Entombed (34 page)

He knew the answers as
well as I did. There was no reason for me to speak.

Mike turned and
climbed up to the top of the dune, sitting down in the middle of the
path that led down the other side. He stared out at the distant
horizon, the seamless line between the ocean and the sky. "I understand
why you come back to this place."

I slowly moved up
toward him, trying to get a foothold in the shifting sand.

"I used to look at
you, back when we first started working together," Mike said. "I'd
heard about-about what happened to Adam from the guy you shared an
office with. I used to look at you and wonder how you handled the grief
at that young age, when you seemed to have everything else going for
you. I used to try to figure out how you got up in the morning and got
on with your life. I didn't know why you gave a damn about all the
needy derelicts who showed up on your doorstep, why you cared about
helping any of them when you could have slammed the door behind you and
walked away from it all."

"You think I didn't
wallow in my own self-pity for months? You think the thoughts I had
were any different than what you're going through this very minute?"

I reached out my hand
and Mike extended his, to pull me up next to him.

"You didn't want to
close your eyes in the hospital because you were afraid of your dreams,
your nightmares," he said. "Me? I wouldn't mind dreaming. The
dreaming's gonna be all I have left. It's knowing that every time I
wake up and open my eyes, my first thought will be Val, my first image
will be that broken little body that fought so hard to make it."

I stood behind him, my
hands on his shoulders. He didn't brush them away, so I squatted and
began to gently knead them.

"How long, Coop? You
got a smart answer for everything. You got an answer for that, for how
long it takes?"

"Longer than you can
even begin to imagine," I said. I talked to him about emptiness and
unfairness and profound unhappiness. I told him about the darkest
thoughts I had confronted and the hardest things I ever had to do in
the face of my despair.

"And it stops? You're
gonna tell me that someday this pain just stops?"

"It's going to be with
you forever, Mike. Just like you said. Before your eyes open in the
morning-every single morning- you'll be stabbed in the heart by some
memory of Val the second you're even conscious. The first moment you
have a thought, it's going to be Val," I said, pausing and backing away
a bit. "And then one day-maybe eight months, maybe a year from
now-you'll wake up one day and you'll think of something you forgot to
do the night before, someone you have to call about a case, some
problem you promised to take care of for your mother. Some really
trivial thing."

I stood up, ready to
turn and go. The sun had almost disappeared and the temperature was
dropping.

"That's the day you're
going to hate yourself most-the first time something sneaks into your
consciousness before Val does. You'll be angrier at the world than you
are right now. Mad at yourself, too, for letting it creep in there. But
then it will happen again, more and more often. And each time it does
you'll despise yourself for betraying Val's memory with such
insignificant thoughts. Until some very distant day, inconceivable now,
when the memories assume a balance of some kind, when they bring
pleasure with them almost as often as they cause pain."

"That doesn't seem
possible to me," Mike said, standing and brushing the sand off the seat
of his jeans. "I don't think I can deal with it."

"Nobody does. Nobody
wants to."

"You come out here to
be near him, don't you? You feel closer to Adam when you're here."

I didn't answer.

"The heavens, the
ocean, sand for as far as the eye can see-and not another person
around," he said. "Makes you pretty conscious of your own mortality."

He reached into his
pocket, removed a black velvet pouch, and handed it to me.

"Open it. Go ahead."

I untied the
drawstring and turned it upside down in my hand. Out slipped a diamond
ring-a slim gold band with a small brilliant stone in a classic round
setting.

"It's very beautiful,"
I said, holding it up and watching the gem sparkle, reflecting against
the shimmering surface of the water. "Did Val-?"

"Nope. A surprise,"
Mike said. "Valentine's Day. I had it up on a shelf in her bedroom
closet that she couldn't reach."

No wonder he'd been so
short of money these past two months.

He took the ring from
me and loped down the dune toward the edge of the water. I called out
after him but I knew there was no way to stop him. I watched as Mike
waded into the frigid surf, drew back his arm, and hurled Val's ring
into the riptide that was sucking the waves out to sea.

