Saints Of New York (36 page)

But
Frank Parrish did none of these things. He merely left his apartment and
started walking, at first nowhere in particular, but as he crossed the corner
of DeKalb and Washington he felt an irresistible need to go back to the
location of Kelly's body. He took the long way around Brooklyn Hospital, this
time thinking nothing of how he could convince Caitlin to work there, his mind
focused on Kelly, the simple fact that she had been strangled and left in a
cardboard box.

In
the alleyway itself there were no signs that such a thing had ever taken place.
There were no shreds of crime scene tape on the handles of the nearby
dumpsters. There were no chalk marks on the ground, nothing that would indicate
the significance of what had happened only five days before. They were
operating on the basis that Kelly had been put in the box and delivered here.
That would not have been done in a car. A flatbed, a pickup maybe - something
sizeable for sure. And whoever drove it wouldn't have wanted to attract undue
attention. A utility vehicle - phone companies, repairmen, something of this
nature? Or simply an SUV with a tailgate or a wide rear door.

Did
anyone at South Two own such a vehicle?

Parrish
thought about the people they had interviewed. Lavelle, Kinnear, King, McKee .
. . the others whose names and faces were now a blur. He tried to picture any
one of them doing something like this. Did they actually have anything on any
of them? And as for Lester Young . . . Hell, as it stood right now, they
couldn't even find Lester Young. One fragment of hearsay from Lavelle about
McKee, the fact that Andrew King was capable of physical violence, then
nothing. On the face of it, McKee seemed the most caring and dedicated of the
lot. He'd worked in Welfare South before South Two. He'd known of Jennifer Baumann,
but beyond that appeared to have no direct connection to any of the girls. But
then no-one in such a position would have been dumb enough to drug and rape and
kill his own charges. It all came down to two things: firstly, was the
perpetrator an employee of Family Welfare, and secondly, was it a case of
direct involvement? Was the South Two employee the killer, or was he passing on
details of potential victims to someone outside the employ of the city? That
raised one further possibility. If details were being passed out of the system
to an external perpetrator, then was the inside man perhaps really a woman?

This
last question was so anathema to Parrish that he didn't want even to consider
it; not until all avenues had been exhausted with the male employees. Until
Monday he had no-one.

And
it was with that thought that Parrish headed back to his office to see if some
further details could maybe be gleaned from different sources.

Using
the internal system, he patched into DMV. DMV gave up the drivers' license
details for all of the interviewees. There were no outstanding and prior
traffic violations, no DUIs - a rarity in itself. King did not have a drivers'
license it seemed, and though McKee did, there was no indication that he
currently owned a vehicle. That, however, did not preclude the possibility that
he did. Unfortunately the system did not work backwards. If Parrish had had a
license plate he could have confirmed the registered driver. The database
didn't list submissions by name, and thus he could not determine the license
plate of a vehicle McKee might have owned. It would be a matter of sitting
across the street, waiting for McKee to leave his house, and then following him
to see if he walked to a car parked elsewhere. Either that, or ask the man on
Monday. But why was he focusing on McKee? Why not Lavelle? There was nothing to
tie any of them to any of this. The strongest connection - and this simply
because his name had arisen twice - was Lester Young. They had to find him, if
only to eliminate him from the investigation.

Once
again, Parrish was chasing vague and indistinct shadows, trying to read signs
when no signs were present. It had been foolish not to ask all of them when
he'd had the chance. And do you drive? You do? What vehicle do you own at the
moment? But this was the way such things happened. This was police work. As the
investigation progressed and other circumstances were taken into account, new
questions needed to be asked. Going back was difficult, especially with such
informal interviews. The subject had cooperated, he had answered all questions
asked of him, and to go back a second or third time could be construed as
harassment. And if the subject was a perp then you were merely putting him on
the alert. Now he knew the threads that were being followed. All of a sudden
the car has been extensively valeted, every inch of the vehicle washed,
polished, wiped, vacuumed and dusted. It was a matter of trying to determine
what was needed without making such a thing completely obvious. Perhaps in his
professional capacity alone Parrish was capable of subtlety and discretion.
With everything else he was clumsy and insensitive. Like in his marriage. Like
with his daughter.

