Lisa’s friend clutched her elbows across her chest, obviously uncomfortable but also pushing herself to be a good advocate. Sampson and I respected that, but there were other considerations.
“We’ll be as brief as we possibly can,” he said. “But this rapist is still out there.”
“Don’t you dare lay a guilt trip on her. Don’t you dare.”
We followed Ms. Goodes inside through a marble-tiled foyer. A sweeping staircase to our right echoed the curve of the chandelier dangling overhead. When I heard the chatter of children’s voices off to the left, they seemed somewhat incongruous with the formality of the house. I began to wonder where these people kept their messes.
Ms. Goodes sighed, then showed us into a side parlor where Lisa Brandt sat alone. She was tiny but pretty, even now, under these unfortunate circumstances. I had the sense that she was dressed for normality, in jeans and a striped oxford shirt, but it was her bent-over posture—and her eyes—that told more of the story. She obviously didn’t know if the pain she was feeling now would ever go away.
Sampson and I introduced ourselves and were invited to sit down. Lisa even forced a polite smile before looking away again.
“Those are beautiful,” I said, pointing at a vase of fresh-cut rhododendron on the coffee table between us. It was easy enough to say because it was true, and I honestly didn’t know where else to start.
“Oh.” She looked at them absently. “Nancy is amazing with all that. She’s a real country girl now, a mom. She always wanted to be a mother.”
Sampson began gently. “Lisa, I want you to know how sorry we are that this happened to you. I know you’ve spoken with a lot of people already. We’ll try not to repeat the background detail too much. Okay so far?”
Lisa kept her eyes fixed on the corner of the room. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Now, we understand you received the necessary prophylaxis but preferred not to provide any physical evidence in your exam at the hospital. Also, that you’re choosing for the time being not to give any description of the man who committed the crime against you. Is that correct?”
“Not now, and not ever,” she said. Her head shook slightly back and forth, like a tiny no repeated over and over.
“You’re not under any obligation to talk,” I assured her. “And we’re not here to get any information that you don’t want to give.”
“With all that in mind,” Sampson went on, “we have some assumptions that we’re working with. First, that your attacker was not someone you knew. And second, that he threatened you in some way, to keep you from identifying him or talking about him. Lisa, are you comfortable telling us whether or not that’s accurate?”
She went very still. I tried to gauge her face and body language but saw nothing. She didn’t respond to Sampson’s question, so I tried a different angle.
“Is there anything you’ve thought about since you spoke with the detectives earlier? Anything you’d like to add?”
“Even a small detail might aid in the investigation,” Sampson said, “and catch this rapist.”
“I don’t want any investigation of what happened to me,” she blurted. “Isn’t that my choice?”
“I’m afraid it’s not,” Sampson said in the softest voice I’d ever heard out of him.
“Why not?” It came out of Lisa more as a desperate plea than a question.
I tried to choose my words carefully. “We’re fairly certain that what happened to you wasn’t an isolated incident, Lisa. There have been other women—”
At that, she came undone. A choking sob escaped her, letting loose everything behind it. Then Lisa Brandt doubled over onto her lap, sobbing with her hands clutched tightly over her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a moan. “I can’t do this. I can’t. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Ms. Goodes rushed back into the room then. She must have been listening just outside the door. She knelt in front of Lisa and put her arms around her friend, whispering reassurances.
“I’m sorry,” Lisa Brandt got out again.
“Nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart. Nothing at all. Just let it out, that’s it,” said Nancy Goodes.
Sampson put a card on the coffee table. “We’ll show ourselves out,” he said.
Ms. Goodes answered without turning away from her sobbing friend.
“Just go. Please don’t come back here. Leave Lisa alone. Go.”
Chapter 55
THE BUTCHER WAS ON A JOB—a hit, a six-figure one. Among other things, he was trying to keep his mind off of John Maggione and the pain he wanted to cause him. He was observing an older well-dressed man with a young girl draped on his arm. A “bird,” as they had called them here in London at one time.
He was probably sixty; she could be twenty-five at most. Curious couple. Eye-catching, which could be a problem for him.
The Butcher watched them as they stood in front of the tony Claridges Hotel waiting for the man’s private car to pull up. It did so, just as it had the previous evening and then again around ten o’clock that morning.
No serious mistakes so far by the couple. Nothing for him to pounce on.
The driver of the private car was a bodyguard, and he was carrying. He was also decent enough at what he did.
There was only one problem for the bodyguard—the girl obviously didn’t want him around. She’d tried, unsuccessfully, to have the older man ditch the driver the night before, when they had attended some kind of formal affair at the Saatchi Gallery.
Well, he would just have to see what developed today. The Butcher pulled out a few cars behind the gleaming black Mercedes CL65. The Merc was fast, more than six hundred horsepower, but a hell of a lot of good that would do them on the crowded streets of London.
He was a little paranoid about working again, and with pretty good reason, but he’d gotten the job through a solid contact in the Boston area. He trusted the guy, at least as far as he could throw him. And he needed the six-figure payday.
