Saints Of New York

  He picked up his chair, set it straight, took his jacket from the back and put it on.

  He walked to the door and hesitated. He looked back at her and half-smiled. 'Tell you something, Mom. I love you, and I respect you. And I understand your frustration with Dad, but believe me when I tell you that you are one hell of a bitch sometimes.'

  Robert Parrish, looking more like his father than he ever had, left the house on a high. Half an hour and he'd be at his father's apartment, and he would have a story to tell.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  It had taken a few minutes for Frank Parrish to extricate himself from the cupboard beneath the stairs. Thankfully the blade of the screwdriver had been slim enough to fit in the gap between the latch and the striker plate, otherwise he might have had to break the door to get out. He stood in the hall for a while, and then he sat on the floor with his back against the wall. He massaged his thighs, his calves, flexed his knees, and waited until circulation fully returned to his legs, but they still hurt like hell.

  He stood carefully, leaning against the wall for balance, and then he walked up and down the hallway a few times until he felt that his legs were once more his own. His stomach hurt. He could feel it a little more than before.

  It was then, as he closed the stair cupboard door once more, that he paused. He reached out his hand and pressed against the floor. Almost imperceptibly, but unmistakably, it gave. Overtaken by a sudden feeling of urgency and agitation, he hurriedly pulled the contents out of the cupboard again. A toolbox, a vacuum cleaner, a pair of kid's sneakers, a bucket of paintbrushes and three cans of paint, a blanket, a shoebox. Beneath these things, there on the floor, was the small section of carpet, cut perfectly to fit snugly in the space. Parrish took a screwdriver and used it to lift the corner of the carpet, and saw linoleum beneath. He kept tugging until the section of carpet came away entirely, then he used the screwdriver once more and lifted the linoleum. He saw the edge of a floorboard and, pulling back the floor covering a little further, he discovered that the board had been cut horizontally. As had the one beside it. And the one beside that.

  His heart racing, Parrish tugged at the linoleum. It had been stapled at the back edge and it tore fractionally. He cursed, and used his screwdriver once more to ease out the staples. He pulled them free, the linoleum came away complete, and he put it beside him in the hallway. The cut boards - three of them, side-by-side - now gave the impression of a two-foot wide trapdoor. Parrish levered the screwdriver beneath the nearest board and prized it up. He saw them right away, and there was no mistaking what they were . . .

  Reaching out to lift the other board he heard a car slow and stop outside the house. His heart froze. He heard the car door open. Hurrying, desperate, panic-stricken, he replaced the first board, the linoleum, stuffed the carpet back in the cupboard, after it the sneakers, the cans of paint, the bucket of brushes, everything he had taken out of there. He pushed the door to with his shoulder, snatched his bag and his torch from the floor and turned to run up the stairs.

  Frank Parrish made it to the uppermost riser just as someone put a key in the front door lock and turned it. . . just as he realized he'd left his screwdriver behind.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  Carole Paretski paused in her ex-husband's hallway and waited for a good three or four minutes. The house was utterly silent. She went on through to the kitchen, the utility space, and right to the rear door that led out into the yard. She headed back to the front of the house and began looking for anything that seemed out of place. She looked in every DVD case, amongst piles of magazines and work-related documents. She went through Richard's bureau - opening drawers and rifling through them, ensuring that she put everything back exactly as she'd found it. She walked around the edges of the room, pulling back the carpet and looking beneath for any sign that floorboards had been loosened. She tried to think what she would do if she had something important to hide. Where would she put it? How would she make it as secure and concealed as possible?

  She did the same in the hallway, even started to knock the lower risers of the stairwell to see if any of them sounded less solid than the others. There was nothing.

  The last thing she checked was the under-stairs cupboard, and it was here that something struck her as odd. Richard was meticulously neat, always had been. What she believed would have been very orderly was somewhat random. A screwdriver on the floor, the section of carpet haphazardly tossed in there, cans of paints, a spilled bucket of brushes, a pair of Sarah's sneakers just thrown in there as if they were to be discarded.

