by Blake Banner
“He was dead by the time he reached the bottom of the stairs. You grabbed the knife and I am willing to bet that you were out of your mind as you stabbed him. You were not stabbing Jacob, you were stabbing Ahmed.” I turned to the captain. “Sir, my own recommendation to the DA will be not to prosecute. That will be controversial, and frankly, I don’t care. I believe Jacob’s killing was an act of self-defense, and I believe that Ahmed’s killing tonight was partly self-defense, and partly momentary insanity brought on by unendurable provocation.”
He stared at me like he didn’t know whether to sack me on the spot or crucify me first. After a moment, he heaved a huge sigh. “Well, let’s see what the DA says. It is certainly far from clear-cut.”
I turned back to Sylvie and Mary. They had let go of each other and were frowning at me, like they didn’t really understand what I had just said. I gave a smile that had more of reluctance and sadness in it than humor.
“Be smart, Sylvie, and this will soon all be over. Face it this time, see it through, and you might just be able to leave it all behind you. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
EPILOGUE
Later that night, as we pulled away and headed north once again toward Morris Park, Dehan asked me, “One thing I don’t really get, is why, after all these years, Ahmed suddenly decided to go after Sylvie?”
“That, I am afraid, was my bad. When I let him know today that we were on to him, he decided, rather stupidly, to eliminate the only witness to Simon’s murder. He was such a stupid, arrogant ass that until then, he had enjoyed the power game of occasionally bumping into Sylvie in the street, taunting her, talking to their son, watching him grow, and knowing that he had an ever more powerful emotional grip on her. But once that grip was broken, and we were closing in on him, he diced she had to die.”
We drove in silence for a few moments, through the dark, empty streets. I turned right onto Morris Park without thinking.
“The lab results on the spit showed that Jacob was, indeed, Ahmed’s son. And the prints I collected from him on that blank envelope…”
She narrowed her eyes and nodded. “I wondered why you did that.”
“Yeah. They were the same as the prints on the plastic bag. Of course, Humberto knew Ahmed. He was their gardener. He was happy to accept that gift from him, considered him a guardian angel.”
She nodded. “That makes sense. What about the kitchen knife? How did he get that?”
I smiled. “That was more complicated. I am guessing that Jacob took it from the block in the kitchen to threaten Mary with it. Maybe he dropped it when his mother turned up. Maybe he dropped it when he fell down the stairs. We’ll never know. The thing is, she grabbed it in a rage frenzy and stabbed him. Then, I figure she wiped her prints off it and hid it. Maybe she buried it in the garden or hid it in the hedgerow and Humberto found it.
“After that, either with Paul’s collusion or not, again, we’ll never know, she swapped her block of knives with the block in the rectory. I checked earlier this evening. The big knife is missing, but the one we have in evidence is a perfect match.”
“Son of a gun.”
“Yup.”
We were silent again, cruising up Morris Park toward Haight Avenue.
“There is one other thing I don’t understand, Stone.”
“What’s that?”
“Why we are heading east on Morris Park. You live up here, but I live down on Simpson Street. Remember?”
I shook my head. “I figure I have done such a damn fine job, I deserve for you to take me out on a date. We are going to have a shower and a Martini…” I looked at her with no particular expression and watched her eyebrows crawl up her forehead. “Separate and discreet showers and Martinis, Dehan, behave yourself. And then you are going to take me to Artie’s Steak and Sea Food Restaurant, fifteen minutes’ drive from my house.”
“Oh, am I?”
“Indeed you are. After that, we will get a taxi to my place and you will teach me your mother’s recipe for margaritas.”
“Ha! That is a family secret.”
“Yeah, but I am family. We are going to get married and have twelve kids. I converted for you, remember?”
“Just twelve now? It was going to be fifteen.”
“Teach me your mother’s recipe for margaritas and we’ll make it fifteen.”
