“Get out here,” Bill said, his powerful arm easily pulling my partner out of the doorway. “Of all the stupid things I’ve ever heard you come up with…What, you think because the FBI is here that the president has some kind of interest in what you’re doing?”
“Well,” Mike defended, “you just said it was an election year!”
“A gubernatorial election year,” Bill answered, swiping some of his soaking black hair behind one ear with his cigarette hand. “You think because some Fed flunkies from Albany are playing cover-up that you’re suddenly a priority in the White House? No, I’m just telling you that there’s more than the usual BCI guys you’re used to dealing with at work, here. I mean, Jesus, fellas, couldn’t you have let this one go? Maybe have caught the next train?”
“Listen, Bill,” I replied, “if you could’ve seen the first scene we did, and the way that girl had been artificially posed in a place somewhere other than where she died…you wouldn’t have been able to back off, either. This whole thing is just rotten and royally fucked. And we’re the only ones that have a shot at solving it, you know that.”
Considering the matter further, Bill let out a long, smoky blast of air. “Yeah—I guess so,” he conceded, dropping his cigarette butt and grinding it out with his boot. “Because that’s what’s going on around the corner, I’ll tell you that: rotten, royally fucked bullshit. Speaking of which, I’d better get back—we still on track? Did you come here with some new information, or just to shoot the shit?”
“Just wanted to see what’s up,” Mike said. “Which it sounds like we needed to know. What was the delay about, anyway?”
“The weather,” Bill replied, whipping some of the moisture off of his windbreaker’s hood. “I wanted to wait for the rain, it’ll make the body that much harder to examine. Okay, boys…” Bill shook my hand and then Mike’s; but Mike’s he did not release immediately from his very strong grip. “But I am not shitting you, Li—I want that hundred bucks. Maybe you’re not aware of how much pathologists up here make, but—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, Bill—ow, fuck, let go of my hand!” Mike quietly cried, finally slipping loose of his tormentor. “While I do not admit to dealing seconds or any other nefarious practices, I will attempt to pay you your hundred bucks as a token of goodwill.”
“Yeah,” Bill said dubiously. “Goodwill my ass. Okay, lemme get back to it. And listen—” His voice became suddenly and quite genuinely concerned. “You two watch your backs. If this thing reaches even as high as the governor, a couple of dead county advisors won’t be much of a price to pay for keeping it quiet. I mean, didn’t we already see that with Gracie Chang?” Mike and I could only murmur assent. “Okay, then. You stay low and shoot first, right?” He nodded and started off, then seemed to remember something and turned, speaking in a very hushed voice. “Hey, did you see that trooper? She’s a tough girl, man, but she’s kinda hot!”
“Go for it, Bill,” Mike whispered. “Never hurts to have another friend among the Staties.”
As Bill disappeared back around the corner, I turned to Mike. “Let’s get moving.”
“And where are we moving to?” he asked as we reentered the car. “Back home, I hope.”
“Nope,” I said, lowering myself into my seat and finding that the pain in my hip had at last subsided. “We’ve got one more stop to make. The Harriman Office Park in Albany.”
I was ready for what I got: “What?” Mike whined loudly. “L.T.—you heard what Bill said, why would we go right into enemy territory, just when things are working?”
“Because I want to make sure Paul O’Brien gets this news fast and reliably,” I answered. Then I looked at him pointedly. “Or would you rather let two innocent people get grilled by Mangold for longer than they have to?”
“They’re not exactly ‘innocent people,’ ” Mike answered sullenly, as he started the car. “And I just don’t see why we have to go there.”
“Because we’re the ones who can get them released—now.”
“Ah, shit, Trajan…” Mike turned as he backed quietly out of the school driveway, then faced forward again to slowly pull away from the scene. “You’re getting that tone again.”
“What tone?”
