Surrender, New York

  “Right,” Mike answered. “And he eventually got four consecutive life sentences—which was the plea deal, for Christ’s sake, because the cops swore they could have saddled him with quite a few more counts. So there’s no way he’s out.”

  “No way, indeed,” I said. “He was killed in prison.”

  “Fuck. That’s right—at Auburn.”

  “Had his throat cut from ear to ear, about six months after he got there.”

  “Yeah. Frankly, I’m surprised he lasted that long. Guy running young boys from upstate and Canada down to the city, to the waiting clutches of pedophilic men—” Mike stopped himself suddenly. “Don’t,” he warned. “Do not. You know better than to suggest that kind of connection, L.T.”

  “Michael, I haven’t suddenly lost my senses, nor forgotten my own present theory.” I finally turned around, to see that the look in Mike’s eyes was just as freaked out as I’d imagined it would be. “I’m not talking about any connection to some other killer. Not at all…”

  “Then what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “If we are proposing that these kids got to New York—” I lifted my cane toward the highway. “How did they get there?”

  Mike sighed impatiently, and looked around at the highway: to find yourself along such isolated stretches of Route 22, especially at that hour, can be frightening; and Mike was rapidly becoming caught up in that sensation: “Yeah, that’s half of what I was afraid you meant…”

  “Well?” I parried, pulling out a cigarette, lighting it, and beginning to pace, letting the exercise of the few muscles in my left stump ease some of the cramping pain in my side. “Consider it: someone could be following an entirely different agenda concerning the dead children—in fact, we know they are, since the victims are not only boys but girls—and yet using the same…delivery system.” I jabbed toward the road several times with my cane. “To wit, Route 22, one of the ‘NAMBLA highways,’ as they were called.”

  “Trajan,” Mike said, taking out a cigarette of his own. “I am begging you—do not bring up the fucking subject of NAMBLA—any aspect of it. Not when we get to this next murder scene, or at any other time during this investigation.”

  “I don’t intend to. But the fact is that Odell claimed to have been paid to bring what he said were runaway boys to New York, to members of NAMBLA, using this road.”

  “So what?” Mike nearly shouted. “The guy was a half-wit!”

  “Ah,” I replied. “Now, that was never actually established. In fact, Dr. Abrahamsen said that the whole mentally challenged line was an act, just like Berkowitz’s claim that he got his orders to kill from his next-door neighbor’s dog.” Dr. David Abrahamsen had been one of the great criminal psychiatrists of our time, the man who had effectively sent David Berkowitz—the “Son of Sam”—to prison rather than a psychiatric center, after rightly asserting to the court, over the dissent of half a dozen other doctors, that Berkowitz’s insanity act had been just that. He had also been a mentor of mine, prior to his death in 2002.

  “So what?” Mike repeated. “What has any of this got to do with our case? Those supposed ‘members of NAMBLA’ were never even named.”

  “That’s not my point,” I replied. “He picked up boys along highways that we happen to know were associated with NAMBLA, from other missing-children cases. And he delivered them to someone in New York, that much we do know—”

  “Or he just killed them all.”

  “He confessed to killing four, Mike, and got the max four times over: they couldn’t have done much more to him if he’d confessed to another dozen. So why didn’t he? He was a serial killer, after all, that would have been the usual behavior.”

  “And you and I don’t go by ‘usual’ anything!” Mike shook his head in weary frustration. “Trajan, if you bring up that NAMBLA shit with these people now, I warn you, there will be backlash, from law enforcement, from the gay community—”

  “And quite right that community would be to lash out,” I said, nodding. “ ‘The North American Man-Boy Love Association’—has there ever been a more reprehensible euphemism for a gang of child molesters?”

  “Which doesn’t change the fact that a lot of its members were some very influential and famous people,” Mike interjected quietly, as if we might be overheard.

  I tried to recall a quote: “ ‘To label pedophilia as criminal is ridiculous.’ ”

  “Who came up with that gem?” Mike asked. “Or is it one of your own?”

  “One of their more illustrious members,” I said. “A New York poet whose place on the Lower East Side had been rumored for a long time to be one of the last stops for the routes that were used to get kids south: from Canada, upstate, anyplace where their ‘liberators’—of whom Odell was only one—found lost boys looking to get to the big city, or susceptible to such persuasion. The adults waiting in New York would then subject them to a period of ‘self-discovery,’ during which they’d realize that their restlessness was only an expression of their repressed homosexuality.”

  “And if they weren’t repressed homosexuals?” Mike asked.

  “No such animal,” I replied. “Not in the NAMBLA book. All boys were innately gay, to them—just needed a friendly hand to allow them to come out, to embody the true nature that the narrow communities they’d come from had forced them to keep hidden.”

  “Which doesn’t explain why some of them wound up dead,” Mike said, indicating the increasingly black line of the woods somewhat fearfully.

  “Sure it does,” I said. “If they proved uncooperative—if it seemed like they might blow the lid off the entire operation—then they just disappeared altogether. Without the knowledge of NAMBLA’s organizers, of course. No, the supposition in each case was that they tried to make their way home and met with the wrong person or persons along the way.” I shrugged. “It does happen. Anyway, the point is, a few that we know of ended up on the sides of highways, or in the woods somewhere, or in abandoned barns, dead—you starting to get the idea?”

