A Simple Act of Violence (59 page)

Miller took the stairs two at a time, hurried along the corridor and entered the office, using his elbow to lever down the handle and move in backwards with the armful of books.

‘Miller,’ Lassiter said. ‘Jesus, man, where the hell have you been?’

Miller turned, surprised to hear Lassiter’s voice, and found Al Roth and Nanci Cohen, Chris Metz, Dan Riehl, Vincent Littman and Jim Feshbach seated in a group on the right side of the room.

Miller dropped the stack of books on the nearest desk and hesitated for a moment.

‘Better come take a look at this,’ Lassiter said. He rose from his chair, took what appeared to be a monochrome photograph from the desk and held it out for Miller to look at.

‘What is it?’ Miller asked as he walked toward the assembled group.

‘Your friend Sergeant Michael McCullough,’ Lassiter said, ‘or more accurately, the reason we have not been able to locate Sergeant Michael McCullough.’

Lassiter leaned over, indicated a man standing in the second row from the back, fourth from the end of the line.

Robert Miller’s heart stopped beating.

It did not start again for quite some time.

‘So what does this mean?’ Lassiter asked.

Miller could not speak. He stared at the face before him, the uniformed figure of John Robey, the way the man looked back at him, almost smiling in the bright sunlight. A slight frown as if the brightness bothered him, but he was there, standing alongside fellow officers at the Seventh Precinct.

‘So?’ Lassiter prompted. ‘What the fuck is this? We’re dealing with a renegade cop here or what?’

Miller shook his head. ‘I don’t know . . . God, I don’t even know what the fuck to say. This is so—’

‘You sent Oliver over to Robey’s apartment,’ Lassiter interjected. ‘Apparently Robey is not there.’

‘I went to see Robey. He said he wanted to show me something. He walked me back to the Carnegie Library and then he disappeared.’

Lassiter frowned. ‘He what?’

‘He disappeared. I walked with him all the way to Second Street, and then he just ran right into the traffic and disappeared.’

‘And the books?’ Lassiter asked.

‘They’re the books that Catherine Sheridan returned on the morning of her death. He wanted me to get them from the library—’

‘What the hell for?’

‘I don’t know . . . there’s five of them . . . the first letter of each book title spells Robey. They spell his name. I think there’s something in them . . . a message perhaps, I don’t know.’

Nanci Cohen spoke. ‘So she knew he was going to kill her?’ She stood up, walked toward Miller and picked up one of the books. She opened it, leafed through it, turned it upside down and shook it to see if anything fell out. There was nothing. She did the same with each of them. Roth and Metz joined her, started looking through them also.

‘Hang fire here,’ Lassiter said. ‘Back to something that’s a little more pressing right now . . . the fact that this college professor is either a cop, or is someone impersonating a cop. This is just un-fucking-believable.’

Nanci Cohen put down the last of the books. ‘Thing that amazes me is that you had him, and then you lost him . . .’

‘I didn’t have him,’ Miller replied, something of frustration, exasperation, in his tone. ‘You were the one who said we had nothing on him. You were the one who said there was nothing we could do—’

Lassiter raised his hand and silenced Miller. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘We’re not getting into a firefight here.’ He turned to ADA Cohen. ‘We have sufficient evidence to get a warrant on his apartment?’

She nodded. ‘Sure we do. Suspicion of impersonating a police officer is good enough for me.’

Lassiter turned to Metz. ‘Get the paperwork sorted out. Get it done now. I want a warrant tonight. We’re gonna get into that place and find out whatever we can about this guy in the next two fucking hours, okay?’

Metz started towards the door.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Nanci Cohen said. ‘I’ll drive it over to Judge Thorne.’

Lassiter turned to Miller. ‘Go through these books with Roth and the others. See what you can find. Soon as we have this warrant I want you over at the Robey apartment. Tear the fucking place to pieces. Find out who the fuck this guy is and what he’s doing.’ Lassiter glanced at his watch. ‘I have to go see someone. Be an hour. Call me soon as you have the warrant. If I can I’ll meet you there.’

Miller watched him go, hesitated for a moment and then sat down heavily.

It was a few minutes past six. He’d not eaten since breakfast.

