Night Work Page 18

  “Somebody from the Westchester Police Department wrote that report,” I said. “It wasn’t Howie. Detective Borello, excuse me. Or anybody else up here in Kingston.”

  “I realize that. But as I look at this now, two years later, I can’t help putting myself in that Westchester detective’s shoes. Here’s a man whom it might occur to me to suspect, but he’s just lost his fiancée. His best friend, a fellow detective in a neighboring county, can vouch that he was with him around the time of the murder.”

  “Yes. He was with me. I was here in Kingston. He asked the question, he got his answer, and he wrote it down. End of story.”

  “He was with you, yes. Around the time of the murder. But let me ask you … It takes about what, ninety minutes to get down to Westchester from here? Maybe sixty minutes if it’s late at night and you’re really moving?”

  “Do you honestly believe,” I said, my hands clenched together in a ball, “that I would …”

  That word. I could barely say it.

  “That I would strangle … to death … the woman I was about to marry? The only woman I’d ever really loved, and probably ever will love for the rest of my life. Do you honestly believe …”

  “I believe you could have,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “I believe you had just enough time to get down there, especially if you weren’t quite as drunk as your friends seemed to think you were. Your friends who I’m sure were quite drunk that night.”

  “Ever since you got here,” I said, “you’ve been moving toward this, no matter what I say. No matter what I do.”

  “I came here with an open mind,” he said. “Both of us did.”

  I looked over at Shea. I couldn’t read anything on his face. Anything at all.

  “So say it, Detective. One of you. Go ahead and say it.”

  “We’re running out of options,” Rhinehart said. “You know that.”

  “Say it. Say the words.”

  He leaned forward a little more. “You want to hear me say it.”

  “Yes, I do.” This was why I kept talking to them, I realized, when I knew I shouldn’t have. I had to hear them get to this point, so I could try to make it go away. The classic mistake any suspect makes, thinking he can explain his innocence if his accusers will just listen to him.

  “Okay, then,” Rhinehart said. “Here it is. As of today … after exhausting every other possibility … and I mean every possible alternative …”

  He stopped. I waited.

  “I am finally convinced,” he said, “by the overwhelming set of circumstances … that you not only killed Marlene Frost and Sandra Barron this week, but that you also killed your fiancée, Laurel Harrington, two years ago.”

  Somehow, no matter how much I knew it was coming—from the moment he had pulled out that photograph of Laurel again, I had known exactly where we were going to end up—somehow, I still felt surprised, by it. I felt surprised, and I felt sick about feeling surprised when I shouldn’t have been, and I felt the absolute terror of what this could mean for me, all at the same time.

  “We’ll try to understand everything,” Rhinehart said. “We promise. But you have to help us here.”

  “No,” I said. “No. You guys are totally on the wrong track. I’m telling you.”

  “This man who’s supposedly following you around, killing these women … the man you tried to catch the other night … He doesn’t really exist, does he …”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I made him up.”

  “He’s you, isn’t he? The man you’re chasing is yourself.”

  “Okay, now you’re just starting to sound ridiculous.”

  “I’m serious, Joe. Whatever happened, two years ago … what you did to Laurel … you must have buried it deep inside yourself. Am I right? But it can only stay bottled up for so long … When it finally comes out again …”

  “I have one question for you, Detective.”

  “It’s over, Joe.”

  “You brought me in here for questioning, and you had to read me my rights because at this point you were finally ‘officially’ considering me as a suspect. Better late than never, I guess. I’m not sure the DA will be liking that too much. But no matter.”

  “Did you hear me? It’s over.”

  “Here’s my question, Detective. Am I charged?”

  “Come on, Joe.”

  “Am I charged at this time or am I not charged?”

  “Don’t play it this way. It’s not going to work. I’m serious.”

  “If I’m not charged and I’m simply being held for questioning, then I only need to stay for a reasonable amount of time. You know the law as well as I do. I think we can both agree that a reasonable amount of time has come and gone. Which means I’m free to leave.”

  I stood up.

  “You cannot leave, Joe. You have to talk to us.”

  “If you don’t want me to leave, then arrest me. Get your handcuffs out and arrest me right now.”

  I stared him down. He didn’t say a word.

  “You can’t arrest me,” I said, “because you don’t have a case. You don’t have a case because I didn’t do it.”

  “Let me walk you out, at least,” Shea said.

  “You really suck at playing the good cop,” I said to him. “You should go back to being the hotshot kid with the stupid earring.”

  “You need to stay in town,” Rhinehart said. “We’ll be talking to you again very soon.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” I said. “I’ll look forward to ending both of your careers, too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re such a great detective, you figure it out.” I swung the door open and walked out, heading straight for Chief Brenner’s office. Howie, I thought, I need you, man. You’re working second shift now, right? Where the hell are you?

  I looked into the chief’s office. It was empty.

  You have to tell them they’ve got it wrong, Howie. You have to tell them I was with you that night.

