Halfway through the page he heard a vulgar noise, conveyed by bullhorn, from the knot of protesters. He ploughed on, without hesitation, not even looking up. Another noise.
“What a load of crap!”
He raised his voice, riding over the shouting.
“What about the animals?”
“What about the killing of Smithback?”
“Stop the murderers!”
He continued in a slightly louder monotone, eyes on the page, his bald head bowed over the podium.
“Talk, all talk! We want action!”
He could see, out of the corner of his eye, the boomed mikes and cameras swinging away from him toward the protesters. There were a few more shouts, arguing, a waving sign pushed aside by a cop. And that was it. The disturbance was contained; the protesters intimidated. There weren’t enough of them to trigger mob mentality.
Wartek finished, folded the paper in half, and at last glanced up. “And now I will take questions.”
The cameras and mikes were all back on him. The questions came slowly, desultorily. Disappointment seemed to hang in the air. The protesters remained in their corner, waving their signs and chanting, but their voices were now subdued and mostly drowned by the rush of traffic on Chambers Street.
The questions were predictable and he answered them all. Yes, they were bringing action against the Ville. No, it would not be tomorrow; the legal process would determine the schedule. Yes, he was aware of the allegations of homicide against the group; no, there was no proof, the investigation was proceeding, no one had been charged with a crime. Yes, it did appear that the Ville had no valid deed to the site; in fact, it was the opinion of city attorneys that they had not established a right of adverse possession.
The questions began to die, and he checked his watch: quarter to one. He nodded to his aides, raised his tufted head to the press one last time. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this press conference.”
This was greeted with a few more catcalls from the protesters: All talk, no action! All talk, no action!
Feeling pleased with himself, Wartek slipped the paper back into his suit pocket and walked up the steps. It had gone just as he’d hoped. He could almost see the evening news: a few sound bites from his speech, a question or two answered, a few moments devoted to the protesters, and that would be it. He had covered all the bases, thrown a bone to every constituency, and displayed the sober, dull face of New York City officialdom. As New York protesters went, this had been a pretty anemic group. Clearly this was a sideshow to whatever else the main group was planning. He had heard of a second Ville protest in the works, much bigger than the first, but thank God it wouldn’t be in his sandbox. As long as they didn’t protest here, he didn’t really care. If they ended up burning down the Ville—well, that would be a convenient solution to his problem.
He reached the top of the stairs and headed toward the revolving glass doors, two aides at his side. It was lunch hour, and streams of municipal office workers were leaving the large building and pouring down the stairs. It was like swimming against the tide.
As he and the aides worked their way upstream against the flow, Wartek felt a passerby strike him hard with his shoulder.
“Excuse me!” Wartek began to turn in irritation, when he felt the most surprising sensation in his side. He jerked back, instinctively clutching his midriff, and was even more astonished to feel—and observe—a very long knife being extracted from his body, right through his clutched hands. There was a sudden feeling of heat and ice at once; ice inside him, in the depths of his guts; heat rushing outside and down. He looked up and had a brief glimpse of a swollen, scabrous face; foul sticky hair; cracked lips drawing back over rotten teeth.
And then the figure was gone.
Speechless, Wartek clutched his side, staggered forward. The crowd streaming past seemed to hesitate, bunch up, collide into one another.
A woman screamed in his ear.
Wartek, still unable to comprehend, his mind a blank, took a second staggering step. “Ouch,” he said quietly, to no one in particular.
Another scream, and then a chorus of noise, a roar like Niagara Falls, filled the air. His legs began to buckle and he heard incoherent shouting, saw a rush of blue uniforms: policemen madly fighting their way through the crowd. There was another sudden explosion of chaos around him: people going this way and that, back and forth.
With a supreme effort he took another step and then folded; he was caught and eased to the ground by many hands. More confused shouting, with a few persistent words penetrating the hubbub: Ambulance! Doctor! Stabbed! Bleeding!
He wondered what all the confusion was about as he lay down to sleep. Marty Wartek was so very, very tired, and New York was such a noisy city.
