The Judas Child (7 page)

Now Costello held up the arrest report with Phil Chapel’s signature at the bottom. “Why didn’t
you
make out this report, Kendall?” The captain’s words were vaguely threatening.

“It was Phil Chapel’s arrest. I just carried the bike for him.”

Costello shook his head. “Miss Fowler set the reporters straight on who did what and why.” The threatening tone was not vague anymore. “I really
hate
this, Kendall. From now on, you report directly to me, and you report every damn thing you do. You can start with an
accurate
arrest report. Then I wanna talk to you.”

When the door to the private office had slammed shut, Marge put one hand on Rouge’s shoulder. “It’s not as bad as you think.” She opened her appointment calendar. “See this? I got you down for an applicant interview. That’s what he wants to see you about. It’s a transfer to the State Police
and
a promotion.” Now she waved his mouth shut. “It doesn’t matter if you never filed the application. It wouldn’t be on his desk unless he asked for it. So you’re going to be a baby BCI investigator. Okay?”

She handed him a sheaf of papers. “That’s your report. I got all the facts from Miss Fowler’s interview. Just sign it and wait ten minutes before you hand it in. If you don’t pretend you typed it yourself, you’ll jerk him out of shape again.”

“Thanks, Marge.”

“Anything else I can do for you?”

“I need to find a woman.”

“I’m not easy, Rouge. I have to be seduced. I want flowers.”

“She’s tall, brunette—”

“I can do brunette. But I look better as a blonde.”

“The trooper at the desk said she was in here yesterday, but he didn’t get her name on the logbook. She’s got a scar on the right cheek. It runs down to her mouth. Looks like she’s always smiling on one side.”

“I’ve seen her.” Marge shook her head in mock wonder. “God, did she turn heads in this place. I don’t know what got the most attention, the face or that skirt. It’s slit up to—”

“Where can I find her?”

“You’ll see her tomorrow at the briefing.” Marge looked down at her appointment calendar. “She’s giving a lecture to the task force at ten o’clock. But you should think this through, Rouge. In my experience, nice girls wear panty hose.”

 

“So what do you think of our Ali now?” The prisoner addressed the shadow lying underneath his bed. He found great peace in merely sitting on the floor, leaning back against the cool wall and staring into that patch of darkness.

It was insane to regard a shadow as a sentient being. Or perhaps the young were onto something when they suspected their own beds of harboring entities; the children all knew they were not alone in the dark. And now Paul Marie knew it, too.

The shadow understood things about children, and little girls in particular. The thing under the bed had absorbed all the guilt of the prisoners in neighboring cells as well as their extensive knowledge. It was always awake to their confessions, so the priest might sleep through the long nights of whispered atrocities.

In the early days of confinement, when he had suffered the rapists, the shadow had emanated sorrow for him—and forgiveness for them. When Paul Marie had increased his size and beaten an assailant nearly to death, the shadow had absorbed the blows of the beaten man, felt all the pain, and thus allowed the priest to wield pipe and fist, to break the bones of faces and limbs without remorse, untroubled by empathy.

In exchange for services rendered, the prisoner gave sanctuary to the thing under the bed. He sometimes suspected it of being a flawed and somewhat shopworn deity in search of redemption, and doing hard time as the surrogate soul of a priest. He knew he had either lost his mind or found his faith. One of these things must be true.

But which?

No matter. He would not take the thing back inside himself. It could die under the bed for all he cared. Yet he did nothing to harm it, made no attempt to kill it, though it would have been as simple as lifting up the mattress and exposing the shadow to the overhead light.

Now Father Marie inclined his head in a prelude to conversation with the dark thing. “Are you hungry? What would you like best? Shall I throw you a bone—or a little girl?”

He stood up and made a square tour of his small austere cell, ten feet by ten, trailing one hand along the bare wall and then the bars.