34

None of us felt much
like eating dinner.

More than the
landscape and the foliage change when winter comes to Chilmark. Not
only the general store closes, but so does every up-island restaurant
and inn. No fried clams at The Bite, no lobster rolls at The Galley, no
shore dinners at The Homeport, no conch fritters at Cornerway, and no
harpooned sword from Larsen's. There was always some clam chowder in
the freezer, and I defrosted it for the three of us. Mike barely played
with it while we tried to distract him with memories of weekends and
evenings that all of us had spent together.

Mike stood up from the
table, walked to the bar, and opened the liquor cabinet. He closed it
and turned to Mercer. "I'm not gonna drink. It's too easy to get
through it that way. Feel like a walk?"

They let themselves
out the back door and went off in the dark. I took a book into the
living room, added some logs to the fire, and poured myself the drink
that Mike had rejected. It was almost ten o'clock by the time they
returned.

Mike warmed himself in
front of the fireplace for a few minutes before telling us he was going
to try to get some rest. He and Mercer clasped each other in an embrace
and then Mike grabbed the banister and pulled himself up the stairs.

"I think he's worn
himself out enough so that he may actually sleep a few hours," Mercer
said, joining me with a glass of vodka.

"Did he talk?"

"Enough. You know he
was prepared for, well-the worst-a year ago, when Val's treatments
weren't going well. With the cancer in remission, this hit him like
such a bolt of lightning I'm afraid it's going to set him back twice as
hard."

"What time do you want
to head home?" I asked.

"Grab a ferry late
morning, if we can. Be in the city by six."

"Did you reach
Lieutenant Peterson this afternoon?"

"Yeah. You and I have
some catching up to do this weekend. We've lost Mike for the rest of
this one."

"I've been making a
list," I said, ticking off names with each finger of my left hand. "I'm
sure Peterson has, too. We've got to sit down with Professor Tormey,
now that we know what the Raven Society is. I'm going back at Gino
Guidi, whether or not Ellen Gunsher has been able to rework a deal with
his lawyer."

"You guys never got to
talk to him about Poe, and there he is, a major benefactor of the
cottage."

"Well, we didn't know
it at the time. And Emily's pal Teddy Kroon still has questions to
answer, as far as I'm concerned."

"It's not the right
moment to bring this up with Mike," Mercer said, "but you were with him
when he went to that retired cop's apartment, weren't you?"

"Aaron Kittredge?
Yeah."

"Mike had asked the
lieutenant to get his departmental file. The loo filled me in on that
today. Kittredge is my first priority when we get back."

"Why?"

"He left the
department without a pension. Had to sue to get it reinstated."

"He told us that. You
got the back story?"

"Rubber gun squad,"
Mercer said. "Got dumped to Central Park."

Trigger-happy cops
were relieved of their weapons while the shootings they were involved
in were investigated. Those who weren't indicted, but who weren't
completely exonerated either, wound up flopped into some uniformed
assignment where little harm could come to people in their way. Central
Park was one such holding zone-very few human residents, with only
squirrels and pigeons to endanger.

"Who'd he shoot?" I
asked.

"Think of the story
that Zeldin and Phelps told us."

"Of course," I said,
closing my book. "Ten years ago-the cop on his way into the Botanical
Gardens to talk to Zeldin. Shot a neighborhood kid in the back. Why the
hell was he going to see Zeldin in the first place? That had to be at
least ten years after Kittredge met Emily Upshaw, so what's the
connection? What's the renewed interest in Poe, assuming that's what he
was going to Zeldin's about?"

"I've been spinning
with that one all afternoon. You with me? We'll get to Kittredge first
thing Sunday morning."

Mercer said good night
and went upstairs to his room. I turned on the television to watch the
late news before going to sleep. Mike's devastating loss had taken my
mind off what had happened to me yesterday. My headache had been
replaced by a dull throb.