“Hmm, it’s a tempting offer, alright…”
BOOK 6
STRANGE AND SINISTER PATH
ONE
The captain wandered into the detectives’ room looking like a surprised ostrich lost in Times Square at rush hour. He rarely descended from the remote heights of his office upstairs. Now he inched through the room, looking right and left until he saw me watching him. He waved and moved my way. When he was within earshot I said to Dehan, who was reading through cold case files, “Don’t say anything rude about the captain.”
She frowned at the page in front of her like she wasn’t really listening. “Why?”
“Because he’s right behind you.”
She jumped and looked around. I smiled. “Guilty conscience, Dehan.”
The captain still wore his air of ratite uncertainty. “Good morning, you two. How’s tricks?”
I offered him no expression and said, “She hasn’t come in this morning, sir.”
His eyebrows twitched and he placed a file on the desk. After a moment, he sat and nodded, like he’d got the joke but didn’t think it was especially funny. “We have an unusual request from the sheriff of Lee County, in Colorado.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, but Dehan dropped the case she was reading and frowned. “Lee County? Colorado? Really? What’s the request?”
“The details are in the file,” he patted the file with his palm, “but in a nutshell, detectives, Kathleen Olvera, of Rosedale Avenue, just down the road here, aged twenty-three, was found in Lefthand Canyon…”
Dehan laughed. The Captain looked at her like she’d said something inappropriate. She suppressed the laugh. “Lefthand Canyon? Seriously?”
“There was nothing funny about the way she was found, Detective Dehan. She had been clubbed, strangled, raped and then decapitated. This was back in 2012. There was some uncertainty over jurisdiction…”
I leaned forward. “Why?”
“Because it wasn’t clear that she had been killed there.”
I scratched my head. “It’s not very likely that she was killed here and transported over one and a half thousand miles to Colorado.”
“Quite. I agree. And as the actual scene of the crime was never discovered, the local sheriff investigated. However, there was very little evidence and eventually the case went cold.”
“So what’s his request?”
“The Denver DA wanted a review of cold cases, and as they were not able to make any progress, and Kathleen was originally from here, he has asked me if I wanted to run it by our cold cases team.”
I raised my eyebrows and spread my hands. “Sure. We’ll take a look, see what we come up with. But if it turns out to be a Lee County, Colorado case, we’re going to end up batting it right back to the sheriff.”
He nodded, then made a peculiar smile with the corners of his eyes. “Have a look. See what you come up with.”
He left us and wandered around the detectives’ room for a bit, peering at things and smiling with an air of it all coming back to him, then retired upstairs. You got the feeling he’d had quite enough excitement for one morning.
I picked up the file and Dehan snatched it from my fingers. She leaned back in her chair and put her boots on the corner of the desk. Her legs were as long as an eight-day week. She read aloud while I sat back and enjoyed looking at her.
“Kathleen Olvera, twenty-three, married to Moses Olvera, then twenty-four, of Seven Hills, Colorado...”
“Ah!”
“Don’t interrupt. Mother of new-born Sin-eed—S-I-N-E-A-D—how do you pronounce that?”
“Shin-aid.”
&nbs
p; “What is it, Irish?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Kathleen, Sinead, these guys are Irish. OK. So according to testimony given by Moses and Kathleen’s mother, Melanie Vuolo, in July of 2012, Kathleen was suffering from postpartum depression and decided to take a few days and go visit Moses’ parents, in Seven Hills. That was Friday the 6th. The parents in-law, that’s Alfredo and Ingrid, claim she never showed up. A few days later, some trekkers found her body abandoned in the woods and called the sheriff. He administered a rape kit because her clothes were in disarray. Her blouse had been ripped and the zipper on her skirt was broken…”
“What?”
She glanced at me. “The zipper on her skirt had been broken.” She continued reading. “Only one of her shoes was found at the scene. The other was recovered later, on the Lee Hill Road, half a mile outside Boulder.”
