Saints Of New York (15 page)
Read Saints Of New York Online
Authors: R.J. Ellory
The
offices of the Records Archives Division was open, and would be until
four-thirty that afternoon. Access to what he wanted was easy and swift. He
showed his ID, he told them what was needed, and they came through with files
on both Karen Pulaski and Rebecca Lange.
Karen
had been a McDermott at birth, her parents unmarried. The father was the victim
of an apparent hit-and-run when Karen was four, the mother had overdosed when
the child was six.
A
year
or so later David and Elizabeth Pulaski - registered as potential adoptive
parents with the County Adoption Agency for three years - took delivery of
their new daughter, a recalcitrant and difficult seven-year-old who had started
out with two strikes against her.
CAA
and Child Services visits were monthly for the first six months, quarterly for
the next twelve, and then once a year, those visits finally becoming a
formality. Mr and Mrs Pulaski, according to the reports on file, had done a
remarkable job with their adopted daughter. Karen had become a happy, well-
balanced, socially-oriented girl, and had stayed that way until someone
strangled her with a cable and pushed her body into
a
dumpster.
Parrish
turned to Rebecca. It seemed from a number of notes in her file that Child
Services were well aware of Helen Jarvis,
and
understood that she was really the one
who would be taking
care
of
Rebecca. On paper Danny was the guardian; in reality he
had
little to do with the girl until she
began visiting him in Brooklyn.
On
the face of it, there seemed to be no connection between the girls aside from
the fact that they'd lost their parents early
and
had been adopted - officially in Karen's
case, unofficially in Rebecca's.
Cross-referencing
the files, Parrish found no common denominator in assigned officer or
supervisor, either from the CAA or Child Services. One hailed from South
Brooklyn, the other from Williamsburg, but CAA and Child Services also dealt
with Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ridgewood, their jurisdiction stretching as far
north-west as Brooklyn Heights, as far south as Gowanus and Red Hook. If there
was a connection then Parrish could not see it, which left it open to
coincidence. And Coincidence did not sit well. It never had. Coincidence
defied Frank Parrish's natural sense of order and prediction. Then there was
the short skirt, the halter-neck, the high-heeled shoes and, in Rebecca's case,
the haircut and the nail varnish. Again a coincidence, the fact that in both
cases the perp was a re-clother?
What
now interested Parrish was the possibility that there might be others. Missing
girls, re-clothed, hair cut, fingers and toes painted, perhaps wearing clothes
that were out-of-character. Girls overlooked in the general manner of
investigation because they were never seen as anything other than isolated
cases, but - as had been said so many times - once was happenstance, twice was
coincidence, but a third time was conspiracy.
Notwithstanding
the possibility that the cases were isolated, unrelated, completely devoid of
connection, it was Rebecca's face that still haunted Parrish. He remembered his
own daughter at sixteen, and that simple image reminded him that Rebecca had
been someone's child, and if he didn't pursue the truth of her death then who
else would? Danny? Danny was dead. Helen Jarvis? Hardly . . .
It
was four o'clock by the time he once again sat behind his desk in the 126th
Precinct. Radick had left a note.
Shooting Range,
it read.
Call me if you need me, otherwise see
you tomorrow.
Parrish had eaten no lunch, but
whatever hunger he should have felt was absent. A drink,
though
...
a drink would have been good.
He
accessed Divisional Records on his own system, ran a search for missing persons
and homicides, limiting it to the previous twenty-four months, age range
between fifteen and twenty. Girls only. He fetched some coffee while the machine
did its work.
When
he came back he had seventeen names on the screen. Only one of them was his.
January 2007, a nineteen-year-old called Angela Ross. Parrish remembered the
case. Originally filed as a Missing Person, Angela had been found the following
morning. She'd been stabbed eleven times - three times in the neck, twice in
the side of the head, the remaining wounds to the upper torso. The perp had
never been found, and the reason for her murder had remained completely
unknown, never so much as guessed at. Parrish knew from his own investigation
of the case that there was no connection to Child Services. Both Angela's
parents had been blood; Angela had been the youngest of four children.
He
looked through the other sixteen cases. Five had been assigned to Hayes and
Wheland, three of them closed; seven to Rhodes and Pagliaro, six of them
closed; finally four to Engel and West, two of them closed. That gave Parrish
five unsolved and still extant cases, three of them Missing Persons, two of
them straight homicides, all females between fifteen and twenty, all of them
from within the 126th Precinct's jurisdictional territory. He jotted down their
names and the case numbers, and headed down to Records to pull the relevant
files.
It was the photographs that did
it. For some considerable time he did nothing but sit there, the pictures laid
out before him. Two homicides, three apparent runaways. Five girls, all young,
two of them at the end of their lives before those lives had even begun. In one
instance - seventeen-year-old Jennifer Baumann - the body had been laid out
carefully on a motel room bed, restful almost, as if a consensual sacrifice.
There were signs of bruising and restraint on the wrists and ankles, and the
motel room had been confirmed as the secondary crime scene. Jennifer had not
been murdered there, simply left there for someone to find her. Another -
Nicole Benedict, also seventeen - was found dead in a mattress bag on an
apartment block stairwell. Her head had been twisted back at an extraordinarily
sharp angle. Parrish stared at the picture for quite some time, the image
jarring and unsettling. It seemed physically impossible that such a thing could
be done to a young girl, but it had been, and the photographs were there to
prove it.
