‘You spoke to Bill Young, you say?’ Tannahill asked. He was a short man, no more than five-six or seven, but he was wide in the shoulder, narrow in the waist. He was not a man who could wear off-the-rack suits and look like anything but a cop, a doorman, a convict released for a funeral.
‘We spoke to Bill, yes.’
Tannahill nodded as if quietly remembering something. ‘He okay?’
Roth shrugged. ‘As can be, you know?’
‘Fucking tragedy man, a real fucking tragedy. Guy was a fucking admiral. Fucking beast of a guy. Good fucking cop.’
Roth didn’t speak. Tannahill was on a fucking monologue and Roth felt it unwise to interrupt him.
Tannahill was elsewhere for a little while longer, and then he turned and smiled at Roth and Metz in turn. ‘You guys got this Ribbon bullshit then.’
‘We have,’ Metz replied.
‘Pair of fucking schmucks then, ain’tcha?’ He laughed. ‘You’re after McCullough now?’
‘We need to see him yes,’ Roth said. ‘He was here back in 2001—’
‘Very short while,’ Tannahill said. ‘Some guy was s’posed to come. I was a grunt back then, just your regular cannon fodder. Made sergeant in the middle of 2003. Knew the guy who went out to Port Orchard, guy named Hayes, Danny Hayes. His wife got pregnant, twins. Some problem. Something went awry. She wanted to move out near her folks in Port Orchard and it was fixed up so Danny transferred out there. We were supposed to get some guy from the Ninth, but then we got McCullough instead.’
‘You remember where he came from?’ Metz asked.
Tannahill shook his head. ‘He never said, I never asked. McCullough was not the sort of guy you’d choose to socialize with.’
Roth frowned. ‘How d’you mean?’
‘I don’t know where he came from. Vice maybe. Heard Narcotics. Fucked-up guy. Real fucked up.’ Tannahill smiled knowingly. ‘You ever see one of these characters, like you think they’ve maybe lost it, but they can still do the job, can still make the busts?’
Roth nodded.
‘McCullough was one of them. Normal world you’d have him put away somewhere quiet so he didn’t harm anyone; sugar paper and red crayolas, you know? But he had a good record as far as I know, and when he did that gig in September everyone was all over the place saying what a fucking hero he was. Me? I didn’t know what to make of him. Too intense for me altogether.’
‘That was the coke?’ Metz said.
‘Yes. Some high-quality shit that was.’
‘And it went out of lock-up?’
‘In a heartbeat,’ Tannahill said. ‘IAD was into everything within seconds. They questioned McCullough, but he could’ve eaten three or four IAD guys for snacks and still sat down for dinner. It was a real fucking circus. What really happened no-one knew. No-one got busted because there was no-one to bust. Guy on lock-up was as trustworthy as they come, had been doing it for about three hundred years. It was ghost fucking cocaine, I tell you.’
‘You think McCullough took it out?’ Roth asked.
‘Course he did,’ Tannahill replied without hesitation. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if the guy went into lock-up and hoovered it out the bag right then and there.’
‘You figure him for a user?’
‘I couldn’t figure him for anything. Drugs. Crazy. On the take. Hookers. Running some sort of sideline in stolen goods. God knows, man, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that the shit went down with the coke vanishing, IAD came in and out like a wet whirlwind, and then it went quiet until October.’
‘The drugs raid,’ Roth said.
‘Raid?’ Tannahill said, and smiled. ‘Who called it a raid? Was a fucking fiasco. CI got himself killed, McCullough was wounded. Whoever the fuck they might have been after got clean away—’
‘You saying it wasn’t a raid?’ Metz asked. ‘McCullough went out on his own?’
‘He sure did.’
‘But that’s not what the newspaper reports said . . .’
‘PR department,’ Tannahill said. ‘A raid gone wrong looks an awful lot better than a renegade cop and his CI trying to change the world on their own.’
Roth was quiet for a moment, trying to take this in.
