Saints Of New York (41 page)

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Authors: R.J. Ellory

BOOK: Saints Of New York
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'Did
you believe him?'

'Good
God no, of course not.'

Parrish
leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, pressed the palms of his hands
together and hesitated before he spoke again.

'Ms
Paretski - Carole,' he said quietly. 'For no other reason than you're the one
person who probably knows Richard better than anyone, I have to ask you: do you
think - do
you
think he possesses the capability of harming another human being?'

'You're
looking at him for this girl's murder, aren't you?' she said matter-of-factly.
'All this runaround shit is besides the point, isn't it? You think he's killed
some teenage girl don't you?'

'We
think - we know - someone has killed a teenage girl,'

Parrish
replied, 'and we believe that it might be someone connected directly or
indirectly to Family Welfare. Like I said, and this is no bullshit, we're
talking to everyone, we're following every line, we're tracking dirt across
everyone's carpet, you know? This isn't something we can fuck about with,
Carole. This isn't something that you can talk to your kids about, or call
Richard on, and you can never, never bring it up when he comes over to get
Sarah and Alex—'

'Well,
I'll tell you something right now, he is
not
coming over to get Sarah and Alex, not
this weekend, not any fucking weekend—'

'That's
the point right there, Carole,' Parrish said. 'That's what we
cannot
do. You can't assume that he has
anything to do with this, and we can't afford to have you give anything away.
You cannot let him know that we spoke to you, and you cannot give him the
impression that you are aware of us speaking to him at his workplace. If he
brings it up, then just treat it as irrelevant. Show whatever level of interest
you would ordinarily show, and no more. I really need you to work with me on
this point, okay? We might be right off-track on this, you know? We might be
looking in completely the wrong direction. Like I said before, we're going with
everything we can, but we're treading careful because this is a big case and -
potentially - something that could go very very wrong if we make a mess of it.
You say the wrong thing then, if he
is
guilty of something, well then that would seriously hamper any chances we might
have of bringing him in.'

Carole
Paretski sighed audibly. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes for a
moment. 'You're telling me that my ex- husband might be a child-killer but,
regardless, you want me to let him come over on Saturday and take the kids off
me for two days.'

'It's
this coming weekend that he has them for both days, right?'

'Yes,
it is.'

'Well,
yes, that's what I want you to do, and I want you to do it just like always. We
find anything else then he might be a guest of ours this weekend and you won't
have anything to worry about.'

'Okay
. . . okay . . .'

'So
back to the question. Do you think that your husband possesses the capability
and potential to harm or hurt another human being?'

Again
she closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them they were
flint-hard. 'Hurt another human being?' she echoed. 'I'll tell you something,
Detective Parrish, most murderers are fucking cowards. They're liars and
they're cowards. Well, Richard McKee is a liar and a coward, and I think if it
came down to it, if it meant the difference between self-preservation or not,
then yes, 1 believe he could hurt another human being.'

Parrish
was silent for a moment, and then he leaned back in his chair and nodded his
head. He wondered whether he was hearing something of substance, or simply the
bitter resentment of a betrayed ex-wife. Wouldn't Clare say precisely the same
thing about him? Obsessive, married to the job, capable of lying, of hurting
people, neglectful? Of course she would, and she would say worse.

'I
thought that's what you might say,' he replied. 'I really didn't want to hear
you say it, but that's what I believed you were going to say.'

'So
what now?' she said. 'You want to look at his porn collection?'

'You
what?'

'I
have them. The magazines and DVDs. Boxes of the shit in the garage. I told him
I was going to get it destroyed, but I didn't. I don't really know
why
...
I just didn't know what the fuck to do
with it.'

'We
absolutely do want to see it,' Parrish said.

Carole
Paretski got up. 'So you can save me a trip to the waste dump. You can come get
it from the house right now.'

They
left together. Radick called Crime Scene and told them to meet them at the
Paretski address. They needed photos of the boxes
in situ
before they took them away.

FIFTY-FIVE

 

Parrish
was disappointed. The boxes of pornography turned out to be two, not twelve or
fifteen or twenty. The magazines were magazines, the DVDs were DVDs. It was the
kind of thing that Joel Erickson would call 'lightweight'. It was not difficult
to see that many of them were well in excess of eighteen years of age, and yet
dressed and photographed in such a way as to make them appear younger. It was
impossible to know - as with all such photographs - how many were there consensually
or there against their will; how many were drugged or drunk or stoned or
threatened; how many were being blackmailed or prostituted, or how many had
been convinced that if they didn't do what they were told and make like they
were enjoying it, then something dreadful would happen to them, their loved
ones, their friends . . .

It
was impossible to know anything except that Richard McKee was a man who
possessed a predilection for young-looking girls. This was not the dark world
that Parrish had hoped he would uncover.

Parrish
and Radick stood in the corner of Carole Paretski's garage on Steuben Street.
Crime Scene had been and gone, pictures had been taken. They had been given
clearance to examine the contents of the boxes, and they did so while Carole
Paretski hovered by the connecting door to ensure that Sarah and Alex didn't
wander through to see what was going on.

