A Simple Act of Violence (27 page)

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Authors: R.J. Ellory

BOOK: A Simple Act of Violence
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Miller leaned forward. ‘You what?’
Metz nodded his head. ‘You know what I think? I think they were on a witness program . . .’
‘I figured that,’ Roth interjected.
‘No fucking way,’ Miller said. ‘You can’t be serious . . . absolutely no relatives whatsoever? None of them?’
‘Nothing,’ Metz replied. ‘And their possessions have been handed over to the county probate court. Packed up and shipped off to some storage facility outside of Annapolis. I’ve applied for inventories but was told that it could be a month before they get to it—’
‘Get a warrant,’ Miller snapped.
‘I’ve applied already . . . should get word back tomorrow.’
‘This is unreal,’ Miller said. ‘This is just un-fucking-real . . . I can’t actually believe that I’m hearing this.’
‘It’s got to be witness protection,’ Metz said. ‘It’s got to be. Only time I’ve ever come across anything like this is with people on the program.’
Miller didn’t reply.
‘Anything else?’ Roth asked.
Metz shook his head. ‘Just follow up on the warrant application in the morning. Take it from there.’
‘Good,’ Roth said. ‘So go home . . . need you in for a briefing at nine.’
Metz wished them luck and departed.
Miller still didn’t speak.
‘So?’ Roth asked.
Miller shook his head. ‘I’m stunned,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m actually fucking stunned by this entire thing . . .’
‘Go home,’ Roth said. ‘Go get something halfway decent to eat, get some sleep, for God’s sake. You can’t do anything more about this tonight.’
‘I will, I will . . . you go ahead, okay?’
Roth rose to his feet. ‘Little one won’t go to bed until she’s seen me.’
Miller didn’t reply.
‘I’ll be here before nine,’ Roth said as he walked to the door. ‘Get things set up before everyone arrives.’
‘See you then,’ Miller replied, and turned back toward the window as he heard the sound of rain against the glass.
Close to midnight, there in the kitchen of his apartment on Church, Robert Miller stood quietly with his back to the edge of the sink. It was still raining. He could hear it against the window behind him. He tried to comprehend the things that were consuming his life. He tried not to think about what might happen. Tried also not to think about what he might become if he failed with this case. It was important. Everything had been important in its own quiet way, but this was perhaps the most important thing of all. He felt as if the eyes of Washington were upon him. Five women were dead, and no-one knew why. No-one even possessed an inkling, could see no rhyme nor reason . . . There were so many things that would have made his task easier to confront. A witness, for example. Just one. One single eyewitness to look at the pictures, to answer questions, to maybe give some kind of idea of whether they were even on the right track. But no, they had nothing at all. Nothing but hope and luck. They were the most valuable commodities an investigator could wish for. Continuing hope, a willingness to persist methodically in the face of all accumulated dead-ends, and a piece of luck. Something that would open this thing up and make it whisper the truth.
He watched the darkness through the window until it was once again light, the memory of how he had felt in his office ever present. Like being watched. The same way Natasha Joyce had been watched.
Miller showered, shaved, dressed, and by seven-fifteen he was back in his kitchen. After a piece of dry toast and half a cup of black coffee, he returned to the Second as if it was his spiritual home.
 
He collected the pictures for the patrolmen - half a dozen to a set, a hundred sets in all. The patrols would go out in squad cars, and those squad cars would fan out across this sector of the city, and the men in the passenger seats would keep their eyes wide. There would be calls, there would be false alarms, there would be people who knew with absolute certainty the name and address of the man in the picture. And the patrolmen would follow up, and they would find that the man looked nothing at all like the picture, and they would thank everyone for their diligence and apologize for any inconvenience caused, and they would return to the precinct in the certain belief that Catherine Sheridan had visited Darryl King accompanied by a ghost. Such was the way of the world within which Robert Miller existed. It was not NYPD Blue or CSI or Law and Order. It did not begin and end within an episode. Life was not like that. Life was laborious and exhausting, it stretched patience and nerves, and results were obtained through diligence and industry and tireless perseverance. And sometimes, despite all those efforts, they found nothing.
He would brief Oliver and Metz, Riehl and Feshbach. He would tell them to respond to every call as if it was the only one they’d get. He knew there were no guarantees, no foolproof systems that could be employed; knew that there would always be someone who knew something but did not call, or reached the point of dialling the number only to have reservations and hang up, or hated the police and decided that assisting them in their investigation would be a betrayal of their principles. Or they were scared. That more than anything.
Miller went out for coffee. He carried it back and sat in the meeting room until Roth arrived at eight forty-five.
‘You been here all night?’ Roth asked.
Miller smiled, shook his head. ‘You’re s’posed to be a detective, right? I have a different color shirt on.’
‘You don’t look like you went home.’
‘I sent my body,’ Miller replied. ‘I stayed here trying to work this thing out and I sent my body home without me.’
Roth frowned. ‘I’m starting to worry about you.’
Miller opened his mouth to retort with a wisecrack, but a knock at the door stopped him.
Carl Oliver and Chris Metz came in.
‘We’re in here for this briefing, right?’ Oliver asked.
‘We sure are,’ Roth said. ‘Take a seat.’
Metz glanced at his watch. ‘Time we starting?’
‘Nine, officially.’
‘Gonna go get a smoke and a cup of coffee before we kick off. You guys want anything?’
Miller shook his head. ‘I’m good.’
‘Get me a latte,’ Roth said.
Metz frowned. ‘Sure as fuck I ain’t gonna get you anything of the sort. Black or white, that’s your choice.’
Roth waved his hand. ‘Get whatever.’
Metz turned to leave.
‘I’m gonna have a semi-skinny hot wet decaf cappuccino with a hint of almond essence and a parasol on the top,’ Oliver said, following after Metz.
‘Screw you,’ Roth called after them.
‘This is what we have,’ Miller said. ‘This is who’s gonna find the Ribbon Killer.’
Roth shook his head. ‘Who the fuck comes up with these names, that’s what I wanna know. The Ribbon Killer. Jesus, it’s all so goddam melodramatic. The Ribbon Killer. Half the problem we have with these things is we create a legend around these people—’
Miller raised his hand to stop him. ‘I got a headache, Al. I can’t take any more.’
Roth nodded understandingly. ‘You need to get laid.’
‘I need a lot of things . . . and right now that comes round about fifteenth on my list of priorities. First thing is get this meeting done and get these pictures out. Don’t know about you, but I want to get down to the administrations unit and find this Frances Gray woman.’
‘Sure,’ Roth said, ‘and then we check out whoever Natasha spoke to at the Fourth.’
The sound of voices from the corridor, the hubbub and commotion of men gathering.
‘Lock an’ load,’ Roth said. ‘We’re up.’
The first handful of men came in through the door and started to take seats. Miller stood at the front of the room, to his right a table laden with the photo packs.
Lassiter appeared in the second wave, behind him Oliver and Metz. Everyone quietened down. Lassiter indicated the back of the room with a nod of the head. He was there for added authority, to remind them of the gravity of the situation.
Eight minutes past nine the last of the attendees was seated.
Miller cleared his throat, picked up one of the photo packs, withdrew one of the images.
‘This man,’ Miller started, ‘is someone we need to talk to as a matter of extreme urgency.’
 
