A Simple Act of Violence (60 page)

That most of all: he wanted the nightmare to end.

A stream of traffic seemed suddenly to run to their left down Franklin. The road ahead cleared.

‘Go!’ Roth said, and Miller put his foot down to cover the last two hundred and fifty yards to their destination.

 

Standing at Robey’s apartment door, Carl Oliver closed his eyes for a second and then raised his hand slowly. He knocked once, stepped back, rested the palm of his hand on the butt of his sidearm. No mistaking: his heart was running ahead of itself, his pulse trying to catch up.

He gave it a good thirty seconds. There was nothing. Not a sound from inside.

He raised his hand and knocked again, louder this time, gave it ten seconds and then shouted, ‘Police! Open up, Sir!’

This time there was something, definitely a sound from inside the apartment.

Oliver felt his heart stop. Thus far it had been assumption: that someone had returned, that someone had found their way into the apartment, that he would knock on the door and there would be a response. Now it was more than assumption. Now the situation created an entirely different range of emotions and thoughts.

Oliver stepped back a pace, wondered if he should stand to the side of the door. He was not familiar with such scenarios. Movies he had seen yes, and at the academy they went through some brief explanations of how one handled such situations. But no amount of training with other rookies could prepare you for what you felt at such a time. This was something that could not be compared to anything else he’d experienced. He was not a veteran cop or an ex-soldier. He had not done two tours of duty in Iraq. He did not know how to deal with the feelings he was experiencing. He only knew that if he screwed this up another woman could die. Maybe two. Maybe more.

He sensed that whoever was inside was now close to the door, and then Oliver heard the man’s voice.

‘Who is it?’

‘Police, sir. It’s the police. I need you to open up the door.’

‘Why? What do you want?’

‘Is that you, Mr Robey?’

Silence.

‘Gonna ask you to identify yourself there, sir. This is the apartment of Mr John Robey. Are you John Robey?’

Again there was silence.

Oliver felt his heart in his throat. This was where it went one way or the other. This was where he’d get a reprimand for not waiting for back-up. This was where the voice command drills only served so much purpose.

‘Sir . . . gonna have to ask you one more time to open the door—’

‘Okay, okay, okay . . . chill the fuck out for God’s sake will you?’

The sound of the lock snapping back. Oliver felt himself tense up inside.

The door handle turned, the door started to open. Oliver took a step to the left. Put himself out of any direct line of fire. He wondered what on earth he believed might happen. There was someone inside. Right now they were cooperating. They would open the door and everything would be fine. It would be someone who was supposed to be there . . . Robey’s brother with a spare key come to visit . . . a friend from down the block come to feed the cat at Robey’s request. They would identify themselves, and there would be a moment of awkwardness as Oliver realized that some kind of mistake had been made.

Everything was going to be fine. Everything was going to be just fine . . .

The door opened.

The man who looked back at Detective Carl Oliver was not identifiable, because he held a scarf over the lower half of his face.

‘John Robey?’ Carl Oliver said, and it was the very last thing he would say, because the man took one step back, raised his hand, and with a silenced .22 he put a neat punctuation mark in the middle of Oliver’s forehead. With insufficient force to make it through the cranium and out the other side, that .22 would ricochet back and forth inside Oliver’s skull for a good eight or nine seconds.

Oliver stood there, his mouth slightly open, a crooked smile on his face as if a joke had been played on him, some kind of prank, and it was registering slowly, dawning on him that he’d been taken for a fool, and even now people were laughing, and he was going to start laughing too, and he was going to be a good sport, he was going to take it well, be one of the crew, and everyone would have forgotten about it by tomorrow . . .

But he didn’t start laughing, and nor did the man in the apartment. The man just waited until a thin line of blood oozed like a tear from the corner of Oliver’s eye and ran down his cheek, waited a moment more until Carl Oliver dropped like deadweight to the floor, and then he closed the apartment door quietly behind him.

He made his way quickly and quietly toward the back of the apartment, collected a few things that he could manage to carry unaided, and then he went out of the window.

 

Robert Miller and Al Roth found Carl Oliver four minutes later, and by that time whoever had shot him had disappeared.

