Full Frontal Murder (22 page)

Once again Holland paced off the extent of his new world. A half-circle exactly fifteen feet from its center to the perimeter. Slightly beyond the perimeter, four lanterns. Slightly beyond the lanterns, four corpses. That maniac who'd nearly blinded him with the light for his camcorder—was he just going to leave them there until they decomposed?

The man himself had never stepped into the light, had never spoken. Before he left, he'd pushed in a plastic bucket with his foot. Then he'd gone without a word, the glow of his flashlight shrinking to a pinpoint before it disappeared completely.

The bucket contained a thermos of water and a ham sandwich. Holland knew what the bucket was for and used it. The sandwich was dry, but the water was delicious. He restrained himself from gulping it all down; there was no telling how long he'd have to make it last.

He took inventory. Both of his guns were gone, including their holsters. And of course his billfold and watch were gone. His jacket was missing; his shirt was dirty and bloodstained, and one sleeve was torn. The pockets of his trousers had been emptied.

Holland searched through every inch of rubble within his half-circle, looking for a wire or something pointed he could use on the locks on the manacles. There was nothing. Grit and bits of pebbles and broken cement, not even a real stone. The only thing that had any potential at all as a weapon was the rusty bottle cap. Holland pocketed it.

His captor had approached from the left, his flashlight visible from a long distance away. Holland could see nothing but darkness over his head; but at one point during the videotaping, the maniac who'd put him here had almost dropped his light and had turned it upward as he caught it. Holland had a glimpse of cement ceiling about twelve or fourteen feet up. He was in a long, low place, then, with no electric power or running water.

He could hear only one sound. Occasionally from the darkness around him came a stirring, a rustling. Rats.

A wave of drowsiness came over him. He tried to shake it off; he needed to have a plan for the next time his captor visited. Assuming there was a next time. He needed a way to make the other man approach him …

Holland's body was suddenly so heavy that he sank to his knees. He could feel the heaviness spreading outward from his center even to his fingers and toes. The water … the bastard had put something into the water.

He swayed on his knees a couple of times, and then keeled over.

Mrs. Grainger had demanded news of Mr. Holland. When Marian had none to give, she reluctantly pointed her toward Bill Tuttle's office. Mr. Tuttle was in charge while Mr. Holland was “away,” The Pilgrim said.

Tuttle's office was at the end of the hall. A skinny, balding man with an anxious manner was saying on the phone, “Sorry, Mr. Bayban, but I just can't authorize that big a job … Well, do you have to have an answer right now?… Just as soon as Mr. Holland returns, I give you my word … A few days, a week, I don't know … I'm sorry, Mr. Bayban—that's the best I can do. Yes, I will call you.” He hung up and looked worriedly at Marian. “If you're here to apply for a job, you're hired. You can have mine.”

“I hope you're joking,” Marian said. She introduced herself and Tuttle practically hugged her, he was so glad to see her.

“Any news? Is he all right? Have you heard from the kidnapper? How much ransom will we need?”

She told him that Holland was alive, that they had heard from the man who abducted him, but there had been no ransom demand as yet. She did not tell him there never would be.

“What can we do? How can we help?”

“By not helping. I know you feel you should do something, but you can help us most by staying out of the way.”

“We're a detective agency. Me, I do all my detecting at the computer, but we do have operatives on the payroll—”

“Mr. Tuttle—please. You'll only muddy the waters. Keep out of the case, and keep everybody else here out too. You'll just slow us down. You can see that, can't you?” Reluctantly, he nodded. “We are going to get him back,” she added with a confidence she was far from feeling. “The best thing you can do for Holland is carry on business as usual.”

He ran a hand over his balding head. “But that's a problem too. It's anything but business as usual here. I had to fire one of our investigators this morning. One of the first men Mr. Holland hired when he opened the agency.”

“What happened?”

