“Uh huh.”
“Where?”
McKenna pointed at the laptop, its screen also smeared and dotted with blood and tissue, but not overwhelmed by it.
“What’s it say?”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a little note pad. “It all runs together on the screen, but when you put in spacing, it reads: ‘My quest is over. My job done. I did it. I did it. I did it. Burned and scattered to the wind. Ashes to ashes. I did it. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.. ’”
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee,” I mumbled. “Blessed art thou amongst women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…
“I thought you were Jewish.”
“I was married to an ex-Catholic for almost twenty years. And try and remember, Jesus’s last supper was a Passover Seder.”
He snorted and shook his head. “You’re just full of surprises.”
“Everybody seems to think so.” Then I asked the million dollar question: “Do you think he really burned her body?”
“Let’s go for a walk.”
We went back down the stairs, turned around the staircase into the kitchen, but when we stepped into the kitchen, a young detective, NYPD shield hanging out of his jacket pocket, put his hand up and said to McKenna, “Wait a second. Who’s this guy now?”
That set McKenna off. “This guy is the PI that gave me the lead that got us here. He’s the one who tracked Tierney down in the first place.”
“We’ll wanna interview him when you’re done.” He continued to talk to McKenna directly as if I wasn’t standing a foot away from him.
“That’s fine,” I said. “Now can I see what there is to see?”
The young detective jerked his head over his left shoulder. “Go ahead. I’ll be outside when you’re ready.”
The kitchen, like the living room, was a museum piece. The floor was a sheet of yellow and green linoleum-the real stuff-and the appliances were from, as my mom used to say, the year of the flood. The wallpaper, a green floral print, had been around since WWII. The table was green Formica with a fluted aluminum border and the chairs were bent tubular aluminum with jade green plastic cushions. We turned right at the ancient fridge and then right again to an open door. The door led down three rough-hewn wooden steps to a small combination root cellar/pantry. In a house built so close to the water, this was the nearest thing you could get to a basement. The room was on the opposite side of the house from the porch, so I hadn’t noticed it when I was here the first time. Windowless, it was dark in here even though the sun was peeking through the kitchen windows. There was a bare bulb overhead in an old ceramic ceiling fixture. McKenna pulled the beaded chain that hung down from the light.
There before us was a kind of makeshift altar and shrine. The altar, complete with a kneeling step for prayer, was covered in candles and old candle wax. Above the altar was a collage of images of Sashi Bluntstone. Most were cut out of newspapers and magazines and glued and lacquered to the wall. Not unexpectedly, Sashi’s eyes had been blackened and blood poured from her ears. But there were other photographs that sat on top of the altar and leaned against the wall. They were of Sashi Bluntstone, her hands and legs bound behind her like the arms and legs of the stuffed bear left in my car. In the photos, she was propped against a blank wall and nude except for panties. She was limp and her eyes shut.
“See those panties?” McKenna whispered, pointing at the photos. “They were on the altar when we found this room. They were bloody, Moe. It was dried blood.”
“Fuck!”
“It gets worse.”
“How much worse?”
“Wrapped inside the panties we found some small charred bones. Human bones. One of the guys thinks they’re from a finger, maybe a pinky, a child’s pinky.”
The world began wobbling so fiercely, it was all I could do not to throw up right there. I managed to make it outside to the water’s edge before giving up whatever I had inside me. Then I plunged my head into the icy cold water. Now the what-ifs weren’t McKenna’s cross to bear. They were mine. And the cold water would have helped only if I’d managed to keep my head under.
TWENTY-SIX
I sat in Dr. Mehmet Ogologlu’s waiting room, thumbing through the magazines and trying very hard to fight my own desire to leave. Nothing new in that, in fighting myself. I’d been doing it for the two very long weeks since I’d thrown my guts up at the water’s edge behind Tierney’s house. Christmas was at hand, the world had stopped wobbling, and everyone had seemed to move beyond Sashi Bluntstone’s kidnapping and murder to the next petty, scandalous, or violent thing the media ran up the flagpole to distract us from what was actually important. Sometimes I think George Orwell got it right. He was just off by twenty years or so. Yes, people had moved on, but I hadn’t. That’s why I was here.
The first week was the roughest, although several days of it are lost to me forever. I spent nearly twenty-four hours at Brooklyn South Homicide on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island following the discovery of John Tierney’s body. There I was interviewed for hours on end by myriad detectives and representatives from the Brooklyn DA’s office. What happened after that I’ve been forced to piece together. I remember I started drinking the moment I walked back into my condo. I don’t know when I stopped or if I stopped, only that Sarah found me passed out and half-dressed on the bathroom floor three days later. She said I hadn’t been answering my phone messages or my emails and that everyone was worried about me. What did that mean, everyone? Isn’t everyone’s everyone different? How many people did my everyone constitute? Three? Four? Two? What was the formula? Thinking about it just made me feel more wretched.
