“We have reason to believe he’s dirty,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.
Zach was completely blindsided. He reacted before he could stop himself. “Oh, come on, Rebecca!”
“I know.” She held up a hand. “I know. He’s your partner—”
“It’s not that—”
“And I know what you’re thinking. I know how Goulart feels about me. Or about women in general. Or about his ex-wife, whom he projects onto women in general, or whatever it is. I know you figure that must mean I hate him back. Well, I won’t pretend he’s on my Christmas list. But truth is true, right? That’s the whole thing about it. Eyes open or eyes shut, it’s just the same. Things happen or they don’t. People are what they are. You have a lead, a clue, you follow it, you find what you find, like it or not. The truth is true. We know that.”
Zach’s narrow, wind-weathered face had turned to craggy stone. She was right, of course. The truth was true. But she was also right—it was also true—that Goulart was his partner. And unless Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell could prove what she had said—unless she had recordings or pictures—real money shots of Goulart receiving a brown paper bag full of Benjamins in a drug-den men’s room—Zach would stand by the man who had walked into that Kansas farmhouse with him three years ago—and his feelings for Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell would turn as stony as his expression.
“There’s true—and then there’s proving it,” he told her tersely.
She leaned in even closer. Zach could smell her bath soap, feel the heat of her breath. He caught a glimpse of the flames dancing around a marble façade on the TV set behind her.
“You remember that cargo ship we had the Coast Guard stop last month?”
“The Chevalier, yeah. What about her?”
“Supposed to be carrying—”
“A container of sex slaves out of Eastern Europe, yeah, only it wasn’t.”
“Only it was. Only it might have been, anyway,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. “A sailor off that ship was busted for killing a hooker in New Orleans last week. He was looking for a deal, so he told the cops there that they’d been tipped off—on the Chevalier—they were tipped off that the Coast Guard was coming for them. He says they took the girls out of the container, cut their throats, and threw them overboard. Raped them first, made a party of it.”
Zach flinched at the image, but he said, “What’s that got to do with Goulart?”
“Sailor says they got the tip on the Wednesday. That’s before we even contacted the Coast Guard. On the Wednesday, no one knew we were onto them but you, me, and Goulart.”
“. . . and the CI who tipped Goulart off in the first place. And whoever told him.”
“The sailor says the tip-off came from law enforcement.”
“The sailor also rapes and kills women. That raises some questions in my mind about his character.”
There was a flash of irritation in Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell’s green eyes. Irritation—and anxiety, too. Well, yeah: she worried about what people thought of her, and Zach—Zach was the Cowboy—honest to the ground and universally respected. If she lost his good opinion, she’d lose the support of every agent in the division. They’d mutter to one another about her behind her back whenever she passed by. So this was getting tense for her now. She couldn’t afford to alienate her best man.
She broke eye contact. Stood. Went back to her desk, around her desk. Zach avoided watching her. He gazed stonily at the TV where some rioters were throwing bottles at some big old church, it looked like.
Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell yanked a desk drawer open, yanked a manila folder out, her motions tight and brisk: more of her I’m-all-business routine. Zach just about never lost his temper; but he was, all the same, getting good and angry at her now.
She gauntlet-slapped the folder down on the desktop. “We’ve put key captures on his work computer. Taps on his desk phone and cell. A trace on his cell.”
Zach stood up. He didn’t say anything, but the way he stood up, the way he glared at her, let her know that she was close to losing him entirely. Bugging his partner’s phone and computer? She better be right. She damn well better be.
“Why just Goulart?” he asked her. “Why not me? I knew about the Chevalier. So did you.”
“Because I know you didn’t do it. And I know I didn’t. Just hear me out, okay?”
“I’m listening.”
“Goulart has been making multiple calls to burners, untraceable phones.”
“Probably to CI’s.”
“He’s made several night visits to an abandoned mansion up near Rhinebeck. Windward, it’s called. We think he’s using it for some kind of message exchange.”
“To meet a source, more likely.”
