Ed Dee - The Con Man's Daughter

Headlights flashed across the bedroom wall as a big vehicle turned into their street. Eddie squinted, trying to see if he recognized the car. He wondered if it was the YPD making its hourly drive-by. A dark SUV, one of the king-size models, towered over his neighbors' Hondas and Tauruses. Brake lights painted the street with a red glow. The bass thump of music reverberated. A little too loud for police work.

Maybe it was a wrong address, some yo-yo looking for his bimbette. Nothing to do with him. Kids, probably. Kids with a case of beer iced down in a cooler on the floor behind them. Probably just driving around, looking for a girl who lived on the hill. She won't do it, but her sister will. But then the big tires bounced softly up onto the curb, bright lights pointed at the house. Eddie put his big silhouette in the center of the window, hoping it would scare them off. On the lawn, near the edge of the driveway, Eddie noticed the small pink doll-house Grace had dragged out there earlier. He still remembered the argument that Christmas Eve when he and Eileen had put it together. The SUV stopped halfway up the driveway.

Please back off, he whispered. Eddie's nature begged him to run outside, but he knew he couldn't abandon Grace. Disappearing had been his old act. He looked back at Grace, who was sound asleep, zonked-out. Maybe she'd sleep through this.

The engine growled as the driver seemed to search for the right gear-reverse, Eddie hoped. He had a bad feeling; the guy was too ballsy. Either drunk or crazy. He prayed for drunk as the music got louder, thumping in his chest. Grace moaned something, half-asleep. Call the cops, he thought. That's what a good citizen would do. The SUV made a sudden hard left onto the lawn, then went right across it, tire tracks cutting deep in the soft grass and aiming directly at the pink dollhouse. The cracking of plastic echoed in the quiet neighborhood as the big tires crushed it.

Eddie raced down the hall and grabbed the Smith & Wesson from his bedroom closet. He didn't care who the hell it was, or how many. He could feel his arms reaching into the SUV, yanking whoever it was out of that car. His hand was on the doorknob when Grace cried out from the bedroom.

"I'll be right back, babe," he yelled. "Everything is okay."

She called him again.

"Just a second, honey," he yelled.

Something hit the front of the house, slamming off the ancient door. Grace cried, "Granpop."

So he ran to her and held her and watched from the pink bedroom as the SUV backed down the driveway. The driver peeled out, tires screeching. Bits of mud and stones pinged off the sides of parked cars. Grace, her voice thick with sleep, asked what was happening, unsure whether or not she was in a bad dream. He held her and said it was just a dumb driver who got lost and that she'd always be safe with him.

Three marked patrol cars from the Yonkers Fourth Precinct responded. In the swirl of light on the lawn, Eddie let Martha snatch Grace from his arms and take her to her house. He told the cops he didn't get a plate number but that even if he had, he was sure the vehicle had been stolen. He led them to the other evidence, a gray canvas bag that had been thrown against the door-the door that no friend ever used. Detectives examined tire marks and photographed the bag. He asked the detectives to contact Babsie Panko and tell her about the canvas bag and its contents. Stenciled on the side was u.s. mail. Inside was a human head.

Thursday, April 9

1:00 A.M.

For the second time in four days, a yellow crime-scene tape stretched across Eddie Dunne's driveway. Bits of pink plastic dollhouse were scattered across the lawn. Tiny dresses and miniature chairs and tables clung to clumps of grass around deep, swirling wheel ruts. CSU techs dug up chunks of turf for tire-tread comparison. Standard operating procedure, but a waste of time in this case. It might reassure the victim when you went through the evidence-collection motions, but both the techies and Eddie knew the SUV had already been transformed into a metal block and stacked with other metal blocks in some junkyard in the borough of Brooklyn or Queens.

At this point, an unidentified human head was all the Yonkers PD had to work with. Until the location where the crime actually occurred could be determined, investigative responsibility fell to the jurisdiction where the head was found. Along with Kate's kidnapping, Babsie Panko had inherited a possible homicide. She volunteered to take the case because in all likelihood it was related to the kidnapping. The canvas bag and its decaying contents were on the way to the medical examiner's office in White Plains. Babsie put the head on the seat next to her and took off.

Babsie Panko said that so far that year, more serious crime had occurred on Eddie Dunne's lawn than in the rest of the entire Fourth Precinct. She told him she didn't know how he had the guts to look inside the bag. He said it was easy; he had to know. At first, he didn't think it was real, just something you see on the shelves in Wal-Mart on the days before Halloween. But it had weight to it. He'd reached in and turned the spongy skull around. It wasn't trick or treat. He'd taken only a quick look. Enough to know it wasn't his daughter.

The sun rose before the police cleared the scene. They were slowed by curious neighbors in bathrobes and suppers, who added their individual two cents and then shuffled home. Despite Martha's objections, Eddie insisted that Grace go to school. He wanted her life as normal as possible, and he'd fight Martha daily on that. Babsie Panko arranged for a plainclothes cop to be assigned to Christ the King. After Eddie got her to school and met the cop, he went home, showered and dressed, then drove to Brighton Beach. More than five hours early for his meeting with Matty Boland.

The skies were gray; heavy low clouds hung over the skyscrapers of Manhattan. A constant pain drummed above Eddie's eyes as he rode down the West Side Highway. He always got a headache before the rain. Staring at every face in every car made it worse. But he thought that if he could only look into every single vehicle, every single room, sooner or later he'd find the face of his daughter. He wouldn't miss that wild red hair. Then all hell would break loose as he slammed across lanes of traffic or through walls. Kate would expect nothing less of him.

When she was young, Kate hated her red hair almost as much as her freckles. He would hold her and kiss each freckle on her nose until she giggled, then screamed, "Daaaad" in frustration. In grade school, the kids had called her "Howdy Doody." It had infuriated her, and punches were thrown. Eileen, feeling guilty over passing those physical traits along, had claimed Kate was just another "fighting" Dunne. But by the time she got to high school, the freckles had disappeared. She grew tall and straight. Her figure filled in, even curvier than Eileen's. She never heard those taunts again. And somewhere along the line, he'd stopped kissing her on the nose.

Eddie knew Kate was alive. If they'd killed her, it would have been her head in the bag last night. That would have been a final gesture, he thought. That would have been the move that meant nothing else mattered. If that had happened, he'd be turning Yuri Borodenko's mansion on the Atlantic into a mausoleum. Borodenko would hear the news in Russia, and misery would enter his life.

Today, there were no cars in front of Borodenko's for him to blow up. Eddie parked halfway down the block, wondering where to begin. They'd cut down the dogwood tree; the scorched logs sat stacked near the curb. All around the stump, grass, blacktop, and sidewalk were blackened in a circle twice the size of a Rolls-Royce. The black circle made the house seem even more of a white stone fortress.