Abbie studied the photos. She looked at the knife marks on Decatur’s face, studying them almost as if they were paint strokes on a canvas.
“It’s a different pattern. Whoever killed Jimmy Ryan was more controlled. Here the killer is just slashing and cutting.”
“You’re right. If this is the same guy, you think Ryan was more personal?”
“Not sure. Maybe he learned he could do it and do it well. He could get Decatur tied up, torture him, play his games and get away. With Jimmy, he takes his time.”
“Could be.”
“Or not. We’re missing something, Z.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Missing something? We’ve been handed the whole storyline here.”
Kearney pulled her chair over, sat and stared at Z.
“How do you figure?”
“Way I see it, Jimmy Ryan wants back in the drug game and earn a few dollars. Calls up the only guy he knows from the old days, Gerald Williams Decatur, arranges for some kind of exchange. So Decatur goes to his source to get the goods. But maybe he forgets to pay, or it’s a double cross from the get-go. The source follows Decatur to Niagara Falls, gets the merchandise back, tortures him to find out who was going to buy the stuff. Decatur gives up the name. Then the killer tracks down Jimmy Ryan, tortures him to find out where he’s hiding the money, offs him and then, boom, he’s in the wind.”
Kearney leaned back in her chair. “Why does he carve a symbol into Ryan’s forehead then? Look at these pics. The killer worked Decatur over for hours, I’ll bet. You think a street guy like Decatur, an ex-con, is going to hold out for the sake of some white boy in the County he knew fifteen years ago? And Jimmy Ryan is going to give up his life for a few thousand bucks? If this was a small-time drug caper, they would have talked.”
“Okay, Okay,” Z said. “Maybe you’re right, Professor. Maybe both victims give up the goods early on. But think about it. What if the killer’s a sadistic fuck who likes inflicting pain? Suddenly he finds himself in a room with a tied-up victim.”
“Early Christmas for a psycho.”
“Thank you. Boom, work turns into play. He starts jabbing them with the knife just for the fun of it. Ever thought of that?”
“Then why does he cut off Jimmy Ryan’s eyelids?”
She tapped Z’s desk once.
“I need to see the motel room.”
“The room? Jesus, Abbie, it’s been cleaned up and rented out for months. There’s nothing there.”
“I need to see it.”
“Why?”
“It’s January. No one goes to the Falls in January, so just maybe the room hasn’t been used too many times. In any case, I want to see it.”
“Please. Do we really want to do this? Get inside the mind of the killer and all that horseshit? I say we just be regular cops and I go home to my kids. You …”
Z shrugged his shoulders and swallowed his next words. Abbie leaned over and looked into his eyes.
“I have nothing to go home to, Z? Is that what you’re saying? And that’s why I get obsessed with these cases?”
“Now, Ab, I didn’t say that …”
“Well, say it.”
He opened his mouth to continue, but Abbie held out her hand.
“This is what I’ll do for you, Z. You find out who Decatur’s source was before he got sent away. See if that person has an alibi for October 6. He didn’t have much time to make new contacts after he got out of jail. And I’ll go to Niagara Falls and pursue the real killer. Because this is not about drug mules.”
She slipped into the town of Niagara Falls and drove through the near-deserted streets. This place was suffering, too, just like Buffalo. But there was a different feel to the loneliness here. It had once been the honeymoon capital of the world, which meant the motel sheets, the curtains, the signs, and the souvenir shops—all were part of the memories of aging brides now living in Tokyo or Liverpool or Phoenix. All the thousands of cheap honeymoons that had taken place here seemed wounded by the current state of the city, Abbie thought, as if the decline in Niagara Falls might reach across the globe and poison the marriages of people who’d been happy here once.
You’re really something else, Abbie. Stop dreaming about Japanese honeymooners and find your killer.
Before she’d left, she’d called ahead to Niagara Falls PD to clear the visit and had spoken with Detective Mills, the lead on the case.
“Anything new?” she’d asked him.
“Not really. We’ve been a little overwhelmed by the Outlaws thing.”
