Night Work Page 12

  I saw her again. In my mind, Laurel lying in her bed, the sash from her curtains wrapped around her neck.

  That finally did it. I threw up all over the sidewalk, feeling the convulsions in my stomach again and again until there was nothing left, until I was gagging on nothing but air.

  When I stood up, I looked around at all the cars parked on the street. Up Broadway, down Broadway, the double lanes of Pine Grove Street with parking in the middle. Across Broadway, the three-way intersection with Grand cutting in at one angle, Prince Street at another. The heart of the city, it felt like, this old bus station with the high windows, a hundred places to park all around it. Hell, two hundred, at least. All the places you could just sit in your car and watch me. You could be in one of those cars right now, catching your breath. Watching me.

  I saw the police car then, coming fast up the hill. It was running silent, with lights flashing. Too late now. Way too late.

  I spat the last drop of bile from my stomach. I kept looking all around me.

  “Who are you?” I said to the night. “Who are you and why are you doing this?”

  NINE

  The pounding woke me up. I sat up in my bed, still dressed in the clothes from the night before, the sheets twisted around me. I was breathing hard, like I had never stopped running.

  Someone knocking on my door? I looked at the clock. It was almost ten. After sleeping on the gym mat two nights ago, and then last night … Hell, what bad dream could even compare to what had happened last night? So maybe three or four total hours of troubled sleep in two nights, with me late for work now, and somebody actually climbing up the back stairs to see me.

  I got up and opened the door. Detective Shea was standing there.

  “Joe,” he said, his eyes narrowing as he looked me up and down. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I came to ask you about that man you were chasing last night.”

  “I figured. Have there been any other developments in the case yet?”

  “We’re just doing some legwork right now,” he said. “I was downstairs talking to Mr. Anderson, long as I’m here.”

  I had to process that one for a moment. “You mean about Sandra. When she came here the other night.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Come on in,” I said, stepping back from the door. “Sorry, the place is a mess. I never have visitors.”

  He came in, looking around. What impression he was getting about me, I didn’t even want to guess. “Looks like you have quite a music collection,” he said, nodding toward the shelves of CDs. Then he was right down to business. “So tell me about this man you ran into.”

  “I didn’t run into him. That was the problem. Anyway, I told the Kingston guys everything last night. Didn’t they show you the report?”

  “I saw it. I just wanted to hear it again, in person.”

  It didn’t take long. I gave him the whole story, seeing the man by the waterfront, chasing him to Abeel Street and then up to Broadway, completely losing him.

  “You didn’t see his face at all?” Shea said. “You can’t give us any kind of a description?”

  “He was about my height and build. But a lot faster. That’s all I can tell you.”

  He kept writing, slowly shaking his head. “He may be more careful,” he said, “now that he knows you’ve spotted him.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that. I saw him and I went after him.”

  “I understand. I’m not saying you did anything wrong.”

  “Where’s your partner?” It felt like a good time to change the subject. “He really does things by the book, doesn’t he …”

  “He’s a good man,” Shea said. “He’s seen everything. At least twice.”

  “If you ever have to play good cop/bad cop, I don’t suppose you have to wonder who’s who, eh?”

  “He can be quite human sometimes, believe me. You’d be surprised. Anyway, he’s down at your office right now. He wanted to get a jump on looking through your old clients.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “I thought I was supposed to put that list together myself.”

  “We all need to work on this together,” Shea said. “Time is of the essence, I’m sure you’d agree. If Detective Rhinehart and I are involved directly, things will move a lot faster.”

  “You’re right.” I pictured Rhinehart sitting in Larry’s office, asking the man for his full cooperation. “Of course. I just wish I had given my supervisor a little more warning.”

  “He doesn’t know about this?”

  “Everything’s been happening so fast. I haven’t had the chance to sit down with him.”

  “I’m sure he’ll cooperate with us, won’t he?”

  “I’m sure. But I should really get over there. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get cleaned up.”

  “Go right ahead, Joe. I’ve got some more people to talk to. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  I showed him out the door and told him to be careful going down the rickety old back steps. Then I went into my own two-minute drill, taking a quick shower and throwing on the first clean clothes I could find.

  Anderson tried to stop me on my way out the back door. “That woman who came to you for help,” he said. “She’s really dead?”

  I knew he didn’t doubt what Shea had told him. He just needed to say it out loud, to hear me agree with him that it made no sense.

  “It’s true.” I looked at my watch. It was ten fifteen. “But I’ve gotta talk to you later. I’m supposed to be at the office.”

  “Okay,” he said. He looked dazed, something I’d never seen in him before, this man who spent his whole life fighting and training other men to do the same. “We’ll talk later.”

  I felt bad leaving him like that, but I had no choice. I went outside, got in my car, and drove up Broadway to the office. The deputies stopped their conversation in midsentence when I entered the lobby. Charlie was just opening the door. He froze as soon as he saw me.

