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“You’ve been paying for eight empty safety deposit boxes?”

“I’ve been meaning to close my account at that bank.”

“Who else knew your box numbers?”

Petrenko shrugged. “No one that I can think of. Detective, this vodka has made me very sleepy. Please, I doubt I can be of any further assistance to you.”

“That’s quite all right. And don’t worry about a thing. I’m sure there must’ve been items in those boxes that you’ve forgotten about. Maybe papers, maybe other things. I want you to rest assured that I am going to dedicate myself to finding who did this and recovering what was in those boxes. I’ll be working on this twenty-four-seven if I have to. You can count on it. And when I find what was stolen, you’ll be the first to know.”

The two men stared at each other. There was no misunderstanding what Resnick was promising. After Resnick left, Petrenko sat staring blankly as his hands slowly clenched into fists.

“That fucking
zhid
,” he swore. “He came here just to rub it in. Someday soon, I will make it my pleasure to take care of him personally.” He then turned to Yuri Tolkov, who had been sitting to his right. “Find out if these Arabs were stupid enough to have kept that briefcase.”

Yuri nodded, pushed his chair back and got up from the table. The other two men followed him, leaving Petrenko alone, clenching and unclenching his fists.

17

Carol gave her husband a concerned look when she saw him. “What happened to your face?” she asked.

Dan ran a hand lightly across his jaw. “Shrini made lentils with green curry for lunch. I got some sort of allergic reaction from it.”

Thin lines creased Carol’s brow as she moved closer to him. “That’s funny,” she said, her eyes narrowing, studying the pattern that the rash made. “You’ve had Indian food before without having any reaction. And this rash seems so isolated, mostly on your nose and jaw.”

“I guess it’s just one of those things.” He waved a hand in the air as if that would wave the issue away. “I am so damn beat right now. I’m going upstairs to take a nap.”

She was still frowning as she nodded to him. “Dinner will be ready soon. I’ll let you know when the food’s on the table. Oh, I almost forgot, Gordon called.”

For a second Dan felt as if his heart had turned to slush. Barely under control, he asked Carol what time that was.

“Right after you left this morning.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Only that he wanted to talk to you.”

“I’ll call him back after I take a nap,” he said.

As he walked up the stairs, he really did feel exhausted. All he wanted to do was lie down on the bed and close his eyes. Just hide someplace dark. When he got to the bedroom, he pulled the window shades down, then collapsed on to the bed. Lying there, he thought about all the lies he’d been telling Carol. Before this robbery business he had never lied to her. Not once. Now he was telling her one lie after another. At first, he had felt guilty about it, maybe even remorseful. Now he felt almost nothing. It was amazing to him how easy the lying was becoming.

He was drifting off when the lights turned on. He saw Carol moving towards him, her face flushed with excitement.

“You won’t believe what’s on the news,” she said, breathless.

Dan pushed himself up and sat helplessly as Carol turned on the television set. The top story was about the bank robbery. When they showed a high-school graduation picture of Margaret Williams, all Dan wanted to do was slink off into some dark corner and die. According to the report, the other woman, the one shot in the stomach, was in intensive care and the doctors weren’t sure yet whether she was going to make it. “We’ll know more in the next forty-eight hours,” one of the doctors was saying. The story seemed to go on forever. Dan sat there dreading what was going to come next, praying that they wouldn’t show a photo of Gordon. When they came to report on the dead man found outside the bank, they described him as being in his early sixties, wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and shorts. Police were working on the assumption that the robbers killed him either for his car or because he might’ve seen something. Instead of showing a photo of Gordon’s corpse, the news aired a police drawing of what the dead man would’ve looked like if he were alive. They asked for anyone with information about him to contact the Lynn Police. Carol gasped when she saw the drawing.

“Do you know who that looks like?” she asked.

Dan could feel himself shaking his head.

“I swear that could be Gordon. And that Grateful Dead T-shirt—”

“Come on,” Dan half heard himself saying, “a lot of guys wear those types of T-shirts. And that doesn’t look at all like Gordon. Jesus Christ, that’s a drawing of an old man.”