Then, for a few days after that, I sat alone in my apartment. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I was numb. I wasn’t drinking. My body’d had quite enough of that, thank you very much. I played some old vinyl records without listening. I watched a lot of movies on cable, though I couldn’t tell you which ones. I screened my calls, answering only Sarah’s. She called every day. My daughter was back in my life, which was exactly what I’d hoped for when she begged me to get involved that morning at New Carmens. What I couldn’t figure out was the value of hopes realized versus the price paid. I didn’t know how to do that kind of calculus, but somewhere I heard the devil laughing, or maybe it was God.
I waited and waited for the cops to call me back in, but the call never came. It wasn’t going to. That’s what Detective McKenna told me when he showed up at my door, eight days of newspapers cradled in his arms. The first thing he said was, “Christ, Prager, you look like shit.”
“That I do,” I said, staring in the mirror and running my hand over the thicket of gray stubble covering my face. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve dug up every inch of Tierney’s property and taken his house apart, moldy stick by moldy stick.”
“Find anything else?”
“A few things, yeah.”
“Like what?”
“Like ten thousand dollars of the ransom money in a paper bag in one of the kitchen cabinets.”
“How do you know it’s from the ransom?”
“For starters, the parents identified the bag. It’s from a supermarket in Glen Cove. Their fingerprints are all over the bag and the money,” he said. “We also found a length of bloody gauze shoved under a mat in the backseat of his car. It’s the kid’s blood.”
“Fuck! Anything else?”
“Like what, Prager, a map to the pit where he burned her body?”
“Like the rest of the money?”
“No more money. Who knows what that wacky fuck was thinking? Maybe he flung it into Jamaica Bay or ate it for lunch.”
“Any more bones?”
“None of those either. We’re never going to find her ourselves. You know how it’s going to be. Ten years from now, some old fart will be walking his dog in a state park or along a parkway and he’ll trip over something and he’ll look back and see a bone sticking out of th
e ground. That’s how she’ll be found.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Sure I’m right.”
“What about the way he was living?” I asked.
“Tierney? Oh, it was his house, all right. The mother died like two years ago and left it to him, but that’s when he started going completely over the falls. Had all the utilities shut off because he told his shrink that he was worried Hamas could listen in on his thoughts through their special wires.”
“What’s the deal with Brooklyn South Homicide?” I asked. “They gonna keep me waiting until I start crawling on the ceiling before they call me back in?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Let me shower and shave before-”
“No. I’m here to tell you it’s over. They’re done with you. I’m done with you. Both the Nassau County PD and the NYPD have finished our investigations. We’ll keep looking for the remains, but the case is pretty much over. It’s all on Tierney, not on you. We figure the girl was already dead by the time you showed up and both departments agree that in his house at night in the dark, anyone could have missed the door to the pantry. The police get second-guessed all the time and we’re not about to play Monday morning quarterback with you.”
“But what if she wasn’t already dead? What if I’d just come to you with the list when I got it? What if I hadn’t been so fast to dismiss Tierney as a suspect?”
“Come on, Prager, we went over this a hundred times when you were at Brooklyn South. There’s no way of knowing any of that. You want to beat yourself up over it, I can’t stop you, but it’s a waste of time. The fact is, you led us to Tierney. You found him, not us. Maybe if the parents had come to you sooner, we could have saved the kid. You think that doesn’t eat at me? That me and a whole team of detectives were chasing our own tails around and you come in and in a few days… voila! None of this is on you. Whatever peace the parents have now is because of you.”
We didn’t talk much after that. He’d had his say, done his duty, and now he needed to move on. Goodbye was a simple handshake.
Somehow, none of what McKenna had to say made me feel better. Sure, I’d neglected to tell the cops that I hadn’t checked the house, that it was Jimmy Palumbo who’d done it, that it was him and not me who failed to find the altar room. But that didn’t get me off the hook. The fact is, I should’ve looked for myself. Maybe I would have found that room in the dark, maybe not. That’s not the point. The answer to why I didn’t have a look for myself was easy and it had nothing to do with believing Jimmy. It wasn’t even about believing Tierney. Now, looking back I wondered why I was so quick to believe a crazy man’s ten seconds of coherence.
“I didn’t take her,” John Tierney had said.
Those words were going to haunt me for the rest of my life; a lot about this case would. There was Delia Parker’s dead baby boy, a baby whose name I still didn’t know. And there was that other question, the bigger question, hanging over me like my own personal rain cloud. Why hadn’t I turned Martyr’s list over to McKenna the minute I got it? The thing is, the answer that I gave the cops was perfectly reasonable. It sounded so much like the truth I swear I almost believed it myself when it came out of my mouth.
I told them that it didn’t make much sense to me to turn over reams of unvetted data, that I was afraid it might slow down their investigation and waste manpower by sending the cops off in a hundred different directions. I said I thought I was being responsible by paring down the list, by doing some of the initial legwork myself. And hadn’t I turned the list over to McKenna the second I saw I wasn’t up to the task?
Even now, repeating the words in my head, it sounded like the truth, but it wasn’t. It was a rationalization. The real answer to both questions, to all the whys, was the same and much more simple than the answers I gave the cops. The answer was that I was a prideful son of a bitch. I always knew better. I always had too much faith in my own decisions, in my gut, in my ability to read people. So when Tier-ney said he didn’t do it and it rang true to me, I accepted it like the gospel truth. Hence there was no need for me to double-check Jimmy and search the house for myself. I’d already declared John Tierney a non-suspect by reason of insanity. And the list… I didn’t turn it over because it was mine, because in my gut I felt that if Sashi could be found, I would find her, not the cops.
