“Can we get Peppermint Patties?” Emily asked.
Abby wanted to say no. But how could she resist all four of the prettiest blue eyes in the world? Sometimes the magic was too strong to resist.
“Okay,” Abby said. “But just one each. And you can’t eat them until after dinner tonight. Okay?”
“Okay,” in tandem. They took off for the candy aisle. A minute later they returned. Emily carried the goods. She put them in the cart. There were three Peppermint Patties.
Again with the three, Abby thought.
“Sweetie, I said one each,” Abby said. She picked up one of the candy bars. “Did you bring this one for me?”
No answer.
“Okay, let’s get one more,” Abby said. “One for Daddy. Then we’ll have enough for all of us.”
It seemed like this was getting to be a standard routine and speech. It wasn’t like the girls were leaving out Michael in the equation. Abby had watched them interact with other kids many times. They were always generous with whatever they had to share. This was an early lesson from both her and Michael.
On the other hand, the girls were only four. She couldn’t expect them to be math wizards yet.
The Eden Falls Free Library was a small, ivy-laced brick building near the river, a Mid-Hudson design that also was home to the Crane County Community Theater.
Despite the fact that the girls were getting somewhat proficient at the computer, Abby was scared to death of leaving them alone online. So, at least once a week, time permitting, she took them to an honest-to-God, brick-and-mortar library. She had spent a great deal of time at the Hyde Park Library as a girl, and she would not deny the experience to the girls. There was something about the feel and smell and heft of books that no computer monitor could supply. Neither Charlotte nor Emily ever wanted to go. An hour later, neither wanted to leave.
As the girls settled into the children’s section, Abby heard an EMS siren approaching the library. As a trained RN, it caught her attention. It had always been so. From the time she was a child, she had been expected to go to medical school, to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a surgeon. Dr Charles Reed knew his son Wallace did not have the discipline or temperament for heart surgery, or even the rigors of residency, but felt his only daughter did.
Abby had gotten as far as her freshman year in pre-med at Columbia when, one night, on an icy sidewalk in the East Village, she slipped and broke her wrist. While being treated in the emergency room at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, she watched the ER nurses in action, and knew that this was what she wanted to do, to work the front lines of medical care. Part of her had to admit that she knew it would get under her father’s skin, but when she switched over to the Columbia School of Nursing, she knew she had made the right decision. It took Charles Reed most of the ensuing thirteen or so years to get over it, if he ever did.
As the EMS ambulance passed the library, Abby flashed on the night, five years earlier, when she met Michael.
She had been on for almost twelve hours that day. The ER wasn’t busier than usual – that night there had been only one gunshot victim, along with a handful of domestics, including one that had ended in the husband, a fifty-nine-year old man who apparently had received a Westinghouse steam iron to the side of his head for saying to his wife, as a prelude to sex: “Yo, fatso, get with it.”
At midnight an EMS arrived at the door. As they wheeled in the unconscious patient, the paramedic looked into Abby’s eyes, his post 9/11 thousand-yard stare in place.
“Bomb,” the paramedic said softly.
All kinds of things raced through Abby’s mind. All of it terrifying. Her first thought was that the city had been attacked again, and this was just the first of the victims. She wondered how bad it was going to get. As the other two nurses on duty prepped a room, Abby stepped into the waiting room. She flipped the television channel to CNN. Two guys yelling at each other about the mortgage crisis. No attack.
When she stepped into the triage room, she saw him.
Michael Roman, the man who would become her husband, the love of her life, supine on the gurney, his face powdered with black ash, his eyes closed. She checked his vitals. Steady pulse, strong BP reading. She studied his face, his strong jaw, his fair complexion and sandy hair, now coated with black ash.
Moments later he opened his eyes, and her life changed forever.
In the end he had a slight concussion, a small laceration on the back of his right hand. Days later, when Abby saw the photographs of the car bombing, and what it had done to the nearby building, she, like everyone else, was amazed that he wasn’t killed on the spot.
