Inherit the Dead

8 ALAFAIR BURKE

Perry felt hungover from not enough sleep. All night, his mind had been running through the case: from meeting Julia Drusilla to the drive out east to see Angel’s not-so-grieving father to speaking to Randy Hyde and Lilith Bates, and checking out the Memory Motel. At some point he had managed to make himself interesting enough to explain why that crazy Lilith Bates had been following him. Now, after meeting with Arthur Gawain, he was back in the city to meet his old friend at the 19th Precinct.

Located on East Sixty-seventh on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the 19th Precinct serves one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the country. More than 217,000 people packed into approximately 1.75 square miles. Nearly twelve hundred per city block.

All things being equal, more people means more policing. But not all populations are created equal. This one also happened to be one of the richest in the nation — the chosen locale for foreign consulates and ambassadors, the city’s most elite prep schools, and the kind of New Yorkers who believed that jeans were for south of Twenty-third Street. The only kind of “spree” going down in the 19th on a usual weekday morning would be of the shopping variety, committed on Madison Avenue by ladies in coats that cost more than Perry made in half a year.

But just as not all populations are created equal, not every weekday morning was the usual. Perry had been on the job long enough to read the energy of a station. This morning, the house was hopping.

Bumper-to-bumper squad cars lined the south side of Sixty-seventh Street, red lights flashing from the tops of the RMPs. Uniformed officers poured from the station to take their places behind the wheels of their radio motor patrol units. Others stayed busy filling the backs of two flatbed trucks with metal crowd-control barricades.

Where was Watson? They were supposed to meet outside so Perry could skip the always-pleasant experience of announcing his always-memorable name at the front desk of his old precinct — not that he cared.

He started to take in the action from the front of the neighboring building until he noticed the sign at the entrance: KENNEDY CHILD STUDY CENTER. Man alone outside a day care. Way to blend. He moved west and leaned against the side of the precinct’s brick exterior, pretending to fiddle with his phone like any other multitasking pedestrian.

The experienced officers looked put out by whatever mission they were on, but comments shared among the rookies revealed their eagerness.

Perry spotted Henry Watson hop out of an unmarked fleet car halfway down the block, easy to spot since Henry was a good head taller than everyone else. As he walked, Watson popped a white square of gum from a foil packet in his pocket.

Perry called out to his friend. “And they said you couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Watson caught Perry’s gaze and smiled, then flashed him five fingers as he pulled one of the uniformed officers aside. He needed five minutes.

As Perry continued to listen in on the action, he started to piece together the reason for all the activity outside the precinct. For once, a protest that actually makes some sense. Protest scheduled for noon. Ninety-first Street outside the Russian Consulate. Hunter College sophomore. Body found in “the guy’s” bed last weekend. He’s some kind of attaché. Like a briefcase? No, numbskull — it’s some kind of diplomat thing. GHB, the date-rape drug, in her system. We can’t touch him.

Only four syllables, but each one dripped from the young officer with anger. We can’t touch him. Perry knew the feeling. He’d felt it on the job more times than he should have, including on the case that first brought Watson and him together. Watson was working homicide in the Bronx, Perry in downtown Manhattan. Two different boroughs, two missing girls, two sets of grieving families. No reason to make the connection.

The girls had been missing for more than six years when Perry got word: police in Portland, Oregon, had cleared four unsolved murders with a DNA hit. Now the defendant was ready to give up more names and dates. Girls in six states across the country — totaling either sixteen or eighteen. He wasn’t certain, but he knew it was an even number. He liked to kill in pairs.

Among the names the suspect was dangling were Kerry Lighton, a struggling artist who painted by day and stripped by night, and Tonya Barton, a for-hire “escort” who dreamed of becoming a nurse once she kicked her heroin habit. Perry was the detective on Lighton’s case; Henry Watson was the detective on Barton’s.

All those dead women. Six states, but not one of them with an active death penalty. The killer was already serving four consecutive life sentences without parole. So the district attorneys in the five remaining states cut a deal: life sentences to run concurrently with Oregon’s in exchange for information about the location of the bodies. It would bring the families “closure,” they explained.

We can’t touch him. Perry and Watson drank together for six hours after the sentencing hearing.

Four minutes after he’d flashed five fingers, Perry’s old friend, Watson, waved him into the precinct, patting him on the back as he entered. It was all the greeting they needed.