I could smell the
coffee brewing shortly before 7
A.M.
I asked Mercer to have the transit
department's report from the rapist's MetroCard faxed to the house, so
I could play with it on the long car ride home. The three of us moped
around before driving to Vineyard Haven to get on the short standby
line for the ferry. By one-fifteen, we were on Route 8, headed for I-95.

Stretched out on the
rear seat, my ski jacket pillowed under my head, I unfolded the papers
from Transit SIB-the Special Investigations Bureau-and began to scan
the report.

The MetroCard had been
purchased on January 3, a little over a month ago. It was sold at a
newsstand on Fifty-ninth Street. Unfortunately for us the buyer paid
cash. A credit card imprint might have solved the case nicely.

I leaned a pad against
my right knee, to chart the man's movements. Between eight and
eight-thirty every weekday morning, he boarded the downtown Lex at
Seventy-seventh Street. I drew a star at that intersection, just a few
blocks west of the location of all the attacks. In the evenings between
six-thirty and seven o'clock, most of the return trips were from the
East Fifty-first Street station, a commercial area surrounded by
financial institutions as well as offices and stores of every kind.

There were several
random rides, some late-evening trips home, where he boarded the train
close to midnight. I would have to compare these dates against the
crime occurrences, to see whether he was prowling the neighborhood
close to the times of the attacks.

There was only one
anomaly.

"Hey, Mercer. The
snowstorm two weeks ago, do you remember what night it was?"

"It was a Monday. I
don't remember the date but it was my RDO"-police jargon for regular
day off-"and I was home after the weekend. Why?"

"Give me a minute."

Mercer's Metro man had
followed his usual route in the morning, going back uptown from
Fifty-first Street a bit earlier than usual, at five-thirty in the
afternoon. An hour later, he got on the southbound train again at
Seventy-seventh Street.

At ten that same
evening, the rider took his first bus ride using this pass. All his
other travel had been in the tube. He boarded the M2 on First Avenue,
scanning the MetroCard in at the Forty-fourth Street stop.

All the details began
to click into place. The secure residence on the Upper East Side; the
physical description of the clean-cut, well-spoken assailant; Annika's
good ear-picking out a single word that sounded like the accent of an
upper-class British student; a rapist who disappeared from the
city-perhaps the country-for four years before returning; a compulsive
criminal whose DNA didn't seem to be in any data bank in America; and a
MetroCard from the perp's pocket that suggested he entered a bus in
front of the only buildings that stand on the east side of First Avenue
and Forty-fourth Street.

"John frigging Doe.
You want to nail the bastard, Mercer? Call the squad and get somebody
over to the United Nations stat. Find out whether there was a
reception, a speech, a party-whatever was going on the night of that
storm. Get the list of whoever attended-spouses, children, staff. Get
the address of every ambassador and delegate who lives in Manhattan."

Mercer was watching me
in the rearview mirror, smiling for the first time in two days.

"Take it to the bank,
gentlemen. John Doe is the son of an African diplomat."

35

Mike didn't even seem
to be listening to me.

Mercer was interested
in my idea. "Break it down for me, Alex."

"We're talking about
the comfort zone of the perp, right? We've been looking at black men
who work on the Upper East Side- restaurants, hospitals, high-rise
buildings. Clerical jobs, dishwashers, janitorial staff, and all the
other menial positions. Now think about how many of the diplomatic
corps and consulate employees associated with the United Nations live
in town houses in the exact same neighborhood. Do you have any idea how
many African diplomats and their families are living there?"

"The map has changed
so many times since I was in college, I'm embarrassed to say I can't
even tell you how many countries are in the UN."

"Coop's stretching on
this one," Mike said.

"Maybe so. Maybe I'm
too high up the ladder, but these missions all have big staffs, and
most staff members have families here, even U.S. nationals who live in
the zone."

"What else?" Mercer
said. "I better give our profiler a nudge. See if he's ready with his
geographic jeopardy spot, and if your theory works with it."