Precious Blood (37 page)

He threw down his bag and went to the kitchen. Three messages. His cat paced on the counter, purring, while he played them back.

The first was Rad, voice creaking and painfully slow. Rad had passed Jenner’s information on to the Inquisitor team; they’d located a software business address for Robert Farrar and a handful of residences for the name. They were checking the residential addresses, and an ESU team was responding to the software company address.

The second was from Pyke, a terse request for news, for anything Jenner had heard. The third had come in just before he’d walked through the door.

“Doc, it’s Pat Mullins. Rad asked me to follow up with you.”

There was a loud grinding crackle and then a silent pause; Jenner imagined the glove covering the mouthpiece as Mullins spoke with someone on the ESU team. He came back on the line, sounding tired and pissy, and Jenner knew his leads hadn’t panned out.

“Evening was a bust. Six Robert Farrars in the five boroughs, contiguous New Jersey, Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk, and whatever the hell that southernmost county in Connecticut is, Fairfield, I think. We identified a software company he was a partner in, went belly up not too long after 9/11. In association with that, we found a residential address for Robert Farrar; he’d moved from the place, like, three years ago. No forwarding address. We’re following up on that now.”

In the background, Jenner could hear chatter, and imagined the strike team back at the station. Hanging up the body
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armor, locking the guns into the cages, bitching about the evening, about his bum leads.

“Took an ESU team to Williamsburg, to the office address. It’s a retrofitted factory; the whole building’s used by technology firms and the like. Got the building manager out of bed, he says the guy moved out of there a year or two ago, when his business went bust. So that’s a whole night, nothing to show for it.”

Noise welled up in the background, and Mullins paused for a second. “So, yeah. A bust. But, anyway, thanks, Doc.

Take care.” He paused a second, then added, “Sorry.”

Then a click, and the loft was silent again.

Jenner looked again at the postcards he’d stolen from the dying priest. A waste of time—various watercolors in Farrar’s weird maroon color scheme, just views of the Manhattan skyline, the correspondence a couple of years old.

He threw them down on the table and started to undress.

So, that was that. Driving through the snow, he’d imagined Ana being rescued, Farrar shot dead. By the time he reached New Jersey, the fantasy played in an endless loop, slow motion like the climax of a Peckinpah movie. The shadowy figures of the ESU team slipping around back of a suburban house, or a burned-out warehouse, flash-bangs in, cops through every door and window. Farrar going for his gun and being blown away, every person in the room emptying his assault rifle or handgun clip into him, shredding the monster until what was left would have to be scooped into garbage bags and carried to the morgue. Ana would be tied to a chair in the corner like a silent-movie heroine, weak from hunger and fear, and when the cops pulled down her gag, she’d ask for Jenner.

So much for that.

He felt like his chest was slowly caving in. He’d found the guy, but there was nothing he could do. He’d blown his last chance with the cops. Sure, they’d work his leads, and if the
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leads paid off, they’d bust Farrar, but Jenner was history. If they ever thought of him afterward, the thing they’d remember was how he got Joey Roggetti killed. How he dragged them from their homes a couple of nights before Christmas to chase down shitty leads in Brooklyn in the freezing cold.

Jenner lay down on his bed, staring at the ceiling. After a minute, he rolled carefully to his right and picked up his book of saints, a mass-market paperback published by a Cis-tercian press in England. The entry began blandly enough: Anastasia d. AD 304, tortured and received the Holy Crown of Martyrdom at Palmarola during the Diocletian Persecution, after refusing to renounce her faith.

But Jenner knew that they always hid the
really
horrific deaths behind banal descriptions. He made himself read the whole text one more time.

Saint Anastasia, on discovering that all the confessors had been butchered by the emperor, wept openly in the Roman court. When asked why she was crying, she said she wept at the loss of so many of her brethren.