“And he’s got an alias drop.”
“Probably . . . some girl. Or some case or something.” But even in his anger, Zach knew this was suspicious, hard to explain. An alias drop—the old trick where you set up an e-mail account under a fake name, then leave draft messages for your contact to pick up—it was pure dealer stuff, pedophile stuff, a ruse meant to cover the trail of your communications.
Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell saw Zach waver. She seized on it, pressed her advantage. “When we monitored the drop? The receiving end? An untraceable IP. Pinged around hell and gone until we lost it. Very sophisticated. Someone who really-really didn’t want to be identified and knew his way around a computer.”
“You read any of the e-mails?”
“They were mostly in coded language. ‘I may go out walking later.’ That sort of thing. One said ‘Contact you later.’ He kept changing the drop, and we think he was also using a laptop that wasn’t on the warrant. We didn’t get much but, come on, just the fact of them. . . .”
This didn’t sound good, Zach admitted to himself. But it wasn’t enough to overcome his loyalty.
“Broadway ain’t dirty,” he drawled. “I’d know if he was.”
If Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell had been married to the man, she’d have recognized that drawl. Grace knew it well. It meant Zach was digging in, end of conversation. He was—as Grace often whispered in frustration as she swished from the room—stubborn as a mule in cement when he wanted to be.
But Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell was deaf to it. She kept at him. “Dominic Abend knows we’re after him, right? More than that, he probably knows we’re the only agency that is after him in any meaningful way. Makes sense he’d want someone inside. Doesn’t it? Goulart’s vulnerable. He has the divorce. The lawsuit on his old house. We know he just applied for a twenty-thousand-dollar loan. . . .”
Which he wouldn’t need if he was on the take, Zach thought—but he was so disgusted with all this now, he wouldn’t even grace it with an argument anymore. He knew why Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell hated Goulart. Everyone in the Bureau knew. Goulart wouldn’t keep his mouth shut about her, and some of what he said was true. That would get you in Dutch with any boss. But to call him dirty. . . .
Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell could not keep the tension out of her voice anymore, or the gleam of anger out of her big eyes. This had not turned out the way she had hoped or imagined—and she was so desperate at this point not to lose Zach’s respect that she wouldn’t let it end, wouldn’t let him go. She was too insecure to realize that that would have been her best move—or, if she did realize it, she couldn’t get herself to do it.
“Look, I swear to you,” she said, “this is not personal. This is not about him and me. All I’m asking: keep an eye out. Make sure. See something, say something. We have a line on Abend now for the first time. That’s the only reason I bring this up. Otherwise I would have waited till we had more proof. But I don’t want Abend to slip away like that container ship just because we didn’t do due diligence. . . .”
There was a light, brisk knock at the door. It clicked open a crack and Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell’s receptionist stuck her round, dark, pretty face in.
A flash of green-eyed annoyance from Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. “What?�
�
“There’s a call for Detective Adams,” she said. “From overseas. A Professor Gretchen Dankl. They sent it up here because she says it’s urgent.”
“I better take that,” said Zach. He didn’t bother to disguise the subtext: Plus I’ve had enough of this crap.
Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell could only nod, pressing her fists to her hips, deflating with a long sigh.
“All right,” she said, and then added more or less pathetically: “We good?”
“Yeah,” said Zach, meaning no. “We’re good.” Meaning: You’re on my shit list for certain.
He strode toward the face in the doorway. “Put it through to my cell,” he told her.
His cell phone buzzed in his pocket as he stormed angrily down the hallway toward the elevators. He snapped it out.
“Agent Adams,” he said.
The voice on the line was an eccentric cocktail of qualities. It was deep, almost masculine, but vulnerable and womanly, tremulous like a damsel’s in distress but at the same time somehow also strong, grimly determined. She spoke rapid-fire. A thick German accent but perfect English.
“Detective Adams. This is Professor Gretchen Dankl. I have received your e-mail.”
