Werewolf Cop (5 page)

Stu . . . stu . . . stupe bassard . . . stum . . . they said a word I don't know. Stoomp bassard. Bassard.

He called up his search engine. It would spell-check and make substitutions, which might make some sense out of what the boy had said. Zach searched
stupe bassard
.

Did you mean stupid bastard?
the search engine asked.

He searched
stump bassard
.

Did you mean stump busters?

He scrolled through a few stump removal services, then tried again:
Abend bassard . . . Brüderlichkeit bassard . . . German bassard. . . .

That seemed to get him somewhere:
Did you mean German bastard sword?

He shifted a little closer to the edge of the sofa. “I might,” he murmured to the living-room shadows. He was thinking of the longswords the BLK preferred to kill with. “I might mean that.”

The French épée bâtarde as well as the English bastard sword originates in the 15th or 16th century . . . irregular sword of uncertain origin. . . . The German langes schwert (“long sword”) . . . as opposed to kurzes schwert (“short sword”) or half-sword . . . hand-and-a-half sword later called bastard. . . .

He skimmed through it, but could see nothing meaningful, no connection to his charnel-house crime scene. Could there be some valuable old sword Abend was looking for? Something with some important history or symbolism maybe . . . ?
He who pulls this sword from this stone shall be crowned mob boss of the Western world. . . .

He put a fist against his kidney and stretched his back, trying to figure it out.

We need to talk.

He shook the thought of Margo off, literally shook his head to make it go away. No sense worrying about it in the dead of night. Nothing he could do now. But, of course, he
was
worried—very.

He leaned forward again, resting his fingers on the keyboard, staring over the top of the monitor into the darkness, uncertain where to go from here.

Experimentally, he typed:
stupe sword.

Did you mean stone sword? State sword? Stun sword? Stupid word?

He typed:
stump sword
.

A couple of video-game sites came up:
The Stump and the Sword
.

He who pulls this sword from this stump. . . .

He was about to try some other combination when he noticed, at the bottom of the page:
Stumpf's Baselard
.

He remembered Mickey Paz:
Stoomp bassard. . . .

“Stumpf's Baselard,” he whispered into the quiet of the sleeping house. “What the hell's a baselard?”

The search engine displayed the first two lines of the entry:
By Gretchen Dankl. This abstract explores the history and legend surrounding a missing 15th-century dagger. . . .

A missing 15th-century dagger. . . .
He tried to keep his mind easy, but he sensed that he had hit on something. More than that, the semi-accidental way he'd hit on it had an aura of providence about it, like it was a Meant Thing. Wouldn't be the first time. Every cop depended on such heaven-sent coincidences. Hunches. Random chains of discovery. Nothing mystical about it, just something that happened from time to time. Every cop had a collar with a story like that attached.

Zach hit the link.

The page you have requested is no longer available.

He was midway through a curse of frustration when a new e-mail appeared, and he clicked over to the e-mail page and saw it was from her, from Margo.

Darling. I know you got my text today. I need to talk to you. Please don't ignore me. Not after what we've meant to each other. M.

His whole body recognized her old fraught style. His whole soul soured at it.
What we've meant to each other.
It was black-magical in its power. Zach could picture her, in her Westchester mansion, sitting in her dark living room as he was in his, sitting at her computer as he was at his, pressing
SEND
.
What we've meant to each other.
Like casting a spell on him from a distance. The familiar melodrama of her diction seemed to suck him out of his life into a vortex that pulled him down, down, down. . . .

“Zach?”

His breath caught as he looked up and saw Grace on the stairway. Wifely in her flowery nightgown. All the love life he had ever cared about or wanted.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, baby, I'm okay,” he told her. Margo's e-mail glaring at him from the laptop monitor. What if Grace came over and sat beside him, laid her head on his shoulder, saw? “I just couldn't sleep, thought I'd get some work done. You go on back to bed.”

“All right. But come to bed soon. You need your rest.”

“I will.”

