Soul Patch (30 page)

Vijay took slow, measured steps, crushing bits of dirt and flakes of concrete as he went. He was breathing hard and fast, his heart pounding inside his small chest. When he guessed he was pretty close to where he wanted to be, something cracked loudly under the weight of his Nikes. A stick, he thought, or a small piece of PVC piping. Not wanting to use up the batteries unnecessarily, he knelt down and felt for the ball in the darkness. Almost immediately, his fingers landed on their target. But something was wrong. The thing in his hand was rounded but irregular. It was way too hard to be a plastic ball. There were ridges and . . . eyeholes!

Panicked, Vijay dropped the flashlight and the skull and ran into the darkness, swallowing his screams as he went. No matter what, he could not let the others hear him scream.
Bang!
There was headsplitting pain and his ears rang so loudly he could no longer even hear himself breathe. He felt himself spinning off into space even as the floor pulled him down, down, down. Then there was nothingness.

DETECTIVE JIM FEHERTY had watched the grainy black-and-white security tape so many times it was beginning to dissolve into a gray blur. According to the time stamp, at 5:47:21 p.m., a white male child positively identified as ten-year-old Timothy Joseph Ritter Jr. enters the play area of Jungle Jerry’s Playplex. Eleven minutes and thirteen seconds later, a black female child positively identified as five-year-old Tanya Davis is escorted to the ball pit by her mother. Several other children are seen to come and go, but neither the Ritter nor Davis child are seen to exit.

People told Feherty he had been mad to swap his NYPD gold shield for one in some cockamamie upstate town. Sometimes he thought he was crazy too, but felt he needed the quiet. And Petersboro was only a stone’s throw from the best fishing in the state. That’s the way he figured to ease into retirement: in waders or a rowboat with a rod and reel in hand. Jim Feherty just wanted to work cases that made some sense and he thought that’s what this move offered. He had seen enough body parts in garbage bags and whenever he found himself second-guessing his decision to take this job, he thought about Billy Pesco.

On a beautiful spring day in 1987, Jim and his partner caught a homicide at a deli on Hillside Avenue in the Jamaica section of Queens. There they found the owner, Billy Pesco, murdered behind the counter. His eyes were open, his body still warm, and his blood leaking out of three holes in his torso onto the wooden slats above the tile floor. Both Jim and his partner had the same thought.

“Robbery,” they said simultaneously.

“Think again,” said the uniform who had been first on the scene. “The register’s full and that’s a real Rolex there on Billy’s wrist. And look under the counter. See that bank deposit bag? It’s looks pretty full to me. And just between, you, me, and the Holy Ghost, Billy keeps a loaded Glock under there too.”

Just then another uniform stuck her head into the store and asked the two detectives to please step outside. There, hands cuffed behind him, legs spread, face pressed to the hood of a patrol car, was a young Hispanic man. Next to him on the hood of the car was a hero sandwich half-wrapped in foil. Only one bite had been taken out of the sandwich. The female uniform waved an evidence bag at the detectives. Inside the bag was a .45 Browning automatic that had recently been fired.

“We found him two blocks away sitting on a stoop. He had the hero in one hand and the .45 in the other. His name’s Alfredo Ordonez. I read him his rights already.”

“You do this, Alfredo?” Jim Feherty asked.

“Yeah, I did that fuckeeng guy.”

“Why?”

“Look at that hero, man. That’s why.”

Feherty picked the hero sandwich up in his gloved hand and took a careful look. “Corned beef. So what?”

Ordonez stared disbelievingly at the detective. “Look! Look at the hero. See the mayonnaise? He put fuckeeng mayonnaise on my corned beef.”

“You put three bullets into a man at point blank range because he put mayonnaise on your hero?”

“I hate mayonnaise. I like mustard.”

The next day, Feherty put in his papers.

As Jim Feherty pressed the rewind button yet again, there was a knock on the door. Before he could give his permission, an over-eager deputy sheriff stuck his head into the room. There had been a break in the case. A known pedophile, Thomas Horvath aka Dirty Tommy, had been identified by several Playplex employees as a man they had seen lurking about that day.

“We got him on tape from a second camera,” the deputy said. “We got units rolling to his last known address right now.”

“Any tape of him with the missing kids?” Feherty asked, never taking his eyes off the tape counter in the corner of the monitor.

“Nope.”

“Let me know when he gets here.”

Confused by Detective Feherty’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, the deputy wondered about the detective’s state of mind. Regardless of what Dirty Tommy did or did not do, Feherty thought, it wouldn’t explain why the tape said those kids were still in there. And while taking note of the sour expression on Corina Davis’ face as she walked Tanya to the ball pit, Jim Feherty swore he could smell corned beef.

DYLAN COHEN CHECKED his watch and spoke up, “Something’s fucked up. Vijay’s been in there way too long. It’s after twelve-thirty.”

“Give him a few more minutes. He’s just trying to scare us now,” said Matt Poole, with little conviction.

Ricky Smith agreed.

“But what if he’s hurt or something?” Dylan asked.

“Okay, hero, you go in after him,” Poole said.

Dylan had nothing to say to that, but it was clear the boys were all nervous.

“Forget this, I’m going for help,” Dylan said. “You guys want to split, go ahead. I got him into this and it’s my problem. It’ll take me five minutes to get to a phone, so that’s how much time you’ve got.”