“Which Outlaws thing?”
“Are you kidding? Four months ago we had the beginning of a biker war. Six Outlaws were killed in their headquarters by someone with a machine gun—probably the Warlocks. Six dead in Niagara Falls is still news.”
“Right, I did hear about it. Did anyone hit back yet?”
“Nada. The whole county’s on pins and needles. But somebody in an awful-smelling leather vest is going to die pretty soon now.”
Abbie laughed.
“So we’ve done the basic protocol with Gerald Decatur,” Mills went on, “but not a hell of a lot more. If you guys can get the collar down there, I’ll buy you a cold beer.”
Abbie had promised Mills she’d keep him up to date on her progress.
The Lucky Clover was a sixteen-unit motel on Ontario Avenue, a major thoroughfare that ran perpendicular to the Niagara River. The parking lot was slick with rain and she could see the plume of mist from the Falls off to the north as she pulled in. She got a plastic card key from a bored clerk who’d been off the night of the killing. Room 15. It was near the end of the row, a steel door with dents in it about waist high. It looked like it’d been kicked in a couple of times—the door cratered just below the doorknob—and then repainted in pale blue.
Abbie slid the key in the lock, waited for the light to turn green, and then opened the door. A musty smell rushed out.
The room was bare-bones: two twin beds, a squat twenty-inch TV, a small desk with a lamp on it and a wooden chair, a gray and pea-green weave on the carpet. The bathroom door was kitty-corner to where she was standing.
Abbie went to the bathroom first. The glow of the light was greenish, the tub a dark blue, pitted here and there where the enamel had chipped. She pulled the top off the toilet tank and looked inside; it was a favorite hiding place for drug fiends, since no one wanted to open the thing. She ducked down to look behind the mirror. She checked the top of the light fixture. Nothing.
Abbie went into the bedroom and pulled the sheets back on each bed, bunching them at the foot, then studied the mattresses. The one farthest from the door was pitted with cigarette marks and small tears—impossible to tell when they were left there—but no blood. The one closest to the door had a huge liver-colored stain near the top, closest to the wall. Was it possible the motel owner had been too cheap to replace the mattress Decatur had been butchered on? She got a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She pulled the sheets and the thin duvet covers back up.
Abbie moved the nightstand away from the wall and saw that the motel owner had bleached the carpet but hadn’t even bothered to cut out the bloodstained section and replace it. Gerald Decatur’s blood had mixed in with the green weave of the carpet until it appeared to be a large rust stain.
The double drawers of the nightstand were empty except for a Gideon Bible and a local guide, provided by the Chamber of Commerce. “The Falls Is Back!” it read in big sea-green letters. There were quick stories with lots of exclamation points and pictures of the aquarium, yellow-raincoated tourists aboard the Maid of the Mist floating toward the Canadian Falls, and the “Virtual Reality World at Ride Niagara.” Abbie flipped through the pages, read a line or two, and felt that she was now officially wasting her time.
She thought back on the crime photos. What possessed her to come up here? Her obsession with cases was eating up her life again. Already she was down to four hours’ sleep a night. For what? There was nothing
to see here. Everything had been scoured, double-checked, sanitized. She sat on the bed and closed her eyes and she tried to block out the tinny music that drifted in from the souvenir shop around the corner. Suddenly, she got on her knees, ducked her head until it grazed the carpet, and shone her flashlight on the underside of the two beds.
Nothing.
If Gregory Decatur had been sitting propped up on the bed at the angle his neck had been in in the photos, where would he have been looking? She sat on the bed, put her back to the wall, tilted her head slightly upward, and found she was staring at the last row of plaster ceiling tile, directly above the TV. Abbie got up, grabbed the back of the desk chair, pulled it next to the TV stand. She climbed on top of the chair, reached up with her hands and pushed the ceiling tile up. She brought her flashlight up and flicked it around. Dust, wires, and a scrunched-up Lays potato chip bag flashed in the bright beam. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Damn it, Absalom, go home.
