Later, in the shower, Liz’s question resonated
work the case
and while Kate stood naked under jets of hot water she realized that simply the idea itself had made it possible for her to get out of bed, step into the shower, squeeze shampoo into her palms, and lather up her hair, all without crying or thinking about loss and pain, her mind occupied and distracted for the first time since Richard died.
What was it Willie had said after Elena’s deaththat he had used his painting to overcome his grief, to reconstruct his shattered world?
Kate stepped out of the shower, wrapped a soft white towel around her wet hair, studied her face in the slightly steamy mirror. The woman who stared back at her actually looked different from the woman who had been crying for days, her eyes somewhat more alive now, mouth determined.
Work the case.
Was it possible?
Kate plucked a cotton ball from a glass canister, dipped it into aquamarine-colored astringent, drew the liquid across her skin as though stripping away the layers of civility she had painted over the tough young cop from Queens. The face that stared back at her was not quite Kate Rothstein, wife and socialite who gave fabulous dinner parties and worked for charitable organizations. Instead she was getting closer to that younger, grittier homicide detective who could take in the worst possible crime scenes, chase down runaways, and defeat the Death Artist.
Kate nodded at her image, acknowledged an old friend she was damn glad to see.
She could do this. She could be a cop again.
Apparently, Liz knew her better than she knew herself. And why not, after almost twenty years of friendship, though when they’d first mettwo rookies, a year on the Astoria forcethey had not particularly hit it off. Kate McKinnon, the feisty Irish girl from the family of cops; Liz Jacobs, the brainy Jewish girl whose family had practically disowned her when she’d traded a psych degree at NYU to study police work at John Jay.
It was a case, the disappearance of a sweet-faced eight-year-old boy, Denny Klingman, whose school photo practically broke Kate’s heart, and the capture of Malcolm Gormely, a crack-dealing pornographer, pedophile, and possible murderer, that had ultimately brought the two women together.
Gormely was the number one contender in the Klingman disappearance and had evaded the NYPD in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island, switching his base of operations from borough to borough whenever he smelled the cops closing in. Now it was suspected he’d set up shop somewhere in Long Island City.
Queens Chief of Police Clare Tapell thought women would be a good addition to the all-male special victims squad. She chose Kate because of her experience in tracking runaways, and paired her with Liz, who was already known as a diligent researcher. Within a day Kate was having a face-to-face with a former prison cellmate of Gormely’s, who, in exchange for a five-year reduction on his twenty-year armed-robbery term, informed her of Gormely’s predilection for prepubescent boys, preferably blond (Denny Klingman was blond), and the telephone number of a man the feds wanted for child pornography who traded dirty pictures with Malcolm Gormely. Meanwhile, Liz had cross-checked every file on any kid who had gone missing over the past decade, and any MO that even remotely resembled Gormely’s (snatching kids in supermarkets while their moms or nannies were preoccupied selecting Birds Eye frozen peas or corn niblets).
The short of it was that Kate made contact with the kiddy pornographer by posing as a buyer, got him into cuffs, and threatened to cut his balls off if he didn’t tell her the whereabouts of Gormely’s new headquarters. Then she and Liz, fearing that sirens and flashing lights would further endanger little Denny Klingman’s life, staked out the deserted rag-and-remnant factory in Long Island City without backup. A few hours and several cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and glazed crullers later, they watched Malcolm Gormely leave, then picked the lock, found the nude and terrified Denny Klingman and another eight-year-old boy, both of them blond and cherubic, tied and gagged. Liz brought the kids back to the station while Kate bagged the photo equipment and stash of kiddie porn that almost made her sick, then sat back, lit up a cigarette, and waited for Malcolm Gormely.
Three hours later, when the backup Kate had called arrived on the scene, they needed an ambulance for Gormely. “He resisted arrest” was all Kate had said.
Denny Klingman was returned to his grateful parents. But no one claimed the other boy. Not until Gormely divulged the fact that the kid had been sold to him by the boy’s crack-addicted mother for a two-day supply of heroin.