“The one that got us run out of New York,” Mike answered. “Remember what I said, L.T.—we’re fresh out of places to get exiled to…”
{ix.}
Heading west on Route 7 from Hoosick Falls, we eventually emerged from the wilds of the eastern corridor of New York and approached the shell of bright light that, even though the sun had not set yet, marked the location of the old Dutch wilderness fortress that had developed, over the centuries, to become Albany. The bosses and consortiums that had long ago run New York State had not wanted to see political as well as economic power concentrated in the massive port at the mouth of the Hudson; and, when the Erie Canal had still been the nation’s most vital commercial route to the West, Albany, as the canal’s eastern terminus, had possessed the leverage to make the leaders of the southern metropolis pay homage, despite Albany’s being only a fraction the size of its southern rival. By now, however, hard times had fallen on the proud old capital, so that even the late Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s vainglorious tribute to himself and his clan, the Empire State Plaza, with its marble and steel office towers, imposing government buildings arranged around reflective pools, and bizarre, saucer-shaped performing arts theater (officially known as The Egg, but referred to by almost everyone in the area as some sort of giant flying saucer that had collided with the Earth at a sharp angle), could no longer quite prevent the city from once again projecting the overall impression that it had in the beginning: that of an outpost in the wilderness working hard to survive.
Nevertheless, when one moved in on the city and crossed the Hudson on I-90, it was hard to deny that Albany was enduring its fall from preeminence with a certain defiance, if not hope: tax incentives and breaks given to companies, especially tech companies, that would move their headquarters or significant outposts to the city’s environs had changed many of the former uses of office buildings both public and private. And among the places still struggling to redefine itself was the Harriman Office Park, or, officially, the W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus. Perhaps because it was just across the road from the main group of SUNY-Albany buildings, the ovular park had borrowed that seemingly benign title, “campus”; but there was no confusing it with a place of learning. The architecture was an inconsistent patchwork, none of it very attractive; and while the State Police and Bureau of Criminal Investigation Building just west of the park proper represented that ugly form of official architecture prevalent during the mid-1960s, it at least had some sense of symmetry and vertical thrust (for a three-story building) in its dark windows interrupted by lengths of light stone. But the more recently constructed home of the Forensic Investigation Center next door, with its scattered windows and horizontal lines of tan and beige stone, was an indisputable eyesore that seemed to reflect every scandal in which the FIC lab and its techs had been involved: most recently, accusations that as many as a dozen techs had cheated on the qualification test to operate the new TrueAllele-3 DNA-sequencing equipment. This was a particular irritant to Mike, who had been teaching for years that, while DNA did and does indeed represent the greatest hope for getting at the facts of cases (especially those involving wrongly convicted prisoners who are also poor minority defendants), it is still largely that: a hope, relying as it yet does on techs whose collection and analytical skills range from good to flat-out incompetent or corrupt. The best DNA analysts, on the other hand, tend to be independently minded, and therefore of little use to the state, their careers instead being sustained either by the occasional wealthy client or by crusading academic institutions or both.
After finding the Washington Avenue exit on 90, we made our way to Campus Access Road and then hung a right into the State Police’s territory. This little enclave was not marked by the rest of the campus’ ai
r of question about the future use of its buildings: one knew that all three of its structures—headquarters, the FIC Lab, and the State Police Academy—having been at last gathered together in one spot, were there to stay. We pulled up at the old HQ building, right in front of which sat Paul O’Brien’s unmistakable 1979 black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, complete with T-top and massive golden eagle emblazoned across the hood, which couldn’t have looked more out of place amid the cruisers, SUVs, unmarked interceptors, and late-model private vehicles of the troopers and detectives. Seeing the thing and pulling into the empty space beside it, both Mike and I began inevitably to laugh: in part out of genuine amusement, in part out of envy, for the Firebird had been meticulously maintained by O’Brien over the years, and was every bit the street-legal monster that it had been on the day of its manufacture.
