A Dark and Broken Heart (16 page)

No, this was not a simple case of three dead guys in a storage unit. This was something else altogether, and Walsh realized how much he had missed it. He had two weeks before Callow returned, two weeks to prove to himself, to prove to everyone, that he could do this thing, that he belonged here, that he had learned how to make a mark that counted for something in this territory.

Somewhere there was a fourth man with a great deal of money and a car with tires that matched those treads, and this was going to be legwork and late hours, the usual routine for such cases. Homicides fell into four main categories—premeditated and intentional, everything from domestic murders for the insurance money to contractors employed to make someone disappear; those occasioned in the execution of another crime—bank robberies, kidnappings and suchlike; crimes of passion—the drunken ex-husband stabs the wife’s new lover; finally, the gang-related and territorial homicides. Pretty much everything fell into one of those boxes, and what had happened with the Sandià robbery was the latter. Until the fourth man was found there was no way to determine whether or not it had always been his intention to kill the other three, but this didn’t change the nature of the crime. It was an internal thing, something that fell within the bounds of the criminal fraternity, and there was little going on in that fraternity that someone somewhere didn’t know. It was a matter of finding that person, or getting something on someone that could then be used as leverage to find that person. That’s all it would take. Walsh would begin with Fulton’s closest people, the ones whose names appeared most frequently as accomplices, those with whom he had shared a cell and then maintained a connection post-sentence. That was how the vast majority of these partnerships were founded. There was little to talk about in a twenty-three lockdown aside from what they were going to do once released.

Walsh set everything else aside and combed through Fulton’s file. Three names figured prominently, two of them from prison terms. One of them was back inside, and thus was out of the loop. That left two, the first being Fulton’s cousin on his mother’s side, the second a cellmate from the upstate three-to-five. His name was Richard Moran. Fulton played booster, Moran was the driver. So, if they’d worked a few things together, why wasn’t Moran brought in as a driver on the Sandià hit? Because Fulton was a hired hand, that’s why. The fourth man was the contractor, not Fulton. The loyalty lay with the money, so Fulton may have suggested Moran, or Number Four might already have secured his driver before Fulton joined the crew. Walsh pulled Moran up on the system. He had a sheet like Fulton’s—B&Es, GTAs, assault and battery, possession with intent—and though he’d done eighteen months a while back, he seemed to have slid through everyone’s fingers for the rest of it. Seemed that the PD spent the vast majority of their time and resources chasing the big guys, the guys like Sandià, and Sandià would never see the inside of a jail cell. Otherwise, they were chasing the small-timers, the kids with the dime bags, the speeding offenders, the traffic violations. In between was a whole world of violent, single-minded thieves and dealers and sex offenders, every one of them protected by the lumbering inefficiency of the system. This was the nature of the beast, and if you didn’t care for it, then this was not the line of work to pursue.

The second connection—the cousin—was named Edward “Eddie” Fauser. Fulton’s maternal aunt had married one Jerry Fauser, and Jerry Fauser was a star. He was inside even then, serving an eighteen-to-twenty-five for armed robbery. He’d gone down in May of 1994, had done sixteen, looked like he’d be doing at least another three or four. Two parole applications had been denied, next one wasn’t due until after the following Christmas. Eddie was definitely his father’s son—looked like him, behaved like him. Followed in the family business, started young, worked hard at it, and by the time he was nineteen he’d already done a year for aggravated assault. On his sheet were charges of attempted robbery, malicious wounding, physical abuse of a minor, an assorted collection of robbery-related things, but—once again—he appeared to have maneuvered his way through all of it with a certain deftness and aplomb. He was out and about too, didn’t have anything pending, but the last time his name had been linked to that of Laurence Fulton had been four years before.
Fulton and Moran, however, had been marked up as prime suspects for questioning in a recent robbery. Nothing had come of it, and they were not pursued. But it had been recent, and that’s why Walsh felt his time would be better spent following up on Moran. If that went nowhere, then he could go running after Eddie Fauser.

Moran’s last-known address was on the outskirts of the Yard, up around West 132nd, just near the point Park Avenue crossed the Harlem River. Walsh called down to the pool for a vehicle, took his jacket from the back of his chair, and made his way out.

