“I have samples of the hair from the altar and the garden. I want to test the samples …”
“What did you two fight about?” he asked suddenly.
“It has nothing to do with the case. As I was saying, I’m going to run some tests to see how it was cut.”
She could be so bull-headed. “Beka told you everything, then she stopped. You two barely spoke in the past six months.”
“We didn’t speak at all,” she corrected him.
“Why?”
“Ask me something else.”
He decided to give it a rest and come back to the question. “Was she ever violent?”
She stared at him. “Where’s that coming from?”
“It’s a different question.”
“She had an artistic temperament.”
He thought about asking Devon if Beka’s temper was anything like hers, but fiddled with his pencil instead. “Do you think she would have told you if she was having problems with Gabe?”
“A year ago I thought Beka told me everything. Right now, I’m not so sure. ”
“Which brings us back to your argument.”
“I promise you it has nothing to do with the case.”
“Then you won’t mind telling me.” Her eyes were busily looking at something under his desk. His face flushed angrily. “What the hell did you two argue about?”
“You! Okay?” she yelled back at him. “You!”
He was stunned.
“Beka thought I was wasting my life with you. Said the only reason I’ve been with you for five years is because you can’t marry me!”
He felt his face fall. It had been said, the unspoken stated. “What’d you say?”
There was a knock at the door; Frank poked his head in. “Just got Newsday.” He held up the front page: “Murder of the Millenium—Black Widow of Bridgehampton Leaves Behind Blood Bath.”
Hurley had landed the lead story, and the cover photograph was none other than Devon looking stricken with Loch’s arm around her comfortingly—the caption left nothing to the imagination: “Best friend and Suffolk County’s first female Crime Scene detective, Devon Halsey, of Sag Harbor, is overcome with emotion after leaving scene. Can she handle her job?”
Devon hid her face in her hands as Frank continued to read the article out loud. “Retired star of the International Contemporary Dance Company, Beka Imamura, and her husband, artist Gabriel Montebello, died New Year’s Eve around midnight, according to the county coroner. Local fixtures in the East End art community, Imamura and her husband were well-respected and liked by all. Friends and neighbors are shocked by the events that began the year …”
Devon couldn’t listen to any more and headed for the ladies’ room, where she locked the door and sat on the toilet. Her body shook, tears stung her eyes, but still she could not cry.
No one had cried when Todd first disappeared. They had simply hoped for his spontaneous return—a bit naïvely in retrospect—but it had never occurred to any of them that Todd Daniels was gone forever. And now Beka and Gabe were gone as well. After the immortality of youth, mortality had been a jarring sense of cruel reality. They had gotten over Todd’s disappearance, but it still haunted them, as any unanswered question did. She could remember bits and pieces of the party, the nights they searched for him, but she could barely recall anything physical about Todd. Only his essence remained.
“Why’d you do it, Beka? Screw the suicide or the murder or whatever, just explain the hair to me. Why’d you cut your hair?” she whispered. Then she had a feeling that she knew. She yanked down on the industrial size roll of toilet paper and ended up with one tiny square of sandpaper-textured tissue in her hand to try and blow her nose in. It was Todd who had died, not Gabe. Todd. But why had Beka cut her hair this year? Why not last year, or the year before? What had she learned about Todd that made her grieve his loss this New Year’s?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Gates of Dharma are manifold; I vow to enter them.
—THE FOUR VOWS IN ZEN
Devon did not return to Loch’s office. She wasn’t interested in seeing or hearing anything more about the Newsday article. All she wanted to do was find out what happened to Gabe and Beka and get on with her life. What part did she want to get on with? Wasn’t there more to life than her job? What about that nagging sensation in the back of her mind that time was running out? The clock. She had always scoffed at women who felt that way, but she was thirty-eight and that was exactly how she herself was beginning to feel. It wasn’t that she had a yearning to procreate or mother the world, but she did long to grow old with someone.