“Is that Nicorette I saw you chewing?” Perry had recognized the packaging when Watson first popped the gum on the street. He realized it had been too long since the two men had talked.

“Feel like an eleven-year-old girl, all the gum I’m gnawing these days,” Watson said. “Maria didn’t want me smoking around the baby. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I know she’s right but, man, I’ve tried everything. The patch. The electric cigarette. Acupuncture. Meditation. Self-help recordings. All kinds of crap Maria brings home from the natural-food store. Hypnosis.” He lowered his voice for that last one. “I got newfound empathy for all those junkies I pulled in over the years.”

“Right. Because when I think of Henry Watson, that’s what I think of — empathy for the hard-lived and downtrodden. You have any contact with this Hunter College thing I’m hearing about?”

Watson shook his head and sighed. In context, he was answering in the affirmative. “Bad guy’s got diplomatic immunity. He claims she OD’d, but we say he dosed her. Turns out it doesn’t matter, because his country won’t waive. That’s what I was talking to the grunt about. Poor girl’s parents are getting hounded by the media. Figured this convoy to babysit the protestors could spare one car to keep watch at the family’s front door.”

“It’s not easy working those cases,” Perry said. “Especially now that you’ve got a daughter.”

“Tell me about it. I was holding Anna’s little hand last night and found myself wanting to microchip her. One tiny GPS tracker under her soft, pale skin, and maybe I’d never have to worry about her again.”

There was a time when Perry had been the young married father, and Watson had been out every night collecting numbers scrawled on matchbooks. Now the tables had turned. Except Perry’s form of bachelordom wasn’t holding up its end of the swap.

Watson fell hard into the chair at his desk. “Jesus. I’ve turned into frickin’ Jabba the Hutt.”

Perry noticed for the first time that Watson had added a good fifteen pounds to his already large frame. “Having kids will do that to you. I remember with Nicky.”

Watson waved off the comment, and Perry knew his friend was saving him from the funk that would come from talking about the old days with the family. “Listen to us talking about weight gain and babies and health regimens. Like a couple hausfraus on Dr. Phil. Not what you came here for.”

He gestured for Perry to take a seat in the wooden chair next to his desk and removed a file folder from the top drawer. “I ran all the names you gave me. In no particular order, we’ve got Randall, aka Randy, Hyde.”

Perry took the printout Watson handed him.

“We’ve got juvie pops for a residential daytime burg and starting a brawl at a multiplex. Turns out when you’re fifteen, you’re young enough to take a girl to see a cartoon movie about talking cars, but old enough to bean the head of a kid three rows in front of you with a popcorn bucket for talking smack about said girl. Seven teenage boys kicking the crap out of each other by the time it was over.”

“Who said chivalry was dead?” Perry scanned the rap sheet. “Nothing as a grown-up?”

“Nada. Next on your list are Julia Drusilla and Norman Lawkey or Lowkey.”

“Loki,” Perry said, spelling it: “L-o-k-i.”

“Whatever. I found him.” Another two printouts. “I swear, I thought you made up these names to screw with me until I got hits on them. No criminal history, but they were in the system as complainants.”

Perry was still scanning the documents. “Anything recent?”

“Norman Loki had a Rolex swiped last summer, a break-in. Description of the suspect was white male, twentyish. Never turned up.”

“What about Julia Drusilla? You said she also turns up as a complainant?”

“Nothing quite as exciting as Mr. Loki’s break-in, I’m afraid. Her parents died in a car accident a decade ago, and the reconstruction investigators for the New York State Police questioned her for background. Nothing came of it, though.”

“Why an investigation?” Perry asked. “Was the accident considered suspicious?”

Watson shrugged. “Seven o’clock at night. Dad driving, mom in the passenger seat. Car swerved into the wrong side of the road on I-684. T-boned into an eighteen-wheeler. No drugs or alcohol in either tox screen.”

“So why’d they talk to Julia Drusilla?” Julia had told Perry that her parents died in a car accident, but never mentioned an investigation or being questioned by State Police.

“You’d have to ask them,” Watson said. “My gut? You’ve got two dead bodies with a Park Avenue penthouse address in a three-hundred-thousand Maybach.”

“What’s a Maybach?”

“If you gotta ask… ” Watson grinned. “A car. German. Started before the war, after the war, I’m not sure. But a real status symbol. They just stopped making them — too expensive — soon to be collector’s items.”

Perry got the picture.

