Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

“I wasn’t real keen on those two anyway,” I said. “Though it wouldn’t have been the first time that a long shot came in. But Anger. I guess I was holding out some hope for him. Sometimes the excessively gentle ones-well, you know.”

“A name like that was too good. But the alibi’s fine. Anger’s out.”

“So what do you think, Megan? I mean about Riddick and Robin. Are they copycat jobs, or is it possible that Fox was innocent all along?”

She was shaking her head before I’d even finished the question. “It’s him. The case is too strong. We got the fibers from Nikki’s plaid skirt off of Fox’s scissors. That was huge.”

“You never recovered the skirt itself.”

“Doesn’t matter. We had the receipt. We got the positive ID from the clerk at Liana who sold it to her. Nikki’s neighbor saw her leaving the building wearing it, a green-and-black plaid skirt. Fragments of the same skirt end up in Fox’s bedside scissors? Plus the blood on the scissors?”

“But the defense leaked the story that it was all just sex play. A game of dress-up. They said Nikki got nicked by the scissors when Fox was hacking her out of the skirt.”

“Of course they leaked the story. We got the DNA match on blood that was on the scissors as well as the semen the M.E. recovered from Nikki’s body. No question she had sex with Fox just before she was killed. Or possibly it was even while they were having sex. A man who likes to pretend he’s in bed with a schoolgirl and he’s attacking her with a pair of scissors? I wouldn’t put anything past him. If the defense was so confident about their version of things, they could have put Fox on the stand and had him tell the tale. Uh-uh. He’s our man, Fritz. And ladle in the case for Cynthia Blair. Fox was desperate to keep a lid on that affair. And I mean desperate . When she told him she was going ahead with the pregnancy, that was pretty much her death warrant. You heard the testimony. Fox’s attitude toward fathering children was lethal.”

The sketch artist showed up, and we got to work. The good ones employ a relaxing technique of mild hypnosis. This was a good one. We moved into Joe Gallo’s office so we could have some privacy. Megan took the sketcher out into the corridor, where she briefed him on what we were looking for. The two came back in, and Megan pulled the blinds. I was instructed to close my eyes and think about the ocean. It took me a moment to clear the beach and to locate the big open expanse the sketcher was looking for, but I eventually got it. The sketcher moved me into a trancelike place. He had a voice like one of those classical DJs. I expected him to introduce Rachmaninoff any minute. I heard my disembodied voice talking with him, and I heard myself describing the man who had thrown me into the East River. An image of his face floated in my head crystal-clear, and I calmly ran down his features. When the blinds were opened and I opened my eyes, I was handed a sketch that looked 70 percent like Ratface. I worked with the sketcher until we got to about 85 percent, then I had to beg off. My head was really doing a number. I didn’t want pieces of my skull breaking off and littering Joe Gallo’s desk. The sketcher told me I was a good subject and took off. Megan told me to drink a cup of water-it had appeared miraculously on her desk-and she left the room and came back a minute later with a large brown envelope. Several copies of the sketch were in the envelope.

“I’m not giving these to you.”

“No, ma’am.”

She handed me the envelope. “You’re not to distribute these.”

“No, ma’am.”

“I don’t generally find ‘ma’am’ to my liking.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Megan walked me to the front door and followed me outside. Megan wasn’t dressed for outside, and she hugged herself tightly. She looked like a woman in a straitjacket.

“That conversation we had. About the job. The part about it being toxic.”

“What about it?”

“I’d like that not to go anywhere.”

“I wasn’t planning on hopping on the phone.”

“You know what I mean. I’ve been back to work since the fall, but I’ve still got a lot of eyes on me. There are some people who think I lost it with Albert Stenborg, that I got spooked and that I’m still spooked.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with admitting you’re spooked. It’s human.”

“Being spooked and admitting you’re spooked are two different things.”

“You don’t seem to have a problem admitting it to me.”

“You’re not a cop. I don’t work with you. Besides, I don’t know. I remember that time you pretended to run into me at Mumbles.”

“That was the name of it. I’d forgotten.”

“What the hell was a guy like you doing in a place like that?”

“A guy like me what?”

“A guy.”

“I do recall I seemed to be in the minority.”

“The point is, it was a nice gesture.”

“That’s not how you reacted at the time. As I recall, you told me to mind my own goddamn business.”

“So original.”

I shrugged. “I’d heard you weren’t treating yourself so good. It’s not unexpected, given all you were in the middle of. I’ve had some pretty sour points in my time. Sometimes you welcome a person nosing in, and sometimes you tell them to mind their own goddamn business.”

Megan released her grip on herself and blew into her hands. Her lips were going blue. “Let me ask you something. Something that’s none of my own goddamn business.”

“Shoot.”

“You’ve killed someone,” she said. “That’s not a question. I happen to know it.”

“Okay.”

“You can tell me to shut up if you want.”

“Go ahead.”

“I hate this word, it’s gotten so self-helpy, but did you get closure on it?”

“It?”

She could read my tone of voice. “Jesus. You’ve killed more than one person? I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“That’s okay. All part of the résumé. As for your question, I can’t answer it. Or if I can, I think the answer is no. Closure isn’t a concept that makes sense to me. Not in this context. That kind of closure is too cold for my tastes. Plus, I don’t really buy it. I think it’s denial, to use another self-helpy word.”

“Then you understand what I’m talking about.” She indicated the precinct house behind us. “There’s no one in there I can talk to about any of this. Joe, I guess. But only so much. Pope is too green. I don’t want to spook him. But what you just said, that’s the problem. There’s this idea that I’m supposed to shake off what I did. But what I did was I failed to save my girlfriend and I failed to save my partner. Both of them went down on my account. That’s not something a person just shakes off. And believe me, killing Stenborg didn’t do it for me. Not by a long shot. The time to kill him was before he did his damage. I could unload pistols into that bastard all day long and it wouldn’t make any difference. That’s what I’m carrying around. It’s this feeling that I owe Helen. I owe Chris Madden, too, but if I’m brutally honest, that’s not where the trouble is. It’s Helen. I feel like I still owe her. And the thing is, I owe her what I can’t give her.”

“Thinking like that is only going to drive you nuts.”

“You rest my case.”

“You said you’re not getting much sleep. Is that it?”

“Let’s just say I find it’s a lot easier the less I close my eyes.”

I headed for the subway. The station was like a deep freeze. People stood on the platform stomping their feet and beating their arms up and down. Deep freeze or a nuthouse. The 1 train came in, rocking slightly as it hurtled forward. I caught a glimpse of a rat scurrying to get out of its path. I’d moved closer to the edge of the platform than I’d realized; I could practically smell the train. The sight of the scurrying rat brought to mind a memory I wasn’t particularly fond of.