“Hmmm…”
“Shut up. The rape kit established that she had had sex before being killed. Impossible to tell whether it was consensual or not because, after a week in the open, in warm weather, the body was badly deteriorated and partly eaten by animals. The semen was too deteriorated and contaminated to provide a hit. The head was found about six feet from the body…” She pulled out an eight by ten photograph, examined it and tossed it over to me. “It had been severed surgically, with a single, clean cut, no hacking or sawing. The weapon was not found. There was evidence of blunt force trauma to the back of the head, pre mortem.” She sighed. “A few initial suspects…”
I held up a hand. “Stop there. Let’s not follow the same mistaken tracks that they did. Let’s pursue our own thoughts. Anything strike you? Where do you want to start?”
We stared at each other for a few long seconds. It was a habit we had got into which irritated other people, but it helped us to think. Eventually she said, “Let’s talk to the mother. She lives on Commonwealth Avenue,” she checked the file, “and so do Isaac and Anne-Marie. That’s Moses’s brother and his wife. They seem to have been a close-knit family.” She shrugged. “Catholics. Kathleen’s postpartum depression seems to be what sent her off to Colorado, and eventually her death. One person she is most likely to have talked to about it is her mother. Let’s start there.”
“Hmm…”
“You’ve never been a mother, you wouldn’t know.”
“Or a daughter. Let’s go, Little Grasshopper. Let’s go talk to Melanie Vuolo. It’s not a bad place to start.”
October was feeling too lazy after the long, warm months to move over and let in the cold. The leaves on the trees were turning copper, but were in denial about their age, and the whole of New York was pretending it was still summer. So we decided to walk the half-mile to Commonwealth Avenue at an easy stroll. Along the way Dehan talked.
“So. She lives in the Bronx but she dies in the Rockies. Is that a random event, or is there a direct causal link? Her husband is from Colorado, she claims she is going to see his parents…” She shrugged and spread her hands while making a ‘what can I say?’ face. “Maybe they got on well. She has her own mother here, but maybe she gets on with the in-laws. It’s not common, but it happens. However that may be, the fact that she never turns up has got to raise the question, was visiting the in-laws just an excuse? Was she really going to meet somebody else?”
“That’s two questions.”
“Don’t interrupt me, Stone. I’m having a flow. We need more facts. We need to know, what was her relationship like with the in-laws? Did she meet her husband in Colorado, or here in New York? If it was out there, who else did she meet?”
“Whom.”
“What?”
“Whom else did she meet?”
“Uh-huh… Also, her depression.” She shook her head.
“What about it?”
She sucked air through her teeth. “You can’t generalize, I know, but the normal thing is, if a girl is depressed after childbirth, she turns to her mother. She doesn’t put one and a half thousand miles between herself and her mother. Know what I mean? I mean, if her and the in-laws live that far apart, how close can they be, right?”
“Fair point.”
“So, my gut, which you are always saying I should listen to, is saying this was not a random killing. She was in Colorado not for the in-laws, but for somebody else.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Cherchez l’homme.”
I smiled. “Unless she was a lesbian. In which case cherchez la femme.”
“Right. Here we are. It’s that one over there.”
It was basically a large, red brick box with a very small patch of garden out front, sitting behind a very large, old chestnut tree. Directly opposite there was a row of much bigger red brick boxes, in the form of a complex of apartment blocks that were probably about a hundred years old. They were surrounded by wrought iron fences that hadn’t stopped kids from spraying the old walls with ugly, uninspired graffiti. They thought of themselves as artists, but most of them seemed capable only of painting their signatures.
I had stopped to look around while Dehan climbed the steps and rang on the bell. It had once been a solid, working-class area. But decades of Don’t Give a Damn had reduced it to a dystopian wilderness where adults hid indoors from a world they no longer understood, while their kids bought into the myth that, in an ugly world, the smartest thing you can do is make it uglier.
The door was opened by a dark, frowning woman in her fifties. Dehan showed her her badge as I climbed the steps.
“Mrs. Vuolo? Melanie Vuolo?”