  I didn’t try to say anything. I went right up the stairs to Larry’s office. His guest chair was empty now, but from the color of his face I could see that Rhinehart had been sitting there.

  “Joe,” he said. “Come in and sit down.”

  He stood up to close the door behind me. I sat down.

  “I know this must have been a big surprise,” I said. “Let me explain.”

  “You don’t have to explain anything. Detective Rhinehart gave me the whole story.”

  I knew this wasn’t the kind of thing he had signed up for when he took over this office. I knew that we were still feeling each other out, that he’d never be able to understand what I had been through, or what I was going through now. So I guess I wasn’t sure what to expect from him. Still, he surprised me.

  “First of all,” he said, “as I told the detective, I’m going to do everything I can to help you. Whatever you need, Joe. Anything. You just tell me.”

  “I appreciate that. Seriously.”

  “Second of all, while I’ve never seen anything this … overwhelming in over twenty years on the job, I have to say that … I mean, I guess I can see where it’s coming from.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We work with people on the edge, Joe. You know that. We see people at their worst. When things don’t go the right way … you and I, we’re sometimes the last man they see before they go to prison.”

  “Yes.”

  “I had a guy …” he said. The classic opening line for any probation officer story. Get a bunch of us together and that’s the first thing you’ll hear us say. I had a guy.

  “I had a guy, Joe. Big guy, six foot four, probably two fifty. A great big teddy bear most of the time. You just had to make sure you kept one thing out of his system. You want to guess?”

  “Alcohol.”

  “Nope, not alcohol. Sugar. He was allergic to it.”

  “Allergic to suga
r? I never heard of that.”

  “Me neither, until this guy. It was like poison to him. He would totally lose it, have no control over what he was doing.”

  “Okay …”

  “He was only twenty-two years old, married about a year. His wife made sure she kept all the sugar away from him, but you know how it is. It’s hard to avoid sugar. It’s in everything, even ketchup. So inevitably, he’d get some sugar in him, turn into a zombie, break things, get into fights. One time, he hits his wife, she lets it slide. Second time, that was it. Domestic assault, three years probation. Plus a divorce. He’s getting along okay with it, until I find out he’s been following his ex-wife around and threatening her. So I have to ring him up. The judge sends him up for two years, stalking and aggravated harassment. He gets out, and of course his ex-wife is contacted so she can keep an eye out for him. But he never goes after her. Instead, he goes after me.”

  I leaned forward in my chair.

  “He was following me. He was calling me late at night, telling me that he was outside my house. That he had a bunch of candy bars with him. It almost sounds comical, right? But I tell you, it gave me a new appreciation for what stalking victims go through.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Besides me buying double locks for all my doors? And keeping a gun under my pillow?”

  “Yeah, besides that.”

  “He shot himself in the head, right in my driveway. There were Snickers bars all over the front seat.”

  “At least it wasn’t you he shot.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “At least it wasn’t me. But it was clear that in this guy’s mind, I was a big reason why his life went wrong. If not the only reason. Never mind what the sugar did to him, or what he ended up doing to his wife, none of that. He only saw me.”

  I could relate to what he was saying, but only so far. I had certainly seen the resentment before—kids who blamed me for sending them back to Family Court, mothers and sometimes fathers who looked at me like I was the one tearing their families apart. But to take it that much further … I could barely imagine it.

  “Detective Rhinehart asked me for a list of all of your past clients,” he said. “That’s going to take a while. In the meantime, he’d like you to focus on the most likely suspects. If it’s even possible to think of your clients that way.”

  “I’m going to have to try.”

  “I’m giving your cases to other officers for the time being. You need to work on this, with no distractions.”

  “Everybody here’s pretty busy,” I said. “They already have full caseloads.”

  “You need to help catch this guy. As soon as possible. You know that.”

  “I know.”

  “So get started.” He stood up and opened his door for me. “Remember, anything you need, Joe. Anything.”

  I looked him in the eye and shook his hand. “Thanks, Larry. I promise you, I’ll make sure they catch him.”

  There’s a big storage room at the back of our building. All of our files are kept there, in several rows of filing cabinets. We’ve got some vending machines back there, too, and a table to sit at if you really need a break from your office. In the corner there’s an alcove guarded by a floor-to-ceiling fence, with two padlocks. We keep our firearms locked up there, along with the weapons we’ve confiscated from clients. My favorite was the authentic samurai sword, complete with the gold-inlaid scabbard.

  I walked up and down the rows of cabinets, looking at the dates. There were so many files inside each drawer, one for each probationer, all these crimes with victims and perpetrators, some going to prison, others going totally straight, most of them somewhere in between. And the families, many of them broken by the crimes, some of them broken long beforehand with no hope for ever being whole again.

  If the client fails, it doesn’t mean that you’ve failed. They drum that into your head from the first day, but still … In the back of my mind it always feels that way. It has to. I was the last hope and I wasn’t enough. If I blame myself … why wouldn’t somebody else? So now … Hell, am I really going to go back through all of my failures? Find the one person who could actually be capable of doing something like this? All because of me?

