Moonlight Falls (33 page)

It didn’t take long to hit the jackpot.

Once the suit jacket, shirt and undershirt were removed, we could plainly view the hasty incisions that had been made over the places where the organs were harvested. There was one on the right side of the upper pelvis and two more on the left side. And if we could plainly see the incisions, so too could the video camera.

Both kidneys and the liver were gone.

Whoever had performed the butcher job had not even bothered to fill in the hollow places left behind where the organs had once filled them out. Just a cursory needle and thread job.

My God, even the devil has more respect for the dead
.

George worked fast, audibly describing the details of the post-burial autopsy exactly and precisely as it would have been done had it been officially commissioned by the State. With the procedure concluded and the two of us certain beyond any doubt that someone somehow had cut out the kid’s organs immediately after death and without the necessary notification from the family, we dressed Kevin back up, laid him once more inside his casket. Securing the lid, we then rolled him back out to the El Camino, slipped him inside with the other two bodies. That accomplished, we went back inside to remove our scrubs and to retrieve the tape.

The entire procedure took only forty-five minutes from start to finish .

Heading back out to the car, I made a mental note of the accumulated evidence.

I had the Montana cadavers and I had the exhumed body of Kevin Ryan plus his recorded postmortem examination. There was the Swiss bank account and there was the paper trail in my possession that described victims I’d rubber-stamped for Cain—each one of them organ donors. There was the film of Cain entering and leaving a downtown Woodstock Russian restaurant and there was Dr. Miner’s toxicology report that had picked up on the Curare, not to mention evidence that proved Scarlet had been drugged way beyond the possibility of committing suicide with a knife. There was taped testimony from Lynn suggesting that Cain was sleeping with Scarlet. If what she told me was true, Stormville’s newest Police Captain could be nabbed with murder and the motive with which to execute it. Then there was George’s testimony and mine.

Not that it would count for much.

I felt all the air inside my lungs escape like suddenly deflated balloons. I reached out with both hands, balanced myself against the El Camino flatbed.

“Divine,” George shouted, grabbing hold of my shoulders. “You ready to do this?”

“Yeah,” I lied, my voice hardly more than a whisper. “Yeah.”

George slid out the pine box, opened the lid. I climbed inside, laid down on my back, hands crossed at my chest.

“Next stop, Stormville,” he said before closing the coffin.

79

ONCE PAST THE THRUWAY checkpoint just north of Kingston, George pulled over onto the shoulder, killed the lights. The danger gone, he helped me out of the beer casket. Then I joined him inside the cab. He reached into the pocket of his black trench coat, handed me a cell phone.

“Thought you didn’t believe much in modern technology?” I said.

“It came with the haircut,” he said just as he pulled back out onto the highway, hit the gas.

The traffic was light. The checked line-stripes zipped past the white headlights like machinegun tracers. Hypnotic and quick. It was one o’clock in the morning. My job wasn’t finished. I decided to get right back to work.

I dialed Cain’s cell phone.

There was a quick pickup. Cain wasn’t sleeping well these days. Who the hell was?

He barked out his name.

I said, “Whatever happened to a polite hello?”

Dead air told me he was trying to swallow a brick.

He said, “Tell me where you are, Divine. I can come get you. No cops, no press. Just you and me.”

Not a word about Joy. Could it be they hadn’t found him yet?

I was counting on it.

“I know everything about everything,” I told him. “About you, Jake and Joy running the body parts. About Scarlet threatening to go public with it. About you killing her even though you were fucking her. About a grief-stricken Jake Montana going turncoat on you after you did it. About you killing him to shut him up. About you trying to burn up all trace evidence along with his house.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. I remembered Lynn saying the same thing.

“You pinned the whole thing on me because you had my signatures on all those case reports; because you had a beer bottle with my prints and spit on it; because you might have proof that Scarlet and me were occasional lovers.”

There was a shuffling noise. I heard the pop-top on his Zippo lighter. It told me he was firing up a smoke. I pictured the top cop sitting at his S.P.D. desk, bottle of scotch by his side, shirt sleeves rolled up, with only the white bulb of his desk lamp to light up the blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

He said, “And I suppose you can prove all this.”

