The Angel of Knowlton Park (46 page)

He picked up the six pictures he'd gotten from Andrea Dwyer and looked at them again. He used a magnifying glass, then passed the glass and pictures to Kyle. "These look like they were taken in Osborne's apartment?" Kyle picked up the glass and spread out the photos. Burgess turned to Stan. "What about Taylor's apartment?"

Perry stopped abusing the wastebasket, examined the pictures, and shook his head. "It's a modern condo. This looks like a cellar."

"We find out where that phone booth was?"

"Yeah."

"Show me." Perry rolled out a city map and pointed. "There's a convenience store on that corner, isn't there?"

Kyle set down the magnifying glass with a sigh. "It looks like cement or stone. And pretty beat-up."

"So they had what? Abandoned house? Warehouse? Someplace they could go and shoot their dirty pictures without someone seeing. Somewhere in that neighborhood?"

"Osborne knows," Perry said.

"If he'll talk. What about Taylor?" Kyle suggested. "I'll get Vince."

"What about Darlene Packer?" Perry said. "Maybe she knows something. Something she doesn't even know she knows, about where Ricky might be living. For that matter, what about the older sister. Shauna? She might turn out to be the hooker with the heart of gold if she knew her sister was in danger."

"Head of lead is more like it. But Packer's a possibility." Burgess had another idea. "Delinsky will know about abandoned places in that part of town. Delinsky and Aucoin."

Anxiety pulled them out of their chairs and onto their feet. Somewhere out there, two young girls and a small boy were in danger. No one fooled themselves that Ricky Martin's relationship to Iris would give her much protection. Even if they got nothing, it was better to be out there, looking. Perry went to find Shauna Martin and Darlene Packer. Kyle left to meet with Aucoin and work his half of the East End. Burgess got the other half and Delinsky. They left Vince Melia and Rocky Jordan working on getting access to Taylor or Osborne. Perry would meet up with them later.

Delinsky tapped the wheel with his big hands a few times, looking out into the night. "I'm sorry about this morning. I was being stupid."

"Don't worry about it. Everybody gets stupid sometimes. I've been where you are. Someday you'll be where I am. It's the same job, just the view is different, depending on where you sit."

Delinsky nodded. "Any idea what we're looking for?"

"As Detective Perry so eloquently put it, 'needle in a fuckin' haystack.' We're looking for someplace Osborne might have used to take his dirty pictures. A place Ricky Martin might coop. Place McBride might take someone—empty house, building, warehouse."

"Gonna be a long night, Sarge. You want to ride with me or you want to follow?"

"I'll follow you." He hoped Delinsky wouldn't take it wrong. He just wanted to be alone with his thoughts. Two hours later, butt sore and eye sore from staring out into the darkness, his knee afire from hundreds of stairs, he wasn't so sure. Increasingly, his thoughts were stark neon messages flashing "urgent" through his brain. The knife in his gut was a steady pain now, another permanent fixture like his knee. Delinsky didn't look like he felt much better, and the radio had served up nothing that looked like news, good or bad.

They stopped at the top of the hill above the cemetery and looked back down at the city sparkling below them. Lights burned. Cars moved. Boats bobbed out on the water. Except for the incredible thickness of the air, the storm lurking on the horizon—nature mirroring his inner state—it might have been a normal night. A city crawling with police officers. Tension ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level, and yet things looked so normal. He wanted to get out and yell. Wake everyone up. Blow off some of the awful tension.

What do you do when you know something awful is happening but you can't find it or fix it, and fixing things is your job? Making the world safe. "Can you believe it?" he said. "Life's just humming along like nothing is happening." It had been so many hours. What were the chances the three of them, any of them, were still alive? Slim to none. But he had to hope.

"Most of those folks down there, they don't give a damn," Delinsky said, his voice a deep rumble in the dark. "They're dead."

Pool cue hit the eight ball. Eight ball careened down the felt, slammed into a random thought, and drove that thought right into the pocket. He straightened up like he'd been electrified. "Cemetery. Maintenance shed," he said. "Crypt where they store bodies in the winter? Kyle said cement or stone."

"Say what?"