50
Slowly she drifted in and out of dark dreams. She slept, half woke, slept again. At last, full consciousness returned. It was pitch-black and smelled of mold and wet stone. She lay there for a moment, confused. Then it all came back to her and she groaned in terror. Her hands groped damp straw over a cold concrete floor. When she tried to sit up, her head protested fiercely and she lay back down with a wave of nausea.
She struggled with an impulse to scream, to cry out, and mastered it. Once again, after a few moments, she made the effort to sit up—more slowly—and this time she succeeded. God, she felt weak. There was no light, nothing, just darkness. Her arm was sore where the IV had been, and there was no bandage covering the injection site.
The realization settled in that she’d been kidnapped from the hospital room. By whom? The man in the orderly’s uniform had been a stranger. What had happened to the cop guarding her room?
She rose unsteadily to her feet. Holding her arms out, shuffling cautiously, she made her way forward until her hands touched something—a wet, clammy wall. She felt around it. It was constructed of rough, mortared stones, powdery with efflorescence. She must be in some kind of cellar.
She began feeling along the wall, shuffling her feet. The floor was bare and free of obstructions except for patches of straw. She reached a corner, continued on, counting the distance in foot-lengths. Ten feet more and she came to a niche, which she followed—hitting a door frame, and then a door. Wood. She felt up, then down. Wood, with iron bands and rivets.
The faintest gleam of light shined through a crack in the door. She plastered her eye to the crack, but the tongue-and-groove construction defied her attempts to see through it.
She raised her fist; hesitated; then brought it down hard on the door: once, twice. The door boomed and echoed. There was a long silence, and then the sound of footsteps approaching. She leaned her ear against the door to listen.
Quite suddenly, there was a scraping noise above her head. As she looked up, a sudden blinding light burst over her. Instinctively she covered her face and stepped back. She turned away, narrowing her eyes to slits. After a long moment she began to adjust to the dazzling light. She glanced back.
“Help me,” she managed to croak.
There was no reply.
She swallowed. “What do you want?”
Still no reply. But there was a sound: a low, regular whir. She peered into the brilliance. Now she could make out a small rectangular slit, set high into the door. The light was coming from there. And there was something else: the lens of a video camera, fat and bulky, thrust through the slit and aimed directly at her.
“Who… are you?” she asked.
Abruptly, the lens was withdrawn. The whirring noise stopped. And a voice, low and silky, replied. “You won’t live long enough for my name to make any difference.”
And with that the light was extinguished, the slit closed heavily, and she was once more in darkness.
51
Kenny Roybal, high school dropout, sat on the baseball bleachers and gave the weed a quick cleaning, combing through it, flicking out the seeds and rolling the rest into a fat doobie. He fired it up and inhaled sharply, then passed it on to hi
s friend, Rocky Martinelli.
“Next year,” said Martinelli, accepting the joint and nodding at the field beyond the dark baseball diamond, “we’ll harvest the pot growing down there.”
“Yeah,” said Roybal, with a sharp exhale. “It’s premium grade, too.”
“Fuck, yeah.”
“Word, homeboy.”
“Word.”
Roybal took another hit, passed it back, then exhaled noisily. He waited while Martinelli took a hit, the joint crackling and popping, the tip brightening momentarily, Martinelli’s long, dopey face illuminated a dull orange. Roybal took back the joint, carefully tipped off the ash and reshaped the end. He was about to light it again when he saw, through the gathering dusk, a squad car oozing into the far parking lot like a cruising shark.
“Five-O. Heads up.” He dropped down behind the bleachers, Martinelli following. They peered out through the metal and wooden supports. The cop car stopped and a headlamp swiveled around, playing across the diamonds.
“What’s he doing?”
“Who the fuck knows?”
They waited, crouching, while the light slowly slid over the bleachers. It seemed to hesitate as it passed by them.
“Don’t move,” came Roybal’s low voice.
“I’m not moving.”