Matt and Rick said they were sorry, but were certain their parents would kill them if they knew they had even come up here. When Dylan got around to asking the nameless kid, he’d already gone. 1989

The judge was accustomed to midnight arraignments and trials in nearly empty courtrooms. Nothing during his long tenure on the bench had prepared him for the circus that greeted him as he stepped to the bench.

“Be seated!” shouted the bailiff.

Although these proceedings were merely perfunctory and his comments already prepared, the salty old jurist made a show of seriously reading through the papers stacked high before him. In the end though, all he had to say was, “Thomas Horvath, you have been found in violation of the terms of your parole. I am therefore remanding you to the state correctional facility at Batavia to serve out the remainder of your original sentence. Have you anything to say to this court?”

A frightened looking man of fifty-eight rose to his feet, as did his court-appointed attorney. “Ya-Ya-Your Honor,” he stammered. “It’s true I done some bad things in my time and if they didn’t find that special room in my house, I woulda done some more. I don’t wanna do them things, but I can’t help it, I swear. So I guess it’s a good thing that I’m going back inside. What I really wanna say is that, as God is my witness, I never done nothing to them two kids at that Playplex place. I know everybody thinks I did, but I didn’t. I couldn’t kill no kids. It’s like they was gobbled up.”

The judge had nothing to say to that and waved for the court officers to remove the prisoner from his courtroom. It was all over in five minutes.

Outside the courthouse, reporters shoved microphones and handheld cassette recorders in Detective Feherty’s face. Cameras click-click-clicked. Television lights made the detective shield his eyes with his hand. Was he satisfied? Would they ever find the bodies? Was he
proud to have put Dirty Tommy back where he belonged? Did he think Dirty Tommy used the secret room to torture and murder the missing kids?

“No comment,” is what he said.

What he wanted to say , no one wanted to hear. Because although he had worked diligently to put Thomas Horvath back behind bars and had been the one to find the entrance to the secret room in Horvath’s basement, Jim Feherty believed every word of Dirty Tommy’s statement to the court.

MALCOLM HAD WANTED to stay home with her, but Corina refused and sent him off to work. Alone, she watched the live reports from outside the courthouse. She felt sorry for Detective Feherty. He seemed so ill at ease in the spotlight. He had always been so gentle and patient with her, never defending himself against her grief-driven rages. He had done his best. Everybody had, even the Puds, but no one could tell her what had happened to her precious child. She turned off the TV and swallowed the last handful of pills. Corina went into Tanya’s room, folded herself into her daughter’s long unused bed, and went to sleep forever.

JIM FEHERTY DIDN’T bother with clocks. They only frustrated him these days. He knew it was late, very late and that he should have been asleep for hours. But sleep came harder and harder to him, so that it barely seemed worth the effort. Even so, he was annoyed to have someone knocking at his cabin door at this time of night.

“I’m coming, for chrissakes! Hold your horses,” he screamed, throwing on a flannel shirt and pulling his .38 off the top of the refrigerator. Before opening the door, Feherty popped on the porch light and took a peep at his late-night visitor through the side window. The guy looked harmless enough in his corduroy blazer, sweater, and running shoes, but you never know.

“Jeff Kinnock,
Finger Lakes Tribune
,” the pale man on the porch said, holding up his press credentials.

“I’m already a subscriber.”

“Sir, I’m not—‘’

Jim Feherty was laughing too hard for the reporter to finish his sentence. Although he’d lived on the outskirts of Petersboro for eleven years, the retired detective had never gotten used to how tone-deaf upstaters were to sarcasm. He tucked the .38 in his waistband.

“Let me guess,” Feherty said. “It’s Halloween, so you got a brilliant idea to write a follow-up piece on those missing kids, right? I hate to bust your cherry, kid, but I’ve averaged one hotshot media type a year for the past nine years who had the same brilliant idea. But you are the first one who thought to show up this late.”

Kinnock said, “Nice speech, but I break stories. I just came here to get a reaction to a tip I got from a source that another kid’s gone missing at the Playplex building.”

“You headed over there?”

“Of course.”

“Come on,” Feherty said, grabbing his hunting jacket. “We’ll talk on the way.”

They exchanged few words until they were getting pretty close to the abandoned shopping center. Feherty finally asked the reporter to repeat what his source had said as closely as he could remember it. Kinnock complied. There wasn’t much there, no details, really, only that a young boy had gone missing. Feherty was disappointed and was embarrassed by his disappointment. He found his heart was divided into warring camps. On one hand, he hoped it all just turned out to be a Halloween prank. On the other . . .

Kinnock seemed to read Feherty’s mind. “You hope it’s real, don’t you? That it’s not a prank?”

“You’re smart for a reporter. When I was a young detective in the city I was on a rape task force for a few months. We had this one guy who was a real monster, but a smart one. After averaging a rape a week for two months, he just stopped and his trail went cold. We figured he got killed, arrested for something else, or moved to another city, but I remember hearing the lead detectives talking about the next victim. It was like they were praying for him to strike again so they could have fresh evidence. Now I’m just like them.”

“It’s natural,” Kinnock said. “Nothing to feel guilty about.”

“You think? Then why don’t I sleep nights? I’ve spent part of each day for the last nine years hoping for some other kid to vanish so I could satisfy my curiosity. You try living with that.”

At the bottom of the hill leading up to the old shopping center, a sheriff’s deputy waved the reporter’s car to a halt. Kinnock rolled down his window and raised his hand to show his credentials, but Feherty grabbed his wrist. When the deputy recognized the retired detective, he waved the car through without hesitation.