"The cemetery. In Timmy Watts's treasure box, he had a small American flag and a ribbon from a memorial wreath. Neddy Mallett said his sister Nina met McBride yesterday in the cemetery. Cemeteries have crypts. Vaults. Whatever they're called, right? So, where would it be?"

"This is Aucoin's turf. Let's see what he knows."

Minutes later, there were five of them standing there. Remy Aucoin was a fairly new policeman, but he came from a police family, and he'd grown up in the neighborhood. Aucoin dug through papers in a battered briefcase and pulled out an old map. "Eastern Cemetery," Aucoin said, spreading the map out on the hood of his car. "Let's take a look."

"I'll call Vince," Kyle said. "Let him know where we're at."

They identified all the places that seemed to offer possibilities and split the list, Aucoin and Perry going for the maintenance shed, Burgess and the other two heading for the crypt.

Police officers are supposed to be fearless, but only the stupid or careless truly are. Good, healthy fear is what keeps you alive. As Burgess crunched his way down the glass-strewn sidewalk in the pungent darkness, guided only by the occasional streetlight, his looming sense of dread intensified. His vest and collar felt too tight. He unsnapped his holster, checked his gun, replaced it. Didn't want a repeat of the fiasco with Osborne.

In the distance, thunder rumbled. Jagged streaks of lightning danced across the sky. Car tires hissed on the dew-damp pavement. A motorcycle revved its engine and tore off into the night like an angry bee. Sirens screamed and blue lights flashed as the oblivious city went about its business. Kyle stumbled and muttered a curse as a howling ball of fur scurried across the street. Delinsky moved silent and almost invisibly beside him.

Their destination was a black iron door leading to an underground room built directly into the hillside. In childhood, he had passed it often, wondering what mysteries lay inside. He'd felt the delicious shiver of danger at contemplating seizing the big ring that served as a handle and pulling. Once or twice he'd tried. It had always been locked, never revealing the cold, dark room that lay beyond—the room his mother had told him was for storing bodies in winter when the ground was frozen too hard for burial. On a winter night after one of his parents' more violent fights, when the smashing of dishes and the sound of blows had subsided, he'd found his mother unconscious on the kitchen floor. For a second, he'd thought she was dead, imagined them bringing her here and shutting her up behind this door. Across the years, the memory of that silent, bloody kitchen was as vivid as yesterday.

Now he studied the door. It was a bad situation. There were no windows and only one way in. No way of knowing what lay on the other side, who they might find. Whether Martin or McBride might be armed. Positioning the others to his right, he grabbed the handle, using the door as a shield. Slowly and ponderously, the heavy door began to move. He opened it a few inches and stopped, peering cautiously through the opening. It was absolutely black. He pulled harder. The door resisted. Moving quickly across the opening, he signed for Delinsky to trade places.

Delinsky seized the handle and pulled. The door gave suddenly with a sharp creak, scraping loudly over the cement sill. He held his breath, listening, detecting no sounds in the darkness. Using the doorframe as a shield, he stuck his flashlight around the edge and snapped it on. Cold, musty air streamed past as he illuminated the cavernous darkness. A high-ceilinged stone cave lined with stone racks along the walls for coffins. Some trash, stubs of burned candles, and a torn sleeping bag spoke of occasional human occupancy.

He stepped in, letting the flashlight travel around, checking tier after empty tier. Burgess doing one side, Kyle and Delinsky the other. Moving back toward the farthest corner.

Kyle's light stopped on what looked like another ragged sleeping bag. With an exclamation, Kyle rushed forward, fumbling with the zippers, pushing back the filthy, rotting cloth to reveal some curly brown hair, a bare shoulder in a blue dress. Kyle's scrambling fingers burrowed through the hair, searching for a pulse.

"Alive," he said. "Alive. Alive. Delinsky. Ambulance."

Delinsky had already stepped outside and was calling. "I'll get the car," he said, taking off at a run.

Kyle supported her while Burgess peeled the filthy bag away. Together they carried Iris Martin outside, laid her out on the blanket Delinsky had spread on the sidewalk, and began working at the bands of duct tape that wrapped her like a mummy.