It took two burly cops to hold Kate back when they tracked the woman down and brought her in, and later, after the mother had talked her way around an overwhelmed Child Protective Services Unit, Kate was sorry she hadn’t killed the woman when she had the chance. For months that little boy’s face had haunted her dreams. Just one more kid she could not save.
At the rather brief Internal Affairs investigation Liz covered for her by testifying that Malcolm Gormely had indeed resisted arrest, that Kate had no choice but to tackle the guy to stop him from escapingeven though she hadn’t been there. The fact that Kate had suffered no more than severely lacerated knuckles while the pedophile sustained two black eyes, a shattered cheekbone, several missing teeth, a broken kneecap, and seven fractured fingers was deemed “necessary” by IA. After all, it was reasoned, Kate could have shot him.
After that case, Kate and Liz were heroes and friends forever, though they never spoke about Malcolm Gormelyor the wrath Kate had rained upon him.
K
ate crossed her bedroom, bare feet on plush carpets, and opened her spacious walk-in closet. Thinking about Liz, how they had first met and worked together, and what she had done to Malcolm Gormely seemed like another lifetime. She had been an entirely different person then.
Or had she?
Even now she could remember how good it had felt to hurt that guy.
Kate forced the memory away, concentrated on choosing clothes that would feel like cop business, pushing aside the high-end designers, settling for jeans and strong-soled shoes, each selection separating her farther from her normal life.
Her .45 Glock automatic was just where she’d put it a year ago, on the top shelf of her closet, way in the back, behind a stack of old scarves she rarely wore.
Why hadn’t she gotten rid of it?
She had thought about doing it dozens of times, but hadn’t.
Kate wrapped her hand around the weapon, the pistol she’d gotten a year before she’d left the Astoria force, choosing it for its lightweight polymer frame and ergonomic design, reliable trigger pull and pointability, all of which increased the odds of hitting your target.
The pistol felt cool in her hand. She checked the trigger and drop safety before clipping in a magazine. Thirteen rounds. Unlucky number, thought Kate.
She was almost there now. Almost back in the role of cop. Almost not a wife. Almost. But not quite.
Widow.
How could that word possibly apply to her? Other women were widows. Not she.
Kate stopped a moment, taking in the all-white bedroom as though she were looking for something to remind her of who she really was.
Richard’s pajama bottoms lay strewn across the bed. She’d been wearing them for days, refusing to give them up, repeatedly telling Lucille never ever to wash them, though she’d impulsively had most of Richard’s clothes picked up by Goodwill, had asked Lucille to remove the photos of him, store them away, out of sight. God, the look she’d received for that request. Lucille didn’t get it. At first, all she had wanted was oblivion, no images to remind her of him, no memories to haunt her. She just could not look at them, at anything that reminded her that the man she had lived with and loved for more than a decade was gone.
But now she resurrected one, plucked it out of the drawer, a favorite photo that she’d had on her night table for years. Her fingers lightly skimmed the delicate silver frame, then Richard’s smiling face, his hand just above his forehead shielding his eyes from the sun. She rummaged further in the night table, came up with a plastic bag containing his wedding band, heavy gold Rolex watch, and the sterling silver money clip with his initials, RR, engraved, that she’d bought him for his fortieth birthdayhis favorite gift from her. She barely remembered tossing the bag into the drawer when she’d come back from the morgue.
Kate ran her fingers over the etched initials. Such an odd memento, a money clip, but one that brought Richard so clearly back to life, “Mr. New York,” what she always called himwith just a hint of sarcasm; the way he’d ceremoniously slide it out of his pocket, peel off bills for this and thatrestaurants, cabs, coat-check girlsspending cash lavishly, a sport for the poor boy from Brooklyn.
Kate placed the smiling photo of Richard on her dresser, laid the money clip beside it. Yes, Richard would want his money clip with him, she was sure of that.
