Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

"Who's the boyfriend?" she asked over the bucket.

"Just another con."

"Which kind?"

"Oh, definitely the behind the bars kind. Maybe the other kind, too. He's got a kid. A plausible villain, if a villain."

"Nice bod, in any case," said Sister Mac.

"I didn't notice," said Lucy airily. "Unlike you nuns, I only focus on the spiritual elements of men."

"Uh-huh. How's the real boyfriend? Daniel."

"Went back to Boston. He wouldn't focus exclusively on the spiritual elements."

"You give that boy a hard time."

"He gives me a hard time. He won't take no."

"He wants to marry you."

"No, the opposite. We're twenty and twenty-one. We're still in college. We're too young to get married. But he'd like a down payment on nuptial bliss while we wait."

"My sister Kate was married at eighteen. Five kids and married to Jim for twenty-nine years. Happy as clams, according to her."

"Try to tell him that, though. People don't get married young anymore, by which he means professional people with careers. I honestly don't see why he stays with me, unless he's like one of those 1890s guys who just wants to deflower virgins, me being the only one in the Boswash region not actually in a religious order. Maybe I should just, I don't know, do it, like everyone else and then he'd be happy and leave me alone. We could be normal cohabiting lustbuckets, for God's sake."

"Would that make you happy?"

"Oh, don't try to be therapeutic, Mac," Lucy snapped. "I'm not in the mood."

"I'm just mopping the floor," said the nun cheerfully. "I'm not a spiritual advisor." This was said in a tone that implied that certain people perhaps needed to check in with their spiritual advisors, instead of mooning, and complaining, and biting other people's heads off. They mopped: Lucy morosely, the nun with the same efficient cheerfulness with which she addressed the tasks that came her way, from making soup to assembling the remains of murdered children. In fact, Lucy had not seen her spiritual advisor in some time. She was avoiding him because she knew he would ask her about her mother, and she didn't want to talk about her mother to anyone, although she knew very well that this was the reason she drove her boyfriend away and snarled at nuns. Although she was perfectly at ease with thugs like Fellini, or whatever his real name was. The bad boys were no problem; in this she was also her mother's daughter.

Outside the church, she saw that Hey Hey was waiting. He beckoned and moved off in his dancing way, his hat pulled low to protect his thoughts, his red coat swirling. She followed, sighing. She did not want to follow a lunatic halfway across the city just now. She wanted to go home and shower the grease smell and the summer sweat off her body. But the man had once led her in this way to a pile of rags that turned out to be a man dying of hepatitis, and a life had been saved. So she followed.

Hey Hey always took the indirect route to anywhere he was going, sometimes risking his life in traffic, to avoid dangerous nodes where his thoughts had been sucked out, despite all his precautions. They ended up in an alley behind a pizza joint, where Hey Hey showed her a cat that had just had kittens.

Felix watched her emerge from the alley with the wacko. Why did she follow him in there? Sex? Dope? He couldn't figure any other reason, and the inability made him irritable. Still, he thought the first approach had gone pretty well. The dumb bitch had bought the story, and being a do-gooder like she was, she was obviously inclined to be sympathetic. He didn't like the way she had made him as a con, but that couldn't be helped- probably just luck, a lucky guess. And the thing with the name, which didn't matter that much. He thought it was pretty cool the way he had recovered with the little girl story, and how he had come up with her name. Sharon. That was the name his ex-wife had been yelling while he was working on her brat. Sharon! Mommy! Sharon! Mommy! It was a sketch, before it got on his nerves and he'd taped their mouths shut. When the time came to do Lucy Karp, he hoped it would be in a place where he could let her yell a little. He thought about this off and on, all the way back to Queens.

"What kind of sick fuck…?" asked Detective Lieutenant James Raney of the room at large, the room being the kitchen of the Chalfonte home, but received no answer. The people in the room- detectives and crime scene technicians and a woman from the medical examiner's office- were naturally dying to know exactly what kind of sick fuck, and his name and address, but just now they could only look at the unbearable scene in silence. They'd seen everything, they had thought, but they hadn't seen many like this one. Detective lieutenants do not ordinarily visit crime scenes, but Raney had come because Rick Chalfonte had been a cop, a detective. He had been retired on a disability for some years now, and Raney wasn't exactly a friend, but they had friends in common, they'd had drinks together, and in the NYPD it was expected that a little extra would be forthcoming when a cop had this kind of trouble.

Raney made himself look at the bodies. This was also part of his job. He felt the bile rise in his throat. He coughed to hide this discomfort and turned to Detective Second Grade Rafael Beale, who had caught this case. Beale's cordovan-colored skin looked muddy, almost greenish, like a shoe left for a long time in a lake.

"We got anything yet?"

"Not much. ME says they died around midday, maybe a little earlier. It's hot, so they didn't cool much. No obvious prints; he probably wore gloves and some kind of wrapping around his feet. You can see where he stood, there"- he indicated smear marks in the pools of stiffened blood on the kitchen floor-"and there, probably when he was doing the girl. Both of them were penetrated vaginally and anally by an object, we don't know what yet. Maybe raped, too, but the autopsy will show it either way. Tore them up pretty bad internally, especially the girl. He left, um, produce in the orifices, bananas in the girl, carrot and celery in Mrs. Chalfonte."

"Rick came home and found them like that?"

"Yeah. Fuck! I'll tell you, Loo, we find this scumbag, it's gonna be hard to get him to a courtroom."

"I don't want to hear shit like that, Beale, okay?" Raney snapped, and added in a calmer tone, "How did they die?"

"After he had his fun, it looks from the spatters, he cut the girl's throat. Sprayed blood all over the mother. That was after he cut the breasts off her, you can see there…"

"Yeah, I get it," said Raney quickly, "and then he smashed her head."

"Yeah. Some kind of hammer or steel bar to do that kind of damage. We haven't found the murder weapon or anything he left. He was real careful."

"Uh-huh. You'll run this through the bureau?"

"Oh yeah, VICAP, the works. Looks like he had practice, maybe he did it before. And also the posing, the sexual shit. Could be. You ever work a serial, Loo?"

"Once. A pair of wack jobs was snatching little girls, a mother and her son. Satanic rituals. But nothing like this. This is fucking off the charts. Anything back on the canvass?"

"Not a whole helluva lot. Of the four closest houses, two were unoccupied at the time of, one neighbor had the TV on, didn't hear shit, the other's an old lady, heard screaming at about the right time, but she thought it was from a TV."

"Then he must have had the tape off their mouths for some of it."

"Yeah, the sick piece of shit. He wanted to hear them scream; that, or else he was torturing them for some information, or whatever."

"What kind of information?"

Beale shrugged. "You know, where's the money or the dope?"

"What, you think Chalfonte's a guapo drug lord?"

"No, but, you know, it's something to think about. Why he didn't leave the tape on them."