The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  That’s when the holes appeared, one after the other, in the front door—splinters flying everywhere. Puffs of sawdust and plaster dust filled the air. Giorgio let out a sickening cry and thudded to the little oriental rug in the hallway. Mama was shrieking with panic at the top of the stairs. I headed for Giorgio at full speed, which, at my age, was only slightly faster than standing still. I raised my .38 to fire through the door, but stopped myself. I realized that if I missed I might hit a passerby or someone in a house across the street. Worse, if I hit and killed the shooter, we might never find Siobhan alive. I got to Brahms pretty quickly, just in time to hear feet scuttling down the steps and the screeching of car tires. There wasn’t a lot of blood, but Brahms was holding his hands up over his face. I yelled up to Mama to call 911 while pulling Giorgio’s hands away. I nearly passed out when I saw the needle-like sliver of wood sticking three inches out of the corner of his right eye.

  “It’s not in your eye itself,” I told him. ”You’ll be fine. When the cops get here, leave me out of it or say I was someone else. Siobhan’s life might depend on it.”

  I stood, opened the front door, and ran for my car.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  I had a rough timeline and the half-exposed face of a girl in a photograph. I hoped that was enough. It had to be. My guess was that the photograph girl’s death was connected to the Hollow Girl’s suicide post. I knew there was someone out there with a lot of money to throw around, but was the dead girl his girlfriend, his friend, his sister, his daughter, or his niece? Maybe the photo was an old picture of his wife or mother as a girl. Whoever she was, she had an angry angel out there willing to kill to get his revenge. That told me a lot about him. He was used to getting his way. I guess most people with a lot of money are used to that. Nancy and Julian Cantor certainly were. Maybe that’s why he wanted revenge in the first place, because the universe had dared defy him; it had taken away something he treasured. And I couldn’t forget that it was important that he do this thing himself and not hire proxies to do it for him. It wasn’t enough to kill the Hollow Girl. It wasn’t enough for him to do it. He had to be seen to do it.

  What was the old saying? It isn’t enough for justice to be done. It has to be seen to be done.

  I counted backwards from Millie McCumber’s reappearance at Giorgio Brahms’s door in March.

  He said she’d looked fit, tanned, and healthy. And given how Giorgio had described her when she’d left him the year before, I figured it would have taken at least three or four months to clean her up and get her healthy. That took me back to November or December of 2012. Regardless of how many resources and how much money he had at his disposal, it would take time to find a junkie on the run, even a semi-famous one. I counted back three months more. That put me in July or August. And I figured that in spite of all this guy’s planning and apparent lust for revenge, it took him some time to make the decision to turn his dream into murder. It’s one thing to plan to take a life. It’s something very different to take one. So I counted back another month. That left me at May or June of 2012.

  What I had was a girl—at least, she was a girl when the photo was taken—or a woman dying in the spring of 2012, somehow connected to the Hollow Girl’s late-’90s posts. She was probably, but not definitely, from a wealthy family. Suddenly, it felt like all my figuring didn’t add up to much. Before I started my computer search, I checked out the background material Devo had sent that had sat unread in my inbox. There was nothing there I hadn’t expected. Both Millie McCumber and Anthony Rizzo had too much money in their bank accounts; Michael Dillman and Giorgio Brahms, not enough. That was all moot except for old Giorgio. At least he was still alive, though a bit worse for wear.

  * * *

  The phone was ringing in my head, and then in my condo. I’d been in that disoriented, groggy middle world between sleeping and wakefulness when I startled. What day is it? What time is it? Where am I supposed to be? What am I supposed to be doing? For the first few seconds, the only thing I was certain of was the ringing phone. Shaking the sleep out of my head, I looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly 4:00 A.M. I grabbed the phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened? Why didn’t you call?” There was an air of sleepy desperation in Nancy’s voice.

  “I’m sorry. I fell asleep at my computer.”

  “I guess I fell asleep, too, and when I woke up and saw the time it was—”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated. “But I’m close, I think. Someone tried to kill Giorgio Brahms tonight. Last night.”

  “What?”

