The Follower (26 page)

“I have no idea who knows him and who doesn’t know him. We finished serving lunch a little while ago. If anyone’s still around, why don’t you ask them?”

John watched her walk away, the two-inch heels of her designer shoes clickity-clacking along the floor.

Outside, a small group of homeless people were loitering in front of the church. John asked them if they knew a guy named Franky Franco. Although he hadn’t flashed his badge or announced he was a cop, they all seemed naturally suspicious. He sensed that at least two of the guys knew Franco, but no one cooperated.

“All right, I’m a detective, like that surprises any of you,” John said. Then, figuring he’d pull the sympathy card, he added, “Look, so here’s the deal. Franco’s missing; he could be hurt or in trouble and his family’s worried. I need to know if anyone was with him on or around Thursday night. I’m talking about yesterday, all day. Did anyone see him or talk to him or does anyone know who saw him or who could’ve talked to him?”

“Sorry,” an older black guy said, “we don’t know nothing.”

John knew the guy was full of shit, that he probably had a long rap sheet—actually, he was starting to look familiar—and there was no way he’d ever help a cop.

Then an old white guy, who looked homeless in a dirty old suit jacket and jeans, and who had awful BO, came over. He claimed he was a friend of Franco’s.

“What happened to him?” the man asked, seeming genuinely concerned. “Is he okay?”

John stuck to the story that Franco was missing, figuring this was his best bet to get the guy to be forthcoming.

“When was the last time you saw him?” John asked.

“The other night,” the man said. “What was it? Thursday. I slept next to him at the shelter on Seventy-seventh.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Then he was here in the afternoon the next day—yesterday. But at night he didn’t show.”

“So you’re positive you were with him all of Thursday night?”

“I wasn’t with him—I’m not a faggot. But I slept on a cot next to him, yeah. Why? Wait, let me guess. He said he killed somebody.”

“How’d you know that?” As far as John knew, Franco’s confession still hadn’t been made public.

The man laughed. “He does it all the time, that’s why. I guess he started telling you guys the same crap he’s been telling me. Last week, some guy in the Bronx got shot—he told me he did it. One time, some husband killed his wife in Brooklyn, he told me the cops got it all wrong—he did it. He tells me he killed somebody new almost every time I see him. Funny thing is, at first I believed him…I mean, he seemed for real…then I figured out he was taking it straight from the papers. So who’d he say he killed this time?”

Trying to put his embarrassment on the back burner, John said, “A guy—the other night in Carl Schurz Park.”

The old guy and the black guy started laughing.

“You mean the guy who got it near Grade Mansion?” the old guy said. “Yeah, that’s just like Franky. I bet he really thinks he did it, too.”

“You’re sure he didn’t leave the shelter Thursday night?”

“Franky’s not a killer,” the old guy said. “He’s crazy as hell, yeah, but he’s no killer. What, don’t tell me you believed him?”

The old guy and the black guy laughed again, louder than before.

John returned to his car. Maybe some new information would come out on Franco, but John knew that the odds that the nut had killed Barnett were almost zilch. John sat there for a few minutes, with his forehead resting on the steering wheel, trying to think about his next move. It was hard to focus, though, when so many negative thoughts were swirling around in his brain. This case wasn’t getting solved. In forty-eight hours he’d accomplished absolutely nothing. Worse, he had no idea where a break would come from. He was so fucking incompetent, he wondered if he should take himself off the case—do the public a favor.

“Fuck me,” he said, and pounded the dashboard with his fist.

He was sick of this shit but, one way or another, this case was going to get solved. He remembered telling Andrew Barnett’s parents that he was the best man for the job and, beneath all the self-doubt, he knew this was the truth. He’d catch a break eventually, but it wouldn’t happen sitting on his ass.

He felt like he was missing something very obvious. He had to go back to the basics, the crime itself. It was a strangulation, most likely a crime of passion. Maybe there was jealousy, an affair, a love triangle. He remembered one of Barnett’s roommates, William Bahner, telling him about the double date he’d been on the night before the murder with Andrew Barnett, Katie Porter, and a friend of Katie’s. John had a feeling Bahner was hiding something. Maybe Bahner had a thing for Katie and bumped off Barnett to get him out of the way. It was worth looking into anyway.