The siren faded into the distance. Abby glanced at her watch, then over at the children.
The girls were gone.
Abby sprang to her feet. She walked over to the children’s section, looking behind all the low stacks, the festive displays for books on Easter and Passover. She stepped into the ladies restroom. No Charlotte, no Emily. She went down to the lower level, the section that had the DVDs and CDs. Sometimes she and the girls picked out movies here in the Family section. There she found four children, none of them her own. Quickening her pace, she returned to the ground floor, and was just about to speak to one of the library assistants when she looked down one of the long stacks in the adult section and saw them.
Her heart found its way back into her chest. The girls were sitting side by side, at the end of the stack of books. They had a large, coffee-table sized volume across their laps. Abby walked down the aisle.
“Hey, ladies.”
They looked up at her.
“You guys shouldn’t run off like that. Mommy got a little worried.”
“We’re sorry,” Charlotte said.
“What are you reading?” Abby got down on the floor with the girls. She sat between them, took the book from Emily. She glanced at the cover.
Russian Folk Tales and Legends.
“Where did you find this?” Abby asked.
Emily pointed to the bottom shelf of a nearby stack.
Abby returned to the page at which the girls had been looking. On the left was a large color plate, an intricate woodcut of a fairy tale figure, a tall, skeletal man with a pointed chin, rabid eyes, and gnarled fingers. He wore a black velvet robe and tarnished crown. To the right was an index to stories about Koschei the Deathless. Abby skimmed the next few pages, a little unnerved.
There were a number of variations on the legend, it seemed. One version included a prince and a gray wolf; another was about a firebird. One thing they agreed upon, though, was that Koschei was an evil man who terrorized the countryside, primarily young women, and could not be killed by conventional means. This was because his soul was separate from his body. As long as his soul was safe, he could not die. Except for one way, according to one of the variations. If he was stabbed in the head with a needle, it would be curtains for the big ugly guy. But only if the needle was broken.
Nice kid’s story, Abby thought. Right up there with Charlotte’s Web.
The good news was that her daughters couldn’t yet read.
Back in the car, heading home, Abby realized she couldn’t get the melody the girls had been humming at the grocery store out of her head. She knew it – recalled the piece of music the way you sometimes remember a face, like a person who was present during something important in your life: wedding, funeral, graduation. It was so melancholy, Abby doubted it was a wedding. The song was too gloomy.
She realized the only way to get a song out of her head was to replace it with something else. She flipped on the radio, dialed to a Nineties oldie station. Good enough.
Twenty minutes later they pulled into the drive. The sun was out, and the girls were giggling over something secret, as they often did. As Abby unloaded the groceries she’d found that the mysterious tune had left her, but for some reason the sense of unease had not.
¦ Uploaded by Coral ¦
PART TWO
SIX
The borough of Queens is the largest of the five boroughs of New York City, and the city’s second most populous. It sits on the westernmost section of Long Island, and is home to both LaGuardia and JFK airports, as well as the US Open for tennis. At one time or another the borough had been the residence of a number of celebrities, both famous and infamous, including Tony Bennett, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Gotti. It was by far the most culturally diverse borough, boasting more than one hundred nationalities.
The office of the district attorney, a modern ten-story building located in Kew Gardens, looked as if it had been built by five different architects and builders, composed of a series of additions added in different eras, a pastiche of style, materials, and methods. One of the busiest DA’s offices in the country, it was home to more than three hundred attorneys, and five hundred support personnel.
The Major Crimes, Investigations, Trials, Special Prosecutions and Legal Affairs divisions of the office were responsible not only for the prosecution of arrest cases brought to the office by the New York City Police Department and other law enforcement agencies, but also for proactively seeking out wrongdoers and aggressively undertaking investigations of suspected criminal conduct.
The DA’s office, too, boasted its own stars. Frank O’Connor, a former Queens District Attorney, figured prominently in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film The Wrong Man.
