Moonlight Falls (20 page)

Nothing but ringing coming from Miner’s office phone.

When his voicemail clicked on I decided not to leave a message. I didn’t know his home number. Miner didn’t believe in giving it out to anybody.

I hung up, hoping to Christ he still believed in me.

A minute later, I picked the phone back up, punched in the number for Stormville Medical Center, Pathology Unit.

Robb wasn’t answering.

Or maybe it just seemed that way considering I was once more under the gun.

But when he finally picked up, I told him right off, “Cain changed his mind. Before you and me could do it for him.”

My blood was boiling. I could feel it running, throbbing through my veins, as if my skin had somehow peeled itself back and away from my body.

Just breathing coming from the phone.

“George,” I said. “You there?”

“Divine,” he said. “Didn’t you just call me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m calling you.”

“No, what I mean is, you called me a couple of minutes ago with the exact same information—suicide to murder; keep Scarlet’s body in storage; hold off Fitzgerald … Remember?”

I sat back, swallowed a hard breath.

“It’s not memory that’s the problem,” I said.

“Oh, that’s good, ‘cause for a second or so I thought you might be losing your mind.”

“What’s left of it,” I said, lowering the phone.

But Robb didn’t laugh.

My mind, it wasn’t always right.

I put the phone back up against my ear.

“I’ll call you back,” I said and hung up.

I sat there at the table with the rain having picked up against the roof and the kitchen windows. I poured a whiskey and wracked my aching brain.

What it all came down to was this:

Just what the hell was Mitch Cain hiding?

What was so important that he was willing to murder for it?

I lifted my head, looked out the kitchen window at the gray, rain-filled sky. I knew that in order to get at the real truth, I had to dig deeper. I had to start investigating the
why
on top of the
how
. I had to go back in time to some of the first jobs I’d done for Cain. Not as one of his full-time staff detectives, but as his “part-timer.”

It might not have been the correct place to begin digging. But at the moment, it was the only place I had.

I went upstairs into the master bedroom, dug two large boxes out of the closet, carried them one atop the other down to the kitchen table where I began skimming through them. As I’ve pointed out one-hundred times before, I’d been placed on disability not long after botching a raid on a suspected drug dealer. The job had been my first since returning to the force after a lengthy recovery. But after that and the lawsuit that followed, the department relegated me to the part-time projects Cain and/or Jake specifically brought me in on, not as an S.P.D. detective necessarily, but as an independent investigator or a detective’s assistant assigned to check and corroborate official police findings. In other words, so long as I did what they told me to do, following their leads from A to Z, there was no problem, no head condition to consider.

Starting at the box marked ‘00-’01, I glanced at my very first part-time assignment dated August 3, 2000 in blue ballpoint.

The job involved a teenaged kid who, in a drunken stupor, rammed his motorcycle into a parked car killing both himself and the woman who was still belted into the driver’s seat.

A clear case of vehicular manslaughter.

That is, had the kid lived.

But at Cain’s request I gave the scene a quick once-over, examining both the wreckage of the motorcycle and the car—the former a Harley Davidson and the latter a Volkswagen Beetle. In my estimation the kid had been killed instantly when he went through the side window and collided head to head with the driver, who was also killed instantly.

Even now I recalled taking the time to check out their separate I.D.s—names, addresses, D.O.B.s and vitals. The fact that they were both organ donors (blood type B and A respectively), didn’t surprise me in the least.

So far so good, as far as two unnecessary deaths went.

But when I requested the scheduling of an autopsy with George Robb, Cain swore up and down that it would be waste of precious time. That if I went “easy on this one,” he’d see that I was well compensated. The force—especially S.I.U.—was overworked now, he claimed. That was back when Jake, in cooperation with the Mayor, had initiated a plan to rent cops out to private businesses as security guards. The result? The S.P.D. didn’t always have the manpower or the resources necessary to investigate every little accident or drug-related shooting that came their way.

