Andrew Vachss - Down Here

“Oh, never mind. ” Michelle probed in her purse, handed the Mole her cell phone. “Call my boy, please,” she said. “Tell him we need to see him.”

The Mole didn’t move.

“You do know where he is, don’t you?”

“He has a cell phone, too,” the Mole said, defensively.

“Well, then?”

“He is still at school. Is this—?”

“Yeah, it kind of is, Mole,” I assured him.

While he was dialing, Michelle took out one of her extra-long, ultra-thin cigarettes. Pink was the color of the day, apparently. I lit it for her.

“He’s coming,” the Mole announced, handing back Michelle’s phone.

“What are you working on now?” she asked him.

“A new polymer,” the Mole said. “It is—”

“Well, I can’t understand all that,” Michelle cut him off. “While we’re waiting for Terry, you’ll just have to show me. Come on.”

The Mole followed obediently, his face flaming.

I sat down with Simba, and we told each other lies about when we’d been young.

It took Terry over an hour to show up. I took a tenth of that to tell him what I wanted.

“Sure!” he said. “I can do it, easy. The scanning’s pretty much mechanical. Take some time, though, even with the setup I’ve got. But you might want something better than a simple-sort.”

“Go slow, kid,” I cautioned him. “Remember who you’re talking to here.”

“I can write a program, but you’d have to spell out for me what fields—never mind, just the kind of things you want to connect, okay?”

“I’m not sure I’m . . .”

“Look,” he said, enthusiastically, “it would be nothing to sort by, say, time of day, or if he used a weapon, like that, see? But if you wanted to make an ANOVA . . . Never mind. If you wanted to know the extent to which different factors impacted on the model . . .”

“Terry . . .”

“Okay, wait. I got it. Look, let’s say the ‘standard’ attack was between four and six in the afternoon, and the guy used a knife, all right?

“But in some of the attacks he was, I don’t know, dressed all in black. Does him dressing in black affect the time of day or the weapon? See? The more . . . factors I have, the more I can help you find the pattern.”

“Could you superimpose?” I asked him.

“Now you’ve got me confused,” he said, grinning.

“If you had all the addresses where the rapes occurred, could you put a map of the metro area over it, somehow?”

“Sure. But what would you want that for?”

“The rapes went down in a lot of different counties. But no one was ever actually arrested, so the different offices probably didn’t share information. In fact, I can’t figure out where . . . Wolfe’s friend got them all. Anyway, maybe there’s some main highway that gets him in and out of all the areas, so, if you look at where he hits, you might get an idea where he’s striking from, where his home base is.”

“No problem,” the kid assured me. “If it’s in the data you’ve got, I’ll write a program that will tell you a lot more than what’s already on paper, I promise.”

“Isn’t he a genius?” Michelle said, beaming.

“Pop taught me all of it,” Terry quickly disclaimed.

“Well, you certainly didn’t get your fashion sense from him,” Michelle snapped back. “Or those good looks, either.”

“All from you, Mom,” Terry said, putting his arm around her. “And a ton more.”

The kid was a scientist in his soul. He understood that if a lab ran his DNA, they’d know he hadn’t come from the Mole and Michelle. But he knew something else, too. Something we all know down here—some of the truest truths never make the textbooks.

On the return trip—Michelle still glowing, humming to herself like a happy little girl—my cell phone buzzed.

“What?”

“She wants to talk to you.” Pepper, no-nonsense voice.

“Wherever she—”

“Do you remember the last place you met with her?”

“Yes.”

“There.”

“When?”

“Soon as you can make it. She’s waiting.”

As if it had been eavesdropping, the Plymouth’s engine answered.

The office building was on lower Broadway, a few blocks north of what outsiders keep calling “ground zero.” Since 9/11, you don’t want to be bringing a car into that area after dark. Too many eyes.

Last time I’d been there, Mick had been working the lobby desk. Wolfe’s crew had some kind of deal with the people who ran the building: they rented out little pieces of it for a few hours at a time.

I tried the front door. Locked. I buzzed for the night man. Not surprised to see Mick, wearing a pair of dark-green pants and matching Eisenhower jacket, with some company’s name stitched in gold on the front.

He let me in, relocked the door.

“Same place?” I asked him.

He turned his back on me without answering, walking toward the freight elevator. I followed, got in the car. Mick threw a lever, and the car dropped, slow and noisy.

He let me out in the basement. I heard the door close behind me, so I walked around the corner to where Wolfe had been the last time.

And there she was, sitting on a double-height set of lateral file cabinets. She was dressed in denim overalls and a red pullover, her long, dark hair tied behind her, no makeup.

“Behave!” she said to the Rottweiler, before he could even threaten me.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“You mean the lockup?” she said. “Sure. It’s been years since I was putting people away, and those ones wouldn’t be on Rikers, anyway.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. Rikers Island was a jail, not a prison. People were sent there to await trial, or to serve misdemeanor sentences. Wolfe hadn’t won all her bouts as a prosecutor, but when she landed her Sunday punch, the opponent always went down for the count.

“It doesn’t need to be personal,” I said. “It’s a bad joint. Things happen.”

“Something did happen,” she said, the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. “A very large woman came up to me while I was waiting on the chow line. In fact, she bulled her way in, right in front of me.

“I just ignored it—I wasn’t going to fight over a place in line. Then she turned around and spoke to me. Not shouting, exactly, but loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘don’t say a word to me. Not one word. I know you’re not about talking. Just wanted you to know you got friends here. So, if anyone gets stupid with you, all you got to do is point them out. Not even with your finger. Just nod your head, and it’ll be taken care of.’ Wasn’t that nice of her?”

“Hortense is a righteous woman,” I said. “Always has been.”

“I appreciate what you . . . I appreciate what she did,” Wolfe said. “But it wasn’t me who told Pepper to—”

“Pepper did the right thing, and you know it,” I said. “And Davidson’s the right man for the job.”

“The job, ” she repeated, bitterly.

“Look, I know you didn’t—”

“Didn’t what? Didn’t shoot that maggot? How do you know?”

“It’s not you.”

“ What’s not me?” she challenged. “Maybe I read that letter he sent me, and went over to his house to tell him to step off. Maybe he got aggressive, and I panicked. Pulled out a gun and shot him. And then ran.”

“Right. As if you’d go to meet a freak like him without backup.”

“What if my backup helped me get away?”

“He was shot with a twenty-five.”

“Isn’t that a woman’s gun?” she said, unknowingly echoing Sands. “And three shots— sounds like panic, doesn’t it?”