Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3

by Jeffery Deaver

  THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED the airing of Go For Broke were not the best of Mike O’Connor’s life.

  The loss of a quarter-million dollars hurt more than he wanted to admit.

  More troubling, he thought he’d get some publicity. But in fact there was virtually none whatsoever. Oh, he got some phone calls. But they were mostly about the foiled robbery attempt and Dillon McKennah’s rescue. He finally stopped returning the reporters’ calls.

  His pilot for Stories was now completely dead and nobody was the least interested in hiring him for anything other than things like Viagra or Cialis commercials.

  “I can’t do it, honey,” he said to Diane.

  And she’d laughed, saying, “It wouldn’t be truth-in-advertising anyway, not with you.”

  And so he puttered around the house, painted the guest room. Played a little golf.

  He even considered helping Diane sell real estate. He sat around the house and watched TV and movies from Netflix and On Demand.

  And then one day, several weeks after the poker show, he happened to be playing couch potato and watching a World War II adventure film from the sixties. Mike O’Connor had seen it when it first came out, when he was just a boy. He’d loved it then and he’d loved it the times he’d seen it in the intervening years.

  But now he realized there was something about it he’d missed. He sat up and remained riveted throughout the film.

  Fascinating.

  Long after the movie was over he continued to sit and think about it. He realized that he could identify with the people in the movie. They were driven and they were desperate.

  He remembered a line from Homicide Detail. It had stuck with him all these years. His character, tough, rule-bending Detective Olson, had said to his sergeant, “The man’s desperate. And you know what desperation does—it turns you into a hero or it turns you into a villain. Don’t ever forget that.”

  Mike O’Connor rose from the couch and headed to his closet.

  * * *

  “HEY, MIKE. HOW YOU DOING? I’m sorry it didn’t work out. That last hand. Phew. That was a cliff-hanger.”

  “I saw the ratings,” O’Connor said to Aaron Felter.

  “They weren’t bad.”

  Not bad? No, O’Connor thought, they were over-the-top amazing. They were close to OJ confessing on Oprah, with Dr. Phil pitching in the psychobabble.

  “So.” Silence rolled along for a moment. “What’re you up to next?”

  Felter was pleased to see him but his attitude said that a deal was a deal. This was true in Hollywood just as much as on Wall Street. O’Connor had taken a chance and lost and the rules of business meant that his and the producer’s arrangement was now concluded.

  “Taking some time off. Rewriting a bit of Stories.”

  “Ah. Good. You know what goes around comes around.”

  O’Connor wasn’t sure that it did. Or even what the hell the phrase meant. But he smiled and nodded.

  Silence, during which the producer was, of course, wondering what exactly O’Connor was doing here.

  So the actor got right down to it.

  “Let me ask you a question, Aaron. You like old movies, right? Like your dad and I used to talk about.”

  Another pause. Felter glanced at the spotless glass frames of his posters covering the walls. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”

  A lot of people didn’t, O’Connor was thinking; they liked modern films. Oh, there was nothing wrong with that. In fifty years people would be treasuring some of today’s movies the way O’Connor treasured films like Bonnie and Clyde, M*A*S*H or Shane.

  Every generation ought to like its own darlings best.

  “You know, I was thinking about Go For Broke. And guess what it reminded me of?”

  “Couldn’t tell you.”

  “A movie I just saw on TV.”

  “Really? About a poker showdown? An old Western?”

  “No. The Guns of Navarone.” He nodded at the poster to O’Connor’s right.

  “Go For Broke reminded you of that?”

  “And that’s not all. It also reminded me of The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch, The Dirty Dozen, Top Gun, Saving Private Ryan, Alien…In fact, a lot of films. Action films.”

  “I don’t follow, Mike.”

  “Well, think about…what was the word you used when we were talking about Stories? ‘Formula.’ You start with a group of diverse heroes and send ’em on a mission. One by one they’re eliminated before the big third-act scene. Like The Guns of Navarone. It’s a great film, by the way.”

  “One of the best,” Felter agreed uncertainly.

