Gun Machine

Twenty-Five

POLICE-CHANNEL FLOW on the drive from One Police Plaza to Ericsson Place:

A dead man found folded into a suitcase that was left in the back of an empty building in Williamsbridge. First guess was that he’d been in there three months.

A dead woman found in front of St. Brigid’s in the East Village. Police on scene commenting that they didn’t know what she’d been drinking, but she appeared to have no stomach.

A dead man found in a Bronx apartment, stabbed to death within the past week, forensics complicated due to the corpse having been partially devoured by rats and a small pet dog.

An unknown individual blew him- or herself up at the Bushwick Inlet. One other fatality: the individual’s arm had somehow been launched laterally at ballistic speeds, went through a parked rig’s window, and broke its driver’s neck.

Tallow killed the radio. He’d taken a slight detour on the way back to Ericsson Place, up Fulton, and now he wanted to concentrate. Driving slowly, he looked at the building frontages across the street from the Fetch.

There was a ripple of fear in his chest as he saw the PROTECTED BY SPEARPOINT SECURITY sticker on the window glass of a cheap shoe store not quite directly opposite the Fetch.

Tallow peered and calculated. The shoe store did not face the side of the Fetch that had the alley adjacent. There was a good chance that any clever camera located in that store window had not seen a thing.

He also noted that there was no police tape across the mouth of the alley, nor were there any notices to potential witnesses posted nearby.

Tallow drove on, well aware that his luck had been tested again.

His cell phone rang just as he was parking at Ericsson Place, and he fumbled it over the wheel trying to do two things at once when his mind was already in seven places at the same time. Tallow managed to keep the phone at his ear on the third try. “Hello?”

“Detective?”

“Mrs. Westover?”

“Yes.” Emily Westover gave a little laugh that disturbed him. “I just wanted to thank you again. You know, for looking after me.”

Tallow listened to the ambience of the call. She was in her apartment. Her voice had that deadened quality that came with thick glazing, the kind that silenced the outside city and absorbed interior sound. There was music of a sort, playing in another room. Native American chants, he realized, but the authenticity was off. It was one of those nineties records where ethnic audio sources were put to muted beats and electronic chill-out washes.

“You’re very welcome, Mrs. Westover. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Don’t go to Werpoes,” she said in a rush.

“What? Why would I?” Tallow said, thinking, Let’s see.

“It’s, it’s just not safe. I worry that maybe I made you think about it.”

“Your husband went back to work?”

“Yes. He doesn’t know I’m calling you. I suppose he might when he gets the phone records, you know, the itemized billing. But I’m calling to thank you.”

“Mrs. Westover, I meant to ask earlier. That brooch on your jacket. What is it?”

“It’s an elk symbol. It’s…do you promise not to laugh?”

“I promise,” he said, letting her hear the smile in his voice.

“It’s protective. Protective magic. In Native American medicine, the elk protects you from the unknown.”

Tallow felt a sudden crest of deep pity for Emily Westover. That brooch must have cost her five hundred dollars. She probably had a stack of CDs and a drive full of MP3s that were no more Native American than the pap she was playing right now. He couldn’t help but think of Vivicy, of the mysterious wizards Machen hired but understood not at all, of the office that spoke of money without the basic grasp of aesthetic and arrangement that nature bestowed on even the common rat, and of the music that evoked some prefab heaven whose furnishers shopped at off-brand stores.

So there she was, living in a fiction, her wealth buying her nothing but pretty fakes, locked in a glass castle where all the guards worked for her husband.

“I see,” he said. “Mrs. Westover, why don’t you tell me what you’re really worried about?”

She was trying to tell him, in her damaged way, that she knew. She had somehow found out that Westover and the killer were connected, and she was unable to do anything with that knowledge. It broke her. All she could do was learn as much as possible about what little she’d found out. She’d tried to learn about Native Americans. The sum of her achievement was that she was now scared of everything.

She gave that broken-glass laugh again. “The things I’m really worried about. Good God, Detective, I could be on this call all day. But then I think, you know, what do I have to be worried about? I’m surrounded by everyone I know. It’s just that sometimes it feels like, well, I’m surrounded by everyone I know. If you know what I mean. I say that a lot. I worry that people don’t always know what I mean, these days. I don’t think I speak as clearly as I used to. Or think as clearly. But that’s hard, because life was always simpler before, and there just weren’t as many things to think about. It’s like, walking through the city, on sidewalks, you only have to think about one thing at a time. But if you’re walking a deep forest trail, you have to think about three or four things at the same time—”

“I’ve never walked a deep forest trail,” said Tallow. “Do you get to the countryside much?”