  Carole frowned. She started to lift things out one by one and place them on the hallway rug behind her. The section of carpet came out last, evidently cut to fit in the space, evidently supposed to belong there, matching the hallway carpet exactly. She started to put it back - why, she didn't know - but she did, and it was as she pressed it down that she felt the floorboards move beneath the linoleum. She paused. She looked back to her right the the screwdriver, and using the tip she lifted the edge of the linoleum and started to pull it back. She tucked the screwdriver into herback pocket, carefully lifted the whole section out and placed it behind her. She paused for a moment, and then she lifted one of the boards.

  Frank Parrish stood silently at the top of the stairs. Someone was down there, and from the angle he could not see who it was. It had sounded as if they were searching the place, much as he had done, but that didn't make sense. Who else would have come over to look through the house? Someone with a key, evidently. Who would have had a key? Only person he could think of was Carole Paretski. Or perhaps a girlfriend that McKee had withheld from them? Then it struck him: the accomplice. It had always been there at the back of his mind, the feeling that McKee had not worked alone. Had the accomplice come over to remove evidence, take something away, collect something that McKee had promised him? Was their relationship such that they trusted one another with house keys? Of course it was. Hell, they kidnapped, drugged, raped and murdered teenage girls together.

  Parrish eased out his .32 and took a deep breath. Perhaps half a dozen risers down the stairwell and he would be able to see who was in the hallway. He raised one foot, and then lowered it ever so slowly to the right edge of the uppermost riser. He released his weight as carefully as he could, praying that the risers did not creak, that they were solid and secure and silent. With all his weight on his right foot he gripped the banister and started to move his left. He could feel his heart thudding in his chest. What would he do? Arrest the guy? He could do nothing else, and yet the arrest would be invalid. He would be the one arrested shortly thereafter. Illegal search, BE, the whole works. Whatever the consequences, it didn't matter. McKee's accomplice was down there removing all the evidence and Parrish had no choice but to stop him.

  He lowered his left foot silently, exhaled, inhaled once more, and lifted his right foot again.

  The horror and dismay that engulfed Carole Paretski as she lifted one image after another from the box beneath the floorboards was immeasurable. Teenage girls, they had to be, and they were dying. There was no question in her mind that these girls were being tortured and killed. Their eyes staring back at the camera - wide and terrified and bloodshot. Their faces reddened, blue in some cases, as something was tightened around their necks and they were choked into lifelessness. Naked, kneeling, prostrate, tied, handcuffed, some of them bruised and bleeding, some of them already unconscious as her ex-husband fucked them. There was no doubt in her mind that it was Richard. His face was not present in any of the images, but she had spent sufficient years living with him, sleeping with him, had carried and given birth to two of his children . . .

  She knew what she was looking at, and every fear that had ever possessed her was realized in that moment.

  Beneath the pictures were DVDs, dozens of them, and as she looked through them - handwritten titles that were more often than not just a single girl's name - she began to appreciate the breadth and depth of what he had been doing. Fran
k Parrish had walked her around the edges of it, unable to tell her the truth. There was something about how he had asked questions, something about his manner, that had done nothing but exacerbate her fears. And now here she was - kneeling in the hallway of Richard's house, in her hands the evidence that the police needed - DVDs and photographs of some of the very worst things that she could imagine, her husband guilty of far worse than she could ever have believed.

  The DVDs slid from her fingers. They scattered across the floor, and as she watched them go she saw something that struck her with such force she was unable to breathe.

  Sarah and friends - August, September, October 2004

  Carole picked up the DVD. Sarah? Her daughter? It couldn't be. It wasn't possible.

  She got up suddenly, and walked through to the sitting room. She snatched the DVD remote from the coffee table, switched on the TV, waited for the DVD tray to slide from the front of the machine and then she dropped the disc in.