“Yes, Professor. Thank you for getting back. I wanted to—”
“It is Abend you are looking for. Dominic Abend. It is he who has butchered these people.”
Zach slowed to a stop, a live wire of excitement snaking in his belly. He was near the elevators but turned his back on them, narrowing his focus to the voice on the phone. “You know Abend?”
“I know him. I know everything about him, more than you do. He will do worse than this, much worse, before he is finished. You cannot understand how bad. You must come to Freiberg. You must come talk to me, listen to me, see what I have to show you. You must find Stumpf’s dagger before Abend does. Otherwise all is lost. All is lost. Your city. Your country. All the world.”
5
THE WEREWOLF’S DAGGER
Modern Europe began and ended in Germany, was born when Martin Luther shattered the unity of Christian truth, and died amidst the atrocities of the Third Reich. At the beginning and at the end, at the birth and at the death, was Stumpf’s Baselard.
When the jet lifted off, Zach had just begun reading the translated article Professor Dankl had sent him: actual printed pages she had sent him by overnight mail, strangely enough. She had refused to e-mail him any kind of electronic file. He glanced up from the words, looked out the window, saw the Newark runway let go its hold on the 767’s retracting gear, saw Manhattan’s jagged density of soaring stone fill the twilit window, the scene distant and unsteady as an old silent movie—and he was startled by his feeling of relief, startled by its strength and sweetness—startled, but not entirely surprised. These last two days on the earth below had been nothing for him but round upon round of trouble and unease. He suspected he had argued so forcefully for this trip to Germany in part because of his eagerness to get away. He likewise suspected that Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell had freed the two grand from E.C.’s budget as a way to get back in his good graces after her accusations against Goulart. Well, fine. He was damned glad to be airborne whatever the reason, glad beyond telling that for the next eight hours—all night long—he would be out of reach by phone or e-mail, out of touch with the troublesome world.
He lowered his eyes to the pages again:
The man who would become known as Peter Stumpf was born Peter Griswold in the village of Epprath near the country town of Bedburg in the electorate of Cologne. Though records of his birth were lost during the chaotic bloodshed of the Thirty Years War, the date was doubtless some time in the mid 1500’s.
The son of a well-to-do farming family, young Griswold was said to have devoted himself to sorcery and evil from an early age. After “acquainting himself with many infernal spirits and fiends” (according to his trial transcript), the necromancer managed to raise the Devil himself, who promised to give him “whatsoever his heart desired during his mortal life,” presumably in exchange for his soul. Griswold’s request of Satan was that “at his pleasure he might work his malice on men, women, and children, in the shape of some beast, whereby he might live without dread or danger of life, and unknown to be the executor of any bloody enterprise which he meant to commit.” The Devil agreed, and gave him a magic belt which, when worn, transformed Griswold “into the likeness of a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like brands of fire; a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth; a huge body and mighty paws.”
Even now, airborne and all, Zach found it difficult to concentrate on the paper. Those accusations against Goulart were still on his mind, for one thing. Words that couldn’t be unsaid, thoughts that couldn’t be unthought, following him up into the stratosphere. Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell had motive to slander his partner, yes. But that didn’t make her wrong. She was insecure and desperate to establish herself with her masters in Washington—who included, as near as Zach could tell, the Attorney General, the director of Homeland Security, some sort of FBI liaison, and about seven or eight congressional oversight committees—but that didn’t make her wrong either. If Goulart’s opinion of her got back to D.C., it could ruin her; if Goulart was dirty and she nailed him—well, that could make her name. But none of that made her wrong. Goulart had either gone over to the dark side or he hadn’t. The truth was true, no matter who spoke it or why. So after his meeting with Rebecca A-H, Zach found himself watching his partner more closely, combing their conversations for clues, even giving Goulart opportunities to confess, to come clean—and hating himself for it, and hating Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell for getting him started.
He let out a long breath to clear his mind—to try to, at least. Returned his eyes to the pages in his hand.