To some, mostly those who were not inside the elite divisions of the office, the building was called the Palace. Those who did work in Major Crimes never did anything to discourage the practice. And while a palace can really only boast one king – in this case it was the District Attorney, Dennis R. McCaffrey – it can have a number of princes.
When Michael Roman, inarguably the most favored prince at the bar, arrived at the Palace on the day before the Ghegan trial was scheduled to begin, there were only a handful of people. If Saturdays turned the New York legal system into a ghost town, Sundays rendered it virtually barren. Only the newest and most ambitious young attorneys, along with royalty like Michael Roman, ventured into the office. The second floor was all but deserted.
As much as Michael enjoyed the buzz and noise of the office when it was in full swing, he had to admit he liked having the place to himself. He did his best thinking on the weekends. There was a time when the DA’s Homicide division was located in a dumpy little building in Jamaica that looked like a check-cashing store and, for a number of prosecutors, Michael included, it was almost a pleasure to try cases out there, off the beaten path, away from the boss’s scrutinizing eye.
After five years of working in these trenches, vaulting his way up from the Intake Bureau to the Felony Trial Bureau, Michael cemented his reputation with the trial and conviction of the Patrescu brothers, a pair of vicious drug dealers who had cold bloodedly murdered six people in the basement of a fast food restaurant in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Michael and Tommy Christiano had worked nights and weekends on that case, backed by a capital investigation team with hundreds of detectives from the DA’s office and the NYPD.
Marku Patrescu was currently serving six life sentences in the Clinton Correctional Facility, better known as Dannemora. His brother Dante, who had pulled the trigger, had been executed that March. After Dante’s sentence was carried out, Michael began to hear interesting stories from DAs all over the city. It seemed that apprehended suspects, in a wide range of crimes – rapes, assaults, robberies – cited the Patrescu execution as a major reason not to carry a weapon, or use a weapon in their possession during the commission of a felony. It was this sort of evidence of cause and effect for which prosecutors live.
The same team that worked tirelessly to convict the Patrescu brothers helped put Patrick Sean Ghegan behind bars. Ghegan’s trial began in just over twenty-four hours. Michael had everything in place – the ballistic evidence tying Ghegan’s weapon to the crime, a line-up that positively identified Ghegan as the man who had been observed threatening Colin Harris in his florist shop, along with surveillance camera footage that showed Ghegan entering the store moments before the murder.
The only thing Michael did not have, not in the sense he needed, was Falynn Harris, the daughter of the slain man. Falynn, whose mother had died in a car accident when she was only six, had not spoken a single word since the day she saw her father die in a hail of bullets.
Today would be Michael’s last opportunity to get Falynn to talk.
Michael knew why he was so driven on this case. It was hardly a secret around the office. Falynn’s story was not that different from his own. He had ridden shotgun on every detail leading up to the prosecution, had walked the evidence through the firearms unit, had personally interviewed everyone involved. Michael Roman was known throughout the Palace as the kind of prosecutor who liked to tie down evidentiary details even before charges were returned.
Michael had already met with Falynn six times, once bringing her to his house in Eden Falls, hoping that spending some time with Charlotte and Emily and Abby might open her up. No such luck. Each time she sat, curled into a ball, completely closed off from the world, embraced by the cold arms of grief.
Unless there was a continuance, today would probably be Michael’s last chance to prepare her for testimony. She had been subpoenaed by the defense, the judge had already ruled on the matter, and whether Michael liked it or not, she was going to take the stand.
She looked younger than fourteen, even younger than she had the last time Michael had seen her. She was slight and gamine, with light brown eyes and curly chestnut hair. She wore faded jeans and a burgundy sweatshirt, battered Frye boots, at least three sizes too big for her. Michael wondered if the boots had belonged to her father, if she had wadded-up paper towels in the toes.
Then there was that face. The face of a sad angel.