A possible break finally came on Long Acre near the Covent Garden underground station. The girl jumped out of the car at a stoplight, started to walk off—and the older man got out as well.
Michael Sullivan pulled over to the curb immediately, and he simply abandoned his car. The rental could never be traced back to him anyway. The move was a classic in that most people wouldn’t even think of doing it, but he couldn’t have cared less about just leaving the car in the middle of London. The car was of no consequence.
He figured the driver-bodyguard wouldn’t do the same with the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, and that he had several minutes before the guy caught up with them again.
The streets around the Covent Garden Piazza were densely packed with pedestrians, and he could see the couple, their heads bobbing, laughing, probably about their “escape” from the bodyguard. He followed them down James Street. They continued to laugh and talk, with not a care in the world.
Big, big mistake.
He could see a glass-roof-covered market up ahead. And a crowd gathered around street performers dressed as white marble statues that only moved when someone threw them a coin.
Then, suddenly, he was on top of the couple, and it felt right, so he fired the silenced Beretta—two heart shots.
The girl went down like a throw rug had been pulled out from under her two feet.
He had no idea who she was, who had wanted her dead or why, and he didn’t care one way or the other.
“Heart attack! Someone had a heart attack!” he called out as he let the gun drop from his fingertips, turned, and disappeared into the thickening crowd. He headed up Neal Street past a couple of pubs with Victorian exteriors and found his abandoned car right where he left it. What a nice surprise.
It was safer to stay in London overnight, but then he was on a morning flight back to Washington.
Easy money—like always, or at least how it had been for him before the cock-up in Venice, which he still had to deal with in a major way.
Chapter 56
JOHN AND I MET that night for a little light sparring at the Roxy Gym after my last therapy session. The practice was building steadily, and my days there made me happy and satisfied for the first time in a few years.
The quaint idea of normality was in my head a lot now, though I’m not sure what the word really meant.
“Get your elbows in,” Sampson said, “before I knock your damn head off.”
I pulled them in. It didn’t help much, though.
The big man caught me with a good right jab that stung like only a solid punch can. I swung and connected solidly with his open side, which seemed to hurt my hand more than it hurt him.
It went on like that for a while, but my mind never really got into the ring. After less than twenty minutes, I held up my gloves, feeling an ache in both shoulders.
“TKO,” I said through my mouthpiece. “Let’s go get a drink.”
Our “drink” turned out to be bottles of red Gatorade on the sidewalk in front of the Roxy. Not what I’d had in mind, but it was just fine.
“So,” Sampson said, “either I’m getting a whole lot better in there or you were out of it tonight. Which is it?”
“You aren’t getting better,” I deadpanned.
“Still thinking about yesterday? What? Talk to me.”
We both had felt lousy about the tough interview with Lisa Brandt. It’s one thing to push a witness like that and get somewhere; it’s another to probe hard and get nothing out of it.
I nodded. “Yesterday, yeah.”
Sampson slid down the wall to sit next to me on the sidewalk. “Alex, you’ve got to get off the worry train.”
“Nice bumper sticker,” I told him.
“I thought things were going pretty good for you,” he said. “Lately anyway.”
“They are,” I said. “The work is good, even better than I thought it would be.”
“So what’s the problem then? Too much of a good thing? What ails you, man?”
In my mind, there was the long answer and the short answer. I went for the short answer. “Maria.”
He knew what I meant, knew why too. “Yesterday reminded you of her?”
“Yeah. In a weird way, it did,” I said. “I was thinking. You remember back around the time when she was killed? There was a serial rape going on then, too. Remember that?”
Sampson squinted into the air. “Right, now that you mention it.”
I rubbed my sore knuckles together. “Anyway, that’s what I mean. It’s all like two degrees of separation these days. Everything I think about reminds me of Maria. Everything I do brings me back to her murder case. I kind of feel like I’m living in purgatory, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”
Sampson waited for me to finish. He usually knows when his point has been made and when to shut up. He had nothing more to say at the moment. Finally, I took a deep breath, and we rose and started up the sidewalk.
“What do you hear about Maria’s killer? Anything new?” I asked him. “Or was Giametti just playing with us?”
“Alex, why don’t you move on?”
“John, if I could move on, I would. Okay? Maybe this is how I do it.”
He stared at his shoes for half a block. When he finally answered, it was begrudgingly. “If I find out something about her killer, you’ll be the first to know.”
Chapter 57
MICHAEL SULLIVAN HAD STOPPED taking shit from anybody when he was fourteen or fifteen years old. Everybody in his family knew that his grandpa James had a gun and that he kept it in the bottom drawer of the dresser in his bedroom. One afternoon in June, the week that school got out for him, Sullivan broke in and stole the gun from his grandfather’s apartment.
For the rest of the day, he moseyed around the neighborhood with the pistola stuck in his pants, concealed under a loose shirt. He didn’t feel the need to show off the weapon to anybody, but he found that he liked having it, liked it a lot. The handgun changed everything for him. He went from a tough kid to an invincible one.
Sullivan hung out until around eight; then he made his way along Quentin Road to his father’s shop. He got there when he knew that the old man would be closing up.
