Black Irish (26 page)

Brake lights bobbed in the darkness as the rain lashed across her eyes. Abbie angled toward the railing on her right. She groped in the blackness until she found the top bar of the railing and swung herself over. For a horrible moment, she thought she’d misjudged and this wasn’t the inner railing but the outer one, and she was going to plunge into the dark water that roared beneath her, but her shoes smacked against a metal grate. There was a narrow pedestrian path ahead of her, sectioned off from the traffic lanes on her left. Abbie straightened up, turned to lean into the howling wind, and began to climb. The bridge hummed through the hood as the metal cables seemed to vibrate to the gathering storm.

She ran, but the slick metal grate almost caused her to go face down on the walkway. She pulled out her gun and held it tight against her right thigh and hurried ahead, trying not to slip.

The sound was deafening and ahead was blackness with a line of red brake lights on her left. Abbie couldn’t even see where the bridge ended and the sky began. The rain speckled her vision the few times she lifted her head up to check her progress. But the incline was slowly leveling out.

Suddenly she saw a figure moving away from her on the walkway, dark, bent, and moving fast toward the American side.

Abbie pointed her gun and shouted, “Buffalo Police!” but the wind tore the words away.

The figure seemed to merge into the blackness and disappear. Then suddenly she caught its outline against the lights of Buffalo. Abbie dropped to one knee to frame the outline against the glow and saw that it was a man, head down.

“Stop and put your hands up! Police!”

The figure turned, reached into its pocket, and pulled out a black object.

Abbie yelled,
“Stop right there or I’ll shoot!”

A blaze of light shot from the figure’s midsection, then flicked
up. She could see a bright yellow coat with three bands of white reflector paint. The flashlight was pointed at the figure’s bright yellow jacket and the logo “Buffalo Fire Department.” Under the yellow helmet and visor tilted down against the wind, she saw the bottom half of a male face, stubbled with dark hair.

Abbie blew out a breath in relief, stood and holstered her gun. She waved the fireman closer.

“Could be …,”
the fireman yelled. He was holding on to the rim of his helmet, trying to stop it from blowing off. The wind was whipping by so hard she could hear only some of what he was shouting.

“Could be what?”

He said something that sounded like
“Sue-thide.”

“You see it?”

He nodded.

“How long ago?”

His words were mangled by the shrieking wind. He tried again but Abbie only shouted,
“What?”
and cupped her hands over her ears to show she couldn’t hear.

The man nodded and held up ten fingers.

Abbie nodded back. A gust of wind bucked her up against the outer railing and she caught a glimpse of white surf forty feet below.

She pushed herself closer to the fireman and shouted, “Did he leave ID?”

The fire helmet shook back and forth and the man’s lips turned down at the corners.

Abbie nodded and began to move past him. The fireman grabbed her arm as she passed. He yelled something but the wind was shrieking up the roadway and its pitch rose with his voice.

“What?” she yelled.

“… help orrr …”

“What?”

The storm seemed to be roaring into a hurricane. She was able to catch only part of what the fireman was shouting.

“Someone helped him over the railing?”

The fireman nodded.

Abbie gave him a thumbs-up to show she understood, then pointed up at the top of the span. He nodded and turned into the blackness ahead of her.

The gale blew up through the metal grate walkway and it felt like the wind was trying to lift her off the bridge and send her spinning into the Niagara. Abbie switched the gun to her left hand and grabbed the railing with her right. The lights of Buffalo bobbed ahead of her to the south, the rain whipping across her vision at a thirty-degree angle.

A branch of lightning flashed in the black sky. And suddenly Abbie saw it.

A white shape appeared and then vanished ten feet below her. A white shape like a face.

Abbie backed up against the outside railing, pointing her gun down. How could someone be
below
her? The face had gleamed for a split second in the blue-white flash of lightning, then disappeared into the blackness.

The rain pounded against the plastic hood as she crept forward, gun still trained downward.

A lightning flash illuminated the scene below for a half second and she saw the face ten feet below her, not looking up. This time it was moving away from her. Her heart fluttered in fear.

