Saints Of New York (30 page)

Bad
cop. No donut.

He wore his fears like a scar. He
wore his heart on his sleeve, and that heart was broken and bleeding, raw and
hollow.

Emptiness
like a raw tooth socket.

After three Bushmills he believed
he was forgetting what he had done.

You're
unaware of what's important until it's gone.

After the fourth he made his way
to the jukebox and put on Art Tatum.

I
drink because I am lonely. I drink because I am afraid. I drink because of my
father. Always the same old reasons: a liar never varies the story.

He tried to recall what had
happened in Caitlin's apartment. He tried to remember how hard he had hit her.

And
you were the darkest of all my nights, the brightest of all my days.

But he could not. He knew his
mind had closed down somewhere back there, and anything that was in his memory
would not be available for some time to come.

Change
here for everywhere, and everywhere else as well.

He felt like the worst kind of
human being. Less than that. Less than a human being.

Oh,
Frank, your mother must be so, so proud of you . . .

And he wondered what tomorrow
would bring. Wondered if Radick would speak to Valderas, if it was all over, if
the world as he knew it had now drawn to a close and there was no longer a
place on the stage for Frank Michael Parrish.

Lord
God, if nothing else, just grant me one more day.

Five, six drinks, and he knew he
should leave now, take a cab, go home and sleep it off.

And so he did. He paid his tab,
left a ten-buck tip, and found his own way to the street.

In his years as a policeman,
Parrish could have counted on one hand the times he'd been woken by nightmares.

Such was the power of the images
and emotions that assaulted him that night that when he woke he believed he was
still dreaming.

The pictures were there at the
very forefront of his mind; the emotions were in his gut, his chest, his heart;
there in the sweat on his hands, in the dampness of his sheets, his tee-shirt,
his hair.

The door that had once so
decisively divided the two parts of his life was no longer a door. It was a
curtain - thin as gossamer thread - and through it he could not only hear the
voices of the dead, he could now see their faces.

Kelly, Rebecca, Karen, Nicole,
Jennifer - even Melissa, because something told him that she was also dead, and
it told him with certainty.

And in amidst their faces was
Caitlin, looking back at him - at one moment sympathetic, in the next accusing.
In her eyes he could see Clare again, and he wondered what his ex-wife would
say to him next time he saw her. Maybe she wouldn't wait; maybe he'd get a call
from her . . .

You
fucked up your own life, Frank, and you fucked up mine. Can I please ask you to
stay away from the kids so you don't fuck theirs up
as
well? Is
that too much to ask?

But... but...
but.. .

Enough
already, Frank. Like I've said so many times, some people you have to wait for
them to fuck things up. But you? With you there's no waiting. You're a fuck-up
before you arrive.

Parrish
got up. He filled the bathroom sink and held his face underwater for as long as
he could bear.

He
drank some orange juice. He tried to make himself throw up but he couldn't.

He
went back to bed, and somewhere between agitated wakefulness and restless
sleep he spoke with the girls one by one. He listened to what they had to say.
He knew it was nothing more than imagination, but it possessed power sufficient
to make him believe that they were right there beside his bed explaining all
that had happened to them.

Girls
with lives that had never really started. Drugged and bound and fucked and
killed. Left in a hallway, left in a motel room, left in a cardboard box for
the janitor to find. What a waste. What a terrible fucking waste.

The
pain woke him, and it was a real pain, not something from his dreams. That
awful cramping in his lower gut again. The pain that had come back enough times
for him to think that perhaps he should really attend to it, see someone, get a
check-up.

But
he knew he wouldn't. Knew he wouldn't do anything until he'd found the truth of
these killings. There was just one dimension left to everything. The whole of
his life was now collapsed into learning what had really happened to Rebecca
and Kelly and the others. And why was it so important? Why this case above all
others? Because these girls were like Caitlin? Because they represented every
failure he had perpetrated with his own daughter? Because Caitlin could so
easily have been a victim too? Because if this man wasn't stopped, there could
be so many more?

Someone
out there knew the truth. Someone in Family South Two. Lester Young, perhaps? A
man who had transferred to the Probation Service, and could even now be making
the lost and forgotten disappear from the face of the earth . . .

There
was too much of a coincidence, too much of a connection for him to ignore it.
One of those forty-eight men knew these girls' names, knew their faces, their
phone numbers, their personal details. These girls had been chosen by someone
to serve some purpose. Perhaps for nothing more than sex. Perhaps for
photographs. Perhaps they had been dressed to look younger, and those images
were now being circulated in the community that paid for such things. There was
a depth of degradation and depravity out there that the vast majority of people
could not even comprehend. Whatever could be imagined, people had already done
it. Beyond that, they spent their time figuring out how to push the limits even
further. Whoever had taken these girls from their families, whoever had drugged
them and killed them, well they were nowhere near the bottom of the food chain.
How did Parrish know that? Because they had been found. Not only that, they had
been found intact. Those killers even more base in the scale of things would
have broken up those bodies, torn them to pieces and buried them or scattered
them to the four corners; they would have pushed them into waste pipes and
garbage disposal units, into the river, the New Jersey marshes. And they would
never have been found.