“I’ll get him,” Kate whispered as she slipped Richard’s wedding band onto the fine gold chain she always wore around her neck. The ring skidded along the chain, coming to rest in the hollow between her collarbones.
Kate looked back at the photo and money clip, felt the coolness of the gold ring against her flesh. It wasn’t much, but enough to resurrect his presence, something to keep her heartor what was left of itconnected while the rest of her detached. A necessity if she was going to work this caseand survive.
She knew what she must do. Find out who did this. And then she would feel…Kate rolled the thought around in her mind.
How would she feel?
No, there wasn’t time for that, for her
feelings
. One foot along the path of emotion and she’d be a goner, no help to anyonenot to the cops, not to Richard, certainly not herself.
Just go through the motions.
In the bathroom, Kate stared at herself in the mirror. Makeup. Right. A must. She would not go out and have people pity her. Concealer under her eyes. Mascara. Lip gloss. That was enough, and all she could manage. Then she pulled her thick dark hair straight back off her face, twisted it up, and fastened it with a few pinsa style she rarely wore because Richard had not liked it, and he was right. It did not suit her long nose or the angles of her face, though right now she didn’t care.
When she focused on the finished product she hardly recognized herself. Few traces of society woman Kate Rothstein remained, which was good. The work she had ahead of her was no place for the creature of comfort and benevolence she had cultivated.
Funny, thought Kate. She believed that she’d erased the tough cop from Queens, but damn it if she wasn’t always there, like that Glock she had not thrown away, waiting.
Kate looped the holster over her shoulder and slipped the Glock in place.
Of course Liz had been right. She needed to do something.
Later there would be time to grieve. Now was the time for action.
B
lackened shades shroud the windows, creating luminous skeletal outlines against shadowy walls; overhead fluorescents dim, softening the edges of the long table littered with paint tubes, pastels, and crayons, a beat-up-looking couch, canvases pinned to the gray walls.
So often he imagines he can see those blinking lights, red, green, and blue, the ones she would string up in one dreary tenement after another, but of course it’s just an illusion and he knows it. It has been that way since the accident.
He holds a pair of wraparound shades in his fingertips, gently swings them as he moves closer to the canvases.
Was it all a waste of time? These tell him nothing. Absolutely nothing. Hair mashed into gray-black blood, colorless, unexciting. They were so vibrant, weren’t theymagenta and violet, wild strawberry, and raspberry?
She wore a raspberry beret
He tries to remember while the song plays in the back of his brain, but it won’t come. It’s no good. Nothing is any good. He might as well be dead.
One hundred twenty-three dead and still counting. The plane went down over a cornfield in rural
“Shhh!”
He lets his body collapse onto the beat-up couch, feels tears on his cheeks and swipes them away with a fierce gesture. “Baby,” he says, annoyed with himself.
Baby, baby, baby don’t leave me…
Another one of those oldies
she
liked.
“Stop!”
The tune quiets. For the moment.
He paws through boxes and bags on the couch, suddenly starving, pushing aside Oreos, mustard-flavored pretzels, Mr. Peanut Deluxe Party Assortment, and tears the tonguelike metal seal off a column of Pringles, stuffing handfuls of the uniform chips into his mouth, practically choking, his hunger a deep, never-sated void. He is always craving something.
If asked, he would say that it is his work, only his work, his painting, that sustains him; that it is merely frustration, his need to see and know the truth that takes him out of his studio and into a gray world that he would prefer to ignorea world not nearly as beautiful or wonderful or perfect as the one he strives to create on canvas. It’s a shame, really, that’s what he’d say, an annoyance and an interruptionno question he’d prefer to be left alone, paintingbut then the need starts up and begins to grow inside him, expanding the emptiness until he can no longer stand it, and, work pushed aside, brushes left sodden with paint, canvases unfinished, he is off, the hunt commencing. It’s not really a decision, nothing to which he can say yes or no. It’s a need, a quest for knowledge, and, yes, a release and satisfaction, he will admit that much.