“Stop!” she shouted, but the lightning flashed away and the man was gone. She remembered that the Peace Bridge had work platforms below the roadway. But the platforms didn’t go all the way to shore; they reached only across the middle span and led nowhere. So if he was down there, he was trapped, unless he could climb back onto the main roadway and somehow sneak past her.

Abbie bent over the railing and looked wildly left and right into sheets of rain for a ladder. She could smell the river churning beneath her. Underneath she saw the black outlines of the bridge superstructure. Then she heard something moaning in the wind.

A white face swept past, ten feet below, moving away from her again. The face was turned toward her. But the man was walking
backward
.

“Buffalo Police!” she cried, sticking her gun through the railing to try and get an angle.

Flash
, the man turning—slowly, almost as if in a dream, and retracing his steps. Abbie’s gun dipped to follow him, but again he was swallowed up in darkness.

Abbie desperately tried to clear her eyes of the streaming water, but everything was blurred.

“Buffalo PD,” she shouted again, but the wind whipped her voice to shreds. Could the perp even hear her down there? The rain was drumming so loudly on the steel bridge she could barely hear herself.

She pulled her radio out of her pocket.

“Dispatch, five-ten.”

Come on, come ON
.

“Five-ten, go ahead.”

“I have a Caucasian male on the underside of the Peace Bridge. Will not respond to orders. I need units here with ropes and a stretcher.”

“Roger that. Where on the bridge?”

“Midway. Request expedited.”

“Roger.”

The dispatcher began to call more units as Abbie stood and began to feel her way forward. The top railing was round and thick and she could feel paint flake away under her hand. She slid it forward. If she was right, the perp was directly beneath her now.

Her fingers brushed something on the rail and she snatched her hand back.
Jesus Christ
, she thought,
is that what I think it is?

Abbie’s fingers tapped along the railing, rain bouncing three inches off her exposed wrist, which was already beginning to freeze. She took a step and reached farther along.
Where was it? Did I pass it?
All of a sudden her hand touched something rough.

She found the thick rope looped three times around the railing.

A face flashed in her mind. A pale white face.

Her mind dropped into a Tilt-a-Whirl spin.

Abbie lurched over the railing and cried out “DAAAAAAD!” staring
into the white-speckled darkness of the roaring Niagara, surging past like a locomotive.

Black water rushing by. The bridge shaking in the wind.

Then the man moved lazily into view.

Not pacing. Swinging.

“DAAAADDDDD!” she cried, and reached over for the rope. It was thick and fibers came off in her hand as she clawed it. But the body on the other end of the rope was too heavy. She could barely lift it a couple of inches before the weight and the wind snatched it away.

The spray whipped her face. She felt her mind slipping, tilting into the black.

Abbie peered into the darkness, praying, her lips moving as water pelted her face. Then lightning streaked once more across the sky.

She saw a body on a bucking rope.

It was white, naked. Finally, she remembered her flashlight and pulled it out of the jacket pocket. The rope popped and moaned in the wind as she clicked it on and then turned the beam downward.

The body was mangled.
It doesn’t look right
, Abbie thought.

“DAD, CAN YOU HEAR ME?” She leaned farther out and saw the outline of the huge gray concrete base that supported the bridge.

He must have slammed into it, breaking his bones. I have to get him up or he’s going to be smashed to a pulp
.

But as she watched, she realized the body was swinging free, missing the edges of the concrete base by a few feet. Why did the body appear so mangled and broken?

She made out a tiny thin line of black around its neck. The same line along the top of the shoulder just above the arm. And the left. And then she saw something that turned her stomach.

She swiveled and slammed her back against the railing, sliding down. She collapsed, relief and horror surging through her.
Thank you, thank you, Lord
.

Down below, the body swung freely through the pelting rain. It had to be Joe Kane. And his head was facing the wrong way.

P
ERELLI WALKED INTO THE MEETING AND SLAMMED DOWN A FOUR-INCH
stack of files.

He coughed.

