Habit (33 page)

He was hit in the chest and in the shoulder. He felt one of his fingers taken by a bullet – the appendage literally exploded beside his head.

In that moment, a strange thing happened. As he registered the injuries to his body, and as the State Troopers coming into the room glowered behind their smoking service weapons, he found himself thinking of a professor of his own, from years ago as an undergraduate student. He couldn’t recall which course it had been, but the teacher had once said that the answer to ninety-nine out of a hundred questions could be found by “following the dollar.” Everything came down to money, the professor had warned. The market system drove all inequality, which led to nearly every crime there was a name for. Money, it seemed, was the mother of all habits. No matter the pain it caused – war, poverty, greed – it remained fixed in civilization; the great and unconquerable addiction.

His legs were giving out beneath him. He saw his wife and daughter getting into the car, and he saw himself retreating into the restaurant bar, disappearing into the gloom.

The troopers were shouting about the baby. But while that was happening, Reginald Forrester was trying to get away. He was still firing into the oncoming policemen. Brendan had time to see one of them take a bullet in the stomach before Forrester was taken down by two other troopers, who tackled the killer to the ground. Another scooped up the baby a second later. She appeared unharmed.

Brendan swayed on his feet. His arms were stretched out either side of him, still forming a sort of human barricade, or shield. His left hand was a bloody mess, dripping quarter-sized drops on the smooth court floor.

His knees finally buckled. The wounds in his chest and shoulder were coming to life. That was how it felt. For a few seconds there had been nothing, and now they seemed to grow, like mouths. Howling, burning mouths in his body, releasing their liquid. His vision swam once more as he dropped.

He felt an arm around him and for a moment thought a State Trooper had him. But then he realized that no one did. One Trooper was slumped in the doorway. Another had gone around the detective and was pulling Alexander Heilshorn away from the scene. Two others were subduing Forrester, yanking his gun from his waistband, prying the other from his grip, and handcuffing him. A fifth Trooper was tending to the child.

The baby was squalling. Its cries filled the room.

Brendan turned to look up in time to see Heilshorn being led away. The old man looked back at Brendan, and Brendan thought he saw pain in his eyes. And fear.

Then a silken blanket of unconsciousness slipped over the detective, and all was dark.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE / MONDAY, Time Unknown

He was in an ambulance. A moment later, he was in a hospital. He was being rushed down a hallway. He lost consciousness again.

* * *

Rudy Colinas was there. Colinas was explaining that he had given the troopers and Albany City Police a description of the red pick-up truck used in the attempt to murder Brendan, and Healy’s last known location. Since he had turned his phone on, they were also able to locate the detective, but the truck had been spotted before they’d even needed to use GPS to triangulate his position. It was registered to Jerry Brown.

Brendan tried to talk. His lips felt gummy and numb. The expression on Colinas’s face was not good. He said a doctor described one bullet wound as having severed the subclavian artery. Brendan needed a blood transfusion. Colinas was already removing his jacket and rolling up his sleeve.

* * *

The transfusion worked, but there were other complications. Brendan swam back into consciousness again. He had been with his wife and baby girl. It was hard to leave them behind. He wanted to go back.

A woman stood over him with AED paddles in her hand, having just shocked Brendan back to life.

He didn’t see himself, not like in those pulp stories and quasi-documentaries about out-of-body experiences in times of mortal trauma. He knew what the brain did in situations like this. He understood how the synapses were firing like a wild west shoot-out in his grey matter, and that random thoughts and memories were stimulated. Like things he’d seen over the past few days. A stretch of road. The woman at the vegetable stand. The glimpse of someone in the room on Forrester’s video – the one who then held the camera. The open dresser drawers at Rebecca Heilshorn’s murder scene. Olivia Jane’s locked office door.

For a brief moment, Brendan thought that Delaney was standing over him. The vision – if it was that – triggered another gush of recall. Brendan found himself remembering back as far as the first morning at the Bloomingdale house. He saw Kevin Heilshorn spilling his bike in the dirt driveway. He saw Kevin wrestling with the deputies, trying to get inside to see his dead sister.

