Bone Thief (17 page)

The electronically amplified voice of Detective Vince Viallo still echoed in Margaret's ear. He had reached her on her cruiser's car phone to inform her that a bartender at The Lobster Trap had ID'd the photo of the Benjamin woman. She had come in to the restaurant alone, ordered a drink, and left alone. Disgruntled, Margaret pulled the Plymouth to the curb in front of the One Stop Pharmacy and got out. She made her way into the drugstore, a vast space flooded with white fluorescent lights. Approaching the store's counter, she spotted the store's proprietor, Gerard McCabe, who was offering a selection of condoms to a perplexed teen.

“So, what'll it be? Ribbed? Lubricated? Or do you want the ones with the little catchall pouch at the end?” McCabe asked.

“I just want…uhh…uhh…” the disoriented youth stuttered.

“Look kid, you're nowhere near a decision. Do me a favor. Come back and see me after you've started to shave.”

The youth scrambled toward the exit and vanished as McCabe turned his attention to Margaret.

“They're gettin' younger and younger every year,” he sighed. “Tell me you're the bearer of good news on the investigation.”

She wished she was. She knew it would be of some comfort to this grieving husband. But the investigation, thus far, had produced more questions than answers. And here she was, about to ask another one.

“This may seem like an odd question, Mr. McCabe, but where did you and your wife go on your first date?”

“You're right. That is an odd question. But our first date was no secret. We had dinner in New York City and visited the Empire State Building.”

“You and your wife ever go to Prospect Park?”

“No, not together. Why do you ask?”

“We're working on a theory.”

“Does it have something to do with why you found her body in the park?”

“In part.”

“Well, we were never there together, that's for sure. Listen, my mother-in-law dropped off a box of my wife's stuff. From when she was a kid. She thought I should have it. I'm not ready to open it, though. Maybe you'd like to go through it?”

Margaret nodded.

McCabe sauntered into the storage room and returned with a cardboard box. He handed it to Margaret.

“Maybe it'll help,” he said.

The box was crammed with memories of a young girl's adolescence. Class pictures, two teddy bears, several folded sheets of looseleaf containing handwritten notes between best friends, a pair of soccer trophies, her high-school ring. Margaret picked up an embossed notebook and leafed through it.

It's about her first love,
she noted, excited by her find. A Caribbean man…parents didn't approve…had to hide their love away. Look at this, she wrote a poem:

I'll bet my next promotion that love nest is the Swan Boat House in Prospect Park
, Margaret thought. She grabbed her mobile phone and dialed Driscoll's cellular number.

“Driscoll here.”

“Any luck finding Moira?” she asked.

“None. I've been sitting on the Tiernan house all morning. The place was empty until Mrs. Tiernan came home with her groceries. I told her I was trying to reach her daughter and I think I managed to keep my anxiety in check. She told me Moira doesn't have any close friends. She's likely to be alone. Just her and her goddamn satellite computer off somewhere in cyberspace. She could be anywhere. I alerted the local precinct. Cedric is informing the Task Force, and every other precinct in a twenty-five-mile radius. She has me very worried.”

“I can hear it in your voice.”

“My Nicole had her moments. But this kid is something else.”

“She must open old wounds. I'm very sorry.”

“Thank you. So what did your visit with McCabe produce?”

Margaret told him of her discovery.

“The whiz kid strikes again. She was right about the Benjamin woman, and that poem makes her right about Deirdre McCabe. Margaret, I want you to get back to that body piercer on Houston. See if he further corroborates Moira's theory about the drop sites. I want to know if he has any idea why Monique Beauford's body was found nailed to a boardwalk in Rockaway Beach.”

Margaret pried open the aluminum door to Lester Gallows's trailer.

“Oh Jeez! You're back?” said Gallows, as Margaret marched herself into his emporium.

“I wanna hear it again,” she said.

“You're like a fly on shit.”

“Let's hear it. Tell me about the last time you saw Monique.”

“What's to tell?”

“You got it on with her. Right?”

