Blood Brother

by J. A. Kerley

  “She never told me,” I said, suddenly feeling as if parts of Vangie had been in code.

  Waltz reached in his shirt pocket, pulled a badge polished as bright as a new dime. “And this was her father’s tin.”

  “She gave you his badge?”

  “To help keep me safe, she said, a second shield to cover my back.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “In 1973, when I made detective. We’d grown up in Queens, neighbors, though I was just a scruffy kid to her. At least until we grew up.”

  “You and Vangie were …lovers?”

  A catch came to Waltz’s voice. He pushed past it. “The most beautiful years of my life. Then it sort of ramped down into friendship.”

  “But you still held the torch?”

  The misery in his eyes told the story: Then, now, always.

  “Did you know she was coming to New York?”

  He stood, wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “No. And that’s totally out of character. She always called. For a few days we’d be together and I’d pretend I wasn’t heartsick that she’d go away again, back to that damned Institute.”

  Waltz hung his head. Rain hammered the window.

  “I never knew much of her history,” I said. “Because of my past, I never ask people about theirs.”

  “Her father was ambushed by a sociopath when she was in high school. Her mother had died years before, the Big C. She and her father were all each other had, always there for one another, a team of two.”

  “His death must have been devastating.”

  “She retreated inside herself for a month. When she emerged, her first reaction was to join the force, follow in his footsteps.”

  “What happened?”

  “She pulled all her courage together and went to the jail to visit her father’s killer. To spit on him, she later told me, and to claw out his eyes if she got the chance.”

  “Sounds like her.”

  “She thought she’d find some hulking, tattoos-tained monster with bloodlust in his eyes. She found a forty-three-year-old actuary with a wife and three kids, house in the Connecticut ’burbs. He barely acknowledged her, too busy listening to the voices between his ears. A drooling, gun-slinging doper she could understand – and hate – but a white-collar guy who said a dragon lived inside his spine? That she couldn’t fathom.”

  “Vangie didn’t join the force, I take it.”

  “She had been considering biology before her father’s death. She shifted to Psych, immersed in it – this was a senior in high school, mind you, reading all night, writing papers of professional depth. She got attention, grabbed a full ride at Princeton.”

  “And pretty much re-invented the field of aberrational psychology,” I said.

  “She couldn’t not do it,” Waltz said. “She was amazing.”

  “What happened when you saw the body was Vangie’s?”

  I needed to ask, did it quietly. Waltz closed his eyes.

  “It was an explosion of cold in my face. My knees nearly went, the room swooped around. I realized if our history was known, I couldn’t work the case. So I reached inside and grabbed on to something, you know?”

  Like the day I found out Jeremy was a mass murderer. I said, “Yeah, I know.”

  “We found the recording saying contact you. I chilled the investigation and pulled every sting I had to get you here, to find out if you could help. Someone killed one of the best people on the planet and I need justice.”

  I stared into his eyes. “We can get justice, Shelly. But you’ve got to believe in my ability to find the truth.”

  Waltz walked to the window and parted the drapes, looking into the wind-blown ghosts of rain.

  “How do I know I can I trust you?”

  “Because Vangie did.”

  He closed his eyes, nodded, said, “Tell me the whole story.”

  It took a half an hour. I’m not sure how many of my conjectures he bought, but he asked no questions until I’d finished, starting with the one he found the most troubling.

  “You say your partner, Nautilus, saw a photo of your brother in Evangeline’s office? Naked.”

  I nodded.

  “It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t have entered a relationship with a …with a …” Words failed and his face dropped.

  “Jeremy said Vangie had called him her Sirius. Like the Dog Star. It jives with the reference in Vangie’s recording. That she needed a ‘serious’ …then she stopped.”

  “Dog star?” Waltz frowned. “Needed a Sirius …?” His face went white and I thought he was headed to the floor again.

  “What is it, Shelly? What?”

  Waltz grabbed his coat from the back of the couch, started pulling it on. “I’ve got to take you somewhere.”