The irony in this was that I was already wearing the albatross necklace before I ever heard of Sashi Bluntstone. Her death wasn’t a new lesson to me, but an old one, one I thought I had learned, but hadn’t. I’d simply kept my pride locked safely away in my office with the rest of my life for the last seven years. The lesson was that people don’t change, that I didn’t change, that my promises were just lies in waiting. That my pride and faith in my gut persisted in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. My two divorces and Katy’s murder weren’t enough to humble me. And for fuck’s sake, my ability to read people was as much a myth as the exploding poodle in the microwave. Me, read people? The two closest friends I ever had turned out to be corrupt murderers. What did I really know about people?
Funny that that should be my last thought before John Tierney’s psychiatrist opened the door to his office and asked, “Mr. Prager, would you like to step in?” What do any of us know about people?
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dr. Mehmet Ogologlu was a tall, olive-skinned man with a round face and thinning black hair. He had penetrating brown eyes, a very full mouth, and a beak-like nose. He was comfortably dressed in a burgundy sweater over a blue Oxford shirt and gray cords. His shoes were scruffy old Bass loafers. I guessed most people would feel pretty much at ease around him. He gestured at a brown leather chair that faced his desk and waited for me to sit before he sat himself. I didn’t know if that was a function of good manners or of his training. I wasn’t in a trusting frame of mind.
“Well, Mr. Prager, what motivated you to come see me today?” Although his accent was as Oxford as his shirt, there were still some traces of Turkey in his speech.
“Guilt,” I said.
“We all live with guilt,” he said dispassionately, lifting a notepad and pen off his desk.
“Not this kind of guilt.”
“What kind of guilt would that be?”
“I think I might be responsible for someone’s murder.”
That put a crack in his wall of dispassion. The psychiatrist leaned forward and stopped writing. “Whose murder?”
“Sashi Bluntstone’s.”
Now the wall came tumbling down. He stood up. “Are you a reporter? I will not discuss this with the press.”
“I’m not a reporter.”
“Please leave.”
“I swear, I’m not the press.”
“Who are you?”
“Just who I said I was. My name is Moe Prager.”
He studied me more carefully now. “I am still at a bit of a loss. If I accept you are who you say you are and I am to take you at your word, what is it that you believe I can do for you?”
“Can we sit?” I sat and he followed in kind.
“It’s customary for the patient to volunteer information and for the doctor to listen.”
“I was the private investigator who found John Tierney, Dr. Ogologlu.”
“I was under the impression it was the authorities who discovered John.”
“Through me. I developed the lead and tipped the police off to his activities. They followed up.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Prager, however, I fail to see in what capacity I can be of any service to you. In any case, I feel duty bound to warn you that I am loath to discuss my patients, living or deceased, with anyone.”
“I understand, but maybe if you hear me out…”
“Possibly. It might facilitate progress if I knew in what capacity you come here today: as a private investigator or as a potential patient?”
“Honestly?”
“That would be best, I think, don’t you?”
“I d
on’t know what I’m doing here,” I confessed. “I just knew I had to speak to you.”
“Why is that, do you suppose?”
“Two days before the police went to Tierney’s house, I paid him a visit. He just seemed so detached from the world the rest of us operate in and so lost in his own, that I was convinced he couldn’t have had anything to do with Sashi Bluntstone’s kidnapping. Without a second thought, I disqualified him as a suspect. I was so sure of myself that I didn’t bother searching his house. I even considered not telling the police about him at all. That’s how sure I was. Then, just as I was leaving, he came right out and said he didn’t do it. He was coherent long enough to tell me that.”
“Oh, I see. You are feeling guilty and responsible.”
“Wouldn’t you, in my shoes?”
“It need not be that academic a question, Mr. Prager. I feel quite responsible enough in my own.”
“Then maybe we can help each other.”
“Yes, maybe we can. But if we can, this is not the proper venue. Come.”
For as long as I could remember, this part of Atlantic Avenue, from Court Street down to the BQE, was the main drag of a thriving area for Near and Middle Eastern businesses of all kinds. With Bordeaux In Brooklyn only a five-minute walk away, I sometimes came to the area for lunch or dinner. The Constantinople Cafe, a short stroll from Dr. Ogologlu’s office across from Long Island College Hospital, was a tiny coffeehouse with four small tables, a few decorative water pipes, rugs hung on the walls along with travel posters of ruins and mosques. That’s where the atmosphere stopped and reality set in as a local news radio channel filled the air instead of strains of exotic music. The cafe was shouldered on one side by a large Syrian-owned food shop and on the other by a Pan-Arab bookstore.
“Have you ever had Turkish coffee, Mr. Prager?”
“No.”
That elicited a big smile from Ogologlu. He clapped his hands together and held up two fingers to the counterman. Then, as he pointed at some pastries in a glass case, he and the barista had a brief conversation in their native tongue. When he came back to the table, he was still wearing the smile.
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