A Killer in the Wind Read online

  Dunn was just working Frank Bagot into the backseat of the Beamer. I stood where I was a while and composed myself, considering the night sky: the gibbous moon rising and the Big Dipper bright and the bright stars and planets flickering out from behind the trees, making the woods seem mysterious and deep. With the dog quiet, I could hear the swamp creatures again. Whistling, chattering, humming, groaning like bulls. There was a peacefulness about it after the sudden violence, an atmosphere of rightness and content as if things were working in the dark of the forest the way they were intended to.

  That’s when the ghosts returned to me—the memory of the ghosts, I mean. The memory of the city with all a city’s suddenness and jarring noise. I was thinking about Frank Bagot and the way he came back to his past and the way the past comes back. I had lived three years in exurban Tyler County, but New York was always with me. I was always half-afraid that I would turn this way or that and see the little boy who wasn’t there, see him staring at me with his phantom eyes. Or the woman. Samantha . . . The past shapes your desires and your desires lead you back into the past.

  I took a deep breath of the cool spring air, rich and moist and somehow green, full of the swamp and the forest. You’re fine, I told myself. Fine. But I guess the thing is: Once you’ve been crazy, once you’ve seen ghosts and lived with delusions, you can never be quite sure of yourself anymore. Reality seems fragile to you. You’re always worried it’ll crack and you’ll step through it into the bad time again.

  I heard Deputy Dunn shut the Beamer’s rear door. I walked over to the driver’s side.

  “Nice work,” I said.

  He nodded, big-eyed, big Adam’s apple going up and down. He was still all fired up and confused. But I could see by the look of him that he was beginning to realize he had come through it, and he’d have a good story to tell his Sal tonight.

  We both got into the car, me behind the wheel.

  “You bastard, you hit me,” said Frank Bagot out of the back.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t shove that gun up your ass and blow your brains out,” I told him. I started the car.

  I paused for a moment there, my hand on the gearshift. Looking out the windshield at the lighted house with the moon above it. Finally, with some small trepidation, I scanned the edges of the surrounding forest. Fearing I would see those old ghosts standing there, watching me, from just within the trees.

  But there was nothing. Of course not. I felt fine. Good. I had for years. Not likely ever to see what I once saw, what I saw back then, down in the city. The boy. The woman. Not likely.

  But once you’ve been crazy, you can never be quite sure.

  2

  Flashback: The Emory Case

  THIS WAS A little over three years ago. I was NYPD back then. An undercover vice detective in Manhattan North—what in cop-speak we called an uncle. I had the whole uncle routine going too: the longish hair, the motorcycle, the cigarettes—and the ganja, when off-duty—not to mention the complete disdain for rules and procedures that goes along with the undercover trade.

  I had been a while finding my calling. Raised in orphanages and foster homes, I’d bummed around for a few years after high school. Did construction work here and there. Drank hard. Broke hearts. Punched people. Then, on the advice of a deputy sheriff who’d just finished kicking me in the stomach, I joined the Army. Traveled to the Hindu Kush, met exotic, Pakol-wearing evildoers, and killed them. Came back, got my degree in law enforcement at Syracuse, then applied to the NYPD.

  I became a white shield uncle in PMD—the Public Morals Division—right out of the academy. You can do that in Vice. It’s not like Narcotics. You don’t have to serve three years on patrol. So I scored my gold shield after eighteen months. And now I was a detective—thirty-three because of my late start, but still plenty young enough to be on fire with ambition.

  And I was more than on fire. I had nothing else in my life to distract me. No wife, no family. Nothing but the job. I worked it hard. I developed a hunger inside me. I hammered through my two-week eighty-hour pay periods and then past the twenty-five overtime cap whether the department approved the money or not. Then I worked on into secret, sleepless, unknown nights, and screw the union rules. I combed through hot cases and cold cases. I pawed through buried files in basement boxes that had never even been scanned into the system. I busted my way up from prosses to pimps to mobster traffickers in women and children—all manner of modern slave-traders who preyed on foreigners and the poor. I even did my part to bring down a state senator once, a man of the people trading his vote for high-priced call girls on the side.

