“A crime was committed,” said Mrs. Clark. “Against my son.”
“By who?”
“By the losers he went traveling with. They poisoned his mind, they brainwashed him.”
“Did one of the losers look like this?” Spencer showed her Lily’s Milo picture, and then the mug shot of John Doe.
“I don’t know who that is,” she said, with barely a reaction, as if Milo’s face was not the scariest thing she had seen. “Never heard of any Milo.” She seemed on guard.
“How well did your son know Amy McFadden?”
She raised her eye brows. “So that’s what this has to do with?” She snickered. “The missing McFadden girl? You think she’s visiting my boy?”
“I couldn’t say. How well did he know her?”
“Not well, she was a year younger than him in school. But they may have been friends.”
“Do you know who else Amy went with?”
“I don’t know. I only met her because she used to hang out with that Lindsey, who used to hang out with my son.”
“Is that why your son wanted to go traveling with them?”
“Oh, he pretended he liked the Kiplinger girl, but she meant nothing to him. He was too good for her.”
“So why did he go?”
“Brainwashed, I told you. Got involved with some bad people. I told him, too. I told him and told him, it’s not healthy not to tell your parents about the things you get up to in high school. I think this Amy was up to no good. Jerry never talked about what they did. It was always so hush hush. What did you do, son? Oh, nothing.” She huffed. “And then he left. Left, and we never saw him. When I didn’t hear from him for the first year, I knew he was doomed. I said to my husband, just you wait, the phone call in the middle of the night will come. We waited another year for that phone call.”
“And what did the phone call say?”
“I would have never let him go had I known what I know now. I thought they were just kids, playing around, wanting to see a bit of the world.”
“What do you know now?” Spencer couldn’t get anything concrete out of her.
“They all died, I heard.”
“Well, you know they didn’t all die. Your son is alive.”
“If you can call it that. But the rest of them are dead.”
“Well, Amy didn’t die. She came back to New York.”
“Where is she now?” said Mrs. Clark acidly.
“And Milo didn’t die.”
“I don’t know anything about this Milo.”
She steadfastly refused to say where her son was being kept.
She didn’t want him “bothered.” First Spencer was gentle with her, then he insisted, then he threatened to subpoena all her bank records, for surely the monthly payment to the place that was keeping her son would be on her statement. Only that explicit threat forced Mrs. Clark’s tongue to tell Spencer and Gabe that her son was “remaining” (her term, not Spencer’s) in a St. Augustine convent in Mexico, just south of Nogales, Arizona. To the question of why the mother wouldn’t bring her son home, Mrs. Clark said, “Are there any Catholic missions here on Long Island that you know of, Detective O’Malley?”
“Does your son…need a Catholic mission, Mrs. Clark?” Spencer said carefully.
“It’s either the Augustinian order or a psychiatric hospital for him.”
That did not sound promising.
In the car, Spencer said, “Gabe, I think you and I have to take a little trip.”
Gabe had a good laugh about that one. “Yes, Whittaker will instantly approve—a child who belongs in Bellevue is instead being taken care of by Mexican non-English-speaking nuns, and we are going to go twenty-five hundred miles to ask him…what? Where Milo is? How his final peyote trip was? I’ll tell you right now and we don’t have to fly all the way to fucking Mexico. It was baaaaaad, man.”
Whittaker did not approve this one. “It’s not New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, or Delaware, or wherever else you go on your wild goose chases, O’Malley.” He declared that if Spencer wanted to go on a wild goose chase to Nogales, he would have to go on his own time and his own dime. “Ah, you feel different about it, don’t you, when you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is?” He grinned. “Suddenly seems a lot less important? Though I must admit, I’m impressed that you’re finally following a lead on the McFadden case on something other than Quinn.”
“Yeah, well…” But Spencer said nothing. He was going to keep Bill Bryant to himself for just a few more days.
“Why don’t you call this Jerry Clark on the phone?”
“He’s in a
monastery.
”
“What, they don’t have phones in a monastery?” Whittaker shrugged. “Oh, what do I know. Perhaps they should. Nevertheless, can’t go, O’Malley. You do have some vacation time. Would you like to put in for it? You haven’t taken a full week’s vacation in five years. Take some time off—go to Arizona, have a good time, get some sun. You need it, you look terrible.”
Spencer didn’t know what to do. Even if he could go, there was the issue of Lily. Could he go and leave her when she was so sick? What if they found a donor? What if she took a turn for the worse?
When he told her about Jerry Clark, Lily said, oh my God, go, of course, you have to go. “You go and you get answers. And we haven’t had any answers for so long. Go. I’ll be your Bill Bryant, your own personal benevolent patrolmen’s benefactor.”
He hemmed, hesitated. “What about you?”