The woman shook her head. “No, she don’t live here no more. She ain’t lived here for maybe four years.”
Dehan smiled and put her badge away. “Really? Do you know where she’s gone?”
“Yeah, she was buying a place up in Morris Park. I got the address somewhere, to forward her mail.”
She stared at us a moment, while we smiled politely back. Finally I said, “Could you let us have it?”
“Yeah, is nine-twenty, Van Nest. She say is a nice big house, but she never invite me to go see it. She in trouble? I know her daughter died. And the baby was just a few weeks old. That was a big tragedy for her.”
I nodded. “Were you friends?”
“No.”
“Do you know if her son-in-law moved too? Or are they still here?” I glanced at the block behind us.
“No. They all gone together. Whole family.”
Dehan frowned. “The son-in-law moved with the mother?”
“All of them. They all gone together.”
We thanked her for her help and started back up the road toward the station, under the big chestnuts and the lazy blue sky. After a while Dehan said, “Catholics and Jews.”
There wasn’t much I could answer to that so I smiled benignly at the trees instead. She considered me a moment. When she saw I wasn’t going to ask what she meant, she told me anyway. “The whole family thing. With Jews and Catholics, the family acquires an identity all its own, above and beyond the people who constitute it. It’s like a corporation. In law, a corporation has its own, separate identity. Catholic and Jewish families are like that. Each family has its own, unique identity. When a tragedy happens, the family takes over. Something great happens, the family takes over. Birth, marriage, death… the family.”
She paused, stuck her hands in her back pockets and watched her feet moving beneath her. “Kathleen died. If she hadn’t died, she would eventually have become the matriarch, the family figurehead, and people would have said, ‘Oh, she’s just like her mother!’ Instead of that, she died, so her mother took over. And when she moved, I guess she took the whole family with her. Loyalty. Loyalty to the family. It’s a big deal for Catholics and Jews. It can be a thing of beauty, or it can be a nightmare.”
My car is a thing of beauty. It’s a burgundy 1964 Jaguar Mark II, original right-hand drive, 210 bhp. I observed it fondly now as we approached and asked Dehan, “You think that might be relevant?”
She walked around to the passenger side and waited for me to
unlock the door, staring up at the cloudless sky.
“It’s usually relevant to everything. So yeah, maybe.”
I thought maybe she was right. We climbed in and headed toward Morris Park.
TWO
Melanie Vuolo’s new house was a big, white, detached, clapboard affair a couple of blocks from Van Nest Park. She opened the door and didn’t so much look at us as calibrate us. She had mischievous eyes and a naughty smile to go with it. She had red hair, deep blue eyes and a cute spray of freckles across her nose. She was probably in her mid-fifties, but looked younger. She raised an eyebrow at Dehan and almost winked at me. Her eyelid fluttered, but she thought better of it and smiled instead. Like I said, it was a naughty smile.
“Yes?”
We showed her our badges.
“I am Detective Stone, this is Detective Dehan. May we come in, please, Mrs. Vuolo?”
The change in her expression said she guessed why we were there. She stood back, watching my face. “Is it about Kath? Have you caught the bastard?”
Her accent was Irish. Not New York Irish, but Irish Irish.
“No, not yet, but the Lee County sheriff has asked us to look into a few things at this end.”
She gave a quick nod. “Come in. Would you have a cup of tea?” Before I could answer she looked up into Dehan’s face. “How ’bout you, love? Will you have a nice cup of tea? I’ll put the kettle on, so. Go and sit down. I’ll be with you in no time. Isn’t the weather awful unseasonal?”
The living room was at the back, which made it dark. Through the French doors, the back garden was a luminous green, with the shadow of the house cast long across the grass, touching a large, old wooden shed at the end. The room was fussily furnished, with lots of lace and small porcelain statues of kittens looking nauseating. There were photographs, dozens of them, on every available surface. I scanned them and took note, but Dehan was working through them methodically, one after another. Melanie’s voice came to us from the kitchen.