“Well, for a long time we thought someone outside had broken into our system and was indulging in some malicious mischief. Selected files were destroyed. Memos were tampered with—meeting times would be changed so one or two people would always show up late. One woman came in one day to find her hard disk had been wiped clean. It took her two full workdays to restore everything. And phony e-mail was sent out assigning needless tasks. That made it look as if certain people were nonproductive, just wasting time.”

“And it was all the work of this man you fired?”

“Yeah. He was deliberately trying to make the other investigators look bad. It was his way of gaining advancement. The problem is, I don't know whether I really have the authority to fire anyone or not.”

Marian asked, “What would Holland have done with this man?”

Tuttle thought a moment. “He'd have hung him out of a fortieth-story window by his heels.”

She smiled. “Then I don't think you have anything to worry about. Holland trusted you to take care of his agency for him when he couldn't. I'd say that meant you had full authority to make any decision that needs to be made. In fact, you might want to call that Mr. Bayban back and tell him you'll take the job.” When he looked dubious, she added, “Holland admires initiative.”

“Yeah, he does, doesn't he?” Tuttle suddenly grinned. “All right, I'll be Mr. Initiative himself. Boy, I'm glad you dropped in, Lieutenant. I
will
take care of Mr. Holland's agency for him. I'll take good care of it.”

By the time Marian left, they were both feeling greatly reassured.

When she got back to Midtown South, the first person she saw was Abigail James, sitting on a bench and waiting.

The playwright rose and came to meet her. “Since Mohamet won't come to the mountain … or did I get that backward?”

“Oh, I'm sorry, Abby,” Marian said. “I didn't hear your message until this morning.” She explained about the grease fire that had driven her out of her apartment for a few days.

“Come along home with me and have some lunch,” Abby said. “It's almost noon. We can talk without all that restaurant chatter in the background.”

Marian hesitated but decided she might as well. They'd page her if anything happened.

They walked to the brownstone Abby shared with actor Ian Cavanaugh, four blocks west of the Midtown South station-house on West Thirty-fifth. Ian was still in California, doing his valiant best to keep the movie version of
The Apostrophe Thief
from being turned into utter dross.

“Kelly says tell you that if you know of any hit men currently in Southern California, she'd like to hire one,” Abby said.

“He's that bad, is he? The director?”

“The director's the worst, but they're all meddling fools—the producer, the designers, everybody. Do you remember the scene in which Kelly puts on a dress she doesn't like, just to please her mother? Then she sits quietly at her mother's feet, both of them posing for a picture of domestic tranquillity that's phony as hell?”

“Sure, I remember that.”

“For that scene, the costume designer put Kelly in a skirt so short and so tight that she couldn't sit down at all. So what did the director do? He wrote new lines for the mother, making her criticize her daughter's choice of attire. He changed the
scene
instead of the costume.”

“Oh good god.”

They ate their lunch in Abby's big, old-fashioned kitchen with the high ceiling and the generous floor space. Abby spoke at length of what it was like to watch something she had created being casually and carelessly destroyed by other people. She didn't rant; she didn't even raise her voice. She seemed resigned, and sad.

But then she broke off in midsentence to say, “Marian, what's wrong?”

“What?”

“When I see someone forcing herself to pay attention to what I'm saying, I'm either doing a lousy job of talking or something's wrong. And I don't think I'm doing a lousy job of talking.”

“No, no, I'm with you, I—”

“Marian.
What's wrong?”

Marian stared at her a long moment … and suddenly she found herself spilling out the story. How Holland had been made to think she was in danger, and how he'd been lured into a trap at the Coney Island subway stop. How he was at that very moment chained to a wall somewhere. How they were so lacking in clues to his whereabouts that they were actually checking out abandoned buildings in Brooklyn, just hoping to stumble across his place of captivity.

The look of horror on Abby's face grew with every word Marian spoke. She reached out and took Marian's hands, squeezing them helplessly. “He's
chained to a wall?!
That's … that's barbaric! And you saw a tape of it? Oh, that poor man! Oh, Marian, I'm so sorry. Was he taken for ransom?”

