Little Girl Blue Part 18

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying she went out the back way, Joe. She could be anywhere."

"Bad for me," Norton replied, "and for you, too."

"Are you going to kill me, Joe? What you've already done to me isn't enough? You want my life as well?"

Norton didn't bother to reply. Instead, he ordered his wife to close the window blinds.

Julia listened to the rattle of the blinds as they came down, trying to locate her enemy. The breakfast bar would afford an almost un.o.bstructed view of the dining room, but there was a wall between the dining and living rooms. If she wanted to retain the element of surprise, she would have to wait for Norton to come to her. And he would come, of course. Ever practical, he would want his two hostages together and Elizabeth was still cuffed to the oven.

"Get in here, Lizzie," Norton called, as if to prove Julia's point.

"I can't."

"Don't give me a hard time. For once in your miserable life, just do what I say."

"I'm handcuffed to the stove, Joe." Elizabeth's voice was so drained of emotion it might have come from a computerized phone menu. "I'm not going anywhere unless somebody takes this thing apart."

"That b.i.t.c.h. That f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h."

Julia smiled at the epithet, smiled again as the blinds in the dining room were lowered, then drawn shut. Norton would be in the dining room now, keeping an eye on things. She could turn, get off three or four rounds before he responded. No warning need be given, not after he'd fired on the police, not after he'd taken hostages.

"Alright, ladies," Norton said, "here's what's going to happen. Carla, you're going to go into the kitchen, find a screwdriver, unscrew the handle, bring Lizzie to me. If you try to run out the door, I'll kill you. If Lizzie's not in here in five minutes, I'll kill you. Understand?"

Julia drew a breath, rehea.r.s.ed the sequence in her mind: extend the weapon, turn, locate the target, aim, squeeze. It was funny, all those police doc.u.mentaries with doors flying off the hinges, cops screaming contradictory orders at the tops of their lungs, all those adrenal glands spurting into all those veins. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Cold was the way to go, cold, calm, purposeful. This wasn't a barroom brawl; this was a problem to be solved by simple mechanics. Extend the weapon, turn, locate the target, aim, squeeze. As easy as that.

She waited only until Carla Norton's foot extended beyond the doorway, then she dropped the barrel of her automatic and spun to face the dining room. Joe Norton was standing against the wall ten feet away. He was holding his weapon at his side and she might have given him a chance if her mind, less disciplined than she wanted to admit, hadn't chosen that moment to offer the image of Anja Das-calescu as she'd appeared just before the medical examiner began to sew her up.

Those doe eyes looking up at me. A mouth that was made to be kissed. Hairy as a goat. They loved it.

THIRTY-NINE.

ROBERT REID parked his car in the closest available parking s.p.a.ce, two hundred yards from Julia Brennan's home. He threw the transmission into park reached for the key only to check himself at the last second. Then, smiling, he switched the heater fan to its highest setting and let his weight drop back against the b.u.t.ter-soft leather covering the seat. The January wind outside was strong enough to rock his Mercedes on its springs.

Corry was not yet home. The light in its fixture next to the front door was lit, and there was a light in the kitchen as well, but the rest of the house was dark. Though well after sunset, it was still a few minutes short of five o'clock. Corry usually didn't return from school until close to six.

Reid shifted his feet to allow the stream of air from the heater to sweep beneath the cuffs of his trousers, his thoughts turning to Destroyer and Destroyed. In the preceding hours, Reid had convinced himself that the man he'd come to call D&D had another dumping ground somewhere. That opinion had been confirmed after Reid cashed a series of markers in order to obtain a five-minute phone interview with Sergeant Aaron Ross, the profiler who'd studied the crime-scene evidence. Ross was of the opinion that D&D had been in the killing business for years.

A second e-mail, fired off to , which put the question directly, had drawn a terse reply: Dig deeper, hack.

"The actor in this case," Ross had explained, "is torn between a certain knowledge of his eventual capture, and a certain knowledge that he's some kind of superman who cannot be caught. Now you and I, we think it's impossible to consciously maintain both positions, because we know they can't both be true. But our man, he does believe both at the same time and it's driving him to take risks. It's driving him crazy."

Reid slapped the steering wheel with the palm of his hand, once, then again. Destroyer and Destroyed. The abused child, destroyed by a predatory adult, now become a destroyer of predatory adults. Except it was backwards. It should be Destroyed and Destroyer, destroyed first. But could you expect a psychopath, torn apart by contradictory impulses, to be consistent? Maybe he'd typed the first thing that came into his head. Maybe he hadn't given it ten seconds of thought.

Dig deeper.

a.s.sume, Reid told himself as he checked the rearview mirror for a glimpse of Corry walking up the block, that all communications from D&D were written by the superman part of his personality. What would a superman's boast to make things clear very soon mean in real terms? What did he mean by the command to dig deeper? And why do his Goliaths battle from within and without?