Such, however, would prove the end of any real amusement during that visit. Asking a trooper at the front desk for O’Brien’s whereabouts, we found that he was just where we had feared: in a small observation closet adjoining two discreet, lower-level interrogation rooms, watching the proceedings in each of the latter chambers through one-way mirrors. The silver-haired, black-browed O’Brien, who stood a couple of inches taller than me but was likely twice my weight, shook hands with Mike and me roughly, making it clear from the first that we’d better not be wasting his time.
“Have you got it or haven’t you, Trajan?” he demanded. “Because, take a look—” He held a hand out toward the one-way mirrors. “Those poor old perverts aren’t going to last much longer. They’re almost ready to confess to whatever Mangold wants…”
Jimmy Patrick was in the first of the seemingly sterile yet somehow grimy interrogation rooms, while Jeanette was seated in the second. They both appeared to be genial, aging hippies, overweight but not obese, with that peculiarly trustworthy cast to their features that so many child molesters possess. This appearance had not, however, prevented them from getting the full treatment at the hands of Mangold’s boys: they were both bathed in their own sweat, the air-conditioning having doubtless been shut off without a drop of drinking water or other beverage being provided. Each of their broad faces had grown haggard with exhaustion, along with dehydration and hunger. Two BCI men stood guard, one per doorway, while Frank Mangold shuttled between the two, taking turns berating his collars. Two additional BCI detectives sat at each of the stainless steel tables, waiting for Mangold to leave so that they could play the good cops, and quietly coo to the Patricks that their best chance really was to forget about lawyering up and make a full confession, after which the BCI would recommend to their judges lenient sentences (an impossibility, for such politically unconnected people). But Jimmy and Jeanette just sat there, silently shaking their heads, from which I took it that O’Brien had already been in to talk to each of them.
“So how come you’re out here, Paul?” I asked, to which he held up a styrofoam cup containing something that looked suspiciously like sewage, though its smell did not match.
“I’ve been in there most of the night and all day, smart-ass,” he replied. “Mind if I take a break for a cup of this damned foul BCI coffee while I wait for the two crack investigators who got me into this nightmare to show up with something concrete that I can use to spring this pair? And you’d better have it: Mangold found a hell of a lot of damning information on their computer, along with pretty terrible DVDs. So if he’s also got trace evidence linking them to a body—”
“He doesn’t, Counselor,” Mike said bravely, netting himself O’Brien’s fierce scowl in return.
“That so, Dr. Li?” Paul replied quietly. He was still quietly fuming, but he now showed a glimmer of hope, as well: because he really did respect Mike’s work. “And how can I prove it?”
“Habeas corpus,” I answered. “The body that they planted in the Patricks’ house turned up at the foot of the bell tower at Old St. Mary’s in Hoosick Falls instead. Somehow…”
O’Brien held up a hand to silence me quickly. “Don’t tell me any more,” he said. “If I ever have to defend you guys, I don’t want to know how that body got there. Just that it did.” Taking a deep breath, he threw his half-empty coffee cup into a nearby steel trash can, then hitched his belted suit pants up around his wide, thick midsection in anticipation. “Okay,” he said with a nod. “Let’s just see how Frank tries to worm his way out of this one.”
The microphones in the interrogation rooms had not been switched on—a “technical problem,” one BCI man informed us—but Mike and I didn’t really need sound to determine what was happening. O’Brien chased Mangold out of the first room, demanding to know what actual proof of the Patricks’ involvement in any deaths or other crimes the BCI actually had; but it wasn’t until they entered the second room, where Jeanette Patrick sat, that Mangold spun on O’Brien with a look of shock, one which said that either he hadn’t heard yet that the mummified boy had turned up in the wrong place, or he didn’t believe it. O’Brien pointed at the mirror, causing both Mike and me to recoil a bit, and then Frank went out into the hallway. O’Brien signaled to us to join them.
“Fuck!” Mike declared in a low voice. “I knew it—China, here we come…”
Once in the hall, we looked immediately to Paul O’Brien for guidance, but he only nodded at Mangold. “Well, boys?” he said. “Tell the senior investigator what you’ve seen.”