Had something new been added to his delusion? He could hear the buzzing of flies, but there were none about.
No flights of angels’ wings—only the buzz of fat black insects?
A brain tumor perhaps. He would welcome that. Yes, perhaps the flies were inside him.

But now one flew past him, and then another brushed his skin, and he recoiled.

One more turn around the cell. He came to rest in front of the bed and knelt down to speak more intimately with the shadow. “About those little girls—you know how this will all turn out, don’t you?”

The flies had stopped their buzzing. They had gone away and left him in deep silence, where the real madness was. Now the priest could hear his own heart beating, and then another heartbeat layered over this one, light and tripping, skipping beats, struck with fear—the wild heart of a child.

 

Only Captain Costello was aware of David Shore. The small boy was not simply timid or nervous; he was clearly frightened, all but hugging the wall as he shrank back from the heavy foot traffic in the wide, noisy room of adults. Costello watched the youngster through a crack in the blinds covering the glass on his door. The child seemed fixated on the red-haired cop seated just outside the office.

Shy David was springing off the toes of his running shoes, set to fly, anchored only by fascination for Officer Rouge Kendall. Now David ventured away from the wall with short, halting steps, and Costello was reminded of that first endless trek across a ballroom, heading for the sure rejection of an invitation to a dance.

The child came to rest in front of the young cop, who was engrossed in a handful of papers. David bit down on his lower lip. His running shoes were undecided, stepping one foot forward and one foot back. A baseball card was clutched in his small hand. Captain Costello had to squint to make out the New York Yankees logo and a portrait of Rouge Kendall with his pitcher’s glove.

Well, the trading card was hardly valuable, since the pitcher had washed out in his first season on the rookie league.

The young cop looked up, surprised to see David hovering over him. Kendall stared at the boy’s card bearing the picture of himself as a twenty-year-old baseball player with his whole life in front of him.

Captain Costello sucked in his breath.

So far, the little boy from St. Ursula’s Academy had spoken to no one but Mrs. Hofstra, his school housemother. Costello was convinced that David would have more to say if he could only speak for himself.

Kendall took the proffered card from the boy’s hand, and while the cop searched his pockets for a pen to sign it, David melded into the crisscrossing patterns of uniformed officers, BCI investigators and feds. The child disappeared so quietly the cop had not yet noticed. His head was bent over the card as he signed his autograph for the ten-year-old fan.

Costello winced. The new trainee had blown it.

Rouge Kendall looked up to see the empty space where David had been standing.

Too late now.
The captain opened his office door. “In here, Kendall.”

The policeman entered the office with no sense of fear that Costello could immediately detect. But then, this was the first time he had been alone with the younger man. In the past four years, Kendall’s undistinguished career in a one-car town had made him invisible to the New York State Police. If not for the open file on his desk, Costello would have known nothing about him.

Though the captain had only moved to this state ten years ago, every county resident knew the name of child killer Paul Marie. The victim, Susan Kendall, had become less famous over time, and her sibling was totally anonymous. Until last night, when Costello had called for the background material, he never made the connection between this ordinary village cop and a formerly powerful publishing family.

As Rouge Kendall sat down in the chair by his desk, Captain Costello had an uneasy feeling. He was looking at a perfect specimen of youth, only twenty-five years old, yet bearing the calm demeanor of a more mature man and the weary eyes of a very old soul. Perhaps damage could account for that, and a murdered sister was a lot of damage. Certainly nothing else about this officer was outstanding. The captain had already decided that Rouge Kendall did not belong with the State Police—not as an investigator, and not even as a trooper.

Costello turned his attention to the hastily assembled file on his desk, too thick for such a mediocre cop. “This is all about you, kid.” He tapped the folder. “The Internal Affairs idiots see you paying property taxes on a fifteen-room mansion, and sirens go off in their pointy heads. They don’t know that even the white trash in this town have nice houses. So one of them ran a check on your source of income, and now he thinks a Manhattan auction house is fencing your stolen goods.”