Suddenly, a few small pieces of the puzzle came together. Dig deeper was meant literally. Somewhere in that Queens warehouse, in a lower sub-bas.e.m.e.nt, or literally beneath the foundation, there were more bodies. The Empire Steel warehouse, eight stories tall, occupied a full square block of Long Island City. Had the cops searched every inch of its hundreds of thousands of square feet? There was no electricity in the building and the bas.e.m.e.nts were as dark as caves. If the earliest victims, taken when D&D was still perfecting his game, hadn't been displayed, if D&D, still cautious, had concealed the bodies .. .

Reid shut down the Mercedes, then carefully attached a steering wheel lock before getting out. He paused only for a moment, to set a car alarm so loud the manufacturer guaranteed that exposure for more than sixty seconds would liquefy a thief's brain. Then he headed off to Julia's, fumbling for the house key as he hurried along the sidewalk and up the two steps to the front door.

The key jammed in the slot momentarily and Reid had to jiggle it up and down before the cylinder finally turned. As he stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind him, he made a mental note to buy a tube of graphite and lubricate the mechanism before it froze up altogether. Vaguely, he remembered formulating the same resolve on multiple occasions. That was one of the pleasures, he decided, of growing old. Given enough time, you forgot that you forgot.

He flipped on the light in the small foyer and began to shrug out of his coat when he he suddenly realized that it was very cold in the house. There was a draft blowing through the rooms as well, distinct enough to notice as it washed over his exposed face and hands. Instinctively, as his pulse began to accelerate, he turned his head from side to side, tracking the source of the breeze, an open window somewhere, or an open door.

"s.h.i.t," Reid muttered. "s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t."

He walked into the living room and flicked the wall switch, lighting a halogen torchiere in a far corner. The room was rea.s.suringly empty. It's funny, Reid told himself, as he took a few tentative steps toward the kitchen, the closer I get to the abyss, the more fearful I become. There was a time when I would have gone from room to room, hoping there was a burglar still inside the house.

Reid stepped into the kitchen, glanced at the secured windows and back door, then backed away. The problem was on the second floor, a judgment confirmed when he crossed to the foot of the stairs and felt the draft strengthen. He laid his hand on the banister, lifted his right foot to the first step, then shook his head. The smart move here, without doubt, was to return to the kitchen, call the police and let the professionals check it out. More than likely his timidity would draw a condescending smile from the responding officers, but that was easier endured than searching the house, room by room, on his own. His chest was already squeezing down, his throat as well. If he kept this up.. .

Reid was halfway to the kitchen when he was shaken by a conviction that emerged from nowhere to literally buckle his knees.

You've missed it all, scribbler, but I shall make myself clear very soon.

"Corry?" Suddenly desperate, he turned back, mounted the stairs, pulling himself up by the banister. "Corry, you there?" The only answer, the slap of a blowing window shade in Corry's room at the end of the short hallway, propelled him beyond any rationality. He ignored a rapidly intensifying pain that radiated from his chest across his left shoulder and down along his arm. He ignored, too, the possibility that Corry, in a moment of adolescent carelessness, had simply left the window open and that Julia had been too busy or too distracted to notice. He ignored everything except his own terror. Not Corry. Please, please, not Corry.

"Corry."

Reid's voice was no more than a whisper, forced from lungs that refused to contract as he stopped in the doorway of her room to catch his breath. The window beyond the bed was wide open, but there was no sign of a struggle. Corry's stuffed dog, Wally, a companion since infancy, lay on his back, paws raised in play, head against the pillow. A collection of perfume bottles on a gla.s.s-topped vanity was undisturbed, as were the carefully piled notebooks on Corry's desk and a wastebasket piled beyond its rim with discarded computer printouts.

Relief flooded Reid's body, a drug every bit as powerful as the Demerol they'd fed him after his heart attack, or the rivers of good booze he'd poured into his gut for decades. He shuffled across the room, closed and locked the window, then sat for a moment on the edge of the bed. He would be all right, he told himself as the bands across his chest tightened, millimeter by millimeter, he would be all right if he could just get to a phone.

Reid tried to draw a breath but could manage only a trickle of air, a reversed whisper that didn't come near filling his lungs. He looked for Corry's phone, the panic rising in his chest nearly as intense as the pain, but the handset for the cordless phone was not in its cradle. Nor, when he swept the room, was it conveniently lying on the night table or bureau. Finally, he slid off the bed, dropped to his knees, and crawled into the hallway. The effort took all of his concentration, since no part of him, not even his head, was willing to work on its own. He had to instruct his right hand to slide along the carpet, his left knee to follow; if his attention wandered, even for a moment, he came to halt. Thus, he was completely unaware of the man following behind him, and unaware, too, when, as he came to the head of the stairs, the man gave a little shove that sent him tumbling down.

