Moonlight Falls (31 page)

A brand new 9 mm in hand (and a bruise on his right temple from the dark man’s silenced pistol barrel) the lieutenant/acting Captain approached the double doors that serviced Pathology. Pausing, he turned back to his team of uniformed men and waved them on. When the wall-mounted electronic sensor device detected his presence, it automatically opened the sliding glass doors. Without hesitation, he charged in, the supporting cast of cops right on his tail.

“George Robb,” he shouted inside the narrow basement corridor. “George Robb, you are so fucking under arrest!”

72

WE DROVE IN SILENCE while the afternoon wore on and the rain came down heavier. Soon the Home Depot loomed on the horizon like the giant metal-sided neon-lit hardware and home supply Oz that it was.

“There’s just one thing that bothers me,” George said as we passed signs that directed us towards the parking area. “We go digging up a body illegally, they’ll not only add that to our laundry list of crimes, they’ll toss any evidence we come up with out of court.”

I gazed at George’s profile—the gaunt nose, the long pony-tailed hair, the worn jean jacket that replaced the white smock just before we left the morgue.

“We’re not doing anything illegal,” I said.

“Unauthorized exhumation is not punishable by law in New York State?” he needlessly asked.

He pulled into the massive parking lot, made a beeline for an empty spot up close to the glass entry doors. He threw the transmission into park, killed the engine.

“We’re gonna
get
permission,” I said, lifting the file folder once more, then setting it back down on my lap. “From the family.”

My voice sounded muffled and thick with the engine off and the windows shut against the rain. Taking his hand off the keys, George left them dangling in the ignition.

“We don’t have that kind of time.”

“I didn’t say
when
we’d get it. I just said we’d get it. Sooner or later.”

“You’re
counting
on this sooner or later permission,” he said like a question.

“When the family sees what we’ve done for them,” I said, “they’ll be sending us roses.”

“What about getting caught?” he asked. “You can’t just expect to drive into a cemetery, start digging away.”

“The body we’re going to take is buried in the center of a ten square mile, heavily wooded cemetery,” I pointed out. “We’ll be fine.”

“Risk,” George said with a shake of the head. “There’s some serious risk in what we’re doing.”

“Risk is our middle name,” I said, pulling out a small list of items I needed him to pick up.

“I thought it was Stupid,” he said, snatching the list from my fingers.

My reason for choosing the teenaged body of Kevin Ryan was not indiscriminate.

His official manner of death had been listed on the thin D.C. as “suicide.” I was aware of that fact without having to consult the D.C. itself. After all, I was the one who filled the form out (which George, at my request, later co-signed as the county M.E.).

But I also knew for a fact that Ryan’s death had actually resulted from an accidental hanging inside the walk-in attic of his parent’s suburban home. So did Cain at the time. But while I wanted to list “accidental death” instead of suicide in order to avoid any investigation at all, Cain insisted I go with the latter.

Maybe the general public isn’t aware of it, but many so-called “child suicides” are really just accidents. The “suicides” are almost always young boys who have hanged themselves while thoughtlessly enhancing their solitary sexual experience. They realize that by hanging themselves from the neck while masturbating, they can achieve one powerful orgasm. Ugly to contemplate. But a fact all the same.

I guess it all starts somewhere in the adolescent experience. Kids somehow discover that by applying a pressure to the carotid artery you severely diminish the oxygen supply to the brain. The more the oxygen is cut off, the better the climax. Which is exactly why so many of these kids end up dead. The grief-stricken parents, not wanting to live with the pain and stigma attached to “death by experimental self gratification” almost always opt for the no less tragic, but more understanding suicide. Some are even willing to pay a cop like Cain for the slight change in manner of death.

Suburbanites have their reputations to think about.

Which, as far as I was concerned, is exactly what Cain had been counting on when he called me on the job back in March of this year. I remember looking at the eighteen-year-old’s body which had been hanging from an attic rafter for more than five hours. Cain insisted I call it a suicide, despite the evidence—his entire lower body was naked, his right hand raised high overhead, clutching the Gucci belt he’d wrapped around his neck and buckled to the overhead rafter.