The light continued on, then came slowly back. It was blinding, shining through the bleachers. Could the cops see them crouching here in the back? Roybal doubted it, but they seemed uncommonly interested in the bleachers.
He heard a grunt and there was fucking Martinelli running like a jackass across the diamond and into the field, heading for the woods. The light jumped up, spotlighting him.
“Shit!” Roybal took off after Martinelli. Now the light fixed on him. It felt as if he were running to catch his shadow. He vaulted the low chain-link fence and pounded across the field into the woods, following Martinelli’s dim fleeing form.
They ran and ran until they could run no more. At last Martinelli began to flag, then dropped, flopping heavily onto a log, his sides heaving. Roybal fell down beside him, gulping for air.
“They coming?” Martinelli finally gasped.
“You didn’t need to flake out on me, man,” Roybal replied. “That cop wouldn’t have seen us if you hadn’t jumped up.”
“He’d already seen us.”
Roybal stared into the wall of trees but could see nothing. Martinelli had run a long way. He felt in his shirt pocket. It was empty.
“You made me drop the blunt.”
“I’m telling you, we were made, man.”
Roybal spat. It wasn’t worth arguing about. He fished out the Zig-Zag papers from his pocket, along with the rest of the lid. He stuck two papers together, sealed them, and poured a little pot into the groove. “I can’t see a freaking thing.”
Nevertheless, there was enough faint moonlight filtering through the trees to allow him to tease out a couple of seeds, roll up the blunt, light it, and take a toke. He bogarted it for a moment, exhaled, took another hit, held the smoke in hard, exhaled again, then passed it along. He began to laugh, wheezing. “Man, you took off like a rabbit chased by a hound dog.”
“Dude, the fuzz saw us.” Martinelli took the joint and looked around. “You know what? That weird-ass place, the Ville, is around here somewhere.”
“It’s way over by the mudflats.”
“Naw, man. It’s straight down by the river.”
“So? You gonna run again? Woo-woo, here come the zombiis!” Roybal waved his hands over his head. “Brains! Braaaaaaaains!”
“Shut the fuck up.”
They passed the joint back and forth in silence, until at last Roybal carefully trimmed the roach and put it in a tin lozenge box. Suddenly the muffled sounds of “Smack My Bitch Up” floated into the darkness.
“I bet it’s your mom,” said Roybal.
Martinelli fished the ringing cell phone out of his pocket.
“Don’t answer.”
“She gets mad if I don’t answer.”
“That blows.”
“Hello? Yeah. Hey.”
Roybal listened sourly to the conversation. He had already left home, had his own crib. Martinelli still lived with his mother.
“No, I’m at the library annex. Kenny and I are studying for the trig test… I’ll be careful… There’re no muggers in here… Yo, Mom, it’s only eleven o’clock!”
He snapped the phone shut. “Gotta go home.”
“It’s, like, not even midnight. Uncool, man.”
Martinelli rose and Roybal followed. His legs were already getting stiff from their stupid run. Martinelli started back through the trees, walking fast, his gangly legs barely visible in the dark. He soon stopped.
“I don’t remember this fallen tree,” he said.
“How could you remember anything? You were shagging ass.” Roybal wheezed again.
“I’d have remembered jumping it or something.”
“Keep going.” Roybal prodded him in the back.
They came to another fallen tree. Martinelli stopped again. “Now I know we didn’t come this way.”
“Just keep going.”
But Martinelli didn’t move. “What’s that smell? Dude, did you just blast the butt trumpet?”
Roybal sniffed loudly. He looked around, but it was too dark to see the ground well.
“I’ll lead.” He stepped over the log and his foot sank into something firm yet yielding. “What the hell?” He withdrew his foot and bent down to look.
“Fuck!” he screamed, stumbling backward. “A body! Holy shit! I just stepped on a body!”
Now they both looked down. A bar of moonlight illuminated a face—pale, ruined, bloody, sightless eyes staring glassily.
Martinelli coughed. “Oh, my God!”
