Moonlight Falls (30 page)

“I’ll give you exactly five seconds to write down the social security number and account number,” she said. “Then I want you out of this house.”

It took me about three.

I handed her back the envelope.

She took a moment to smell it. I mean she actually brought it to her face.

“You’re smoking again.”

“No, you live with a smoker. My old good friend, remember?

She gave me a funny look.

I said, “Thank you.”

She said, “Just leave.”

I started for the stairs. But before I took them, I turned back to her.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “about the way things turned out.”

“I’m sorry for our son. I’m sorry for you and I’m sorry for the sad son of a bitch I replaced you with. Or maybe I’m sad for what you’ve become.”

She took a staggered step back, looked me up and down, shook her head. For a moment, I thought she was going to pass out.

“Are you really going to call the cops, tell them I was here?”

She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.

“My God, Richard,” she sadly laughed. “When are you going to wake up to the fact that you have damned us all?”

68

HOLDING OUT HIS HAND, Cain gripped the damp stainless steel doorknob, turned it counter-clockwise. When he discovered the door unlocked, he pulled it open, quietly stepped into the dark kitchen storage room. That’s when he felt the hand grip his jacket collar, yank him back outside, toss him to the ground.

With the rain falling into his eyes, Cain peered up, made out a dark-haired short man dressed entirely in black leather.

He went for his gun, but not before the dark man leaned down, pressed a pistol barrel against his forehead first.

“Reach for a weapon,” he said in a Russian accent, “and I will blow Yankee brains all over the pavement.”

Cain nodded.

“Where’s Joseph?” he asked.

“Maybe you answer question for me.”

“I thought he’d be here.”

“You have appointment?”

“Yes … no.”

“You want to tell me something on behalf of missing Joseph?”

With sound-suppressed automatic gripped in his left hand, the dark man reached into Cain’s leather with his right, pulled out the Lieutenant’s service weapon, tossed it into a dumpster pushed up against the wall.

“Get up,” he insisted, once more yanking on the cop’s jacket collar. “Tell me why you came here with weapon.”

I came here to kill your fucking Russian brother before he kills me first, you stupid fuck!

As Cain slowly emerged from his knees to his feet, both men were unaware of the car that pulled up along the back street, cut its engine and its lights before coming to a quiet stop.

69

I FELT LIKE CRYING.

But I sucked it up and drove the less populated secondary roads on my way back to George’s town house; a route that took me through narrow alleys flanked on both sides by the backs of the old brick row houses. I motored steadily past overfilled dumpsters and countless burnt out cars that had been stripped of everything but their steering columns. The drive took me ten more minutes than it would have had I gone the usual, out-in-the-open route.

Which meant that as soon I arrived at the town house, I wasted no time.

Out in Robb’s living room, I sat at the computer and went online as an AOL guest. When I typed in “WWW.BANKVONERNST.COM,” I came up with a web site that was housed in Liechtenstein. Post-a-Note laid out before me, I typed in the account number and the social security number in the spaces indicated.

The on-line spreadsheet appeared before me in a flash.

Scrolling down I discovered thirty-two separate transactions dating back the past four years to early 1999, all of them adding up to a grand total of $400,806 US.

Unless Mitch Cain had come into some money from some recently deceased aunt or uncle, he was making one hell of a payday as a detective for the Stormville Police.

I made a hardcopy of the statement.

If I’d possessed Mitch’s passwords, I might have cashed the damn thing out, sent all proceeds care of the Attorney General. For now, the bank statement would have to do.

In the galley kitchen off the dining room, I pulled George’s phone book back out from the stand below the wall-mounted telephone. Since I couldn’t very well go to the police with my discovery, I located the address for the local F.B.I. In another drawer I found an envelope and some stamps. Addressing the envelope, I penned URGENT under it and stuck it sideways under the lid of George’s mailbox as outgoing mail.