“I wish people could see what I meant,” Emily said, sounding wistful. Her mood seemed to Tallow to be changing by the moment, and her voice was all but doing the scales. He thought of Bobby Tagg and clamped his lips shut against a surge of bile.

“We all say it, don’t we?” she said. “We say ‘I see what you mean,’ it’s the metaphor for clarity. But sometimes I wish people could see the pictures in my head, instead of my having to describe them with words. Words are clumsy. I wish I could communicate in pictures.”

“Like wampum belts,” Tallow tried, experimentally.

“I just wanted a friend who didn’t report to my fucking husband!” she screamed, and killed the call.

Tallow looked at the phone for a moment, debating whether or not to call her back, apologize for whatever he said or did wrong. He convinced himself that pretty much anything could have set her off. He’d think about it later. Her number was logged in his phone, and he added the number to a contact page and saved it.

The main office was full of people, none of whom would look at Tallow as he entered. The lieutenant’s office had all its blinds down. Tallow stood in front of his lieutenant’s office door, and knocked.

“I said this was a private meeting.”

“I wasn’t here for that, ma’am. Sorry.”

“Tallow? Is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come in, please.”

Tallow opened the door, feeling the eyes of the people in the outer office on his back. It was apparently safe for them to look at him when he couldn’t look at them.

“You’re awfully polite for a maverick cop on the edge, Detective,” said the captain with a smile, putting out a fragile hand. His fingers seemed to move in the wind like brittle, vine-choked branches.

“The only thing I’m on the edge of is dinner hour, sir. Hello.”

“John doesn’t do the rulebook-chewing-mad-dog-cop thing so well,” said the lieutenant from her desk chair. “Honestly? He’s far too lazy for that.”

“You’re lucky I know she’s joking,” said the other man in the room. That man did not extend his hand. He seemed to be expecting something.

“Assistant Chief,” Tallow said, offering his hand.

Assistant chief Allen Turkel was the commanding officer of Manhattan South, with ten precincts under his oversight, including the 1st. His two stars were very well polished. So well polished, in fact, that it looked to Tallow like he’d had to retouch the gold.

“Detective,” the assistant chief said, with the barest incline of a nod and a weak, cursory shake. Tallow had the impression the man was holding out for a salute. He had the posture of a man who regularly sucked his stomach in. “I imagine you’re here to talk to your lieutenant about your charming apartment on Pearl Street.”

“Among other things, sir, yes.”

Two plastic chairs were out, for the captain and the assistant chief. There wasn’t a third one. They returned to their chairs. Tallow chose to stand with his back to the closed door, a position that had him facing their profiles. He clasped his hands behind him, reading the room.

The assistant chief chose to address the lieutenant. “You have a very smart lieutenant here, you know that, Detective? Smartest lieutenant of detectives in my whole borough. I like to think that one day she’s going to be working with me at One PP. And then I think, Why would I take my smartest lieutenant out of the line where she’s doing the most good?”

He laughed. The lieutenant chuckled. Something like the sound of dry twigs snapping came out of the captain’s mouth. The assistant chief’s intended meaning escaped nobody. He checked his watch while everyone else dutifully faked amusement. Tallow eyed the watch. It looked like a Hublot, a Swiss device in brushed rose gold, and a bezel and dial in black ceramics, decorated in screws, grilles, and pistons that evoked the 1920s science-fiction constructivist aesthetic of the film Metropolis. The strap was black rubber. It wasn’t a policeman’s watch. It was a fetish object. Tallow had read that Hublots now came with electronic security cards so that you could prove on the Internet that you owned them.

“I appreciate that, sir,” the lieutenant said. “And I appreciate you coming all the way over here personally. You didn’t have to do that.”

Tallow didn’t smile at the well-planted stroke, but he wanted to.

