The Reckoning (8 page)

It was after three in the morning when Nick and Mavis walked away from the Morrison house. The rain, which had been on and off most of the evening, was coming back on, veils of it shimmering down through the live oaks and palms and pattering on the asphalt drive.

All the cruisers were gone, Riley's CSI van, and Tig's green Benz too. The network satellite trucks and the print people from Cap City had come, pestered, pried, pontificated, and eventually pissed off after hitting a wall of No Comment at This Time from Mavis Crossfire.

There were street cops and detectives who liked to maintain civil relations with the local media. Nick was not one of those cops. His term for war reporters was “combat proctologists.” His term for civilian media people wasn't actually a word.

There was a coroner's wagon parked up the block, sitting in a pool of light under a streetlamp, engine idling, smoke rising from the driver's window, a tiny red spark as the guy drew on his cigarette. The driver got out of his van as Nick and Mavis came down to the curb, his partner, a young woman in a black suit, following behind. Neither Nick nor Mavis knew the girl, but the driver was a Vietnam vet named Myron Silver.

Silver was old, easily into his seventies, and spoke in a slow hillbilly drawl, which was an accomplishment since he was born and raised in Baltimore. He flicked his cigarette into the night as he reached them. “We can bag 'em?” he said, speaking to Mavis.

“You can. We're through here.”

“Four, right?”

“Yes. Four.”

Silver looked at his assistant, back to the two cops. “Heavy?”

Mavis thought it over, looking at the girl. “The bodies?”

Silver tilted his head, waited.

“Not really. The dad ran one sixty. Woman maybe one thirty. The kid was small, and the girl…the girl…a lot of her is just not there. What is there is not all in one piece. You're going to have to use your judgment as to which piece is which. I think you and your assistant can handle it.”

Silver nodded, made to turn away, and turned back to them. “One bag for the dismembered vic?”

Nick shook his head. “No. You'll need three. Tag each one.”

“Tag them? Tag them how?”

“With tags,” said Mavis.

“No, I mean, if we can't ID the pieces?”

“Improvise, Myron,” said Nick. “Use your initiative.”

Silver said he would, looked back at Mavis. “Mavis, no offense, you look like shit.”

Mavis gave him a half-smile. “If I didn't, I wouldn't understand the situation.”

Silver heard that. “Pretty bad?”

“Worst thing I've ever seen in my entire career.”

Silver's eyebrow flicked up, his eyes widening. He looked back at his assistant, who was standing a few feet back, watching and listening but saying nothing. “Well, I guess this'll break in Katie May.”

“That's Katie May?”

“Just came on. This is her first night.”

Mavis looked over at her. “Yes,” she said. “It will.”

Silver and the silent Katie May walked up the drive to see what had to be done and how to go about it. Nick watched them go, thinking about what was waiting for Katie May inside, then went back to his Crown Vic to get some wipes and wash his face. He worked at his hands and wrists a lot, feeling filthy inside and out.

He was watching Mavis at her Suburban, talking into the radio handset, her voice low and laconic. Nick heard her say “ten-seven” and something about the motor pool. She put the radio away as Nick came up to her.

“Something going on?”

“Yeah. Frank Barbetta never turned in his ride. His shift ended at midnight, but he never came back to the substation.”

“They can't raise him?”

“No. He's ten-seven, and his GPS is turned off. Cell phone too. None of the units have seen him, but then, with this…thing…here, most of our guys are uptown looking for suspicious vehicles and doing random stops.”

“Frank ever do this before?”

Mavis thought about it. “Yeah. Now and then. After Brenda flew the nest. No reason to go home, so he just…rides.”

“Yeah? I can see that. Sometimes going home isn't all that appealing.”

Mavis gave him a quick look, started to say something, but let it slide.

“Well, that was a hell of a thing down there in the tunnels. I'd want to drive around and clear my head after seeing something like that.”

“Mavis, you
did
see something like that. You were there too.”

“Not me,” she said. “I was in the Rear with the Gear. Just one of those PUNTS.”