She climbed down and sat on the wooden chair. Gregory Decatur was a random casualty in the drug war, a nobody killed in an out-of-the-way motel room where they didn’t even burn the mattress after a customer was stabbed to death.
The killer wasn’t your boy.
She was about to leave when she looked down at the wooden seat she was sitting on. With a sigh, she got up and flipped the chair over.
A leaping thrill of excitement ran through her. Breathe in and out, she said to herself. Breathe, Abbie.
Her heartbeat settled back down. She took a deep breath and knelt by the overturned chair, her knee brushing the pea-green carpet.
Taped on the underside of the chair was a brown plastic monkey.
She called Niagara Falls PD first, because it was still their case, although she was going to change that. Another voice picked up his phone.
“Homicide.”
“I’m looking for Detective Mills.”
“He’s off shift.”
“This is Detective Kearney with Buffalo PD.”
“This is Magnuson. What can I do for you?”
“I was doing a check of the motel room where Gerald Decatur was found. I came across something Mills should know about.”
“I don’t know anything about the case. You’ll have to wait till Mills gets back.”
“Okay. When is that?”
“Monday.”
Abbie gaped.
“You mean to tell me that you want me to hold a critical piece of evidence on an active murder investigation because someone is barbecuing this weekend? Tell me I’m hearing things.”
“What I’m telling you is that this department is stretched so tight it’s not even funny. If it’s Mills’s case, it’s Mills’s case.”
“What’s his cell number?”
“Listen, Kearney. I don’t take lectures from Buffalo bitches. I’ll leave him a message. Now go fuck yourself.”
Abbie was shocked enough to be speechless for a second. There was a click and the call was cut off.
If they don’t want the clue, I’ll take it as a gift, she thought. She began to think over the appearance of the third monkey as she pulled her car onto the highway, heading south.
When she got back to the office, she found a manila envelope sitting on her desk. Z had left her the file with a Post-it stuck on it.
This was Decatur’s source, the note read. Beside the handwriting was a poorly drawn frowny face.
She read through the file. The source was one Marcus Jones, a product of West Ferry Street. That put him two blocks away from Richmond Avenue, where Gerald Decatur had grown up. Both rough streets, both crawling with gangs and skels and the dealers who supplied them. The two had practically come up together, which on the East Side of Buffalo meant a great deal. Jones had joined the BMF, or Black Mafia Family, gang in 1993 and had quickly become their main drug executive. The source of the supply seemed to be in Atlanta. The Major Crimes Unit had followed Jones down there twice in the mid-nineties, but both times he’d managed to slip away before he made the contact. A couple of days later, Jones was back in Buffalo and the price of cocaine had instantly gone down 15 percent.
When she got to the end of the file, she saw why Z had added the frowny face. Jones was incarcerated downstate on a drug distribution charge. He’d been convicted in 2009 and was doing ten years. Unless the prison had a very liberal prisoner-release program, Jones couldn’t have been the source of the call that brought Gerald Decatur to Niagara Falls and the dingy motel room.
So the murder wasn’t based on old drug ties. And now the plastic monkey had made an appearance.
The motel case, Abbie thought, was a case of beginner’s luck.
Decatur had arrived unarmed at the crime scene and the assailant got the jump on him. As simple as that. The motel’s surveillance camera had been broken that day, as Abbie had learned after going back to the office and questioning the clerk one more time. If it had been working, she’d be staring at a video image of the killer right now.
But Jimmy Ryan was different. The killer had abducted a fit man who could handle himself, got him into St. Teresa’s without anyone seeing, tied him up expertly and worked him over for hours. He’d left nothing behind he didn’t want cops to find. He’d done intricate things with the knife, mutilated Ryan in very specific ways.
He hadn’t been lucky with Ryan. He’d been proficient. And he’d carved the number “1” into his forehead.
Most killers who leave tokens at crime scenes have committed to their craft, Abbie thought. There will be more toy monkeys, she thought. And more victims.