Bryant saw him leaving, called him back.

“Got word from Madigan . . . Looks like he has a lead on this girl, the one from the Sandià house,” he said. “And where you off to?”

“After a buddy of Fulton’s, see if Fulton was a talker.”

“Good ’nough.” Bryant smiled, added, “And, hey, let’s be careful out there.”

“That is such a crap impression. Did you ever
actually
watch
Hill Street Blues
?”

“Yes, I did, wiseass.”

“Well, you take it easy as well, Sarge.”

“Fuck you very much,” Bryant replied, and turned to head back to his office.

Walsh watched him go. Bryant was a good man, a good sergeant, but it was the first time Bryant had ever cracked wise with him in all the months he’d been there. IA was a hell of a way to make no friends.

26
BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE

T
hree blocks south and he would be outside the 167th—that’s how close he was—and for a while Madigan stood ahead of the beat-to-shit tenement building and wondered whether there was anyone inside who would talk to him. And if he found someone who was willing to talk, would they know anything of consequence? The Arias apartment was up on the third. Madigan took the stairs. He didn’t trust elevators at the best of times, and in buildings such as these it was best to trust them not at all. Even as he entered the hallway on the third floor, as he checked door numbers for the right apartment, he had an uneasy feeling. For Madigan, it was never a question of whether or not to trust his intuition. Intuition was vital. Intuition was a faculty to be cultivated—not necessarily depended upon, but certainly cultivated. Criminology and profiling were not sciences. Not in the strictest sense of the word. There were variables in all aspects of these subjects, and the guys that had worked on them initially, the ones who had built the foundations, well, they had originally gone with their intuition. In that moment it was intuition that told him the apartment was empty. Number thirty-seven, supposedly the residence of Isabella Arias and her daughter, Melissa, missing from school for two weeks, now laid up in Harlem Hospital with a gunshot wound. The terrible irony was not missed on Madigan. Had he not hit the Sandià house, the girl would not have been shot. Had he not been carrying seventy-five grand’s worth of gambling debts, he would not have hit the Sandià house in the first place. Had he spent a little more time concerning himself with his own relationships, his own duties as a father, then he would not have been gambling. Now he was out here concerning himself with the well-being of someone else’s child, a degree of concern far greater than he had shown his own children. All the while he was aware of the fact that if too much of what he learned
became common knowledge then he was dead, if not physically then certainly professionally.

He raised his hand and knocked on the apartment door.

“Ain’t there,” a voice said behind him.

Madigan turned, came face-to-face with a middle-aged white woman. “Sorry?”

“She ain’t there . . . She’s gone. Left us with three hundred bucks of unpaid rent.”

“Us?” Madigan asked.

“My brother and me. He’s the super. I do all the money stuff, collect the rent and what have you. She just took off a couple of weeks back and that was that. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of her or the brat kid since.”

Madigan was beginning to get irritated by the woman’s tone. He flipped his badge. She looked at it nonchalantly and shook her head.

“So what? She’s dead or something?”

Madigan closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath. “I’m looking for her,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth what?”

“Elizabeth Young.”

“And your brother’s name?”

“Harold. Harry.”

“And you own the building or just supervise it?”

The woman cracked a bitter smile. “You think I’d live in this rathole if I owned it? No, the place is owned by some real estate people in the city, far as I know. I don’t deal with them. I deal with the property agent. I collect the rent, bank it, do the paperwork an’ all that.”

“And these people, the woman and her daughter—”

“Isabella Arias. That’s her name. And the kid’s name is Melissa.”

“And when did you last see them?”

“Two weeks maybe. Something like that. Three hundred bucks behind and they just took off. I’ve been in there. There ain’t nothin’ worth nothin’ for us to sell and make it back. Hell, I don’t know who these people think they damn well are.”

“Do you remember the exact day you last saw them, Ms. Young?”

Elizabeth Young looked at Madigan for a moment. She seemed
to stand a little straighter. She was being addressed politely, a little respectfully perhaps.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do,” she said. “It was the last day of December, middle of the day.”

“New Year’s Eve.”

“Right. New Year’s Eve.”

“And were they coming in or going out?”