“The evidence I have at my disposal is indisputable and irrefutable. Would you like me to give you an accounting?”

“What do you want from me?”

“Call a press conference with the powers that be,” I told him. “Internal Affairs, the D.A., the Mayor, the fucking Governor for Christ’s sakes. Call it for noon today so that the local news broadcasts it live and uncut.”

Straight ahead of me, dark open road. On the cell phone, the sound of Cain breathing, smoking.

“You announce that your department along with Prosecuting Attorney O’Connor have made a grave mistake in accusing me of Scarlet and Jake Montana’s murders. You tell all of Stormville that I am now a free man, that I need not find myself in legal jeopardy any longer.”

“What am I supposed to tell the press when they ask me for a new suspect?”

“That’s your call,” I said. “I just wanna live out whatever life I got left.”

I glanced over at a smiling George. He pulled his right hand off the wheel, made a thumbs up.

“Second request,” I said. “You and Lynn draw up a letter transferring primary custody of my son to me. I want you to fax it immediately to Stanley Rose’s office.”

Nothing on line but silence.

“What if I say a big
fuck you
to all this?”

“Then I happily go public with the bodies of evidence.”

“The Montanas,” he said. “You took the bodies.”

“I’ll do you one better. You remember that kid Ryan you pinned with a suicidal hanging a couple months ago? Seems his liver and his kidneys showed up missing during our post burial autopsy.”

“We,” Cain said. “As in you and Robb.”

“And did I mention the footage we shot of you going in and out of The Russo Restaurant in Woodstock long before the lunch or dinner hour? Either you’ve acquired a taste for Russian cuisine or you got Russian mob buddies who partake in the illegal heroin and body parts trade with Stormville’s best. You want more?”

“You, blackmailing me,” he said. “Go figure.”

“Goes around comes around,” I said.

George, driving, grinning.

He said, “In the end, it’ll be your word against mine, Divine. The fugitive versus the new Captain of the Stormville cops.”

“Correction,” I chanced. “Your word against mine
and
Nicky Joy’s.”

More dead air; more smoking.

“Joy is with you?”

There
, I thought. He said it.
Exactly what I needed him to say.

“Let’s just say he’s very safe and very sorry for the crimes he’s assisted you in committing against humanity.”

“Sorry for himself,” he said. “Or sorry for you?”

“Sorry for you actually,” I said, “and the hard time you’re gonna be doing when all this is exposed.”

Cain’s tight face seething, veins popping through the skin on his brow—I could see it so vividly in my head I could almost reach out and touch it.

“I’ll call for the conference,” he said. “But how do I know I can trust you? How do I know you won’t turn yourself and your so-called evidence in to the F.B.I.?”

“Send the letter of custody out tonight and go through with your conference tomorrow,” I said. “Then we’ll decide what to do about my evidence.”

He asked, “How do I get in touch with you?”

“Me get in touch with you,” I said, cutting the connection.

80

NOT A SPLIT SECOND after hanging up the phone, an exhausted Cain slammed his fist on the desktop. He stood up, swiped his hand and arm across the desk, plowing everything it contained onto the floor, including a green glass shaded banker’s lamp which shattered into a thousand pieces. Now in the dark office, his breathing was so shallow and rapid, he thought he might pass out.

He was panicking and he knew it.

Digging into the pocket of his leather driving jacket, he found his pack of beloved Marlboros, flipped open the top.

But the pack was empty.

“Fuck you too,” he screamed, crushing the pack in his hand, tossing it to the floor along with the rest of the detritus.

In his head he thought,
Maybe I should have allowed that dark Russian bastard to kill me while he had the chance. Maybe I should not have promised to find Joseph for him. That he needed me alive to find Joseph. Maybe instead, I should have told him the truth: that I had come to The Russo to cover my ass—to kill the white rat.