CHAPTER TEN
ABBIE DROVE DOWN ELM STREET IN DOWNTOWN BUFFALO. SHE NEEDED TO fill out the story of Gerald Decatur, know what shape of puzzle piece he really was, before she could fit him into the overall picture. From the file, she knew Decatur had no living relatives in Buffalo. Either the streets, a family history of diabetes (mentioned in his jacket, from his hospital intake at the downstate prison), or a job in another city had taken them away. That left her only one choice.
She had to go see Reverend Zebediah.
Ever since coming back to Buffalo, Abbie had known she was going to have to make this visit sooner or later, even before the Jimmy Ryan case. The Reverend was too deep a part of her history here; out of respect, Abbie needed to see him. But she was afraid that it would all go wrong and that her warm memory of the Reverend would be replaced by a picture of a broken, cynical man. Buffalo tended to grind you down. Abbie was running out of good memories of the city, and she wanted to keep the Reverend safe.
She’d first met him during her junior year in high school. He’d been the resident minister at the City Mission, the homeless shelter downtown where her mother had ended her days, addicted to heroin and abandoned by Abbie’s father, who had given his daughter her dark hair but didn’t even leave her his name. Abbie had met the Reverend on one of her periodic quests to find her roots. He was the unofficial mayor of Buffalo’s poor and mostly black East Side, and was in and out of the City Mission on a weekly basis. If someone needed a job, the Reverend knew a construction project that was looking for some minority workers to make its federal quota. If you needed a place to stay, he had a crumbling four-story former hotel on Hertel Avenue that he’d refurbished, if you could call mopping the floors, putting in some beds, and horse-trading for sheets and towels a refurbishment. If you needed spiritual guidance, he had the perfect line of Scripture to show you the way. If you needed a lawyer, he knew several who worked cheap and wouldn’t take the DA’S first plea bargain to lighten their workload. His clientele was multiracial and usually desperate.
The Reverend didn’t drive around in a Cadillac, taking people’s contributions and living high. He drove an old Oldsmobile Cutlass, worked nights, selling beer in the stands at Memorial Auditorium during hockey games. At the Aud, he was Zeb the Beer Guy, and sold more cups of Molson ale than anyone else there, his bald head shining with sweat by the end of the first period. With that money, and contributi
ons, he kept a good part of the East Side afloat.
Abbie had started volunteering on weekends, part of the Reverend’s free-floating mission. As a white girl, a County girl, working on the East Side, she was a curiosity. But people welcomed her in, and what she’d found there had astonished her. The County was a swamp of repressed emotions that erupted only during epic drinking binges. But in this part of town, single mothers had hugged Abbie when she went door to door on Thanksgiving with cans of cranberry sauce and yams, invited her to sit down and eat. Middle-aged homeless men in the bombed-out buildings on Delaware and Main had thanked her for the sandwiches prepared by the Reverend’s minions in the hotel’s basement. The men’s fingers were often warped by arthritis or cold, and their eyes rheumy with alcohol, but they were grateful. They wept silently and called her “daughter.” In the County, they talked of the East Side as if it was some kind of lawless wasteland, where family had broken down and people preyed on each other in packs. But she’d found people who could name their fourth cousins and who knew who those cousins were dating, where they worked, what their babies’ names were.
On her after-school trips down the unfamiliar streets, she’d asked about her mother, over and over, never telling people she was Natasha Minton’s daughter, but casually mentioning the name and waiting for the responses she’d dreamt of for years: “Natasha? Sure, I knew her. Got family over on Delavan.” And then Abbie knocking on a strange door.…
It had never happened. Natasha Minton had died at thirty-eight, leaving her two-year-old daughter nothing but a hazy memory of a woman in a yellow dress, holding her hand as they walked down Main Street. At the time of her death, Natasha was a recent transplant from the Midwest, by all accounts a secretive and mistrustful woman who barely made a mark on Buffalo. There were times Abbie hated her for it—Couldn’t you have talked to someone, she cursed silently, had a single conversation about your past? Left me one pathetic little trail to follow? And who comes to Buffalo from the Midwest anyway? How desperate to escape your past do you have to be to come here?
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