  “Nancy, let me make myself some coffee and call you back. I need to wake up for real, okay?”

  “Don’t fall asleep on me again, please.”

  “Give me an hour.”

  “Half an hour.”

  “Sold.”

  I scooped some coffee into the bottom of the French press, put up some water on the stove, and ran into the bathroom. When I came back, I stood at the stove remembering back to the night of Bobby Friedman’s funeral and to Sarah listening to the tale of how I went from college student to cop. I had hardly ever looked back at that decision and, on those rare occasions I had, it was never with regret. Now, as I waited for the water to boil, I couldn’t help but wonder how different my life would have been had I managed to reinterest myself in school. Then I thought of Katy and Sarah, of Mr. Roth and Marina Conseco, and stopped looking back or second-guessing.

  The water seemed to be taking forever, so I sat back down at the computer and tapped a key. And there she was, from a search I’d started when I was nodding off: Emma Wentworth Johns, hiding beneath my screensaver. She had been a very pretty girl with short, dark brown hair, sad gray eyes, and a mournful smile. There was something about her calm pose that hinted at a darkness beneath it. Or was it that the words beneath her photo informed my judgment of her appearance?

  Hartford Register

  April 25, 2012

  Insurance Heiress Succumbs

  By Anita Thompson

  After spending nearly thirteen years in a vegetative state, Emma Wentworth Johns died last evening at the age of thirty. A spokesperson at the Connecticut Institute for Long-Term Care gave the cause of death as pulmonary failure due to pneumonia. Miss Johns, who was to have inherited one half of the vast Johns family insurance fortune, had been the subject of much controversy during her long illness. Miss Johns was declared brain dead shortly after her arrival at the Glaxton-Sultana Medical Center outside of Hartford on the evening of February 14, 1999. In the intervening years, several attempts had been made by friends and family members to remove Miss Johns from the ventilator and feeding tube that kept her alive. All such attempts had been successfully rebuffed by her twin brother, Burton Wentworth Johns.

  Controversy was a part of this sad Valentine’s Day saga from the very beginning. It has been rumored that Miss Johns, who had battled clinical depression, had attempted suicide on several occasions. Although the family has consistently denied it, reports have since surfaced that Miss Johns’s coma was the result of another failed suicide attempt. Reliable sources claim that there were ligature marks and severe bruising around her neck when she was brought into the hospital by her brother Burton on the evening in question.

  Within months of the incident, the Johns family brought suit against the hospital and local emergency rescue squads for failure to respond to the family’s repeated calls for an ambulance to be dispatched to their residence in Farmington Falls. Court filings reveal that there were seven 911 calls placed from the Johns’s home telephone number between 10:32 P.M. and 10:59 P.M. on the evening of February 14, 1999, following the discovery of Miss Johns unconscious in the basement of the family home. Those suits never progressed very far, the courts ruling that the defendants could not be held liable for the extraordinary number of emergency calls on that particular evening.

  When reached for comment on his sister’s passing, Burton Johns stated, “I will miss my bea
utiful sister every day for the rest of my life.” And “I will never forget who is truly responsible for Emma’s death.” When asked to clarify his last remark, Mr. Johns refused to do so. A private family service will be held for Miss Johns at the family estate. No further details were released.

  It was a minute before I realized the kettle was whistling.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Nancy’s house was crawling with law enforcement types and none of them any too pleased with me. Frankly, I didn’t give a fuck. I’d handed them their suspect on a plate and now it was up to them, but all I got was shit for not reporting this or that. It was that territorial thing again. It might not have been so bad had only the NYPD, Nassau PD, Suffolk PD, and the Connecticut State Police been involved. The presence of the FBI put all the other cops in foul moods. No one likes the FBI except the FBI. No one. I would have advised Julian Cantor not to ask them in, but Julian Cantor didn’t ask my advice, and he was the type of man who had to flex his muscles in public.