Bahner had given John his cell number. John called, left a message to get back in touch with him as soon as possible. Then he called Louis and gave him the news. Louis told him that he better make some headway fast, the clock was ticking.

John dreaded making the next call, to Mr. Barnett. He was hoping to get his voice mail, but no such luck.

“So?” Mr. Barnett asked.

“We don’t think he did it,” John said.

Dead silence, then Mr. Barnett said, “Why’s that?”

He sounded too calm, as if he were ready to blow.

John explained about Franco’s schizophrenia and affinity for taking credit for murders.

“So what the fuck’re you gonna do now?” Mr. Barnett asked.

“We have many other leads that we’re following up as we speak,” John lied. “I guarantee you that we’ll do everything possible to catch the son of a bitch who killed your son.”

“Everything possible,” Mr. Barnett said. “That’s not saying a hell of a lot, since so far you’ve done total bullshit.”

Mr. Barnett continued his tirade and John kept saying “Yes,” “Yes,” “I understand,” “Absolutely,” until he was able to get off the phone.

Suddenly John had a pounding headache. He was exhausted,
too, the sleepless night catching up with him big-time. He pulled over at the Starbucks on First and Eighty-fifth for a double espresso. While he was on line, William Bahner called and John arranged to meet him in the cafeteria at Mount Sinai Hospital in twenty minutes.

Back in his car, John felt like shit for stringing Mr. Barnett along. His son had been killed and he had a right to yell and he had a right to demand results. Then John thought about his own son, who was alive and well, but whom John hadn’t seen in, Jesus, over a year.

John wished he could understand what the Barnetts were going through, but the sad truth was, he had no fucking clue.

Sunday morning, at the gym
, Peter looked at his watch for what must’ve been the hundredth time and said to himself, “Where the hell is she?” Yesterday, in the park, she must’ve mentioned three times that she was planning to go to the gym in the morning and yet it was almost noon and there was no sign of her. Peter feared that something was wrong—she was sick or something. She’d seemed perfectly healthy all day yesterday, but he couldn’t think of any other logical explanation. She had a great opportunity to spend more time with him today and he knew she wouldn’t willingly miss out on it.

He resisted calling her. He wanted to, desperately, but his discipline was being tested. He had to stay cool, in control.

But as noon approached it was getting harder and harder to not do
something
. He had started his training for the membership consultant position but was barely listening to Jimmy. He took several breaks, to get water and go to the bathroom, but they were really just excuses to walk around the gym to see if he’d possibly missed Katie.

His agitation must’ve become very noticeable because during one of the breaks Jimmy came over to him and said, “You feeling okay, guy?”

“Yeah, my back’s a little tight,” Peter said. “Must’ve pulled it doing abs yesterday.”

“You should ice it, bro.”

“Yeah, good idea.”

They continued the training but, for Peter, focusing on anything other than Katie had become impossible.

“Sorry, my back’s spasming,” Peter said. “Can we pick this up tomorrow?”

“Yeah,
no problema
, man,” Jimmy said. “But I can’t pay you for the time you’ll miss today.”

Peter, thinking,
Yeah, like I care about your nine fifty an hour
, said, “I totally understand. That’s cool.”

Working at the health club was getting to be a pain. He couldn’t wait to quit and start his new life with Katie.

He took a long time leaving the gym—going to the bathroom again, striking up mundane conversations with a couple of trainers. He was hoping Katie would eventually show, but she didn’t. He remembered how she’d said she couldn’t go out with him tonight, and instead she suggested going out to dinner on Monday. At the time, he’d thought she was just trying to avoid going out two nights in a row with a new boyfriend—very typical dating behavior—but now he wondered if it was because she had other plans—i.e., she was dating someone else. She’d never mentioned a guy in her life other than Andy, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone. Many girls dated more than one guy at a time so there could be “another Andy” in her life, some other Frat Boy she’d met somewhere, or maybe she was seeing someone at her office. The only guy at her job who she talked about was her boss, Mitchell. It sounded like she hated him, but anything was possible. Maybe the tension meant something was going on.

