The Shadow Man (6 page)

The patrol sergeant grinned. ‘When you walk over there, someone’s gonna yell: “There he is!”’

Robinson laughed. ‘Probably. Wouldn’t be the first time.’

The patrol sergeant continued. ‘I put out a BOLO. Maybe we’ll get lucky.’

‘You’re the second person to say that to me in the last half hour. I don’t feel lucky tonight.’

The patrol sergeant shrugged. ‘I guess she didn’t either.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the apartment.

‘You think the witness could work with an Identikit technician?’

‘He said he got a good look. Maybe. But, hey, after he

said that, his wife handed him his eyeglasses.’

‘Great. They over in that bunch?’ Robinson pointed at the collection of elderly people.

‘Right in front.’

‘All right, let me take a look inside first.’

‘I’ve already called forensics. And the medical examiner. They’re on their way over.’

‘Good going. Thanks.’

The detective stepped up to the front of the building. He hesitated for a moment, and then walked slowly into Sophie Millstein’s apartment. With each step he shed a bit of the easygoing camaraderie that he’d employed outside, replacing it with an attention to detail. Another uniformed officer was standing in the living room, next to a covered bird cage, writing in a notebook. He nodded and pointed toward the back, needlessly, because Walter Robinson was already headed in that direction. He was glad that he’d arrived before the forensic team, heartened, as well, that the first police on the scene were not milling about the body, as they tended to do. He preferred to have a moment alone with every victim; it was a time when he could let his imagination play out the dead’s final seconds. If there was a moment when he could hear the murdered person’s voice speaking to him, it would be then. In the sturdy, fact-driven world of the homicide detective, this he knew, was romance. But it helped him along the path of understanding, and he had long ago recognized that anything that spurred the steady progression of comprehension was useful.

As he quietly sidled into the bedroom, moving like a parent careful not to awaken a sleeping child, he thought, as he always did, that he hated being a homicide detective. It was an endless succession of hot nights, dead bodies, and paperwork. Heat, stench, and drudgery. Although he

was still a young man, he had long before given up the fanciful notion that he was somehow linked with Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, nor did he see himself, as some of the more experienced men in his office did, as society’s surrogate avenger, dedicated to righting the seemingly never-ending succession of wrongs that people committed against each other. He had come to see himself as an accountant for the dead. It was his job to tidy up and organize their last, awful moments and present the truth of those seconds to a subsequent authority, be it grand jury or court of law.

The body was spread-eagled on the bed, twisted about unnaturally, tangled in a knot of torn bedclothes. He thought: She must have kicked hard against the weight holding her down, killing her.

He believed he performed his job in a routine, dogged fashion, preferring not to focus on the moments of electric recognition and surging imagination when he centered on a killer. He preferred to consider the excitement he felt as the inevitable result of mere tenacity, where others, who watched him work, would have spoken about artistry. Regardless, his style created results. He cleared as many cases as any other detective on the force, and was held in high regard by his shift commander, a man who cared little for how crimes were solved, but who valued the power of statistics, and thus Walter Robinson was considered a man of potential by the hierarchy of the Beach department.

He, on the other hand, ignored labels, thought potential something similar to a disease, and preferred to work alone.

Robinson approached the victim slowly, taking care with where he put his feet, keeping his hands close to his body. He made a quick notation of the strident red marks on her throat, and saw that her eyes were open wide in

death; there was an old myth that a murdered person’s eyes would print a vision of the killer as death snatched them. He had more than once seen a victim’s eyes ripped from their skull postmortem by superstitious killers. He wished the myth were true. Make things a lot easier, he thought.

He wanted to ask: Who killed you? But all he saw was terror. This did not surprise him; what awakened her was the pressure around her windpipe. If the noise of the breakin had aroused her, then the killing would have taken place somewhere else. He glanced around, looking for sleeping tablets. Check the bathroom, he told himself, knowing that he would find them on a shelf.