Nick smiled. PUNTS was an Army term. It meant Persons of Utterly No Tactical Significance.

“So, Nick, would you like a cigarette?” she asked.

“I don't smoke,” said Nick.

“Neither do I,” she said, reaching into the truck and pulling a pack of Kools out of a side pocket. She offered one to Nick, who took it, and she used a brass Zippo with the crest of the NYPD Detectives' Endowment Association on the side to fire them both up. They stood there and drew in the smoke, let it go, watched it rise up.

“Well, that was real fucking unpleasant,” said Mavis. “You think it was Dutrow?”

“No. Can't say for sure until we get the DNA and blood type. But that's my gut feeling. Timeline is too short. And the scene…what was done…it feels different. Less organized. More like the killer was in some kind of…what?”

“Frenzy?”

“Yes. A frenzy.”

“That's what I was thinking. So we got
two
of these assholes? Exactly what Tig was afraid of.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Nick was scanning the block, looking at the houses, the cars in the driveways: a Benz, a BMW, two Caddys, and a Benz. A car thief's dream.

“This isn't a poor neighborhood. People around here would have security systems.”

“Cameras?”

“Yes. Have we gone around and asked yet?”

“No,” said Mavis. “The Morrisons only had a couple of motion detectors rigged to the yard floodlights. We did do a canvass to see if anybody saw anything, and nobody did. All shut in because of the rain, no one looking out at the street. I'll put some troops on the security camera thing in the morning. That's a good idea. Come to think of it, there's a red-light camera on the traffic mast where Lanai Lane crosses River Road. Maybe it caught something.”

“Yes, do that. The girl, Ava,” said Nick, “she was on Skype when her door came down. Did we get anything from that?”

Mavis flipped her notebook open, read it by the streetlamp.

“Classmate of hers. Julia Mauldar.”

“Little Rock's kid?”

“Sister's kid. His niece. I sent a PW to talk to her. All the kid could say was that Ava was talking to her about another girl in the class—”

“What did the PW say? About this?”

“She woke the family up when she got there. So it was pretty obvious that something bad had happened. She basically said it was a home invasion that had gone badly. They took it…poorly. But Julia agreed to talk.”

“Ava goes to Sacred Heart, doesn't she?”

“Yes. They both do. Did.”

“The Frederick Douglass Panthers played Sacred Heart last Sunday.”

“Yes…and?”

“Dutrow was a linebacker for the Panthers.”

Mavis considered that. “You think that's a link?”

“I have no idea. Maybe. Ava was a cheerleader for the Sacred Heart Razorbacks. So Ava was talking to Julia…?”

“According to the PW, they both had those earbud things on, so the noise downstairs, Ava might not have heard it, or maybe she thought it was something on the television. Julia told the PW that Ava's picture—her Skype video feed—just turned into static. Just went all hazy and crackly and turned into visual white noise. She heard Ava's voice under the static, said it sounded like she was talking to someone outside the room—”

“The door was shattered, you saw the boot mark where the guy kicked it in, so she had her bedroom door locked.”

“Yeah. By then the Skype video was nothing but a field of haze and the audio was going nuts. Julia figured it was something with the Wi-Fi, but they were both on Ethernet cables.”

“She make out anything useful?”

Mavis shook her head. “Just a noise at the end, Julia said it sounded like someone was shouting at her, at Ava, and then the Skype connection just…flicked off.”

“What'd Julia do?”

“She phoned, a landline, it rang several times, and then the line picked up, but nobody answered…Julia thinks someone was there, not saying anything, just
listening,
and she asked for Ava a couple of times but got nothing. Then she got creeped out and hung up. She worried about it for a while, tried the number again an hour later. It rings and rings but no answer. Goes to voice mail, but Julia said she didn't want to leave a message—still creeped out—so she just hung up. Worried some more, sent an e-mail and texted her, Ava. Nothing back. Finally she went and got her mom to call the cops, see if they'd go around and check.”

“And they did?”

“Well, Julia Mauldar's mom is Little Rock Mauldar's sister, and Little Rock's the mayor.”