A song he hated, Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” was on somebody’s car radio down the block, and he was tempted to shoot whoever was playing that shit.
The butcher shop’s front door was open, and when he waltzed in, his father didn’t even look up—but he must have seen his son pass the window outside.
The usual stack of Irish Echo newspapers was by the door. Everything always in its goddamn place. Neat, tidy, and completely messed-up.
“Whattaya want?” his father growled. The broom he was using had a scraper blade to dislodge fat from the grout on the floor. It was the kind of scut work Sullivan hated.
“Have a talk with you?” he said to his father.
“Fuck off. I’m busy earning a living.”
“Oh. Is that right? Busy cleaning floors?” Then his arm swung out fast.
And that was the first time Sullivan hit his father—with the gun—in the temple over his right eye. He hit him again, in the nose, and the large man went down into the sawdust and meat shavings. He began to moan and spit out sawdust and gristle.
“You know how badly I can hurt you?” Michael Sullivan bent low to the floor and asked his father. “Remember that line, Kevin? I do. Never forget it as long as I live.”
“Don’t call me Kevin, you punk.”
He hit his father again with the gun handle. Then he kicked him in the testicles, and his father groaned in pain.
Sullivan looked around the store with total contempt. Kicked over a stand of McNamara’s soda bread, just to kick something. Then he put the gun to his old man’s head and cocked it.
“Please,” his father gasped, and his eyes went wide with shock and fear and some kind of bizarre realization about who his son was. “No. Don’t do this. Don’t, Michael.”
Sullivan pulled the trigger—and there was a loud snap of metal against metal.
But no deafening explosion. No brain-splattering gunshot. Then there was powerful silence, like in a church.
“Someday,” he told his father. “Not today, but when you least expect it. One day when you don’t want to die, I’m going to kill you. You’re gonna have a hard death, too, Kevin. And not with a pop gun like this one.”
Then he walked out of the butcher shop, and he became the Butcher of Sligo. Three days before Christmas of his eighteenth year, he came back and killed his father. As he’d promised, not with a gun. He used one of the old man’s boning knives, and he took several Polaroid shots as a keepsake.
Chapter 58
OUT IN MARYLAND, where he lived nowadays, Michael Sullivan shouldered a baseball bat. Not just any bat, either, a vintage Louisville Slugger, a 1986 Yankees game bat, to be exact. Screw collector’s items, though, this solid piece of ash was meant to be used.
“All right,” Sullivan called out to the pitcher’s mound. “Let’s see what you can do, big man. I’m shaking in my boots here. Let’s see what you got.”
It was hard to believe that Mike Junior was old enough to have a windup this fluid and good, but he did. And his changeup was a small masterpiece. Sullivan only recognized it coming because he’d taught the pitch to the boy himself.
Still, he wasn’t handing his eldest son any charity. That would be an insult to the boy. He gave the pitch the extra fraction of a second it needed, then swung hard and connected with a satisfying crack of the bat. He pretended the ball was the head of John Maggione.
“And she’s out of here!” he crowed. He ran the bases for show while Seamus, his youngest, scrambled over the ballpark’s chain-link fence to retrieve the home-run ball. “Good one, Dad!” he screamed, holding up the scuffed ball where it had landed.
“Dad, we should go.” His middle son, Jimmy, already had his catcher’s mitt and face mask off. “We’ve got to leave the house by six
thirty. Remember, Dad?”
After Sullivan himself, Jimmy was the most excited about tonight. Sullivan had gotten them tickets to see U2’s Vertigo tour at the 1st Mariner Arena in Baltimore. It was going to be a fine night, the kind of family activity he could tolerate.
On the ride to the concert, Sullivan sang along with the car stereo until his boys started to groan and make jokes in the backseat.
“You see, boys,” Caitlin said, “your father thinks he’s another Bono. But he sounds more like . . . Ringo Starr?”
“Your mother’s just jealous,” Sullivan said, laughing. “You kids and I have rich Irish blood running in our veins. She’s got nothing but Sicilian.”
“Oh, right. One question: Which would you rather eat—Italian or Irish? Case closed.”
The boys howled and high-fived one for their mom.
“Hey, what’s this, Mom?” Seamus asked.
Caitlin looked; then she pulled a small silver flip phone from under the front seat. Sullivan saw it, and his stomach heaved.
It was Benny Fontana’s cell phone. Sullivan had taken it with him the night he’d visited Benny and had been looking for it ever since. Talk about mistakes.
And mistakes will kill you.
He kept his face in perfect control. “I’ll bet that’s Steve Bowen’s phone,” he lied.
“Who?” Caitlin asked.
“Steve Bowen. My client? I gave him a ride to the airport when he was in town.”
Caitlin looked puzzled. “Why hasn’t he tried to get it back?”
Because he doesn’t exist.
“Probably because he’s in London.” Sullivan kept improvising. “Just stick it in the glove compartment.”
Now that he had the cell phone, though, he knew what he wanted to do with it. In fact, he couldn’t wait. He drove the family as close to the arena as he could get, then pulled over to the curb.
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