‘McCullough was on his way out, you see,’ Tannahill went on. ‘After the September thing he started fucking things up. He was late all the time. He got his ass chewed by Bill Young more times than I care to recall. Far as I know, Young was looking at instigating disciplinary proceedings, and then we get this tip-off that McCullough has another sting going on like the September thing, but this time it’s a lot bigger. Everyone’s ready for some kind of operation briefing . . . we’re all wired up to get this thing going, and then before we know it we hear that McCullough went on his own with some black guy, the black guy got himself killed, and McCullough is once again in the firing line with IAD and God only knows who else.’
‘But IAD didn’t get a chance to do a full investigation, or so I understood from Bill Young,’ Roth said.
‘McCullough vanished, just like the coke in September. Disappeared, never to be heard of again.’
Roth was quiet. He looked at Metz. Metz was expressionless.
Tannahill shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s as good as it gets really,’ he said. ‘I don’t know that there’s anything else I can tell you.’
‘One thing,’ Roth said. ‘We have not been able to find a picture of him. The ID card that he used to open a bank account was the old style without the picture.’
‘Fuck, I don’t know,’ Tannahill said. ‘His folder went off with IAD way back when. They don’t store records here now. They’re all centralized somewhere near the Eleventh. You could go see them . . .’ Tannahill stopped for a moment. He paused in thought, and then shook his head. ‘Unless . . .’
‘What?’ Roth asked.
‘The evaluation,’ Tannahill said. ‘We had a precinct evaluation right after the September bust.’
Roth nodded his head, started smiling. ‘Evaluation pictures, right. You have them here?’
‘Sure we do,’ Tannahill said. ‘I can go check now if you wanna wait.’
‘Definitely,’ Roth said. ‘Here?’
Tannahill got up from his chair. ‘Fuck it, it’s only upstairs . . . might as well come and help me look through the files.’
Roth and Metz followed Tannahill out of the office and up to the next floor.
Records was the usual confusion of mismatched filing cabinets circumventing the room and numerous tables in the center, many of them buckling beneath the weight of the folders stacked on their surfaces.
Tannahill smiled wryly. ‘’Scuse the mess . . . cleaner’s on vacation, you know?’
‘Where do we begin?’ Roth asked.
‘Files over there are precinct records,’ Tannahill said, indicating the right side of the room. He walked toward the corner, Roth and Metz following. Tannahill tugged open the upper drawer of the cabinet nearest the window. ‘1988,’ he said. ‘’88 to ’90.’ He pulled open the upper drawer of the adjacent cabinet. ‘’93 to ’94 here . . . it’s gonna be the fourth or fifth one from that end.’
Metz opened drawers, Roth too, and within a moment they had found the cabinet that carried files from 2000 through 2002.
After twenty-five minutes Tannahill resorted to pulling every file out and spreading them on the floor. The three of them went through each one twice, every picture, every document from July 2001 to the end of the year. There was no file for McCullough. No records. No picture.
‘Someone must have pulled it,’ Tannahill said. ‘It happens. You know how this shit happens, right?’
Roth didn’t reply; he was at the end of his tether. He knew that if he said anything he would lose it. He was preparing himself for yet another dead-end, another return to the Second with nothing, when Tannahill looked up suddenly and smiled. ‘Too fucking obvious,’ he said quietly. ‘Shit, this is just too fucking obvious.’
‘What?’ Roth asked.
‘The annual pictures, they’re downstairs . . . he’ll be small, but he’ll be there.’
Once again Metz and Roth followed Tannahill as he made his way out of Records, down the stairwell and into the central reception area of the precinct house. Precinct photographs, taken annually, were ordinarily displayed along the corridors, but at the Seventh they had them lining the walls of the canteen and the communal briefing room. Tannahill found 2001 within a moment, stood on a chair to gain sufficient height to bring it down off the wall, and spent a moment scanning the nickel-sized faces of the men pictured there.
‘Here you are,’ he said, and pointed to a man, second row from the back, three or four from the end of the line.
Roth took the picture, Metz peering over his shoulder. Roth frowned, shook his head, and then he started laughing. It was an awkward sound, abrupt, brief, and then he stopped and shook his head.
‘What?’ Tannahill asked. ‘What is it?’
‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ Metz said.
‘What?’ Tannahill repeated.
