“Can you come back in ten …”
Abbie pushed the door open with her foot, slamming it into the man’s chin. He went stumbling backward, and she stepped into the dimly lit foyer with the ascending stairs ahead of her and a small desk with sympathy flowers sitting on it.
The young man was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, barefoot, rubbing his chin, and looking at her from beneath an overhang of greasy mouse-colored hair. With hatred.
“Who are you?”
“Bobby Collins.”
“Bobby, I’m here to search the house. Don’t get in my way. Are you alone?”
“Yeah. Can I …”
“Yes?”
“Can I get a break if I tell you where the stuff is?”
Abbie stared at him for three seconds before she understood.
“It’s your lucky day. The warrant’s not for drugs. I need to look at your father’s papers.”
A shock of relief spread across the face, followed by the tightening of his mouth.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Bobby said truculently. “You can’t just barge in …”
“Just stay out of my way, Bobby.”
Abbie turned left into an old-fashioned parlor. She got immediately a sense of thick wood furniture gleaming in the shadows. When the Irish made it in the world, they bought furniture by the gross ton. At least it wasn’t covered in plastic.
“Where’s your father’s office?”
“What office?”
She turned and walked up to Bobby.
“This visit is about to turn from a murder investigation into a drug sting. Let me ask you a question, Bobby: Where’s your bedroom?”
Bobby stared at her from underneath his greasy bangs, his close-set eyes filled with impotent anger.
“The office is that way,” Bobby said, pointing through the parlor toward the back of the house.
It was surprisingly modern. A bare black Ikea-style desk with no drawers, a steel-gray Dell notebook placed on top, metal shelving to the left with folders backed either in blue, red, or yellow, each color occupying two shelves. To the right a small plasma TV hung on the wall, and underneath it was a small couch covered in nubby blue fabric. Marty Collins had been an orderly man. From what she’d learned, the rest of his life was a mess, so perhaps the neatness here was a dam against the rising tide of chaos.
Orderly men like lists, she thought.
She began with the desk. Beside the chair was a rolling set of three drawers. In the top one she found office supplies, envelopes embossed with “Collins & Sons” in raised green lettering, and a datebook for 2011. She flipped through it. His last appointment had been three days before, a meeting with a Mrs. Kleinhan. “Estate” was penciled in next to it. The other two drawers were filled with case folders, mostly civil, a few drunk-driving charges and an assault, but no names she recognized. The full range of County life: house purchases, wills, divorce petitions, property liens. Marty Collins had been the protector of every significant family in the County that had the money to guard its interests with a two-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer. Abbie guessed that his current workload was represented by the drawer files, while older cases went up on the metal shelves.
She went to the doorway and called Bobby’s name.
“Yeah?”
“I need to talk to you.”
He came padding down the stairway. He looked sick. Abbie had heard the toilet upstairs flush three times in the last twenty minutes. Bobby had no doubt been disposing of his secret stashes.
“Did your father have a place where he kept special things? His will, family pictures, jewelry, anything like that?”
Bobby leaned on the stair banister. “How would I know?”
“How would you know? Do you work, Bobby?”
“Here and there.”
“I’ll take that as a no. If I had a son who was a shiftless drug addict, with no job and no prospects, I’d sure as hell find a place to keep things away from him.”
Bobby’s face was as blank as the wall behind him.
“A safe maybe?”
His eyes betrayed him. They glanced to the left.
“Where is it?”
He sighed. “In the living room, behind the ugly picture.”
The ugly picture was a family portrait. Abbie glanced at it. Happier times—both sons alive. Bobby even looked presentable in a corduroy blazer and a striped tie jammed all the way up to his neck.
“The combination.”
“How would—”
She turned to look at him.
“It’s 5-29-17,” he said. “JFK’s birthday. He used to use my birthday, but he was a spiteful fuck. I’m not the bad guy here, you know.” Bobby turned and headed back to the stairs.
The safe popped open. Abbie reached inside and pulled out a will, two gold watches, a Navy medal of some sort, and an old Bible. She glanced at the other items, turned them over, and pulled the medal out of its presentation books. No marks, no lists of any kind.
She pulled the Bible open.
It was a King James and it smelled of candle wax. Probably an heirloom from the old country, pressed into the hands of a departing ancestor by a parish priest. She flipped hurriedly through the pages. There were no notations in the front. There was a half-completed family genealogy that seemed to end with Marty’s father. The pages were clean, a few with their corners turned back. She straightened one of the corners and checked the passages. The story of Job, one in Revelations. But no pen marks. She turned it to the light. No indentations along the lines or under individual letters.
She paged through the back, looking for pen marks or pages with the corners bent back. Nothing. As she flipped to the last pages, she found three lined pages with the heading “Favorite Passages.” On the first page, in black ink, someone had made a list of citations. At the head of the list were the letters “PPFO.”
The length of the numbers varied. The first read, “12-4, 8-6, 32-2, 14-9.” Space. Then “2-4, 8-8, 27-1, 19-12, 12-18.” A second column listed a similar set of numbers. There were fourteen sets in all.