He deleted the e-mail even as she shuffled sleepily back up the stairs. As full of rage as his heart was, as full of fear and woe as it was, he couldn't hate her—Margo—only himself.

He slouched back against the sofa cushions. Stared at the empty screen, his sick soul leaden.

His thoughts went random. The name Gretchen Dankl swam back into his mental ken. The woman who had written the article about Stumpf's Baselard. He leaned toward the computer again. Typed in Dankl's name, thinking,
Could she be pregnant?
Meaning Margo. But no, it had been six months since they had been together. Too late now for her to run that game on him.

Did you mean
Gretchen Kunkel? Gretchen Runkel?

But underneath the suggested substitutions was a bona fide hit:
Ludwig Wilhelm University, Freiberg. Gretchen Dankl, adjunct professor, literature. [email protected].

Dear Professor Dankl
, he wrote to her.
My name is Agent Zach Adams. I am a United States law enforcement officer with Homeland Security's Extraordinary Crimes Division based in New York City. I am writing in connection with a murder investigation here, and looking for any information you might have about Stumpf's Baselard. . . .

When he was finished, he snapped the laptop shut. With the monitor light gone, the living-room darkness was even deeper. He sat in it—the darkness—for several silent seconds—leaning back again, his arms stretched out on either side of him, rested along the tops of the sofa cushions—just sitting there with the whole Margo disaster a dead weight in his gut. He was unable even to muster a puling prayer for help he knew he didn't deserve.

Then he made a noise of angry dismissal, pushed off his knees, and stood. He slung the laptop under his arm. Trudged wearily up the stairs. He hoped he was tired enough to sleep at last.

And he did sleep, eventually. But first he lay beside his wife for some unknowable eternity, breathing that mysterious air that came off her, that atmosphere that was weirdly like a memory, but like a memory of something better than he'd ever actually known. He lay there and yearned for her touch and love and comfort. But he would not wake her. So he lay alone and wallowed in a looping replay of that irretrievable split second of decision: Margo against the wall, her blouse off, her legs around him, him grunting in her, stupid, predictable, clownish, a human punchline in the Great Running Joke of the World.

Ridiculous. It was all so ridiculous.

But it had ruined everything.

4

REBECCA ABRAHAM-HARTWELL

N
ext morning, Goulart slapped Zach on the shoulder. “The Bitch Goddess wants an update on Paz.”

By the Bitch Goddess, he meant Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. She was the director of Extraordinary Crimes, their boss. Goulart hated her. She'd come up through the ranks as a lawyer, not a cop. That was one strike against her, in his book. Plus she was a woman—that was the other two.

Zach was at his gunmetal desk in Task Force Zero's New York squad room. It was the usual broad common room of desks and cinderblock walls, corkboards covered thick with fliers and venetian blinds striped with a view of some side street. Zach was at his computer, searching
Stumpf
. Finding Stumpf the philosopher. Stumpf the banker. A couple of guys in the law-enforcement databases named Stumpf. A con man. A chop-shop guy. All of it garbage. Dead ends. Nothing.

He sighed and rolled his chair back. Stood.

“Waste of time,” Goulart was muttering—about their meeting with the director, not about Stumpf.

He looked especially sharp today, did Goulart. Light blue suit, white shirt, red striped tie, black hair combed to a fare-thee-well. A slick hook-up artist, was the thought that flashed through Zach's mind. He reflected morosely that his partner's marriage had ended in the typical cop-style divorce, complete with rage, hatred, guilt, recriminations, and one night when Goulart had waved his gun around so that an NYPD domestic incident report had to be discreetly shredded. With droll self-pity, Zach congratulated himself that, if Margo Heatherton had her way, he and Goulart would soon be able to sit around bars together trading ex-wife stories. Something to look forward to, ha ha ha.

“Abraham-fucking-Hartwell,” Goulart sighed as he and Zach walked together down the shabby-tiled hall to the elevators. “What is that, anyway? Abraham-Hartwell? Is she Abraham or Hartwell? I mean, make up your mind, right?”

“Hartwell's her husband's name.”

