Jack frowned. “Why did it take so long?”
“First of all, he didn’t specify his location in that last call. Second, there are only a handful of people here overnight these days, and so there was only a tiny search party.”
Jack shrugged. “Okay, but this place isn’t very big.”
“It looks small from the water, but there are more than a hundred and seventy acres. And there was housing for four thousand people here before the Coast Guard left. There were a lot of places to look.”
“How’d they find him?”
“They just walked around, calling him on his walkie. It’s so quiet here that Durkin actually heard the sound of it coming up out of the basement.” Hillhouse stepped aside to let a couple of techs pass, then turned back to Jack. “Hey, speaking of your guy Balfa, is he coming out?”
Jack shook his head. “It’s his day off, too, and he’s out in New Jersey or someplace.” Catching some more nookie, no doubt. Jack frowned as he thought of their recent phone conversation. Most detectives would have been thrilled to hear of such a potential break in a case, but Balfa had just seemed preoccupied with his own business, as usual. He’d actually had the gall to say, “I’m sure you can handle things.”
“All right,” Hillhouse said, pushing his glasses higher up on his nose. “So our man Reynolds is walking around Nolan Park. Maybe he finds a door unlocked, or he hears something suspicious. He comes into the house, pokes around, decides to check the basement. He comes down, shining his light”—the FBI man nodded toward a flashlight lying on the floor a couple of yards away.
Jack picked up the story. “Someone’s waiting for him in the darkness, but they don’t meet right away, or else he probably would’ve ended up near the bottom of the stairs. He comes across the room, and the perp is hiding. Maybe he’s down behind the bar here, or in the closet. Reynolds makes it all the way across the room, and he discovers the perp. He challenges him. The perp grabs the pool cue, or maybe he was already holding it, waiting…”
The FBI man frowned. “His choice of a weapon is odd.”
“Why?”
Hillhouse walked over behind the bar. “Look at this.”
Jack came around and saw what he was pointing to: a small bottle of gun oil, a bore brush, and a couple of cleaning patches. He bent down: The scent of oil was strong, and the cleaning patches were damp.
Jack’s eyebrows went up. He thought for a moment. “If he used a gun, the sound might’ve given him away. And once somebody knew he was here, he’d be screwed. Where you gonna run to? Speaking of which, I assume you guys have searched the place pretty well?”
Hillhouse nodded. “Of course. We brought over a dog team this morning. The freshest trail led over the side of the esplanade behind the house, right to the water.”
“He kept a boat there?”
“Doubtful. It would have been spotted in daylight. We’re thinking an inflatable raft, like a Zodiac. Maybe he took it out of the water, stashed it under the porch…”
Jack nodded. He liked the way the FBI man focused on the possibilities, the way he obviously cared about his work. Why couldn’t this man be his partner, instead of a lump like Tommy Balfa?
“There’s something else you should see.” Hillhouse led Jack around the other side of the pool table. Several more blankets had been shoved underneath. “We pulled this stuff out,” the agent said, pointing at a number of items spread on the carpet: a couple of comic books, a little portable video game player, some empty candy wrappers, a pile of child-sized clothes. Jack crouched to examine the evidence. Maybe this was where the boy in the box had spent his final hours. The candy and the entertainment indicated that the perp had showed at least some concern for the child’s mental and emotional state. The boy had not been bound…was it possible he had come here willingly—that he might even have seen this as an exciting last adventure?
“Look over there,” Hillhouse said, pointing at the floor nearby. Jack saw a toiletries kit. Next to it rested a half dozen bottles of prescription medicines and painkillers—and a hypodermic needle and a tiny unmarked bottle of some liquid. The fentanyl that had sent the boy into his final sleep?
He checked out the far corner of the room, an improvised workspace. A couple of screwdrivers, a putty knife, some emptied tubes of sealant. No hammer, no saw. Anselmo Alvarez had observed that the floating coffin had been put together without any nails, and now Jack understood why. The sound of hammering or sawing would have been too risky. Which meant that the perp had pre-cut the wood, then carried it over and screwed it together on the island. Which meant that he had committed the homicide with full premeditation—this was no accidental overdose.