“No, the man who took him is a killer. He wants me to close a case I'm investigating. His case.”

“Then close it! You can always go after the killer again, after he releases Holland.”

“Oh, Abby.” Marian shook her head. “He's not going to release him. The minute I announce the case is closed, Holland is dead. The killer will have no more use for him.”

A funereal pall descended. They talked a while longer in muted tones, until Marian needed to get back to the station. The original purpose of the lunch—cheering Abby up—had failed miserably.

22

Back in her office, Marian pulled out the Galloway case files—plural, now, three of them. Each file was filled with notes of interviews, names and addresses, witness statements, detectives' reports. Surely in that mass of information there must be some clue, some hint, some million-to-one shot she could follow up that would take her closer to naming the killer. She set herself the task of rereading every word in all three files.

The sun was setting when she finally gave up for the day. The last notes added were those about Rita Galloway's current lover—who was nonexistent, the detectives were convinced. About that, she had been telling the truth. Marian's head was filled with facts, names, numbers. But nothing had jumped out to say
Here! You missed me!
She'd start over again tomorrow morning.

Marian stayed the night with Abigail James. Abby's house was closer to Midtown South than either Holland's place or her own; but the real reason she was there was that both women felt the need of a friendly presence. But the playwright hadn't mentioned the movie once since Marian told her about Holland.

Abby put her in a room with a four-poster bed—the first Marian had ever slept in. Or tried to sleep in, rather. She lay there in comfort with the scent of freshly laundered sheets in her nose and thought about how Holland was spending the night.

Abby was still asleep when Marian left early the next morning. She was at her desk by seven-thirty, pulling the first of the Galloway files toward her. This time she would read every letter of every word, every punctuation mark, every blank space. If there was anything in there to be found, she was determined to find it.

She'd been at it for a couple of hours when she came to her own notes of the interview with Hector Vargas, the private detective who'd given his niece Julia Ortega a job when she was kicked off the Brooklyn police. Vargas was one of the small army of low-rent private eyes squeezing out a living in New York any way they could; but he wanted the police to catch his niece's killer and Marian thought he could be trusted in what he said about Ortega.

Vargas had told them the killer had hired Ortega to pose as a cleaning woman so she could gain access to Rita Galloway's checkbook. She was to look for deposits of five thousand dollars that had been made over the last few months, implying that Rita was a blackmailer and the killer her victim. That would seem a dismissable ploy except for one thing: Ortega had found two deposits of five thousand each before Rita's brother caught her and threw her out.

That's something they hadn't followed through on.

Marian still thought it was a ploy; Rita Galloway wasn't blackmailing anyone. But if the hinting at blackmail was just a smoke screen, how did the killer know there would be those five-thousand-dollar deposits recorded in Rita's checkbook … unless he'd given her the money himself? And if it wasn't blackmail, what was it?

Rita's bank statement wouldn't show whether the deposits were made in cash or not. There was one obvious way to find out: ask Rita. Marian didn't want to pull anyone off the search for Holland; she'd have to go to Riker's herself. A longish trip; better get started.

She took the Riker's Island bus, the quickest way to get there. The inside of the correctional institution itself was every bit as depressing as she remembered it, its gray walls and battered institutional furniture not exactly geared to inspiring hope. As always, the place was crowded; Rita Galloway was only one of hundreds awaiting trial.

Marian was sitting in a small interrogation room. When Rita was brought in from her Tarial cell, she looked better than the last time Marian had seen her in spite of the prison outfit she was wearing. Her color was better, and her posture was no longer that of a defeated woman.

“Hello, Rita,” Marian said as the other woman sat down across the table from her. “How are you doing?”

“As well as could be expected, I suppose.”

“The other prisoners treating you all right?”

“They gave me a little trouble at first, but now they've stopped.” She smiled wryly. “It's amazing, the number of women here who approve of husband killing.”