LATER DETECTIVE RAMIREZ would squat beside the bloodied body and feel the emotions rise to choke her throat. She’d seen scores of dead, it was the currency of her new post, but this one bit into her in a way that none had before. The sight of the blood, his blood, the sickly sweet smell of the iron and rot released by a body split open by the gunfire, the sick, dead eyes that were full of intense life just a moment before. She was dry-eyed, and her chest wasn’t racked by sobs, but in the storm that raged beneath her brow, she was weeping nonetheless.
A hand fell onto her shoulder, solid and warm. She didn’t need to look up to know to whom it belonged.
“You okay?” said Henderson.
“No.”
“Good,” he said. “When you ever get okay with any of this, then it’s time to hang up your hat.”
“Is that why you’re retiring, old man?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I been thinking about sticking around a little longer.”
“I thought you wanted to get yourself a puppy.”
“Maybe I already found myself one.”
Ramirez shrugged his hand off her shoulder, took a final look at the corpse, her corpse, and then rubbed her face with her hands, hard, as if rubbing out her very features, before standing and turning away. Henderson was looking at her, not the dead body, but his eyes were staring at a casualty.
“They find him yet?” she said.
“Not yet,” said Henderson.
“They won’t.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t expect they will.”
The car outside the house was empty when they checked it right after the shooting, but someone had been there all right. There was a set of headphones, a receiver, and a tape deck, just as Spangler had said. But the tape was gone, and so was the person who had been listening in with the headphones. A host of uniforms were now going door-to-door, and four black-and-whites were cruising the neighborhood, trying to grab whoever had been in that car.
“You think it was him?” she said. “You think it was Liam Byrne?”
“Seems a bit far-fetched. But after what you learned about the guy who signed the death certificate, I’d certainly want to go up to Rahway and ask him what he knows. And we’ll see if this Liam Byrne had any fingerprints on file to match what they already peeled off the car.”
She turned and gave the corpse a quick glance. “You want to know something that makes me believe it, Henderson? Spangler had a bizarre integrity about him. I don’t think he would have lied about it.”
“He was certifiable. Who the hell knows what he was thinking?”
“And we’ll never know now.”
“He had taken at least two lives already, and he would have taken two more if things worked out tonight the way he wanted. Maybe even three. You did the right thing.”
“Okay.”
“And even with all that he was, you tried to save him. I heard you trying.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve tried and failed before,” she said, “but never like this.”
She had been trying, pleading with Bobby Spangler to put down his gun. She had made no threatening moves, beyond, of course, keeping her gun aimed at his heart, and had promised whatever she could think of promising to avoid having happen what actually happened. But whatever she was saying was obviously counteracted by the witch, who was whispering incessantly in his ear and who gave him that nauseating kiss of death.
“What did you say to him?” she screamed at the old lady when it was over. “What did you say?”
“I told him to stop all this nonsense,” said Mrs. Truscott with her hands suddenly becalmed and her lips tight. “I told him to put down the gun and surrender to the nice police officers. I told him that was the only way.”
She was lying, Ramirez knew she was lying, but all she had to go on was what actually happened. Spangler slowly rising, Spangler gently caressing the old woman’s cheek, Spangler slowly turning as the gun swiveled from the senator to Kyle Byrne, Spangler slowly squeezing the trigger.
Ramirez shot him three times in the chest. Henderson fired at the same time, hitting his shoulder and spinning him around, but it was Ramirez’s shots that killed him. Spangler, already dead, fell back as his shotgun spurted upward along with the blood from his chest. When the shotgun fired, finally, the blast took out not Kyle Byrne or Senator Truscott but the imposing portrait above the fireplace.
It played out as quickly as that, so quickly that Kyle and the senator didn’t have time to throw themselves onto the floor until all the danger had passed. And when it was over, Lucia Ramirez, God forgive her, had her first kill.
“Why did you try so hard to help him?” said Henderson. “Most cops, seeing a killer with a weapon pointed at a politician, would have shot first chance they had. And there were chances, moments when his attention wandered, when the gun was pointed nowhere specific. Why didn’t you take him out when you could?”