  Over the course of a couple of years, I developed . . . I’m not sure what to call it—a preoccupation, say, with a perp known to me only as the Fat Woman. She was a specialty broker. A seller of human beings without flaw or blemish, supplying the finest in flesh and souls—in women, girls, and boys—to the very highest class of clients. That’s what my sources told me at least. There was no record of her anywhere—no pictures, no prints. She was just a word on the street, a passed remark, a knowing mutter over the body of a dead child. An elite and legendary monster, like the devil himself. In fact, it’s a good comparison because, as with the devil himself, you only saw the effects of her while she remained invisible. As with the devil himself, some people, even some police, didn’t believe she existed.

  But I did. I believed. And I wanted her. I had an eye out, always, for any sign she had passed by.

  Then came the day—it was deep winter—I got a call from a friend in the one-seven. Their module was working a luxury pross ring run out of a building on Sutton Place. My friend, one of the investigators, a detective named Monahan, had been camped on the street outside for a week. He’d snapped a stakeout photo of a john who frequented the place.

  If uncles like me were the rebels and artistes of the force—the “dope smokers and faggots,” as Monahan poetically put it—investigators like him were usually big, meaty, Irish, or spiritually Irish, guys who didn’t need uniforms to look like cops. Monahan, in particular, was one of these thick-necked musclemen who stretched his shirts to the breaking point. Face of an overfed schoolboy. Red hair worn belligerently short, except on his knuckles, where it was long.

  “Dig this,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of his desk. He pointed to the computer monitor, the picture there. I leaned in for a better look, pressing my fists against the desktop. “The john’s name is Martin Emory. Private financial consultant. Referrals only. Works with millionaires. Is a millionaire.”

  The building that headquartered the luxury pross ring was a tower of red brick and concrete. In the photograph, this Emory guy was just pushing out of its black glass front door and stepping onto the sidewalk.

  “Now watch what happens,” Monahan said.

  He tapped the keyboard to change the shot, then changed it again. I saw Emory move from the building to a sleek black Mercedes parked at the curb. In the next picture, he was inside the car, in the passenger seat.

  “Yeah?” I said. “So?”

  “See the driver?” said Monahan.

  I couldn’t. Not much. The car’s window was rolled up and dark. But if I squinted, close to the screen, I could make out the shape of her: a woman, immensely obese.

  I wagged my head—a kind of shrug. “Maybe it’s his mother,” I said. I said it as blandly as I could. But the truth was, I felt like I was a buzzer that had just gone off. It was a fat woman anyway—and who knows, maybe the fat woman I was looking for. “Any better shots of her?”

  “Just this one.”

  Monahan clicked to his last picture. The woman was turned toward us now, toward the camera, nervously scanning the street. But all I could see—all I seemed to see through the window’s darkness and the buildings reflected on the glass—was a bizarrely piebald oval of flesh framed in short, darkish hair.

  “Where the hell’s her face?” I said.

  Monahan’s massive shoulders lifted and fell under the straining shi
rt. “Beats me.”

  “What, is she wearing a mask?”

  “Maybe. Could be the light. Could be the glass.”

  “I guess. It’s spooky. What about the car? You check the car?”

  “Rental. Phony ID. Dead end.”

  “So that tells us something right there.”

  “Exactly. I’m thinking maybe he gets his expensive thrills inside the building—and his very expensive thrills from her.”

  I didn’t answer, but I was still buzzing, buzzing more in fact, more every second. “It’s a leap. I don’t know. The phony ID is definitely something. Otherwise . . . she’s in the fat half of the female half of the human race.”

  “I got a way in for you if you want it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “One of Emory’s clients is also a john,” Monahan said. “William Russel. Runs a very exclusive private school. I don’t think he’d want to do the perp walk with the Post snapping pictures. If I lean on him, I’m pretty sure he’d give you a referral to Emory.”