“I already told you that.”

“What else can you tell me about her?”

“The bitch was kinky.”

“What's kinky?”

“Her pussy was laced with silicone.”

“Implants?”

“No. Beach sand. The slut pulls out this pouch. I figure she's goin' for a condom. Instead she pours out a handful of sand. She rubbed it in before we screwed. It was like fucking sandpaper. My cock was in heaven!”

“She tell you why she got off on sand?”

“Told me the first time she got laid was under the boardwalk.”

Margaret grabbed her cell phone and quickly relayed the information to Driscoll.

“That's another special drop site,” Driscoll's voice reverberated in Margaret's ear. “We've got the boathouse in Prospect Park, the water under the Brooklyn Bridge, and now the boardwalk. Moira's batting a thousand.”

Driscoll was mindful of what Moira had said in her last communication: that she worked better under open skies. But it had begun to rain. And on rainy days, Mrs. Tiernan had told Driscoll, Moira liked to frequent any one of a half-dozen coffee shops in the area surrounding her home. There, she could sit uninterrupted for hours, while she pounded away on her laptop.

Over the last two hours Driscoll had personally visited all of the neighborhood's coffee shops but had failed to find Moira, and none of the shop's employees remembered seeing a young girl that fit Moira's description. He left his card with each store manager in case the girl stopped in. Seated behind the wheel of his idling automobile, he watched the rain collect on the Chevy's windshield. He grabbed his cell phone and placed yet another call to the Tiernan household. When Seamus Tiernan's answering machine kicked in, he disconnected the call. Disheartened, he returned to his office, where he discovered he had e-mail. Pulling up a chair, he focused his eyes on the computer's amber screen and grew sick with worry as he read the following volley of electronic communications:

Behind the Statue of Liberty, the setting sun was gilding the sky, igniting a conflagration of primary colors that painted the Manhattan skyline in scarlet and gold. But this vista was lost on the solitary figure seated on a wooden bench on the upper deck of the South Street Seaport, staring at the screen of his Lynksys wireless-powered laptop.

“Do you bury them like feral dogs?”

The words loomed on the screen, taunting him. Never had an insult cut so deep. Colm slammed closed the laptop, flung the computer into the water that bordered the Seaport, and marched toward the parking lot where he had left the van.

Her last message had dismantled him. He felt like tracked prey. He thought about his pursuer, this woman who had navigated the Internet in search of his bait. The fact that she had found it infuriated him, for her intrusion had now made it necessary for him to find another lure.

He stopped. A smile slowly emerged on his face.
He
had not been found. She had only found Godsend, who was now resting thirty feet below the surface of the East River. His only inconvenience would be having to find some other way to select and attract future collectibles. The realization consoled him, but when he finally reached home, he was tired and listless. Inside the house, he collapsed on the living-room sofa, where he soon began obsessing over the loss of his last quarry. The pleasure of the Benjamin woman had not alleviated the pain of losing the young girl at the mall.

There was solace under the house. With his trophies, he would find consolation. He made his way down to the cellar. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he heard his mother's voice. “The young honey got away from you at the mall, didn't she? And now ya got another filly onto ya. A computer-literate filly, no less. You cyberghoul, you! Can't you do anything right?”

“Whatcha gonna do now?” nagged his father.

“You've made a mess of it for sure,” his mother scolded. “The police'll be all over you soon.”

“And I'll find a way to be all over them!” he screamed. “Now, shut up, both of you!”

The cellar became silent again. He eyed his parents' skeletal jaws for any sign of movement. They didn't budge.

After dismissing a young patient who had been nearly paralyzed as a result of a motor-vehicle accident, Doctor Colm Pierce picked up the next case from a pile of folders on his desk. It was that of a gerontological patient, an eighty-eight-year-old woman with an injured coccyx. Pierce felt sorry for the poor soul. She was without family and relied heavily on her city-appointed caretaker. What brought a smile to the woman's face was that Pierce insisted he would personally escort her from the waiting room to his office every time she came in to see him.

