Werewolf Cop (3 page)

Zach noticed the little boy's eyes shift to the left—which might possibly mean he was trying to access an auditory memory. Zach also noticed that the kid went on fiddling with the Teddy bear's ear—it was touching; pathetic.

Then, haltingly, the boy said, “Stu . . . stu . . . stupe bassard . . . stum . . . they said a word I don't know. Stoomp bassard. Bassard.”

“Bastard?” suggested April Gomez. “Stupid bastard?

“No!” whispered Zach urgently to the empty room. “Don't tell him what he's saying, April.”

The boy thought about it and then gave a strong and certain nod. “Bastard. Yes. Stupid bastard.”

Well, sure,
thought Zach.
Now that you put it in his head.

April Gomez sat back in her chair, glancing up at the video camera with an air of satisfaction. “Stupid bastard,” she repeated.

With a flicker of annoyance at the corner of his mouth, Zach reached for his phone again to check that text. But he was interrupted—again—as the door came open fast and Goulart charged in after it.

“Look at this.”

He slapped two pages onto the desk and Zach moved closer, leaned in over them for a better look. Two printed photos, two blurry images. Goulart pointed at one, then the other.

“That's the one the uncle took on New Year's eve, right?—the one the feds think is the guy Interpol lost track of in Brussels five years ago. And that—is from last night, from a security cam Paz himself had placed in his building. The killers took out the cam above the door, but this one was hidden in the super's basement flat and trained up at the door through the window.”

“Because Paz knew they were coming,” said Zach, “and wanted to make sure we got a picture of him.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it was just to foil the neighborhood vandals.”

Zach turned the second photo this way and that under his fingertips as he studied it. Neither this image nor the other was very clear. The New Year's eve shot—which he'd examined many times before—showed a man standing absolutely still at the edge of a dense and roiling Times Square mob. The man was fifty, or maybe fifty-five or a fit sixty. Tall, square-shouldered, wearing a long dark overcoat, his hands in the pockets. He had a shaven head, a bulbous nose, and thin lips. And his expression. . . . Possibly Zach projected this onto him—probably—the shot was so grainy, how could anyone tell for sure?—but the man's expression seemed predatory, the smile sadistic, the glint in the eyes likewise cruel. It was as if the man were eyeballing the humanity massed around him and trying to decide how he would best like to have it cooked for his supper.

The other photo—the one under his fingertips—the one from just before the Paz slaughter—showed four men hustling through the autumn darkness toward the front door of Paz's grimy white-bricked building. Three of the men were hunched over, their chins sunk into their overcoats, their hands gripping black dry-cleaning bags in which, Zach assumed, they were hiding their sheathed longswords.

The fourth man—the man surrounded by the others—was, as near as Zach could tell, the same man as the one in the New Year's eve photo: tall, broad, shaven-headed, European, cruel.

“If that—” said Goulart pointing to the Paz shot, “is the same man as
that
,” pointing now to the New Year's eve photo, “and
that
is the same as the guy Interpol lost track of in Brussels. . . .”

“And if the guy in Brussels was in fact Dominic Abend. . . .” Zach added.

“Right. If he was.”

“Well, then,” said Zach with a wry smile, “we are on his trail for damn sure!”

Broadway Joe Goulart grinned, nodding with that silent laughter of his.

Whereupon Zach's phone buzzed again—which is what it did if he didn't read a text soon enough after the first buzz. He glanced at the monitor on the desk. The lady from Children's Services was standing up out of her chair now, apparently bringing Mickey's interview with April Gomez to a close. Zach reached into his pocket, drew out the phone, and called up the message.

“What's the matter?” said Goulart casually. It wasn't that Zach had gone pale or anything like that. He'd barely changed expressions at all. It was just that Goulart was that good. He could read faces like he was reading a street sign.

Zach shook his head as he slid his phone back into his pocket. “Nothing,” he said with a quick frown. “Just—the usual flapdoodle.”