  Eight years, that’s how long I’d been on the job. Seven and a half if you took out the six months I was on leave of absence after Laurel was killed. I went down the line, moving backwards through time until I was back at the first month of my first year on the job. It had all been Howie’s idea, way back when. You’re great with people, he had said. It’s time to do something real.

  It was real, all right.

  “Okay, what am I actually looking for?” I said out loud. I had a legal pad with me, but it was still blank. “I have to have some kind of plan here.”

  One possibility … the classic case of the man sent to prison who, when he gets out, wants revenge against the person who sent him there. With juveniles, though, it would be hard to see that kind of scenario. As hard as we try to keep our guys out of the system, sometimes we’ll send them to one of the two state-run forty-eight-hour secure holdover facilities, just to give them a little taste of how it feels to sleep behind a set of bars. But that would hardly qualify as hard time.

  The hopeless cases, the ones we seemingly can’t touch—they usually bounce around in the system for years before they finally go down for good. By then, I’m nothing more than one name on a long list of badge-carrying authority figures.

  Unless … I thought about it, and wrote down 16 to 18 on the pad, meaning the two-year limbo between a client’s sixteenth and eighteenth birthdays. During that time, any major crimes could result in adult charges—in this state, at least. So conceivably he could draw a major-league adult sentence, even though he’s still on my watch.

  That brought Coxsackie to mind, a state prison up the river in Greene County, and my own personal working definition of hell on earth. It was originally built as a maximum security prison for the worst juvenile offenders in the state, and while the population had since been opened up to other ages, they still had a large percentage of young adult inmates.

  I shouldn’t think something like this, shouldn’t say it out loud anyway, but Coxsackie seems more like a zoo to me than a prison. At most other adult facilities, the majority of the inmates have at least some level of maturity and self-restraint. But you put about a thousand of the worst young criminals in the state in one place, every one of them boiling with rage, fear, adrenaline, testosterone, God knows what else … The one time I visited there, all the yelling I heard, all the taunts the inmates would throw at anyone who happened to walk by—it was a nightmare. No wonder it’s the last place any corrections officer wants to work.

  So if I had a guy who violated somewhere around his eighteenth birthday, say … violated in a big enough way to end up at a place like Coxsackie … What would a few years in that place do to him? And would he still be thinking about me when he got out?

  I tapped my pen on the paper. Where else could I go with this? If it wasn’t somebody who went away to prison himself, could it be a family member? It would have to be a man, that much I knew. It had to be a man who strangled these women, and it was most definitely a man I chased down the street last night. I tried to imagine how it would feel, to be a father and to see my child go away. Would I blame the probation officer, the guy who was supposed to help keep kids out of trouble? If the kid never made it out, either because he was killed there or because he committed another crime there and got sent up for good … Would I be mad enough to kill somebody?

  God, I thought, I can’t even make this leap. Can a person hate me this much? I don’t have a child of my own, so you settle for the next best thing? Kill the woman I’m about to marry? I can almost get my head around that one. If you lose someone you love, then I must lose someone I love. But then what? Two years later, you’re still watching me? Waiting for me to get close to someone again?

  I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine a hat
e that strong.

  I wrote it down in capital letters. HATE.

  Then I opened the first drawer and started going through the files.

  I was seeing double by the time I got back home that evening. There were too many files to read, too many follow-up reports to look up on the computer. I needed some aspirin, some food, and some sleep, in that order.

  Anderson caught me on the way into the gym. “Any news?” he said. “Have they caught the guy yet?”

  “I wish it was that easy,” I said. “But God knows we’re all trying.” Come to think of it, I was surprised I hadn’t heard from Shea or Rhinehart again since that morning. I would have expected at least another call by now.

  Rolando came over to us, wiping his face with a towel. “José, mi amigo,” he said. He grabbed me by the shoulders. “How are you, man? You’ve got us all worried like hell.”

  “I’m fine.” It wasn’t true, but having these men on my side had to make me feel a little better. “What’s that on your arm, anyway?”

  He turned to show me the new tattoo on his left bicep. The name ROSE was written in fresh ink, with the obligatory red rose beneath the letters. “This is for my Rosie, to show her that I’ll always be there for her. She’s been a little anxious on account of the baby coming.”

  “That’s very nice,” I said. “I think you’re way ahead of Maurice now, eh?”

  The man in question came over to us. He was wearing sweatpants and a white tank top. “Quality over quantity,” he said, flexing his arms with the hero on each side. The Rock and his Angel. “Seriously, Joe, you gotta tell us what we can do here. Anything at all, you name it.”

  Yeah, I’ll take my stand right here, I thought. Let the killer try to come find me with these guys in the room.

  A door opened behind me. I turned to see Detectives Shea and Rhinehart. About time, I thought—I want to talk to you about that list of old clients.

  Then I saw the look on their faces. “What’s going on?” I said. I looked to Shea, waiting for the explanation, but it was Rhinehart who answered me.