“What about me?” She smiled. “How long do you plan to be away, detective? I’m only approving Thursday to Sunday. You’ll be back for our Sunday comedy. I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine. Ever since the chemo stopped, I’m not as miserable, have you noticed? No more throwing your white lilies on the floor.”
“I don’t think that was the chemo,” he said, hugging her. “I need Gabe to come, too.”
“You do what you have to do.”
“But you, you don’t go far from the house.”
“Like I would.”
“And don’t go out at night, for anything. I’m going to ask for a patrol unit outside while I’m gone, just in case, but please, take reasonable precautions for your own safety.”
“Okay.” Lily was sitting on the couch gazing at him with a melted face.
“I mean it. I’ll get you everything you need beforehand. Otherwise, call Joy. Call Anne, old Colleen down the hall, anyone.”
“I know the drill.”
“And beep me if you need me. Try not to forget the number this time.”
The hues in the Sonoran Desert were beach sand below and blue sky above, the air was warm, though it was evening, and the white flowers were fluttering on the tips of the spires and arms of the giant saguaro cacti. Spencer saw something in the landscape beyond the desolation, something embracing and holy and transcendent. Perhaps this wasn’t a bad place for a broken boy named Jerry to be. He loosened his tie as he drove, and took off his suit jacket, rolling up his sleeves and rolling down the window. A shirtless Gabe was sleeping in the passenger seat, oblivious to the desert.
The small Augustinian convent called Asuncion was comprised of a small adobe church, and through an oval passageway, arranged around a courtyard, the buildings of a sixteenth-century monastery. It was in northwestern Mexico, forty miles south of the U.S. border, two-and-a-half thousand miles away from Lily. The abbess, a small woman with a black veil covering her head and an acute inflammation of the eye, and two stern reverend mothers all in black, came out to meet them. Turned out they spoke quite good English.
The nuns to the one were unimpressed with Spencer’s credentials as either a detective or a Catholic—particularly a Catholic, he thought. While making quite a judgmental sign of the cross on him and Gabe, the diminutive abbess refused to give him any
information on the state of Jerry Clark, except to tell him that Hobbit was the only name he now responded to.
“We don’t answer to you, detective,” said Mother Agnes, unafraid of him.
Spencer clammed up. They were told it was late in the day and there was “no way” that Jerry was going to be disturbed. The nuns would revisit the issue in the morning. Spencer and Gabe were taken to their quarters with all deliberate speed, especially when they passed two open double doors that led to a dining room where thirty or so young nuns were sitting at long tables breaking their bread. The nuns looked up, “
indelicately inquisitive
,” Gabe whispered, and the reverend mother, said, “Don’t dawdle, please.” They were hurried along to their rooms, where chorizo with beans and rice and some tequila and tea was eventually brought to them. There was plenty of chorizo, not nearly enough tequila. “Spence, do you feel something in the air?” Gabe asked, finishing the last of the tea, after all the other food and drink had gone.
“No, what?”
“I don’t know. The erotically-charged air of the breath of three dozen young girls who have not seen a man, much less two men, in years?” Gabe grinned. “Other than the inmates.”
“I think you’re blaspheming in a holy convent,” said Spencer, grinning back. “Go to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us.”
“It’s going to be a long night,” reflected Gabe.
Night passed slowly indeed, with Spencer all the black lone hours of it craving for more tequila.
The next morning, when they convened with the abbess and the reverend mothers, the first thing out of Gabe’s mouth was, “So what’s wrong with him?”
“We’d like to see him now,” said Spencer, less confrontationally.
There was no answer from the nuns who squinted reprovingly at Detective McGill. Spencer, in sudden throes of deep apprehension of the nuns of his strict Catholic childhood, hemmed
and hawed and finally said with hands knotted into prayer, “Abbess, this is very serious. I know your patient is sick, but a young girl’s life is at stake. We think he might be able to shed some information that will help us find her.”
The abbess was unmoved. “Did the girl just go missing?”
“Yes!” Spencer said, thinking that would help her see the emergency of it, but instead the abbess replied, “Well, there you have it. He hasn’t been out of his room for four years except to get some fresh air in the courtyard. He knows nothing.”
Letting out a breath, Spencer tried again. “This girl was someone he knew five years ago.”
“He’s had no visitors, except for his parents on Christmas. He has not talked on the phone, he has barely talked to the doctors. He seldom speaks of the experience that brought him to us, or of his past life. You’re looking in the wrong place, detective. You will find no answers here.”
Spencer prodded and pushed and cajoled, and became more frustrated, and finally had to persuade her by threatening a court order to get Hobbit out of the convent and into a Nogales hospital where he would be under the jurisdiction of the Arizona State Police. Then and only then did the abbess relent, but not before she imposed on Spencer strict orders not to upset him (“he has been making such good progress”). On the way up to the third floor, Gabe whispered, “O’Malley, we better get the answers we need from him. I can’t stay here another night, this place is about to corrupt me. I’m too much of a sinner, plus I haven’t been willingly inside a church in ten years.”