“Some high-priced mouthpiece for Wall Street dickheads,” said Goulart, stabbing the elevator button with a stiff index finger. “Hartwell,” he said, drawing out the ‘a' to make it sound hoity-toity. He and Zach waited there, shoulder to shoulder. “What, she doesn't want a Jewish name anymore? Hey, I'm not passing judgment, but make up your mind. You wanna pass for WASP, dump the Abraham. Just be Rebecca Hartwell. You wanna assimilate, I say: go for it. Am I right?”

Zach looked down at him. Goulart was broader and thicker, but Zach was taller. “‘Are you right?'” he said. “Are you seriously asking me that?”

Goulart silent-laughed. Which was one of the things—along with his being a great cop—that made it impossible for Zach not to like him: he'd laugh at himself the same as at anyone. “Hartwell,” he said again. “What the hell is
he
thinking? I'd rather get a blow job from a rattler than touch that skank.”

They weren't alone when they got in the elevator. There were two people in the little box with them: a clerical, female, and a uniform, male. Did that stop Goulart? Shoulder to Zach's shoulder against the back wall, he went on.

“These fucking meetings, too.” Muttering, but loud enough for the whole box to hear. “S'what I mean about women in positions of power. Gotta talk about everything. Bah-de-ba-de-ba.” He got an over-the-shoulder glance from the clerical. He smiled good morning at her until she turned back around. “We could be hunting these savages down but no, we have to
discuss
. We have to
process
. It's hormonal, I'm telling you.”

Zach couldn't help but snort—it broke out of him—which only encouraged Goulart. The clerical woman was shaking her head at the elevator door. Luckily, it opened now. She and the uniform both got out. One of the local detectives got in. Stooped, silver-haired guy. Nodded respectfully to the two Zero boys.

The door closed and Goulart muttered, “I mean, look: women—they can't even go to the bathroom by themselves. One gets up, they all go, right? Like a flock of sheep. They gotta be directed. That's their nature.”

The silver-haired guy looked at Zach. Zach rolled his eyes. The local detective grinned.

“Rebecca—I'm not saying she's not a nice person, all that. Whatever,” Goulart continued. “I'm just saying: she's not a leader, that's all. All these meetings—everything she does—it's all about what the bosses think of her, what the press thinks of her. She's over-responsive to authority, what I'm saying. See, a woman, if she doesn't have
a
man to tell her what to do, then she's gotta have
the
man tell her what to do. Makes life a misery for all of us.”

And again, this was the thing about Goulart—about him and his whole belligerent say-the-unsayable routine: crazy as he was, there was always just enough truth in what he said to keep it interesting. Because in the wake of the Paz murders, there was, in fact, a media frenzy (
SLAUGHTERHOUSE!
was the headline on the
Post
's website) and there was, in fact, pressure from D.C. and Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. . . .

Well, Zach liked Rebecca. And he respected her. She was smart, clear-eyed, and well-intentioned. But Goulart had a point: she
did
worry too much about what the media thought of her and what her bosses in Washington thought of her and even what they, Zach and the other agents, thought of her. And she
did
waste their time with too many meetings, too. But then she was the one who had to answer to the federal bureaucracy, not Zach.

“You look like shit, by the way,” Goulart said as they came down the upstairs hall to her office.

“Thanks.”

“Not sleeping?”

“I had a bad night, yeah.”

“That text you got yesterday, I'm guessing.”

“Just a lot of things,” said Zach, with no hope of fooling him. “Personal crap.”

“Woman trouble?”

“Right,” said Zach with a laugh, as if that were an idea too absurd to contemplate. “I got 'em running hot and cold, that's me. Can't sleep for fighting 'em off.” Try to keep a secret in a building full of cops. . . .

The Director's office door was open and her secretary nodded them in—then Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell herself waved them in from the far end of the room. It was a distracted gesture. She was standing over the flatscreen TV on her wall, holding the remote in her hand, staring down at the images. She had one of those modes working that showed four different channels at once: all news, it looked like, all shots of burning buildings and running mobs and cops in riot gear.