Then he would be finished. Then he could rest.
Ana de Jong.
He was ready for her now.
Jenner was sitting by the bed, waiting for Ana to wake, when Rad called to tell him they’d located a possible sec-270
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ondary scene: Green had a small apartment on East Seventh, and Crime Scene had found a concealed remote camera system. Rad asked Jenner if he wanted to come along for the search.
He did. He needed the time to figure out what he was going to say to her. Waiting for Garcia, he continued his search of her clothes and her bags, and found another bag of Steppin’ Razor, full this time. He tossed it into the toilet and flushed, standing and waiting to make sure it disappeared.
Then he flushed again.
He recognized Pat Mullins’s bullet-shaped head at the top of the stoop. It was a brownstone between Second and First, not as classy as he would have expected from a guy as affluent as Green.
“Hey, Pat.”
“Doctor. Nice to see you out.” He nodded at Rad and Roggetti.
Jenner said, “Nice work on getting Green.”
Mullins responded with a wink, saying, “Piece of cake, Doc.”
“Is he saying much?”
“Not a peep. He’s got Barry Haimlisch, who’s shut everything right down.”
Jenner remembered Haimlisch. “I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s sharp.”
Roggetti said, “Well, good for him. The case against his client is pretty much open-and-shut.”
“Maybe,” Rad said.
“What? You don’t think so?”
“Too soon to tell, Joey. I mean, SexBat, sure. But the Inquisitor stuff ? The case is still pretty circumstantial.”
Mullins shrugged. “We’ll see. In the meantime, let’s see what we got here.”
As they walked inside, Rad said, “I was talking with Woody Milwood over at the crime lab, and so far they’ve got no fin-Precious Blood
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gerprint matches between Green and any of the scenes. Not a one.”
Mullins shook his head. “Maybe he’s got an accomplice.
Look, even if we don’t have good evidence on the Inquisitor, we’ve got plenty to send his sorry oral-sodomy-committing ass to jail, and that ought to loosen him up a bit. No pun intended.”
Rad grinned. “You backing down on this, Pat?”
“Nope. I think we got the guy. I’m just being . . .” He searched for a word, then found it. “Keeping my mind open.”
The second-story floor-through had been chopped in half; Green’s studio apartment was in back. The kitchen opened into the living room area, filled mostly with a low platform bed with an ugly maroon quilt.
Green had barely bothered to decorate. A framed poster of skiers at Jackson Hole on one wall, on another a blowup of a photo of a generic sunset over a generic beach somewhere, Mexico, maybe.
In an armoire in the corner, tucked between the TV and a mini stereo system, they found one of the small cameras; the second was hidden in a low bookshelf among medical journals and the occasional textbook. One of the crime scene detectives opened a small wood box on the lowest shelf and spilled its contents onto the bedside table—some condoms, a pair of handcuffs lined with matted fake leopard fur, and a small brown plastic vial of Viagra.
In the armoire, Green had a stack of CDs—Kenny G and Phil Collins, Sade and Enya—as well as The Notebook, The English Patient, and Jenna Jameson’s Wicked Anthology on DVD. Roggetti, poring through the bookcase, pulled out a black plastic album and opened it to show the others a collection of DVD-Rs numbered with black marker ink. Roggetti selected one, put it in the DVD player, and switched on the TV.
There were a couple of flashes onscreen, and the video 272
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began. A girl on the bed, Green on his knees between her legs, her hands on his head.
Someone said, “Turn up the sound!” and Joey looked over the remote for a few seconds before the volume suddenly leaped to a buzzing roar, the girl’s moans over the white noise echoing in the room. Roggetti turned it down a little.
It looked consensual; the others nodded when Jenner said so. He doubted they’d find anything else there, so he told Garcia he was heading home. He left them watching the TV.
Ana’s clothes were folded neatly and stacked on the table.
He heard water running in the bathroom.
When she came out, her eyes were heavily lined with black, her mascara was thick, and her lips glossy. She looked older, almost old.
He sat down and watched as she put a big Urban Outfit-ters shopping bag on the table and began stuffing her clothes into it. When it was full, she set an X-girl bag next to it. She turned to him and said, “You feel sorry for me, Jenner? Is that it? ‘That poor orphan girl, the horrible thing that happened! And now she’s all fucked up and . . . oh, my God, look! She’s on drugs! ’ That it, Jenner?”
She turned away and began cramming socks into the bag.
“Ana, please. I’m not judging you. I can’t imagine how hard all this has been on you. I think you’ve been incredibly brave.”
“Was that what you were thinking while you were fucking me?” She struggled with the zipper of her cheap plastic makeup bag, then threw it down, turning to focus on him.
“No, really, tell me what you were thinking—I’d really like to know! ‘I’m helping her now, I’m doing this for her own good? This oughta make her forget her dead friend!’ ”
He looked away.
She was done packing.
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“And now you’re blue because your little orphan bitch is doing smack? You’re afraid it’s your fault, right?”
He didn’t look up.