Nick looked back up at the house. Silver and Katie May were coming out the front door with a body bag on a gurney. All the lights in the house were blazing into the fog.

“Mavis, what do you think we're hunting here?”

“A sick fuck, Nick. A sadistic sick fuck. A very fucking
strong
sadistic sick fuck.”

“Not what I meant. True and well said, but not what I meant.”

“Then what
do
you mean?”

“The
buzzing
thing?”

“Yeah?”

“It interfered with the radios, down there in the shaft. You could almost hear it.”

“Brownian motion,” said Mavis after some thought. “It's always in your ears. Whenever things are real quiet, you can hear it. It's supposed to be atoms and molecules vibrating against your eardrum.”

“Atoms and molecules aren't going to screw up radio transmissions.”

Mavis shrugged.

“It's been my experience that radio transmissions can be screwed up by mouse farts. And that tunnel was three, four hundred feet into the bedrock. Any kind of mildly radioactive minerals—a seam of it buried in the limestone—that would be enough to do it.”

Nick was unconvinced. “Rainey said he had buzzing in his head. He even used the same word as Dutrow. Like a wasp, he said, a wasp in his head. And Rainey called it a
she
too.”

“Didn't Rainey get electroshock therapy?”

“Yeah.”

“And that cured it, yes?”

Nick shook his head.

“Maybe. There are still some…Dr. Lakshmi calls them anomalies. They worry her. Us. Kate too. She took him down in Cap City—”

“You said. At the neuro clinic in Sorrows. So he's not…cured?”

“Kate thinks…maybe not.”

“Rainey's been through a lot. The abduction, his mother and dad both dead, the whole grave thing, in a coma for a year. Now he's living with you and Kate.”

Rainey Teague was a touchy subject between Mavis and Nick. Mavis was on the kid's side, maybe just because she was a woman. Kate was totally committed to the boy. Nick was neither for nor against the kid.

He was just…extremely wary.

“Thing is, Mavis, when Rainey had this wasp noise in his head, at the same time, Hannah's hearing aids were all screwed up.” Hannah, going on five, was Kate's niece.

“I remember. They had to be replaced.”

“Yeah. At one point, when Hannah was complaining about them, the hearing aids, Kate listened to one, and she says it was exactly like a buzzing wasp.”

“Like what we heard tonight, in the tunnel?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“And maybe like what screwed up the Skype feed here at the Morrison house?”

“Yes.”

“So what you're saying here is that maybe some kind of horrible bad evil but totally invisible demonic wasp cloud of mind-warping free-floating crazy is flying around Niceville and it drills into people's skulls and turns them into sadistic psychokiller zombies?”

“No. I mean, it's more…complicated.” Nick drew on the last of the cigarette, flicked it away, a tumbling firefly vanishing into the dark. Silver and Katie May were bringing out the dead again. There was something really
wrong
with Niceville, he knew that, and what was happening here was part of it.

Mavis said nothing for a while, sensing his mood, if not his thoughts, and then she patted Nick on the shoulder and said, “Nick, I'd love to stay and elaborate on your totally fucked-in-the-head theory, but I'm due back on the mother ship at dawn and if I'm late they'll give away my window seat.”

Nick said nothing, smiled, shrugged it away. “Okay, you're right. Brownian motion?”

“Look it up.”

“I will. Go home, Mavis, get some sleep—”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “That'll happen.”

“Have a shower, or three. And a bucket of martinis. Nothing more we can do tonight. The guy who did this is going to be a bloody mess—”

“Unless he wore a body suit.”

“Yeah. So you've got units out right now—”

“Looking for anybody who is a bloody mess. So does County and State. Even the Parks Service.”

“You give out a description?”

“Yeah,” said Mavis. “I said the guy would look like Jackson Pollock.”

Barbetta said it would rain, and it did.

Barbetta and Danziger got Gordon cuffed and Ollie bagged—not much fun because Gordon had puked and peed himself and they had to get a body tarp out of the trunk to put under him so he wouldn't leak all over the bench seat.