“It looks a lot like Gordon to me,” she said. “Go ahead, call him, see if he’s home.”

“I’ll call him later.”

“I’m telling you, that’s him. If you don’t try calling him, I’m going to.”

Dan picked up the phone and dialed a movie phone line. He waited until he got the recorded message as to what was now playing, pretended to leave a message for Gordon, and hung up. All the while, Carol watched, anxiously pulling at her fingers.

“He’s not home right now,” Dan said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. He’s always out. Who knows, he could be on his way to the Jersey Shore right now.”

“I’m going to call the police,” Carol said. “I’m sure that’s him.”

Dan stopped her as she reached for the phone. “Come on, you know how Gordon is. If you send the police to his apartment, the guy will get weird on me and probably never want to talk to me again.”

“You’re saying that as if it’s a bad thing,” Carol said, only half-joking.

“Gordon’s not that bad.”

“He’s very strange. Most of the time when he’s talking to me, I don’t know what he’s saying.” Carol shook her head. “I wonder what he was doing at that bank.”

“How can you be so sure that’s him? From that one police drawing?”

“I really think it’s him,” she said, but some doubt had edged into her voice. She hesitated for a moment, her mouth opening slightly. “When I was watching the news downstairs, they mentioned something about the bank’s security system not working. Isn’t that what you built for them?”

“I architected the system, I didn’t build it. If they had let me code it instead of farming the coding out, I bet you it would have worked today.”

“You don’t think the system not working was because of a mistake you might have made?”

“No, I don’t. What’s wrong – you’re worried no one’s going to want to hire me after this?”

Carol tried to smile, but it faded fast. “I guess I’m worried about everything these days. It just doesn’t sound like a very good endorsement having a bank security system you built—”

“Architected,” Dan corrected.

“Okay – architected – being broken into. Maybe you should remove that last contract from your resumé?”

“Probably not a bad idea,” Dan agreed.

“Do you think they could try suing you?” Carol asked, her face now racked with worry.

“I’m sure my design was sound. If there are any problems with that system, it must be in the implementation. But that’s what you get when all you care about is price and you have the software developed by the lowest bidder. Don’t worry about this, okay?”

“I’ll try not to. This whole thing is just so freaky. Especially that drawing looking so much like Gordon.”

Dan tried to make an innocuous comment. Standing up, he felt as if all his strength had bled out of him leaving him sluggish, like he had a bad flu. On their way downstairs, Carol knocked on both kids’ doors, telling them to come down for dinner. While they sat at the table together, Dan couldn’t look at his children and couldn’t stand the thought of them looking at him. He could barely lift his head enough to look past his plate. After the robbery, he had been mostly in shock. Now, the full magnitude of the events was hitting him.

Two people dead, another critically wounded, and it was his fault. Gordon, that young girl, both lying in a morgue now because of him. Because of him…

What did I do?
he thought.
Jesus Christ, what the fuck did I do?

Carol was telling the kids about the bank robbery, about how it was the same bank Dan had worked at only a month earlier. As she talked, he involuntarily shrunk inwards, as if her words were blows that he needed to protect himself against.

“Wow,” Gary said, “Dad, what would you have done if you were there today and a bunch of guys came in with guns?”

He could feel Gary’s eyes boring into him. Sitting there he felt dirty, diseased, as if he were contaminating his wife and children. He couldn’t stand it.

What the fuck did I do to myself? To them? What in the world did I do to them?

“I don’t know,” he said, his words catching in his throat.

Susie was now asking about the robbery. How could he just sit there and listen to them talk about it? How in the world could he possibly do that?

He pushed his chair away from the table.

“I’m not feeling well,” he told Carol. “I’m going upstairs to lie down.”

His wife’s brow furrowed the way it did whenever she was surprised. “Do you want me to bring you up the rest of your dinner?” she asked after a short hesitation.

“No, that’s okay, I really don’t have any appetite.”

He caught a glimpse of their faces as he turned from them. Carol showed mostly a mix of worry and confusion, maybe even a bit of the brittleness he had seen flashes of before. Susie was staring straight ahead, her features now pinched and angry. Even Gary seemed taken aback.