All she and Loch did every day was work. He gave new meaning to the word workaholic, and if he did leave Marty and marry her, would it be any different? Would he come home after his shift, or fall asleep at his desk as he had tonight? And after one too many nights of being left alone, would she still wait up for him, or would she be at her own desk catching Zs? And where would they live? She loved the remoteness of Sag Harbor, while Loch liked to be inundated with urban activity. She and Beka used to joke that someday they’d be the mah jong mavens of some retirement village—now, she didn’t even have someone to joke about that with. How had this sudden loss of plans, of life, of friendship happened?
The Find Todd Daniels hotline and headquarters had been based on the second floor of First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue, and it was in full operation by the fourth night of Todd’s disappearance. An assemblage had organized itself quickly into volunteer groups including New York parishioners, the Daniels family’s congregation, Todd’s schoolmates from Yale, and local volunteers. Devon and the gang arrived around seven p.m. and watched the bustle around them in quiet amazement. Devon thought they had done an excellent job of searching for Todd in the previous four days, but nothing had prepared her for the kind of systematic order of search-team deployments across a grid of the city. Every quadrant, from Fourteenth Street to the Staten Island Ferry, was sectored off, and each had its own little push-pin, color-coordinated to signify which areas had been searched and which ones were still open territory. Neighborhood watch groups were covering the areas they knew best and showing up, like the loftmates, after the regular workday to help find Todd. It was with a mixture of regret and relief that Devon watched these newcomers to the crisis. Refreshed, invigorated, and looking highly efficient as well as rested and hopeful, they wore little name-tags and carried clipboards as if organization alone would bring Todd through the doors of their headquarters.
“Hi, I’m Paul. Night manager for FTHQ, that means Find Todd Headquarters.” He handed them forms to fill out. “Just put your names and addresses here and we’ll put you into groups with a leader who’s familiar with search techniques.” He was a bright know-it-all.
Beka curled her lip and looked askance at Devon.
“We also have phones to answer for the ladies, if you’d rather not be out in the cold.” He looked at Devon as he said it.
She laughed, but no one else seemed amused. The loftmates stared at the young man as if he’d just flown in from Mars—or Connecticut, which at that moment seemed as distant as Mars.
“How many hours should I sign you up for? We usually try to rendezvous about ten-thirty, in time for the eleven o’clock news, so we can give the anchors any new developments. And we have walkie-talkies! One for each group. Did you hear about our request for volunteers on the evening news?”
Josh flopped his arm casually over the night manager for FTHQ and announced, “Paul, we’re from the loft. We’ve been at this for days, not hours. We know what to do. Now, why don’t you just tell us where to go.”
The silence was deafening. It was quite clear where Paul wanted them to go.
His tone was riddled with blame and accusation. “I should have recognized you.” He looked disgustedly at Beka. This pious young man must have been their age exactly, but acted sincerely as if God was on his side, not theirs. “Obviously, your techniques didn’t work. I g
uess I’ll have to divide you up with some of our neighborhood watch teams.”
Todd’s smiling face looked down on them from the FTHQ flyer with the hotline number on it.
“Hey! We are a team!” Josh retorted, pushing the guy back with his forefinger. “We were out there with Sam as soon as we knew Todd was gone!”
“Too bad he wasn’t in one of the local bars you searched.”
“We went everywhere he might have gone!” Alex defended their actions.
“Drunk.” Paul’s righteous eyes blazed.
Devon saw Todd’s mother look up from where she was answering phones, her tear-stained face and tired eyes echoing their own hopeless faces. Devon stepped back from the group; this was not her fight.
Beka pulled herself up to new heights, her sinewy body lengthening like a snake ready to strike its prey. “You weren’t there, so don’t tell us what happened,” she hissed in his face.
“Come on, guys, let’s go.” Alex opened the door. “We don’t need this shit. Sam knows where we’ll be tonight—where we’ve been every night since New Year’s. On the streets …” She walked up to Paul’s pompous face. “… looking for Todd.” They all turned to leave.