  I went down the stairs to the night sergeant’s desk.

  You have to tell them, man.

  Two steps from the bottom, I saw the chief. He was just about to head up the stairs, his usual look of complete composure nowhere to be found tonight.

  “Joe,” he said, “what are you doing? Did your lawyer get here yet?”

  “Where’s Howie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Chief. Where is he?”

  “I’m serious. I don’t know. But you shouldn’t be talking to him, anyway.”

  “Since when?”

  “I know he’s your friend, but as of tonight, he has a big conflict of interest. Best thing for everyone is for him to keep his distance for a while.”

  “I need him, Chief. He has to set those BCI guys straight.”

  “If they want to talk to him, they will. But right now, there’s nothing he can do to help you.”

  “No, Chief. You don’t understand.” You obviously don’t have a friend like Howie, I wanted to say to him. You don’t go all the way back to two kids on the playground, looking out for each other.

  “I do understand, Joe. You want to be a friend? Go home. Or go find your lawyer. Don’t drag a good cop into the middle of all this. I told you, he’s not in a position to help you right now.”

  I pushed past him, went out the back door into the night. The sun had been up when I had gone in. Now the rest of the day had been eaten up waiting in that windowless interview room, then listening to the accusation, the sky not only dark now but dark like it had settled in hours ago. I looked at my watch. It was almost eleven.

  I called Howie on my cell phone. It rang four times. He didn’t answer.

  “Howie,” I said when the beep came. “Call me. Right away.”

  I hung up and started walking, dimly remembering being driven down here in the back of Rhinehart’s car, my own car still up by the gym. As I trudged up the hill, I remembered the night I chased the man wit
hout a face up this very sidewalk. I turned as I walked now, looking behind me, wondering if he was back there in the darkness somewhere, watching me, maybe even laughing.

  The feeling stayed with me all the way up Broadway, one set of eyes on my back at all times. Unless I was imagining it now. Maybe it would always feel this way, for the rest of my life.

  The gym was dark. I didn’t go inside. Instead, I got in my car and drove right back down Broadway. I cut over to the bridge and rode high above it. I could keep going, I thought. Drive all the way down to I-84, then head west, the whole country opening up from that one highway. I could be in Ohio by morning.

  Then right back here by nightfall, Joe. Sitting in the county jail.

  I took the turn right after the bridge, went to Howie’s condo overlooking the creek. I didn’t see his car parked in front, but I knocked on the door anyway. Elaine answered.

  She smiled for all of a half second, until she actually looked at my face. “Joe, what’s the matter?”

  “Where’s Howie? I need to talk to him.”

  “He’s at work.”

  “No, I was just there. He’s not answering his phone, either.”

  “Get in here,” she said, practically yanking me off my feet. “Tell me what the hell’s going on.”

  She closed the door behind us while I gave her the one-minute version. Her jaw dropped when I got to the part about the accusation. “Please tell me you’re kidding me, Joe. Please.”

  “I wish I were.”

  She picked up her phone and dialed. “Howie has to be at the station,” she said. “Where else could he be?”

  I paced around the place while she stood there waiting for Howie to answer his phone. I went to the back porch and looked out. With the lights on behind me, I couldn’t see anything except my own face in the glass.

  “I need some air,” I said. As much as I had wanted to get here, now all of a sudden I couldn’t stand the light and the heat and the four walls. “I can’t breathe.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said, the phone still next to her ear. “Just sit down.”

  “I’m going outside. I’ll be right back. If I try to stand still, I’ll go crazy.”

  “Joe …”

  I didn’t stay another minute to argue with her. I opened the door and went outside, sucked in a gallon of air like I’d just come up from underwater. I walked up and down the parking lot a couple of times, then went around to the back of the condo unit. There was a narrow strip of grass there, giving way to a long, weedy slope down to the water. I walked to the edge, kicking up great clods of freshly mown grass. From where I stood, I could see across to the lights on the waterfront. There were three bridges spanning the distance, to the right the newer bridge I’d just been on myself, to the left the old suspension bridge. Just beyond that was the railroad bridge. I heard the distant clattering of a train on its way. I breathed in the night air and tried to find some kind of purchase on things, some solid ground I could stand on. I didn’t find any.

  That’s when I turned and looked back up at the window. High above me, I saw Elaine, backlit by the bright lights in the room. She was still, like she was watching me. Then I saw the second figure in the room. A larger figure, coming up behind her.

  One second I stood there watching it happen, the figure getting closer. One second to realize that I had become the angel of death, that any woman I came in contact with would be in immediate mortal danger.

  I started running, slipping in the wet piles of loose grass, scrambling my way up the hill and around the building to the front door. I turned the handle, put my shoulder into the wood and swung it open. Ten feet into the room, finally regaining my balance and standing upright again, I saw Elaine standing by the window, holding on to Howie like a teenage girl at a horror movie.

  “JT,” he said. “What the hell?”

  “You,” I said, trying to breathe. “It’s you.”

