Richard Price - The Whites

Billy snagged a wandering Transit detective. “Listen, we can’t have trains stopping here right now. Can you call your boss?”

“Sarge, it’s Penn Station.”

“I know where we are, but I don’t want a fresh herd of drunks stomping all over my scene every five minutes.”

The victim lay on his side, neck and torso compressed into a hunch, his left arm and leg thrust straight out before him as if he were trying to kick his own fingertips. It looked to Billy as if the guy had been trying to jump the turnstile, bled out mid-vault, then froze like that, dying in midair before dropping like a rock.

“Looks like a high hurdler just fell off the front of a Wheaties box,” Feeley said, then wandered off.

As a CSU tech began teasing the wallet out of the victim’s formerly sky-blue jeans, Billy stopped marveling at his live-action lava cast and took his first good look at his face. Mid-twenties, with wide open, startled blue eyes, arched pencil-thin eyebrows, milk-white skin, and jet-colored hair, femininely handsome to the point of perversity.

Billy stared and stared, thinking, Can’t be. “Is his name Bannion?”

“Hold the phone,” the tech said, pulling out the guy’s driver’s license. “Bannion it is, first name—”

“Jeffrey,” Billy said, then: “Fuck me sideways.”

“Why do I know that name?” the CSU tech asked, not really interested in an answer.

Jeffrey Bannion… Billy immediately thought of calling John Pavlicek, then considered the hour and decided to wait at least until daybreak, although Big John might not mind being woken up for this one.

Eight years earlier, a twelve-year-old boy named Thomas Rivera had been found beneath a soiled mattress in the tree house of his City Island neighbors, the Bannions. He had been bludgeoned to death, the bedding atop his body spattered with semen. John Pavlicek, back in the late ’90s Billy’s partner in anti-crime but at the time of the murder a detective assigned to the Bronx Homicide Task Force, was called in when the body was found by a cadaver dog three days after the boy went missing.

Jeffrey Bannion’s oversized, learning-disabled younger brother, Eugene, admitted to the jerking off — the tree house was where he always went for that — but said that when he discovered the boy, he was already dead. Nineteen-year-old Jeffrey told Pavlicek that he himself was sick in bed that day, said Eugene had already told him that he had done it. But when the cops turned the lights on the younger Bannion, Eugene not only stuck to his story but couldn’t even begin to speculate on how Thomas Rivera had come to be in the tree house or talk about what kind of weapon had done the deed, no matter how much trickery or cajoling the Homicides employed, and it made no sense that a fifteen-year-old that dim could hold out on them.

Pavlicek liked the older Bannion for it from the jump, but they couldn’t shake his sick-bed story, and so the younger brother went to the Robert N. Davoren juvenile center at Rikers, a Bloods, Ñetas, and MS-13 petri dish, where he was placed in Gen Pop without the requisite psych eval, a big oafy white kid who tended to throw indiscriminate punches when he was freaked, and his murder, only five days into his incarceration, racked up nearly as many headlines as that of the boy he had allegedly killed.

Within days, despite Pavlicek’s full-bore campaigning, the Rivera homicide was marked “closed by arrest,” formally shutting down any further investigative work. Shortly after that, Jeffrey Bannion packed his bags and moved in with various relatives out of state. At first, Pavlicek tried to swallow his frustration by burying himself in other jobs — although he never lost touch with Thomas Rivera’s parents and he never lost track of Bannion’s whereabouts — but when he learned, through connections, of two incidents of assault in which the vics were preadolescent males, one in each of the small towns Jeffrey was living in at the time, neither investigation leading to an arrest, his obsession with nailing this kid returned in raging full effect.

Eventually Bannion moved back to New York, sharing a house in Seaford, Long Island, with three friends. Pavlicek, still on him like Javert, reached out to both the Seventh Precinct in neighboring Wantagh and the Nassau County Detective Bureau, but either Jeffery had kept his nose clean or he had gotten even slicker with age. The last anyone had heard of him — and most galling of all — was that he had recently applied to the auxiliary PDs of a dozen Long Island townships and had been offered training by three.

“My supervisor wants to know how long we have to be shut down for,” the returning Transit detective said.

“We’ll be as fast as we can be,” Billy said.

“He says we got to mop that blood up out there by five-thirty, same for removing the body. That’s when the commuters start coming in earnest.”

Clean it up or preserve it… Clean it up or preserve it… Somebody will complain; somebody always complains.

As another mob staggered off the latest 2 train into Penn Station, a teenage girl stared goggle-eyed at Bannion for a second, looked up searchingly into her boyfriend’s eyes, then wheeled and puked onto the platform, adding her DNA to the mix.

“It’s a bad night for this,” the Transit cop said.

Stepping back into the seamy arcade, Billy stared down the length of the tape. Other than the still-congealing blood, the killing floor — a debris field of candy wrappers, Styrofoam cups, the odd article of clothing, a shattered liquor bottle barely held together by the adhesive on its label — gave up too much and nothing at all.

As CSU continued to bag and photograph, as the LIRR and Transit detectives and his own crew began to work the waiting room, wandering among the semiconscious potential wits like a squadron of visiting nurses, Billy noticed that one of the commuters sleeping there had what appeared to be blood on his Rangers jersey.

He took a seat next to him on a wooden bench, the kid’s head tilted back so far it looked as if someone had slit his throat.

“Hey you.” Billy nudged him.

The kid came out of it, shaking his head like a cartoon animal just whacked with an anvil.

“What’s your name.”

“Mike.”

“Mike what.”

“What?”

“How’d you get the blood on you, Mike?”

“Me?” Still whipping his head from side to side.

“You.”

“Where…” Looking at his jersey, then: “That’s blood?”

“You know Jeffrey Bannion?”

“Do I know him?”

Billy waiting, One Mississippi, two…

“Where is he,” the kid asked.

“So you know him? Jeffrey Bannion?”

“What if I do?”

“You see what happened?”

“What? What are you talking about, what happened?”

“He’s been stabbed.”

The kid shot to his feet. “What? I’ll fucking kill them.”

“Kill who.”

“What?”

“Who do you want to kill.”

“How the fuck should I know? Who did it. You leave them to me.”

“Did you see it?”

“See what?”

“When was the last time you saw him? Where was he, who was he with.”

“He’s like a brother to me.”

“Who was he with.”

“How should I know. What am I, his bitch?”

“His what? Where do you live.”

“Strong Island.”

“More specifically.”

“Seaford.”

“Who else was with you, point out your posse.”

“My posse?”

“Who, sitting here, in this waiting room, was with you tonight, everybody going home to Seaford.”

“I’m no rat.”

“I’m asking who are his friends.”

Mike turned his head as if it were on a rusty turret, taking in half the dull-eyed commuters around him.