Without
a warrant he could not run a search on anyone's credit cards to ascertain
whether or not they might have hired an SUV or a pickup. As already
established, the box itself had given them nothing.

Parrish
sat for a while in silence, eyes closed, breathing as slow as he could manage.
If one of the South Two employees had killed these girls, assuming that they
were all the same perp, then why would he have changed his MO? Say Melissa
was
the first: why pack her into a trash
can and wire the lid shut? Why try to hide her? Then later, confidence
increasing perhaps, he decides not to hide them at all? One in a mattress bag,
another in a motel room, a third in her brother's apartment. No attempt to hide
the bodies. So did that exclude Melissa from the serial, or did it make her the
beginning of an evolving pattern? The broken neck was an index, but there was
no way now to determine if her fingernails had been painted like the others.

Parrish
tried to quell his frustration. He tried to focus on something,
anything,
that would make these things gel. Six
dead. Six ghosts. And where were the girls killed? Rohypnol played its part,
certainly with some of them, more than likely with them all. They were
kidnapped - or lured somewhere - and drugged. Their hair was cut, their
fingernails painted. They had sexual intercourse, quite probably unaware of
that, and then they were strangled. Snuff movies? Was that it? He recalled the
conversations with Swede and Larry Temple. Such people as these were too small
for this. Gonzo porn, underage stuff yes, but serial killing for snuff movies?
It was not in their repertoire. He thought about who he knew, what lowlifes
might have slid across his desk in earlier years. Had he ever run a snuff case?
Had he ever heard of one in the Precinct? He couldn't recall one.

This
was something new, something out of the regular ballpark.

Parrish
rose and walked to the narrow window that looked down into the street. He was
unable to define how he felt. Adrift? Without an anchor? Certainly disturbed by
the seeming lack of anything substantial throughout this entire case. Yes, he
was assuming they were all linked, but not without reason. Yes, he was working
on stale cases that had long since been dropped by the original investigating
officers. Yes, he had included a case that was way out of precinct jurisdiction,
and yet bore all the hallmarks of the same perpetrators.

It
was intuition, gut feeling, something so basic and fundamental to this
business that it gave substance to his certainty. Like a blind man with an
astonishingly acute sense of hearing, Parrish believed that all cops -
certainly those that dealt with homicide - cultivated an extended sensory
catalog. They sacrificed personal stability for intuition; exchanged marital
comfort for an innate conviction that someone had lied; let go of parental
skills to make way for the unrelenting persistence necessary to watch someone
for three months before they made a move. It was a trade-off, always a
trade-off, and though the faculties gained were redundant once your work was
over, they were still as much a part of you as your memories of better times.

It
was this, and this alone, that gave Parrish the resolve to keep on looking, to
keep on asking questions, to do everything he could to bring the girls'
murderer to a small and airless interrogation room in the basement of the
126th Precinct. Either that, or to see him dead.

'I'm reassured
that you came.'

 
'Reassured about what?'

'About you,
Frank . . . you have more staying power than I gave you credit for.'

'I figured you'd
get DTs if I didn't show up.'

'So we're
talking again?'

'We were never
not
talking. You were the one who said you
didn't want me to come anymore. You were the one who was going to give up on
me.'

'I have to
apologize for that, Frank. It was actually unprofessional of me to say that to
you. Sometimes you deal with someone and it becomes so much more than the job.
You know what I mean, right?'

'Sure.'

'So we start
over. A clean slate. I know you want this to work, Frank, and I think that the
only way that will happen is if we
make
it
work.'

'I still don't
really understand what we're trying to accomplish here.'