“Answer me!” she screamed. “Don’t just fucking sit there, say something, say anything. Take a fucking risk!”
He looked at her, but didn’t speak.
She grabbed a candlestick and hurled it at his head. He threw up his arm, knocking it away.
“Fuck you! Fuck you, you fucking coward!”
She lifted the bags, one of which immediately broke at the handle and spilled her things onto the floor. She collapsed to her knees, sobbing as she tried to gather the clothes together in her arms.
He watched her crawling under the table, her flushed face streaked with mascara. A pair of socks, rolled into a ball, skittered out of her reach, and she sank onto her clothes, curling up and crying freely.
He knelt down to help her up, but she pushed him away.
She stood and ran to the sink, pulling out a garbage bag. She scooped most of her clothes into the garbage bag, then spun it shut and picked up the shopping bag. She put the bags on the couch, then put on her coat. Shouldering her bags, she turned to him.
“I don’t need your help, Jenner. You need mine. You need mine! So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, good-bye.”
She slammed the door.
At twilight, around 4:00 p.m., he walked to Williamsburg, to Dalrymple’s Food Discount, and spent the last of his money.
He’d been trying to keep pure by eating only vegetables and grains, but decided he needed more protein, and calcium for his bones, so he allowed himself organic milk and beef, despite the expense.
Back at the warehouse, he unpacked his groceries. His kitchen area was as cold as most refrigerators, but he kept 274
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food in an old steel toolbox because of the rats; the meat went out on the window ledge in a metal biscuit tin.
He boiled some cauliflower. Eating at the bench, he leafed through the Dalrymple’s flyer by candlelight, imagining what he would buy if he had a hundred bucks to spend.
It was a holiday season flyer, and the cover—an old illustration, maybe from the fifties—showed a family gathered around for a Christmas dinner. The fireplace in the background had stockings and swags of holly, and the mom was hefting an enormous turkey onto a dinner t
able filled with decorations and side dishes as the dad and the brother and the sister looked on with enthusiasm and delight.
The children would have already got their gifts—kids got the presents in the morning, he knew. They wake up and come down and there are presents from Santa under the tree and in the stockings, and then Mom and Dad come down and give them more presents. After church, the women cook dinner.
His Christmases had been different. He would wait all day on the bench by the farmhouse door for the church people who brought them a turkey, not wanting them to come in and see his mom and dad passed out at the kitchen table.
He finished the cauliflower and leaned back.
He needed a van.
tuesday,
december 17
She came in just before dawn. Jenner heard her let herself into the loft, the scratch of her keys settling on the table. She slipped under the sheets and lay against him; when she lowered her head to his chest, he felt her tears on his skin.
He figured she was high, but he didn’t care. He would help her get through this, get straight.
She was asleep. He looked at her face, now without makeup.
She was beautiful.
He would help her. He would get her help, and everything would be fine.
To his surprise, she was up before him. He found her in the living room, tapping numbers into his cell phone’s memory.
“Here,” she said, handing him the phone. “I want to test it.”
She opened her phone up and showed him. “Look, you’re on speed dial.”
Jenner’s phone rang, an irritating high blurting.
“Now you do me. Just press two and hold it.”
He pressed the key; her phone played a little snippet of music.
“I like yours better.”
“We can change the ringtone.”
He pulled the juice out of the fridge and poured them each a glass. He put one down in front of her and waited. She was studying her phone intently.
“Ana?”
“What?”
“What do you want to do?”
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She was still looking at the phone. Just when he thought she wasn’t going to answer, she said, “To kick. To kick it.”
“Will that be hard?”
“Maybe.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
She shrugged. “Long enough that when I’m not high, I really want to be high.”
“Since Thursday?”
“This time.”
He looked at her.
“And before?”
“On and off. Once in a while.”
He sat next to her.
“Snorting?”
“Uh-huh.”
She was concentrating on the phone now.
“Injecting?”
She turned quickly to him and said, “Oh, my God, Jenner!
Of course not!”
“So how are you going to stop?”
“I’ll just stop.”
“And that’s it?”
She smiled at him sadly. “No. You’ll help me.”
He put an arm around her. “When did you last get high?”
“About nine a.m. I used up the last—you didn’t find everything, by the way. But it’s finished now.”
“Is there anything I should get?”
“I don’t know. A TV Guide and some ice cream?”
“Cherry Garcia?”
“Sounds good.”
He put on his coat, and she grabbed his arm and looked him in the eye. “Thanks, Jenner. You’re a good guy.”
The phone rang. Garcia.
“Jenner, the chief is holding a press conference in about twenty. I think he’s going to release information about the Green case, and I thought you should be there.”
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He looked over at her. “In twenty minutes?”
“It’s at One Police Plaza. Five minutes by cab from your place, Jenner. If that.”
“Okay.”
He told her and said he didn’t know what to do, and she said go, and he told her he’d be back with the ice cream in about an hour.
