A Simple Act of Violence (66 page)

And then Miller thought of Carl Oliver. Thought of his body there on the walkway outside Robey’s apartment. Someone had been inside, someone had opened up that door and shot Oliver right where he stood.

And there had been no autopsy or forensics reports issued on the Natasha Joyce killing.

And there was no thread, and nothing that made any goddamned sense at all . . .

Miller leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe deep and slow.

He was exhausted, a fatigue so bone-deep he could barely feel his body any more, but these questions would prevent him feeling anything at all but the tension and paranoia of all that he did not understand. He just needed one thing to follow, one thing that would open another door beyond all those that had been closed . . .

In the early hours of the morning he fell asleep fully clothed. Exhaustion swallowed him wholesale, and he did not wake until the early afternoon. By the time he had showered and dressed it was close to four, and for no other reason than to breathe fresh air, to see something other than case files and computer screens, he took a walk from his apartment. He stopped at a restaurant beyond Logan Circle, ate more than he had in the previous forty-eight hours, and realized that somewhere he had to find a balance. If he continued in this manner he would not make it.

He walked home, let himself in the back way, tried to watch some TV, but his mind was elsewhere.

A little after eight it came to him.

Follow the money.

Catherine Sheridan had received money at the end of each month from . . . from where?

Miller got up and started pacing back and forth between the door and the window. He tried to recall when he’d seen the statements. He tried to picture himself standing in the room with Al Roth, leafing through those pages, one after the other after the other . . .

Miller thought to call him, glanced at his watch, decided against it.

He went through to the kitchen and made coffee. He stood there, concentrating, trying to see nothing but the minutes when he’d had those pages in his hands.

It was like the McCullough account. Not the account, but the bank. Washington American Trust. There was something that connected them. Washington? Trust?

Miller suddenly got it. Trust . . . United Trust. Those payments had originated from some entity that called itself United Trust. They had never pursued it. He shook his head, cursed himself. There were so many things they hadn’t pursued, but they’d had so little time, and so much had happened . . .

He sat down at the kitchen table. He took an unopened envelope, some piece of junk mail, and scribbled ‘United Trust’ across the back of it. He went to the internet, ran a search for any such company. There was nothing within the Washington city limits. He checked nationally, found a good dozen companies with ‘United Trust’ somewhere in their corporate name. The closest was Boston. There hadn’t been anything in Catherine Sheridan’s house to suggest some line of work - a remote salesperson, an out-of-state representative of some financial institution. Once again, it was the reality defying the appearance. Fact still remained that she’d been receiving an income from some outfit bearing the name United Trust. These things went both ways. If he couldn’t find the company directly, he would have to go at it from a different direction. The money she’d received had arrived into an account. Miller had seen the statements in her house. Now it was a matter of remembering the name of the bank that Sheridan had used.

Maybe he could do something, but to do it he had to remember the name of the bank.

Miller smiled when he thought of who would know. John Robey would know. More than likely he knew everything there was to know about Catherine Sheridan. Would Roth remember it? There was no way of telling. There were lines drawn in sand, and Roth would not be willing to cross them. Not because he was afraid, but because he was attuned to his family, a concern for their welfare, the fundamental necessities of survival for which he was responsible.

Miller went back to the internet. There were dozens of banks in the city. Washington Finance, American Union, Corporate Loan & Savings, East Coast Mercantile, Capital, Merchant & Legal - page after page, the names blurring one into the other until Miller couldn’t see properly. He leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment. Once more he tried to picture the pages that he held in his hand. He could see a blue and green logo, of this he was sure. A blue and green logo, almost a square, perhaps an oval? He ran the images option, and then typed in ‘Washington banks’.

Bottom of the second page he found it. A blue and green logo, an oblong design with rounded corners. He clicked on the image, waited a moment, and the site came up. First Capital Bank. This was it. This was definitely the logo he remembered in the left-hand corner of Catherine Sheridan’s statements. Payments from United Trust into the First Capital Bank in the name of Catherine Sheridan.