Or maybe she had guy friends—you always had to look out for them. Girls always naively assumed that guys they were involved with platonically didn’t want anything from them, but that was never the case. Peter knew that all guys—himself excluded—were pigs. They hung around, waiting until their female friends got into vulnerable positions, and then they went in for the kill. Peter had no idea how many guy friends Katie had—it worried him how little he knew about her—but he assumed there were some. If not friends, then acquaintances—pigs waiting in the wings for the going to get
rough, for her to need a shoulder to cry on, so they could swoop in and take advantage of her.

Peter couldn’t let this happen. He had to prevent it. He didn’t care if he had to kill a hundred Frat Boys. He’d do whatever he had to do to keep Katie safe with him.

Leaving the gym, Peter’s heart was beating wildly. He started walking, then running toward Katie’s. Then a voice in his head screamed,
Don’t do it!
and he turned around. He sat on a ledge outside a building and tried to settle down. While his first instinct was to get rid of whoever was in his way, he knew if he went over there and demanded to get into her apartment, it would lead to disaster. If she was with a guy, what would he do, kill him in front of her? He had to be a lot more clever about it than that. And what if he was wrong and there was no other guy? She’d think he was a lunatic and would never forgive him.

Rushing over there like a maniac would’ve been the biggest mistake of his life, and he was glad he’d had the wherewithal to talk himself out of it. He had to bide his time, keep watching her and gathering as much information as he could, and proceed from there. But, from now on, hanging out across the street from her building was out of the question. Although Katie had claimed that someone had confessed to the murder, Peter didn’t believe it. There had been nothing on the news or in the papers about a confession. For all Peter knew, the police had found a witness from the Big Easy who had seen him talking to Frat Boy the other night, and maybe his disguise hadn’t worked as well as he’d thought. Even going over with a different look could be a mistake if the police were watching Katie for some reason.

Peter racked his brain, trying to figure out what to do, and it didn’t take long for the answer to come to him. Suddenly feeling back in the driver’s seat, he walked down Second Avenue to a coffee shop that had Internet terminals. He purchased a half hour of time, then went online and searched for private detectives in New York City. He avoided the large companies, figuring they wouldn’t answer the phones on a Sunday or wouldn’t be willing to start immediately. Instead,
on a piece of scrap paper, he made a list of ten or so independent investigators. Then, on the street outside the café, he started making calls on his cell.

A couple of the numbers were disconnected and he reached the answering services of several others. He was beginning to think it would be impossible to reach a PI today when Stanley Ross answered his phone. Peter explained that he suspected his girlfriend was having an affair and wanted Ross to follow her. Ross, an arrogant, gruff-sounding guy, said he was currently working on two other cases and couldn’t start until sometime next week.

Peter reached a couple more answering services and was losing hope again. Then, on his second-to-last call, to Hillary Morgan Investigations, Hillary herself picked up. She lived across town, on West Seventy-seventh, worked out of a home office, and seemed interested in taking on the case. She said her specialty was infidelity.

“You sound perfect,” Peter said. “The thing is, I think my fiancée’s cheating on me right now. Can you start immediately?”

“I’m sorry, I have a personal commitment today,” she explained, “but I can start first thing tomorrow.”

She sounded tough, competent, and Peter wanted to use her. Besides, he didn’t know if he could even reach another PI who was willing to start immediately, so for all he knew, she could be his only possibility.

“Look, I really need you to start today. Whatever your fee is, I’ll pay double.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“Triple.”

She paused, not for long, then said, “Well, I guess I can rearrange my schedule.”

While he was talking to her, giving her basic information about Katie, he hailed a cab and headed toward her place. When he clicked off, he was riding through the park, halfway there. When he arrived at her apartment, a brownstone, she was amazed that he’d gotten there so fast.

She looked younger and less competent than Peter had
expected. She had short dark hair and wore glossy lipstick. She had a raspy, smoker’s voice, which was probably why she’d sounded older on the phone. The small one-bedroom apartment was cramped and dingy. She led him into a small alcove, her home-office area. She had a Jack Russell terrier, which kept yapping at Peter, trying to climb his legs.