As for Newly Dead Ollie, he seemed to have gained weight just by getting himself decapitated, which made no sense, given that Ollie's head must have weighed in at around forty pounds, but it felt like it was true anyway.

They had just heaved the body bag containing Ollie's floppy carcass into the trunk of Barbetta's cruiser, the car shocks groaning, when the skies broke open and the rain came sheeting down, waving like silky drapes in a warm wind off the Tulip.

Danziger climbed into the shotgun seat as Barbetta started up the cruiser. In the back behind the security grid Gordon was sniveling and sobbing, nose running and his big body jerking and shaking, tears streaming down his fat cheeks. He looked like a big nine-year-old kid who wanted his mommy.

Barbetta twisted around in the driver's seat, banged the grid with the palm of his hand. “Gordon,” said Barbetta, “if you don't knock that crybaby shit off, I'm going to tase your fat ass right where you sit.”

Gordon's sniveling stopped, or at least it slowed down and lost some of that glutinous boot-stuck-in-a-mudhole awfulness. He gulped down some air, swallowed hard. “Frank, you can't just shoot Ollie and dump him in the river, that's illegal—we got rights—”

“Jeez, Gordon,” said Barbetta, shaking his head and putting the cruiser into drive, “give it a rest. You sound like fucking NPR. Write an op-ed for the
New York Times
. Okay?”

He looked over at Danziger, grinned at him. “Should have called in a ten-fifty-four and left him there.”

A ten-fifty-four call was Dead Livestock Blocking Public Road. Danziger shook his head, offering Barbetta a smoke.

“We can have a beer, talk this over after you've got Gordon booked and bagged.”

Gordon heard that, stopped sniveling just long enough to say, “You're so fucked, Frank. That was fucking cold-blooded murder and I'm telling everybody at the station—”

“Shut up, Gordon,” said Barbetta, talking around his cigarette, this time with a lot more ice in it, “or you won't see the inside of a cell. I'll go down by the flats and leave you for the river carp.”

“You can't…we got constitutional rights. This is so
fucking
illegal! Help me somebody! Help me!” Gordon started banging his head against the window beside him, banging it hard and often, screaming for help. While kicking the back of the front seat and making Danziger's chest hurt.

“Shit,” said Barbetta, pulling over. “This'll just take a minute,” he said, getting out of the car. He stepped back to the left-side door, jerked it open, and punched Gordon in the side of the temple, his meaty fist traveling no more than six inches, but it had all of Barbetta's weight and muscle behind it.

Gordon's fat face went all rubbery and he toppled over onto the bench seat. Barbetta slammed the door, got back in behind the wheel, his breathing slightly ragged, and they drove on in blessed silence for a while.

Danziger saw they were headed north through the Tin Town side roads toward the Armory Bridge and away from the South Sector Substation for the Niceville PD. There wasn't a soul on the streets, not even another squad car. And the radio was silent. No cross talk at all, and Barbetta hadn't called in to Central since the shooting. And the MDT, the mobile display terminal, was dark.

Not normal. Not normal at all.

Something wrong about this.

Not a righteous kill
—the phrase ran through Danziger's mind. Frank Barbetta was a by-the-book street cop. He had a laminated card stuck in the visor over the passenger seat, with the cop's mantra printed on it:

WALK THE LINE

AND CUT NO SLACK

HOOK 'EM AND BOOK 'EM

AND DON'T LOOK BACK

Barbetta must have noticed Danziger looking at the card. “Okay. I can hear your brain moaning and bitching from all the way over here. Gordon's napping. You can tell me what's chewing on you.”

Danziger drew on his cigarette, gave it a moment, and said, “Frank, my friend, that was not a righteous shoot.”

Barbetta laughed, more of a snort, really. “Ya think? Ollie was coming at you with a fish knife. I'd say that made it pretty fucking righteous.”

