A Dark and Broken Heart (12 page)

Madigan sat on the stairs. He put his head in his hands. His breath was coming short and fast. He hadn’t even noticed. He was winding himself up. He was thinking too much. Sandià didn’t know. Sandià wanted him to get the inside line on the killings. Sandià wanted him to take care of the little girl. That was all he wanted. Hell, if he did those things he would be off the hook. Sandià would wipe the seventy-five grand, and that would be finished. Williams, Landry, and Fulton were dead. Madigan had the money. As it stood now, there was very little chance that they would see the work of a fourth man in this thing. But if they did, if there had been some detail overlooked, if the money was marked and they counted up what was on the floor of the storage unit and started to ask questions about the remainder . . .

Madigan stopped in his tracks.

The fourth man.

Of course, there
had
to be a fourth man. Not himself, but someone else. Any remaining clue regarding his own presence would then be attributed to whoever he chose.

And how would that fourth man be identified? By the money, that’s how. Put that money someplace, and no matter what happened, no matter what was said, whoever was in possession of that money would be the fourth man. It was that easy.

Madigan got up. He felt his head clear. He felt his heart settle, his pulse slow down. It was simple. Find a patsy. Find somewhere to put that money, and he would have someone to take the fall. Give word to Sandià, Sandià takes care of things, retrieves his
money, and Madigan winds up with a closed case, Sandià off his back, no debt, and a clear conscience.

Yes. No question. The most complex situations were always resolved with the simplest solutions.

And then he remembered the girl. There was still the girl, the agreement he’d made with Sandià that he would ensure no further harm came to her. Why was she important? That was something he needed to know. And if she survived, would she be able to identify Madigan from the assault on the house? Surely not. She had been in another room. She had seen nothing. Couldn’t have seen anything, could she?

Madigan was buzzing. He was electrified. He would never sleep, not now, not now that he had a solution worked out for this. All that remained was the girl—her name, her identity, the part she played in this game.

Madigan left the house. He walked to the car, got in, pulled away from the sidewalk, and headed for Harlem Hospital.

19
A DEVIL IN THE WOODS

“W
hat is it?” she said.

She stood in the doorway. She had on a robe, her hair was tousled, her eyes sleepy.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Walsh said.

“You okay?”

He smiled. “Sure.”

She came forward, sat facing him, reached out and took his hand.

She said nothing. Walsh liked that best about her. Carole Douglas. A woman who had the ability to say nothing and yet communicate everything that needed to be said.

“Something bothering you?”

He shrugged. “Work stuff.”

“Tell.”

“Went out to a crime scene. Three dead guys. Bryant asked me to go, didn’t have anyone else to secure the scene. I went to be helpful, that was all.”

“And?”

Walsh smiled wryly. “The bug’s still there,” he said.

Carole nodded. “As if that’s a surprise.”

He gripped her hand. She read him better than anyone.

“You say what you say, Duncan, but what you say and what you feel are rarely the same thing. Whether that’s a man thing, or that’s just your thing—” She smiled briefly. “No, it’s a man thing. Anyway, regardless, you are a policeman because you want to be a policeman. It’s not a job you choose; it’s a job that chooses you. I get why you didn’t follow through with SWAT, but I never did get why you left Homicide—”

“Because it’s a circus, Carole. Because it’s a joke. Because it’s bullshit.”

“And—what?—Internal Affairs is any less bullshit?”

“We’re not having this conversation.”

“Sure we are. You don’t hear yourself talking already?”

Walsh sighed.

“You sighing about me, or you sighing about yourself?”

“Myself.”

“So tell me what happened today.”

“There isn’t much to tell. I went out there. Three dead guys, a whole pile of money all over the floor of this storage unit. I wanted to see beyond what was there. I wanted to see something that no one else would see. I wanted to understand what had happened there, what had really happened, and I haven’t felt that for so long.”

“You think no one can do the job as well as you?”

