’ll only embarrass yourself.”
She slid in front of me, pulled something out of her pocket, fiddled for a moment at the lock and the door opened.
“What did you do?”
“Mean Streets College, Sensei, mean streets.”
We stepped inside the dark hall. Pallid streetlight leaned in, making dull stencils of the banisters, on the floor and against the walls. I pulled my flashlight from my inside pocket, switched it on and played it around the small, cramped space. There was a narrow staircase rising to a second floor. On the right there was a door. I opened it onto a room that was pitch black. I said, “You think the lights work?” I reached in a flipped the switch. The lights came on.
The drapes on the right were drawn closed across the windows. The furniture was basic, and could well have been fifteen or twenty years old. There was no TV. There were no books, ornaments or photographs. But the place was clean. There was a white vinyl sofa with matching chairs, a coffee table on a rug.
Dehan moved across the room to the kitchen, separated from the living space by a breakfast bar. She ran her finger over the surface. “Dusted,” she said, and opened the fridge. The light inside came on and it started to hum.
“Milk, butter, hummus, eggs. Somebody either lives here or spends time here, Stone.”
“Somebody who doesn’t watch TV, and hasn’t much they want to remember, by the looks of it. You think maybe they’re sleeping upstairs?”
I switched on the landing light and climbed the steps without being too careful about making a noise. The landing was small. There was a small bathroom with a shower cubicle. There was soap, unused, but no toothpaste and no toothbrush. The bedroom door was slightly ajar. Inside, it was very dark. There was no snoring, no sound of heavy, sleepy breathing. There was only silence. I went over and pushed it all the way open. Then I switched on the light.
He was on the bed, as I had expected. But what I hadn’t expected was to find him handcuffed to the headboard. His ankles were also cuffed to the footboard, so that he was spread out in a big ‘X’. His eyes were wide with terror and he was staring at me. But he wasn’t seeing me, because he was very dead.
Cause of death was not hard to establish. The duvet between his legs was saturated with blood, which had sprayed as far as the footboard and even spattered the far wall of the bedroom. His genitals had been removed, apparently with a single, clean cut, and placed on his belly. From the gray, pasty color of his face and his naked body, it looked as though he had been pretty much exsanguinated from that single wound.
There were other wounds: savage wounds all over his body. There were multiple stab wounds to his left chest, slashes to his face and his legs, to his torso, his neck and his arms. But none of these had bled. He had been castrated and allowed to die, and then he had been attacked.
Dehan said, “I’ll call dispatch.”
A huge wave of weariness washed over me. I pulled my phone once again from my pocket and called the inspector.
“Stone, I am on it. Just give me…”
“Sir, you are not going to believe this.”
“What?”
“We have found Giorgio Gonzalez. He’s dead. He was castrated and left to bleed to death. After that, he was badly mutilated.”
“Poor bastard.”
“Agreed on both counts, sir.”
“Where was he? You went to the house, didn’t you?”
“The neighbor, a cop from the 45th, Bob Smith…”
“Bob? Sure! I know Bob! He lives there? Whaddaya know! Damn good cop.”
“Yes, sir. He thought he heard shouting from the house, so we thought it best to investigate.”
He grunted. “Very well, just as long as we’re covered. Are we any closer, John, to knowing who did this?”
“Yes, sir. As I said earlier, I had no doubt as to who had done it. Cyril Browne did it.”
“But I thought Cyril Browne was dead!”
“Yes, sir. He is. I’ll explain in the debriefing. It’s a little bit complicated. But I hope to have an arrest soon.”
“Good. We have had quite enough homicides for one night, John.”
“Yes, sir. I agree.”
I hung up and Dehan and I made our way down to the ground floor. I opened the door and stepped out into the cold. Dehan came close beside me. “You OK?”
I nodded. “It was a difficult call. If I had played it differently, Clay, Santos and Giorgio might still be alive.”
She shook her head. “You can’t do that, Stone. You did what seemed right at the time.”
“I should have brought Giorgio in straight away. I didn’t see this coming.”
“Nobody could have.”
“I liked Clay.” I smiled. “He was a pain in the ass, but I liked him.”
Far off, on Soundview Avenue, the first siren wailed, returning to Patterson Avenue once again. It would soon be followed by others. Dehan slipped her arms around me and we waited there, on the steps, for the patrol cars to arrive.
They came within a couple of minutes, accompanied by Frank and the Crime Scene team. We went down the steps to meet them. Frank looked pissed. “What the hell is going on, John? We hadn’t even got halfway back!”
I tried to smile but failed. “I think I’m done for tonight. At least I hope I am. Upstairs in the bedroom. Giorgio Gonzalez, castrated, bled to death. I have to notify his lover. After that, I am going home.”
Frank was frowning at me. “Are you OK?”
“Just tired. Catch you later, Frank. If I’m signifi
cantly wrong about cause of death, call me, will you?”
“You won’t be.”
“See ya.”
I put my arm around Dehan and we walked slowly up Taylor Avenue to Sandy Beach’s house. I let go of Dehan and rang the bell. Dehan took my hand and muttered. “Poor woman. She’s going to be devastated.”
She opened the door almost immediately, smiled brightly and then frowned.
“My goodness! You look exhausted. Please do come in out of the cold. What can I do for you?”
We stepped inside and she closed the door behind us. The living room and the dining room were on our right, and a passage ran down to the kitchen at the back of the house. On the left, a staircase climbed to the upper floor. She indicated the door to the living room and we went through. Four lamps gave a warm, amber light. There was a fire burning in the grate, and Debussy was playing softly in the background.
“Do sit and get warm. Are you off duty yet? Can I offer you a drink?”
I smiled and sat in an armchair. Dehan sat next to me on the sofa. I said, “Not quite yet, but almost. Ms. Beach, I think you ought to sit down. We have some very bad news.”
She went very still. After a moment, she sat in the other armchair. “Is it Giorgio?”
I nodded. “Yes. He’s dead, Ms. Beach. I am very sorry.”
Her whole body seemed to jolt three times, like the shock was hitting her in stages. Then her bottom lip started to quiver. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She clamped her hands to her mouth and gave a small, strangled scream. Dehan rose, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket and went to sit on the arm of Sandy’s chair. She put her arm around her and gave her the handkerchief.
But Sandy fell back, stifling her screams behind her hands, calling on some unnamed divinity to make it not true; to make it so that it was somebody else, not Giorgio.
All we could do was watch her and listen to her grief, and wait for the storm to pass. There was nobody to help her through it. The only person on Earth she had to turn to in moments like these, was the one whose death she was grieving. Eventually her convulsive crying began to subside, and her breathing became more quiet. Dehan stood and went to the kitchen. Sandy sat up, blew her nose and wiped her eyes. We sat in silence until Dehan returned with a glass of water. She gave it to Sandy, who drank half and let out a shaky sigh.