“You’ve come to the right place to beg forgiveness,” Spencer whispered back. “I’d get started if I were you. Ten years is a long time.” He hadn’t been willingly inside a church in twenty.
On the third floor in front of an unpainted canvas wall covering, the abbess stopped. “Detective, he is a soul on the brink.”
Aren’t we all. Spencer became peripherally interested in the
canvas. Lily could do wonders with it. Why was it left deliberately blank and then hung on the wall, as if it were art? Why was it left blank? So
he
could supply the content?
“Jerry has no more protections. He is raw, he has no defenses. They’ve all been stripped away from him. We use prayer and soothing voices to bring him back from the abyss. But he hovers there all day long. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. He spends his days either in catatonia or in a deep state of panic. He imagines himself being killed, being buried alive, he sees poisonous snakes in his room, adders in his bed, scorpions on walls, everything is supremely frightening to him. Sometimes when he sees new people—doctors, social workers, even nuns—it triggers a memory sequence, in vivid detail, of his original trauma. That’s why we usually don’t allow visitors. It can take him weeks or months to recover from the flashbacks. He flogs himself with his terrors. We comfort him with prayer.”
“How has that been working out, abbess? Five years now. Is his ego healed?”
“It’s a process, detective.”
“A long process, I imagine.” Spencer’s eyes were on the blank canvas.
“He has not recovered. He may never recover. I’m telling you this because he is not much of a talker, and he gets upset at the smallest things. I’m going in with you, I need you to be easy on him. Detective, are you listening?”
“Understood, abbess.” Spencer turned to her. “I heard every word you said, and I will be as soothing as I can. But I need to go and speak to him alone.”
“He needs
me
there.”
“He’s going to have to do without you for five minutes. If he talks to me, I’ll need no more than five minutes of his time. By the way, is there any cell phone reception here?”
“Cell phone reception?” she said, as if he were asking for reception to Lucifer.
Spencer sighed. Even his beeper was working only intermittently.
He hadn’t heard from Lily since he got into Tucson early yesterday. He hoped everything was all right.
The bare room was small and overlooked the mountains that for some reason were not majestic but monastic. A white-linen bed, a white lamp, a weave throw-rug, a chair by the window. In the chair sat a small, emaciated man, appearing smaller because he had no legs. Though he was supposed to be only twenty-six, still a boy, Spencer was distracted by how old he looked, how aged. Suddenly Spencer began to wish he hadn’t left Lily alone.
Lily had gone out to get some cherries in the afternoon. She actually felt like eating something. No mistake about it—maybe her blood was like corn syrup, but Lily was better without chemo. She waved to the patrolmen sitting outside her building, and slowly trudged up the stairs to her apartment. Lily thought it was definitely time to move. The stairs stank. Fifteen-hundred dollars a month, and the place smelled worse than ever, like the homeless that were once outside were now squatting inside with no place to go. The odor got worse as she climbed the stairs, Tompkins Square Park brought home.
When she opened the door to her apartment, the stench hit her full blast. She breathed out in revulsion and gasped and tried to scream. The man with the glass eyes was sitting on her couch, his filth draped over her blankets, over her cushions.
Lily turned instantly, to run, to run, but he jumped up, spry and agile, and was on her, his hand over her mouth. His face, his broken swollen nose, his insane glass eyes were next to her. Words were tattooed in blue above his eyebrows. Now that she was close, she could read them.
Aryan
over one brow,
Honor
over the other.
Hammer and sickle
inked over his throat,
Aryan Honor
over his face. He dragged her inside and shut and bolted the door. The reek was devastating—as if a thousand unwashed
men were throwing themselves on her—and, with some small subconscious satisfaction she retched and threw up against his foul hand.
He let go of her then, in visible disgust—at
her!
He shoved her into the kitchen where she cleaned up as best she could. He wiped himself with a paper towel and sat back down on the couch. Well, that’s it for the couch. His eyes were fixed on her. Lily managed to speak. She said, “What do you want?”
He sat motionless, rigid, his ice crystal eyes locked on her like firing sights. What could this person have to do with her funloving friend who liked to dress up, who chose her perfume for the lightness of its fragrance? He carried his stench with him like a curse.
He spoke. He said, “Where is Amy?” in a guttural American voice. She understood what he said though he garbled some of the letters, the s sounded like a
zh
and the
r
whirred. He sounded as if he had something in his mouth like a dirty washrag.
“What?” It was a gasp, not a response. His question pounded like cymbals on her heart.
“Whish part did I not enunshiate? Where izh Amy?”
She stammered. “I don’t know.” We thought
you
knew. How could
you
be asking me this? If
you
don’t know, then who knows?