I remember standing there, little more than a year after my accident, nauseous as all hell from the anti-inflammatory drugs they were making me take on top of the motion sickness pills and prescription codeine. I recall thinking,
Little? There are two dead people lying in the middle of the road and you’re calling the situation “little.
”

But Cain insisted: why did I think he had to resort to hiring back retired and disabled cops on a freelance basis to lessen the load? He just didn’t have the staff or the time. So if I could work it out with him at his request, things would go a lot smoother.

“And who knows, old partner,” he said, “this is Stormville after all. I can give you a shitload of work on top of the disability scratch.”

The golden carrot set before me in the hazy glow of the street lamps, Cain stated that in his own opinion, cause, manner and mechanism of death were obvious (crashed motorcycle; massive head trauma; accident). There was no reason to prolong both families’ agonies. Then, with his back to the parked cruisers and the accident wreckage, he proceeded to slide out ten, one-hundred dollar bills from the interior pocket of his blazer, stuffed them into the side pocket of my leather jacket.

At the time, I was going through my divorce.

With my mounting law bills and support payments, I never considered the possibility of not taking the cash. After all, I wasn’t a regular cop anymore. I was simply a part-timer living on the Union’s disability. They wanted to throw a little extra cash at me, I might find myself a little more cooperative in my methods of investigation.

And cooperative I was.

I simply reached out with my pen, signed off on the paperwork, then went home to draw up a full case synopsis of my own.

The second job came a month later.

A fifty-seven-year-old widow had jumped from the fifth floor window of her downtown apartment building onto the Grand Street cobblestones in what was once Stormville’s Little Italy. Murder as the manner of death had already been ruled out by on-site S.P.D. when no forcible entry and no fingerprints, latent or otherwise, other than the woman’s own were discovered at the scene.

But when I was brought in, I could immediately see that the shattered body was found lying face down in the road only about twelve feet away from the building. Anyone having passed Forensics 101 will tell you that suicides always
jump
out of a window or off a ledge. Homicides, on the other hand, are almost always
dropped
so that they land right beside the wall or the concrete sidewalk below.

Of course, I recalled not being particularly surprised by the fact that this woman was also an organ donor. I didn’t think twice about it while I watched Cain pull up to the scene in an unmarked cop cruiser, again with specific underhanded instructions for me to keep my mouth shut about the possibility of murder, despite the position and location of the body. Once more he offered me cash.

Twenty-one-hundred big ones.

This time however, in the interest of covering our asses, Cain agreed that I call on my friend George Robb to assist with what amounted to about a half-hour of bogus paperwork and signatures. For the sake of S.O.P.

S.O.P. according to Cain.

I took careful sips of the whiskey, moved through the stacks of notes, records and reports like a man possessed.

The third job came just one week later in late September of 2000.

A twenty-year-old black man was gunned down outside T.J.’s. Bar and Grille on South Pearl Street inside Stormville’s south end. Cain met me on the scene at two in the morning, again asking me to sign off on their case synopsis and, at the same time, seeing what I could do about securing the necessary paperwork without going to the bother of autopsy.

“They’re just drug dealers anyway,” is how he put it, while handing me yet another envelope. This time a mouthwatering grand total of twenty-five hundred.

I sat at the kitchen table and once more ran down the Xeroxed list of the dealer’s vitals. His height, weight, criminal record, and how the dealer bequeathed his body to science. The postmortem request was to take immediate effect upon his sudden death.

“Bequeathed his body to science,” I whispered to myself.

I guess that’s when the realization slapped me over the head.

I flipped through the remaining stack of notes. I had no idea why it hadn’t occurred to me earlier, or why I had never noticed it until now. Maybe it had something to do with my condition. Maybe it had something to do with sitting down and wading through the material all at once. Because it was only now that the pattern seemed crystal clear. Obvious even. Or was it just a coincidence that every single man and woman whose death I had, quote—
investigated
—unquote, had consented to organ donation?