“Oh, I did, I did,” the assistant chief proudly faux protested. “It’s my borough. It’s my call. I just felt you were entitled to a direct explanation about all this.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Oh, no need, no need. I mean, you know, Charlie here”—indicating the captain—“knows that I’ll give you anything you need to get a job done. But we also have to be attentive to the way of the future. And a case like this one—oh, yes, yes, Charlie, I know it’s a nightmare—we have to be attentive to resources. Evidence Collection Teams were a good idea, and they help balance the load, but a case like this one completely knocks that out of whack.”

The captain looked, to Tallow’s eye, simply too weak to talk. He was only ten years older than Turkel, but he had thirty-five years on the job to Turkel’s twenty-five, and the past ten had evidently bled the man in ways Tallow had never learned of. It was left to the lieutenant to negotiate the landmines Turkel had scattered.

“None of us ever expected that ECTs would be tested like this, of course,” she said. “And I’m not averse, in principle, to the idea of us receiving help from the public sector. I would like to know how the chain of evidence is going to work, sir.”

“Oh, no need, no need. Just think of it as adding an extra link or two to the chain. I’ve known Jason Westover a long, long time. He really does understand our needs in this.”

Tallow prickled.

“And he is…?” asked the lieutenant.

“The founder and CEO of Spearpoint Security. We go way back.” The assistant chief said it in that dismissive, it’s-nothing way that meant it was not to be dismissed and that it was in fact very important for everyone to know he knew wealthy and impressive people.

“I met Jason Westover earlier today,” said Tallow.

To Tallow, in that second, it seemed very much like ghost bombs were hanging from invisible threads above the room: like the cascade of circumstance had guided him into a trap when all the while he’d believed he was slogging his way toward the light. Like the hopeful sunrise at the end of all this turning out to be the glow of burning bodies and a house on fire.

“Really?” said the assistant chief, with a half-raised eyebrow of feigned half interest. Tallow could read the man. He was very interested.

“Yes. And his wife.”

“Oh, yes, yes, Emily. She hasn’t been well recently. I’m hoping it wasn’t, um, a professional…?”

“Not really a subject for the room, sir.”

Turkel’s face lit up. “Right. Yes. Thank you.”

“So,” said Tallow, “I have two people from Spearpoint literally loading my evidence into boxes and intending to drive it all to one of their storage facilities in two trips.”

“They told you that?” the lieutenant said, wincing a little.

“Yes, ma’am. Right after they explained to me that the very elaborate security mechanism on the apartment’s door came from Spearpoint.”

“What?”

“That’s right, ma’am. Which, in an ideal world, would lead us to sales and installation data at Spearpoint that would put a name on our man. But this is the real world, and I fully expect CSU to eventually match a gun from the cache to a dead Spearpoint employee who used to take on side jobs for cash. Just like we found a dead man from the Property Office when we looked for an explanation of how Son of Sam’s handgun was in the cache.”

Tallow discovered that the captain was looking at him, the expression on the man’s face difficult to decipher. “What was your name again, Detective?”

“Tallow, sir.”

“No. Your full name.”

“John Tallow, sir.”

“John Tallow. Okay. Carry on.”

Tallow had no idea what that was about. “Well, I don’t have a lot more to say, right at this moment. The assistant chief obviously couldn’t know that the kind offer from his friend came from the same company that fitted the locks to our man’s door. Perhaps that doesn’t even matter. That said, the same company that had a security system walk out of its depot and affix itself to the door of a presumed serial killer is intending to look after almost all of our evidence overnight.”

“Detective,” warned the lieutenant.

The captain stirred himself. “I think John’s just laying out the obvious concerns here, Lieutenant.”

“Yes,” said Turkel. “Well. It was a very kind offer from a company that wants to help serve this city and a police department already overstressed by case management. I don’t think we can throw that kind of offer away on the strength of could-bes.”

Turkel stood, adding, “The pursuit of this entire case is somewhat quixotic, in any event.”

That escaped nobody.

Tallow decided to trip a trap and see what fell.

“By the way, Lieutenant,” Tallow said mildly, “we got another ballistics match. Our man killed Assistant Chief Tenn’s daughter.”

The current assistant chief stopped moving.

The captain blinked slowly, like a lizard taking in the sun, and opened yellowish eyes on Tallow. “Del Tenn’s kid?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“That was a stray bullet from a gang firefight.”