  “Group of intrepid commandos. Eliminated one by one…But in a certain order, of course: sort of in reverse order of their youth or sex appeal. The stiff white guy’s one of the first to go—say, Anthony Quayle in Navarone. Or Robert Vaughn in The Magnificent Seven. Next we lose the minorities. Yaphet Kotto in Alien. Then the hotheaded young kid is bound to go. James Darren. Shouldn’t he have ducked when he was facing down the Nazi with the machine gun? I would have. But, no, he just kept going till he was dead.

  “That brings us to women. If they’re not the leads, they better be careful, Tyne Daly in one of the Dirty Harry films. And even if they survive, it’s usually so they can hang on the arm of the man who wins the showdown. And who does that bring us to finally? The main opponents? The older white guy versus the enthusiastic young white guy. Tom Cruise versus Nicholson. Denzel versus Gene Hackman. Clint Eastwood versus Lee Van Cleef. DiCaprio versus all the first-class passengers on Titanic.

  “Kind of like the contestants on the show. Stodgy white guy, minority, hot-headed youth, the woman…Bingham, Stone, Kresge, Sandy. And after they were gone, who was left? Old me versus young Dillon McKennah.”

  “I think you’re pissed off about something, Mike. Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “The game was rigged, Aaron. I know it. You wrote your quote ‘reality’ show like it was a classic Hollywood Western or war movie. You knew how it was going to come out from the beginning. You followed the formula perfectly.”

  “And why the fuck would I do that?”

  “Because I think you’re trying to get a movie financing package moving with Dillon McKennah. That caper film he was talking about. He’d shot himself in the foot with Town House and that other crap he appeared in. He needed a bump—for both of you.”

  Felter was speechless for a moment. Then he looked down. “We talked about a few things, that’s all, Dillon and me. Hell, you and I talked about Stories. That’s my business. Oh, come on, Mike. Don’t embarrass yourself. It was a fucking pissant reality show. There was no guarantee of a bump.”

  “But it did get Dillon a bump. A big one. And you know why? Because of the robbery. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that was a classic Act Two reversal—according to the formula of scriptwriting. You know how that works. Big plot twist three-quarters of the way through. Guns of Navarone? The young Greek girl, Gia Scala, the supposed patriot, turns out to be the traitor. She destroys the detonators. How’re the commandos going to blow up the German guns now? We’re sitting on the edge of our seats, wondering.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “The robbery, Aaron. The attempted robbery. It was all set up, too. You arranged the whole thing. That’s what made it more than boring reality TV. My God, you even added a dash of COPS. You got the attempt and Dillon’s Steven Seagal karate moves on security camera and that night it was on YouTube and every network in the country. TV at its best. You think there wasn’t a human being in the country who wasn’t going to turn on the second episode of Go For Broke and watch Dillon and me slug it out?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  O’Connor held up a hand. “Now, don’t embarrass yourself, Aaron. On the set of Homicide Detail, we had an advisor, a real cop in the LAPD. He’s retired now but we’re still good buddies. I talked to him and told him I had a problem. I needed to know some facts about
the case. He made some calls. First of all, the gun that Sammy Ralston had? It was a fake gun. From a studio property department. The sort they use on TV sets, the sort I carried for seven years. Second, turns out that his phone records show Ralston called a prisoner, Joey Fadden, in Lompoc prison a few weeks ago. The same prisoner that you interviewed as part of that series you shot on California prisons last year. I think you paid Joey to get Ralston’s name…Ah, ah, ah, let me finish. Gets better. Third, Ralston keeps talking about this mysterious biker named Jake who put the whole thing together and nobody knows about.”

  “Jake.”

  “I dug up my fake shield from the TV show and went to the bar on Melrose where Ralston said he met with Jake. I had a mug shot with me.”

  “A—”

  “From Variety. It was a picture of you and your assistant. The big one. The bartender recognized him. You got him to play the role of Jake, costume, fake tats, the whole thing…I just walked past his office, by the way. There’re posters on his wall, too. One of them’s Brokeback Mountain. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Jake. Think about it.”

