A Simple Act of Violence (49 page)

‘Numbness?’

Robey smiled knowingly. ‘This stuff doesn’t touch my life. This sort of thing doesn’t even reach me. Numbness. The incomparable ability we all possess to pretend that such things only ever happen to others, and they more than likely deserve it. We are extraordinarily capable of convincing ourselves that it happens over there, and as long as we don’t look over there then we won’t have to deal with it.’

‘I deal with it.’

Robey nodded. ‘As do I.’

‘In what way do you deal with such things?’ Miller asked.

‘I possess an inquisitive nature, Detective Miller. You come to me and ask of my whereabouts. You imply that I know something. You mention the names of women I do not know, and then you walk away. I am not going to leave it be. I want to know what you think; why you would consider that I could be capable of something like this. I want to understand what it is about me that gives you such an idea. I am inquisitive. I look. I listen. I try to understand.’

‘And from what you’ve heard, what you’ve read in the newspapers, what is your impression of what I am dealing with here?’

‘You are dealing with a nightmare.’

Miller laughed suddenly, unexpectedly, an inexplicable reaction. It was just a simple statement of opinion, stated so emphatically, with such certainty, and voicing a thought Miller himself had had so many times, that he reacted.

Robey inhaled slowly, exhaled again. ‘If I were you?’

‘Yes professor, what would you do if you were me?’

Robey leaned back and crossed his legs. He tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling for quite some time. When he returned his gaze to Miller there was something almost sympathetic in his expression. ‘I would find the common denominator, detective.’

‘Between?’

‘The women.’

‘The common denominator.’

‘Yes indeed. Five dead women. All of them apparently murdered by the same man. They all live in Washington. Right now that’s all that seems to exist as a common thread. A serial killer is killing women who live in Washington, but there must be something else. I know I must be stating the obvious. I can imagine that more time has been spent trying to identify the common thread—’

Miller cut across. ‘You want to know what the only thread is? The only thread is you. You say that you didn’t know Catherine Sheridan, and yet Natasha Joyce saw your picture and confirmed that you went down to the projects a few years ago looking for a man named Darryl King. I could take you over to see Natasha Joyce, but hell, oh shit, she just happens to have gotten herself murdered too.’

‘He strangles these women, correct?’ Robey asked.

‘Yes.’

‘No weapon,’ Robey said.

‘That’s right, no weapon.’

‘The closer you get the more professional you have to be.’

Miller frowned.

‘Killing people. You start with a rifle. You graduate to a handgun, then a knife, then strangulation. The better you are the closer you can get.’

Miller frowned. ‘This is something you know because-?’

Robey laughed. ‘Because I watch Luc Besson films, no other reason than that.’ He shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand why you’re here, Detective Miller. I appreciate that you think you have something . . .’

‘I have a picture of you with Catherine Sheridan. I have three pictures of you with this woman, and on the back of one of them is written “Christmas ’82”. Does that mean anything to you?’

Robey was silent for a time, and then he looked up and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it means nothing of any significance to me.’

‘Where were you in Christmas of 1982?’

‘God, that’s what? Twenty-four years ago?’

‘Right,’ Miller said. ‘Twenty-four years ago . . . where were you then?’

‘Let me think . . . ’82, ’82 . . . I was still in New York around Christmas of ’82. I took a temporary job in New York in the summer of ’81, and then it became something more than temporary, and I ended up staying there until the summer of ’83.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Same thing I’m doing now. I was much younger.’ Robey laughed. ‘It seems like a different life.’

‘You were teaching?’

‘Yes, teaching, lecturing. Lecturer’s assistant was the job title, but the lecturer was sick much of the time so I ended up taking most of the classes myself.’ Robey smiled nostalgically. ‘It was a good time in my life. I enjoyed New York, not enough to want to live there, but it was good. I met some good people there, people that helped me find myself so to speak.’

‘And you left in the summer of ’83?’

‘I did, yes . . . what is this? This is becoming something of an interrogation.’

‘Hardly an interrogation, professor.’

‘So I was in New York when this photograph was taken. Perhaps the picture was taken without my being aware of it. Perhaps this woman was a student there, a fellow teacher. God, I don’t know. Like I said before, there could be a hundred reasons for someone winding up in a picture and not remembering it, not even being aware of it.’

Miller nodded. ‘You’re right, professor. I’m not questioning such a possibility. The thing I’m questioning is that it could have happened three times.’

Robey didn’t respond.

‘And the fact that I took those pictures down to this woman’s house, this Natasha Joyce, and she didn’t hesitate for a second in identifying you as the man that came down to the projects with Catherine Sheridan. She looked at your face and she said, “That’s him. That’s the man”, and there wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind about who you were.’

‘That is something I can’t explain,’ Robey said matter-of-factly.

‘Nor me, professor. I simply cannot explain how she could have been so certain. There was no maybe in it. And she was not a stupid woman. She was very quick indeed.’

‘It seems these killings are becoming more frequent,’ Robey said. ‘Unfortunately, I believe that we are responsible for creating these things.’

Miller frowned.

‘The French have an expression. Monstre sacré. It means, literally, the sacred monster. It refers to something created that the creator wishes he had not.’

‘Your book,’ Miller said.

Robey waved his hand dismissively as if mention of his book was unimportant. ‘We have anesthetized ourselves, detective. We have anesthetized our sensibilities to such things. It becomes the norm to expect such atrocities on an almost daily basis. Of course, an element of it is generated by the free press, to give them their chosen title. They are free to exclude the good and promote the bad. They tell us exactly what they want us to hear, and I’m not talking about a single case, detective. I’m talking about confusing and misdirecting an entire nation, even the population of the planet itself.’

‘I don’t know that I’m that cynical or suspicious, professor. ’

‘Is that so, detective? You think you’re not affected by these things?’

