The Dark Root (23 page)

I didn’t go upstairs, though. Fresh from my visit to the Klesczewskis, I was soaking up the air that we shared, searching for her presence.

· · ·

I lay on the bed much later, the phone in my hand, my eyes staring at a blank window full of night.

“You sound lonely, Joe,” Gail said.

“I am—and a little ticked off. I had a good life once, surrounded by my books and my music and my junk food. Life was balanced. I could go for walks, or stay at the office, or go visit you, if you were around. It was pretty good.”

“You miss that?” she asked gently.

“No. I wish I did. You ruined everything.”

Her laughter filled my head.

TONY BRANDT BANGED HIS COFFEE MUG
down on the counter with a curse and sucked on a scalded finger, checking his clothing for stains.

“Now you know why people say the stuff’s a health hazard,” I told him as I poured myself a cup from the officers’ room urn.

“I don’t have time to drink it anyway,” he muttered, now inspecting his finger. “Just force of habit.”

“Got a date?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He glanced up at the wall clock. “Early-morning head-bashing session over at the high school. All this talk of gangs has got them worked up, just like we hoped. Shit—I’m running late.”

He abandoned his mug on the counter and walked quickly toward his office. I took a side door into the hallway that separated the main part of the department from the detective squad across the way. For the second day in a row, the hall was empty of reporters. The last of the TV trucks had left the night before. As ironies would have it, the press had put us on the back burner just as our momentum was building.

Dennis DeFlorio hailed me from the short flight of steps that led to the Municipal Building’s rear double doors and the parking lot beyond. He was carrying a bulging, battered briefcase in one hand, and the ubiquitous donut in the other.

“Joe, where were you last night? I was looking for you.”

“I went to visit Ron.”

He walked down the hallway to where I was waiting, taking another bite along the way. “I got some good news about the gunman with the tattoo—the one they called Ut. And Dan Flynn called late—said his INS contact confirmed that Sonny and Truong are one and the same. No doubt about it.”

Down the hall, near the rear steps, Tony Brandt burst from the department’s main entrance. He was wrestling into his jacket, holding a folder in the other hand. “See you later,” he called over his shoulder and promptly fell headlong down the stairs.

Dennis and I broke into a run to see what was left of him.

Brandt was curled up against the double doors, clutching his ankle. The floor was littered with the oversized confetti that had exploded from his folder. “Jesus H. Fucking Christ. I think I broke the goddamn thing.”

We clattered down the steps to his side. I gently pried his hands away from his ankle, undid his shoelaces, and removed both the shoe and sock underneath. Dennis, looking a little hapless, began gathering the sheets of paper.

“Can you wiggle your toes?” I asked. “Hurts like a bitch,” he said between clenched teeth, but the toes moved slightly.

I felt around the ankle, which was beginning to feel warm and spongy. There were no hard bulges or any signs of a broken bone. “You may have broken it—but it could just be a bad sprain.”

By this time, several people had collected at the top of the small stairwell. “Better call an ambulance,” I suggested.

“No. Out of the question,” Brandt half yelled.

Everyone stared at him. “I’ll go to the hospital, but in a car. I don’t want an ambulance.”

“That’s crazy. They…”

He grabbed my arm with an unmistakable ferocity. “No ambulance. They’ll turn this into a goddamn circus. I’m sick of being front-page news. Besides, what the hell can the ambulance do now? Slap some ice on it and make a lot of noise? Just put me in my car.”

I glanced out the glass doors at the parking lot and the department’s four-wheel-drive Jeep station wagon, generally reserved for the shift patrol lieutenants. “All right. We’ll take you in the Jeep. You’ve got to keep that foot elevated and your car’s too cramped.”

The crowd thickened measurably, and Tony capitulated. “Fine—whatever. Just get me out of here.”

I yelled over my shoulder for someone to call the ER and let them know we were coming, and then I helped Dennis form a chair with our interlocked hands. We lifted Tony up and out the door, carrying him to the waiting Jeep with as much speed and gracefulness as possible.

We’d just gotten him settled into the front, with the seat tilted back and his foot propped up on a folded jacket on the dashboard, when Harriet appeared by my side with a bagful of ice cubes. “There’s someone on the phone for you,” she added, “from the Montreal Police.”