For twenty-five years, Griswold the werewolf roamed the countryside around Bedburg, wreaking havoc and spreading terror. At first, he limited himself to taking revenge on anyone who displeased or defied him, but as his anonymity stoked his confidence, he felt freer to indulge his worst impulses. As a man, he would waylay maidens in the lonely meadows and deflower them—then devour them in the form of a wolf, escaping afterward undetected into the deep forests. At last, he descended into every kind of cruelty and depravity. He committed long-running incest with his daughter and enticed her into complicity in his murders. He seems truly to have loved his son and “yet so far his delight in murder exceeded the joy he took” in him that he slaughtered the boy and “ate the brains out of his head as a most savory and dainty delicious means to staunch his greedy appetite.”
In all this, he escaped detection—escaped even suspicion—by changing from a wolf back into the shape of a man when his crimes were done. So even as the countryside was gripped with terror, the killer remained incognito.
Enter a local executioner, whose full name has been lost to history, but who is sometimes referred to in later documents by the generic name of “Hans.” A dishonorable outcast because of his bloody profession, Hans longed to establish himself in the community as a respected hero and thereby win the love of Margarethe, a farmer’s daughter. Convinced that the monster who had been terrorizing the countryside for so long was no mere wolf but some kind of demon, Hans devised a plan to catch him. He armed himself with a baselard—a short sword or dagger—which he had confiscated from one of the murderous highwaymen whom he had lately beheaded. This weapon he had now gotten blessed and anointed with holy water by a local priest. Hans believed these solemnities would redeem the dagger from its sinful history and transform it into an instrument of godly justice.
The executioner set up a blind near a local meadow where the werewolf was known to roam. He lay in wait for three consecutive days, spying on the maids who came here to do their washing in the river and then lingered to gossip as the daylight waned. At last, on the third day, just as sunset approached, Hans discerned his quarry: an enormous wolf prowling through the trees hard
by, sniffing for the blood of innocents. Before the beast could launch an attack on the young women gathered at the riverbank, the executioner leapt from his hiding place and confronted him. Though the werewolf’s claws tore across the executioner’s chest, Hans nonetheless managed to strike back, slicing the creature’s foot off with the sanctified dagger. The wolf swiftly limped away, howling in agony, and the wounded Hans followed its trail of blood until it led him, lo and behold, to the home of Peter Griswold. There, it was discovered that Griswold’s left arm now ended in a bloody stump, so that he was known ever after as Peter Stump or Stumpf. On this evidence, Hans assembled the locals roundabout into a posse, and had Griswold bound and brought before the authorities.
It was Hans himself—now recovered from his wounds—who laid Peter Stumpf on the rack for interrogation. Fearful of torture, the werewolf confessed to everything, a whole lifetime of demonic crime. On All Hallow’s Eve, 1589, in keeping with the sentence of the court, Hans brought Stumpf to the place of execution known as the Raven Stone. There, he pulled chunks of Stumpf’s flesh off with red-hot pincers (a practice known as “nipping”), broke his legs and arms with a wooden axe, and finally cut off his head with a sword.
And then, of course, there was the whole Margo fiasco, Zach thought. Which was even worse than the Goulart situation, much worse. Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell’s charges against Goulart were sure to bring trouble down on the Task Force one way or another, but Zach could live with that. Margo, though. . . . She could lay his life waste. Break his wife’s heart. Destroy his children’s home. Condemn everyone he loved best to a grief he couldn’t even bear to think about. And what other outcome—what good or even less-horrible outcome—could there possibly be? She had texted him again yesterday. What do I have to do to get you to pay attention to me, darling? He could practically hear the rising hysteria in her tone. A sizable part of his relief at wangling this trip to Germany derived from the fact that it enabled him to put a message on his phone and text and e-mail saying “I will be out of the country for the next few days and unable to receive communications.” Which would electronically make his excuses to Margo and maybe give her a chance to calm down or reconsider or be fatally hit by a car. It would give him a chance to think things through as well.
Werewolf Cop Page 5