 
 
 
P
erhaps something preternatural, perhaps merely a figment of my own imagination or paranoia, but I believe they are nearly here.
Wednesday morning. November 15th. I stand before a class of students, and there is a moment of silence. Possibly they imagine I have forgotten what I intended to say. Possibly they do not care. They could never know that within those brief seconds I visualized and remembered a conversation about balance, a conversation that now seems to belong to someone else’s life.
‘You have balance,’ he said, as if of some rare and extraordin
ary thing. A thing of beauty. A thing to be guarded and preserved.
His name was Dennis Powers. He had a wide face, his lanternjawline almost caricature, and he smiled with too many teeth. He was a training instructor, and though he stood a good three or four inches taller than me there was something compact and tight and wired about him. There was something about Dennis that frightened me. He made me feel as if I had to be ready for anything, the likelihood being that it would not be good.
‘He’s a good guy,’ Catherine had told me the day before. She
had on the hat again, that turquoise beret, and she was on her way somewhere, and she was carrying books under her arm, and the whole scenario could have been something from some East Coast university campus. That’s what we were; we were students, but what we were studying would not be found on any Ivy League curriculum. Geopolitics and World Affairs; War Against Communist Infiltration; Subversion, Military Coups, Assassination . . .
It was April of 1981, three months or so before my twenty-second birthday, and I already believed it. It was indoctrination, brainwashing, propaganda - whatever the hell you wanted to call it - but it was subtle, and it worked. By the time Catherine and I really got to know one another we were in deep. By the time they asked us to go into the field we were affiliated and registered, enrolled, signed up, stamped and passed and printed. By July of the same year, even as we boarded the plane together, the belief that we were doing the right thing was in our blood.
‘There has to be something inside of you,’ someone told me
many years later.
‘Something
inside of you that fundamentally agrees with the crazy fucking shit they do out there to be involved in the first place. The shepherds, the readers, the trainers . . . they all know how to look for it, and they can see it in you like you have a lit-up sign on your goddam forehead.’
Later I would understand, but to this day I cannot tell what it was they saw in me. Perhaps the fundamental disagreement with the way life had been thrown at me. Perhaps the death of my parents - or, more, the circumstances of their deaths - and the indirect way in which I had been involved. Perhaps the fact that what my father did was crazy, but at the same time I understood why he did it, and perhaps it was this that they saw in me because that Sunday, the day I met Dennis Powers for the first time, he looked right at me, dead square in the eye, and he told me I had balance.
‘You need balance,’ he said, and then he smiled, and I guessed
he was somewhere around forty-five or fifty years old, but later he told me how young he was when he went out to Vietnam in 1967 . . .
‘I was all of twenty in 1967, younger than you are now.’
Dennis Powers was born in 1947. When I met him in April of 1981 he was thirty-four years old. The fact that he carried so many more years scared me. It looked like three or four lives had been jammed handful-over-handful into his skin.
‘I can tell you a little of what I’ve seen, but I don’t wanna tell you,’ he said. ‘You don’t wanna hear about the things I have seen,
believe me.’
I looked up, raised an eyebrow.
Dennis smiled. ‘Now you’re gonna tell me that you do wanna
hear some stories, right? You wanna hear about all the horrors I have witnessed, and that will help put everything in perspective. You’re gonna tell me that, aren’t you?’
He didn’t give me time to respond.
‘Not gonna tell you that shit,’ he said, ‘but I will tell you one
thing. What I’ve seen out there—’ He nodded his head toward the perimeter of the Langley facility as if everything beyond belonged to some strange and faraway world.
‘Out
there is fucking madness, ’ he said quietly. He was relaying universal truths, passing
them on generation to generation.
‘Out
there you have the beginning of a world you wouldn’t even wanna be part of. World that’s coming is not something that you’d ever want to bring children into. People don’t give a fuck about the planet. They don’t give a fuck about anything but money and sex and drugs and more money and more sex. People need to wake the fuck up, you know? But with TV, and whatever the hell else they can get to keep their minds shut down, they ain’t never gonna open their eyes and see what the hell is going on around them. You understand what I’m saying?’

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