Walsh shook his head. “No, of course not. I just know how important it is to close cases. I know that it’s often easier to accept what appears to be, rather than dig any deeper . . .”

“So say something.”

“Say what? That I have a hunch? That I have some intuitive feeling that something isn’t right, but I don’t know what it is?”

“Duncan, you were born for this stuff. I’ve always said that. I knew that when I met you, and I’ve hung in there for the last seven years because . . .” She shook her head. “You want to know what I think?”

“I guess I’m gonna find out whether I want to or not, right?”

“I think you’re running away from commitment—”

“Carole—”

“Shut up a minute, okay? Hear me out. I know you won’t marry me. I’ve accepted that we’ll not have kids together. That was a big deal, okay? We’ve been over this before, and I’m not going to get into it again. Loving someone is sometimes about sacrifices, right? But the sacrifices I’ve made, well, you know how I feel because I’ve said it before. The sacrifices I’ve made have been a great deal bigger than the ones you’ve made. I’ve done the marriage thing before. I’ve got two kids. That makes it easier for me. And we’ve stuck it out, we’re still together, and it’s working fine. But one thing I will not do, and I’ll tell you this right now, is sit and watch you fold your career up nice and neat and put it in a box in the basement—”

“What the hell is that—”

“What you’re doing means something, okay? I don’t give a damn whether you do Homicide or SWAT or IA or the mayor’s office, but if you’re not going to be a husband or a father, then the
very least you can be is a man with a career that means something to him.”

“Carole, I—”

She shook her head. “Carole nothing,” she interjected. “It isn’t a rehearsal, Duncan. It isn’t a quick go at something to see if you like it. You’re either in or you’re out. You’re thirty-nine. Past forty, you’re getting into the zone where it’s a little tough to start from scratch in an entirely new direction. You were a cop before I met you, and you’re still a cop now, but you act like it’s something you’re doing weekends.”

“Carole, I want to go back to Homicide.”

“I don’t think you should have left Homicide in the first place.”

“Well, you could have said something—”

She raised her hand playfully. “Asshole,” she snapped. “The number of times I—”

“I know. I know,” Walsh replied. “I was just teasing you. I know what you said, Carole, and I listened. But I figured I knew better.”

“Isn’t that always the way?”

Walsh didn’t rise to the bait.

“Come on,” she said. She glanced at the small LED clock in the hood of the stove. “It’s nearly four in the morning. Get a couple hours’ sleep. We’ll talk about it more later.”

Walsh got up from the table. At the kitchen door he grabbed the cord of her robe and pulled her back. He just held her for a while, and neither of them spoke, and he knew she was right, and she knew she was right, and that was the main reason they worked so well together. Walsh possessed a sense of humility, an ability to be wrong without feeling challenged or emasculated, and that lack of self-importance had made it impossible for her to give up on him even when he was at his most infuriating. She was a senior nurse. She was good at her job. She had never questioned her purpose to do what she did, but she knew she was in the minority. Some people spent their entire lives trying to figure out who they were and what they should be doing. She’d been one of the lucky ones and got it right straightaway.

“A devil in the woods,” she said.

“You what?”

“You know something’s there, but you try and convince yourself it’s not. That’s the way most people live their lives. They think if they can’t see it, it isn’t real.”

Walsh said nothing. He felt what he felt. Something had
happened in that storage unit, something real and tangible and unavoidable. First time he’d seen a real crime scene in nearly eighteen months. Pictures, sure; there were always pictures. There was the story the duty guys told you, the ones you followed up on when there were officer-involved shooting reports to corroborate, the endless paperwork, the words you heard from so many people about the same damned thing, but none of that was
real
. Not like that storage unit. Not like three dead guys and a whole heap of cash, blood and tread marks and abandoned cars and the unmistakable tension he’d felt when he stood there with the camera and took his pictures.

Something didn’t make sense. Something didn’t add up. And he was damned if he knew what it was.

Devil in the woods.