  Rain whipped the window. Lightning flashed.

  “Outside? In that?”

  “Get your goddamn coat on.”

  We ran to his car, drove from Brooklyn into Manhattan, wipers fighting the rain. I knew by the streets and buildings we were near where the Twin Towers had stood. Waltz U’ed in the street, pulled up beside a small fenced-in area bathed in the yellow glow of streetlamps.

  “This is a dog park, right?” I said, perplexed.

  “A dog run. It was named after an explosives dog that died on 9/11. The dog’s a local hero.”

  “Explosives dog? You mean a bomb-sniffer?”

  “Exactly.”

  We got out of the car. The rain had dropped away to a chilly mist. Waltz pulled me by my sleeve to a metal plaque on the gate of the run. I couldn’t read the words. He got out his flashlight, snapped it on. The plaque showed the outline of a retriever followed by a dedication date and a few lines of type. Above the dog and inscription were three simple words …

  SIRIUS DOG RUN

  “My God,” I whispered. “The bomb-sniffing dog’s name was Sirius.”

  Vangie had grown up in NYC. The first years of her career had been here. She visited often, subscribing to the New York Times, the Post, and the New Yorker to keep a foot in the old neighborhood. Surely she’d seen news stories on the incident, the park dedication.

  If so, “I need you to be my Sirius, Jeremy,” equated to “I need you to sniff out a bomb, Jeremy.”

  But Jeremy wasn’t tuned to explosives, he was calibrated for mental dysfunctions. His life among the violently insane, his intellect, his supranormally tuned senses, his self-awareness, all combined in the ability to detect pathological mental conditions in others, to know how those people would act in a range of conditions.

  Question: Why would Vangie want my brother to find a madman?

  Answer: Because something unspeakable would happen if the madman went undetected.

  Waltz had arrived at the same conclusion. He touched my arm.

  “Do you understand what may be happening, Detective Ryder?”

  “I think so, Shelly.”

  “Where do we go from here?”

  THIRTY

  The tape snapped from Alice Folger’s face. Jeremy Ridgecliff plucked the washcloth from her mouth. She gagged, then accepted the water he dribbled across her lips. She was in a bed, canopied with red velvet. She was tied tight, but with a pillow beneath her head. Ridgecliff had lifted her from the wooden box; it must have taken tremendous strength. Where did he store it in that lanky body?

  She heard another rumble of thunder outside. It would rain until the leading edge of the incoming high-pressure ridge pushed the low out to sea. The rain would dissipate tomorrow afternoon. She’d at least like to die on a sunny day.

  Ridgecliff said, “Do you need to drain?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Food?”

  She shook her head. Her last meal had been bits of leftover duck scented with cognac. He’d allowed bathroom visits in both locations, all carefully controlled. So far he hadn’t hurt her.

  He started to replace the tape. She shook her head. “Wait …I can help you in this unfortunate situation, Mr Ridgecliff
, We have a friend in common, a Mobile detective named Carson Ryder. You used to speak to him when you were at the Institute. He speaks highly of you, says you’re exceptionally intelligent. In fact, he thinks –”

  “Are you fucking him?”

  “What?”

  “Are you fucking Ryder? You’d be attractive to him and he’d love to swim the ol’ weenie around in you. Are you fucking him? It’s a charitable thing to do.”

  “I don’t think we should discuss my personal life, Mr Ridgecliff, not when there’s so much to talk about –”

  Ridgecliff began chanting like a schoolboy. “Heard it, heard it, heard it in your voi-eece. You’ve been fucking Ry-der.”

  “Mr Ridgecliff …”

  “I hear these days women will fuck anything without a second thought: other women, Dalmatians, pumpkins, Carson Ryder …”

  “I won’t lie to you Mr Ridgecliff. You’re in trouble. There’s a chance you could get hurt –”

  “Do tell.”

  “I’d like for you to consider me a friend. Someone who can help you get to safety and –”

  “STOP TRYING TO HUMANIZE YOURSELF! I’VE FORGOTTEN MORE OF THAT FRESHMAN-LEVEL PSYCHOBABBLE THAN YOU’LL EVER KNOW.”