  “Who did you expect?”

  “I thought it was … I mean, I was down by the water …” I bent over and held on to my knees. “When I looked up here …”

  “It’s okay.” He came over and put a hand on my back. “Everybody’s okay.”

  “No.” I stayed bent over, breathing hard and looking at the carpet. “He’s watching me, wherever I go. Nobody’s safe.”

  “Whoever it is, we’re going to find him, JT. He’s not going to hurt anybody else.”

  “They don’t even believe he’s out there, Howie. They think I did it.”

  I straightened up finally and grabbed Howie by the shoulders.

  “Do you hear me? They really think I did it. All of it. Even Laurel.”

  He didn’t look surprised. “I know,” he said. “I just got the whole story. Come sit down and we’ll figure this out.”

  As midnight came and went, the three of us were still sitting out on the porch, looking out at the lights over the creek. I had both hands around my second cold beer.

  “I overheard those guys, by the way,” Howie said. “They were really going at it.”

  “Who, Rhinehart and Shea?”

  “Yeah, right after you left. The Rhino wanted to charge you, but Shea was telling him they couldn’t do it.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “If he did, I didn’t hear it. That’s right about when the chief found me and threw me out of the building.”

  “How much trouble are you in?”

  “It’s nothing. I just have to take a little vacation for a few days and not come near the place. Or you, for that matter. I forgot to mention, by the way—you’re not here right now.”

  “Got it.”

  “Anyway, there must be a big hole in their case. It sounds like the Rhino was taking a chance, trying to sweat it out of you like that.”

  “If there’s a hole, I don’t know what it is,” I said. “If I was on their side, hell … I’d have to admit, everything’s adding up.”

  “But it’s not. That’s the thing. They must know something’s missing. Shea does, at least.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “You get a new lawyer,” Elaine said. “Somebody who’ll actually show up when you need him.”

  “She’s right,” Howie said.

  “I’ll call Tom Petro,” I said. “He’s probably the best man in town. But then what? I can’t just sit around and wait for them to patch up their case.”

  “How many old clients did you go see today?”

  “Two that I could find. Two others were gone. I was going to have Shea look into those.”

  “Out of the two you talked to, you didn’t get anything?”

  “No. They were right on top of my A-list, too.”

  “Maybe it’s not somebody so obvious.”

  “If so, then I’m in trouble. I can’t talk to everybody who ended up getting violated. There’s hundreds of them.”

  “I’ll help you,” he said. “Give me some names.”

  “How would you know if you found him? Unless he took one look at your badge and started running away or something? Besides, you’re officially on vacation right now.”

  “I can’t just sit around, any more than you can. I have to help you.”

  “I guess I can give you the two names from today and the last known addresses. You’ll have one pot-head and one vampire.”

  “Piece of cake.”

  We all seemed to run out of steam for a minute. I took a long drink of beer and looked out at the night. “Why did we stay here, anyway?” I finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were supposed to blow this place a long time ago, remember? How many times did we make that promise to ourselves when we were growing up?”

  “I think about that sometimes,” he said. “Maybe leaving would have been too easy, you know? When have either of us ever done things the easy way?”

  “Yeah, but after all those years of hating it …”

  “You grew up, JT. You fell in love with the place. I think I
did, too.”

  “Come on.”

  “Kingston’s a great town. You know it is.”

  I took another drink. I wasn’t sure if I had a comeback to that one. Hell, maybe I did love the place. “I don’t love it this week,” I said. “That much I know.”

  “You don’t have to decide tonight, anyway. You should go home and get some rest.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. As long as they don’t fill in whatever holes they think they have and arrest me. This time tomorrow, I could be sitting in a jail cell.”

  “You can’t think like that. Get your list and go back to work.”

  Another joyful day, I thought, revisiting all my clients who ended up behind bars. Beats being behind them myself, I guess, waiting for the judge to set a million-dollar bail.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold the phone.”

  “What is it?”

  “Elaine, the last time I was here …”

  She picked her head up. It looked like she had drifted off in the last minute or so. “What? I’m sorry.”

  “What you said before. When I was here a couple of nights ago, before the phone rang … You remember? Howie answered and they told him about Sandra?”

  She shook her head. “I remember the call, yes. But what were we talking about?”

  “We were talking about me going out and seeing all the old clients who violated, remember? That was the first time I started thinking about it.”

  “And I said, ‘How about the client who didn’t violate?’ I remember now.”

  “The client who didn’t violate?” Howie said. “What do you mean?”

  “The one who should have been locked away,” she said, “but wasn’t.”

  “So the victim,” he said. “Or rather, the victim’s family. Something happened because a client was running around free, and now they blame Joe because he didn’t put that person away.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “What do you think, Joe?”

  A few names came to mind. One in particular. From the way he looked over at me, I could see that Howie was right there with me. No surprise, as this particular case was as much his business as a Kingston detective as it was mine as a probation officer.

  “You’re thinking of who I’m thinking of?” he said.