  Even as she pressed the play button her heart was hammering through the front of her ribcage. Even as she saw the jagged black and gray lines at the start of the images she knew . . . she just knew . . . and there she was, Sarah, her own daughter, with a couple of school friends on a sleepover.

  She fast-forwarded the images, and she found what Richard had been looking for. The three of them getting changed into their nightclothes. She closed her eyes. She felt the overwhelming grief, alongside it the sense of relief as she began to understand what would happen to him, that now he would be out of their lives for ever, that he would never, never be able to do anything to Sarah again.

  As the TV started up Parrish moved more quickly. Maybe whoever was down there had just come over to watch some of the DVDs. Maybe that was the arrangement he had with McKee. On the days McKee was out of the house the accomplice could come over. Or maybe they watched these things together, but Saturdays - when McKee was out with the kids - the accomplice had free rein to come around and party all by himself.

  The feeling of vindication he had experienced when he saw the pictures that McKee had hidden beneath the floorboards more than compensated for any sense of guilt he felt about breaking into the man's house. The man was scum, the lowest of the low, and this was where the game ended. How he would do it he didn't know, and in that moment - as he reached the bottom of the stairs, as he turned with his gun ahead of him towards the front room of the house, he didn't care. It was now over - for Melissa, Jennifer, for Nicole and Karen and Rebecca and Kelly. For all those that would have followed in their wake, the nightmare was finished.

  Frank Parrish - feeling a greater sense of resolve and clarity than he could ever recall - reached the sitting room door.

  Was that the front door?

  Carole stopped dead. She froze for a split-second, and then she backed up and pressed herself against the wall behind the door. The sound of the TV almost drowned out the beating of her heart. She squinted through the gap at the edge of the doorframe, and she saw nothing but a gun. She couldn't believe what she was seeing, but she could not negate her own eyes.

  Did Richard own a gun? Had he obtained a gun from somewhere? Had he come into the house while she'd been watching the DVD, seen the mess spilling out of the cupboard, and was even now planning on shooting the imagined burglar?

  Carole reached for the screwdriver in her back pocket and held it tightly. She hesitated for a second, looked through the gap one more time to see Richard take another step forward, and knew she had to do it. She knew that this was her chance to be rid of the bastard for ever.

  Stepping forward suddenly, her left hand brandishing the screwdriver, she grabbed the door handle and used it as a pivot to swing herself around the edge of the door. She had her full weight and strength behind her, and even as Frank Parrish stepped across the threshold of the room he saw nothing but a flash of silver, the shape of an arm, and then there was a pain beyond description in the middle of his body. It was not the pain that made him drop the gun, but the sudden and unexpected shock. The gun clattered to the ground, and he dropped to his knees, and he looked down to see the handle of a screwdriver protruding from his upper abdomen, right there beneath his ribs, and when he took a moment to look up he saw Carole Paretski looking down at him with a look of such surprise he couldn't help but smile.

  The smile lasted no more than a second. His system went into shock, he started to hyperventilate and shake, and had Carole Paretski not had the foresight to grab his shoulder then Frank Parrish would have fallen forward and driven the screwdriver all the way into his stomach. Internal bleeding kicked into overdrive as he passed out without a sound.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  Robert was in his father's apartment no more than five minutes before he picked up the phone and called his cell. It rang out. He called the Precinct and asked for Frank Parrish and was told that Frank was not on duty that weekend.

  He wondered where his father could be, and then thought of Eve. He searched for Frank's phonebook, couldn't find it, and then noticed the cell phone at the side of the bed. He had switched it off, left it behind, and Eve's number would definitely be there. He found it without delay, called it, got the voicemail and left a message.

  'Hi, Eve, this is Robert, Frank's son. Was wondering if you knew where he was—'

  'Robert?'

  'Oh, hi there. How ya doin'?'

  'I'm good, yes. How are you?'