Abbie looked at the first set of numbers and flipped back to page 12. It was part of the preface to the translation, and her index finger slid down to the fourth line. Her lips moved as she mumbled: “Matters of such weight and consequence are to be speeded with maturity: for in a business of movement a man feareth not.”
“In a business of movement,” she said to herself.
If this was a simple page-and-line code, it would require three numbers: page, line, and the position of the letter in the line. There were only two numbers in each series. There was something missing.
Abbie checked the next reference. The line read: “Everlasting remembrance. The judgment of Aristotle is worthy and well known: ‘If Timotheus had not been, we had not had …’ ”
She snapped the book closed and rushed out of the office, pulling out her cell phone as she headed toward the front door. Once outside, she punched in a number and hurried toward the Saab.
“Dr. Reinholdt. So nice to hear your voice, too. I have something for you. Can I drop it off in ten minutes?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
AFTER LEAVING THE BIBLE WITH DR. REINHOLDT, SHE RACED OVER TO Mercy Hospital. Her father had been moved to a private room that had opened up on the third floor. There was a cop sitting by his door, working on a crossword puzzle.
“Are you alone?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“Put the book down, okay?”
He nodded and slid the book of puzzles under his seat.
Her father’s face looked thinner. She stayed by his bedside, holding his hand. The flesh felt papery. A few times she saw his pupils jerk behind his eyelids. What are you dreaming of, Dad? she thought. Who’s chasing you now?
Her phone rang.
“It’s Billy. Listen, I need to talk to you.”
She hadn’t spoken to him since the night at his house. She felt a rush of longing for him.
“Don
’t turn on the charm, Billy, it’s really not necessary.”
He sighed. “Sorry, Ab. Come over when you can. Listen …”
“Yes?”
“The other night. Did you try and get in my windows before coming through the front door?”
“Your windows? Why would I do that?”
“So that’s a no?”
“That’s a no.”
Silence from the other end.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Just get here when you can, okay?” He hung up.
She wanted to go to Billy, but the thought that she might never see her father again kept her at the bedside. Finally, twenty minutes later, she kissed her father’s sunken cheek, checked that the cop was watching the hallway, then dashed for the elevator.
As she strode through the parking lot, her cell rang again. She recognized the number: Reinholdt.
“Detective?” His voice sounded fluty with excitement.
“You’ve cracked it.”
“Half a day in the Buffalo Public Library. I was afraid that the code didn’t refer to the Bible, and I was right.”
“What is it?”
“Why was there no other book in the safe, Detective?”
Abbie rolled her eyes.
“I don’t have time for parlor tricks, Doctor.”
“It’s a simple question.”
Abbie stopped and rubbed her forehead. She thought hard.
“I have no idea.”
“Because Marty Collins carried the text in his head. He surprised me. Come by and I’ll explain.”
She jumped in the car. Billy or Reinholdt? She was approaching Cazenovia Park Road. Right meant Reinholdt, straight ahead meant Billy.
Billy had a gun. And she had to have the list. She made a quick right, punched the gas, and felt the Swedish turbo kick in.
She found Dr. Reinholdt at the farthest table in the Historical Society library, sitting in the middle seat. In front of him was a single sheet of paper. He was sitting up as straight as his round body would allow. He looked like a governor waiting to sign an execution order.
Abbie pushed the doors open and the smell of books washed over her.
“Doctor, I don’t have a lot—” she said, hurrying toward him.
“I have everything ready for you.” His voice was calm again.
She walked quickly to the table and came around to where he was sitting. Reinholdt nodded as she moved behind him, tilting her head to read the document, but it was turned over to its blank side.
“A brief synopsis,” he said.
“Doctor, with all due respect—”
Reinholdt continued as if she hadn’t spoken.
“At first, I thought like you that there was a number missing. And there is—but it isn’t the last number, it’s the first. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“The page number is missing. The document the code derives from is so short that it doesn’t require page numbers. The two numbers are actually the line and the letter position within the line.”
Abbie straightened up, intrigued despite herself.
“A poem?”
“Excellent. My first instinct as well. And if it was a poem, who would have written it?”
“Yeats?”
“Bravo. The cliché Irish poet, I’ve always found him rather unbearable with his mooniness and pathetic love affairs. I tried all the classics, ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ ‘Easter, 1916,’ the obvious choice. It’s about the uprising that began the Irish revolution.”
“I know what it’s about. Doctor, please, what did you find?”
“I found out it wasn’t Yeats.”
“Then who was it?”
“PPFO. How obvious could it be?”
“Not very, apparently.”
“P … P … F … O. What is the founding document of the Irish revolutionary movement?”
She felt the urge to cold-cock him with her Glock and abscond with the document.
“I have no idea.”
“The speech given by Pádraig Pearse over the grave of O’Donovan Rossa in 1915. The original call to arms. Everything in recent Irish history flows from it. Popularly known as Pádraig Pearse’s Funeral Oration. PPFO.”
Abbie nodded, hurrying him along.