Robinson let his own eyes move from the body, surveying the room like an appraiser in the moments before an auction. Drawers were torn open, their contents dumped out. A bedside lamp was smashed to the floor. At first he thought: struggle. But then he appended this idea. No, he told himself. The struggle was on the bed, in the knot of sheets and ripped nightgown, and it was over quickly. This was hurry. Someone who knew he didn’t have much time, and so he ransacked the room as fast as possible. He saw that a pillow was lying on the floor, without a case. An old woman sleeping on freshly laundered sheets without a matching pillowcase? No, that’s what he grabbed to hold what he was stealing. He made a mental note, memorizing the floral pattern of the sheets. Are you smart enough to throw that away? I doubt it.

The detective gave a long sigh, slowly letting his breath slide from his body. It was hot in the room; the warm air from the broken patio door, and from the front door left open for the medical examiner and the forensic teams, was overcoming the air-conditioning. He could feel a line of sweat starting to form on his forehead, unpleasant

stickiness beneath his arms.

He shook his head slowly.

It was all so terribly, horribly familiar, he thought.

An elderly woman. Alone. A garden apartment without a good lock on a patio door. A neighborhood filled with shadows and alleys, and old folks who cashed social security checks. Just enough jewelry and twenty dollar bills to hold out the promise of a quick and easy score, not nearly affluent enough to warrant alarm systems, security guards, and Dobermans. The fringe world, he thought.

Typical urban routine nightmare, he said to himself.

It happened somewhere, every night. Little variations on a common theme. You’re old and vulnerable and trying to hold on to what little you have left of this world, and there’s someone younger, stronger, and more desperate who’s going to come and take it from you. If you’re lucky, he just knocks you down, or hits you in the head. You survive with a concussion, a fractured arm, a broken hip. If you’re unlucky, you die. He tried to imagine how many cases like this one he’d seen. A dozen? A hundred? Did she have any idea when she went to bed that she was prey?

He spoke softly, out loud, addressing the killer:

‘So, you broke in, that wasn’t too hard, and then you caught her in her bed asleep, and you strangled her, but killing her made too much noise, and so you jumped up and grabbed what you could and then ran, but not fast enough, you bastard, because somebody saw you.’

He heard voices coming from the living room, and realized that the processors of violent death had arrived. He heard a police photographer’s voice call out, ‘Hey! Walter, where you at?’ and he answered: ‘In here.’

He glanced at the body again. Something struck him as out of place, and he couldn’t quite identify it.

Still vaguely bothered, he moved to meet the men

coming into the bedroom. He immediately retreated into the forced jocularity that protects all the people who are charged with sorting out violent death.

‘Hey, Walter,’ said a diminutive technician, lugging a huge, leather case. ‘What’s shaking?’

‘Not much. She lived alone, Ted. Should be prints. Make sure you get those drawers good. Bobby, you shoot everything, including all the stuff in piles where the perp threw it. And then get shots of the forced entry. Is Doctor Death here yet?’

‘He was just pulling up. Actually, it was one of the assistants. The chief must be sleeping in tonight.’

‘Nah, he’s probably working that triple over in Liberty City,’ the photographer interrupted as he adjusted his light meter and flash bar. ‘Little problem at a crack house, so I heard on me scanner driving over. You know: “That’s my pipe!” “No it ain’t!” Bang, bang, bang. That’s what’s gonna grab headlines tomorrow. That’s where he’ll be.’

Robinson knew that the county’s chief medical examiner liked to attend the deaths that would preoccupy the Herald and the local television stations. But he shook his head. ‘He may start out over there, but you watch. He’ll get here before we’re finished. And so will the papers and the TV stations. So he’ll be here, probably right about the same time they show. I’d like to say he’s working himself to death, but that doesn’t sound quite right.’

The other policemen crowding into the room laughed. There was a popping sound as the photographer started taking his shots. It mingled with the activity that immediately enveloped the room as technicians working fibers, fingerprints, and searching for other evidence began doing their jobs.

He decided he would go outside and speak with the people who’d chased the killer away. They’re old, he

thought, and it’s late, and pretty soon the hour will catch up with them. Get their story while it’s still fresh.

From the doorway, Robinson scanned the room again, trying to discover why he felt unsettled. He glanced over at the body another time. He still did not form her name in his mind; that, he knew, would come soon enough. For the moment, she was just another item to be catalogued.

