I examined the book’s fine leather binding quickly, along with the faded gold lettering on its spine. “Oliver Twist,” I said; and then, moving to the inside of the front cover, I noticed an elegantly lettered bookmark stuck inside. “ ‘The Odyssey Bookstore,’ eh?” Then I went directly to the title page: “First American edition, signed by the author…” My understanding of what Mike was up to had finally grown complete. “Hell’s bloody bells, Michael—so you’ve got it…”
“And I’m about to get more,” Mike declared, having yanked one more volume from the sack. “Catcher in the Rye—signed by J. D. Salinger. Also from the Odyssey, also a first edition—a first American edition, if you can believe it.”
“Yeah,” I murmured rather grimly, putting down the copy of Oliver Twist. “I can believe it. The Dickens is enough, but the Salinger? Given the market—especially in New York, where nine out of ten trust-fund babies are walking around trying to be Holden Caulfield—that has got to be major bucks.”
“Okay, boys,” Pete said, picking up the Dickens. “You mind explaining it to me?”
“Well, it’s good, and it’s bad, Pete,” I said. “The Odyssey Bookstore is a very upscale joint selling rare editions on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Both these books were bought there, for enormous amounts of money. The Dickens is rare enough, even though it’s not a first British edition. But a signed first edition of Catcher in the Rye? God only knows what that must’ve gone for. Yet a boy who we know loved books shows up dead in Surrender with that kind of merchandise?” I shook my head. “Put it, again, in the context of what we’ve found out about the two girls, and I’m afraid we have a definite pattern. Three kids, all separated from their families in Burgoyne County, end up having gone to or near New York City, and return with evidence of having spent time with people of impressive means who were plying them with the specific kinds of things we know they were most attracted to…This is no God damned coincidence.”
“Well, L.T.,” my partner said at length, genuinely conceding the issue. “Looks like you were right, too. Congrats—even if I did have to supply the pesky evidence. As fucking usual…”
“Yeah,” I said gloomily, sitting against Pete’s dashboard and taking another look at the scene around us. “Well, we certainly can’t tell them any of this. No matter how true it may be.”
“You mean,” Pete added, no great joy in his voice, either, “that the notion of something like the NAMBLA killings is actually proved by all this?”
“Not the particulars, Pete,” Mike answered. “We’ve got a different group of target kids, in this case: girls and boys. So it’s something more generalized, and more shielded. But the method? When you add the remarkable proximity of one of the main routes of—supply…”
“Meaning Route 22?” Pete asked.
“Meaning 22,” Mike said with a nod. “So, given all that…Then yeah, it’s looking like somebody, either coincidentally—which is awfully unlikely—or intentionally, is repeating the damned method.” He finally let go of the knapsack. “There’s a couple more books in here that fit for the Howard boy, not that it makes much difference…” He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “It definitely does appear that we’ve got some new person or group following the general NAMBLA pattern.”
“But with one more twist,” I explained to Pete. “They’re not just picking up kids around here who have no future, and then taking them downstate—they’re offering promises beforehand of whatever appeals to each kid’s wildest dreams. He, she, or they know these kids. Personally. Know what they want out of life. And the parallel goes even further—because some of them have ended up back up here, probably for the same reasons some of the NAMBLA kids did: they didn’t like the price they were being asked to pay for their very fancy lifestyle, in the end. So they had to be gotten rid of, to protect the rest of the operation.” Both Mike and I were dancing, now, to avoid the subject of possible suicides: we didn’t want, in light of our last important experience with law enforcement in New York, to give away too much too soon.
Pete was, understandably, very apprehensive. “And the county and state people—I mean, I know they’re not gonna want to hear it, but…you’re saying we can’t tell them?”
“That’s what we’re saying, Pete,” Mike answered.
“So what do we do?” Pete protested. “We have to tell them something.”
“Not yet, we don’t,” I said. “We have to do just the opposite: keep it to ourselves. Let Steve know, of course, like Mike says, and see what he can do with it. But the rest of them? For all the reasons we’ve mentioned, we say nothing. This is going to have to be our theory, for now. Because we have to put it through a much more serious set of tests—it’s too radical not to.” I gripped my cane tighter, struggling to get out of the cruiser. “Our immediate concern, however, is to make sure that Mangold and his boys don’t slaughter that guy in the house. Because there’s a good chance that, far from being crazy, he’s the first living person we’ve encountered who may be able to shed some light on exactly what is happening—the hows and the whys. So, come on, both of you—let’s get out there…”
Pete led the way through the increasingly anxious ranks of the various officers who were watching the building on which were trained the lights of the fleet of official vehicles around us, along with a couple of high-powered searchlights that had by now been brought in. It was the kind of scene that, again, had become dreadfully familiar, in the years since 9/11: cops strapping on black Kevlar and donning military-style helmets of a matching shade, all looking forward to executing some sort of paramilitary maneuver in order to—what? To pursue one evidently terrified man who, even assuming he was in fact armed, had not fired a single shot, nor done anything else much, save be seen in the same building as a dead boy and heard uttering phrases of which no one had been able to make any sense? That he had then snatched, upon the arrival of a steady stream of aggressive law enforcement officers, the first person he came upon—Weaver—either as a hostage (which was clearly what the officers all thought) or simply in an effort to explain himself to someone who wasn’t holding a gun to his head, was eminently understandable. However, such distinctions were of no concern to the growing assault force around us: a special buzzword had gone out among the ranks, and whatever those men and women knew about actual police work was fast giving way to the new vision that most law enforcement officers had of themselves, of something between an occupational force and an absolute guarantee against any and all that was contained within that one electric word that had taken on such terrible connotations in daily American life since 2001: threat.