Parrish
gathered up the files and returned to his office. After an hour he had found
only one reference to Child Services - merely a footnote that Hayes had made,
inconclusive, as to whether Jennifer Baumann had been in the care of Child
Services, or she had a friend in care who needed to be questioned. Parrish did
not intend to pursue the question with Hayes. His decision - certainly
contravening protocol if not procedure - was to say nothing about his interest
in these cases.
He
put the files in a lower drawer, the two homicides uppermost, and before he
left he took one more look at the face of Jennifer Baumann. Her eyes were just
sadness personified, a sadness so deep it made Parrish feel hollow. He now had
four dead girls - Rebecca, Karen, Jennifer and Nicole, perhaps unrelated,
perhaps entirely irrelevant, but it would do no harm to keep hold of them for a
while. The dead ones seemed important. The runaways? Well, they could be dead
too, but right now they weren't, at least not on paper.
At six-thirty Parrish was seated
in a corner booth in Clay's Tavern. He couldn't take his mind off Caitlin. He
knew there was no reason to be more worried about her welfare today than any
other day, but the pictures he had looked at had disturbed him enough to
exacerbate that worry. She resented even the slightest attempt on his part to
give advice or interfere with her life, and he needed to learn to leave the
girl alone. He needed to let her go. She was old enough to sink or swim by
herself.
Parrish
didn't worry about his son anything like as much. With Robert it was different,
as was always the way with sons. Robert challenged and argued and debated and
raised issues. Parrish had even told Robert about Eve, and Robert thought it
was
most cool
that
his cop dad had a relationship with a hooker. Both Robert and Caitlin had a key
to his apartment, but Robert was the only one who'd ever shown up unannounced
and unexpected. Frank knew his son had a little more devil-may-care in him than
his daughter, but with Robert it had never been a question of his physical
welfare and safety. But Caitlin . . .
Parrish let go of the thought.
Caitlin was fine. It was just the case that had got to him, he told himself.
The photographs, the consideration of dead girls in motel rooms, on stairwells,
girl with handprints on their necks . . .
He bought another drink. The
money he'd taken from Danny Lange was burning a hole in his pocket. He'd
forgotten to drop i off, would take a walk back the way he'd come and deliver
it before he went home for the evening.
Within an hour he was joined by a
regular - ex-police Lieutenant Victor Merrett, old-school, old-time, a veteran
of the day. He sat down with Frank, they talked of nothing in particular for a
while, and then Merrett mentioned Frank's father.
'Have to be honest with you,
Frank,' Merrett said, 'and meaning no disrespect to his memory, but I never did
see eye-to-eye with your father.'
'Well,
Victor, I can tell you that what people saw and what really was . . . hell,
let's not even go there eh?'
'Don't
get me wrong, Frank, I'm not saying he wasn't a good cop. He was as good as
they get—'
Parrish smiled wryly. 'You on the
books, Victor? Were you
ever
on
the books down here?'
'On the books?'
'Taking an income from my
father's crew, you know?'
Merrett frowned. 'What the hell
you asking me that for, Frank! What kinda question is that?'
'A straight question, Victor. A
straight fucking question. You can't answer a straight question?'
'You're drunk, Frank. Jesus, I
come here to be sociable, come to say hi, how ya doing, and you give me this
shit. What the fuck
is
wrong
with you?'
'Ain't nothing wrong with me,
Victor. Something wrong with
a
whole bunch of
other people though, and I just wondered if you were one of them.'
Merrett got up. He looked down at
Frank and shook his
head.
'Think
you should go home,' he said. 'Get whatever the
hell
is
going on with you slept off.'
Parrish
leaned forward and picked up his glass. 'Well, before you go, Victor, let me
tell you something about my father. The only people he ever saw eye-to-eye with
were the ones who were taking money off of him, the people he had something
over, right? If you weren't on his side, then you were an enemy.'
'But his
reputation—'
'Bullshit
reputation, Victor. John Parrish was as crooked as they come and that's the
truth.'
Merrett
looked alarmed. 'I don't think that's something you should go shouting your
mouth off about, especially in the state you're in—'
'Why?
Why shouldn't I say what the fuck I like? It's the truth, Victor, the fucking
truth. He was a bullshit artist just like the rest of them. He didn't do
anything but stick his hand deep in the honey pot and take just whatever the
hell he wanted for the whole of his working life. And you can't tell me that
people didn't know. You can't ever convince me that the people who were above
him didn't know what he was doing. But they let it slide, Victor, they
tolerated it because he brought in enough small fishes to keep the net heavy.
That's what he did. And even those guys, even the ones he brought in, he didn't
bust them, Victor. He didn't do the work. Those guys were given to him by the
Mob, and he wheeled them in and his superiors were happy, and the Mob was
happy, and everyone slapped everyone on the fucking back and went home with
their skims and kickbacks. That's the way it was, Victor, and that's the way it
will always be.'
'Christ
Jesus, Frank, I never heard you talk like this. What the hell has gotten into
you?'
Parrish
smiled enthusiastically. He was drunk and he didn't give a fuck. 'Therapy,' he
said. 'I've been having therapy.'
'Well,
Frank, I have to say here and now, that I think it might be a good idea if you
got another therapist. Doesn't seem the one you've got is doing you much good.'
Merrett started
towards the door.
'You're
leaving?' Parrish asked.
'I have to make
a move, Frank, yes.' 'Well, seems to me the least you can fucking do is buy me
a drink before you go.'
Merrett
stood there for a moment looking down at Frank Parrish. 'Think maybe you've had
enough,' he said quietly, and then he turned his back and walked away.