It hadn't been a matter of simply confining her. The placement and amount of tape was sadistic, covering her face like a thick mask with only a minute space for breath, her arms pulled back until they were nearly dislocated and then bound there, her legs bound from thigh to ankle. She had left that morning with high hopes and a pretty blue dress to meet the man who'd done this to her.

Despite the heat of the night, her skin was cold from the chill of the crypt. Burgess wondered if McBride had planned to leave her there. Wrap her up until she was helpless, then leave her to die a slow, terrifying death.

Delinsky returned with scissors from his first aid kit and began cutting away tape, loosening her arms and legs and then going carefully to work on the tape across her face. There was no way to remove it without hurting her but he was as gentle as he could be. Burgess and Kyle worked the tape off her arms and legs, wincing as the pieces pulled free from the bruised white skin. When they could, they folded in the sides of the blanket and wrapped them around her.

Delinsky cursed and murmured as he worked, a profane running litany of what he was going to do with McBride when they caught him, mixed with gentle endearments designed to support the unconscious girl's courage. Burgess heaved himself to his feet and called Melia to report on what they'd found and request a crime scene team. Then he called Perry.

"Nothing here, Joe. We're going to check out a building at the other end."

Medcu arrived and they sent Iris off to the hospital, Burgess explaining to them about her deafness. Delinsky followed in his car, to be there to get her story if she was able to tell it, and to provide a familiar face when she woke among strangers. Burgess suggested Delinsky call the school, see if someone could find Missy Steinberg and send her to the hospital. Iris was going to need all the support she could get.

He stood a minute, regrouping, watching the ambulance pull away. Then they turned things over to Rudy Carr and his crime scene team and went to join Perry.

"I don't know whether to laugh or cry," Kyle said.

"Me neither." Any satisfaction he might have taken from finding Iris Martin was erased by the fact that they still had two more children to find, so many hours had passed, and they were running out of places to look. He was stumbling over his own feet and Kyle wasn't doing any better. Anyone watching would have taken them for a pair of drunks looking for a private corner of the cemetery to finish their bottle.

Suddenly, the quiet of the graveyard was shattered by a voice yelling, "Stop! Police!" followed by the unmistakable sound of a gun. Like Siamese twins, he and Kyle hit the ground.

"That way," Kyle said. Here, away from the streetlights, the night was black as despair. But they could both hear the thudding footsteps heading in their direction. "Now, if they don't shoot us by mistake..."

Burgess grabbed the radio. "Perry? Aucoin? What the hell's happening?" and gave, as best he could, their location.

"He's heading right toward you," Perry yelled. "And he's got something like a small cannon."

"Who? Which one?"

"Ricky fucking Martin."

The footsteps were getting closer. Burgess shut off the radio. Silently, he and Kyle moved apart, loosening their guns, watching for movement in the darkness. Then, suddenly, Martin was right in front of them. Abandoning his vow to never tackle anyone again, Burgess dove at Martin's legs, executing a neat take-down, while Kyle grabbed the body.

Martin was a wild man, gouging, thrashing, kicking, and swinging the gun like a club, inflicting damage wherever he could, all the while roaring, snarling, and spitting. His shirtless torso was so slippery it was like wrestling an octopus. It didn't stop until Kyle used his heavy flashlight on Martin's shoulder and arm, flailing until the roars subsided.

It took both of them to get his arms behind his back and get the cuffs on. Only then, shining the light on his face, did they see why he was so slippery. He was coated with blood, his eyes wild and unfocused. Burgess called for backup and a transport van. Martin went on cursing, spitting and trying to bite. Kyle grabbed him by the hair, hauled his head back and raised his flashlight. "You don't settle down, I'm going to ram your teeth down your throat. You hear?"

Martin tried to jerk his head free, spat at Kyle, aimed a foot at his crotch. Kyle sidestepped, nodding. "Okay, brother. If that's how you want it." He kicked Martin in the balls and when Martin bent over, brought his knee up into Martin's face. The man went down, scrambled up, and lurched at Kyle again. Kyle landed another kick and a few punches and this time, Martin went down and stayed down. "PCP, Joe? Angel dust?" he asked.