Devon looked back as the door shut behind them—the room had not stopped its activity. Todd’s mother was still on the phone; Paul had simply turned around and gone back to the map.
The next day she went back and volunteered formally. She was not overly surprised when she found Josh in the back room answering phones, but that no one else from the loft ever came back disappointed her. She had hoped they would band together in this crisis; instead they fell apart.
“You used to be an artist.” She could still hear Beka’s rage, as if becoming a cop had been a personal act of betrayal. There were days, especially days like the last two, when Devon wasn’t quite sure why she had joined the force. Financial security had played a role in the decision—her dad had been so proud when she told him she was going to take the civil service exam—but there was something more to the decision …
After Todd disappeared she had felt—as they all had—that there wasn’t much more time left to get it right, and trying to help Sam and his family find Todd had been a kind of self-awakening. There were two kinds of people—those who got involved and helped and those who didn’t. The day she went back to FTHQ she decided that she wanted to be the kind of person who helped. Maybe it was as simple as that. She liked working at Find Todd Headquarters, and while she could not stand that guy Paul, he was gone after the second week anyway. Most people did not have the staying power that it took to search for something—someone—after hope faded.
Devon was there to the end. She helped them break down the office, two months later, when everyone conceded that if Todd was coming home it was on his own volition or as a spring floater. When neither happened, despair, like a shroud, fell over the loft. Beka began doing drugs in earnest; Alex took a job in California; Godwyn moved to Chelsea where photographers were supposed to live; Maddie disappeared herself for a few years, calling only on holidays; Josh moved uptown; and Sam went to grad school in a less urban area. Devon moved back home, began studying, and passed her civil service exam in the highest percentile in the state. By the first anniversary of Todd’s disappearance, Devon Halsey was a member of the Suffolk County Police Department.
She sat down at her desk and looked at Beka’s hair samples. Her head ached with pressure. There was so much to do and such a multitude of things to figure out that she wasn’t even able to begin prioritizing all her responsibilities.
Frank came in and sat down at his desk without saying a word. She looked at the clock on the wall; the lieutenant would be in any second to update them on overtime and the lab situation. He always made an appearance twelve minutes into a shift so he could see who was late.
His door opened. It was 12:12 a.m. “Good evening, gang. Sergeant Houck says that Hematology and Toxicology will be open at eight a.m.,” he announced. “This is the priority tonight. Don’t do anything but process this scene so we can close the case, quick-quick.”
“That’s what we’re doing, lieutenant, unless something else comes up,” Frank reminded him. Lieutenant Whittaker was newer to the unit than Devon and had been an unfortunate bureaucratic assignment, yet another political move that compromised the department’s integrity but made somebody upstate happy. He had never worked in the Crime Scene Unit and both Devon and Frank had to walk him through procedure to make sure he didn’t make mistakes, rather than the other way around.
“No, no, this is priority, Frank.” Frank tilted his head down and cast a disparaging look over the rim of his bifocals at the lieutenant. “Unless, of course, something else comes up.”
He was such an asshole. Devon pressed down too hard on her mechanical pencil; the lead snapped. “Halsey, the sarge wants to see you in his office.” She followed her superior officer out of the room and headed back upstairs.
Sergeant Houck was sitting at his desk with the window open, despite the cold and Lochwood standing in the corner. He smiled as soon as she came in and motioned for her to shut the door. The faint odor of cigarette smoke lingered in the room—no smoking did not apply in Houck’s office.
She tried to read the atmosphere in the room, and smelled conspiracy as rank as stale tobacco fumes.
“Halsey, I’m sorry for your loss,” Houck began, “and even sorrier about the asshole reporter that put you on the front page of today’s paper.” It wasn’t even one in the morning and already everyone knew about the headlines. She had no doubt the chief of police had been awakened for the second night in a row by this case.
“Thank you, sir.” She sat down across from him, wondering what to expect.