“Coming in, just her and the girl. Had some bags, groceries, I reckon. Didn’t pay much attention, to tell you the truth. I’d let the rent slide for a while, it being Christmas an’ all, but I reckoned I could only let it go so far. People I answer to don’t know the meaning of compassion, if you know what I mean. Besides, I hadn’t seen them for a good few days. Figured they might have gone visiting with family or something, considering all that had happened. So I waited a couple of hours and then I knocked on the door. No answer. Not a sound. I imagined they’d just gone out again without me hearing them. I went over the day after New Year’s, knocked again. Same thing. Left it a couple more days and still there was no answer. I kinda got worried then, because like I said, I was rememberin’ what happened to her sister an’ all—”

“Her sister?”

“Sure, her sister, Maribel. Pretty girl. Really pretty. Ever such a sweet girl, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thereabouts. Anyway, considering what had happened to the sister I got a little worried—”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Young, I need you to back up here. What was it that happened to her sister?”

Elizabeth Young frowned. She looked at Madigan like the comings and goings of Maribel Arias were common knowledge. “She was murdered. Murdered just the day after Christmas.”

The hairs rose on the nape of Madigan’s neck. “Murdered?”

“Sure. Yeah. It was all over the building. They found her head in a Dumpster someplace, the rest of her a block or two away. You didn’t know about that?”

“No,” Madigan said. “I didn’t even know she had a sister.”

“Yes, she definitely had a sister, and that sister definitely got herself murdered. Anyway, as I was saying, I kinda got worried seein’ as how this thing had happened to Maribel, so I opened up the apartment and took a look inside. Nothing to see. Everything looked like it had before. I got to thinking that maybe she just got
scared or whatever, and she just decided she was going to take off someplace. That was the only thing I could think.”

“And did you report this?”

“What’s to report? People bail out on their rent all the time. There was nothing to tell anyone. She was there, and then she was gone.”

Madigan was quiet for a moment. He was trying to think, trying to put something together. “I want to see inside,” he said eventually. “You have the keys?”

“Sure do,” Elizabeth replied, and then she hesitated. “You need a warrant or something?”

“Unpaid rent, tenant gone, and your brother’s the super? I don’t need a warrant. I just need you to say it’s okay.”

Elizabeth shrugged. “Okay with me.” She went back into her apartment to get the keys.

She opened up, left him alone in there, went back to her own place. Inside it was as the woman had described. Madigan stood for a while in the silence of the room. The air inside was musty, a little dry. No air-conditioning, no open windows for two weeks, that was all. He walked through the living room into the kitchen, opened drawers and cupboards, opened the fridge, the microwave. He went back through and looked in both bedrooms, the small bathroom, an adjacent closet. Someone could be home any moment now. That was how it felt. On the floor of the girl’s room were a couple of dolls, a coloring set, a scattering of cheap toys, the kind that came with fast food kids’ meals. Didn’t appear to be any missing clothes. The mother’s room was the same—a cheap dresser, cosmetics on top of it, a bed that had been slept in and left unmade, the cupboards and drawers full of clothes. Where is it that people go where they need to take nothing with them?

Madigan went back to the living room and stood in the middle of the rug. He closed his eyes. The mother and daughter were seen two weeks ago. They vanish within a couple hours of being seen. They leave all their clothes and possessions behind. A week or so before that the mother’s sister was murdered—decapitated, her head found in a Dumpster, the rest of her elsewhere. There had to be a connection, and that connection—Madigan suspected—possessed a great deal to do with the little girl’s presence in the Sandià house. It was this thought that chilled him.

He went through the rooms again, looked more carefully, looked beneath the rugs, behind the fridge, behind the TV.

In the bathroom he stopped. Behind the door, low and near the ground, there were a series of dark scuff marks on the paintwork. Madigan closed the door, put his shoulder against it, and then pressed the edge of his shoe against the lower part of the door. The scuff marks were in precisely the position they would be had he tried to prevent someone getting in. Had someone come here for the girl and the mother? If so who, and why? Sandià? What would Sandià want with a woman like Isabella Arias? More to the point, what would he want with her daughter? And did their disappearance relate to the death of the sister, Maribel?