“Well, I had my Colt stuck up his nose and you had him covered with your Defender and Gordon hadn't even shown a weapon yet—”

“Come on, Charlie. Ollie had a blade. I've seen what he can do with one. He may be a big guy, but he's quick and mean. I once had to take him out of a bar on my own and it was a near-run thing until I tased him. And you know a knife is ten times more dangerous than a gun. He was a few feet away from you, showing a blade, and even if you'd put one through his forehead, we've both seen guys get cut up by a charging felon. Lotta really important arteries and shit are maybe a millimeter below your skin, you can bleed out in three minutes.”

Danziger considered this, with all of its carefully twisted evasions and half-truths. It was a plausible version of the events, as long as they were the only people telling it. Danziger reached out, tapped the dash cam on the cruiser's deck. “What about this?”

“I went off duty two hours ago. No dash cam after I booked off. No radio either. No MDT.”

“We're still in your duty ride. It's got GPS. Central will know you're rolling.”

Barbetta patted the wheel. “Yeah, we are. Love this car. Her name is Mariah. Got the high-power mill, racing suspension, beefed-up grill, bumper bars. Nobody else gets Mariah. She's all mine to do what I want. I always disable the GPS when I sign off. None of Central's fucking business what I do after hours, where I go, who I see. I want to see a CI, he's got to know I'm off the grid. It's called gathering intel, and you used to do it all the time.”

Danziger had to admit this was true.

Part of being a good street cop was knowing who was doing what, and for that you needed snitches, and snitches needed to know you were being…discreet…when they met with you. Their lives depended on it.

“So you're just…freelancing?”

“Yeah. Didn't feel like going home. I like being in the car at night. Operating. Looking for pukes and assholes. I like the…jazz, the intensity down here. You know what I mean.”

That was true. Being in a squad and rolling, ready for anything, knowing you were the meanest son of a bitch in the valley, and armed, with a badge—well, that feeling, once gone, could never be replaced.

Barbetta was nodding, feeling Danziger's connection. “Yeah. You get that. You know exactly what I'm talking about. I mean, fuck
home
. Feels like I'm already home, you know? Anyway, got a hell of a headache, some kinda migraine, and Brenda's long gone, nobody waiting up for me anymore, so there's no sleeping gonna happen at my place.”

Witnesses.
“That guy in the news booth,” said Danziger, “looks like a monkey, I heard him calling the cops. Dispatch would have that 911 call tagged.”

“The monkey-looking guy in the newsstand is Juko Aivazovzky. He's one of my CIs. He called me, not Dispatch. He works for
me
, not the city.”

“Okay, another thing. You've got Ollie's fish knife in your pocket.”

Barbetta went blank, patted his coat. “Jeez. I do. Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

Danziger worked it through. He figured what was done was done. On the other hand, what had
not
been done yet required some thought. “You really are gonna toss Ollie in the Tulip, aren't you?”

Barbetta looked over at Danziger and then back at the street. The lights of the Armory Bridge were a string of yellow pearls stitched through the tree branches.

“Not us,” said Barbetta. “Gordon back there.”

Danziger took that in.

“Why he's along, right?”

Barbetta smiled, his heavy jaw and gloved hands lit up by the dashboard glow, the upper part of his face in darkness except for two small pinpricks of green light in his eyes.

“What'd Mommy always say? Many hands…?”

“Make light the burden,” Danziger said. “Frank, I'm okay with backing you up on the shooting, you know that, although I notice I now have Ollie bits all over my best range jacket—”

“I'll pay for the dry cleaning. And there's some Handi Wipes in the glove compartment, 'cause you've also got Ollie bits on your cheek there.”

“Thank you,” said Charlie, digging around for the Handi Wipes. “But now you want me to go along with dumping a headless corpse into the river.”

“You afraid we'll get cited by the EPA? Ollie is completely biodegradable, fulla nutrients and shit, so he's good for the environment. Charlie, he's just another fucking suicidal ratbag from Tin Town. The world's a better place. Next objection?”

“A
headless
ratbag, Frank. Ollie is currently headless. Headless ratbags are not often considered suicides by the authorities, since one's commitment to slicing one's head off tends to taper off dramatically at around the halfway point. So the cops usually leap to that whole foul play thing.”