'But you
understand enough to know that it might help.'

'Maybe. Yes,
sure . . . whatever, you know?'

'So we have
talked about your daughter. We've talked some about the case you're working on.
The thing we talked most about was your father, and I don't think we ever
really came to a conclusion about that.'

'How d'you mean
- conclusion?'

'Your
conclusion, Frank. Whether or not you feel you have attained some sense of
closure about who he was and the effect he had on your life.'

'Closure? That's such a bullshit
word, don't you think? What does that even mean?'

it means simply that you feel you
have come to terms with something. That you have reconciled yourself to
something—'

'I'm not the sort of person who
reconciles himself to things easily.'

'So perhaps we need to talk more
about him.'

'I don't know what else to tell
you.'

'I have a question . . . just
something that I was considering over the weekend.'

'Go for it.'

'Do you think you are how you are
as some sort of revolt against him?'

'In what way?'

'The apparency. He
appeared
to be the model cop, but he was
actually a very destructive and corrupt man. You appear to be destructive—'

'That would make sense if I was
all good inside, but I'm not, believe me.'

'You don't think you're a good
man?'

'I don't know what I am, but I
know I have a habit of fucking things up. I mean, just look at what happened
with Radick and Caitlin.'

'It's not uncommon for people undergoing
counselling to start letting go of some of the feelings they have been
suppressing, Frank. Not uncommon at all. Your outburst towards your daughter
represented not only a desire and an impulse to protect her, but also has to be
viewed in light of the fact that right now she is the only person in your
family that you feel you can still affect.'

'I'm trying to help her.'

'I know you are, Frank.'

'So how comes it ends up
harming?'

'I can't answer that, Frank, only
you can.'

'God almighty, are you never
allowed to just state an opinion? Why do you have to be so goddamned careful
about everything you say?'

'Because
our conversations are not about what I think, they're not about my opinions.
They're about yours.'

'So
you want to know my opinion?'

'That's
why we're here, Frank.'

'On
anything in particular?'

'Your
opinion about your job for starters. Tell me your opinion about what you think
you're doing, and why. Tell me your opinion about the people you have to
contend with, the victims and the perpetrators.'

'My
opinion? My opinion is that everyone has the capacity for evil. It isn't genes
and chromosomes, for God's sake. It's situational dynamics, it's environment,
and maybe it's even mental illness, and I don't think anyone even has a glimpse
into the truth of that. Maybe it's just that some people are naturally
destructive, and maybe some have the capacity to withhold themselves and some
don't. I think psychiatry and psychology are little more than guesswork. I
think they blur the lines. Hell, it used to be easy to tell the difference
between the perps and the vics. Then these people, people who were supposed to
be authorities on the subject, came along and started to tell us that these
assholes were just as much victims themselves. Victims of society, victims of
parental abuse, victims of neglect. Christ, if everyone who'd been mistreated
as a child wound up a serial killer then there'd be nobody fucking left. Well,
as far as I'm concerned these supposed authorities did accomplish something.
They convinced us that assholes do bad shit to people not because they're just
assholes, but because of the terrible fucking things that were done to them
when they were kids. They're telling us it's not their fault, that they're a
product of the society we've created. And all the lawyers get on the bandwagon.
Prosecutors become defenders. Expert ; witnesses testify on behalf of whoever
writes the largest checks. They even contradict their own testimonials and says
it's because there's been further research, and then you find out it's because
the defense attorneys just put another zero onto their fee. It
all
ended up about money. It stopped being
about guilt and innocence, and started being about the skill with which
lawyers could manipulate juries. Used to be that theories would fall apart in
the
face of facts. Now the facts have become
fluid. The facts can
be
altered,
at least the way that people are given the facts. And
this
job? What we do? You have no idea
how frustrating this can be. We are fighting a losing battle. The harder we
work to bring justice back to the law, the harder the law fights to make real
justice unattainable for most.'