Maybe it was time to walk home in the dark and face him.

20
HUMANESQUE

W
here did I go?

Where did who I was and who I have become take different routes?

How did this happen?

I stand there. I am silent. I can hear the sound of the machine that helps her breathe, the machine that monitors her heart, her pulse, her blood pressure, the drips of saline and glucose and sedative as they make their way into her frail system and keep her distant from the pain
.

I wonder about her name, her home, the identity of her parents. Does she have brothers, sisters? Are there people—even now—out of their minds with worry, frustrated by the seeming inability of the police department to do anything to help?

I see my own children—every one of them. I see their faces as best as I can recall them. Cassie, Adam, Lucy, Tom
.

I know that they don’t look the same way as I remember them
.

It all moves so fast—so exhaustingly, terrifyingly fast
.

The decay is observable, but slow. Like the wearing down of rocks by rain. Ideals, a philosophy, an uncompromising viewpoint, and then you arrive at the place
.

It even has a name
.

We call it the Trade-Off
.

You’ve got someone. Some A-hole. He’s done something. He raped or assaulted or butchered or stabbed or shot someone. Usually a kid. Pretty much one-for-one it’s a kid. You have him in the tank. It’s a done deal. Now it’s just a matter of paperwork
.

And then something happens
.

You’re sitting there on the other side of that plain deal table, five or six hours in the interrogation room, and someone knocks on the door. You go to the door and you think it’s such and such a person for this or that reason, and you get the look
.

You open the door and you see the look
.

There is an almost imperceptible shake of the head, and then they look down
.

The search warrant wasn’t signed; the warrant didn’t extend to his garbage pail, and the garbage pail was where you found some nine-year-old kid’s underwear covered in her blood and his DNA; the confession has been kicked back by the ADA; there’s a rumor about coercion, unnecessary force, something
. . .

He’s going to walk
.

And it’s not like you couldn’t let it go. Hell, shit happens. Maybe you could let it go. Maybe you could convince yourself of the existence of karma, some grand order of things, some master plan within which we all fit like jigsaw pieces
. . .

Yes, maybe you could let it go
.

But when you see that look on his face; when you see the deadlight in his eyes, the shadows that sit behind them, and the way that arrogant, condescending smile creeps around his lips, you know that even as he rises from the chair and makes his way to the interrogation room door, there’s someone else in his mind, some other little kid, the next one he’s taking
. . .

That’s the Trade-Off
.

And you do it for the right reason. You so do it for the right reason
.

Three hours later the perp is pulled over on a suspected DUI. Some bullshit. The cycle cop searches the car while the perp stands aside and smirks. What d’you know? There’s another article of the dead kid’s clothing right there under the backseat. The perp pleads ignorance. Now he isn’t smirking anymore. He’s handcuffed. Another unit comes out on backup. They bring the boy in and he’s fucked. He’s arrested, charged, arraigned, bail is denied, and someone gives the word to someone who gives the word to someone, and some other perp puts a shiv in the boy’s ribs in the shower room. Honor amongst thieves. Even the worst of the others can’t abide a child killer
.

The sense of satisfaction when you see that wide-eyed disbelief, the sense of vindication you feel when that guy comes back in on a different charge and he knows he can do nothing about it . . . Well, that sense of satisfaction is like a drug. You need it, but you hate it. You have to have it, but it costs so damned much
.

You tell yourself it’s necessary. The system will screw you before it screws those who buck that same system. You have to do your own dirty work. The law can go only so far. Lawyers are worse than the assholes they defend. What would you have me do? Let these bastards just walk the streets and do whatever the hell they want?

No, justice has to be seen to be done, even if it’s distasteful
.

So I did those things. I did all those things for the right reasons. There were a few that slipped through the wires, that made a run for it and we never got them, but that was rare. And when Sandià entered the picture, when the information we needed had to come from a source other than our own CIs and intel operatives, well, that’s when it got crazy
.