He thought of the age-progressed photographs in the
classified sections of the newspapers:
This is how our son would look
now. Have you seen him or anyone who looks like him? Please call 1-800- THE
LOST. Thank you. (This item funded by The National Center For Missing
Exploited Children.)

Thousands
of them. Tens of thousands. Where were they? Where did they go? Why?

Parrish
did not sleep again. He waited patiently until morning broke through the
bedroom drapes, and then he rose and showered and shaved and dressed.

A
new day, and yet a day like all the others.

'I fucked up.'

I 'I know.'

'Radick
told you.'

'He
did.'

'And
he told Valderas and God knows who else as well, right?'

'No,
he didn't, and he says he's not going to.'

'And
his reasoning behind that?'

'Ask
him.'

'I'm
asking you.'

'He
considers that what happened last night is between you and your daughter, not
between you and the department.'

'Well,
that's very noble of him.'

'I
don't think you can afford to be sarcastic, Frank.'

'I
fucked up, okay? I already told you I fucked up. I'm not being sarcastic, I'm
being straight with you.'

'Honestly,
Frank, I think that that's one thing you haven't been.'

'What
the hell is that supposed to mean?'

'Take
a look at yourself. He doesn't want to work with you, you know that? He knows
he doesn't have a choice, but he's putting in an application to transfer again.
He's looking at staying on in Homicide but moving to another precinct.'

'You
serious?'

'Of
course I'm serious. You physically attacked him, Frank. You broke up your
daughter's place, you kicked Chinese food down the stairs—'

'I
was pissed—'

'Pissed
or not, Frank, you have no right to do that kind of thing,
and considering the situation
you're in I'm amazed that common sense doesn't dictate some sense of balance to
your actions.'

'He
is twenty-nine. My daughter is twenty—'

'And
what does that have to do with it?'

'Goddammit,
he's a cop, Marie . . . he's a fucking cop. This is not the sort of thing I
want for her.'

'What?
You think he was over there trying to sleep with her? You think that's what was
going on? Honestly, Frank, I don't see how you could have been any further from
the mark on this one.'

'You're
telling me he wasn't over there trying to fuck my daughter?'

'Yes.
He was not over there trying to sleep with your daughter. He was over there
because
she
gave him her number, and
she
wanted
to speak to him privately, and let's see if we can guess what she wanted to
talk to him about, eh, Frank?'

'No
need for the sarcasm—'

'You,
Frank. You are the what and the who in everyone's life right now. Your
daughter, your partner, me. Frank Parrish has gotten everyone wrapped around a
pole, worried sick about what he's going to do next. Does he still have a job?
Are his kids going to stop talking to him? Is his partner going to move to
another precinct just to get away from him? It's all about you, Frank, so I
think you've succeeded in that much at least.'

'Succeeded
in what?'

'Getting
yourself up there in the limelight. Getting everyone to see what a mess you've
made of everything, but you're convinced that it's not your fault. I think we
all realize that now. I think, we're all willing to accept the fact that no-one
can help Frank Parrish but himself, and he's the last person in the world who's
going to do that.'

'Seems to me that you're saying things
that you really shouldn't be saying—'
      
'

'Why?
Because I'm your therapist? Though right now I don
'
t
see
that I'm doing you any good at all.'

'So
what? You're going to quit on me?'

'You're running
me to the limits, Frank, and I don't know
how
much longer I'm willing to let you do
that. I have so many more people to see, and all of them, without exception,
are a hell of a lot more forthcoming and straightforward than you. Thing
about
this job is that people actually
appreciate what you do for them - at least most of them do. but it's almost
impossible to overcome the difficulty of trying to help someone who just
doesn't want to be helped.'

'You're
bailing out on me? That doesn't show a lot of persistence now does it?'

'Persistence?
I'm not sure you're the best judge of persistence—'

'Don't
even go there, okay? Don't tell me about persistence. Persistence is pretty
much the only thing that keeps me doing this job. The few people you manage to
take off the streets, the ones that aren't kicked right out of court on some
bullshit technicality, are replaced by their brothers, their cousins, their
neighbors. You get older, they stay the same age. And the law? What the fuck
is that? The law and justice are not the same thing, haven't been for fifty, a
hundred years. Now the law plays out for the lawyers and the perps, not the
victims or their families, and definitely not for the police. What do we
represent for your average citizen? We're a fucking joke, that's what we are.
They know we're not going to catch anyone, and in the rare case that we do then
the asshole is gonna get the best defense that the taxpayer can buy. The guy
that got robbed is paying taxes to defend the guy who robbed him. What do they
hope we can do? They hope we can be some sort of legal revenge, that's what.
They hope that we'll chase down some guy, and that guy'll kick and scream and
resist arrest, and hopefully he'll have a gun or a knife and try something, and
we'll get a chance to blow him away. That's what they hope. They want us to
kill the perps so they don't have to carry the burden of guilt themselves.