And he saw Kevin lying in the garden behind Olivia Jane’s house. The blood spatter around his head; the crimson dapples on the summer squash.

Hadn’t it been Delaney who had suggested Olivia Jane as the grief counselor? Certainly it was Delaney who had been hot to pin Rebecca’s murder on her brother, Kevin. Delaney who assumed, as did much of the department, that Kevin had come after Brendan and Olivia because he was afraid the therapist would reveal his guilt.

Yet Olivia was so ethical. She wouldn’t speak about what had transpired between her and Kevin. She was a vault, locked up like her home office. She wouldn’t treat Brendan either, though she clearly wanted to know what he was thinking, what he was feeling. As a friend, she’d said. She was highly ethical.

Except, perhaps, for her duplicity regarding her treatment of Rebecca Heilshorn.

These things spun through the detective’s mind like celestial events, gliding in and out of his semi-conscious mind. Thoughts and faces.

Seeing light was common in such circumstances, too, some part of him reflected. The light at the end of the tunnel, a frequent trope about coming close to the afterlife. Even his wife and daughter were nothing more than snapshots of his past, animated by his addled, oxygen-deprived mind.

But they were convincing. They stood and beckoned to him, and they were oh so convincing.

It felt warm where they were.

He began making his way toward them, in a world that resembled their neighborhood in Hawthorne, only at night, only on a much larger scale, so that his wife and daughter were tiny. So small, and they kept shrinking. He chased them. His wife waved. It was now hard to know if it was a beckoning wave or a gesture of goodbye.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR / THURSDAY, 12:22 PM

Colinas went to the evidence locker for the Heilshorn case and stood looking at the crumpled lump of burnt laptop. He looked at it for a long time, wondering what secrets it held. Correspondence between Rebecca and her family was evident on the laptop which had not been destroyed, plus emails between her and Kettering, reinforcing his statements about her. This other computer could have contained much more. Maybe threats coming from Forrester, maybe threats from others.

Forrester had enough common sense to know that cops could seize any device like a laptop or a phone or iPad and lift all kinds of information from the drives, and so he’d completely destroyed it. That was one thought. But, Forrester had held onto another device – the camera. It contained incriminating evidence that he was intimately involved with the murder victim. And that was to put it mildly.

Colinas stood looking at the small camera, and tried to imagine Brendan Healy sitting in a room with this psychopath, forced to watch what was on it. Colinas himself didn’t have the clearance to access it. Taber was keeping things under tight wraps until he knew which way IA’s sword was going to fall. Someone was going to pay, and already it didn’t look good for the Department, who had been cooperating with a man who was also deeply involved in the sordid mess.

Alexander Heilshorn was an enigma. He was currently being held in the County Jail on suspicion of kidnapping and obstruction of justice. Colinas believed that the victim’s father had had good intentions if it were true that he’d harbored prostitutes. But the State Detective also sensed a sinister undercurrent at work. The old man had withheld information to protect children, or so he claimed. It was hard to envision the charges sticking. But Heilshorn was afraid of something. With his daughter’s murderer captured, Heilshorn should have been enjoying some measure of relief. Only the wealthy doctor, robust and affable just five days ago, had seemed to wither and shrink.

Colinas felt a chill and left the evidence locker.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE / THURSDAY, 3:33 PM

Taber, Colinas, Senior Prosecutor Skene, and several consulting detectives stitched together the events they now believed had led up to the murder of the young Heilshorn woman.

The 911 transcript clearly indicated that the killer was male. The victim had referred to the killer as “he” several times. Plus, there were the boot prints in the dooryard and the mark found on the door to the victim’s bedroom – size eleven work boots, the kind a man wore on a construction site, typically. Hai Takai, the footprint analyst, matched the prints to the footwear of a recent arrestee.

They were Forrester’s.

Reginald Forrester had tried to set up an alibi for himself that he was at work when Rebecca Heilshorn was killed. But the contract to build the new Business School building had been stalled the day before her death. His alibi was not corroborated. It was so transparent that it felt to many of the men that it wasn’t even a serious attempt at a lie. It was as if Forrester didn’t care, or was toying with them.