There was a direction to take. There was something he could do.

Miller took a note of the bank’s address. Vermont Avenue, the same as the Washington American Trust where the McCullough account was held.

His feelings of anxiety had increased. He was scared, no doubt about it, but how else should he feel? There was no other appropriate emotion for such a situation. He was planning on doing something that he knew he absolutely should not do. Despite every rational thought he possessed screaming at him to let it go, he could not.

Monday morning he would go see Nanci Cohen. He would ask her for something without directly asking, and then he would visit the First Capital Bank on Vermont Avenue and see what he could learn.

Miller drew the drapes a handful of inches. He looked through the gap into the late night of Washington. The streetlights, the sound of traffic somewhere on the highway, the sense that everything was out there waiting for morning.

The sense of being watched was suddenly overwhelming. He pulled the drapes together and stepped back. His heart missed a beat. He felt his knees begin to give, and he turned and walked back to the chair by the door.

He looked down at his hands. They were shaking.

He’d never felt like this before. Invaded. Possessed by something. Driven to find something out that he had been instructed to leave alone.

He wondered whether Robey had chosen him all along, and if so . . . if so, for what possible reason?

Catherine Sheridan’s death had been reported like any other murder. How could Robey have known that he would get the call-out?

Miller tried to convince himself that Robey could not have known. Robey could not have been that much in control, surely . . .

And then Miller tried to stop thinking. He lay down on the bed. He wanted to sleep but could not. He had slept into the early afternoon, and now felt nothing but agitation and restlessness. He put on the TV again, surfed until he found something that caught his attention, lost interest, surfed again, and on it went until he could bear it no longer. Close to midnight he took a drive, listening to the radio, trying to focus on nothing but the road ahead of him.

Back at the apartment by two, he showered again, lay on his bed again. He knew he would not sleep, and it took all his patience to wait until daylight broke through the curtains and told him that Monday had arrived.

When Miller finally went downstairs to the deli there must have been something in his expression, for Harriet took one look at him and nodded understandingly. She did not press him to eat breakfast. She made him fresh coffee, set the cup before him at the table in the back, and then went through to help her husband in the front.

Miller drank his coffee. He looked back at Harriet as he closed the street door behind him. She did not speak, and Miller himself said nothing.

Perhaps she, of all people, understood more of what he was doing than anyone.

Miller called Roth a little before nine, told him he was going to take a drive somewhere, perhaps down to Hampton to look at the Atlantic.

‘You okay?’ Roth asked.

‘As can be.’

‘You wanna come over watch some football later?’

‘No,’ Miller replied. ‘I wanna spend some time outside. Get some air. This thing is bullshit. I just want to get away for a few hours.’

‘Call me if you need anything,’ Roth said.

‘It’s okay. Say hi to everyone for me.’

‘Come over later, say hi yourself.’

‘I might do that.’

Miller hung up, pulled away from the back of the Second Precinct and drove west toward Nanci Cohen’s offices.

 

The Assistant District Attorney smiled a lot for someone in her position.

She had one of her people go out and get coffee. She insisted Miller try some kind of macchiato thing. It had a caramel under-taste that he found nauseating.

Nanci Cohen was the kind of woman that Harriet Shamir would recognize. She put herself right up front, right there ahead of everything, and there was no ignoring her.

‘You can’t,’ was Nanci Cohen’s response. It was an uncomplicated and unconditional response, and there was something about her directness that made Miller smile.

‘What? You think I’m joking?’ she asked.

‘No, I don’t think you’re joking.’

‘So what are you telling me then? You smile like this is some kind of comedy scene. You don’t have a case, detective. You don’t have a case. There is nothing. It is all gone. Someone who has an awful lot bigger balls than Lassiter, even the Chief, has sent his thugs down to take all your shit away. There is nothing left, Detective Miller. Like I say, you have no case. You can’t do anything.’