Roth said nothing, but he started to feel the sheer weight of it. He started to get some kind of an idea of what they were dealing with, and it unsettled him deeply.
‘You know this guy?’ Tannahill asked. ‘You know McCullough?’
Roth was shaking his head. ‘No, we don’t know McCullough, ’ he said quietly. ‘But we know someone who was using his name.’
I
think it was Matisse who said that a painter should begin by cutting out his own tongue.
To stop him talking.
To stop him explaining what he meant with each and every brush stroke.
To stop him rationalizing and justifying, analyzing, interpreting what he felt at the time. He just expressed what he felt. The feeling was there, and then it was gone. That was art. That was life. Perhaps it was death.
Perhaps they should have cut our tongues out as well.
I feel for Miller. I feel for what he will find and what it might do to him.
I feel for the edge of things, the line that was drawn, and I see a man walking toward that line without ever realizing it was there.
At Langley, again in Managua, they taught me how to disappear.
I have never forgotten how to do that, and so I do it again.
I am gone . . . like I was never even there.
FORTY-SEVEN
Miller stood at the counter while Julia Gibb gathered together the five books that Catherine Sheridan had returned. He’d already called the Second from his cell phone, told Oliver to get to Robey’s apartment, to call him if Robey showed. But Miller knew that Robey would not go back there. Not yet. Not until something had happened. What that was Miller had no way of knowing, but he was certain Robey was now orchestrating every aspect of this, perhaps had done so from the start.
Miller felt nothing but a sense of impending horror.
He did not understand the significance of these books, but he had no choice but to secure them, to take them back to the precinct and pore over them, see if there wasn’t some clue, some message that Catherine Sheridan had left.
But now it was different. Now it appeared that Robey was leading him toward something that Catherine had wanted them to know. That could mean that Robey and Sheridan were in collusion, or she had known he was coming for her, and if that was the case then it opened up all manner of possibilities. First and foremost, it indicated that Sheridan knew she was going to die. She returned the books, and then she was murdered. Miller did not believe in coincidence. The pizza number. The Darryl King case records. Visiting Natasha Joyce. Natasha’s murder on Tuesday. Now it was Friday and still there was no complete forensics report. The photographs beneath the bed, those unmistakable images of Robey as a younger man, the pretended alibi, in itself so weak Robey knew they would expose it effortlessly . . . All these things were part of something else.
Miller’s heart was missing beats. His pulse was erratic. He felt dehydrated and nauseous.
As Julia Gibb rounded the end of the nearest shelves, her arms laden with books, Miller’s pager went off. He glanced at it. Roth. He silenced it; Roth could wait until he got back to the Second.
‘Here we are, detective,’ Julia Gibb said. ‘Fortunately no-one has taken them out since they were returned.’
Miller thanked her, gathered up the books and started towards the door.
‘I presume they will be returned to us,’ she called after him.
‘As soon as possible,’ Miller said.
‘I’m not so worried about those four, but the Wilcox isn’t in print any more . . . very hard to find, you know?’
‘I’ll take care of them,’ Miller said. ‘Bring them back as soon as I can.’
He almost dropped the books as he maneuvered himself sideways through the door, and then he hurried down the steps. He crossed Seventh and started up New York toward the Second Precinct. No more than two blocks and he was already out of breath, hurrying back toward whatever Roth had to tell him, whatever he might find in the books he carried. He thought of the forensics report from Natasha Joyce’s apartment, the autopsy results, and with that came thoughts of Marilyn Hemmings, of Jennifer Irving and Brandon Thomas . . . All so distant, so far removed from what he was doing, a part of some other life. Everything had moved so fast. Six days since Catherine Sheridan’s death. Less than a week. Reports daily to Lassiter, those reports passed on to Killarney, whoever else might have been interested at the FBI. And what did they have? Proof of Robey’s involvement came from the illegal acquisition of evidence, the use of city staff and facilities to determine the incriminating nature of that evidence. Where did that leave him? More importantly, where did it leave Marilyn Hemmings?
Miller’s mind reeled at the possibilities and implications.
He reached the Second and went up the steps and through the doors into reception.
‘Roth was after you,’ the desk Sergeant called over. ‘He’s up there now.’