  It was the most terrifying voice she’d ever heard. That it was coming from a plump man in eye liner and shag wig made it more frightening, like a kitten opening its mouth and having a cobra’s fangs.

  “I’m …sorry Mr Ridgecliff. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  “DON’T GET ON MY UNHAPPY SIDE.”

  “It was a mistake. I learned from it. I’m sorry.”

  “Your contrition is accepted, Miss Alice. Unless you misbehave, I have no plans to hurt you.”

  It took several seconds for his words to register. “Wait, what? You don’t plan to …kill me?”

  “It’s messy and I wouldn’t get my deposit back on the house.”

  “Then why did you abduct me, Mr Ridgecliff?”

  “To protect you.”

  “Protect me?” Folger asked. “From what?”

  He pushed the tape over her mouth. Started away, but turned. He put his lips beside Folger’s ear, his breath warm and wet.

  “My past.”

  In the morning I met Waltz for breakfast in a coffee joint three blocks from the cop shop. The last of the storm was blowing through and all the vendors on the street had magically produced boxes of umbrellas in two color choices: black and blacker. I closed my new black umbrella and went inside, saw Waltz at a lone table by the window, staring blankly into rain plummeting over a multihued sea of traffic.

  I bought coffee and a bialy and we huddled close across the small table. We had both walked out on to a tightrope no wider than a thread. We didn’t know where it went. All we knew was that any fall would be long and irreparably damaging.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked. “We didn’t discuss much of that last night.”

  “We have to operate on the assumption that Vangie brought Jeremy here to find a madman. That finding the madman would avert a disaster. If the investigation starts closing in on Jeremy, we, we …”

  “We fuck it up, temporarily,” Waltz growled. “If that’s going to keep Folger safe, that’s what we do.”

  “I’ve got to redirect my investigation toward Vangie. Try and figure out what she fell into.”

  “How will you start?”

  “By changing my entire mind-set, Shelly. Inverting my prime assumption: that Jeremy is decompensating.”

  “He is. You said it a dozen times.”

  “Maybe. But the new assumption has to be that Jeremy is as bizarrely rational as always. Though he may not be making sense to us, he’s making perfect sense in his world.”

  “I wonder how much sense he made to Evangeline?”

  I shrugged. It hit me that now might be the time to ask something that had been on my mind since last night.

  “Shelly, the Evangeline Prowse I knew never wanted anyone to call her anything but Vangie, was almost strident about it. She didn’t care for Evangeline. Yet that’s what you call her.”

  Waltz turned away and looked out into the rain. It rippled and shifted down the pane, turning the streetscape into a scene from a kaleidoscope filled with shards of light and broken shadows. His finger touched at the window, like he could change the shapes he saw.

  “She loved the name Evangeline, actually. Loved its rhythm and poetry, as did I. But she said from the moment she went to Alabama, she would tell everyone that her preference was Vangie. Only one person would ever again call her Evangeline.”

  I started to speak but couldn’t find the words. Waltz turned back to the window and that’s how I left him.

  I hustled back to the hotel. The stacks of files and information supplied by the NYPD had grown daily. Pads of paper covered the bed. I had sticky notes on one entire wall and had forbidden the housekeeping staff from entering lest some crumb of note-taking be disturbed.

  I arm-shoveled pads to the floor, turned on a muted news channel and stared at the ceiling. Vangie’s reason for bringing Jeremy to New York was to avert a disaster. But had she encountered the threat during a visit to New York? Or in her daily work?

  How did this connect to Jeremy’s assertion he and Vangie were …what? He’d never used the word lovers, choosing innuendo and bombast, which he often used to disguise a lie.

  Was there any connection to the invisible patient? The confidentiality problem to which Traynor had alluded? The break-in at Vangie’s house?