“Damn.” I’d forgotten I’d left a message last night for Jean-Paul Lacoste—Dan Flynn’s Montreal contact—asking him to call me as soon as he could.

“Go ahead, Joe,” Tony told me, “I’m all set.”

Dennis was already sliding in behind the steering wheel. “I’ll drive. Harriet, could you make sure they meet us with a wheelchair?”

I half smiled at this unusual show of foresight. “All right. I’ll also have someone call the school and tell them not to expect you.”

“Yeah, right,” Tony growled, half to himself. “They’ll be impressed how far I’ll go to avoid a meeting.”

I laughed. “I’ll come see you later.”

Dennis dropped the key as he was about to put it into the ignition. He was groping around near his feet when I told him, “You can fill me in on what you found out when you get back.”

“Right—if I can ever get out of here,” he muttered irritably.

I hurried back to the building, glancing over my shoulder at the door just as Dennis shouted, “Found it.”

He leaned forward slightly to turn the ignition; Tony’s foot was propped up on the dash, looking comically out of place.

What happened next froze me where I stood. A flash of angry red light arrowed up from under the steering wheel, enveloping Dennis’s still-passive face in a demonic flame. A sudden and terrifyingly large burst of white smoke then erupted from the Jeep, accompanied by the concussion of a short, deep-throated explosion. Just before it was enveloped in a curling white wreath, I saw Dennis’s head snap back, his mouth torn open by the shock of the impact. An instant later, I was pelted by a rain-like shower of debris landing all around me.

My nose stinging with a sulfurous stench, I saw the hulk of the car emerge from the smoke, looking normal below the window sills, but like a smashed aquarium above—dominated by a menacing white cloud that hung in the air like a nuclear mushroom.

I broke into a run, calling out, slipping on the glistening, still-spinning litter covering the asphalt. A glance at Dennis told me he was dead. Not just the blood, which painted the inside of the car, but the way his head was tilted back—flopped over the headrest.

Tony, on the other hand, was still moving.

I skidded around to the passenger side and tore open the door. Tony lay reclined on his seat, writhing in pain, moaning softly. His clothes were burned and torn, covered with blood; he was littered with chunks of flesh, mostly from Dennis, whom I now saw was missing both legs. Gingerly, I leaned closer to Brandt. “Tony, Tony. Can you talk to me?”

Blood was running from both his ears, which I knew was due to the compression of the blast. His eyes, when he opened them, made me catch my breath. They were bright crimson, red from the inside, as if something had exploded in his brain and his eyes had been made clear windows to the mayhem within.

“Jesus Christ” was all I could say, before reaching out tentatively to see if somehow I could help.

· · ·

I stood by the window of the ER waiting room, looking out at the parking lot where we’d arrested Nguyen Van Hai the day before, knowing somehow that that event and the reason I was here now were directly connected. Throwing political correctness to the wind, along with some basic civil-rights tenets, I’d ordered Sammie to organize a canvass of every Asian we knew of or could find, even before Tyler had finished roping off the explosion site.

I was having difficulty settling down, accepting that Dennis was dead and Tony badly hurt. I kept having to batten down spasms of anger that burst like firecrackers inside me, and to quell the impulse to lash out at something, or someone. I knew that now, possibly more than at any time in my career, the coolheadedness I preached about to others was going to be crucial—to the department, to the public’s perception of it, to the people we were paid to protect, even to the surviving members of Dennis DeFlorio’s family.

Furthermore, I knew that although Billy Manierre had automatically become acting chief the moment that blast had gone off, he was in no position to afford me the protection from both press and politicians that Tony routinely had.

Despite the clarity of these insights, however, the whole notion of grinding away on the case as I had been, nibbling at the edges when I knew it would finally extend beyond my jurisdictional reach, was anathema. In the same way that I wanted to kick a chair or punch a wall to blow off steam, I also wanted to be cast free of having to depend on disinterested, overworked cops, hundreds of miles away, to dig into details that mattered so little to them.