Grouped around the open rear end of a black, unmarked van (clearly belonging to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation) and behind the girding troops was the group of people we had been summoned to see. At their center, her diminutive size and smart black pants suit belying her toughness, was Cathy Donovan, the assistant district attorney for Burgoyne County. One always got the feeling that Donovan must have been something of a hot ticket, at whatever high school she had attended, but that the demands of achievement during law school, along with those of the family that was so necessary to the political career that had filled the years thereafter, had turned her good looks hard, and caused her to constantly exude the air of someone who was not to be trifled with. And I did not: because for all that she may have been an ambitious political apparatchik in county and state affairs, Donovan was also smart and discerning, and not at all predictable.
No such assessment, however, could be offered of the woman who was standing next to her. Nancy Grimes, head of the Forensic Investigation Center, was garbed, as ever, in a white lab coat large enough to fit her hefty frame, beneath which she wore some sort of bland clothes that were of no account: the only article that concerned her was that eternally crisp white coat, which she sported like a field marshal’s uniform—an analogy that applied perfectly to the manner in which she ran her laboratory. Although it had been beset, befo
re and during her tenure, by scandals (most of which centered, like almost all forensic lab troubles, on techs falsifying results, either out of simple incompetence or to suit the needs of prosecutors), she nonetheless carried her impressive bulk with an attitude that dared any who came close to try to impugn either herself or her staff. That she almost always kept close to Donovan, in every way, on such occasions was only a further reminder of how very much criminal science, when it became forensic science, had prostituted itself to the requirements of prosecutory officials. But Grimes never seemed to mind in the least that she was projecting such an impression; and certainly Mike and I, two exiles from the official world that she still very much inhabited, were always meant to be particularly impressed by her lack of concern on this score.
Facing these two women was Frank Mangold, the detective from the state BCI, along with Nancy Grimes’ criminal psychologist, someone whom I was disappointed and not a little disheartened to see and whom I had once known well: Dr. Grace (Gracie, to more-than-official acquaintances) Chang. But the real danger in this last appearance lay with Mike: Gracie had been something of an apprentice among the NYPD crime lab’s group of criminal psychologists, when Mike and I were still in the city, and Mike always had a bit of a thing for her. And so, observing that my partner still hadn’t spied his old heartthrob, I said:
“Uh-oh. Get hold of your hormones, Mike.”
“What, what, what?” he shot back, nervously but eagerly.
“Standing next to Grimes,” I answered with a nod.
“Where, who—?” he asked, in the same rapid, uneasy tone; and then he caught sight of her. “Well—fuck me…”
“I will do no such thing,” I replied quietly. “She might, if we handle this correctly.”
“Oh, eat shit, Trajan,” Mike murmured. “How long have you known that she’s been working in Albany, anyway?”
“Hey, I don’t get appointment reports from these people,” I defended. “I can only assume that she got tired of being a small fish in a big pond, and decided to enhance her stature by decreasing the size of her swimming hole. It would have been a sound move, for a girl as smart as Gracie.”
“Yeah,” Mike answered uneasily. “Fantastic. Now what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
“You’re supposed to be your normal charming self,” I answered, dead serious. “And remember, above all, that she may be here simply because she told Nancy Grimes about your jones for her.”
“Gracie?” Mike’s face went wide with disbelief. “No. She’d never be that ruthless, or that manipulative. Unlike certain of your girlfriends.”
“Oh, really?” I answered. “Mike, she’s a criminal psychologist, and was a good one, if a relative beginner, when we knew her; and she’s doubtless only gotten better, with time and experience. In addition, like everybody else in the state system, she’s ambitious. I don’t like to think it, either, but—it’s an awfully strange coincidence, isn’t it?”
Mike began to nod, his cognitive functions steadily melting away in the face of Gracie Chang’s animated and charming face and figure. “And we don’t believe in coincidences…” he finally mumbled, as if in a trance.
“I don’t get it,” said Pete, who, up to this point, had been maintaining a bewildered silence. “You’re saying that Mike and Dr. Chang were once involved?”
“No!” Mike shot back; then he softened: “Sorry, Pete. But no. I’ve just always thought she was pretty hot.”
“Well,” Pete judged with a nod, studying Gracie, “I guess she is. But are you saying that’s going to be a problem, Dr. Jones?”
“I’m saying the rest of them likely intend her to be one, Pete,” I answered. “But I’m sure Dr. Li knows how to be professional, now that he is aware of the score.”