She was then interrogated, and revealed herself as a Christian. When Diocletian couldn’t persuade her of the existence of the gods, she was sent to the holy man Upian. When Upian failed to get her to renounce her faith, he sent three pagan women to seduce her. When she rejected them, Upian attempted to force himself upon her; he was immediately struck blind, then collapsed and died, convulsing in agony. The prefect of Rome then tried to starve her to death, but she miraculously survived. Finally, she was led to the island of Palmarola for torture and execution. Her breasts were cut off, she was burned on a bonfire, and then decapitated.

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Religious myth is fluid, the stories changing with the century and the chronicler. Farrar would piece together the cru-elest version, distill the most horrific interpretation. It wasn’t a story from almost two thousand years ago anymore: it was real, and it was actually going to happen.

The Ambien Jenner took worked too well: he slept until the early afternoon, waking with a start to the ringing phone.

He hadn’t closed the curtains; the sky was tarnished tin, the room shadowy and somber.

He was too stiff to reach the phone, but when he heard Rad struggling to speak, he pulled himself out from under the blankets and picked up.

“Rad. I’m here.”

“Hey. Jenner. Good to speak to you.”

“How you doing?”

Rad coughed, and muttered “Ow” under his breath.

“Hangin’ in there. Okay.”

“I got your message last night. Thanks. And Mullins called to say the warehouse was a bust, and the residential addresses, too. Anything else turn up?”

“Naah. They think he’s the guy. Farrar.” He was breathing a little heavily. “They confirmed he designed and installed the databases at Hutchins, and at New Hope Clinic. Figure he has backdoor access. Computers—”

Jenner said, “Yeah. That’s pretty much what we figured.

Anything else?”

“No . . . Keep you informed . . .”

“Okay, Rad. You take it easy, okay?”

“You too, Jenner.”

He was about to hang up when he heard Rad say,

“Jenner.”

He answered.

“Jenner . . . you did good. You got everything right, all along . . . I appreciate it.”

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“Thanks.”

“No, Jenner, wait.”

It was painful to listen to him.

“Look. They’ll get her, okay? They’ll find her.”

“Thanks, Rad. I hope so. Thanks.”

There was a clatter as the detective hung up.

He put on a robe and drank some water. He put fresh food in the cat’s bowl and took care of the litter. He went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, then went back into the kitchen. The Weetabix was finished, so he fixed a bowl of Raisin Bran, then took it to the table and sat, looking out over the East River. He spat out the first mouthful of cereal; the milk was clotted and bitter. How could he not have noticed? He picked up the bottle—expired five days ago.

He sat, the taste of spoiled milk in his mouth, staring out the window. The Lower East Side, and Brooklyn beyond, the low mosaic of dense buildings, a few boats on the river, and on the other bank the warehouses of Williamsburg, like an old Dutch engraving.

The phone rang. Dan Israel from the DA’s office. More bad news—he should stop answering the phone.

Apparently, Father Sheehan, who was enjoying sudden celebrity in ancient language circles, had given an interview to the
Times
. Trying to share credit, the priest had cited the tracings Jenner had made of Barbara Wexler’s back. When Whittaker read the article, he’d discovered that Jenner had seen the body at the morgue; he’d had the surveillance video pulled and reviewed by Security. They’d identified Jenner breaking into the office early that morning, coming over the rooftop next to NYU Medical Center.

Whittaker had turned the tapes over to the DA’s office and was demanding that charges be pressed. Jenner’s actions were technically a class D felony, and the evidence against him was strong. Dan and Ken Salt had arranged for Jenner to quietly appear before a friendly judge the following day;
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both felt that it would be best to plead guilty. Conviction could carry a sentence of up to seven years in prison, but given the circumstances, Jenner would receive a fine and probation.

If Jenner didn’t make his court date, a warrant would be issued for his arrest. If he pleaded guilty, the fine wouldn’t be large, and the probation wouldn’t be long. But there was something else: the felony conviction would go on his record, and Whittaker would be lodging a formal complaint with the state licensing board. A felony conviction made it quite possible that Jenner’s license would be suspended or withdrawn, particularly with Whittaker’s growing influence in Albany.

Jenner thanked Dan and hung up.

After he’d showered and dressed, he called Rad at Bellevue.