Roth sat facing him. Feshbach, Littman and Riehl stood on the other side of the room, uncertain of what was needed.

‘One book each,’ Miller said, and picked up Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates.

Detective Carl Oliver sat in an unmarked sedan on the junction facing New Jersey and Q Street. He did not envy Miller. The thing had smelled bad since day one. He was willing to help, for sure, but help had a limit. There were certain cases that assumed possession of your life for the duration, and this was one of them. Miller had been on the radio. The APB guy, this John Robey, now appeared to be Sergeant McCullough. Seemed a cop had killed the Sheridan woman, or something such as this. It didn’t matter. Ultimately none of it mattered. It was all politics anyway. Serial killers had been big in the ’80s. Serial killers were passé. Now it was simply a matter of closing a case because the chief of police wanted it closed. All he had to do was watch the apartment for a man that would not return. That was easy enough. He could smoke, listen to the radio, whatever he wanted, and watch the street.

Seemed it was money for nothing, until Carl Oliver turned to the right and saw a man fitting John Robey’s physical description cross the junction up ahead and start toward the end of the block.

 

Littman picked it up, the small marks at the bottom of certain pages, like the flick of a pencil above certain numbers. He was holding a copy of Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. As soon as he mentioned it, Feshbach picked up on the same thing. Tiny pencil markings to indicate a number, then another, then another. Scrutinizing each page individually, each of the five detectives listed the sequence as it was noted.

‘Some kind of code,’ Miller said. ‘A cipher perhaps . . .’

‘Letters also,’ Riehl said. ‘I’ve got a coupla letters marked on page one here, and then I get a sequence of six numbers, then I get another coupla letters, then a sequence of five.’

‘Just write them down,’ Miller said. ‘Write them down in the sequence you find them.’

Miller did the same. Page One: ‘In the Oceania wing of the Louvre I saw it: the totem.’

A mark above the a in Oceania, and then on the seventh line, ‘Except the infant was only a head, grotesquely large and round’, a mark above the q.

Miller noted these, and then found a mark above page numbers: the 1 in 10, the 2 in 12, the 5 in 15, the 9 in 19, lastly the 8 in 28.

He wrote them down in sequence:
a q 1 2 5 9 8
.

The sequence started again, this time
g j6 6 9 9
, and again
b d 7 14 99
.

‘Dates,’ Miller said. ‘They’re fucking dates aren’t they?’ He looked at Roth. ‘Got three here . . . December 5th, 1998, then June 6th, 1999, next is July 14th, 1999 . . .’

‘And the letters?’ Roth asked.

‘Initials, what the fuck d’you bet they’re initials,’ Riehl said.

‘Jesus,’ Miller exhaled quietly. ‘Names and dates. They’re goddamned names and dates . . .’

‘Don’t miss one, for God’s sake,’ Roth said. ‘Miss one and the whole thing goes awry.’

‘Everyone complete the book they’re on,’ Miller said. ‘Mark every letter and number in sequence, and then pass the book along. We cross-check to make sure we’re right.’

Roth looked at him, raised his eyebrows, slowly shook his head. ‘This is just so fucking beyond me . . .’ His voice trailed away into silence. He looked down, focused on what he was doing, started writing again.

 

Carl Oliver called the precinct from his car, told them to get Miller and Roth out to Robey’s place. It looked like John Robey was on his way home.

Oliver exited his car and crossed the street. The man he’d seen had passed the junction, turned left, was now approaching the stairwell that led up to Robey’s apartment. Oliver stayed close to the façade of the adjacent building. He did not need to try and look inconspicuous. Inconspicuousness was in his nature.

Oliver did not see the man’s face. All he knew of Robey was the image from the treated photographs, the basic height and build Miller had told him. Oliver waited for him to reach the stairwell, and then he followed.

 

‘Thirty-six,’ Roth said. ‘Thirty-six separate sequences . . .’ He paused, looked across at Miller. ‘You see them, right?’

Miller nodded. A slow-dawning realization had blanched the color from his face.

‘What?’ Littman asked. ‘See what?’

Miller turned the page around and pointed to a sequence of three:

‘And they mean what?’ Littman asked.

‘Margaret Mosley, March 6th, 2006, Ann Rayner, July 19th and Barbara Lee on August 2nd . . . the three women this year before Catherine Sheridan.’