Mike turned to me, the pace of his words picking up: “So I assume you have a way to use this to our advantage—and give me a straight answer, Trajan, because I’ve been stuck on that farm with you and your fucking cheetah for an awfully long time…”
Glancing back at Gracie, I decided I couldn’t really blame Mike for his attitude. Like my partner’s, Gracie’s family had originally been from southern China, and she had the classic look of the region, with eyes that somehow hid hints of night-sky blue amid the brown and black, high but gentle cheekbones that formed a heart-shaped line with her small, soft chin, a diminutive nose, and a lovely smile that hid just one or two charmingly crooked front teeth. She was one of those girls that you saw all over New York, growing up and in college: always carefully turned out (though since she’d become a criminal psychologist, she’d learned, with a few hints from me, to understate it), and now able, it seemed, to move among even the ethnically parochial officials of Burgoyne County with a kind of mature, genteel, yet self-possessed polish: something you perhaps wouldn’t have expected, if you’d seen such girls as teenagers and then students at design or pre-med programs in the city, and watched them laughing and giggling uncontrollably on the subway, always three or four at a time, their hair often changing color from month to month or even week to week. Almost inevitably, they’d be swaying along on one of the three or four routes back to Long Island City or Queensboro Plaza, from whence they’d catch the 7 Train up to Flushing, which has the highest concentration of Chinese businesses and residents in the borough.
None of which, of course, mattered to Mike, at just that moment; and, sympathy aside, I knew I had to get his mind back on business quickly. “How it may work to our advantage,” I said, “will, I think, become obvious—because if I know Gracie, she did not, in fact, come here just to play somebody’s puppet. Not for the likes of these people—or haven’t you noticed who’s standing on the other side of her?”
“Yeah,” Mike said, shifting his gaze with not a little dread. “That asshole…”
Senior Investigator Frank Mangold of the BCI was, in appearance, a throwback to another era, a man on whom the absurdly tight-fitting men’s fashions of our own times always looked like they were hand-me-downs from the early 1960s—especially when matched against his buzz-cut grey flattop and rather sallow face. But despite his appearance and his unimposing height of five foot nine or so, one would have committed a terrible error by considering him less than the physically powerful man that he was: he’d gotten his earliest edification as a Marine, then his academy and detective’s training in New York City during the era of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s right-hand police commissioner, Bernie Kerik, influences that Mangold enjoyed demonstrating by personally pursuing and wrestling to the ground suspects who elected to take flight rather than submit to arrest. That such suspects usually returned to the other officers on the case badly beaten and sometimes wounded was never questioned by anyone in a position to do anything about it; for the Bureau, perhaps even more than the New York State Police below it, had become a shoot-first, investigate-later crowd, in recent years.
But for the moment, it was the curious presence of Gracie Chang, and Mike’s reaction to it, that continued to concern me. “Yes,” I said, turning to Mike. “That asshole. And we’re going to have to deal, at the same time, with Gracie’s apparent commitment to the politics of prosecution. You going to be okay if I have to get rough?”
Mike, probably through the prolonged study of Frank Mangold’s face, had come out of his sex-starved daze, and shot me an annoyed look. “Hey, quit worrying about me, L.T.; it’s not like we ever had a thing. I just thought she was good-looking, that’s all.”
“Good,” I replied. “Because we don’t need any complications, at this point.”
Finally I glanced over to discover who completed the circle of law enforcers we were facing; and I was more than happy to see that the two remaining figures were men that Mike and I actually liked and trusted. One was Steve Spinetti; and the other was Major Mitch McCarron, a tall, reticent man who had seen much of the considerable dark side of life in Burgoyne and its surrounding counties during his career. McCarron had risen from the ranks of patrolling officers, like most troop
leaders in the State Police; but, unlike many of the gun-happy younger troopers that he commanded, McCarron had developed a true mastery of all elements of first response, from talking criminals out of unwise decisions to tracking and capturing alive some of the worst offenders in the area over the last twenty-five years. His voice was tinged with the same slow, ambiguous dialect that marked Pete and Steve’s conversation, which had once been so common to upstate New York, and which I could still detect in the older farmhands on Shiloh, among others. Whether I warmed to this style of speech because of my childhood memories of life on my great-aunt’s farm—the only unequivocally happy recollections I had of my youth—or whether all people found it equally pleasant, I could not say. But my adult years had borne out my trust of those who spoke in a similar manner.
There was only one topic under discussion, as we approached, and since all involved had to speak over the din of the action around them, it was easy enough for us to tell what that subject was long before we had been spotted (although we certainly could have guessed it): how best to approach the man inside the building without further endangering the life of the unfortunate Dr. Weaver. Or rather, the question at hand was who was best fitted to this task: it seemed that neither the BCI nor the State Police could get an official hostage negotiator to the scene anything like immediately (for they had few such people, to start with), and somebody had to try to save Weaver before the momentum of the assault force—which was slowly but steadily closing in on the abandoned apartment house, without anyone ordering it to—caused a manifold tragedy.
“Okay,” Pete said as we approached, “let me handle taking you in. The distraction’ll give me a chance to tell Steve about what’s up. From there, though—you’re on your own.”