Abbie sat in a chair in a corner. Her eyes were circled with black. She felt if someone touched her, she would tip over into some kind of bottomless dream. The room was filled with men: O’Halloran, Alexander, Z, Perelli, plus some others, men she assumed were from the mayor’s office, standing awkwardly in the corners. The edges of the faces around her were blurred. She needed caffeine or sleep.

“Okay, let’s get this started.”

He looked over to Abbie, who didn’t lift her head.

“Detective Kearney, you want to tell us how you knew to look for the latest victim on the Peace Bridge? Do you have information you want to share with this department? Or its goddamn chief?”

Abbie looked over at Z. They hadn’t had a chance to talk. He didn’t meet her eyes.

“It wasn’t information. It was a hunch.”

“That was a hell of a hunch. Please elaborate. And I want you to leave nothing out. Nothing, understood?”

Abbie’s head felt heavy. She felt she was drugged, even though she had barely closed her eyes the night before. What was the densest
matter on earth? Some kind of metal, she thought. The name fled her brain.

“Abbie?”

She looked up. Perelli was staring at her, his anger masked by what appeared to be fear.

“Yes?”

“It’s your meeting.”

She glanced around at the faces. They turned away, all except for Z, who nodded and gave her a go-get-’em smile. She must look like hell.

“What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with Joe Kane.”

Abbie felt a wavelet of nausea lap at the base of her skull. The other two hadn’t bothered her as much, but what had happened to Kane …

“Do you need a moment?”

“He was …”

“Yes?”

“He was cut up and put back together again. Backwards. The head was sawed off, then sewn back onto the neck just above the collarbone with sailing thread. We found a store at the marina had been broken into. That’s probably where he got it.”

The room was still.

“The arms, the same thing. Cut off and rotated 180 degrees. And the legs. The tongue was cut out and not found with the body. Kane’s penis was cut off and inserted into his anus. The monkey was found inserted above the severed right arm before it was reattached to the body.”

She’d stood by the coroner as he did the examination. What bothered her was how the body looked. A Frankenstein job, she thought, but didn’t Dr. Frankenstein want to create a human being? Wasn’t it a noble experiment gone wrong? She couldn’t remember, but she thought so.

This killer wanted only to destroy. The reversed feet pressing against the stainless-steel table made the stiff body stick up, as if it
were shoving its shorn genitals into the air. At first, the Latino mortuary assistant hadn’t known whether to lay the body on its back. He’d looked at her, confused. She’d told him to proceed the way the body was.

“My working theory for the last few days is that the killer has been telling us his life story. More importantly, he’s been telling the victims, showing them how he lived at certain points in his life. Obviously he feels they are responsible. So he is forcing them to relive his pain and anguish.

“Jimmy Ryan was forced into a very confined space. Marty Collins was made to feel as cold as humanly possible. And now Joe Kane …

“The killer feels violated in some way. Reversing the head and the limbs … it’s like a distress signal. Something terrible was done to this man—and not just physically. Or not
primarily
physically. He feels his humanity was violated. And then what he did with the genitals. I’m guessing he was raped.”

“That sounds like prison.”

“A lot of it sounds like prison. Confinement, cold, possibly sexual abuse.”

O’Halloran cut in. “Okay. But how did you know to look on the Peace Bridge?”

“Like I said. It was a hunch. It began with the information about Jimmy Ryan’s earlier arrest. He was caught on the Peace Bridge.”

“Yeah. And?”

“He wasn’t found with guns or drugs. The Clan wasn’t exporting either of those. I should have made the connection.”

It wasn’t entirely true. The light that had gone on in her head had to do with Mrs. Ryan’s face days after her son had been killed. It was a special calm, the calm of a martyr’s mother. If Jimmy had been bringing in dope or AK-47s, even if they somehow benefited the IRA, the woman’s face would have been lined with shame and grief. She knew the County too well. Mrs. Ryan’s behavior was all wrong for a drug mule’s or a gunrunner’s mother. It was right for something else.

Her eyes had been shining. As if her son’s death had finally revealed some meaning to her. The truth of Jimmy’s wayward life.