Disappeared but good . . . like he was never there.

Within thirty minutes the Robey apartment was a confusion of people. Robert Miller stood for some considerable time in the outer walkway ahead of the front door. He felt the same as he had that night of Catherine Sheridan’s murder. He did not know Carl Oliver, not well, not as he knew Al Roth, but the death of a colleague brought an exceptional kind of fear. It was not the man who had been killed, but what it represented. He had been here at the wrong time. That expression had never made sense to Miller. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No. It was either the right place at the wrong time, or vice versa. It was never both. Both didn’t make sense. Robey’s apartment. That’s where Oliver was supposed to have been. Had he been two hours earlier he wouldn’t be dead. Right place, wrong time. That simple.

But Oliver’s killing meant a great deal more. His killing meant that whoever was involved in this considered themselves above the law. This was now no longer a matter of a few dead women. This was perhaps a matter of more than thirty killings, persons as yet unknown and unidentified, a matter of connections that went back through John Robey and Catherine Sheridan to something far, far greater. Miller believed this, believed it with everything he possessed, but there was no proof, nothing probative to suggest any connection - except a hairbrush that was ten or twenty feet from where he now stood.

Lassiter appeared, alongside him ADA Cohen and Chris Metz, in his hand the warrant to search the apartment - a warrant that was no longer required. Robey’s apartment was a crime scene; Robey’s apartment was full of photographers and forensics people, and when the crime scene unit showed up it was as if the Second Precinct had moved to New Jersey and Q Street.

‘This is just fucked,’ Lassiter kept saying, an edge to his voice that told of all the late night phone calls, the questions he would not be able to answer, the beratings, the criticisms, the threats and innuendoes regarding what would happen to his career if he didn’t . . .

Miller could not speak. He watched while pictures were taken of Carl Oliver’s body. He watched while he was put on a gurney, as the medics awkwardly maneuvered him down the stairway to the street. Marilyn Hemmings appeared. She raised her hand and smiled at Miller. Miller raised his hand back. He saw her just the once, saw her sign something, and then she went away.

A slick of blood was all that remained. It was small. It had leaked from Oliver’s mouth. There had been no visible exit wound to his head. He was thirty-four years old. He liked R.E.M. He smoked cigarettes that he rolled himself.

At one point Miller slid down to his haunches and wrapped his arms around his knees. Al Roth came out of the apartment and stood over him silently. After a minute or two he said, ‘When you’re ready . . . when you’re ready you better come in and take a look at this.’ And then he went back inside and left Miller there, in the outer walkway, with his forehead on his knees and his heart in his mouth.

By the time Miller got up it was close to eighty-thirty. He stepped into the apartment and waited patiently for someone he recognized to appear inside. It was Lassiter, and though Lassiter looked beaten to hell, though he didn’t really have a great deal of anything to say, Miller could tell from the man’s expression that whatever existed within that apartment had changed his mind about what they were dealing with. Changed it completely.

The room where Miller had spoken with Robey was the same. The dark carpet, the sofa against the right hand wall, the window on the left overlooking the back of the building, the parchment walls, the line drawings in their stainless steel frames.

‘In back,’ Lassiter said. ‘You need to come and see what we’ve found.’

Nanci Cohen was there, Al Roth and Chris Metz. Metz left when Miller and Lassiter stepped into the room. He looked overwhelmed and exhausted.

Miller didn’t say anything for a long time. The window overlooking the street had been boarded over, and beneath it was a wide table. Upon the table were two desktop computers, a police receiver, two laptops, a stack of manila folders, some of which had spilled to the ground. There were leads hanging free from the edge of the table.

‘We think there was another laptop,’ Roth said. ‘There’s a window back there in the kitchen. Whoever was here went out that way. There’s a fire escape . . .’ His voice disappeared as he realized that Miller was paying no attention at all.

The wall was ahead of them.

The wall was what it was all about.

The wall was a good twelve feet wide, maybe eight or nine feet high, and aside from the maps and sketches, aside from the confusion of multi-colored pins that marked streets and junctions and other unspecified locations, it was the pictures that communicated everything that needed to be said. Some of them photographs, some polaroids, some of them clipped from newspapers and magazines.