‘So what? I just let the thing drop—’

‘This is the only murder we have in Washington? Of course you let it drop. In fact, you don’t even have a question here. The thing has been taken off of you . . . the whole goddam thing. These people have the authority to do anything the hell they want. They’ve taken the case, they pulled the APB on your guy—’

Miller looked up suddenly. ‘They did what?’

‘Your guy, Robey . . . they pulled the APB.’

‘Why? What the hell would they do that for?’

‘He killed a police officer, Detective Miller. John Robey killed a police officer who was in the line of duty. This becomes an entirely different kind of thing now. You know the story on these things. People don’t kill family, right?’

‘There’s no evidence that it was Robey.’

Nanci Cohen smiled knowingly. ‘Don’t be so naïve, detective. Whether he shot Detective Oliver or not is beside the point. This man is a danger to the public, also to the police. He is . . . hell, you know how this goes better than anyone. The dangerous ones they tell the public about. They stick their faces in the papers and on the tube. The really dangerous ones we never hear a word about. Don’t matter if they catch them or not, ’cause no-one’s any the wiser.’

‘So my hands are tied,’ Miller said in a flat tone.

‘More like they cut your hands off completely. Hell, take a couple of days vacation. You earned it. I saw how you guys worked that thing, but those are the breaks, right?’

Miller, hiding everything he was feeling, trying to control the anger, the frustration, trying to show nothing more than philosophical resignation, rose to his feet and smile at ADA Cohen.

‘It’s a mess, eh?’ he said. ‘It really is a fucking mess.’

‘Be grateful it isn’t your mess any more, detective.’

Cohen rose also, walked him to the door. ‘So what’re you gonna do?’

‘Take a drive down to Hampton, look at the sea.’

‘Good for you,’ she said.

She had one of her people show Miller out.

Miller stopped at a deli and bought a 7-Up to settle his stomach. He drove north west to Greg Reid’s forensics laboratory, had to wait half an hour for Reid to appear, and then asked him for a copy of Catherine Sheridan’s death certificate.

Reid seemed unsurprised by the request. He showed Miller through to the admin station, took a seat at one of the computers, typed his request, and within a moment a printer spat out a copy.

Reid walked Miller to the outer doors. There was a moment of awkward silence between them before Miller thanked him once more.

‘Good luck,’ Reid said.

Miller smiled resignedly. ‘That is a rare commodity on this one, believe me.’

He walked away, around the side of the building and back to the car.

By the time he reached Vermont Avenue it was ten-thirty.

Standing in the foyer of the First Capital Bank, Miller realized how quickly the initial investigation into Catherine Sheridan’s murder had moved. This was something they had never done. They had never traced back the money she’d been receiving each month. It should have been such a simple and fundamental thing, but somehow - in amidst everything that had occurred - there were so many small details overlooked. Afterwards it always seemed straightforward, uncomplicated - he should have done this or that, he should have pursued such-and-such - but it was impossible to see the outside of something from within.

Miller remembered what Harriet had said: The best kept secrets are the ones that everybody can see.

Catherine Sheridan’s life, the lives of Margaret Mosley, Barbara Lee, Ann Rayner - even John Robey - all the names in the books that Catherine Sheridan had so patiently and meticulously annotated for his revelation . . . these people had lives that were something other than first presented. They were ghosts, each and every one of them, and behind the face they wore for the world was an entirely different reality, an entirely different explanation for their deaths. These were not accidents, not the result of foolish misadventure. Miller felt sure that the hit-and-runs, the drug overdoses, the heart attacks, even these most recent killings attributed to some specter that the newspapers had dubbed The Ribbon Killer, were in fact nothing other than executions. Lives had been terminated for a reason. By Robey? Had Robey killed all of these people, and if so why? And if not Robey, then who? The identity of the man in the trunk of the car, the ribbons in the glove box, those in his hand . . .