“
One's?
You're using the word
one's
? Coker was here, he'd laugh his ass off, then probably shoot you. You sound like that dude in
Downton Abbey
. What the fuck gives with these
one's
?”

“Yeah. Good point. But you know what I'm getting at.”

“He coulda done it with a shotgun.”

“If you use a shotgun on yourself, it just sorta turns the entire skull into a big peeled-open banana skin. It doesn't
erase
it. Ollie got it from twenty feet. And how'd he get to the bridge?”

“So okay, it's not a suicide. Some gangbanger finally took Ollie out. Nobody in Tin Town is gonna be sorry to see the last of him. Jeez, Charlie, I'm beginning to think you just don't want to get involved?”

“I'd say I'm already involved. It's just that, I gotta say this, you're acting a bit weird.”

Barbetta barked out a laugh, grinned at Danziger.

“I'm acting weird?
I'm
acting weird? That's fucking rich, coming from you. You have any fucking idea how
weird
it is, you sitting around in my cruiser giving me fucking grief about whether we dump a sack of dead meat into the fucking Tulip?”

“Why's that weird?”

“Because, Charlie, no offense or anything, not to put too fine a point on it, you're supposed to be dead.”

Understandably, Danziger needed some time to process that. Barbetta let him. They were at the bridge now, and he pulled over next to the Works Department Quonset hut.

“Dead? What the fuck do you mean? How dead?”

“Dead enough to give you a funeral and everything. I went to it. In my dress blues. We all did. State, County, us guys. Mavis Crossfire gave a speech and we all got shitfaced afterward at the AmVets Hall. As Joe Biden says, it was a big fuckin' deal.”

Danziger thought that over. Being dead would explain a lot—the whole memory-loss thing—but then it raised a lot more questions than it answered. Starting with “Was it an open casket?”

Barbetta's mind went back to look. “No, come to think of it. At least it was closed when I got there. Big US flag on it, honor guard all around it.”

“If the casket was closed, how do you know I was inside it?”

“Christ, Charlie, who'd want it open? Look in the rearview mirror. You're ugly as a chewed boot right now. Think how much worse you'd look dead. Besides, I heard you were all shot to shit and like horribly mutilated and stuff. Nobody needs to see that.”

“I was
mutilated
?” said Danziger, looking down at his crotch, which is the first thing guys check when they hear the word
mutilated,
his voice going a bit screechy. “Who the fuck mutilated me?”

Barbetta hunched his shoulders. “Okay, fuck, maybe not
mutilated
. I was just heating you up a little. Where's your sense of humor at, for fuck's sake? But shot, yeah, you were definitely shot. That much I do know.”

“Who the fuck shot me?”

“Buncha mob pukes, I heard. Nick Kavanaugh was there, and Mavis Crossfire, paying you a visit, like, up in your ranch there. These mob guys show up, some kind of Sicilian vendetta thing over that Frankie Maranzano asshole Coker popped at the Galleria Mall. Five of them, suddenly it's like the OK Corral. You and Coker killed two, Reed Walker killed another, Nick Kavanaugh did a guy hand to hand right there in the sweet grass, and Mavis shot the last guy.”

“Good for us. So how did I get shot?”

Barbetta laughed, shook his head. “Trying to be a fucking hero, Charlie. Story is a shooter was going for Mavis, you stepped into the line of fire, took two rounds meant for her.”

“Where?”

“I think inna chest there. Pow, pow, and bingo, you're KIA.”

Danziger touched the sore spots on his chest and felt the world slip sideways.

Barbetta was on a roll. “Yeah, you died a fucking hero. Which is why Mavis did the eulogy thing for you. Did a good job too. Had everybody all teared up. Pipe band played ‘Danny Boy' and ‘Amazing Grace.' Sun was shining. Cops in from all over the state, flasks of whiskey were going around the ranks. Icy cold beers in the trunks. Fuck, it was a terrific day…except for the you-being-dead part, I mean. No offense.”

Danziger gave the whole concept some serious consideration. It sounded like he'd had one hell of a send-off and he sort of wished he could have been there. He decided he needed more data.