“Rich couple like that, State Police are going to cross the t’s, dot the i’s, and whatnot. They called around. Tried to see if they were missing anything. The daughter — what’s her name, Julia — was upset but wasn’t able to offer any relevant information. They figured the old man fell asleep. So what gives on these people?”

“Hmm?” Perry was still thinking about the death of Julia’s parents and didn’t register his friend’s question.

“When I was running the names, I was reminded of those tests back in school: How do these three things go together? A thug like Hyde; a socialite like Julia Drusilla; and this Norman Loki, out at the beach. What ties these three together?”

Perry told Watson about the disappearance of Angelina Loki and her relationship to each of the three people Perry had asked Watson to run through the system. “If I find her by her twenty-first birthday, she stands to inherit a big chunk of her grandfather’s estate.”

“Grandfather, as in the dead guy in the Maybach?”

Perry nodded.

Watson let out a whistle. “Major bank. Seems like a good reason for the girl to want to be found.”

“If only I were so lucky.”

Perry had looked into the source of Julia’s family’s money. Her father, Antonio, had come from modest beginnings, the son of a father who worked as a dressmaker in the Garment District and a mother who taught piano in their Forest Hills apartment. But Antonio had more ambitious plans. Thanks to his first marriage to an heiress more than twice his age, by thirty-five years old, he was a widower in control of a $100-million inheritance. Through leveraged buyouts and other investments, he managed to turn that comfortable little sum into a fortune that landed him on Forbes magazine’s annual list of billionaires for more than the last decade of his life.

“Well, good luck with the case, man. It’s really great to see you. Been way too long.”

“I don’t want to press my luck,” Perry said, “but any chance I can hit you up for one more favor? That deadline of Angel’s twenty-first birthday is almost here, and it’s not looking good. Plus, I think someone tried to follow me back from Long Island last night, so I’m starting to think she could be in real trouble. Any chance you can track her cell phone for me?”

Perry still marveled at how much more information law enforcement could gather now than when he was on the job. Thanks to technology, police could find out what Web sites people frequented, who they e-mailed, and what books they bought, usually without even having to get a search warrant. By pulling a few strings with Angel’s cell phone company, Watson would be able to determine not only whether Angel was receiving or making phone calls, but also her possible location. A phone’s pings to cell phone towers for service used to give police an area of a few square miles to narrow down a search. Now, with the proliferation of towers and a little bit of luck, cell phone tracking could put you within a city block of the person you were looking for — or at least of her phone.

“Careful, Watson. You do a friend like that a little favor, and the next thing you know, you’re on IAB’s shit list.”

Perry turned toward the intruding voice. It was from a short-haired, pink-faced man in a dress shirt that stretched across his belly. He was no looker, but the Donald Duck tie suggested that even he managed to have a kid in his life. Perry didn’t recognize the man, but the man obviously recognized him.

It was also obvious the man wasn’t done making noise. “Doesn’t matter how many years go by, Christo. You walk into a house, someone’s gonna notice.”

Perry felt his fists clench on impulse. Did this smart-ass think he was the first self-righteous cop to make a wisecrack about the Internal Affairs Bureau at Perry’s expense? Did he believe that his jabs were any kind of penalty compared to the price Perry had already paid? The job. His wife. His daughter, Nicky.

How many times had Perry seen the dirty looks and heard the snide comments? He’d lost count, but every single time, he found himself wondering the same thing: Did these high-minded cops sit in judgment over Perry for what he supposedly did, or for getting caught supposedly doing it? Invariably, the ones who were loudest in their disdain for him were the ones who used racial epithets, joked about domestic violence, and referred to bribes as “consulting fees.” Perry always suspected that their sole reason for casting dispersions was to mask their true approach to doing the job.

And Perry had learned from experience that there was no point in offering a retort. Instead, he turned his back to the man, like he always did. But today, Perry wasn’t alone to hear the gibes.

He saw something in his friend Watson’s face that was unfamiliar. Embarrassment. Sympathy. Pity.

“I’m sorry, man,” Watson offered. “We should’ve met at a diner or something. But don’t mind that hump, okay? Dude’s one flask away from a liver transplant.”

Perry started to tell Watson not to worry about it. That it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. That he was almost used to it after all these years.

But sensing Watson’s guilt, he did something else instead. He flashed a smile, patted his friend on the back, and said, “So about Angel’s cell phone. Let me write down that number for you.”