Costello crumpled these papers into a ball. “We transfer all the shooflies to IA. Keeps them from playing with their guns and shooting themselves in the foot.” He separated out the bulk of the file and pushed it to one side. “I know you were born in that house. I guess you’ve been selling off heirlooms to make the taxes and upkeep?”

Rouge Kendall nodded.

“So we throw out the IA crap—except for this.” He held up two sheets of paper. “They took a statement from your bartender at Dame’s Tavern. And that’s how I happen to know you drink too much, and you drink alone.”

No response. Evidently the new recruit didn’t mind that his captain thought he was a lush. Or maybe this statement was also crap. Costello put it in the bogus pile at the edge of his desk.

“Now what’s left, Kendall? For the rest of your life, I only need one page, maybe half a page. When you were a kid, you washed out of a military academy after less than four months. You played ball in prep school, and the Yankees won you in a first-round draft. Instead, you went on to Princeton University and quit school at nineteen. You went back to the Yankees and signed for a hefty bonus. Again, you washed out. One of the coaches on the rookie league remembered you. The guy said you had the talent, but you never had any heart for the game. You blew every chance to dazzle the managers and never made the cut. Your coach wondered why you even gave it a shot.”

And now Costello leaned back in his chair and waited, but Rouge Kendall did not rush in to fill the silence with excuses and explanations.

The captain made his own best guess. “I figure you were after the money. Your old man left a lot of debts, didn’t he? That contract bonus was your only chance to make some real cash. Am I right?”

The young policeman only stared at him. There was nothing in Kendall’s face to suggest insubordination; evidently, he simply didn’t care if Costello got it right.

“Kendall, I don’t think you’ve got the heart for this job either—not the makings of a good investigator. You’re a twenty-five-year-old man who doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up. I don’t think you’ll last a month.”

“Then why am I here?” There was no sarcasm. Kendall seemed only curious.

Costello picked up the BCI application and flipped through to the last page, a form required for separation from the Makers Village Police.
No signature?
Apparently, no one had even asked if this cop wanted a transfer.
Now whose screwup was that?
He set the application forms to one side.

“Fair question, Kendall. You’re here because you made us look good when you brought in that girl’s bike.” And this was the truth, or part of it. “Thanks to you, we got a leg up on the feds, and right out of the chute, too.” God, he had loved that. “And I can make use of you for a while.”

The captain waited for some response. He had no idea what the younger man was thinking, and he was feeling oddly manipulated by the continuing silence.

Costello looked back at the slender biography. “So you went to St. Ursula’s Academy. Good. Marge Jonas got you an appointment with the school’s director. After you talk to him, I want you to get cozy with David Shore. I think the kid’s holding something back, probably nothing important. Maybe he’s just feeble. David was abandoned in a department store when he was three, lived in foster homes till he was six—that’s all we know about him. See what you can add to that.”

He had meant that Kendall should get out of his office and get on with the information gathering, but the younger man took him more literally.

“He’s not feeble,” said Kendall. “If David’s not from money, then he has a full scholarship at St. Ursula’s. That means his IQ goes right off the charts. The cutoff number is lower for paying students, but all the scholarship kids are high in the genius range.”

The new recruit was holding up the boy’s trading card, and now Costello could read the false prophecy, “Tomorrow’s Star,” printed at the bottom of the special issue.

Kendall slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. “And David is so crazy about baseball, he kept a five-year-old card on a player who never made the cut. He can’t say two words out loud, not to a stranger, but he talks to Mary Hofstra. So he’s—”

“Mary? You know the housemother?”

“I remember her, and she probably remembers me. If David’s holding back, it’s not because he can’t communicate. Either he doesn’t want to rat out the girls for something
they
did, or he’s ashamed of something
he
did.”

Costello nodded as he leaned far back in his chair.
So this cop can think. So?
Rouge Kendall’s brains had never been in question, but his history worked against him. “Okay, you be David’s new best friend. Nail down a case for runaways. Any questions?”