  My mind felt like a myopic eye trying to track a thousand comets through the night sky. Facts swirled across suppositions, names danced around places, theories disappeared down black holes. I’d absorbed too much information and it had jumbled. How to make sense of an onslaught of the senseless? I mulled the thought for two minutes, then called the concierge.

  “How fast can you get me a roll of butcher’s paper?”

  I was intrigued by Cluff’s methodology. Pour your mind on to a white expanse and study the facts in a spatial setting, adding underscores, arrows, impromptu timelines. Decide what’s wheat and chaff and keep unrolling paper. If an idea goes nowhere, you still have a quarter-mile of thinking ahead.

  I sat and poured both fact and supposition on to the paper, crossing out, adding, tearing away paper and starting anew.

  I transcribed the duality of voices at Jeremy’s murder scenes. I saw my notes on Harry’s conversations with Dr Traynor at the Institute, how my brother’s underlying motive – primal judgment? Was that what they called it? – had never been ascertained by Vangie. She must have ceaselessly attempted to uncover Jeremy’s “Fire that lights all fires” as Traynor also called the seminal moment of transition to murderer.

  My pen paused. Was it irrelevant? Of all the cases presented to Vangie over her career, my brother’s would have been one of the most enigmatic. Apparently, however, he had never confessed his original pinion point: What drove him to kill the first woman?

  I heard Vangie pick away at the lock as Jeremy jittered and danced, bobbed and weaved, letting Vangie close, but never in the final door. He would have been irritating, frustrating and angering. A total challenge from the day he entered the Institute.

  Challenge.

  The word echoed in my mind. Why?

  I studied trails of words and arrows on my eight-foot-long mural of death. Where had I seen the word? There, in my longhand notes of Harry’s discoveries. Traynor had told Harry that if Vangie had a private client, he or she would have to pose a tremendous challenge. Saturdays, one to three p.m., Vangie had – according to her neighbor – kept hours with a client. But the neighbor had never seen anyone enter or exit.

  Maybe there wasn’t a client. Perhaps it was Vangie’s way of grabbing some quiet time to write or take a nap.

  Or …

  Could it be because the challenging client couldn’t be there? Except perhaps, as an avatar, a symbolic representation.

  A photograph on the door.

>   Had Vangie been searching for Jeremy’s primal judgment? Had she uncovered a transforming moment in his past that had kindled today’s crimes?

  I re-read all police reports, moving backward in time, ending with Officer Jim Day’s notes on my father’s murder scene: clear, precise, insightful, with a concluding judgment that stepped outside objective reportage:

  “ …the entire scene was drenched in anger and release. It seems some pivotal mental barrier was broached, a threshold crossed, a major decision acted upon.”

  Pivotal mental barrier? Day seemed to have discerned a subtext in my brother’s murderous actions. Had Day noticed anything else? And if he had, would he remember?

  Was he even alive?

  There was nothing I could do from here. Not with any efficiency. I pulled my phone and called Harry. As I dialed, my eyes drifted to the far-left end of the butcher paper, where I had started by encapsulating the details of my father’s death. The details had been supplied by Officer Jim Day, his name in a wide swathe of black ink.

  Day. Where my brother’s records started. Where everything started.

  “Nautilus,” my partner answered.

  “I need to talk to a guy, Harry. He may be hard to find.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Nautilus listened into his phone, heard pages flipping back and forth as the county police clerk checked her records. “I got it that Officer Jim Day worked here for three years and two months and, uh, six days. That was twenny-five years back.”

  “There’s no current address for Officer Day?”

  “Nope. If he’d worked here long enough the state’d have a pension account address, where the check is sent, but he didn’t do that.”

  “Is there anyone who’d know where Officer Day might be?”

  “I expect Sher’f Reamy might. He was around back then, only retired a few years back. If anybody kep’ touch with Officer Day, it would be the Sher’f. Or mebbe he knows somebody who knows somebody, that kind a thing. You got a pin or a pincil?”

  Nautilus dialed Reamy’s number. Heard the phone pick up.

  “If this is another goddamn call for burial plots, I ain’t gonna be the one needing ‘em.”