When he is hunting his hunger abates, sustained by the chase alone. He goes days without food, thinking of nothing elsenot eating or sleeping, or bathingconsumed by his need, until he has done it and he has seen what he must see and feel, and then, only then, does the real world intrude again, and the hunger for banal needs like food and drink and sleep return.
It’s a process, really, like any other. Only, in his case, deadly.
He sits up, swipes crumbs of broken chips from his lap and thinks,
I am a seeker of the truth.
He looks again at his most recent creationsones made at the scenesand is bathed with disappointment, like a baptism gone wrong.
Why can’t it ever last? Isn’t he entitled to know? Why is he, and he alone, so severely punished?
You’re grrrrrrrrrrrreat!
“Am I, Tony?” he whispers into the dim room. He doesn’t feel it.
Grrrrrrrrrrrreat!
“Thanks.”
It helps having friends like Tony. Someone who knows he is good and smart. Tony has made him feel a lot better, strong enough to pull himself off the couch and get to work.
He squirts several blobs of oil paint onto his palette, lifts one of the several magnifying glasses he owns and stares at the paint, his eyes blinking. He will not allow himself to be frustrated. Right now, he wants to work. And at the moment he is not hungry. Not yet.
N
ola Davis struggled to lift herself out of bed. A relatively simple act a few months back, but now, with her beach-ball eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant belly it was like trying to defy gravity.
Had she totally blown it, now, of all times, with a year to go in school and all she had been through to get here?
How stupid was she?
Nola shook her head, shoulder-length dreadlocks brushing the smooth dark brown skin of her cheeks.
Well, it was far too late for self-pity. She had made her choice and would just have to live with it. Hell, she’d survived growing up in a concrete jungleas wise old Bob Marley had sung in his drugged-out Jamaican patois on one of her favorite CDs.
Nola had a sudden, almost violent urge to pee. If she could run she would have, but a sprightly waddle was about all she could manage.
She flushed, slowly eased herself up, hands under her belly for support as she padded back into the combination bedroom/living room of the Upper West Side studio apartment that Kate was paying for while she finished up her senior year at Barnard
if
she finished her senior year.
Nola sighed. No way she’d be finishing out the school year, not even the semester, with a baby due in less than a month. She’d just do what she could, take her incompletes, and start up again next fall, which made her feel bad, like an ordinary colored girl who didn’t know any better, which she guessed she was though she’d worked hard not to beordinary, that is.
She stroked her belly and thought of Kate, who had been great, as always, though Nola suspected she was disappointed by her getting knocked up, even if she’d never shown it.
Nola waddled into the kitchen area and attempted to snare a box of tea bags from a shelf above the sink, though getting onto tiptoes was becoming an effort in her condition. Maybe she
should
move in with Kate and Richard, she thought, straining to get a grip on the Lipton container.
No, not Kate and Richard. Just Kate.
Nola’s eyes filled with tears as she lowered herself into a kitchen chair.
How was it possible? Richard dead.
She just didn’t know what to say to Kate, whom she loved so much it hurt sometimes, just babble, anything to keep herself, and Kate, from crying. She had a feeling that if the two of them started, they could cry for a full year straight.
She’d never seen Kate like this, had to admit it scared her. Kate, her mentor, her champion, the woman who could do anything, alone now, and Nola knew she would never admit she needed to be taken care of.
But didn’t everyone need taking care of sometimes?
Matt Brownstein, whom Nola had been sleeping with most of last semester, sure as shit didn’t know how to take care of anyone, not that she wanted him to take care of her, the arrogant asshole, also a senior at Columbia, studying studio art, paintingwho hated using condoms, but when Nola became pregnant insisted she get rid of the baby, that no way he was sticking around for
that
.
Why had she taken up with him in the first place?
Was it because he was a tall lanky white guy with curly hair, and because he was Jewish, just like Richard Rothstein?