  I kept peering into the monitor. Spooky: that featureless, piebald oval where her face should’ve been. Must’ve been the glare on the glass.

  “What do you think?” said Monahan as I hesitated. “You want to make contact with him?”

  I was only pretending to think it over. I already knew what I was going to do.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. I’ll make contact.”

  Which I did, about a week later, posing as a wealthy video game designer. I figured I played video games and read about them and Emory probably didn’t, so it was a good cover. Monahan put the squeeze on his private school perp, Russel, and got me the referral I needed.

  We met on a Wednesday in Emory’s apartment, which doubled as his office. It was a penthouse on East 52nd Street, right above the river. Wraparound windows and a balcony over the water. Polished wood floors and elaborate carpets. A lot of stuffed white chairs and glass furniture. A lot of black-and-white photographs on the wall: famous actresses and athletes, reclining nudes, plus one of a nude woman kissing another woman who was wearing a veil. I recognized some of these photos. I’d seen them before in magazines. But I guessed these were the originals or early prints or something—something expensive. The whole place felt aggressively expensive, an advertisement for Emory’s investing skills, I guess.

  But that wasn’t all. There was an atmosphere about the place, a subtle atmosphere of creepy sexuality. Maybe it was the photographs that did it: the sprawled poses of the actresses and the drooping eyelids of the nudes. Even the rippling six-packs of the boxers and ballplayers might have had something to do with it. Even the furniture: sparse and spare, yet oversoft like rotten fruit. It was the whole place—I don’t know; I couldn’t put my finger on it. Could’ve just been me, my jaded point of view, my cop instincts. But I didn’t think it was me. I thought it was Emory. I already suspected what the guy was under his pink polo shirt and khaki slacks. I thought he meant the place to feel the way it did. I thought it was a kind of subliminal tease built into the décor, his private joke, his private perversion—whatever it was—hidden in plain sight, mocking any visitor who wasn’t in the know. Anyway, all I’m saying is: The place made me queasy.

  His short, bustling Puerto Rican maid let me in. Then Emory turned from the river view at the far wall of windows and walked across the living room to greet me. I shook his hand and I thought: He’s evil. I did, just like that, right off. He was round-faced, bland-faced—flaccid-faced somehow though he was barely forty. Pale and soft, with short, sandy hair and green eyes embedded in wrinkled folds of flesh. There was something coy and provocative in the way he looked at me. It was the same attitude I sensed in the apartment generally, the same giggly hint of a barely hidden secret, a cherished pet wickedness that only the initiated were allowed to see full-on.

  We sat in his office down the hall. Wooden paneling. Leather-bound books. A vast mahogany desk with a glass top and gold trimming. We sat side by side and examined my fake portfolio displayed on his computer monitor. He gave a speech about diversification and hidden opportunities in the current market. He made it sound like he was addressing my case specifically, but I could tell it was a speech he’d made before. For my part, I played it strictly straight, nothing out of line. I was supposed to be one of these creative types who made a lot of money but didn’t understand the ins and outs of high finance, so I nodded a lot, as if I were pretending to understand what he said but didn’t. All the while, I was buzzing inside, wired, electric. There was something about this guy that felt like bingo. For the first time since I’d heard of her, I thought I was on the trail of the Fat Woman.

  Only when we were done, only when we were shaking hands again, out in the living room, out by the door, did I drop my bait.

  “This all sounds very good,” I told him. “I’m going on vacation next week, but I’ll call you as soon as I get back.”

  “Oh, where are you going?” Emory asked politely, because that’s what people politely ask.

  “Bangkok,” I told him. “Thailand. I spend a lot of time there,” I added, averting my eyes.

  “Good food, I hear,” said Emory. And then, as if joking: “And lots of prostitutes, right?”

  I laughed and said, also as if joking, “You got to spend your money on something.”

  He laughed too, but his mocking eyes caressed me.

  I knew I’d set the hook. I knew I had him. I wouldn’t have to do anything else, not yet. He’d come back to the subject on his own. They all do. They can’t help themselves, these guys. They want to tell. They want to share. They want to convince themselves that everyone is secretly like them, deep down.