He didn't for a minute think Goulart believed him, but that was beside the point. Whether Goulart believed him or not, there was no possibility Zach was going to tell his partner what had been in that text, or who had sent it, or that he had been dreading just such a message for weeks and weeks, and that now that it had come, the low boil of suspense that had been robbing him of sleep in the small hours of more nights than he cared to think about was bubbling over into a sour and sickening certainty that the worst mistake of his life had come back to haunt him.

3

GRACE

D
riving home through darkfall on the out-borough streets, Zach listened to the news on the radio—or, that is, he set the radio to the news station and drove without listening at all. The radio reporters—one reporter after another—described the second day of looting, rioting, and arson fires in London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and Athens far away. The urgency in their voices, at once pompous and terse, became a wordless drone, part of Zach's aural ambience, along with the sea-like sough of tires on pavement and the hoarse rush of air from his Pontiac's vents. He gazed out the windshield at the twilight streets—at brownstones and supermarkets, at white headlights and red taillights, at brown-skinned women pushing silver shopping carts under Chinese restaurant marquees and Spanish grocery awnings—and half to himself and half to God, he cursed the day that Margo Heatherton had found him.

She
had
found him. He knew that now. She had seen—well, everyone had seen—the photograph of him after the Emily Watson kidnapping, the famous Cowboy shot of him holstering his nine as he swaggered out of the Flint Hill farmhouse where he'd out-gunned Ray Mima. She had set her sights on him and sought him out. But, of course, he hadn't realized that at the time.

At the time, there were a lot of things he didn't realize. He was not a man who thought about his own emotions much. They came and went, a distraction more than anything. As far as he was concerned, emotions did little more than distort the shape and color of the landscape of events, turned it gray when he was down, turned it bright when he was feeling good. Which was all only in his mind, because the landscape of situations and events remained unchanged no matter how he felt, no matter how his feelings colored it. Best to keep his eyes on the world and out of his own shirt pocket, that was his philosophy. Let his heart feel what it would, it made no difference to the facts of the matter.

At the time Margo found him, Zach's wife, Grace, normally sweet-natured, cheerful, and efficient, was feeling low and disoriented after their move to New York. She missed her mama and her sisters and her church people back in Houston. She was harried with relocation details and, though she never said as much, Zach sensed that she resented the long hours he had to spend on the job. For the first time in their marriage, she gave off an air of sweat and weariness when he approached her. Meanwhile, he himself was coming down from what he hadn't even realized was the excitement of his year-plus of fame, suffering delayed withdrawal from the drug-like thrill of the chase and the gunfight and the public triumph afterward. He was lonesome and bored.

Not that he considered any of this an excuse for what happened. Zach Adams never excused himself for anything. He carried in his mind a precise catalogue of his moral errors going back to the age of three, and he lost sleep over all of them. It was not about excuses—it was just that he realized now, looking back, how restless and dissatisfied he'd been, whereas at the time he hadn't given it a thought. It was only emotion.

Margo Heatherton had had a friend in the governor's press office and had gotten his e-mail address from her—that's what she said. She wrote to him asking if she could interview him for background to a novel she was writing about a kidnapping. That sounded different, anyway. After a month or two of back-and-forth, Zach had arranged to have lunch with her. She was a poised, elegant 25-year-old with long, silky blond hair and fine rose-white features. She had a sympathetic air and a mischievous wit. Not the usual class of woman he came into contact with: she had an aura of high society.

He cursed the day.

The Pontiac now veered from the crowded commercial streets onto a grid of neighborhood back roads. The heavy-hearted Zach traveled from stop sign to stop sign until he reached his home territory: green lawns divided by front walks leading to front steps rising to the front doors of two-story red-brick houses with white bay windows below and gray cross-gabled roofs above—one after another of them.

He pulled into his driveway. As he was stepping out of the car, his five-year-old boy Tom came banging through the house's storm door. He shouted “Daddy!” and dashed to Zach across the lawn. Zach's two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Ann, gripping the wrought-iron bannister, was carefully negotiating the cement steps. Grace was right behind her, bending forward to shepherd her down. They were this way every evening when he came home, as excited to see him as if he were returning from an ocean voyage of many months. He put his arm around Tom's shoulder and hoisted Ann up into the crook of his other elbow. The boy chattered to him about the day's heroics and the girl showed him her crayon picture. Grace met him on the walk and kissed him, her eyes smiling. She had a scent, he would have sworn, a sort of atmosphere about her that, even now that they were nine years married, gave him a yearning feeling deep down.