A nurse’s aide told him that Garcia’s wife had had the phone removed from his room.

Jenner broke down and called Pat Mullins. Some news, no real progress. Every trail for Farrar had gone cold. They’d located the former CEO of Farrar’s software company in a federal prison in South Carolina, doing time for embezzlement. He’d been interviewed, and had volunteered that there was something wrong with Farrar physically—he needed to have regular hormone shots—but something even more wrong with him socially. The man said Farrar straight out had no idea how to communicate with other people.

They’d done a broad-area canvas through the neighborhood around Farrar’s old company in Williamsburg; other than a lot of bums, the search had been negative. Since they had no photograph of Farrar, it had been a shot in the dark at best. Besides, who’d hang around in the place where their life’s work went belly-up?

Looking for a photo, they’d run a DMV search; they’d just now located a record for him in Pennsylvania. His full name was Robert Sebastian Farrar, age thirty-five. They had
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requested the photo from his expired driver’s license; more than ten years old, but better than nothing. They were considering doing another sweep through Williamsburg, this time with the photograph.

The Pittsburgh-based forensic unit was in Snowden at that moment. They’d shoveled their way into the storage shed and were going through its contents. A Questioned Documents specialist on the team had been faxed copies of the text on Barbara Wexler’s back; he was currently working a comparison to the painting in the priest’s bedroom. Document examiner or not, Mullins said, it was pretty much a slam dunk, given the case history and the subject matter of the painting—the man having text cut into his face.

They’d subpoenaed the phone records from the rectory in Snowden, but he figured that was likely a dead end.

“And that’s about it. When we get the photo, it’ll go out to the media. He’ll be on every TV in New York tonight, and on the cover of every newspaper in the country tomorrow morning.”

He was silent for a second, then continued, a little softer.

“Look, Doc. We’ll find him. Probably by tomorrow morning it’ll be all over. Once his photo’s out, someone’ll drop a dime. You’ll see. Leave the worrying to us, okay?”

“Thanks.”

“We’ll take care of this. You rest up. How’re the ribs?”

“Fine, Pat. They’re fine. Thanks for being straight with me.”

The detective hesitated a second, figuring out how he was going to say what he wanted to say.

“So you should rest up. And . . . Doc, look, it would probably be better if you didn’t call me on this line. My battery’s almost dead, and with things going the way they are, every-body and his brother is calling me. If anything happens, I’ll let you know right away, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks.”

The line went dead.

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He sat at his table and watched the fading light die out over the water. He couldn’t even think. No bright ideas, no sudden inspiration.

Jenner paced the loft, measuring out the room in long strides, wall to wall. He was losing his mind; he had to get out. What could he do? Where could he go?

He couldn’t stop thinking about her, the image in his head throbbing between life and death. Ana bound to a chair, alive; Ana butchered and burned, dead.

He would go out. He had to get out.

He couldn’t stop imagining her dead, imagining that Farrar had killed her and butchered her and burned her.

Jenner didn’t have to shut his eyes to see how she would look now, her hair singed to bristle against her blackened scalp, the splitting of her baked skin, the wounds he’d inflicted

. . .

He had to stop. His clothes felt strange. Not too tight, not too loose, not itchy, just . . . strange. Hanging on him like body armor. The elevator door opened, and he was in the basement; he’d pushed the wrong button. The basement hallway reeked of rotting fruit and roach spray; it never had when Pete was alive.

He rode back up to the lobby, but there was nowhere for him to go. Why would he go out? He would stay home. He should stay home, in case someone called.

He checked his mailbox, clogged with junk. Flyers, mailings from real estate agents, menus, bills. There was a small gray cardboard box of new checks, and a plastic-wrapped sample issue of a new lifestyle magazine for rich New York-ers. He was going to toss them out then and there, but the elevator opened, and he climbed in, his bones aching.

He threw the mail on the table, then opened a bottle of wine. Glass full, he sorted the mail, threw out most, and took the check box over to the desk where he kept his check-Precious Blood