“No, sir,” Tallow said, speaking to the captain but daring to look directly at the assistant chief. “We have the gun in the Pearl Street cache. Our man simply waited for the most opportune time to make the hit. Gunfire, chaos. He hid his kill amid all the others. Just like every other kill he’s made.”

“Damn,” the captain mused, sagging into himself in the chair. “You know what I liked about Del Tenn? He said to me once, ‘Everyone tells me I can keep getting promoted and keep getting promoted till finally I’m not doing a job at all. I guard the south of Manhattan, where I was born and where my father was born. Why would I want another job?’”

“I didn’t know him,” said the lieutenant.

“Lovely guy,” said the captain. “Went to pieces when his little girl was lost. At the funeral he said to me that it was like Manhattan had betrayed him. Never saw him again.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief. “Well.”

Tallow gave him an amiable smile without letting him off the cold hook of his gaze. “Quixotic, sir, yes. But as you can see, we’re putting together a picture of our man. The way he works.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief. “Well.”

“The sort of people he deals with.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief.

“Did you know Assistant Chief Tenn, sir?”

“No, Detective. Well. Not well. Marcus Casson took over from Tenn, and I took over from Casson.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said the captain quietly, as if speaking from a distant cave. “Casson moved on to Transit as a bureau chief. After Beverly Garza died.”

The threads of the net, thought Tallow, are so fine as to be invisible, until the light catches them.

“How did she die, Captain?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” the assistant chief said. Tallow was still standing in front of the door.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” he repeated, “I have to get back to my office.”

“Oh,” said Tallow. “Yes, sir. You have to get back to work.” He took a step to the side and opened the door for Turkel. “Thank you for coming over and explaining things to us. Very kind of you. I think we all know where we stand now.”

Assistant Chief Turkel gave Tallow a hard look. Tallow saw a man without empathy. He’d heard of it, could fake it when he needed to, but felt nothing for anything himself. He looked at Tallow as if Tallow were a dead animal on the side of the road.

“You’re working this case on your own, yes?”

“Yes,” said Tallow.

“Shouldn’t you be mandatorily off the street?”

“I was told we didn’t really have the resources for that, sir. The whole system’s out of whack, after all. So I was put where I’ll do the most good.”

“Perhaps,” the assistant chief said, and left. Tallow closed the door.

“John Tallow,” said the captain, “I did not know that you were a smart man.”

“Jury’s out on that,” said the lieutenant.

The captain laughed a whispery laugh, standing with difficulty. “You know,” he said, “if you’d been a smart man all this time, I would have heard about you. But I’ll tell you a thing. When I was a detective, I was partnered with a smart lady. Very smart. So smart that she got promoted, up the chain and away from me. My next partner, God love him, he was so stupid that the squad room had to make up new words to describe him. It was like I didn’t have a partner at all. And it was at that point, John Tallow, that I finally began to learn how to be police. You were probably a smart boy when you were assigned here. But I have a feeling that only just now did you start becoming a smart man.”

The captain moved to the door, with some visible pain. Tallow opened it for him. The captain looked at him levelly.

“I can’t cover your ass, John. I will leave this room and go back to approving the requisition of paper clips or some damned thing. Being the captain of the 1st doesn’t even make me the most important office-supplies manager in the area. That’ll be some Master of the Universe down on Wall Street. I’ve got no juice with anyone and a bunch of senior staff just waiting for me to cardiac out on the crapper one morning. I can see where you’re taking this. All I’m going to say to you is, you better damn well have it.”

Tallow said, “Captain, how did Beverly Garza die?”

The captain smiled, very thinly. “She was run down. Hell of a thing for the chief of Transit, right? But I’ll tell you something. The pathologist swore up and down that he’d found gunshot residue on what was left of her head. Like someone shot her and then drove over her. CSU even turned up a mashed bullet on the scene. Nothing ever came of it, mind.”

“Did you know her well?”

“Because I remember it so well, you mean? No. It stuck in my head because of that bullet. A .357, fired from a restored single-action revolver. The old night-shift boss at CSU, it was his personal project for six months. I remember it because he came up with the weirdest match. He thought it came from a Pinkerton pistol. The kind the railroad police used in the 1800s. But the old boss at CSU, he really wanted to come up with something. Now him, he was close to Beverly. Not me. I’m not close to anyone. Never was.”

The captain left, no energy left for an acknowledgment to the lieutenant.