FORTY.

JULIA DID everything right. She fired four times in rapid succession, burying each round in a tight pattern to the left of Joe Norton's sternum, then stopped when the gun fell from his hand and he slid to the carpet. Her weapon still at the ready, she stepped forward, retrieved Norton's automatic, checked for a pulse, only to find that Norton had achieved his final wish. He'd played the game to the very end.

As Julia reached for the radio, Foley's voice, emotion-filled for once, poured from the tiny speaker: Brennan. Brennan. For Christ's sake.

"Brennan here," she responded, her chest tight, voice much thinner than she would have expected. "The scene is under control, Pete. Send in the cavalry."

She needn't have bothered. A dozen New Jersey State Troopers crashed through the door even before she returned the radio to her pocket. Absurdly, they surrounded Elizabeth Nicolson and Carla Norton, leaving Julia, the only woman holding a gun, to her own devices. True, her badge was displayed on her chest, but a badge can belong to anyone. It was not an error, Julia decided, that she would have made.

A moment later, Foley's head appeared in the doorway on the other side of the kitchen. He glanced around, nodded to Julia, said, "The other one, Gorovic, he turned. I've got the name of the adoption agency that brought the children into the country."

"Great."

Julia walked over to the kitchen table, sat down, laid her weapon on the table top. Her legs, relieved of the burden of her weight, began to tremble, her hands as well. Nevertheless, she retrieved her cellular and managed to punch in Commander Harry Clark's number at the big house. It was now six o'clock.

She got through first to the lieutenant who guarded Clark's time, a big-bellied vet named Brittman, then was put on hold. As she waited, a middle-aged trooper sporting a pair of stars on either shoulder approached her. The man's right ear was noticeably larger than his left, lending him a goofy aspect despite the stern expression. The spider veins running along his cheeks and over his nose didn't help either.

"Lieutenant," he said without introducing himself.

"I'm reporting to my superior." Julia offered an explanation she knew the man would accept. The New Jersey Troopers were reputed to have great respect for the chain of command. "The women, by the way...." She swept her hand in a wide semicircle. "I have no reason to believe that either played a part in the shooting."

"Clark here."

Julia held up a finger, then began to speak rapidly. Clark listened without comment, willing, apparently, to absorb the facts while he pondered his next move. "I don't have all the details yet," she finished, "but there are others involved, foreign nationals who have every reason to flee as soon as they learn what happened here."

To his credit, Commander Clark made his command decision quickly. "I'm coming out," he told her, "by helicopter. Anything you need before I arrive, route it through Brittman."

"It won't be me, sir." Julia looked down at her trembling knees, thinking so much for the dangerous-woman persona. She'd never felt weaker in her life. "I need some time, administrative leave if at all possible, medical leave if that's the only option. But I have to stop, sort things out. If I don't .. . Anyway, I'm putting Bert Griffith in charge. It's better that way anyhow. The locals'll have me tied up for hours, but Griffith wasn't near the scene when the shooting started."

When Clark spoke, after a brief pause, his voice was gentle, even kind. Julia would never have expected it of him. "I shot somebody once, put the mope in a wheelchair for life. My partner wanted to go out and celebrate, buy me drinks 'til I dropped, but I turned him down. Instead, I went up to St. Mary's and spoke to a priest I knew. It made a big difference. Now, let me talk to whoever's in charge."

Julia folded her hands, in part to hide, if not still, their trembling. She laid them on the table, waited patiently until the trooper, who identified himself to Clark as Colonel Thaddeus Harman, finished his conversation. Then she immediately dialed her home number. "I have to call my daughter," she explained, "tell her I'll be late."

Instead of Corry, Julia listened to her own voice request the favor of a message. How insipid I sound, she thought, like one of those incompetent jerks who think they're in complete control when they've never done anything right in their entire lives.

"Corry," she said, after a sharp prompting beep, "I'm in New Jersey. I'm okay. I'll be home as soon as I can. Love you."

For a minute, Julia considered leaving the cellular on, just in case her daughter needed to get in touch, deciding finally that she wouldn't have time for a rea.s.suring conversation, not until she was debriefed by the locals and by her own superiors. As soon as things cleared up, though, she'd retrieve her messages, make another attempt to reach Corry. Meanwhile, she was unavailable.

When Julia looked up, Colonel Harman had vanished. She glanced into the dining room, saw Foley seated across from a trooper who'd laid his Smokey Bear hat on the table beside him. She noted Foley's relaxed shoulders, the amused smile on his face, and felt a quick surge of affection. When she'd ordered him away from the scene to warn the locals, he hadn't simply obeyed. Not Peter Foley who believed the chain of command to be at best an inconvenience. The local cops had to be warned. Somebody had to to watch the house. If he hadn't believed in her, he'd never have marched off, Nevin Gorovic in tow. If she hadn't believed in him, she'd have interrogated Gorovic herself.