“Pádraig Pearse, a schoolteacher and nationalist, called forth the valiant men of Ireland to rid the nation of the oppressors. His speech became the … the Declaration of Independence for the rebels.”
Reinholdt looked over his shoulder, his eyes gleaming back at her.
“Any member of the Clan na Gael worth his salt would know it by heart. Don’t you see? It was a sort of security device—no need to keep the document around for prying eyes to stumble on. And it’s just one page.”
He turned, picked up the yellowing sheet and turned it over. She saw the heading, “Pádraig Pearse’s Oration at the Grave of Donovan O’Rossa (1915).”
“There are many different printings, of course, and each one changes the line breaks. I nearly lost my mind searching for one that would give us Christian names. I found a copy of the original downtown, and of course, that was the one Collins had in his head. I—”
“Doctor, I’m sorry to do this.”
Abbie reached around for the yellow sheet, snapped it off the table, and began to run for the door.
Her last glimpse of the doctor was of his forlorn shape slumped at the table.
Abbie raced to the parking lot and fumbled for the keys. When she was inside, she jammed the gear into drive and fishtailed toward the exit. On to Delaware. Through downtown, edging through red lights and then slamming the accelerator. Right on Tupper Street and onto the Skyway.
Abbie came off the Tifft ramp and barely made the turn without slamming the passenger door into the concrete abutment. She raced down Tifft toward the County, pushing the car faster and nearly taking a teenager crossing McKinley out at the knees.
“The fuck—” he yelled at her, but she was gone before the rest of the words could reach her. She turned left on Abbott, her back wheels sending up sprays of water, then whipped the wheel left on Dorrance Lane.
She saw the lights from two blocks away, the neon blue and red flashing off the second stories of the wooden homes. There’d been no chatter on the police radio.
Must be a fire, she thought.
But there was no ribbon of smoke in the air.
When she got closer, she saw two police units. They were in front of Billy’s house. A cold hand gripped the bottom of her stomach.
No, it can’t be.
Abbie raced up to the house and angled the Saab into the curb, slamming on the brakes. She was out the car before the headlights dimmed, and ducked under the yellow police tape.
Just let him be alive. Please, that’s all I ask.
A cop saw her coming and stepped out of the doorway. She was inside the living room, and there was Billy on the floor. But the face wasn’t Billy’s anymore. It was a bad Halloween mask.
O’Halloran was kneeling beside the body, checking his pockets.
She heard someone scream as if their body were being torn apart. O’Halloran turned, his face mottled with shock.
“Kearney, what the f—”
The floor loomed up at her, the rug Billy had bled on after she threw him over the couch. But now there was a lot more blood on it than she’d remembered, soaked deep and crimson.
She remembered nothing after that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
WHEN ABBIE CAME TO, SHE FELT LIGHT, AS IF SHE WOULD FLOAT AWAY. SHE was sitting in her cubicle at headquarters. Z was holding a cold cloth to her forehead and talking to someone on his phone.
“You know there’s no way that can happen …” he said quietly.
The lights were sending stinging rays into her eyes. She felt her eyelids flutter. Involuntary response.
Suddenly, bile rose in her throat, along with the memory.
“Billy.” She reached for Z’s arm.
&n
bsp; With an infinite weariness, Z slipped the phone into his shirt pocket and grabbed her shoulders. His eyes came parallel with hers. Sad walrus eyes, red-veined. And something fearful in them.
“Don’t think about that now.”
“Is he dead? Just tell me.”
Z pulled his chair around the foot of the cubicle wall and sat heavily across from her. He took her hands in his.
“He’s dead, Ab. Looks like he was number four.”
A wave of nausea rippled through her stomach. No, not Billy. It should have been me. She was the reason Billy was dead. Whatever he was going to tell her had cost him his life.
“I should have gone to him first, Z. Why didn’t I go to him first?”
“Ab, there’s nothing you could have done.”
“I could have saved him.”
Z dropped his head.
“What did you say?” Abbie said.
He looked up. “Huh?”
“You said he was the fourth.”
Z nodded.
“The fourth? There’s no way. Billy …”
His face came to her with the name. The smiling, gentle face of Billy Carney.
“Billy wasn’t part of the Clan,” she gasped out.
Z shook his head. “They found a toy. In his mouth.”
“That can’t be right. Billy’s an innocent bystander. He was going to tell me something and the County killed him.”
“Are you up to taking a walk?”
“I think … I think so.”
“Okay, hon. Come on then.”
“Where are we going?”
“Conference room. Perelli wants to talk.”
He lumbered heavily beside her. Her feet seemed as if they were moving a thousand feet below her, boats creeping along as she watched from a high-flying plane.
She saw Perelli and O’Halloran waiting in the conference room. I don’t want to hear the details, she thought. What does it even matter?
Perelli saw her and his expression changed. He nodded to O’Halloran. When she entered, Perelli took her elbow and guided her to one of the black vinyl-backed chairs.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Not good.” Z answered for her.
She lowered herself shakily into the chair. O’Halloran moved to the other side of the table.
“This won’t take long. Things are moving fast. I want to talk to you about Billy Carney.”
Black Irish Page 23