  Felter said nothing but his expression was essentially: Shit.

  “Dillon knew about the setup. He knew about the fake gun. That’s why he took on a guy who was armed. He wasn’t in any danger. It was all planned. All planned for the bump.”

  O’Connor shook his head. “I should’ve guessed before. I mean, the final hand, Aaron? You know how most poker games end: Two guys half-comatose from lack of sleep and one beats the other with three sixes over a pair of threes. A four-of-a-kind versus a straight flush? That only happens in the movies. That’s not real life.”

  “How could I rig the game?”

  “Because you hired a sleight-of-hand artist as the dealer. You saw his card tricks when we met him…I ran him down. And I checked the tapes. There were no close-ups of his hands. I’ve got his name and address. Oh, and I also got the phone number of the gaming commission in Nevada.”

  The man closed his eyes. Maybe he was thinking of excuses and explanations.

  O’Connor almost hoped he’d say something. Which would give the actor a chance to throw out his famous tag line from the old TV series. Save it for the judge.

  But Felter didn’t try to excuse himself. He looked across the desk, as if it were a poker table, and he said, “So where do we go from here?”

  “To put it in terms of television, Aaron,” Mike O’Connor said, pulling several thick envelopes out of his briefcase, “let’s make a deal.”

  A TEXTBOOK CASE

  a Lincoln Rhyme story

  Physical evidence cannot be wrong; it cannot perjure itself; it cannot be wholly absent.…Only human failure to find, study, and understand it can diminish its value.

  —Paul L. Kirk, Crime Investigation: Physical Evidence and the Police Laboratory

  1

  THE WORST I’VE EVER SEEN,” he whispered.

  She listened to the young man’s words and decided that was a bit ironic, since he couldn’t have been more than mid-twenties. How many crime scenes could he have run?

  But she noted, too, that his round, handsome face, crested by a crew-cut scalp, was genuinely troubled. He had a military air about him and didn’t seem the sort to get flustered.

  Something particularly troubling was down there—in the pit of the underground garage they stood in front of, delineated by yellow fluttering tape, the pit where the woman had been murdered early that morning.

  Amelia Sachs was gearing up at the staging area outside the bland apartment building in this equally style-challenged neighborhood of Manhattan, East Twenty-sixth Street. Here were residential low-rises from the 1950s and ’60s, some brownstones, restaurants that had been born Italian twenty years ago and had converted to Middle Eastern. For greenery, short, anemic trees, striving grass, tiny shrubs in huge concrete planters.

  Sachs ripped open the plastic bag containing the disposable scene suit: white Tyvek coveralls, booties, head cap, cuffed nitrile gloves.

  “You’ll want the N95, too,” the young officer told her. His name was Marko, maybe first, probably last. Sachs hadn’t bothered to find out.

  “Chemical problem? Bio?” Nodding toward the pit.

  The N95 was a particulate respirator that filtered out a lot of the bad crap you found at some crime scenes. The dangerous ones.

  “Just, you’ll want it.”

  She didn’t like the respirators and usually wore a simple surgical mask. But if Marko told her there was a problem inside, she’d go with it.

  Worst I’ve ever seen…

  Sachs continued to pull on the protective gear. She was claustrophobic and didn’t like the layers of swaddling that crime scene searchers had to put up with, but were necessary to protect them from dangerous substances at the scene. More important, the outfit protected the scene from contaminants police might throw off—their hairs, fibers, flecks of skin and other assorted trace they might cart about with them. (One man had nearly been arrested because a tomato seed had linked him to a murder—until it was discovered that the seed came from the shoe of a Crime Scene officer, who’d neglected to wear booties…and who was soon, thanks to Lincoln Rhyme, a former Crime Scene officer.)

  Several other cars arrived, including that of the Major Cases detective lieutenant, Lon Sellitto, an unmarked Crown Victoria. The car was spotless and still dripping from the car wash. Sellitto, on the other hand, was typically disheveled. He wore an unpressed white shirt, a skewed tie and a rumpled suit, though fortunately in wrinkle-concealing navy blue (Sachs recalled that he’d worn seersucker once and never again; even he had thought he looked like tousled bed sheets). Sachs had given up trying to guess Sellitto’s age. He was in that timeless mid-fifties that all detectives first-class on the NYPD seem to fall into.