Nola tried not to think about it. She stared up at the reproductions of artworks pinned to her wall. Studying art history had been the most amazing thing in her life. And now she’d have to delay her matriculation at the prestigious NYU Art Institute, which Kate had pulled plenty of strings to get her into, not to mention a few months abroad to actually see some of the art she had only seen in reproduction. She hoped Kate hadn’t lost faith in her.
She wondered whether, given what had happened, Kate had lost her faith entirely.
Nola tugged a tea bag out of the box and dropped it into a mug. She would have to be strong. For Kate, and for her baby.
But then she pictured Kate, all alone, in that big white bed in that big apartment, and she was crying all over again. Maybe, she thought, it would be a good idea if she did move in.
W
ork your husband’s case? Are you crazy?”
“I have never felt less crazy about anything in my life.”
A minute earlier the two women had been embracing, standing in the center of Tapell’s One Police Plaza office, the chief attempting in her cool, somewhat awkward manner to soothe her old friend and colleague. But the moment Kate made her request Tapell had taken three steps back. Now she leaned against her desk, glanced at the ceiling and puffed out a sigh. “I’d be a bad friend and an irresponsible administrator if I assigned you to the case, Kate.”
“Remind me if I have the facts wrong.” Kate folded her arms across her chest. “But weren’t you, only days ago, begging me to help out on this case?”
“That was before”
Kate did not let her finish. “I can still help evaluate the psycho’s paintings, and”
“That’s not the part that concerns me and you know it. Come on, Kate. You’re too close.”
“We’ve had this conversation before, remember, a little more than a year ago? My being too close, too emotionally involved. And I did the job then, didn’t I?”
“At a cost.”
“To
me
. Not to you.”
“And you’re willing to go down that road again?” Tapell shook her head. “Well, I’m not. Sorry, Kate. Not Richard’s case.”
Kate blinked, attempting to stop her tears.
“Look at you. You can’t even hear his name. How on earth do you think you can work his case?”
“That’s my problem.”
“No, it’s my problem, and Brown’s, and anyone else’s you’d be working with. Cops need to have their feelings in check, and” Tapell stopped, offered Kate a look that mixed regret with sadness. She certainly did not want to berate her old friend at a time like this. “Look, it’s simply not a good idea.”
Kate glanced out the window at the complex of government buildings, then back at Tapell. “You’ve done what you had to do even when it wasn’t a good idea. I know that and you know that. I need to do this, Clare and” She stopped herself from saying the words:
I know the truth about you, Clare, and I’ll use it if I have to.
The air in the room went still, both women replaying a bit of historyTapell’s ascension to chief of police after a cop with a Serpico complex had blown the roof off a cops-on-the-take scandal that had brought down her predecessor. Tapell had been tapped as the replacement because of her squeaky-clean reputation. But Kate knew better. The same shit was going on in Astoria. Not that Tapell condoned itjust that she was an overworked, underpaid civil servant who had chosen to concentrate on bigger issuescleaning up the bad neighborhoods, getting drug dealers away from the schools. When her name was tossed in the ring she had a choice: come clean and pass up the opportunity of a lifetime, or take the chance to do a greater good, sweep the dirt under the rug, make a few deals, and keep her mouth shut. She’d opted for the latterand Kate hadn’t blamed her.
Kate looked into Tapell’s eyes and saw it: the chief knew what she was thinking.
The two women continued to stare at each other, the secret hovering there between them, an odor ready to befoul the air.
Kate thought that if it went on much longer she would surely back down. But she did not stop staring and she held the thought in her mind
I’m sorry, but I will use this if I have to
and when Tapell said, “Okay, I’ll call Brown,” Kate just nodded.
Later, when she was out on the street, she was relieved she hadn’t actually spoken the words. She wasn’t proud of the fact that she had considered saying the unthinkable, was somewhat ashamed, even a bit shocked, that she had been willing to go so far to get what she wanted. Now she hoped that she was rightthat she did have it in her, the ability to work this case and keep her emotions under control, because right now she felt ready to explode.