Roggetti, Mullins, and Garcia were onstage, flanking the Chief of D’s, standing back by the flags. Jenner was surprised at how small the room was, too small to deal with the crowd of reporters. The room buzzed with at least a dozen languages, and Jenner saw cameras with battered stickers from Japan’s NHK, the BBC, and RAI from Italy, among others.
Scales put his papers on the lectern and scanned the crowd, nodding at Jenner. He tapped on the microphone, then began to speak.
“I have a brief prepared statement, after which I’ll refer all questions to the public affairs officer.”
He cleared his throat, then continued. “I’d like to announce that this morning a grand jury indicted Dr. David Green for seventeen counts of oral sodomy, twelve counts of sodomy, and two counts of sexual battery on a minor. At a hearing immediately afterward, he was denied bail on grounds that he is a proven flight risk. He has been remanded into custody until his trial.”
He paused. The reporters listened, pens poised above steno pads, microcassette and minidisc recorder microphones pointed at the chief.
Scales breathed in, then said, “Dr. Green is no longer considered a person of interest in the Hutchins student homicides.”
Etiquette immediately collapsed, the reporters rising to their feet, shouting questions and waving microphones.
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The chief nodded grimly. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.”
He started off the platform when Richie Parsons, in the front row, shouted, “Are you telling the people of the City of New York that you have no idea who the Inquisitor is?”
The chief stopped, weighing his options.
He turned, walked back to the lectern, and began to speak, the AV tech turning the microphone back on midway through his first sentence.
“. . . all must be considered. Dr. Green was only a person of interest in the Inquisitor killings, never a suspect. This confusion rose up out of rumors tossed around by the media, something out of NYPD control.
“Rest assured: we have strong leads, and all of these leads will be explored to the fullest extent possible. We are confident that we will have the perpetrator in custody soon.”
He switched off the mic at the lectern, then added an un-amplified “Thank you” before leaving the conference room, followed by Garcia and then Roggetti and Mullins, the three detectives looking very somber.
Jenner caught up with them outside on the plaza, and together they walked over to Duane Street for coffee at the Courthouse Diner.
Jenner asked, “What happened to your new witness?”
Pat Mullins said, “The lawyer? Turned out she was a psycho. Hasn’t worked in a couple of years—went schizo.
Her current residence is an assisted living facility a couple of blocks north of the park, but she’s circling the drain, and smart money says she’ll be locked up or on the street in the next year or so. She tried to bite Ruben during the photo lineup.”
Jenner asked, “So, what’s next? What do we have? Rad?”
Rad shook his head. “There’s not much forensics. No, wait, it’s actually the opposite—we have all the forensics in Precious Blood
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the world. We got fingerprints and bite marks, we got blood.
But none of it’s in any database. His blood doesn’t ring any bells at CODIS, and we’ve got no suspects for a DNA comparison. Everyone at the clinic comes up clean—we’re pretty much at square one again.”
Jenner leaned back. “Okay. We know the link—Green’s clinic. Is it the clinic, is it the clinic database, is it prescriptions he wrote . . . ?”
Rad stopped stirring his coffee. “We figure someone outside has access to the database. Mason said a real hacker would have had no difficulty at all get
ting past the firewall on that database program.”
Jenner said, “It’s got to be someone outside the clinic—
they could access and change files like the appointment calendar, which was electronic, but couldn’t get rid of the hard-copy stuff printed out in the office.”
They all nodded, and Mullins said, “But where do we start? Is it because they’re egg donors? Because they’re Hutchins students? Why those four?”
Roggetti added, “And who’s next?”
They were all silent for a while.
Jenner’s cell phone rang. It was embarrassingly loud.
He opened it.
“Hello?”
There was no answer.
“Hello?”
He looked at the phone, then shrugged. “I don’t know how to use this thing. Ana gave it to me. She’s sending me a text message—this is her cell number here, but she’s added 911
at the end.”
Rad looked at it.
“That means ‘emergency.’ We’ll run you up.” Rad grabbed his coat. “Yo, Mullins—Dr. Jenner, Detective Roggetti, and myself are forever grateful for your generosity.”
They left Mullins signaling for the waitress.
In the car, Jenner dialed her number, but kept being told, 282
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“The customer you are calling cannot be reached at this time.”
He turned to Joey and said, “Faster.”
Joey hit the siren and they pulled ahead, racing up Centre.
Rad said, “What’s going on? Should I call for backup, Jenner?”
Jenner shook his head; she was probably starting to withdraw. “I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.”
They flew past Canal Street.
He leaned forward to talk to them. “Look, I should be straight with the two of you. This whole thing has taken a real toll on her. I found out last night she’s been doing heroin. We had a fight, and she ran away. She came back this morning, and she’s trying to get straight.”
“That’s rough.” Rad nodded. “Poor kid.”
Jenner tapped Joey’s shoulder and said, “Take the left onto Prince and right on Crosby—you can park in the lot round the back.”
Roggetti pulled in near the back loading dock, next to a graffiti-covered delivery van. Jenner had the door open before the car stopped, the detectives following him a second later.
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