Cheerfully, he stepped outside and walked down the narrow corridor. The hospital's loud speaker crackled. “Trauma team, report to Pediatric ICU, Stat!” There was a shuffle of feet. A member of the trauma team rushed past him, heading for the bay of elevators. It was Doctor Stephen Astin.

“Steve, we gotta talk,” Pierce called out.

“Not now, Colm. I'm on my way to a Code Blue.” Astin stepped inside the elevator and hit the sixth-floor button.

Just as the elevator's doors were closing, Pierce slipped inside. “Need I remind you you're into me for nineteen grand?” he said to Astin.

“Like you'd let me forget.”

“Your third installment was due a month ago, so why haven't you answered my e-mail?”

“Night Rider is running tomorrow night at Belmont. He's got five grand of our cash running with him. It's a sure thing. Money in the bank.”

“That's what you said the last time.”

“C'mon, kid, you don't need the money. Why ya houndin' me?”

“Whether I need the money or not is none of your fucking business. It was a loan. Not a grant.”

“Don't hand me that shit.”

“What shit? I did it to help you.”

“No, you didn't. You did it to see me strung out. It gives you a charge. Admit it.”

The doors of the elevator opened, ushering the two angry men into the pediatric intensive care unit, where they were greeted by Doctor George Galina and Susan Dupree, the ICU nurse.

“It's the Parsons girl,” Nurse Dupree announced. “It's the damndest thing. She wakes up screaming her head off. You'd think those punctured lungs were down for the count, but no.”

“Wha'd she say?” asked Astin.

“I couldn't understand a thing.”

The trauma team geared into action, and within seconds, Clarissa's body was punctured, injected, and palpated, sending each of her monitoring units into an electronic frenzy.

“She's flatlining!” Doctor Galina hollered.

Astin grabbed hold of two electric defibrillator paddles. “Clear!” he shouted, electrocuting the girl's heart after Susan Dupree lay bare the girl's chest.

Clarissa's body jerked, and her chest muscles tightened as waves of electricity riddled her nervous system. Tendons contracted and released. The heart convulsed, fluttered, and finally kicked in, forcing blood to vital arteries.

“Set up a drip of dopamine HC1 and titrate. Stat!” Galina ordered. “A push of epinephrine. Now!”

The needle entered the ravine between Clarissa's breasts, punctured her cardiac muscles, and delivered the stimulant, making the heart beat faster. As freshly oxygenated blood rushed to Clarissa's brain, it slowly recovered from its torpor. Her eyelids quivered, then opened. Her ears intercepted muffled sounds.

What was happening to her? Who were these masked men? She felt like carrion being plucked by ravenous beaks. Tears flooded her eyes, fogging her field of vision.

Suddenly, the face of the man who molested her came rocketing into sight. With it came the memory of his lecherous pursuit. The uninvited images filled the girl with dread, stirring a feeling of horror. Her fright quickly exploded into panic, propelling her into a full-blown cardiac arrest.

“She's leaving us!” Galina hollered.

“Clear!” barked Astin, grabbing the defibrillator paddles again and jabbing them brusquely against the girl's chest.

Two hundred joules coursed through Clarissa, jolting her small frame. Inert, her body endured another discharge of electrocution, and another, and another.

“My God, we've lost her,” Doctor Astin sighed.

“What the hell went wrong?” Pierce protested, praying she didn't miraculously regain consciousness.

“Sometimes God has other plans.”

“Not while I'm around.” Pierce picked up the defibrillator paddles and, like a cymbalist clanging his brass instruments, he pummeled the girl's chest again and again.

Clarissa's body quaked under the assaults, only to return to the listlessness of death.

“Doctor, she's dead!” Nurse Dupree screamed.

“Have you lost all faith?” Pierce bellowed, about to go in for yet another assault. But Doctor Astin grabbed hold of his arms.

“Enough!”

With a feigned look of defeat filling his face, Pierce dropped both hands and stared down at the girl's inert frame.

“Kids these days. Some of them just don't want to be saved.”