When he saw the flashing strobe lights of the police vehicles from the end of the block, Simon Winter stopped short, his feet suddenly rooted to the pavement, his jaw dropping open in abrupt astonishment.

He took a single step toward the lights, his imagination racing through a series of nightmares. He told himself: There’s been a fire. A breakin. A heart attack. An accident. With each possibility, his pace picked up, so that by the time he reached the yellow police tape, he was running hard, his shoes slapping a cadence of worry against the cement. He would not allow himself to form the words he feared most in his head: There’s been a killing.

He stopped at the entrance to the Sunshine Arms, breathing hard. There were at least a half-dozen cruisers pulled up on the narrow street; their lights bathed the area in strident blues and reds. There were a pair of television station vans, and he saw camera crews jawing by the sidewalk. He noticed a station wagon marked with the county medical examiner’s shield, and saw several uniformed officers standing next to the empty fountain in the courtyard. He realized immediately that there was no urgency in anyone’s actions, and this made him inhale sharply. People work fast when there’s a heartbeat. They

take their time when there isn’t.

He swallowed once, his throat abruptly dry, and ducked beneath the yellow tape. This motion caught the eye of one of the officers, who waved at him.

‘Hey, pops! No entry here.’

‘I live here,’ Winter replied. ‘What’s happened?’

‘What’s your name?’ the policeman asked, approaching him. He was a young man, with the artificial bulk of a bulletproof vest making him seem larger than he truly was.

‘Winter. I live in 103, right there. What’s happened?’

‘You live alone, Mr Winter?’

‘That’s right. What happened?’

‘There was a breakin. Old lady got killed.’

Simon Winter choked on the name. ‘Sophie Millstein?’

‘That’s right. You know her?’

‘Yes.’ He stumbled over the word. ‘Just tonight. I saw her tonight. Helped her lock herself in …’

‘You saw her tonight?’

Winter nodded. He felt his stomach clench with pain. ‘I want to talk with the detective in charge,’ he said.

‘You know something, Mr Winter? Or you curious?’

‘I want to talk to the detective in charge.’ He fixed the young patrolman with a long look, one that covered up the turmoil he felt ricocheting about within him.

The patrolman hesitated, then said, Til take you to him.’

He started to steer Simon Winter across the courtyard, when the old man saw the other members of the complex standing in their nightclothes in a knot to the side of the fountain. Mrs Kadosh instantly began waving at him.

‘Mr Winter! Mr Winter! My God, is terrible!’ Mrs Kadosh burst out. Simon Winter walked quickly toward them. Mr Kadosh was shaking his head back and forth.

‘Terrible is right,’ he said, echoing his wife.

‘But what happened?’ Winter asked. ‘I went out to eat, and then I took a walk, and I only just returned and—’

Mrs Kadosh interrupted swiftly. She was a plump woman wearing her frosted blond hair beneath a hair net large enough to trap most species of fish, and sporting a bright red quilted bathrobe that had a huge flower embossed on the breast and surely was sweltering to wear on this humid night.

‘Is almost midnight, and Henry is readying for bed after watching just a few minutes of Jay Leno, just the jokes part, not so much the talk, talk, talk, and I am sitting up waiting, when I am hearing a scream, maybe, more like a shout of fear, just sudden, coming from where I do not know, but after I think about it, I am thinking it is poor Mrs Millstein, and think maybe this is nightmare because she no longer sleeps so good, and sometimes I hear her calling for Leo, may he rest in peace. So, I am not paying too much attention, but my Henry, he comes in and saying “You hear that?” and of course I say “Yes.” And he says right away maybe we better need checking on Mrs Millstein.’

‘Is right,’ Henry Kadosh muttered. ‘Need checking, Mrs Millstein.’

Simon Winter wanted to urge them to hurry their story, but he knew the Kadoshes were Hungarian - Henry had once been Henrik - and between their age and their fractured use of language, hurry was not something they ever really managed. So he simply nodded.

‘So, my Henry, he goes and finds his slippers, and then he finds his robe and goes to the kitchen and finds the flashlight and then he goes next door and knocks hard for old Finkel to come too…’