“Close the door, John,” she said. He did.

“Sit down, John,” she said.

“I’d rather stand.”

“Sit down.”

“You have really shitty chairs, Lieutenant.”

She burst out laughing. “What did you just say to me?”

“Seriously. They hurt my ass. That’s why you got them. So no one stays in your office too long.”

“You incredible asshole,” she said, still laughing. “How did you even…?”

“The first time I had to sit on one for more than five minutes. It took the rest of the day for my backside to turn the right way out again.”

“Are you waiting for me to fetch you a nice soft pillow, Detective?”

Tallow sat.

“Where are you going with this? Exactly how much more trouble have you made for me today?”

“Not as much as I think I just made for myself.”

“Oh, the assistant chief made it pretty clear that he’s going to look for ways to fuck you, yeah.”

“That’s actually not what I’m worried about,” he said, and then paused. Tallow measured the fabric of his case in his head, and cut off the section he intended to show her. She didn’t need to see the whole thing yet, he decided, and in fact, it might be counterproductive.

“Okay,” he said, taking a breath. “By the end of today, with a little luck, I’ll have more evidence to back up the idea that Spearpoint Security has an involvement in these killings.”

“You said their security door on the apartment was probably a fluke.”

“Probably. However, our man killed one of Spearpoint’s competitors. Maybe that’s a fluke too. But I bet you, I bet you the price of a nice ass cushion for this chair, that the assistant chief is on his cell right now, calling his good friend Jason Westover. And kindhearted Jason Westover will be wondering how quickly he can contact our man.”

The lieutenant folded her arms. “You have no evidence that Westover knows our guy.”

“No,” Tallow agreed. “What I have is Spearpoint appearing in the conversation around the case too many times. What I have are too many questions. Why is this company Vivicy buying the building? Westover met his wife through Vivicy. His wife has a fixation with Native American culture, to the point where she freaks out in the street when she sees a homeless man looking like the worst-dressed Indian tracker in the cheapest Western you ever saw on TV at two in the morning. Our man has a fixation with Native American culture. I…”

Tallow stopped for a moment, looking for the words under the lieutenant’s gaze. He then said, “Things hide in rain.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Sometimes the rain is so heavy that we look up at all the raindrops when we should be looking at the shape of the puddle that forms from them. All of this has been rain. It’s been rain for twenty years, and everyone was looking at the raindrops falling while all of these people have been moving invisibly. They weren’t even traveling through streets we’d recognize. And the rain was so heavy, all over the city, that no one ever looked down and saw the footprints filling with water. I’m starting to see the shape of them now. I just need to be able to see the maps.”

“Put your feet back on the ground for me, John.”

Tallow ran his fingers through his hair. “Nothing is coincidence. We’ve walked right into a net, like a woodland mantrap. If our man had tossed his gun in the river after every kill, we would never have known a thing. I think our man is a directed killer. Hired may not be the right term. And he is so good, so good, that one or all of the people who directed him knew that his unsolved kills would eventually be subsumed in the annual unsolved count in an incredibly dense and crime-heavy metropolitan location. They knew that, so long as no one blundered into their very fine net, the whole operation would be invisible. The only thing we had on our side, it turned out, was that the killer was crazy and kept all his guns.”

“Why? I want to know why he kept all those guns. Is it just some weird serial-killer-trophy thing?”

“Not to him. That apartment is visual language, the codification of a statement in pictures. Exactly what statement, I don’t know, that’s in his head. But when we’ve been taking guns out of there to process? We’ve been unweaving his life’s work. Like unpainting a masterpiece or unpicking a tapestry.”

“John. Seriously. How much closer are we to finding this guy? Because the captain just told you he can’t cover for you, I sure as hell can’t cover for you, and the assistant chief knows he has a way to pull you off the case and put you in your apartment for the rest of your life. And I’ll be honest with you, I’ve thought about that more than once myself. If the assistant chief thinks he can make this whole thing go away—and you can be damn sure he’s thinking about that, very hard—then he will. So I need a call from you. You’ve got no DNA, no nothing but some circumstantial tangle, a handful of processed guns, and some brilliant, fascinating, but mostly crazy-ass speculation. Tell me. How much closer are we to finding him?”

John Tallow closed his eyes, and took a breath.

“Probably not as close as he is to finding me, Lieutenant.”