A Simple Act of Violence (25 page)

For the first few months of his work in Homicide Robert Miller had counted the dead.

He counted thirty-nine, and then he stopped counting. After a while it went into hundreds. Counting seemed to serve no purpose. The victims started to blur at the edges. The men looked like other men, the girls like other girls, even the kids stopped looking so different from one another. The dead people were just dead people - strangers with unknown faces, unknown names: John and Jane Doe, 123 Regular and 5th, No Place Special.

But Robert Miller never really knew any of the dead people. No-one close had ever died on his watch.

Albert Roth, however, had been seventeen weeks into his homicide deployment when he was assigned to watch a guy named Leonard Frost. Frost was an informant en route to witness protection. Roth looked after him for three days, played cards with him, watched a little TV, talked about nothing in particular for not very long. Shook the guy’s hand and wished him well when they parted company. Four hours later Frost was dead. Shot through the head as he entered the Fifteenth Precinct lock-up. Shot by a man posing as a police officer. Roth had been present at something close to three hundred and fifty crime scenes. He had seen more than four hundred dead. Leonard Frost was the only one he’d ever spoken to.

Faced with the beaten corpse of Natasha Joyce, Robert Miller and Albert Roth were both left silent and stunned. They stood there for some time in the doorway of her bedroom. She had been laid on her back on the bed. Her shirt, the tee-shirt beneath, were stained with wide patches of blood. The marks on her face and neck told them that the beating had been brutal and unrelenting. The skin was broken in many places, reddish-purple welts standing out against the dark coffee of her skin. Her eyes were closed with the swelling, and her lips were caked with thick smears of dried blood, as were the neatly plaited corn-rows of her hair.

Al Roth was pale. He was sweating profusely as he took a step towards Natasha Joyce’s body. He and Miller stood on either side of the bed. It was like déja vu, something from a movie they’d seen at different times, a moment of recognition as they realized they’d seen the same thing.

Officer Tom Suskind, the first one to attend the crime scene following a call from a neighbor named Maurice Ducatto, had told Miller that the victim’s child - Chloe, a nine-year-old girl - had been down the hall with an old woman named Esme Lewis. Esme Lewis had apparently returned to the Joyce woman’s apartment with the little girl, had found the door locked, had looked for the building superintendent and, unable to find him, had alerted the neighbor, Maurice Ducatto who - after beating on the door several times and getting no response - had broken in. Ducatto had been the one to find the victim. The old woman and the child had not entered the apartment. Ducatto had directed them to his own apartment where his wife had stayed with them until the police arrived. The girl was even now being dealt with by Child Services.

‘And no-one else has been in here?’ Miller asked.

Suskind shook his head. ‘No-one has been inside except Ducatto himself, and then myself.’

‘And where is your partner, Officer Suskind?’ Al Roth had asked.

‘Sick,’ Suskind replied.

‘All day?’

‘Yesterday as well . . . I’ve been on my own for two days now.’

‘You haven’t been assigned a temporary partner?’

‘Don’t have the manpower,’ he replied. ‘Especially to cover this area of the city.’

Miller said nothing. In his mind he was talking through the scenario with Frank Lassiter, answering the questions that he knew Lassiter would ask. How well had they known the victim? How many times had they visited her apartment? Had they been aware of anything, just anything at all, that indicated she might have been targeted? Was there any real doubt in their minds regarding the identity of her killer? That he was the same man who had murdered Mosely, Rayner, Lee and Sheridan? And why no ribbon this time? And if she was another of his victims then what were they going to do about the fact that they were evidently being watched by the perpetrator? Or was this random? Was this someone else’s work?

Questions that Miller did not want to be asked, that he did not want to face, that he did not know the answer to.

‘Okay,’ Miller said to Suskind. ‘Stay here a while. Stay downstairs. Keep people out of here, let forensics do what they need to do, but everyone else—’

Suskind nodded. He knew the beat. He left Roth and Miller in the bedroom with Natasha Joyce.

‘What about the kid?’ Roth asked.

Miller shrugged. ‘What about her? Jesus Al, you know this shit as well as me. Child Services will handle it, what can I tell you?’

Roth backed up and sat down at Natasha Joyce’s dressing table - a plain deal seventy-five dollar piece of shit with a mismatched stool ahead of it. He looked at her things - the brushes, the dryer, the hair straighteners, the eyebrow pencils and lipsticks, the face creams and anti-ageing lotion, the de-frizz lusterizer serum for flyaway hair. Same shit as his own wife. Same shit, different price bracket. This was all that remained of Natasha Joyce, this and a nine-year-old daughter who would never really understand what had happened to her father, who would now feel the same way about her mom.

Miller took a step back and closed his eyes. Expression on his face like he was trying to absorb something he couldn’t see, as if he was attempting to draw something from the atmosphere that would tell him something new.

‘He knows, doesn’t he?’ Roth said.

Miller opened his eyes. ‘Has to.’

Roth shook his head. ‘He must be watching what we’re doing, where we’re going, who we’re speaking to.’ He inhaled, exhaled slowly. ‘Jesus . . . it puts an entirely different light on it.’

‘This wasn’t random,’ Miller said. ‘This wasn’t random and I don’t think the Sheridan woman was random, and I don’t think the ones before Sheridan were random. I think there’s a reason and a sequence and some kind of method in this madness. Everything that’s happened here fits together . . . the shit with Darryl King and Natasha, the way that none of these women have straightforward histories . . . all of it fits together somehow. There’s a connection that runs right through it all, straight as a fucking ruler, and we’re so busy looking at what’s around it that we’re not seeing what’s right in front of us.’

‘Why no ribbon this time?’ Roth asked.

Miller closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Al . . . Jesus, I don’t fucking know.’

‘We have to find the guy,’ Roth said. ‘We have to find the guy in the photographs, the one that came down here to talk to Darryl.’

‘And we need to speak to this Frances Gray and get whatever we can on Michael McCullough.’

Impulse made Miller want to reach out and touch Natasha Joyce - something compassionate, something that would make her feel that he cared, that he was desperately sorry for what had happened. Because something inside made him feel he had brought this upon her. And though he knew with certainty that this was not the truth, that her involvement - direct or indirect - with the history of this thing was the only reason she was now dead, he couldn’t help but feel what he did. It was personal. It had now become personal. Someone had watched him. Someone had seen him visit with Natasha Joyce, had seen him talk to her, ask her questions, and now she was dead.

‘You okay?’ Roth asked.

‘As can be,’ Miller replied.

‘So what d’you think?’

‘We do what you said. We find the guy from the pictures. We go speak to this Gray woman. We find Michael McCullough. That’s what we do.’

Sounds downstairs. Forensics people arriving. Miller shook his head as if to clear shadows. He looked at Natasha Joyce once more, and then he walked to the door.

It had only been three days since the death of Catherine Sheridan. Four months between the first and second, a month and three days between the second and third, a gap of ten weeks or so between the third and fourth, and now just seventy-two hours. Catherine Sheridan. Natasha Joyce. The connection between them - tenuous though it might be - was Darryl King, a heroin addict informant killed alongside a retired police sergeant in a warehouse drugs raid five years before.

Miller knew it was all connected. The links in the web were tenuous, perhaps invisible, but they were there. Of this he felt sure.