  'Fine, fine, no problems. Was after my dad.'

  'I haven't seen him, Robert, not for a while.'

  'Okay. If you do see him, or if he calls you, let him know to give me a call on my cell.'

  'I'll do that, Robert. You take care now?'

  'You too.'

  Robert hung up. Way cool. Dad's hooker friend. He put Frank's cell on the kitchen table and opened the refrigerator. There were four cans left of a Schlitz six-pack. He pulled one out, cracked it, sat down at the table and drank his beer. He figured he'd hang out for an hour or so, maybe watch the tube, play some records, and then he would head home. That was unless Dad showed up, and then they'd maybe go get a burger or something. He hadn't seenhim for some weeks, and it would be good to catch up.

  *

  Caitlin Parrish was drying her hair when the phone rang. Instinctively, she picked it up just as Radick was coming through to tell her he didn't want to answer it in case it was Frank.

  She asked who it was, what they wanted, and even as Radick stood there watching her, even as she listened to the caller at the other end, she visibly paled.

  Radick frowned, tilted his head to one side.

  'Yes,' she said, 'of course we will. We're on the way now.'

  She hung up, looked at Radick, looked back at the phone.

  'What?' he said.

  'It's Dad,' she replied, the shock evident in her voice.

  'What about him? What's happened?'

  'He's at Holy Family Hospital. He's been stabbed.'

  Clare Baxter had smoked three more cigarettes after her son had left the house. She also poured three quarters of an inch of Crown Royal into a glass and drank it straight. She stood in the kitchen and wondered whether it was her or the rest of the world. Probably the rest of the world.

  Frank would agree with Robert. Robert would be smug and condescending. Fuck the pair of them. Frank always agreed with Robert and Caitlin simply because he felt so guilty about being such an absent father. And he had been an absent father, regardless of what Robert and Caitlin believed.

  She poured another drink even as the phone rang. At first she thought it might have been Robert calling to apologize, but he was too much like his father to dream of such a thing.

  It wasn't Robert, it was Caitlin, and even as Clare listened to her, even as she registered what she was being told, she felt the glass slipping from her fingers. The sound of it exploding when it hit the floor snapped her into action. She hung up, grabbed her coat, and hurried out of the house. If the traffic was with her she could make it to Holy Family Hospital in fifteen minu
tes.

  Robert tossed the empty beer can towards the trash and missed. It bounced off the back wall and skittered across the floor. He left it where it was. He needed a smoke. He didn't have any with him. Where was the nearest store? He'd take a walk, grab a pack, then head back and see if Dad had returned. If not, he would leave him a message and go home. Maybe he'd go see a movie. It was Saturday. Saturday wasn't for studying.

  Robert got up, dropped the can in the trash and headed for the door. His cell rang, and thinking Eve had gotten a message to his father he punched the button without looking at the screen.

  'Dad?'

  'It's Caitlin. Listen to me. Dad's been hurt. He was hurt in some incident. I don't know details, but he's over at Holy Family Hospital. You know where that is?'

  'What? What are you fucking talking about?'

  'Listen to what I'm saying, Robert. I don't know any more than this. Dad is at Holy Family Hospital. It's on Dean Street down near Atlantic Avenue. Get over there now. You got your car?'

  'No, I haven't.'

  'Get a cab, whatever. Just get there, okay?'

  'Okay, yes . . . I'll get a cab. Jesus, Cait, what the fuck—'

  'I gotta go, Robert. See you at the hospital.'

  The line went dead. He stood there for a second, and in a moment of inexplicable consideration he picked up the land- line receiver, hit Last Number Redial, and waited for Eve to pick up.

  He told her what had happened. She asked him where he was.

  'At Dad's apartment. I'm still here.'

  'Wait there,' she said. 'I'm coming to get you.'

  Radick drove. They were there within ten minutes. Caitlin rushed up the steps and hurtled into Patient Registration.