‘I’m not saying that I’m not affected by these things, but—’

‘But what? Tell me how much of the difficulty you run into in your day-to-day work is influenced by drugs - like this Natasha Joyce woman. You say she had a boyfriend, the father of the little girl? He was into drugs?’

Miller nodded.

‘That’s what I’m talking about. How much of your day-to-day work is directly or indirectly connected to the illicit drug trade here in Washington?’

‘A lot,’ Miller said.

‘How much? Ten, twenty, thirty percent?’

‘More than that. I’d say, God I don’t know . . . maybe fifty, sixty percent.’

‘Fifty, sixty percent. And the bulk of that is what? Cocaine?’

Miller nodded. ‘Sure. Cocaine. Crack cocaine predominantly. ’

Robey’s eyes lit up. ‘Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Crack cocaine. The crack cocaine epidemic which has ravaged Washington, Baltimore, L.A., New York, Miami, right? This is a big deal, yes? This is something that has directly affected the lives of millions of Americans, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘No question about it.’

For the first time Robey seemed actually alive. His eyes were animated, his hand gestures emphatic. ‘So who created the monster?’ he asked. ‘Who created the crack cocaine epidemic that is now a monster in our midst?’

Miller shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Most of it comes from Colombia, South America . . . the drug cartels out there. They bring it in and—’

Robey was shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘We created it ourselves.’

‘We created it? I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘We created it. We did. We Americans. The taxpayers, the homeowners, the people with jobs and mortgages, the ones with bank accounts and private schools for their kids. The ones who read the newspapers and watch TV. We created the crack epidemic.’

Miller was beginning to feel agitated. He didn’t get what Robey was talking about.

‘You know where the vast majority of cocaine came from in the ’80s? The cocaine that kick-started the crack cocaine business?’

Miller shook his head.

‘Nicaragua.’

Miller flinched noticeably.

Robey looked at him. ‘What?’

‘Nicaragua?’ Miller asked.

‘Sure, Nicaragua. You seem very surprised.’

‘No, it’s just that . . . it’s just a coincidence, that’s all. I was reading something about Nicaragua the other day.’

‘The fact that Daniel Ortega has surfaced once more? Now that’s a coincidence if ever there was one.’

‘How so?’

‘Bush is struggling. He loses the mid-terms. He puts Rumsfeld out to pasture, and who do they bring in but Robert M. Gates. You know who he was?’

‘Can’t say I do.’

‘Bush Senior’s CIA director. He held the position of deputy director for central intelligence under William Casey in the Iran-Contra affair, and now we go full circle back to Nicaragua. Ortega has gotten himself voted back in, the Sandinistas are in power once more, and we are still blissfully unaware of what happened out there, and how we - in our ignorance and fear - allowed them to do what they did.’

‘Allowed who to do what?’

‘The select few. The government. Those responsible for the welfare and care of the American people. The Nicaraguan war was supposed to be in the name of protecting the American people from a communist presence in our backyard. Was it, hell. They wanted the supply line all the way from South America kept free of interference. It was a fiasco from day one.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean. You’re telling me that the war in Nicaragua . . . the whole Oliver North thing, right? That war was started because the American government wanted to keep cocaine supply lines from South America uninterrupted?’

‘Amongst other things, yes. That was one of the main reasons. Not the only one, but the main one.’

‘I find that very hard to believe, professor.’

Robey smiled. ‘You know John Kerry, right? Ran against George W. Bush?’

‘Sure I know of him.’

‘Back in the Spring of ’86 there was a guy named John Mattes. He was a public defender from Miami. Kerry was a senator at the time, and Mattes started working with him on an investigation into the Contra drug connection. You know who the Contras were, right?’

‘The American-backed rebels . . . they were trying to take out the Sandinista government.’

‘Right. Well, Mattes said a very interesting thing. He said that what they investigated and uncovered was the very infrastructure of the CIA operations out there. He said the whole thing had a veil of national security protecting it. People were loading cannons in broad daylight, in public airports, on flights going to Ilopango airport, and then the very same people were bringing narcotics back into the U.S. unimpeded. John Kerry, running an office under the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, worked for two years and produced a report totalling eleven hundred and sixty-six pages. The three major news networks ignored it. Out of something in the region of half a million words, the stories that ran in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times totalled less than two thousand words.’

‘And this report? This report said that Americans were out in Nicaragua shipping cocaine back into the United States?’

Robey laughed. ‘You sound so shocked, Detective Miller. I find it difficult to believe that something such as this is even a surprise.’

‘A surprise? I can’t even begin to grasp what it means.’

Robey smiled resignedly. ‘This is nothing compared to what really happened out there. United States officials involved in Central America could not even look at the drug issue. Anything that could jeopardize the war effort in Nicaragua had to be curtailed. America’s senior policy makers knew that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems. There was another guy, a man named Jack Blum. He was former chief counsel to Kerry’s subcommittee. You want to know what he said before the 1996 Senate hearings?’ Robey didn’t wait for Miller to reply. He got up, crossed the room, and from a drawer in the desk near the window he took a sheaf of papers and started leafing through them.

‘Here,’ he said, and sat down again. ‘Jack Blum, 1996 Senate Hearings for the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, quote: “We don’t need to investigate the CIA’s role in Contra drug trafficking. We already know. The evidence is there. Criminal organizations are perfect allies in covert operations. The two go together like love and marriage. The problem is that they then get empowered by the fact that they work with us. There was a judgement call here. We looked the other way. That judgement call erred so far on the wrong side of where judgement should have been that we wound up with a terrible problem.” ’

Robey looked up and smiled at Miller. ‘That’s what he said before the Senate. And you know what they did?’

‘Nothing?’

‘Precisely, detective.’