Jesus Christ, even without trying he was hurting them…

Moving slowly, he left the room and headed towards the staircase. His legs cold, dead, almost as if they were disconnected from his body. Looking up the stairs, he didn’t know how he was going to make it, but he had no choice. He needed to lie down and figure out a way to convince himself that things were going to be okay.

Captain Kenneth Hadley’s pale blue eyes did not look happy as Resnick entered the station. In fact, his soft round face seemed to be sagging under the stress of the day’s events. He indicated with a short wave for Resnick to join him in his office.

After Resnick took a seat across from him, Hadley asked his detective where he had been, his voice showing a touch of exasperation.

“I was getting a statement from Viktor Petrenko.”

“Walt’s been back over two hours.”

“Petrenko can be a tough man to track down.”

“In case you’ve forgotten we have had a bank robbery with two fatalities and another victim lying in intensive care with her stomach mostly gone. I need you working this case. I can’t have you running around on a personal vendetta.”

Resnick shrugged. “We needed to get a statement from Petrenko.”

“That could’ve waited.” He paused. “You didn’t do anything to get yourself or the department in trouble, did you?”

“Me? Of course not. I was very sensitive about his loss, letting him know that we would do everything possible to recover his stolen items.”

Hadley let out a lungful of air, the noise escaping from him in a slow hiss. “What did he have to say?” he asked

“Among other things, his safety deposit boxes were empty at the time of the robbery.”

“So he doesn’t want to tell us what was in them.”

“Probably for a damn good reason.” Resnick edged forward in his seat. “This shook Petrenko up. He’s desperate right now. God knows how much he lost, but probably worse for him, he can’t afford to let us find what was in those boxes. Let’s put him and his people under surveillance for a few days and see where it leads us.”

Hadley blinked several times while he stared dumbfounded at his detective. “Not a chance. We’re short-handed as it is. Every man I can free up is going to be working this bank robbery until it’s solved.”

“You’ve got no imagination, Ken.”

“Maybe not, but what I do have is everyone on my ass until we’ve cleaned up this mess.”

Resnick nodded blankly, realizing the futility of trying to argue. “We should put someone on the bank manager. Unless you want to end up with another dead body on your hands.”

“You think he’s involved?”

“I think Petrenko’s going to think so.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t know. The guys who did this found out Petrenko’s box numbers either from Petrenko himself or from someone inside the bank. I can’t imagine Petrenko letting anyone close enough to get that information from him. And you’ve also got someone in the bank shutting down their security system before the robbery and turning it back on afterwards.”

“You still haven’t answered my question. Is this bank manager involved?”

“Logically, he seems like he’d be the guy, but I don’t know. I couldn’t get a good feel one way or the other. Tom and Phil were still working on him when I left. Have you talked to them yet?”

“They’re still at the bank.” Hadley shook his head slowly, a pained expression washing over his face. “Maguire’s looking at the security videos. Why don’t you go join him? And tomorrow take another crack at this bank manager. I need to know if he’s involved. I need this mess wrapped up before I develop any more ulcers.”

“What about having someone watch over Brown?”

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

Resnick started to get up, stopped. “The body we found outside the bank – do we know who he is yet?”

“Not yet.”

Resnick nodded and left Hadley looking miserable, his pale blue eyes staring off into the distance. He found his partner alone in the video room – a windowless eight by ten foot room with a single VCR and monitor, all that the department could afford. A stack of videotapes lay in front of Maguire, who looked up briefly at Resnick with a sour smile before turning back to the monitor.

“Back from your personal errand, huh? Must be nice.”

“Not quite personal. I tracked down Petrenko for a statement.”

“No kidding? How’d that son of a bitch take the news?”

“Not good.”

“Damn, I wish you had brought me. It would’ve been worth the price of admission seeing his reaction. And I bet you had a hell of a lot more fun than what I’ve been going through.”

Resnick looked away, knowing what his partner was going to tell him.

“Margaret Williams’ parents came down to the station. Hadley, the fucking coward, had me break the news to them. I guess I can be thankful I didn’t have to escort them to the morgue.”