“We’re going to have to cap this quick, and the best way I can think to do that is to take you off the case.”
“I take exception to that decision, sir.”
“The department doesn’t need this to be higher profile than it already is.”
“I can handle the heat if you back me up.” She put the ball in his court; she knew how to play the game.
“The pressure’s on.”
“It’s never been off, sir. Excuse me for saying so, but everyone in the department and the precinct has been watching me since day one, so what difference does a little press make?”
“You and Frank are one of the best teams we’ve got. I’m behind you.” She knew he was lying but let him. “This is coming from higher up.”
“I’d like to stay on the case.”
“We’ve already got a handle on it.” Lochwood added his show of support. “It doesn’t make sense to change teams now.”
“But I’m the one taking the heat if there’re any more indiscretions.”
“Are we responsible for the press’ indiscretion?” she asked. Loch winced.
“You know what I mean, detective.” Houck stared at her hard over the rim of his bifocals. So, he knew about them.
“There won’t be,” Lochwood said.
“No, there won’t.” He looked out the window, still undecided.
“Okay.”
She felt like a broken record, repeating herself. “Thank you, sir. Is there anything else?”
“Keep away from reporters.”
Excused, Devon returned to Crime Scene feeling as if the sword of Damocles was now hanging over her head. Frank looked up at her as she came through the door but didn’t say a word. “Houck’s behind me,” she told him.
He groaned. “Watch your back.”
She walked over to the evidence locker and started to open it, then stopped. “Hey, Frank? Thanks for not asking me how I am.”
“Anytime.”
She pulled out two evidence bags and signed their names on the sheet.
Loch did not see Devon for the rest of the night, although they spoke several times on the phone to keep him abreast of the evidence they were processing. Nothing new came up. It still looked as if Beka had killed Gabe, just as Lochwood expe
cted, and if everything went well with the interviews today he’d have the case closed, and Houck and the rest of the assholes upstairs would be happy.
He and Gary arrived at the zendo shortly before dawn. The service began later in the morning than the regular morning sit, but Devon had told them the best time to reach Hans was before six a.m. As they walked up to the house the detectives could see him through the kitchen window, looking very un-monklike in a pair of boxer shorts and a paint-spattered sweatshirt, drinking a cup of coffee with the New York Times and Newsday spread out in front of him. Loch tapped lightly on the door.
“Come in!” Hans waved to them. “Come in. My wife’s still asleep. She likes to sleep in, so we can talk in here if you don’t mind.” The detectives entered the kitchen and introduced themselves. Hans bowed to them ever so slightly and held up the Newsday article.
Loch rolled his eyes. “We’ve seen it.”
“I know Tom. Thought he had better taste.”
“You’d be surprised what people will say for a dollar.”
“I grew up in Sweden during the war, nothing surprises me. Coffee?” The aroma of some foreign dark roast permeated the air and Lochwood surprised himself by accepting a cup. Gary followed his lead. Hans handed them their cups of coffee and placed a small container of cream from the local dairy on the table.
Loch had never seen a table like it. Twelve feet long, roughly oval, as if it had been sliced out of an oblong tree; bark clung to the edges but it had been sanded and polished to a sheen so pure that the rings of the tree circled beneath their cups in slow spirals of a lost time. Loch reached down to touch the finish as Hans motioned for them to sit down. “Devon said you had some questions for me.”
“Yes, but we want you to know that we respect any privileged information that you need to keep private as Beka’s spiritual advisor,” Loch told him.
“Catholic?” Hans asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Raised Catholic.”
“Yes.”
“So was I.” Hans motioned for them to sit. “Don’t worry. Buddhist monks and Catholic monks are two different animals—I can have sex.” He chuckled heartily. “And no one comes and confesses anything to me. Buddhism has karma. You screw up, you pay. One lifetime or another, does not matter. Only active meditation and conscious acts change one’s karma.”
The Weeping Buddha Page 12