  “Yeah,” Mike answered. “But I’ll say it again: you can’t draw that kind of connection.”

  “I’m not suggesting copycat deaths,” I answered. “After all, in this one case—but only the one—Odell left the folded clothes behind, just as Shelby’s were; although he later admitted that he only did so because a passing driver caught a glimpse of him, and he had to abandon his trophies. No, I am noting a single circumstantial similarity, while pointing out—and this is the key—that that case was well known. Anybody could have read about it, and seen that it worked as a way to get kids to the city and into the company of welcoming pedophiles. They could then have picked up on the—logistical technique. You were the one, after all, who detailed how Shelby Capamagio likely reached New York, and somehow found some pretty well-to-do sponsors.”

  But Mike was shaking his head determinedly. “Damn it, Trajan, that’s just what I mean—that’s exactly what will make senior law enforcement around here explode. You remember the rest of the story? Like how long it took for the towns that those kids came from to ditch the stigma of allowing their ‘lost boys’ to get picked up and victimized? Think about it—how many of those ‘NAMBLA Murders’ happened in Burgoyne County?”

  “Two, that we know of,” I replied quietly.

  “Okay—you think the people we’re on our way to see want anybody in the media to even suggest that something similar is happening now, to some of the children involved in the biggest youth scandal of this generation—to throwaway children? And can you guess how long it’ll take them to accuse us of being the source of those suggestions, just as fucking punishment? We’ll be skinned, L.T., you know all this!”

  “Of course I know it,” I said. “And no, I don’t intend to bring it up—not outside our own investigation. But don’t you think it’s just a little bit odd that, once again, four child deaths have occurred within shouting distance of one of the main ‘NAMBLA highways’?”

  Mike sighed his conce
ssion: “Yeah. It’s weird, all right…”

  “And you talk about suggestions, Mike—the people around here aren’t idiots, and a lot of them are old enough to remember that time very clearly. You think that if enough kids go missing now, no matter what law enforcement or the media says or does, that it’s not going to suggest things to them, and they won’t go looking for their own answers? At which point similarities or precedents won’t matter—there’d better be some God damned answers waiting.”

  “But there’s always the chance,” Mike said, struggling, “that it’s just a—a—”

  “Oh, no,” I said, holding up a hand. “Not that damned word, Michael, not to me.”

  “Well!” he protested. “Coincidences do happen, Trajan. Not as often as they do in movies or on television, but they happen. And at this point, we have no concrete reason to believe that this is anything but one. Particularly since the gay community is now a powerful force in state politics: if we let it slip that we’re looking, or causing the sheriff to look, at any kind of connection between Burgoyne County and an old, disgraced gay organization that managed to put a black eye on this county, the shitstorm that will descend on us—”

  “We’re not going to let it slip. How could we? We’re unofficial advisors to the sheriff and his chief deputy. It’s not like we’re going to be holding press conferences.”

  Mike’s hands went to the sides of his head hard. “We don’t have to hold any fucking press conferences—you’ve brought a fifteen-year-old kid into our investigation! What do you think he’s going to do with this idea—keep it to himself? Is that your experience of boys his age?”

  “I think we can trust him—I really do, Mike. And if we can, think of it: we will have an unprecedented chance to find another ring of predators by learning who they are targeting before they make their next move.” I paused and lifted my cigarette toward the woods. “So don’t tell me about coincidences—you don’t believe in them any more than I do. But, in recognition of your misgivings, I’ll agree to keep this theory between us, for the time being. All right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, opening the driver’s-side door of the Empress. “Between us. Now get your crippled ass into this car, so we can go see what is actually happening in Fraser.”

  “Done,” I said, opening my own door; but I had to give the edge of those woods one long last look, if only out of respect for that poor kid who had been found in a condition so eerily similar to Shelby Capamagio’s, all those years ago, and who now seemed to be guiding us…

  Soon enough, however, we were back under way, Mike hitting the gas especially hard: he was right to be irritated, of course, just as he was right to warn me against moving too quickly toward the belief that some group had studied the “NAMBLA Murders” and was now using a similar method to move children who had been abandoned by their families down to New York City and into the company of waiting pedophiles. Statistics, as Mike had said, told us that the odds of such a parallel, intentional or not, were slim; but the two of us had spent most of our careers debunking statistics, although Mike was in no mood to be reminded of that fact.