I looked through each and every case one more time, starting from the top.

Like I said, all of them had organ donor status in common. And there was something else too. Every one of the victims had died a violent, unnatural death.

I sat back and thought about it for a moment.

If I were the M.E, would I have bothered to save what was left of those damaged bodies for science and/or medicine once I’d completed the autopsy?

Probably not.

More than likely, I would have handed over the battle-scarred bodies to the respective families for burial and left it at that.

Christ, why hadn’t I bothered to step out of the forest before now?

Was it possible that I had been so blind that I hadn’t even begun to recognize the part I had been playing in what now looked to me like a black market operation to sell body parts? Was my personal policy of asking no (or very few) questions about to backfire on me now that I had left my name on a paper trail that could be traced all over New York State? Was my brain that messed up?

I took a drink, stared down at the pile of notes, records and papers.

Paper tigers poised to bury their fangs and claws into my back.

More than two dozen cases of suicides, gunshot and car crash victims, drowning deaths, you name it. Every single one of them organ donors and every one of their case synopses executed by me and in full agreement with S.P.D. findings.

Dick Divine, part-time corroborator, big-time patsy, full-time head case.

I thought a little more about Cain’s threat to make me the number one suspect in Scarlet’s suicide-cum-murder. He had copies of everything at his fingertip disposal, I was sure. You see Cain wasn’t the type to overlook things like that. He had been using me all along as the perfect chump for his operation and I hadn’t so much as asked a single question about
why
he wanted to use me.

That is until the S.P.D. Captain himself personally brought me in on Scarlet’s case. No wonder Cain and Montana seemed so caught off-guard when I refused to be their rubberstamp. For the first time in three years’ worth of cases, I was turning my back on them, refusing to follow their line.

Maybe Cain was right when he said that I had suddenly grown a conscience. Maybe not. But then, he
was
right about one thing. He had the power to nail me to a wall.

Power and paper.

He had the ability to establish motive not only in the form of my on-again, off-again affair with Scarlet, but also for my having been seen in her home the very night of her murder. And Cain had the beer bottle with my D.N.A. on it to prove it. For all I knew, he had a secret videotape stashed away somewhere, showing Scarlet and me doing the wild thing.

Shit!

When I really thought about it, Cain could nail me with motive, opportunity, intent and means. It was as simple as all that.

No murder weapon?

Of course there was no murder weapon because I had been the one to dispose of it. I just had no recollection of it. That’s the absolute line they would take in a court of law, so help me God or fate.

Okay, Divine old boy, take a breath … that’s it, breathe easy, get your head together.

I knew then I needed a lawyer. Cain had been right about that too. There was no time to waste. What choice did I have? None, other than contacting the same man whose firm handled my divorce. My Dad’s one-time lawyer.

Regardless of the thirty Gs I still owed him.

48

SEVEN GOD-AWFUL DIGITS I knew by heart.

My lawyer, Stanley Rose. His direct office line.

“You got a lot of nerve calling me, Divine,” he said.

I tried to look on the bright side: at least he didn’t hang up on me.

“I’m doing my best to pay you back,” I said, voice cool and calm. “I swear it.”

It was the truth.

Stanley said, “For more than a year now I’ve been asking you to take some kind of action on your bill. You haven’t so much as responded once. Tell me, Divine, what will it take to get this bill paid?”

I pictured the fifty-something lawyer seated at his wide mahogany desk, horn-rimmed glasses sliding down his straight nose, full head of gray hair groomed to perfection, pale cheeks flushed with anger.

I said, “Listen, Stanley, I’m working on something that will get you paid back in full plus plenty extra.”

For a beat there was only his inhaling and exhaling into the receiver.

“What do you need?”

I started from the beginning, not holding anything back, trying not to repeat anything.

After I finished, I asked him if he’d seen anything about the fatal Montana house fire on T.V.