“Fuck the autopsy,” is how he put it. “Just get George to sign away.”

But when I asked him why the presiding S.P.D. officer on duty didn’t sign it himself, he said he had his reasons. In the end he simply insisted on utilizing my part-time “expertise” on this one, backed up by the M.E.’s signature as well as a comprehensive C.S. for which he was prepared to pay handsomely in cold, hard scratch. The department was crazy backed-up with pending cases.

The usual Cain-Montana police story.

I took a look around the lot to make sure we weren’t being followed.

But that’s when a strange feeling began to swim over me.

A cold, up and down my backbone sensation that told me maybe we hadn’t been careful enough; that it would only be a matter of time until I was connected with George; until somebody discovered that he hadn’t shown up for work today; that the now missing bodies of the Montanas hadn’t made it to the Fitzgerald funeral home after all.

As strange as it sounded, I had to wonder what the hell Cain was doing with his time? Why hadn’t he picked up on me yet? Stormville wasn’t big. Maybe forty or fifty thousand people. Maybe he was so busy reassuring his body part buyers that he wasn’t paying attention to the chase, the re-apprehension of Stormville’s “most wanted.”

The rush of ice cold anxiety was so bad, I couldn’t feel my feet.

I locked the car doors. Turning the keyed ignition, I powered up the dash.

It was the top of the four o’clock hour.

It didn’t take a lot of searching to find an A.M. station that played only news.

After a commercial for a place called the Tire Warehouse, they flashed the lead story.

“The search for escaped S.P.D. officer turned capital murderer, Richard Divine, has intensified late this afternoon. State Police, in cooperation with U.S. Marshals and F.B.I., have set up perimeter checkpoints within a fifteen-mile radius of Stormville city limits. Traffic along the Thruway and Interstate 90 has begun to back up in all directions while choppers are combing the rural and outlying areas for any signs of the forty-year-old detective officially charged in the gruesome killing of local socialite and police wife, Scarlet Montana.

“Speaking from outside the doors to the Stormville Medical Arts Center autopsy room, which only moments ago was sealed off by Stormville P.D., Senior Detective, Mitchell Cain was quoted as saying, ‘We are closing in on Mr. Divine. We know he was here in this hospital within the past hour and we now suspect that Dr. George Robb, hospital pathologist and county M.E., may in fact be aiding and abetting him.’

“This afternoon a shocked Stormville remains on full alert while a man accused of first degree homicide roams the streets and byways of this once peaceful Catskill town.

“This is Belinda—”

I turned off the radio, killed the ignition. So that’s what Cain was doing. He hadn’t been bluffing when he told George that the Montana bodies better make it to Fitzgerald’s funeral home by noon, or else face the consequences.

My brain was buzzing.

Too much adrenaline, too much blood.

Synapses and nerve endings overheating, glowing. I made a fist with my right hand, then released it.

I knew then that we had to go back and get the Montana bodies before the police obtained the warrant necessary to raid George’s home. We’d have to grab up the bodies, exhume Ryan, then get the hell out of Stormville. That is, we’d have to leave town long enough to put our case together. When that was done, I was fully prepared to turn myself in, not as the State’s number one suspect, but as the State’s number one witness.

I wiped the steam off the windshield, looked for George.

What was taking him so long?

For a split second, I pictured his cuffed and shackled body being yanked out the front double doors of the Home Depot, a pair of gun-toting cops on either side of him. But it was my imagination playing tricks on me again.

Lola … I had to talk with Lola.

We had no cell phone. That meant getting out of the car, exposing myself in broad daylight. It was raining again. I had that advantage. There was a payphone mounted to the side of the building. I could see it from where I was sitting. No one was standing near it. In fact, no one was standing outside the building at all.

Only head cases don’t know enough to get out of the rain.

I opened the door, exited the car, felt the cool, hard spray on my face.

73

I SLIPPED THE QUARTER into the slot, waited for the dial tone. Then I dialed the university neurology lab. Lola answered almost immediately.