He sighed theatrically. He sat forward and looked at her with dead eyes. “Lizhen carefully,” he said, and spoke slowly so that Lily could understand every word. “I like that you’ve left her things on her door”—he pointed to Amy’s small engraved plaque that still hung there, though Lily’s gaze didn’t follow his pointed finger—“but you’ve made her bedroom into your studio. All that
art
”—so derisively—“you’ve been selling on the street like a vagabond, done here. Now I know. You’re using her room. As if she’s not coming back. So you must know something. Where is Amy?”
“Who are you?” How did he get in here? The cops were outside! He must have come up through the back door, the basement.
“When you saw me in the park that night, you recognized me.
Amy must have told you about me. I am Milo. Now what have you done with her?”
She was staggered back against the wall across from him, next to Amy’s door, next to Amy’s plaque. “We’ve been looking for her for over a year,” she finally got out.
“Don’t lie to me. I know what you’ve been doing—you haven’t been looking for her. You got sick, been taking care of yourself. You got money from somewhere, been spending it, investing it with Smith Barney. You’ve been playing a little comedy with that detective of yours, like he could find the truth on his ass. But I’m tired of playing. This is the end game. You tell me right now where Amy is.”
“I don’t know!” Lily’s voice was high pitched and shrill. She glanced at the fifty clocks arranged on a wall above his head. What time was it in Arizona? It was late afternoon here.
Milo laughed, a harsh choking sound. “Yes! Very arty of you to have the clocks ticking out your time. And by the looks of you, I don’t think you’ve got much. You might want to buy some more clocks, and set them back, set them slow, see if they can give you a couple of extra minutes.”
Lily’s eyes measured the distance to the door.
“He’s not coming. Friday is his day off from you. Tonight he drinks, carrying his mistress in his arms all the way from Soho.” Milo smiled, showing his rotting teeth. “I follow him, too. I follow you, him. But let me tell you something, I’m not interested in him, or you. I’m interested in only two people. One of them is Amy. Do you know who the other one is?”
Lily shook her head, sinking down to the floor before she could hear about the other.
“And the other is your brother, the honorable congressman, Andrew Quinn.”
She groaned. Oh my God. Where are you Spencer, where are you?
“You think your brother knows where Amy is? Because if he knows,
you
must know.”
“He doesn’t know. And he tells me nothing.” He told me nothing, Amy told me nothing. What am I going to do? Spencer, Spencer.
Lily did the only thing she could do. She fainted.
When she came to, she was on the wood floor and he was still sitting on the couch looking at her with detachment. “Would you like a drink of water?” he asked. “I would offer you some drugs, but I’m afraid the only thing I’ve got will be no good for your condition, though it happens to be very good for mine.” His rag sleeves were rolled up. Lily wished the afternoon light weren’t so bright, exposing the vicious black and blues on the inside of his forearm. His other forearm was swallowed up in a tattooed mosaic of symbols, black swastikas intermingled with green Islamic crescents and red hammer and sickles.
He had a rubber band already tightened around his upper arm, and the needle was in his hands. “You’re not squeamish about needles, are you, Lily? Probably not, since the needles are keeping death at bay from you.” Milo exposed his teeth again. “Though not
too
far away. Just in the corridor.”
The needle went inside his flesh, and his thumb depressed the plunger. Nearly instantly, his eyes glossed over and his head tottered back. His mouth started to make gurgling noises.
Maybe he’ll OD here, Lily thought, the panic inside her very great. While his head was still back, she crawled to the phone, and hid it under her thin shirt. She kept moving toward the door, but his head came up, eyes half closed, and she froze, and then pressed TALK on the phone and dialed Spencer’s beeper number by feel. She waited a second, her fingers at the microphone blocking the sound of Spencer’s voice telling her to leave a number and then pressed 9-1-1-9-1-1-9-1-1-9-1-1.
She decided to call 911. She managed to dial but not to speak, because Milo now glared at her. “What are you doing?”
She pressed OFF on the phone and remained on the floor. “I told you, I don’t know where Amy is. You think if I knew, we wouldn’t have found her?”
Milo sighed again, but he looked happy now. His body was as relaxed and dazed as his beaten face.
“What do you want?” she whispered.
“What, Amy never talked about me to her best friend Lily?”
“Who
are
you?”
“We are the revolution, Amy and I”, said Milo, with ludicrous triumph. “We came to change the order of things.”
The phone rang. It rang under Lily’s shirt where she was hiding it. Spencer!
Milo raised his eyebrows. His glass eyes narrowed, he looked like an apparition, ghostly white, permanently beat up, scarred, tattooed. He looked like he had come from the netherworld for Lily, as if he were a horseman of the apocalypse. Lily couldn’t read the caller ID. She just pressed TALK and cried, “Spencer, help me…”
Milo stood up slowly, as if in a dream, and hit her across the face, knocking her out.