That done, I pulled the duct-taped tape recorder off my chest, set it onto the coffee table. Setting my aching body down onto the sofa, I laid back, head against the springy cushion. To say that I felt very heavy and tired was pretty much an understatement. The 9 mm resting on my chest—easy access—I closed my eyes, drifted.

There was a slam.

I shot up, pistol in hand, aimed for the door.

“Take it easy, Divine. It’s just me.”

George, a white bag in hand.

I took a minute to catch my breath. How long had I been passed out?

“Did you get the shots?”

“We’re ready to roll,” he grinned.

70

THE SUPER 8 FILM had been shot from across a rather dusky, early morning side street somewhere near Woodstock’s rather quaint downtown business center. It showed Mitchell Cain and a thick, black clad (Russian?) man standing outside the back service entrance door to what looked like a restaurant.

The Russo.

Smartly, George took a quick shot of the dashboard-mounted digital clock at that exact point in time. It read 7:30. When the film once more focused on the two men, there seemed to be no doubt that they were arguing. Maybe there was no sound to go with the old 8 mm, but clearly the dark man was holding a silenced automatic on Cain. Clearly they were moving their mouths rapidly and at certain points, waving their arms at one another. I had no idea what they were saying. Although I could not see their faces, there was no doubt that they were fighting, face to face, nose to nose, seemingly oblivious to the pistol as they were the steady rain that soaked them.

But then Cain suddenly turned, tossing a burning cigarette to the wet concrete sidewalk and stormed off across the road.

Another shot at the rental car clock showed 8:20. Cain had been negotiating with his buyers for nearly an hour.

That was it: the visual eyebrow-raising evidence I needed.

The end of the five-minute film ran through the projector causing it to flap with every spin of the top reel. George killed the power, hit the lights.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

He folded down the screen, took a look outside.

Still all clear in Stormville, he reassured. As luck would have it, the town house had belonged to his mother. It was still registered in her name. As for the telephone directory, George was conveniently unlisted. But the safety cushion, such as it was, wouldn’t last very long.

“What now?” he asked turning back to me.

I told him about my little talk with Lynn, about how she led me to the Swiss bank account, how the bank statement was on its way to the FBI.

“She did that for you?” he said, as if surprised.

“Scarlet and Mitch,” I said. “It appears they’d been bedding down.”

He pursed his lips, shook his head.

He said, “It’s official. Detective Cain is now our primary suspect in the murders of Scarlet and Jake Montana. Hands fucking down, Divine old boy.”

I ejected the mini cassette tape from the recorder, put it with the film, my copy of the Swiss bank statement and the case file I pulled from George’s office earlier. I told him that if we had half a brain between us, we would lay low until dark. That would be the safe thing to do, I said. But then, we couldn’t afford the convenience of safety.

George went back into the kitchen, grabbed a Diet Coke, sat down with it on the chair across from the couch. He made a tight-lipped grimace with his lips. Maybe he didn’t say a word about it, but the expression told me he was experiencing pain.

“There’s one more job we have to pull off before I decide to end this thing,” I said.

He pulled a half-smoked marijuana cigarette from his shirt pocket, lit it with his Bic lighter, took three or four tap-tap drags on it, careful not to burn his lips on the fiery nub.

During the trip up to Woodstock, he had tied his long hair back into a ponytail. His face was covered in gray-black stubble. He looked older than fifty-one or fifty-two. But then I also knew how much pain George had to endure day in and day out; how he didn’t have much time left for this world.

“What’s on your mind?” he exhaled.

I stood up, pocketed my 9 mm in the waist of my jeans.

“I’ll explain as best I can during the ride to the Home Depot.”

The plan, as I relayed it to George, went something like this: time was short. Which meant we’d have to back-door the operation. Rather than confront the body part buyers (or what was left of them) up in Woodstock (and who knew where else), we’d go after the product itself. Or in this case, the “host” of the product—the dead and buried victims.