  And he was right, too, that if we openly heeded the strange call of that tormented stretch of highway, it would spell ruin for far more than our advisory role with regard to Steve and Pete. Rather than admit that such a parallel existed, county and state officials would surely see us disgraced and deprived of the livelihood we’d established at SUNY-Albany, in just the same way that we’d been run out of New York City for rather brazenly investigating several cases that connected people of means to a particularly salacious series of murders. Yes, Michael was right to warn me of the dangers of raking up the NAMBLA matter, in any connection—

  None of which meant that privately betting on the seemingly slim chance that such a connection existed might not be the right way to go. And so the possibility remained irretrievably lodged in my brain, as well as in Mike’s, I knew, to become nothing more until we had evidence to support it. Until, that is, we could make it stand up as something other than just one more example of that most seductive, common, and corrosive of all investigatory phenomena: the hunch. Yet somehow, I believed, we might very well do just that, eventually…

  What I could not have guessed at was just how soon “eventually” would prove to be. The rest of our ride was passed in pointed silence, Mike plainly not wanting to hear another word out of me until we reached our destination. And his desire to keep me quiet kept his foot heavy on the accelerator of the Empress along the highway now, until we hit the eastern outskirts of Fraser and had to slow down to avoid being picked up by either a state trooper, a local Fraser cop, or one of Steve’s junior deputies who knew nothing about where we were going or why.

  The county seat was very quiet, by the time we found ourselves on its streets and looking for the turnoff to Route 4 North; or rather, the streets of its manufacturing and government districts were quiet. The former was an even greater monument to lost enterprise than were the darkened textile mills that dotted the rolling landscape of Hoosick Falls: Fraser had once been—like most of the old industrial towns that ringed Albany—a center for the production of mammoth machinery, some of it so large that it was hard to imagine its being made in a place that sat so close to enormous stretches of farmland and wilderness. In Schenectady, to the west, the manufacture of train locomotives—most of the locomotives used in the United States and, indeed, in much of the rest of the world—had been the source of long-departed wealth; in Fraser, the production of the boilers that fit many of those same locomotives had been the wellspring. But the now-ghostly factories that had produced those controlled infernos had long since had their very guts—their mills and their furnaces—cut to pieces and sold as cheap scrap to Chinese traders who shipped them abroad to be melted down and become factories in that country; and only a few of the hollow brick shells left behind had been converted to the production or purposes of anything else. Most simply sat in the growing darkness through which Mike and I moved, staring back at us in accusation, as if to ask—as such buildings throughout the Northeast and indeed all of America forever ask—how we as a people could have let such greatness slip through our fingers, merely to allow their proprietors to move production abroad to maximize personal profits. The country that manufactures nothing, ran the old saying in such towns, eventually becomes nothing; and you could not argue with the logic, when it was displayed by such buildings as we passed in Fraser that night.

  Nor did the downtown business section of town lift one’s spirits very much more: though the recipient of endless grants from Albany to revive its storefront enterprises, as well as to sandblast the marble and limestone of the oldest official buildings, the efforts thus funded had never truly succeeded in removing an aura of decline and decay from the place. Over the whole of this area, as well as over Fraser’s one park, the old Beaux-arts county court and clerk’s offices—long since deserted by such really active agencies as the Department of Motor Vehicles, which had been moved to a bunker-like structure on the southern edge of town during the 1980s—presided with the appropriate air of a madam long past her prime, in whose rooms were conducted affairs of dubious taste and questionable legality. It was impossible not to be charmed by the old girl, even though one was certain that most of the lights that still burned within were illuminating the work of lawyers whose sole interest was shoehorning ever more tax dollars out of an overburdened population, and causing many such citizens—like the families of at least two of our murder victims—not only to give up the struggle to survive in the county of their birth, but to abandon at least one of the hungry young mouths that would only complicate their settlement in other, purportedly more promising climes.

  “Hey, check that out,” Mike said as we passed the courthouse, rousing me from my dismal reverie. “Steve and Pete’s office—there’s almost nobody there.”

  The sheriff of Burgoyne County’s various rooms occupied the northeast corner of the courthouse’s grand old mass of s
tone, and was usually the hub of quite a bit of activity, especially on a warm summer’s evening; but looking toward the parking lot that should have contained half a dozen deputies’ cars, and then at the windows on the first and second floors of offices, I could see that Mike was right: all the cars were gone, and of the offices, only the receiving desk betrayed any sign of light or human movement.

  “What do you think?” Mike asked, with just a trace of dread.

  “Don’t jump to anything,” I answered. “We haven’t hit the fun part of town yet—could just be a long night on Broadway…”

  To find any real nighttime action in Fraser, you had to wait until you’d passed through downtown and hit the low-rent, dilapidated apartment houses of the north side, where the county seat’s most thriving businesses—bars—were lined up along each block, at least two to a side, on the two-way street that had long ago been rather ambitiously named Broadway. The thirst brought on by desperation was the bars’ common reason for prosperity; the only things that varied among them were the races and nationalities of their patrons. No gentrification, of the kind you invariably found to have transformed such places in New York, had yet complicated matters: old-time whites, the descendants of the county’s original settlers, defended their bars, just as the more recent arrivals from different regions of Europe watched over theirs; then, as one moved north, it was blacks who kept vigil over the places they frequented, while Asians went literally underground, and did their drinking amid basement gambling joints.

  As Mike and I drove north on Broadway, which eventually merged into Route 4, we began to laugh at the consistent sight of bodies flying out the doors of these bars, all of them faced with white vinyl clapboarding broken only by small windows whose neon signs declared both their names and allegiances. And yet, on this night, no law enforcement could be seen attending to the brawling. Steve’s deputies’ cars, along with those of Fraser’s police force, had evidently been drawn somewhere else: and we would soon find out just where—and why…