  I couldn’t sleep all that week. I never slept much but this was different. I lay wide awake, staring at the ceiling, night after night after night. Thinking the same thing over and over, the same words: I’ve got her. I’ve got her. I didn’t even know why I thought that. I didn’t even know how I knew. But I knew. Monahan was right. The Sutton Place hookers were just a pastime for Emory, a stopgap. He was into something else—something dark, something nasty, something only the Fat Woman could supply. I’ve got her. I’ve got her. Night after night. I couldn’t sleep a wink.

  “How were the prostitutes?” That’s what he asked me the next time I saw him. Sitting in his living room with the wraparound windows. With the gray winter sky and the gray winter river. Me on the sofa, him in a chair. “How were the prostitutes?” As if he were joking.

  “Young and cheap,” I said with a laugh. As if I were joking.

  “Seems like a long way to travel just for a good time,” he said. Laughing. As if he were joking.

  “Depends on your definition of a good time,” I said. As if.

  “Well, whatever it is, I’m sure with your money, you could find it a lot closer to home.” Laughing, he opened a folder on the glass table between us. Portfolios. Opportunities. “I, meanwhile, have been using my time more productively on your behalf . . .”

  See, now he had tossed out his bait, his hook: You could find it a lot closer to home. And I was supposed to say: Really? Are you serious? What do you mean? And I would say it. But not today. That would have been too eager. It might have tipped him off, put him on his guard. I had to seem to be cautious. I had to seem afraid. Take it slow. Step by step.

  That was the hard part. The waiting. The slow pace and the tension and the constant buzz. No sleep, night after night. Night after night.

  I called him about a week later. Asked him if we could meet somewhere. A restaurant maybe. Have a drink.

  “If you’re going to be handling my money, I’d like to get to know you better,” I said.

  We met at his club. We sat in leather chairs at a small square table under a white marble fireplace the size of a studio apartment. I was wearing an Armani suit I’d DARed—charged to the city on my Daily Activity Report. I thought it was the kind of suit you might wear if you had money but didn’t know money. If you only knew the famous names like Arman
i. I ordered Laphroaig, a single malt. Just a little water, no ice. I’d learned about that on singlemalt.com. But I pronounced the name of the scotch wrong and the waiter corrected me. That was an accident, but luckily it suited my cover.

  “So let me ask you something,” I said. Kind of shyly. Smiling, but not laughing now. This was beyond the point where I could pretend I was joking. This was it. I was making my play. “When you said I could probably find my pleasures closer to home, whatever they were, what did you mean? Were you serious?”

  Emory smiled, an impish, boyish smile, looking down at the table, then up at me. “Are we being naughty now?” he said—and he wrinkled his nose like a dowager talking to her poodle.

  It turned my stomach. This was the thing, the thing that was keeping me awake at night. Not just the scent of the Fat Woman. Not just the feeling that I was getting close. It was this: the evil. I don’t know any other word to describe it. My growing sense that I was in the presence of evil.

  See, I’d seen that look before. That wrinkled nose, that laughing sparkle in the eyes. In the movies, the evil guys laugh out loud. Bwa-ha-ha. Or they chuckle suavely, swirling their drinks in their glasses. But this is the real deal, the real look most of these monsters have. A sort of cute, dainty, delicate recoil from speaking the thing out loud. The forbidden joke of it.

  Are we being naughty now?

  Naughty to me is snapping your girlfriend’s butt with a towel. Naughty to these guys is the unspeakable.

  Emory gave me no other answer. He bluntly changed the subject.

  “Let’s talk about other things for the time being.”

  For the time being.

  I had another sleepless night. Lying on my back. Staring at the ceiling. I’ve got her. I’ve got her.

  Are we being naughty now?

  The next day, I caught someone watching me. White guy in a sweatshirt and jeans, baseball cap and headset. Trying to look like just-a-dude, but a sinewy bone-crusher beneath the costume. Professional talent.