More specifically, my theory revolved around locating just one of the mutilated bodies, attaching it to Cain and Montana either by means of procedural association (the police report) or, better yet, by physical contact.

“The point is,” I said to George as he drove us towards the Washington Avenue Home Depot in his El Camino, “I don’t really have to prove anything. All I need to do is prove that a conspiracy exists.”

Eyes on the rain-soaked road, George shrugged his shoulders.

I told him that the mere suggestion of a conspiracy would naturally lead the F.B.I. to believe that a cover-up was in the works. The cover-up would lead them to the frame-job Cain and Montana had been pulling on me for all these months and years. I told him that Cain, acting in the position as the Chief Investigating Officer on the unnatural deaths he called me in on, never recorded the fact that he pulled organs from the bodies. That deception alone, if it could be proven, was definitely going to raise the attention not only of Prosecutor O’Connor, but also the victims’ surviving families.

“But what’s to prevent Cain from denying everything?” George asked. “He’ll just say he had no contact with the bodies once they left the scene of the crime or accident.”

I said, “No way he can deny everything.”

“And how’s that?”

“Because a police report that requests either partial or no autopsy, by its very definition, must already be thorough and conclusive as to the cause, manner and mechanism of death. Gonna look a little suspicious if he overlooked a missing set of kidneys. If there was no autopsy, how’s a set of kidneys missing?”

He nodded.

“It’s the can of worms trick,” he said. “Poke a hole through the tin lid, get the prosecutor to peek inside.”

“I’m gonna do better than that. I’m gonna shove a fist-full of night crawlers down his throat.”

The El Camino cruised west along the long stretch of highway.

After a long beat, George said, “Let me get this straight. You want to dig up one of the bodies Cain chopped up for spare parts.”

I turned to him.

I said, “The last thing he wants is for one of those chop jobs to suddenly show up, six feet
over
-ground.”

George shot me a look.

“The last thing he wants is a postmortem evaluation,” he added.

“That’s where you come in,” I said. “You perform a postmortem from caudal to clavicle. We do it in front of a video camera, prove without a doubt that the body was cut after it was pronounced dead.”

I could tell Robb was thinking about it.

“The cadavers all gave consent for organ donation,” he pointed out. “What if the court just assumes the bodies were cut up in the interest of science or medicine?”

“You and I both know that anybody under the age of twenty-one must have their family notified prior to going under the knife. Regardless of driver’s license permission. If the family had been notified there would have been a clear paper trail leading up to the recipient.” I picked up the manila folder I took from his office file cabinet earlier, thumbed through it to exaggerate its thinness. “Look,” I said. “No paper trail.”

“Not the first time I’ve laid eyes on those folders,” George said. “Just the first time I’ve realized how stupid they are. If you’re gonna cut up bodies for spare parts, you might as well fill out the false paperwork to cover your corrupt ass.”

I said, “What Cain and Jake must have been counting on was the reactions of the families involved. As far as the families are concerned, the bodies of their loved ones were buried just the way they looked in life. You know how funny people can be about death—”

“—Hermetically sealed caskets,” George jumped in. “Stainless steel-lined concrete burial vaults. Nonsensical when you really stop and think about it.”

“Ah yes, but it makes people feel real calm and collected inside to know that their beloved dead and buried are protected from the worms.”

“I see where you’re headed, Divine,” he said. “Any of those families get word their little boy or girl’s body has been messed with and select members of the S.P.D. may be responsible, they’ll create a shit storm so thick even a slick operator like Cain won’t escape it.”

“Exactamundo,” I said.

“Exactamundo?” George asked with a sour face.

“Sorry,” I said. “But you know what I’m like when I get excited.”

71

THE FOUR POLICE BLUE-and-whites pulled up to the back doors of the Stormville Medical Arts Center. Two on one side of the glass and aluminum entrance, two on the other. With weapons drawn they slipped out of their cruisers and awaited further instructions from their department supervisor, Mitchell Cain.