“I don’t know, Henderson. What are you, my therapist? What do I get, forty-five minutes to pour out my soul before you tell me my time’s up?”
“I’m just asking.”
“I felt sorry for him, all right? I saw his apartment, I saw his desperation. He was living a twisted little life, and I know the witch who was doing the twisting. I had my choice, I’d have shot her.”
“You’ll be thinking about this man next year, and ten years from now, and ten years after that when you’re in my position, standing on the lip of things, looking over the edge. And when you do, knowing that you cared, even a little bit, and did your best to save him . . . well, knowing that is the only thing that’s going to keep you from tearing out your heart, or drowning it in alcohol. Trust me, I know.”
“What do you know?”
“I know what it feels like when you do it on the other side of caring, and let me tell you, it leaves you haunted.”
“Old man.”
“You got that right, but my hair turned gray a long time ago.”
Ramirez looked at Henderson and for the first time saw the hurt in his eyes. Something had happened to him, something had damaged him badly. And all this time he’d been trying to protect her from the same fate. Someday she’d get the story, she was a detective, after all, someday she’d wring it out from him, but not this day. This day she was just glad he was by her side.
“Detectives,” came a voice from the hallway, “can I get the hell out of here? I’ve been here way too long already, and this shirt is getting ripe.”
It was Byrne. Ramirez offered a quick and uneasy smile to Henderson in thanks, and then she stepped away from the man she had killed and out of the room where she had killed him.
“Didn’t we tell all of you just to stay put?” said Ramirez as she and Henderson approached Byrne. Byrne’s jacket was off, his tie loose, but he looked calm, as if he’d already gotten over the violence that had burst about him just an hour ago.
“Yes, you did,” said Kyle Byrne. “But the senator was whisked out with his lawyer before the news trucks showed up, and Mrs. Truscott did that little fainting thing that got her a quick trip to the hospital, which leaves just me.”
“And you’re lonely, is that it?”
Kyle smiled. “Actually, yes. So I wanted to know if I can get out of here, too.”
“Do we have anything we can hold this boy on?” she said to Henderson.
“Extortion?” said Henderson.
“I don’t know,” said Ramirez, staring at Kyle with a critical eye, as if he were a painting, or a horse. “From what we heard over the radio frequency he gave us, he wasn’t trying to trade the file for money.” “A rson?”
“Based on the burns on Spangler’s skin, I’d put the arson on him.” “How about theft of a valuable file?”
“Taking his dead father’s file from his own former home? That won’t stick.”
“Obstruction of justice?”
“Maybe,” said Ramirez. “But we wouldn’t have found Spangler without him.”
“Abject stupidity?”
“Well, there you go,” said Ramirez. “We’re just going to have to hold him over on the grounds of abject stupidity. Because who else but an idiot would put himself in the middle of this craziness for no apparent purpose?”
“If stupidity was a crime,” said Kyle, “I’d have been locked up long ago.”
“Answer one question and we’ll let you go,” said Ramirez. “Who was in the car?”
“What car? The rental thing?”
“Yeah, the rental thing.”
“Nobody.”
“Did you hear that, Henderson?”
“I heard,” said Henderson. “Now we got him for lying to a police officer.”
“It’s a shame,” said Ramirez. “He was almost in the clear. Have you seen your father lately, Byrne?”
“My father?” said Kyle. “Are you kidding me? You didn’t believe that maniac, did you?”
“He seemed to know what he was talking about.”
“He also drew his eyebrows in with a Sharpie.”
“Someone was taping the whole scene,” said Henderson. “That someone took the tape. To clean things up, we’ll need it back.”
“Let me get out of here and I’ll see what I can do about getting you that tape.”
Ramirez looked at Henderson, Henderson blew out a cheek and then shrugged.
“Okay,” said Ramirez. “If the techs are done with your car, you can get the hell out of here. But tomorrow you’re going to have to go on up and talk to an inspector named Demerit with the Haverford Police Department about the fire at your house.”