“It’s me,” I said.

No voice, just breathing, the sound of chairs and furniture sliding around in the background. Like her laboratory office was being ransacked.

“Not now,” she said, low, stern.

“Cain,” I said. “Cain is there, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” is all she said.

“Did he present a formal warrant?”

“Yes,” she said again.

I turned away from the wall, gazed out upon the parking lot. Just scattered trucks and cars pulling in and out. People running, not walking towards the doors, jacket collars pulled up over their heads.

Nature’s wrath; Cain’s rage.

The senior detective (and now South Pearl Street Captain by default), producing the warrants he needed in record time. But then, who knew what judges he had stuffed in his hip pocket? Maybe even Hughes.

I said, “Don’t tell him anything. Call Stanley, tell him what’s happened; what they’re doing to you.”

“Richard,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Are you feeling okay?”

Lola, always thinking of me, my health. Not thinking of herself, her well being.

“Never better,” I lied. “What about you? Can you handle this?”

“He’s coming back in,” she said. “I have to go.”

“You won’t hear from me until this thing is over. One way or another.”

“Live,” she said, and hung up.

74

TURNING AWAY FROM THE piles of papers and overturned desk drawers, Cain lit up a cigarette, faced Lola Ross directly.

“If you know where Divine and Robb are and I find out you’re just giving me the strong/silent type routine, I will come after you with everything I’ve got.”

Cain smiled as the blue smoke oozed from out of his nostrils.

Lola stood tall, stiff, in ironed blue jeans and black t-shirt, bare arms crossed over her chest. When she abruptly reached out with her right hand, snatched the cigarette from the Cain’s mouth, tossed it onto the floor, his gray eyes went wide.

“On the day they bury your cancer plagued body,” she whispered, “I will do a dance on your grave.”

Cain looked down at the still smoldering cigarette, then looked back up.

“Not if you go first,” he said.

75

SOON AS GEORGE GOT back in the car I told him exactly what I knew. Did it as calm and collected as possible.

There was no worse time for panic.

But that didn’t stop George from racing out of the parking lot.

With not another word exchanged, we drove back to his town house as fast as we could without running the risk of a pull-over.

Maybe God was on the side of right. Because the home’s exterior was quiet and calm.

But that didn’t mean we weren’t being set up for a trap.

Pulling the 9 mm, I followed George up the back steps to the rear entrance. Once inside, we scanned the place up and down. No one was there. No cops in the closets; no Marshals on the rooftop.

Just the dead bodies in the bathtubs.

Immediately we loaded the Montanas back onto the flatbed of the El Camino, salvaging what we could of the ice, tossing it all into the mix. The whole operation took about twenty minutes. As George locked the joint back up, we began to hear sirens in the distance. We had no way of knowing if the sirens were intended for us. Neither of us intended to wait around long enough to find out.

But then George brought up a good point.

He said, “They got their finger on me now; they’re gonna plant a bead on the El Camino.”

Now that he was being charged with complicity, his whole manner seemed more serious, less relaxed than before. His face no longer showed hints of a smile, but instead had gone tighter, more gaunt. I had to wonder if the stress of out sit-rep was causing him more internal pain than he already had to endure, day in, day out. For a quick moment I thought about asking him. But then thought better.

He told me to get in.

“I know a guy owes me a favor,” he said. “He’ll help us out with the car.”

We were off towards the downtown in the direction of the river. I didn’t say anything about it, but I could see that George was careful to drive the minor roads, keeping away from the main avenues and thoroughfares.

Soon we came to a downtown warehouse area that was situated maybe a hundred feet from the river. Just one of those old brick monsters that used to serve as an industrial mill in its previous life.

He pulled up in front of a pair of roll-up doors and got out.

He walked up to a metal door that was positioned beside the roll-ups and pressed the bell. After a beat or two, a man dressed in oil-stained overalls showed himself. The man was wearing an old Yankees baseball cap and he was holding a towel in his grease-stained hands.