He had been in the Oneida County Jail that morning, awaiting arraignment when he was found dead in his cell. The men’s pod at the jail had one isolation area, with suicide-watch and round the clock guards, and Forrester had been in it. A full blown investigation had been launched immediately.

Forrester was dead. An autopsy was scheduled for the afternoon, Stanley Clark to perform. The Deputy Corrections Officers on duty were being questioned.

“How did Healy get onto this Forrester guy?” Skene folded his arms and looked at Taber and the rest. “Because that’s going to come up, and you know it.”

Rudy Colinas stood in front of Prosecutor Skene and Sheriff Taber. “Because Healy is smart.”

Skene shot Colinas a look, and Rudy lowered his eyes in a humble gesture. Best not to get Skene all agitated. Their whole Sheriff’s Department was looking bad right now. Chaos was descending. Best to play the dutiful servant, just the messenger. The Sheriff listened silently, his arms folded.

“Healy met with Heilshorn, as you and Sheriff Taber know. Heilshorn is the one who told Healy about Forrester’s whereabouts. He actually warned him to stay away. Healy went anyway, as we all know. It looks like Forrester was luring Brendan into a trap.”

“Let me see if this holds up,” Skene said. “After disappearing for a while into her stint with the escort service, erotic entertainment, if that in fact happened, Rebecca Heilshorn gets pregnant. It’s her second time. She’s scared; she’s too afraid to get another abortion, too afraid that having the child will ruin her so-called career? Or what? We need testing on that girl – Leah, right away. The other one, too. What’s the other one’s name?”

“Aldona,” said Colinas.

“And she’s with social services now. Okay, so Rebecca Heilshorn goes home to her parents. After she has her child delivered by her father, she tells him everything. There are other women, too, who have gone to term with babies born of escort relationships with politicos – women unwilling to abort, who want to use the pregnancy as a way out. So Heilshorn starts delivering them in secret, using his money and influence to then shepherd them to good homes.”

Skene leveled them all with a look that could kill.

“If any of this is true, you realize we’re into the very deep end of the pool, here. Where this goes could be unbelievably huge.

“But back to the case at hand. Our prime suspect is dead. We can still prosecute, but it’s going to be a clusterfuck, I can tell you that right now. We need simplification. Juries don’t like complex denouements, if you catch my drift. This thing with the escort service, I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg here. Whether or not Heilshorn was lying about this thing with the kids . . . being held as leverage or not, we’ve got some serious implications floating around here.”

Colinas regarded Skene. Despite the prosecutor’s efforts to steer things back on course, he seemed hot to get those hands on a government conspiracy. Elections were closer than ever, Colinas figured. Now only a month away.

“But anyway, for Forrester, we have motive, we have opportunity,” Skene said, sounding pleased. “And we have that video.”

“We have motive?” This was the first thing Sheriff Taber had said for a few minutes. Skene looked surprised. “I don’t think we’ve established that. Forrester makes this video, for what?”

“He’s a sicko,” said the prosecutor. “Who cares why?”

“The defense might.”

Now Skene truly did look wounded. He clearly wanted this wrapped up neat with a bow, and it wasn’t quite going down that way. “You’re not trying to do my job, are you, Sheriff?”

“He’s in the video, clearly. But why kill her? Forrester has Heilshorn in his pocket already – this well-to-do doctor has a prostitute daughter. But Heilshorn has Forrester pinned, too – he can blow the whistle any time. But he doesn’t because of these other children. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship in a sad, twisted way. Everything is working. Why kill the girl?”

Skene had no response. Taber walked around his desk and sat down, immediately picking up the phone. Colinas had to stifle a smile.

“Get me Robertson,” Taber said into the phone. Robertson was Taber’s head of the C.O.s at the County Jail. Robertson was probably a nervous wreck, Colinas figured, given what had just happened on his watch.

Sheriff Taber then looked up at Skene and Colinas.

“Maybe it wasn’t Forrester who committed the actual murder. We could have a Charles Manson-type here. Forrester may not have acted alone.”