“Deal,” said Kyle. He stepped toward Ramirez and lowered his voice. “Now that this is over, can you see me?”
“I can see you fine.”
He glanced at Henderson and then gently took hold of her arm and pulled her into a corner. Henderson turned his back and pretended to read something.
“You know what I mean,” said Byrne. “Look, let’s say tomorrow night at eight, at the same bar where you found me this afternoon. We’ll have a few beers, have some laughs, talk about something that has nothing to do with any of this.”
“I might be busy.”
He leaned forward, scratched his lower lip. Instinctively she licked her own lip with her tongue. He leaned farther forward, and she was surprised that this soon after the death and the blood something inside her was able to open up so quickly and urgently. She was surprised even more at the disappointment she felt when he pulled away without kissing her.
“Tomorrow,” he said with a smile before he turned and headed out of the house.
“And tomorrow and tomorrow,” said Henderson.
“What the hell is that?”
“Shakespeare,” said Henderson.
“Don’t give me that Shakespeare crap, like you’re some student of fine literature. We got reports to write, a case to close, an IAD shooting investigation to deal with. We’ve got ourselves a mess to clean up.”
“Yes, we do,” said Henderson.
“So let’s keep our eyes on the ball,” she said.
“Absolutely. But he’s a pretty interesting kid, isn’t he?”
“Don’t even,” said Ramirez.
“Pretty damn interesting,” said Henderson, laughing.
And Ramirez couldn’t help but laugh with him.
IN THE MIDDLE of the night, lying awake in the sagging bed in that fetid motel room, still waiting for his father to reappear, Kyle Byrne gradually grew more and more certain that his father had never returned, that his father’s body had fully and truly been rendered unto ash fourteen years ago, that the whole renewed relationship was a piece of wishful thinking hatched in the fevered recesses of Kyle’s own deranged brain.
The evidence of Liam Byrne’s phoenix-like rise was less than scant. When Kyle quickly searched the rental car outside the Truscott mansion, his father’s luggage was gone, along with the cassette tape that he was recording off Kyle’s wire. When Kyle drove rings around the Truscott neighborhood shortly thereafter, he saw nothing on the dark streets but police cars. When he returned to the New Jersey motel room, there was no hard evidence that his father had ever been there, no toothbrush or strange pair of socks or discarded bottle of aftershave, only a few empty bottles of scotch and the light, lingering scent of cigarettes and Aqua Velva. But maybe he had drunk the scotch himself, and maybe the scents emanated from the guy in the room next door.
Oh, things had happened in the last few nights, he knew that. His house had burned down, his car had burned with it, he had recovered one of his father’s old files, and that file had led him to the bloody events at the Truscott house. And that it had all turned out pretty well for him in the end maybe meant that the spirit of his father had been looking out for him, just as it might have been the spirit of his father that had frightened Tiny Tony Sorrentino off his case. In a way it was a comforting thought, because it was considerably less crazy than what had passed for reality the last few days.
Kyle sat up in bed and took a deep breath. He wanted proof, he needed proof, and he knew where he might get it. The door to the motel’s office was locked, the lights off, but that didn’t stop Kyle from banging on the door like an escaped lunatic.
A pimply-faced kid, whose hair was sticking out wildly, as if he’d just been dosed with static electricity, straggled out of the back room and flicked on the light. He scratched the top of his head, scrunched up his face, opened the door.
“Yeah?” he said, eyes bleary and drool slipping down his slack mouth. “Did an old man come by and leave a message for room 207?” said Kyle.
The kid looked at Kyle with an uncomprehending stare, as if he weren’t sure which of the two of them was the idiot here. “No,” he said, having finally decided it was Kyle before starting to close the door.
Kyle stuck his foot in the gap and pushed the door open, shoving the kid back into the office at the same time.
“Do me a favor,” said Kyle, “and let me see the registration card for room 207.”
“I’m not really allowed,” said the clerk with a yawn.
“Dude, it’s my room. I’ve got the key, and I’m staying the night. Let me see the damn card.”
“There are rules.”