“Call nine-one-one!”
Martinelli, staggering back, fumbled his cell phone out, stabbed at it maniacally.
“I can’t believe it, it’s a body!”
“Hello? Hell—?” Martinelli suddenly bent double and vomited all over the phone.
“Oh fuck, man—!”
Martinelli continued puking, the cell phone dropping to the ground now, slick with vomit.
“Get back on the phone!”
More puking.
Roybal took another step back. Incredibly, he could hear a voice coming from the cell phone. “Who is this?” the tiny voice demanded. “Is that you, Rocky? Rocky! Are you all right?”
Still more puking. Roybal’s eyes turned once more to the body, lying on its side, twisted, one arm thrown up, pale and ragged in the moonlight. This was messed up. Then he turned and ran through the trees: away, away, away, away…
52
It was four o’clock in the morning when D’Agosta and Pendergast arrived at the waiting room of the morgue annex. Dr. Beckstein was already waiting for them, looking strangely chipper. Or maybe, D’Agosta thought, he was just used to hanging around a morgue in the dead of night. D’Agosta felt like hell; he wanted nothing more than to go home and crawl into bed.
And yet that was the very last thing he could do. Things were happening almost faster than he could process them. Of all the recent events, by far the worst—to him, anyway—was the kidnapping of Nora Kelly, not a clue to her whereabouts, the officer assigned to protect her drugged with spiked coffee and his body locked in Nora’s bathroom. Once again, he’d failed her.
And now, this.
“Well, well, gentlemen,” Beckstein said, snapping on a pair of gloves. “The mystery deepens. Please, help yourselves.” And he nodded toward a nearby bin.
D’Agosta tied on scrubs, donned a mask and surgical cap, and slipped on a pair of gloves. The feeling of dread increased as he tried to ready himself for the fresh ordeal he was about to endure. He had a hard time viewing morgue stiffs under the best of circumstances. Something about the mix of dead cold flesh, the clinical lights, and the gleam of steel made his stomach churn. How was he going to handle this one—when descriptions of th
e man while still ambulatory were enough to bring up anyone’s lunch? He glanced over at Pendergast, now swathed in green and white, looking more like a morgue customer than a visitor. He was right at home.
“Doctor, before we go in”—D’Agosta tried to keep his voice casual—“I have a few questions.”
“Of course,” said Beckstein, pausing.
“The body was found in Inwood Hill Park, right? Not far from the Ville?”
Beckstein nodded. “Two teenage boys made the discovery.”
“And you’re certain about the ID on the victim? That the corpse is Colin Fearing?”
“Reasonably certain. The doorman of Fearing’s building gave us a positive identification, and I consider him a credible witness. Two tenants who knew Fearing well also identified the body. It displays the correct tattoo and birthmark. Just to be sure, we’ve ordered DNA tests, but I’d stake my career on this being Colin Fearing.”
“So the first corpse—the suicide, the bridge jumper? The one Dr. Heffler identified as Fearing? How’d that happen?”
Beckstein cleared his throat. “It would seem Dr. Heffler made a mistake—an understandable mistake, under the circumstances,” he added hastily. “I certainly would have accepted the identification of a sister as definitive.”
“Intriguing,” murmured Pendergast.
“What?” asked D’Agosta.
“It makes one wonder what body Dr. Heffler did, in fact, autopsy.”
“Yeah.”
“The misidentification,” said Beckstein, “is not so uncommon. I’ve seen it several times. When you combine grief and shock of the loved ones with the inevitable changes that death brings to the body—especially immersion in water or decomposition in the hot sun…”
“Right, right,” said D’Agosta hastily. “Except external evidence points to this being a deliberate fraud. And on top of that, Dr. Heffler was slovenly in establishing the sister’s identity, too.”
“Mistakes happen,” said Beckstein lamely.
“I have found that arrogance, of which Dr. Heffler suffers no paucity,” intoned Pendergast, “is the fertilizing manure for the vineyard of error.”
Cemetery Dance Page 26