After a minute, Jack stood up and glanced around the room again. It was a treasure trove of potential clues: fingerprints, blood, hair and fiber samples, traceable purchased products, maybe dirt or pollen carried to the island on the perp’s or child’s clothing…Thank God he finally had something to work with.
Moving slowly, he made one final circuit.
“What are you looking for?” the FBI man asked.
Jack scratched his cheek. “I think it’s safe to say that our perp left in a hurry. He abandoned food and clothes; he didn’t get rid of the kid’s stuff, didn’t make much of an effort to cover his tracks. It would be nice to think that he’s just some nut who committed one mercy killing and one defensive attack when he got trapped. It would be nice to think that this will be the end of it.”
Hillhouse nodded thoughtfully. “But you’re concerned that he took the gun?”
Jack shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe he just sees that as a means of self-defense. He hasn’t used it yet, as far as we know. No, there’s something that worries me more.”
The FBI man’s glasses had slipped down his nose again; he stared over the top of them. “What’s that?”
Jack grimaced. “He took the Magic Marker.”
RAY HILLHOUSE GOT CALLED
away by one of the Crime Scene techs. Jack spent a few more minutes poking around the basement, and then he went up to the kitchen for some fresh air. He found Michael Durkin sitting on a kitchen counter, slumped against a cabinet.
“You all right?” he asked.
The security man winced.
“Tell you what,” Jack said. “Why don’t you show me the waterfront, so I can see where the perpetrator might’ve escaped to?” Durkin slid down the counter until his feet reached the floor.
THE SECURITY MAN LIT
a cigarette and drew in a deep lungful of smoke. “Quite a view, huh?”
Jack nodded. The two men stood on an asphalt esplanade just behind the house. It stretched off around the island in both directions.
“I grew up right over there.” Jack pointed across the channel. The Red Hook side was dominated by the loading cranes of the container port, and multicolored stacks of the massive containers were piled next to them like a child’s giant toy blocks. “I’ve never seen it from here, though. It’s weird: It’s kind of like the first time a barber holds up a mirror and you see the back of your head.” He turned around, leaned against a railing, and faced back toward the island. “This is quite a place.”
The security man nodded. “It used to be a whole self-contained world. They had a school, a bowling alley, swimming pools, churches, markets. They even had a seven-hundred seat Loews movie theater.” He pressed his hands down on the railing and stared across the water. “You know the Talking Heads?”
“The TV news creeps?”
Durkin shook his head. “No, the band. From a while back.”
Jack nodded. “Oh…
right
. With that cute blonde,
Debby
something?…”
Despite his sad mood, Durkin managed a smile. “
Whatever.
The point is, they had a song that said, ‘Heaven is a place, where nothing ever happens.’ I think about that sometimes, driving my little golf cart around this island.” He squinted, even though the sun was at his back. He cleared his throat, but remained silent.
Jack glanced at him. “Hey, Michael? Is there something you haven’t told me about this situation?”
The security man rubbed a hand over his face. He looked away for a moment. When he turned back, pain was etched all over his face. “Um, well,
yeah
. That man in there, Barry Reynolds…he’s my father-in-law.” He sighed. “I’m the one who got him the job. He used to be a cop. Not in the city, but over there in Jersey. Newark. He put in his twenty, and then he retired, and then…like a lot of retired cops, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He was the kind of guy who always liked a good drink at the end of the day, but he started really…pretty soon it wasn’t just a beer now and then. He seemed real depressed. My wife started getting worried about him. I did, too. I talked him into going to some meetings, AA and all, and it seemed like it was working. The thing is, I don’t know if you’ve been to Newark recently, but it’s a hard luck town. Lots of bars, cheap liquor stores. A tough place to stay sober…”
The security supervisor cleared his throat again and watched a tugboat muscle a long flat barge against the current. “Anyway, I had this job out here, and I figured I could do him a favor. I brought him on board, so to speak. It seemed like the perfect place for somebody who was trying to dry out. No liquor stores, no bars, absolutely nowhere to buy a drink.” Durkin’s voice broke. “I really liked the guy. And I wanted to help him. This was perfect. There was no way he could get himself in trouble.”