As the first of a series of big tears fell from slate-gray eyes, he reached for the shoulder-holstered 9 mm. He thumbed off the safety, shoved the barrel into his mouth. Shooting hand trembling, he began to depress the trigger with his thumb.

But then as quickly as he decided to call an end to the life, he pulled the gun back out of his mouth. Lowering the weapon, he spit a wad of gun metal tasting saliva onto the floor. He then bent down at the knees, retrieved his phone, set it back onto the desk. Establishing a connection, he punched in the seven digits that would access Crime Reporter Brendan Lyons’ cell phone.

81

WE TURNED OFF THE highway, pulled onto the main rural road that would lead us back into the heart of Stormville.

George was no longer grinning. Nor was he saying a single word about anything.

As for me, the
Maybes
were beginning to pile up in my brain like a multiple car wreck.

Maybe I should have been heading straight for the F.B.I.? Maybe I should have been on the horn with Stanley, telling him to meet me at the downtown F.B.I. headquarters? But then, maybe Stanley wanted nothing more to do with me now that I’d become a fugitive on the run from a crime I “supposedly” did not commit? Maybe he’d prefer that I throw myself at the mercy of Judge Hughes? Maybe he’d decided to ditch me now that I had no way of producing the Deed to the Hope Lane house? Maybe he’d decided to ditch me now that I was a fugitive from justice?

I felt my stomach going sour on me, my head throbbing in its core. I knew that if I started thinking too hard again, I’d risk another seizure.

Goddamned nerves. Or should I say paranoia?

I stared out the car window onto the yellow road signs that flew past, illuminated for just a split second in the El Camino high beams. I listened to the swipe-swipe-swipe of the windshield wipers and for a second I glanced at George’s bald head and newly shaven face.

If it were possible to stop the world and jump the hell off I would have done it in a heartbeat. Instead I’d have to content myself with stopping something else.

I said, “Stop the car, George.”

He turned to me.

“Would do you mean stop—”

“Just stop the fucking car.”

He pulled off to the side, killed the lights but kept the engine and the wipers running.

“We’re not going to Stormville,” he said quizzically.

“Who the hell are we fooling?” I said. “There’s nowhere for us to go, no place to hide.”

“I know some people—”

I shook my head.

“Hear me out,” I said. “Cain has no intention of calling for a conference.”

“You think he just told you what you
wanted
to hear?”

“I think he’s going to stall me,” I said. “I think he has no intention of exonerating me any more than he intends to transfer custody of my kid.”

“You’re thinking again,” he said. “Nice and logical, without the usual crippling effects.”

“Cain thinks Joy is working with me now,” I said. “If he believes the kid is siding with me he’s going to go looking for him. He’ll try and kill him to shut him up. Just like Scarlet; just like Jake.”

“Impossible,” George said. “Joy’s already dead.”

“But Cain doesn’t know that. He probably just assumes that Joy is lying low until this thing somehow blows over.”

George nodded his head. Steel blue eyes told me he knew where I was going with this.

“He’ll start looking in the most obvious place,” he said. “The kid’s house.”

I said, “If I know Mitchell Cain, he’s checking the load on his 9 mm. He’s opening up the trunk of his prized
Beemer
, setting a can or two of embalming fluid inside it. He’s getting into the car and setting out to Joy’s house right now.”

“Why don’t you call him back, save him the trouble?” George asked.

The rain strafed the hood and the trunk. The wipers swished. My heart beat, my belly caved.

“Because no matter who is dead, Cain is not about to deal with me.”

“There’s not gonna be any conferences,” he agreed. “No admittance by the S.P.D. or the Prosecutor of making a mistake.”

“Instead there’s going to be another murder,” I said. “And it’s going to happen now, this very night.”

“Joy is going to die twice,” George said.

“And if Cain has his way,” I said, “the kid’s blood will be on my hands. But if I have my way, I’ll catch him in the act.”

82

FIRST GEORGE PULLED INTO a gas station, checked out Joy’s home address in a phone book that was attached to the pay phone unit by a thin cable.

“How’s the pain?” he asked as soon as he got back inside the car.