Dr. James Franklin, the hospital’s primary general surgeon, stepped into the waiting room and looked around to see if we were alone. Infamous for an irreverent sense of humor that popped up at even the darkest times, he was deadly serious now, perhaps sensing just how far the ripples of this assault were already reaching.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

Franklin joined me at the window and spoke softly. “Better than he should be. It’s lucky that bomb wasn’t filled with shrapnel. As it is, he still caught several pieces of metal and debris—nothing too serious, though. I gather his seat was completely reclined?”

“Yeah. Pushed and tilted back, both. We wanted to give him as much room as possible to prop the ankle up.”

“Right,” Franklin said, half to himself. “The ankle. I didn’t even look at that. The seat position saved him—took him out of the lateral blast path. With Dennis’s seat upright, it shielded him pretty effectively. Jesus, what a mess.”

“Is he going to be all right?”

Franklin didn’t respond as readily as I would have liked. “Probably. Not that you could tell it looking at him now. He can’t speak because of some minor searing of his airway. He’s also stone deaf as a result of dual fractured eardrums, and his vision is cloudy. He’s got several fractured ribs, a fractured leg, a few burns, the puncture wounds I mentioned from the debris, and a headache to beat the band—all of which will probably heal with time.”

“Including the hearing?”

“A little intervention might be called for there. I’m shipping him up to Mary Hitchcock Hospital today or tomorrow so they can check him over. He’ll be out of circulation for at least a month, although partly as an outpatient.”

“Can I see him?”

“You can look at him, through a window, but he’s out like a light. We gave him some meds to make him sleep.”

“Did you take a look at Dennis?” I asked after a slight pause.

Franklin’s tone became a shade more formal. “The ME brought me in for a quick consult, just to help me in my treatment of Tony.”

“What did you find?”

Franklin sighed.

“I could tell you the old cliché that he didn’t feel a thing. That wouldn’t be far off the mark. Gould said the metal cap of the pipe bomb hit him like a slug from an elephant gun, right under the xiphoid process, through the diaphragm, and totally bisecting the aorta. There are few better ways to almost instantly kill a man.”

“So it was a pipe bomb?”

“Definitely. But like I said, the only shrapnel came from the pipe casing itself and odd pieces of…” He hesitated.

“What?” I asked sharply.

“I was going to say
debris
again. But in case you come across it in one of the reports, you ought to know I found bits of Dennis’s bone in Tony. That’s going to entail some blood work we normally wouldn’t do—just in case somebody asks.”

“Like an HIV test?”

He made a sour face. “Among others. I know it’s not likely, but better safe than… Well, you know. That
would
be a hell of a note, wouldn’t it?” Then he repeated, “God, what a mess. Does this have anything to do with that little show you put on for our patients yesterday?” He motioned with his chin toward the parking lot.

I shook my head. “Who the hell knows?”

· · ·

Morningside Cemetery occupies the top and eastern slope of a hill overlooking the broad Connecticut River, contoured so that to stand in its middle is to be utterly alone among its hundreds of variously sized gravestones. The curve of the hill masks all other signs of civilization—the town to the west and north, the railroad track and the road paralleling the river below disappear beyond the close horizon. It is an island of utter calm, gazing out at the area’s two most prominent features, which the rest of Brattleboro routinely ignores: the river, to which all of downtown turns its back to face Main Street; and Wantastiquet Mountain in neighboring New Hampshire, most often screened from view by buildings, but looming from such a height, and from so nearby, that when it occasionally catches the eye, through an alley or over a low rooftop, it does so like an eminently threatening thundercloud.

Dennis DeFlorio’s grave was to enjoy this dramatic, beautiful, neglected view forever.

There were hundreds of people at the burial—most of them in uniform—fanning out in concentric circles from the awning-shaded casket and the decorously camouflaged hole beside it, unhampered by the walls of the small church that had excluded all but a few of them at the service earlier.

The killing of a police officer does that to other men and women who wear badges for a living—stimulates them to convene as they never will for other occasions. They will travel hundreds of miles, from several states away and from Canada, to pay their respects—not so much to a person they never knew, but in homage to an exclusive, lonely, tribal occupation that no one besides them fully understands. Every cop who dies in the line of duty does so alone—in surprise; and perhaps for that reason, every other cop who can do so attends the interment, if for no other reason than to atone for arriving too late.