“We got a call,” I replied, trying not to sound as unnerved as I felt, “from Indian—from Bill Johnson, down at St. Elizabeth’s in Troy. He thought maybe a body they’d found was one more that fit the pattern we’ve established.”
“That you’ve established?” Mangold scoffed. “Maybe you don’t remember, profiler, but you’re off the case.”
“As far as you’re concerned,” I answered, locking eyes with him. “But I contacted both Steve Spinetti and Mitch McCarron, and they asked me, along with my partner, to take a look.”
That one made Mangold pause for a moment: his gaze shifted from me to Mike and back again. “And you’re sure this ‘mummified’ kid was found in the spot where he died?”
“Bill Johnson is,” Mike half-lied coolly. “And that’s good enough for us. His body seems to have fallen from the bell tower to one lower roof eave, and finally to the ground. Bill will do the postmortem, but I think it’s safe to speculate that the cause of death was exposure, not murder.”
Mangold nodded silently—an odd thing, it occurred to me, given the situation—then turned his gaze my way. “And how about the kid’s name? Circumstances? Do we know if he was one of these ‘throwaways,’ yet?”
The question caught me off-guard: if Mangold was lying, he was doing a damned good job of it. “Nothing, on that front,” I said. “We won’t know until he’s identified, and his identity is matched against the record of missing kids. Obviously, given the state of the body, there’s no way to just publish his picture on a milk carton, but Bill will figure out something. There’s DNA, of course, and maybe—I don’t know, precisely, do fingerprints survive mummification, Mike?”
“If it happened recently, as seems the case here, maybe,” Mike replied. “There’s at least a good chance of it.”
Mangold considered this, then suddenly kicked at the wall violently. Then he slowly moved on Mike and me. “You fuckers are playing straight with me, right? Because if you’re not, I’ll—”
“Okay, Frank,” Paul O’Brien cut in. “Threats against civilians who were good enough to do the Burgoyne Sheriff’s Department and a senior State Police officer a favor are both uncalled for and illegal—you know that. Besides, we’ve got more immediate business. You’ve got nothing, now, against my clients, in there, except their interest in certain kinds of pornography. You want to charge them with that, and then admit to the world that that’s all you had? Or you want to let them go with a warning, hold their materials, and just save yourself the embarrassment?”
Mangold turned around. “I have to confess, Paul—I knew you were a bleeding heart, but I never th
ought I’d see the day that you’d be working for child molesters.”
“I’m not working for them,” O’Brien said sternly. “Because they’re not paying me. I’m working for the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the State of New York, which this governor has made a practice of violating by not providing impoverished people like the Patricks, however objectionable their private interests, with adequate legal counsel. Now—what do you say?”
And then the most shocking event in the entire episode occurred: Frank Mangold considered the matter for a moment more, then suddenly and decisively threw the doors to the interrogation rooms open. “All right, fellas,” he said ruefully but firmly. “Let ’em go…”
There were various protestations of disbelief from the other BCI men, but Mangold angrily overruled them. The Patricks found each other in the hallway like what they were, two unjustly hunted if grotesque animals, and then Mangold delivered his little lecture about how he was keeping their computer and their videos, so that in future they’d better watch their step. After that, however, they were released to Paul O’Brien, who shepherded them toward the stairway that would take them up and into freedom. He paused at its base, asking them to wait, then returned to Mike and me, who were standing, utterly dumbstruck, just where he’d left us in the hall.
“Okay, you maniacs,” Paul said quietly. “I’ve just gone out on a major limb, here. Be good and goddamned sure I was right to. And above all—get this case solved…” He nodded with a look that was far more sympathetic than his words had been, then returned to the Patricks and got them going upstairs before Mangold changed his mind.
Mike and I, however, just stood where we were for a few more seconds, unable to quite believe what had transpired—or rather, how it had transpired: by the book, not Frank Mangold’s preferred method. In addition, we were trying to absorb the fact that what had supposedly been Mangold’s master plan had been kiboshed without his raising much of a holler. But holler he soon did, from behind us: