“Curtis will be sorry to hear that,” Mike chuckled Tuesday night after classes, as he studied a photocopy of one of the pictures of Augustine in his office at Goldman. “Assuming he ever comes out of those woods, and hasn’t made it over into Massachusetts by now. He did want this to be a serial killer, the boob…”
“There’s still no word about him?” Ambyr asked, after she and Lucas had joined us. She was, for some reason, more anxious about the tech than any of us: a fact that I chose to dismiss as some instinctive big-sister reaction, for it was impossible to even hear about Curtis without feeling sorry for him, despite his faults.
“No, not a sound,” I said, watching her type notes into her Braille-equipped MacBook. A lot of blind and limited-sight people had abandoned Braille in recent years, with the rise of dictation software and talking books, but Ambyr had stayed with it, determined to be as literate as she’d been when she’d had her sight. “It’s a definite concern,” I continued, staring at the new pictures of Roger and Ethel Augustine that Mike had put up beside the morgue shots of Donnie. “But unfortunately—”
I was interrupted by a startling yet familiar and welcome sound: “Ah-ha!” Mike suddenly shouted theatrically, causing the nearby Lucas to not so much jump as suddenly levitate from his slouching spot. “Ah-ha-ha-ha!” Mike burst out again, laughing this time.
“Christ on a cracker, Mike!” Lucas said. “You wanna warn people, before you pull that shit?”
“Sorry, kid,” Mike answered, suddenly spinning on his desk chair to tap a search into his desktop computer. “But you can’t control a eureka moment!” Whereupon he stopped typing, took one of the photos of Roger Augustine, and threw it under a powerful workbench magnifying glass. He lowered the thing to the right height above the picture, smiled wide, and said simply, “Yeah…Whoa, yeah…!” Then he returned to his computer and kept slamming away with his fingers.
Mike’s mood, I knew, meant that he had laid hands on a genuine clue; so, helping Ambyr toward the H-shaped grouping of desks that was Mike’s center of operations, I asked, “How good?”
“Oh, good,” Mike said, more evenly, but still excited. Even Lucas had climbed down to see what was happening; then Mike typed a certain sequence onto his keyboard, and the image from the magnifying glass was transferred to his big monitor. He zoomed in on one spot that showed only Roger Augustine’s elbow against a marina full of the kind of giant power yachts that he owned, enhancing the resolution of the image as much as possible.
“What the fuck are we supposed to be looking at?” Lucas asked, squinting. “The dude’s elbow?”
“No,” Mike said, never even tempted to mock the kid. “What’s behind his elbow…”
Lucas remained mystified. “A boat. A big-assed damned boat, okay, but so what?”
“It’s his boat—Augustine’s,” Mike said calmly, turning to his laptop computer.
“Awesome,” Lucas droned sarcastically. “Like I need a reminder of how much more fun his life is than ours.”
“Lucas, shut up,” Ambyr ordered, herself sensing the importance of the moment.
“Thank you, Ambyr,” Mike said, although his mind was only half on his politeness. We all waited in silence for what seemed a very long time, but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, before a new page from a site that I recognized—that of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City—flashed up on his laptop: whatever Mike was onto, it was something very specific, indeed. Finally, he spun around and said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a fucking bitch…” The shit-eating grin on his face only widened when he saw our expectant faces. “All right, L.T.,” he announced. “I am the master—even you’ll have to admit it.” He turned to the magnified image again. “His boat: every pirate’s wet dream, especially in the parts of the world where our friends Roger and Ethel insist on going. Which struck me as kind of weird: I mean, why not just cruise around places that are known to be safe? And that’s one of the parts where this gets really good, but later. For now, just look at that baby. What do you see?”
Lucas shouted impatiently, “We see what you just said, Mike, the back of a honking big boat!”
“That’s right,” Mike continued. “The back. But, since the two people who can actually see the picture are too dense to get my point—Ambyr, maybe you can tell me what I’m driving at?”
Ambyr considered the matter for just an instant, then smiled in that knowing way of hers: “The name—the name of a boat is always on the back.”
Mike beamed with pride. “Thank you. That’s right, the name of a ship or a boat is always on the stern. So, L.T., if you’re finished looking at the boat, what else do you see?” I squinted at the monitor, and spied a single name, , which I spoke aloud. “Yep,” Mike agreed. “That’s the Bahamian spelling of the name, by the way: a boy’s name. Now, that also struck me as weird. Boats and ships are almost always given feminine names, or the names of places, behaviors, or events. Or…”
I was already nodding. “Or the name of a child,” I said, remembering the site that Mike had called up on his laptop and glancing at it. “They had a kid, and you’ve found the birth record.”
“Would you expect anything less?” Mike crowed.
I half-heard him. “But something happened to that kid—something that was all but censored from the mainstream media. It’s the only thing that makes sense with his profile. And it must have been bad—intimate and bad, yet in the end not quite provable, or they couldn’t have kept it private. Unnatural death—sudden infant death, maybe, although I doubt it. Too much suspicion about SIDS, these days too many cases that turned out to be murder, or even serial murder, by women. So there’s one other thing: accidental death in the home—no grounds for charging anyone. Correct?”
“Fuck you!” Mike said suddenly, still smiling. “This was my big moment, L.T., and you just went stepping all over it with your Sorcerer of Death bullshit!” Then he got himself back under control, looking to Ambyr and Lucas. “But he’s right. That’s the short story.” Mike turned to the laptop again, moving fast from window to window and file to file, the changing light and colors of each reflecting differently on his face: “First things first: a birth certificate was issued listing Roger and Ethel Augustine as the parents—ten years ago. Baby Augustine was immediately named Kristiano—it’d been Roger’s father’s name. No complications, healthy kid, went home from Lenox Hill in good order. Soon as Ethel was back on her feet and able to use a breast pump, a nanny was hired, also a Bahamian. An old Augustine family friend, one that they were helping get a green card. But they couldn’t prove a motive for her, so she never got into any trouble.”
“Motive for what?” Lucas asked.
“Okay—next step,” Mike said, turning to hit a key on his desktop so that its monitor filled brightly with the image of a short newspaper story. “Archived away in the Daily News—the Times and the Post didn’t even report it—I found this little piece about an infant falling from a window at 799 Park Avenue into a service alley about a year later. Apartment was described as a penthouse, but it’s one of those bullshit postwar condos where there’s like eight apartments listed as penthouses, so who knows. What’s for sure is that it was at least a twenty-story drop for a very tiny kid—gotta hope the little guy passed out before he hit the deck.”
“I don’t get it,” Lucas declared. “Even I know that Park Avenue isn’t by the river.”
“I don’t suppose it’s crossed your mind that they could have moved, kid,” Mike said, making Lucas grow annoyed with himself for not having considered it. “Don’t sweat it,” Mike continued generously. “The obvious gets by all of us, sometimes. Anyway, the baby fell, a brief investigation was conducted, but, like I say, no charges were filed. Some pretty interesting questions were asked, though. The Augustines’ lawyer originally said the couple had been out of the apartment at the time, but when the nanny contradicted them—being as a green card isn’t worth doing four years in Bedford Hills for criminally neglig
ent homicide—and said that actually it happened on her day off, the couple said maybe they had been there, after all. And that’s where the investigation lost focus, at first, and then was abandoned altogether—even though no window guards had ever been installed in the apartment. The managing agent claimed that their office had tried to put them in after the baby was born, but that Ethel Augustine had refused on ‘aesthetic grounds.’ ”
“Hunh?” Lucas noised.
“She thought they were ugly,” I threw in. “But Mike’s about to tell us why that wasn’t the actual explanation for all this…”
“How did you know?” Mike answered, growing further pleased with himself. “The story ended with two more facts that were left alone, apparently by both the media and the cops. One, Roger Augustine was in fact not home, but in his office, when the fall occurred; two, Ethel Augustine, their lawyer said, could answer no questions on the subject, because she had gone into a severe depression that ‘psychiatrists’ had diagnosed as ‘sudden-onset bipolar disorder.’ ”
During this brief retelling, I had turned to the spot in the JU-52 where a picture of the Augustines was pinned alongside the shot of Donnie Butler on a slab in the morgue; but as Mike reached his latest conclusion, my head snapped back around. “That’s impossible. You can cycle rapidly in and out of mania and depression, but with a woman Ethel Augustine’s age, any competent psychiatrist would have told you that she must have been ill for a long time. It may only have been recognized when the baby died, but the lawyer’s repeating what some unnamed doctors said about ‘suddenly’ becoming bipolar? It might sound okay to reporters, but it’s a smoke screen.”
“Correct,” Mike said. “And like all smoke screens, it serves a purpose. Remember that Indian woman a couple of years ago in Queens, L.T.? Baby fell out the window, the same circumstances: at first it was called an accident, then it was blamed on the lack of window guards. Then the mother was reported to be acting ‘strangely,’ and finally they did arrest her for second-degree murder, because she couldn’t afford a pricey legal team that could plead a nonexistent mental disorder. Take away Ethel’s job and the lawyers, and she would almost certainly have been cuffed, too. Instead, they found these unidentified shrinks to say that she’d ‘suddenly’ become bipolar. And that was that, because nobody wants to piss off any big shots in the sectors of the city’s economy that the town now depends on: finance and real estate. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Ethel definitely threw the kid out the window, like the woman in Queens; just that they never bothered to find out.”
Lucas had a look of immediate comprehension. As always, he exhibited no horror at the grimness or shock at the corruption involved in the tale—although Ambyr clearly did—but spoke with eager anticipation: “Yeah, yeah, okay. So the mom offs the kid, maybe, and then they move to a new apartment. So what’s it all got to do with the boat?”
“The point of the boat,” Mike said, “is this: they named it after their son, which might seem like a nice tribute. But then, getting back to my very first point, they go cruising this eighty-foot monstrosity down in waters that are not safe, that are known not to be safe: not even fishermen get a free pass, there, and the International Maritime Organization is constantly telling private yacht owners to steer clear, because it’s no man’s land: you’ve got the Chinese and everybody else arguing over those artificial islands, national navies gone rogue, and a half-dozen other things, most of all pirates. So why go? Why wrap yourselves in a big fat slab of meat and then walk right into the lion’s den?”
I had already been pondering the same question: “Guilt. And not just guilt about the fall—at least I strongly doubt it. Guilt about something more.” I took a couple of steps over toward the picture of the Augustines, and stabbed my cane at Ethel’s very attractive, smiling face. “She didn’t want a baby. She wanted a kid. There’s an enormous difference, obviously; but maybe not so obvious to women like her. In the end, of course, she got what she wanted, even though the suspicious death of Kristiano meant they would never be able to adopt legally. But what the über-rich want, they get; yet as so often happens, both she and Roger found that ‘having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting.’ All of which ended…” I touched the picture of dead Donnie Butler “…here.”
Mike tore at his hair in further exasperation. “Goddamn it, L.T., I swear…” Then he pointed at me, his eyes burning. “That was my summation, you incurable killjoy—and don’t think I don’t know that you ripped that ‘having’ and ‘wanting’ line off from Star Trek, bub!” His face sank and he tossed up some papers. “Ah, fuck it. He’s right, guys, that’s exactly where the facts lead.”
Lucas nodded, in a self-consciously sage way. “Straight back to the wisdom of Mr. Spock…” he determined somberly; then, glancing at the rest of our stunned faces, he protested, “What? I know something about the classics, too, you know.”
“It’s where the facts lead,” I judged, trying to ignore him and get back on track, “but it’s not yet where we can prove that they end up. And we won’t be able to do that until we confront Augustine.” I pulled out my watch, popped it open, and glanced at the little calendar dial. “Their leviathan should be coming back up the Florida coast, by now, if what we were told is accurate. Figure they’re not working those twin Caterpillars too hard, maybe twenty knots average: they could be home in a couple of days. Parked right outside that demon village they live in…”
Lucas shook his head hard. “L.T., what the fuck are you mumbling about?”
“What I am mumbling about, Lucas,” I told him, “is that we need to be ready to head south in as little as—” Then I noticed the actual time. “Damn! Is it really that late?” Mike and Lucas both whipped out their cell phones, and confirmed that it was indeed well past nine p.m. “Jesus, I forgot to feed Marcianna, she must be having a shit fit. Gotta go!”
“Hey!” Ambyr called, latching onto my hand. “Not without me, you don’t!”
“Oh, definitely,” Lucas said, in wide-eyed disbelief. “Let’s all keep our fucking priorities straight, I mean, we’ve only had a major break in the case, after all!”
“Leave it, kid,” Mike said. “We’ve done all we can do, for now. Besides, isn’t it your bedtime?”
“Why, you gonna read me a story, Mikey?”
Now, there was one diminutive by which you did not refer to my partner (as many people in New York City law enforcement had learned to their misfortune), and Lucas had just used it. Grabbing Ambyr’s hand tighter, I pulled her out of the hatch as the first of the loose objects in the JU-52 began to fly. “Come on,” I said, guiding her down the steps. “Before things get really ugly. I’ve got some meat thawed in her cooler up by the gate.”
“Good!” Ambyr replied, throwing herself around me as I lifted her onto the concrete floor of the hangar. “I could use some time away from those maniacs.” She leapt up, wrapped her legs around my waist—somehow knowing just how to adjust her weight so that my prosthesis would not give way—and kissed me as her hair flew in to cover both our faces. “You’ve been so busy, I was beginning to think you didn’t love me anymore, Mister-Doctor-Man…”
We made our way up to Marcianna’s enclosure less quickly than I had originally planned, and we lingered inside far longer than I had intended; and when I finally did return to the hangar and the JU-52, after having walked Ambyr back to the house and made sure that Lucas was, indeed, crashed for the night, I found Mike sitting at his desk with an extremely grim expression on his face. I assumed this was due either to his having to pick up after his latest skirmish with the kid or to my having taken off so abruptly after his presentation; further inspection, however, revealed that he was genuinely troubled.
“Have a good time?” he said to me, in neither a humorous nor a scolding voice. “Good,” he went on, never waiting for an answer. “Don’t bother sitting down—we’re leaving.”
“Leaving?” I checked my watch again. “Mike, it’s past midnight.”
> “Don’t I know it,” he answered, strapping on his .38 and pointing at the desk drawer that held my Colt, silently telling me to arm myself, as well. “Our presence is requested. By Mitch, this time.”
“And where are we going?” I asked, having gotten my holster on and slipping my jacket over it as I followed Mike out the hatch.
Mike stopped halfway down the steps, waiting for me to finish locking up. When I turned to him, he glanced downward as he said, “It’s Curtis Kolmback. He’s up on the ridgeline above the school. Phoned in to say he’d only come in if we brought him. Mitch is on the scene, but Mangold, Grimes, and Donovan are also on their way.” Then my partner let out a long, mournful sigh and continued his descent. “So let’s go. Maybe if we can get to him first…”
{ii.}
By the time we reached the huge parking lot outside the sprawling, Eighties-era brick structure that was the Morgan Central School, another crowd of law enforcement vehicles had assembled, although this one was, significantly, smaller than that which had descended upon the Kurtz house. Even more notably, there were no media trucks present, and heavily armed Special Operations Response men at both the entry and exit drives to the lot were making sure that such remained the case: because Curtis, for all the crap he’d taken from everyone from Ernest Weaver right on up to Nancy Grimes and Frank Mangold, was ultimately one of their own, and this was not going to turn into the kind of media circus to which we’d been subjected at the Kurtz house.