  For the first few hours I felt like the popular girl at a speed-dating session. Every agency on hand wanted to talk to me. And they all got their turns, except there was nothing speedy about it. The Nassau cops wanted to know why I hadn’t reported yesterday’s shooting. The NYPD wanted to know why I hadn’t reported the shooting at Brahms’s brownstone. The Suffolk PD wanted to know why I had given a false statement to their detectives after the discovery of Michael Dillman’s body. The FBI didn’t know what they wanted from me, so they made me give them the whole story from start to finish, and they made me do it four times. They all delighted in threatening me with arrest before telling me to get lost. It almost made me misty-eyed for Frovarp and Shulze.

  I’d kept Brian Doyle and Devo out of it. I’d called them the minute after Nancy had called the cops and warned them to burn the bridges. That had always been our code for cleaning up after our messes and for scrubbing away the trails. I doubted the FBI would be looking at my computer until after they found Siobhan, if at all. Mike Bursaw and Vincent Brock seemed to be the only people on my side, which was like having Abbott and Costello as your backup. The only person whose backing mattered was Nancy, not because we were involved, but because it was her daughter’s life at stake. That counted for something. It counted for even more when Nancy demanded that I stay and be kept in the loop. That made all the guys and gals with badges as happy as I’d been on the day I was diagnosed with stomach cancer. They deigned to show me a recent photo of Burton Wentworth Johns and asked if I recognized him from yesterday.

  “No,” I said, “he was a blur with a gun.”

  I’d kept the photo. He looked a bit like his sister—same color hair, same eyes, same sort of regal bearing—but not all that much for a twin. His face was rather more plain looking than Emma. Though he was only thirty-one years old, he had the ancient, mournful face of a Sioux Indian chief. I knew grief when I saw it, and I was seeing it. It was carved into him. I saw guilt there, too, but didn’t understand it. What had he done to be guilty about? Emma had hung herself, presumably after watching the Hollow Girl overdose. Then there was a commotion, and I stopped wondering.

  “Prager, get over here,” FBI Special Agent Griggs, barked at me. “The rest of you, too, if you please.” The “please” was an afterthought. Was it any wonder why people hated the FBI?

  Nancy asked me if I knew what was going on. I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe they want to use me as a human sacrifice. Who knows?”

  He waited until we’d all gathered at the dining room table. “Okay, I just got word from the Bureau.” He said Bureau with the same sort of reverence my old rabbi used when talking about God and Israel. “We’re officially chasing our tails. Burton Wentworth Johns has been out of the country for the last three months.” He held up some official-looking pieces of paper. “He put his family home up for sale and left for Qatar from JFK on Tuesday, August 13. Roughly fourteen hours later, his passport was stamped by customs. While there, he played golf with our ambassador and visited with the royal family. He has been traveling throughout the region since. Let’s give ourselves fifteen minutes and reconvene for a discussion about a new approach.”

  “Fuck!” the Nassau detective who was working the Rizzo homicide shouted out.

  “Couldn’t’a said it better myself,” Suffolk PD agreed. “Fuck.”

  The Connecticut State Police seemed more relieved than anything. Even in the twenty-first century, no one likes screwing with rich, powerful families. Rich people make campaign contributions, host fundraisers, and have access. Cops’ lives are never worse than when politicians get all over their asses.

  I waited for the tumult to die down a little before talking to the FBI special agent.

  “What do you want?” Griggs asked, a superior smirk on his face. “You realize if you had come to law enforcement earlier—”

  “Stick the lecture, Griggs. What I wanna know is if you’re sure. This guy is apparently as wealthy as the Catholic Church. The rules don’t apply for money.”

  “We have a record of him leaving. No record of his return. He’s gone, and you’ve wasted everybody’s time.”

  “Have you checked with Mexico and Canada?”

  “Go back to the wine shop, gramps. You’re in way over your head. This is serious business, not handing out littering tickets on the boardwalk.”

  “Did you major in Asshole at the academy?”

  “That was almost funny, Prager. Now do me a favor and let the professionals do their work. You’ve done quite enough damage.”

  I did as he asked. Although I was totally unconvinced by his answers, I didn’t have much choice. Once the law was called in, even if I’d been right, I would have been shoved aside and been told to sit at the end of the bench. I didn’t want to think that’s why I had been so reluctant to get the law involved, but now that the bitter taste of resentment was thick on my tongue, I guess I had to admit it was a possibility. I found Nancy and pulled her aside.