T
HAT NIGHT, JACK’S BED
was a raft. He floated on a sea of memories: Michael Durkin’s miserable, guilt-wracked face; the view of Brooklyn from Governors Island; being ten years old and jumping off a pier in Red Hook, laughing with his brother Peter. But Petey was gone forever…
Michelle reached out in the dark and laid her hand on his shoulder, reminding him that he was not alone; they were on the raft together. He turned to her, caressed the side of her face. She hadn’t just stuck with him after the shooting—she had brought him back to life even before it, after all of those years when he had pretty much given up on love.
He leaned over and kissed her. He pulled the covers down off her body, slowly ran his hand over her flat warm stomach, over the round hill of a breast. Her nipple hardened under his palm. He eased her panties off of her hips. Soon he was inside her, diving in a warm blue sea, no memories now, just this eternal present moment. This time, everything felt right. She cried out; he joined her; they
were
the sea.
THERE ARE ONLY TWO
kinds of problems in this world,” pronounced Detective Sergeant Stephen Tanney early the next morning. “There are the
my problems
, and then there are the
not my problems
. This is definitely the second kind.”
Jack sat up straight and clasped his hands in his lap; that helped keep him from strangling his boss. “But it relates directly to the Red Hook case.”
The sergeant’s office felt close and stuffy, especially with three people in it. Lieutenant Frank Cardulli, the head of the Homicide Task Force, was sitting in, listening to what his subordinates had to say. He was a stout, mustachioed fireplug of a man who had been in charge of the task force for years. Unlike Tanney, he inspired great confidence in his team.
Tanney frowned. “Aside from the fact that this has nothing to do with our task force jurisdiction, this isn’t even a
New York City
matter.”
A groan formed in Jack’s throat and he did the best he could to hold it back. “We’re talking about someone who committed two homicides.”
Tanney shook his head. “We’re talking about some nut bird who was holed up on federal property. If it wasn’t for some fluke water current, this whole mess would never have had anything to do with Brooklyn.”
Jack clasped his hands tighter. So typical. Yes, the new Compstat program was helping the NYPD target and deal with the areas of highest crime, and yes, crime rates across the city had plummeted. But it was hard to believe that the Department’s ultimate aim was reducing crime itself. The goal, as always, was making the stats look good. If the easiest way to do that was simply to move the crime elsewhere, so be it. If it could all be shifted out of state, the top dogs would have been perfectly happy. Who gave a shit what was happening in New Jersey or Connecticut? No Department jobs were riding on
those
stats.
Jack stared down at the floor.
Count to ten
, he told himself. “What we have here,” he said slowly and deliberately, “is someone who has killed two separate innocent people, including a child. And he did so in a way that’s likely to blow up in the media, as soon as some smart reporter makes the connection.”
Tanney snorted. “Give it a rest, Leightner. How many times do you think I’m gonna fall for that one? This new shit happened on federal property. It’s not our worry.”
Jack turned to Lieutenant Cardulli. “What do you think?”
The lieutenant leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands together. He deliberated for a moment, then leaned forward. “Well, I certainly agree with you that if we’ve got some wackjob running around out there, he’s gotta be stopped. But the sergeant is right: This is a federal case. And even if the city did have jurisdiction over the island, it would be a Manhattan thing.” He stood up and sighed. “We’ve got plenty to do without worrying about cases that aren’t even ours.” Jack started to protest, but Cardulli raised a palm. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t continue to work on this, but we can’t pull you out of the rotation. If you need some extra resources to work the Brooklyn side of it, I’ll do my best to help out.”
Jack nodded wearily. Like his elderly landlord was fond of saying about just about every problem, from potholes to bouts of the flu: “Whadda ya gonna do? Ya can’t fight City Hall.”
THE HOMICIDE TASK FORCE
was like a crew of fishermen, only they didn’t even have to cast their hooks: Cases kept flopping over the side of the boat. You never knew what each day’s catch would bring.
There had been times when they flew in so fast that the detectives could barely keep up. Back in 1990, soon after Jack joined up, the precincts of Brooklyn South had seen two hundred and sixty murders. He remembered one crazy tour when the first call came just five minutes after his team punched in. Another came an hour later, then another. By the end of the shift, five fresh homicides had piled up, and the detectives could only stare at each other, amazed.