Feshbach frowned, leaned forward. ‘So what? So you’re telling me that there’s thirty-six murders here . . . that this woman had information about thirty-six murders? You can’t be fucking serious!’

Miller opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by the telephone to his left. Roth picked it up, was getting out of his chair even as he acknowledged and hung up. ‘Someone at the Robey apartment,’ he said.

‘Robey?’ Miller asked.

Roth shook his head. ‘Don’t know. Oliver called the desk, said he was checking it out.’

Miller got up, tugged his jacket from the back of his chair, turned to the three seated detectives as he reached the door. ‘Put a search through the Washington system for those dates. See if there’s missing persons or homicides that match the initials for those dates. Check our newspaper records, anything you can think of, okay?’

And then he was out the door behind Roth, the two of them hurrying down the corridor toward the stairwell. Roth called the car pool from his cell, told them to have a vehicle ready. A siren was the only thing that would get them through the early evening traffic.

 

Carl Oliver stood on the lowest rung of the stairwell leading to John Robey’s apartment. He unholstered his gun, chambered a round, set the safety and returned it to the holster. He held his breath for a moment, reached for the handrail, and then started up the risers.

 

Miller drove, pulled the car out onto New York Avenue.

‘Don’t take Fifth,’ Roth said. ‘Back up there.’ He indicated over his shoulder and through the rear window. ‘Take Fourth, take a right onto M, and then take New Jersey at the Morgan Street junction . . .’

Miller followed Roth’s advice, and within a minute was hitting gridlock at the New York Avenue turning.

‘Radio Oliver,’ he told Roth. ‘Tell him to keep an eye on whoever but not to go up there until we arrive.’

‘You think it’s Robey?’ Roth asked as he reached for the handset.

Miller shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think it’s—’

‘Then who?’

Miller leaned on the horn as a car swerved from the left and cut him up. ‘Asshole!’ he hissed, and then looked back at Roth. ‘Who is it? Jesus, I don’t fucking know who it is,’ he said. ‘Don’t even know that I want to know.’

Roth pressed the handset button and waited for someone at the Second to pick up.

 

At the top of the stairwell Oliver paused. This was the shit he didn’t like. Some guys got a rush for this stuff, went looking for it, but not him. He had a leaning towards the methodical stuff, the questioning, the interrogations. In-your-face heroics was for other people.

He leaned against the edge of the wall and eased around the corner. The walkway to Robey’s apartment door was clear. He stepped back toward the top riser and hesitated before moving again. A moment’s consideration of whether he should wait. He didn’t want to go into the apartment. Then again, he didn’t want to be the guy who was too scared to act. Rock and a hard place. He wondered whether he should take out his gun, hold it down by his side. Knew that if something happened fast he might react, and in reacting he might shoot someone who didn’t need to get shot. A sweat had broken out down the middle of his back. He reached up and ran his finger around the inside of his collar. He decided, for no other reason than to end the indecision. What harm could be done by checking it out? He had to check it out. It was a situation without choice. This was police work. You went looking for trouble, you checked things out, you were the other side of the crime scene tape and you knew exactly what had happened.

Carl Oliver took a deep breath, put his hand on the grip of his holstered gun, and started down the walkway to John Robey’s apartment.

 

‘Can’t reach him,’ Roth said. ‘He can’t be in his car. They’re patching through to his radio but he’s not answering.’

‘Fuck,’ Miller said. He swerved around a car as it pulled out, and he flipped the siren. The junction of O Street to their left, P Street up ahead, then Franklin. Miller hammered the heels of his hands on the steering wheel. Every way they turned they’d been stopped. Everything had been an almost-answer, an almost-truth, something that led to something that led to something else. And they were all just small parts of some greater picture, a picture that Miller felt he was beginning to see. He did not want to assume what it might be; he did not want to let his imagination run with it. He felt that it would only serve to complicate something that was already too complicated. He wanted to get to Robey’s apartment, find out if anyone was in there or if Oliver had made a mistake. He wanted Cohen and Metz to return with the warrant so they could take a look inside. He wanted the books to give up their ghosts, the things that Catherine Sheridan wanted the world to know, and then he wanted it all to end.