Miller found Ann Rayner without difficulty. As soon as he found Rayner he found Lee and Mosley. Catherine Sheridan had her own little collection of pictures to the furthest right-hand edge of the wall, her own memorial shrine - a good eight or ten pictures, all of them showing her at different points in her life. In amongst them was an exact duplicate of one of the pictures that had been found beneath Catherine Sheridan’s bed.

Miller turned and looked at Lassiter. Lassiter was no more than three or four feet behind him. On his face was an expression of both disbelief and realization.

‘Robert,’ Roth said.

Miller turned.

Roth raised his hand and indicated one of the photographs pinned to the wall. ‘Alan Quinn, December 5th.’

Miller was nodding. He knew who these people were. He knew their names and the dates on each photograph would compare precisely with the initials and numbers marked on the pages of Catherine Sheridan’s books. Whatever had happened between these people was bigger than anyone in the police department could have imagined. John Robey and Catherine Sheridan knew something, and whatever they knew went all the way back to however many years ago, and he and Al Roth, Frank Lassiter and Nanci Cohen - they stood there facing a wall of photographs, more than thirty of them, that said everything that needed to be said without any words at all.

There were a lot of dead people. They had been murdered, every single one. They had been murdered for some reason unknown. Perhaps by Robey, perhaps by Robey and Sheridan. Perhaps by someone else entirely, and Robey had merely recorded these events, collected evidence, and then drawn Miller right into its web.

‘He knew,’ Miller said at some point, turning toward Roth, toward Lassiter and Cohen. ‘He knew about all these people . . .’

Roth reached forward, and with his latex-gloved hand he carefully took one of the lower pictures off the wall. He held it for a moment, and then turned it so Miller could see.

‘Natasha Joyce,’ he said quietly. ‘She won’t be in the books.’

‘Whatever this is, it’s gone back I don’t know how many years,’ Miller said. ‘I think they’re all the same . . . I think we’re gonna find that all of them have been security screened at some point in their life, and then we’ll find that their name stops somewhere, or their social security number isn’t right, or they’ll have a bank account that was supposed to receive some money but the money never arrived . . .’

‘I have one man for this,’ Lassiter said. ‘John Robey. And right now he’s the only name and face we have for this thing. He goes on the TV.’ Lassiter turned and looked at Nanci Cohen. ‘We have a state-wide manhunt to organize,’ he said. ‘We have a dead police officer . . . and thank God that he wasn’t married and didn’t have kids, that’s all I can say. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s dead, and right now the only one who could have done this thing as far as I’m concerned is John Robey—’

‘I don’t think it’s Robey,’ Miller said, matter-of-fact.

‘You don’t think what is Robey?’

‘Who killed these people . . . I don’t think Robey killed the people on this wall. I don’t think he killed Natasha Joyce. I think he knows who killed them and he’s trying to help us—’

‘You what?’ Lassiter exploded. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? Everything about this says Robey. Right now we have the most successful serial killer in the history of the human race, or near as goddammit. Jesus, I can’t believe you’re telling me this—’

‘I’m saying it because I believe it,’ Miller replied. ‘I think he knows the truth, and he’s been trying to tell us the truth and we haven’t been listening—’

‘Well listen to this,’ Lassiter interjected. ‘We have a suspect on the run, and right now I don’t give a fuck what his real name might be or whether or not he’s our guy or the Archangel fucking Gabriel come down to guide us to the truth. I need him found. I need TV coverage. I need a press conference organized. Whatever the hell we did on the APB before I now need for every patrolman in the state. I need people at the airport, the docks. I need car hire firms, the bus stations, train stations . . . everything goes into finding John Robey. That’s what we’re doing right now. We’re finding this guy. We need to speak to him in relation to the murder of a Washington Police Department detective. That’s the line we take. We don’t go with the serial killer thing. We take this public. We get them behind us. We might piss them off completely with the parking citations and whatever, but they sure as shit don’t like it when people start killing us, know what I mean?’