Falynn had been staying at a foster home in Jackson Heights since the murder. Michael had asked for a patrol car to pick her up and bring her to the office. He met her at the back entrance.
As they rode up to the second floor, Michael tried to plot his strategy with the girl.
He knew that if he could get her to open up in court, get her to look into the face of each juror – just once, just one heart-cinching time – he would put Patrick Ghegan on the gurney with a needle in his arm. And he knew why he wanted this so badly.
As they walked down the hallway Michael watched her. She was observant, smart, ever aware of her surroundings. He knew she saw the Christmas lights that ran along the wall where it met the ceiling, lights no one had bothered to take down for more than five years.
They walked through the small outer office into Michael’s office. Michael gestured to the sofa. “Would you like to sit here?”
Falynn looked up. The slightest smile graced her lips, but she remained silent. She sat on the sofa, drew her legs under her.
“Would you like a soda?”
Silence.
Michael reached into the small refrigerator next to his desk. Earlier in the day, the only things inside had been a single can of club soda and a bottle of Absolut. When Michael first met Falynn she walked in the room holding a diet Dr Pepper, so this morning he ran out and bought a six-pack of the soda. He hoped she still liked it. He popped a can out of the plastic, handed it to her. She took it and, after a minute or so, opened it, sipped.
Michael took the chair next to her. He would give it a few minutes before trying again. This was their routine. In their six meetings, Falynn had listened to everything he had said, but said nothing in response. Twice she had begun to cry. The last time they met, at Michael’s house, he had simply held her hand until it was time for her to go.
“Can I get you anything else?” Michael asked.
Falynn shook her head, and curled into a ball at the end of the old leather sofa. Michael thought about how the mayor of New York City had once sat in the same place, toasting Michael’s success, a place now occupied by a young girl who might never breach the shell of heartache and sadness
that surrounded her. He had never seen anyone so shut down in his life.
He glanced at the file in his lap.
Since her father’s murder, Falynn had run away from her foster home three times. The last time she was picked up for shoplifting. According to the police report, Falynn walked into a Lowe’s and shoplifted a package of peel-and-stick decals, the kind you put on the walls in a kid’s room. The decals were yellow daisies. When she walked past the security pedestals she set off the alarm.
According to the report, the security guards gave chase, but Falynn got away. The guards called the police, gave them a description. An hour later Falynn was found by the police, sitting beneath an I-495 overpass, a place known as a refuge for the homeless. According to the report, Falynn was polite and respectful to the officers, and was peacefully taken into custody.
The report also stated that police found the stolen decals stuck on the concrete columns under the overpass.
Michael watched her. He had to start talking. He had to give this another try. Because if Falynn did not testify, there was only a fifty-fifty chance that Ghegan would be convicted on the scientific evidence. Even ballistics could be impeached.
“As you know, the trial starts tomorrow,” Michael began, trying to sound conversational. “I’ll be honest with you, the defense attorney in this case is very good at what hedoes. I’ve seen him work many times. His name is John Feretti and he is going to ask you tough questions. Personal questions. It would be great if we could go over some of this before tomorrow. If we could get your story out first, it will be a lot better.”
Falynn said nothing.
Michael felt he had one last lever. He sat silently for a while, then stood, crossed over to the window. He shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels, chose his words carefully.
“When I was really small we lived over on Ditmars, in this small second floor apartment. You know Ditmars Boulevard?”
Falynn nodded.
“I had my own room, but it wasn’t much bigger than my bed. I had a small second-hand dresser in the corner, a closet next to the door. The bathroom was down at the end of the hall, by my parent’s bedroom. Every night, right around midnight, I always had to go to the bathroom, but I was scared to death of walking past my closet. See, the door never closed all the way, and my father never got around to fixing it. For the longest time I was sure that there was something in there, you know? Some kind of monster ready to spring out and get me.”
The Devil_s Garden Page 6