  “Listen, I’m sorry about—”

  “Don’t be silly, Moe. It was my decision. I could have called anytime. I thought you were right. I believed what you told me,” she said, a false smile plastered on her face. Things had changed between us, probably forever. I was okay with that. I wasn’t sure that we would have survived this ordeal regardless of the outcome.

  “You’re not a very good liar, Nancy, but I appreciate you trying. If the law lets me, I’m going to get out of here. I’m only in the way now, and I’m only a reminder to you of what you think is a bad decision. Believe me, I understand about bad decisions.”

  If I’d thought or hoped she would stop me, I’d’ve been wrong. At least she was polite about it. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” I stepped to leave. Stopped. Grabbed Nancy by the arm. “Just remember that there is someone out there, someone who shot at me and Giorgio Brahms, someone who killed the doorman. No matter what these guys tell you, someone has Sloane. Don’t let these guys bully you, and don’t let your ex bully you.” I kissed her on the cheek. “You helped save me, Nancy. I won’t forget that.”

  I left the house. When I turned to look behind me, no one was chasing after me with cuffs.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  As I drove home from Nancy’s for what I was sure would be the last time, I was mesmerized by the forsythia atop the concrete center divider on the LIE. How, I wondered, could something so vividly yellow and beautiful in spring, so green and mundane in summer, turn into a chaos of ugly twigs in fall? What was forsythia, really—the yellow for a few weeks, the green for a few months, or the twigs? The twigs, I thought. It’s what we all were beneath the façade of skin and civility: the ugly twigs.

  At least I wasn’t tempted to drink again. The thirst was gone. What I’d said to Nancy before I left was true. She had saved me. She had saved me even if she hadn’t meant to. I wasn’t sure what she had meant to do. I didn’t know that I would ever understand her motives, or if they mattered. I wasn’t sure she had actually
believed her daughter was missing when she met me at the diner. Julian Cantor’s words rang loud in my head: “Nancy fuck you yet?” He hadn’t asked if I’d fucked her. To Cantor, I was an item thrown in the shopping cart and crossed off Nancy’s grocery list. Maybe he was right. Maybe all I’d been to her was an itch for a bored, wealthy woman to scratch. She’d scratched it now, and I’d disappointed her by not being the white knight she had thought me to be.

  I called Devo and Doyle and filled them in. I told them I didn’t think they had anything to worry about, but that they should be diligent in cleaning up just the same. They knew that their job was to move on. Much easier said than done for me. I told Doyle to send their bill to me.

  “Nah,” he said. “Fuck it. I’ll just pad your brother’s bills until we make it up.”

  I didn’t know whether he was kidding or not. I didn’t argue with him. The bill would come due and get paid. Bills always did. The problem with bills coming due is that the wrong party often paid the price. I guess that’s why I had never been able to buy into God. I didn’t believe much in karma anymore either. Whatever goes around comes around. Nope. The longer I lived, the colder and more random the universe seemed to get.

  I did receive one phone call from an FBI profiler named Lawrence Kerr. He was interested in discussing how I’d come to the conclusion that Burton Wentworth Johns had abducted Siobhan Bracken. He sounded like a nice enough guy. He even confided to me that I’d done well for an amateur. I told him to go fuck himself just the same. I had enough of the FBI and the cops to last me for several years to come.

  * * *

  That night, I watched the latest post on my computer. Things had changed and not for the good. Though the Hollow Girl was still bound tightly by the straw-colored ropes, she was no longer tethered to the lally column. She was now laid horizontally on a makeshift table of plywood and concrete blocks, a noose of the same sort of rope around her neck. The short rope was knotted to a wooden joist above her head. The rope near her crotch was dark with wetness. Her eyes were shut and her breaths were shallow. The ball gag had been removed and a plastic oxygen mask had been placed over her nose and mouth. The framed photo of the girl was almost gone from the shot. Only the very top few inches of it was visible, and it appeared that all the black tape had been removed. There was something else, too: a soundtrack. For the entire fifteen minutes, the loud ticking of an analog clock could be heard in the background.