'I
told the kids you were bug people. Said that we might have
a
roach
infestation and you were going to check it out. I told them to stay in the
house until after you'd gone.'

'Where
did he hide these when you were together?' Parrish asked her.

'In
the crawl space up here,' she replied, and indicated the passageway that ran
from the garage to the roof of the kitchen. 'You can access it through a trap
over in the corner.'

Parrish
noted the trap, wondered if there was anything else up there that would be of
interest. He remembered the permit, the citation from the City for Ordinance
Violation.

'I
went up there,' Carole Paretski said, anticipating his next question. 'I had a
real good look, and there isn't anything else.'

'Are
there any other places in the house where he could have hidden things?'

'I'm
sure there are. You want to have a look?'

'Most
definitely,' Parrish said, 'but I'd have to get a warrant and I'd have to
arrange to get it done while the kids were away. I also wouldn't want to leave
any indications that we'd been here.'

if
I give you permission you don't need a warrant, right?'

'That's
right, yes.'

'So
you have my permission, and the kids are away all day tomorrow. You have some
people that can do this, then let's get it done.'

'Thank
you, Carole. That's much appreciated,' Parrish said.

She
didn't say a word in response. She hesitated for a moment, almost as if she
wanted to look once more through that dark and narrow window into her husband's
soul, and then she turned and closed the garage door behind her.

Parrish
and Radick went through the magazines and DVDs.
Barely
Legal. Just Eighteen. Teen Dreams.
All the
material possessed that same consistent thread, yet none of it was any worse
than the usual fare one found on the shelves of drugstores and supermarkets
all across the country. Perhaps that was the saddest thing of all - the fact
that such material was now nothing more than routine. Girls subjected to the
degrading parodies of sex that were so prevalent in such publications. Anal,
oral, double penetration, undertones of bondage and SM; some of them
dressed as schoolgirls, as cheerleaders, some of them displaying that flash of
fear or anxiety that they would have been forced to hide with wide eyes and
false smiles.
No, no, no . . . look like
you're enjoying yourself!

'This
is not what I wanted to find,' Radick commented.

'Same
here,' Parrish replied. 'The more I see, the more I think we might be dealing
with an external connection, someone outside of Welfare. Whoever got Rebecca
killed Danny, remember? I don't get that McKee is capable of shooting someone
in the head with a .22, but if there's someone in the porn business he's
working with then there'll be no shortage of people capable of that.'

'You figure a
lot of these girls wind up dead?'

'Dead,
or addicts, maybe in the porn business for real, or working as hookers. They
all wind up the same way eventually. Very rare to find anyone who makes it out,
and if they do they're badly broken.'

'So
we go through the rest of the house tomorrow, and then what?'

'We
have to find something more than this tomorrow or we have to drop him.' Parrish
held up one of the magazines. 'This shit I can buy at the drugstore.' He threw
the magazine back into the box. 'This gets us nothing aside from the fact that
he likes to read porn. We could never prove that he knowingly purchased
magazines featuring underage girls. The fact that he works at Family Welfare is
circumstantial; so is the fact that he drives an SUV. In all honesty, we still
have nothing.'

'But
do you think he's the guy? Do you think there's even the slightest possibility
that he might be the guy?'

Parrish
closed his eyes for a moment. He then turned and looked upwards, up to the
trapdoor, the crawl space within which Richard McKee had hidden his boxes of
porn, and he said, 'I can't get away from the fact that it has to be someone at
South Two, and right now I have no-one else who even comes close. We've lost
Lester Young. Now I want McKee to be the guy. That's all I can say. I really
want him to be the fucking guy.'

'And for
tonight?' Radick asked.

'I'll
get Ms Paretski to sign something that turns this over to us. I'll put it in
evidence lock-up. You go home, I'll wrap up here. I'll get Valderas to give us
three or four uniforms for the morning and we come back and go through this
place in detail. I want to see if there's anything beyond circumstantial that
connects him.'

'I'll come back
to the Precinct with you,' Radick said. 'I have
nowhere important to go tonight.'

*

Carole
Paretski seemed relieved at the disappearance of the boxes in the garage.

'What
time do the kids leave for school?' Parrish asked her.

'Eight-thirty.
Leave it until nine if you can.'

'And
you don't have to go to work?'

'I
won't go tomorrow,' she said. 'I'll call in. They won't have a problem.'

'I
wish everyone we dealt with was as co-operative as you,' Radick said.

She
shook her head. She hesitated as the sound of one of the kids running across
the upper landing interrupted her. Whichever one it was, they didn't come down
the stairs.

'It's
like the end of something,' she said. 'I've struggled with this for a long
time. I don't know what to think about it now. I try to make sense of it. He
worked, he paid for the things that he needed to pay for, but there was always
that distance. I thought it was me. You always think it's you, right?'

Parrish
started to agree but Carole Paretski wasn't waiting for an answer to her question.

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