All right, she told herself, back to business. The girl and the guy don't get together until the end of the movie.

"Bert Griffith," she called. "You out there?"

Griffith emerged from the living room a moment later. He made a wide circle, edging through a knot of cops and paramedics gathered around Joe Norton's body, then stepped into the kitchen.

"You need me, loo?"

"I'm putting you in charge."

"In charge of what, exactly? We don't have jurisdiction here."

"I know that, Bert. Which means somebody from our side of the Hudson is gonna have to sit up and beg for information. Right now, I don't have it in me."

Griffith's expression softened. "It's okay," he said, "you did good here."

It took Julia a moment to come up with a snappy response, And the world's a better place for it, right? By that time Griffith had gone a-begging and Peter Foley was sitting next to her, enfolding her hands in his. The trembling in her fingers instantly ceased, though her knees continued to bounce up and down as though she were in the final hundred yards of a bicycle race.

"I thought they were ripping you apart in there," Julia said.

"Maybe that's what they had in mind, but I told them I wouldn't be giving a statement until Commander Harry Clark, my lord and master, arrived at the scene."

"You worried about something?"

"Not especially."

"Then why the delay?"

"Because I've been a cop too long to believe that innocence will protect me. Maybe the honcho trooper out there, Colonel Harman, has a hard-on for New Yorkers in general and New York cops in particular. Maybe there's a sheriff in the background who's running for re-election. Maybe one of the ladies, Carla Norton or Elizabeth Nicol son, is claiming that we drove up to the house, guns blazing. Why should I take a chance?"

Julia looked down at Foley's hand, large enough to cover her own. "This killing thing," she said, "it's starting to get to me. I swear to Christ, I don't know who I'm going to be from one minute to the next."

UOMMANDER HARRY Clark hit the Norton home like a thunderbolt, descending onto the lawn at the back of the house as though he'd come to claim it. He advanced on Colonel Thaddeus Harman, one hand extended, cashmere overcoat flowing behind, wingtips a-gleam. All in the same motion, he shook the Colonel's hand, laid an arm across his shoulder, led him out into the back yard.

"Please, please, do me this favor, a one-on-one, just to bring you up to date on what's already gone down. Trust me, this is big, Colonel. Big, fat, and juicy."

When they returned a few minutes later, both men were smiling.

Julia watched from a great distance, unconcerned, as if she were sitting on a park bench alongside a dog run, watching the puppies at play. Clark and Harman parted a moment later, Clark taking a seat at the kitchen table. He was still smiling.

"Just the facts, ma'am," he said to Julia.

"I was the one who interrogated Nevin Gorovic, sir," Foley responded. He moved slightly to his right, away from Julia, drawing Clark's attention.

Again, Julia played the part of observer, a field scientist watching two primates interact, the role so entirely natural she could imagine it continuing forever. Foley offered up a series of names and Clark wrote them down. Foley offered several addresses and Clark wrote them down. When they were done, Clark phoned Chief Linus Flan-nery who presumably wrote everything down.

"All right," Clark said as he hung up the phone and returned it to a tooled leather case on his belt, "lemme bring you up to snuff, lieutenant. First, all day today, and even as we speak, the feebs have been out busting chicken hawks. They're billing the operation as the largest ever conducted." He leaned a little closer. "The rat b.a.s.t.a.r.ds didn't give us so much as a crumb. They cut us out altogether, but now they want a piece of our action. Ain't that a dog? And we're gonna give it to 'em. First, because we're talkin' about interstate, and maybe international jurisdictions, and the feebs are the only ones who can work all sides of the fence. Second, the Justice Department and the FBI have agreed to let Flannery stand on the platform when they do the press conference. They won't let him speak, but they'll say something about a joint investigation."

The federal busts caught Julia off guard. If Clark's information was accurate, Foley had taken nearly a hundred pedophiles out of circulation. Though Agent Lear had known that when he showed up at Foley's apartment, search warrant in hand, it hadn't stopped him. But neither Foley's, nor Lear's, efforts were the most interesting part of Clark's little discourse. No, the deal between the NYPD and the FBI could not have been negotiated on the spur of the moment, which meant that her earlier guess, that Clark had a snitch inside C Squad, had been correct. It was enough, she decided, to renew a girl's faith in herself.

"Are you ready for me, commander?" she asked as her knees finally came to rest.

FORTY-ONE.

CLARK SWIVELED his head all the way to the right, then all the way to the left, the dramatic gesture tempered by a sly smile. Nevertheless, his voice, when he spoke, was barely above a whisper. "You sent your detectives to fetch help before you approached the suspect's home, right?"

"Yes," Julia replied.

He turned to Foley, "When you drove up, detective, you were fired upon before you exited your vehicle and you took a round in your vest, correct?"

"I did."