This was all the love life Zach had ever wanted. Despite his romantic good looks, he had never been much of a Romeo. Maybe it was his religious upbringing, but the sexual pursuit of strangers had never inspired him the way it does some men; a lot of men. He had had a few flings in college. A few longer relationships afterward. But there had always seemed to him something vaguely—what was the word?—
disfiguring
to his sense of himself—even
corrupting
—about being naked with—being asleep in the arms of—being physically
inside
somebody he didn't much give a damn about.

He had found Grace in church, as he liked to joke in his slow drawl. He had started going to church again when he began to feel it was time to somehow “get serious” about his life. His own ideas about God were a bit more amorphous than anything he read in scripture, but he'd always found church a suitable place to go think good thoughts for an hour, if you didn't take any of it too literally. First day there, and out she came to collect the four- and five-year-olds for the Sunday school. He took, as they say, one look at her. . . . Practically brimming over with tenderness for her little charges. And the eager way they clustered around her. And the spilling ringlets of her honey hair, her sweet face so kindly, her figure sturdy and full.

She was then, and remained now, a mystery to him. He was not a sentimental man. He knew she could not be the perfect Proverbs 31 wife he thought she was, or the cornball angel-of-the-house he thought she was either. But damned if he could catch her with her angel mask off or her Proverbs guard down. She was religious in the same beat-by-beat scriptural way his own mama had been, the way he assumed a good woman was supposed to be. And, also like his mama, she gave herself to being a housewife and mother with what seemed to him an almost feral ferocity. She gave herself to him that way too, devoted herself to him, attached herself to his life and submitted herself to his authority so completely that it simply baffled him. He did not have such a high opinion of himself that he could ever imagine he deserved such devotion, so what the hell was she thinking exactly? Day to day, he was never really sure.

But never mind. He loved his wife. This was no mere matter of emotion to him. It was a profound fact of his existence. He might feel any which way about her at any particular moment, sure. But as long as creation endured and ever after, Grace's good was his good, her suffering his. Even his love for his children was somehow an extension of his love for her. Even his love of his own life. When the psycho kidnapper of Emily Watson had fired that 500 at him in the farmhouse, his primary emotion—aside from the adrenaline rush—had been righteous indignation on his wife's behalf. How evil could Ray Mima be that he would risk causing Grace to grieve? That was how much he thought of her.

At that first lunch with Margo Heatherton—this was maybe eight months ago—Margo had interviewed him as “research” for her “novel.” She had been flattering him, he realized now, but it was subtle and at the time he hadn't noticed it. She had simply let him do the talking and occasionally admired his expertise. Then, after a while, she had told him about the troubles of her young life—her desire to go her own way rather than succumb to pressure from her father. Which allowed him to dispense a bit of easy wisdom to her, which also flattered him. Which, again, he didn't realize until much later.

After that—for the next month or two—she did little more than e-mail him from time to time. She'd ask him some new interview question or send him an article she thought might interest him. Every e-mail had her photograph attached. That was just a feature of her e-mail program. But he found himself searching for other pictures of her online. He found two. One in particular showed her at a fancy New York debutante ball, wearing a gown that made her look like a princess. It fascinated him.

Once, after about six weeks, she arranged to bump into him on the street outside the NYPD's 16th precinct, where Extraordinary Crimes was housed. He bought her a cup of coffee at a nearby diner. She somehow ended up telling him about her problems with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a medical student. He felt jealous, though he didn't quite recognize that that's what it was. She invited him to a party later that night. “Bring your wife!” she said. “I'd love to meet her.” But he knew Grace wouldn't be able to get away, and wouldn't like it much if she did. He refused Margo's invitation to go on his own. He liked the look of disappointment in her eyes. All of this, he had now come to believe, had been calculated on her part, a well-planned campaign to draw him in.