  He was also an institution and he caught a few awed looks from the uniforms now as he pushed his way through the crowd of gawkers and with some difficulty, considering his weight, ducked under the yellow tape.

  He joined Sachs and Marko, who wasn’t particularly awed but clearly respectful.

  “Detective.”

  Sellitto didn’t have any idea who he was but nodded back. He said to Sachs, “How is he?”

  Which would mean only one “he.”

  “Fine. Been back for two days. Actually wanted to come to the scene.”

  Lincoln Rhyme, the former head of the NYPD Crime Scene operation and now a forensic consultant, had been undergoing a series of medical procedures to improve his condition—he was a quadriplegic, largely paralyzed from the neck down because of an accident while searching a scene years ago.

  Sellitto said a sincere “No shit. Wanted to come. God bless him.”

  Sachs gave the man a wry look. She was considerably younger and a more junior detective. But she didn’t let a lot pass—from anyone. Sellitto caught the glance. “Did that sound condescending?”

  She lifted an eyebrow, meaning, “Yep. And if Rhyme heard you say it, the reply would not be pretty.”

  “Well, fuck. Good for him anyway.” He focused on the off-white apartment, the water stains on the walls, the mismatched windows, the dented air conditioners underneath them, the sad grass, sick or dying from city dogs more than from the cool air. Still, even an air-shaft studio would cost two thousand and change. When Sachs was not staying with Rhyme she was at her place in Brooklyn. Big. And it had a garden. The month was September and she’d just harvested the last crop of veggies, beating the frost by twenty-four hours.

  Sachs tucked her abundant red hair up under the Tyvek cap and Velcroed closed the coveralls over her jeans and tight wool sweater. The suit fit snugly. Marko watched, somewhat discreetly. Sachs had been a fashion model before joining the NYPD. She got followed by a lot of eyes.

  “Chance of the scene being hot?” she asked Marko.

  It was rare for perps to stick around a murder scene and target investigators, but not unheard of.

  “Doubt it,” the young officer responded. “But…�
��

  Made sense for him to hedge when it came to a scene that was apparently so horrific.

  Before suiting up, Sachs had drawn and set her Glock pistol aside. She now wiped it down with an alcohol swab to remove trace and slipped it into the pocket of the coveralls. If she needed the weapon, she could get to it quickly, even fire through the cloth, if need be. That was good about Glocks. No external safeties, double action. You pointed and pulled.

  Any chance of it being hot?…

  And what the hell was so bad about the scene? How had the poor woman died? And what had happened to her before…or after?

  She guessed it was a sado-sexual killing.

  Sellitto said to Marko, “What’s the story, Officer?”

  He looked back and forth from the older detective to Sachs as he gave the story. “I’m assigned to Crime Scene in Queens, HQ, sir. I had some advanced training at the academy this morning so I was heading there, when I heard the call.”

  The NYPD Academy on Twentieth Street at Second Avenue.

  “Dispatch said any available. I was two blocks away so I responded. I had gear with me and I suited up before I went in.” Marko, too, was dressed in a Tyvek crime scene outfit, minus the head covering.

  “Good thinking.”

  “I wouldn’t have waited but the dispatch said the report was a body, not an injured victim.”

  Crime scenes were always a compromise. Contamination with outside trace and obliterating important evidence could hamper or even ruin an investigation but first responders’ priority is saving lives or collaring perps who were still present. Marko had acted right.

  “I looked at the scene fast then called in.”

  Two other Crime Scene people from the Queens headquarters had just arrived in the RRV—rapid response vehicle—containing evidence collection gear. The man and woman climbed out, she Asian, he Latino. He opened the back and they, too, got their gear. “Hey, Marko,” he called, “how’d you beat us? Take a chopper over here?”

  The young officer gave a faint smile. But it was clear he was still troubled, presumably by what he’d seen inside.