The first thing that Raney did when he got back downtown from Queens was to go into Marlene’s office and search through her files. Given the state and scope of Marlene’s files, this took him the better part of Friday afternoon. The file on St. Michael’s and the trash-bag killings was, of course, missing, since Marlene had taken it with her when she had left for her fateful appointment with Mrs. Dean.
Raney sat in the littered office and rubbed his face, as if that would make his memory work. He pulled out his notebook and read through the notes he had taken at his interview with Mary Tighe. It takes a tale of quite extraordinary depravity to sicken a New York City police detective, and Raney felt an echo of the queasiness he had experienced as the woman had related the details of her married life with Felix Tighe.
That was not what interested him now. What had impelled him back to Queens was the information he had from the court clerk that the woman he knew as Irma Dean was Felix Tighe’s mother. His first notion was that Felix was associated in some way with the child murders. As he had traveled to his appointment with Mary Tighe, he had come to realize that it wasn’t possible. Felix had been in custody during at least one of the trash-bag killings, and besides, he hardly matched the description of the person Raney knew as the Bogeyman.
Mary Tighe had cleared that up: two marriages and two children, and two different names. Mary Tighe had only seen her brother-in-law once; her impression was that he was institutionalized upstate somewhere. But the description she gave him was unmistakable: a blond, goofy-looking giant.
This was why Raney was searching for Marlene’s file. It was inconceivable that such a creature could have completely avoided the surveillance Raney had placed on the street in front of St. Michael’s. Townhouses don’t have back doors onto the street, which meant that the Bogeyman had to be working out of another base.
He vaguely remembered that Marlene had made some mention of another property owned by Mrs. Dean—Marlene had gotten some guy in the D.A.’s office to run a check on her—but he could remember neither where it was, nor the name of the guy, if she had even mentioned it. He recalled, with guilt, that at that period of their professional relationship he had been mainly concerned with getting into her pants.
He was aware of the passage of time. It was getting late, and the rumble of business noise from the hallway was growing fainter. He was also aware that what he should do was to call the lieutenant in charge of the kidnapping investigation, turn over his notes and his speculations, and go back to his current assignment, which was investigating one of the seventeen homicides he was currently responsible for out of Manhattan South.
But that particular lieutenant was a famous dork, who was convinced that the kidnapping was a Mafia operation, and would not appreciate contradictory evidence from a woman with a story that even Raney thought might be half-crazy, a woman who had every reason for a heavy grudge against her old man and his mom.
Ordinarily, he would have discussed the problem with Pete Balducci, but Balducci was set to retire this week, besides being busy with marrying off his daughter, and Raney knew he would not take kindly to any suggestion that they freelance on a case as messy as this one. That meant he had to go to see Karp, something that, for reasons he did not like thinking about, he had been avoiding since the beginning of his involvement with Marlene Ciampi.
In the hallway outside Marlene’s office, Raney paused and looked out the tall window. The sky over Baxter Street was bruised purple with rain and the streets were already shiny with the prelude to the autumn’s first serious storm. He smiled. Cops like anything that keeps the people off the streets.
Karp, he soon found, was not in. Karp was in court, waiting for the jury to convict Felix Tighe. Raney wandered into Karp’s office. No one stopped him; people wandered into Karp’s office all the time, dropping papers on his chair and leaving notes. Raney looked around, examined the desk, looked at the framed diplomas and photographs on the walls.
One caught his eye, a war picture it looked like, a picture of mounted soldiers charging at tanks. There was an inscription on it in French, and it was signed, “Marlene, the Goom, and V.T.” A memory popped up into Raney’s consciousness: the name of the guy who had done the workup on Dean for her. He spun and was out of the office in an instant, off to find V.T. Newbury.
Snarled in the kind of rush-hour traffic that only five o’clock and a rainy Friday can produce in Brooklyn, Ray Guma had been pulling over whenever he spotted a phone booth and trying to reach Karp. He had been unsuccessful for the same reason that Raney had: Karp was in court. The Bollanos had been very helpful with information about the child pornography and prostitution business. They knew who Mrs. Dean was, and they knew who some of her customers were.
Guma thought Karp would be very interested in several of these names, and perhaps even grateful enough for receiving them to forgive Guma for what Guma had just pulled off. Or maybe not: Guma did not intend to find out if he could help it. He shoved a quarter into the slot of his current phone booth. It clicked down the chute, but produced no dial tone. This was not a good neighborhood for public phones. He slammed the instrument with his fist, screamed a curse, and ran back to his car.
The traffic was no better on Broadway. Raney crept uptown, peering through a small clear space in his fogged windshield. The defroster on the Ghia had long since packed it in. He was soaking wet, too, having left his raincoat in the back seat of the unmarked NYPD car he shared with Balducci.
It was dark by the time he arrived at the address on West End Avenue. There were no lights on in any of the windows, and the building had a deserted look. Raney glanced around and saw that the driving rain had cleared the streets of pedestrians. He walked up the stone stairs, pulled a set of picks from his pocket and went to work on the front door lock.
It took him three minutes to break in. The front door gave on an entry hall. Raney took out a pencil-beam flashlight and shone it around. Peeling brown paint, wall sconces without bulbs, gritty dust: It was obvious that this floor at least was unoccupied. A wide stairway with wooden banisters and tattered red carpeting led upward. Raney passed this by and explored the rest of the hallway. Someone was redecorating. Walls had been torn apart and the floors were littered with the detritus of heavy plumbing and electrical work.
There was a door at the end of the hall leading to the back stairway, a relic of the age of servants. Raney descended. You search a building from the bottom up.
The lowest floor was set up as an apartment: an expensively furnished parlor, a modern kitchen, a bath, and two small bedrooms, one furnished for a child with cartoon character sheets and a Popeye lamp, and the other spare. Like most ground-floor rooms in Manhattan, these had their windows covered with grilles.
As he inspected these rooms, he became aware of a hollow booming noise, as if someone were beating on a metallic tank. It seemed to come from below him. He crouched and put his ear to a heat register. Bong. Bong-bong. And a voice, indistinct and angry.
Raney took his Browning from its shoulder holster, jacked a shell into the chamber, and replaced it in the holster. Then he returned to the stairway he had just left. From the landing there a hallway ran to a glassed and wire-meshed door that led to some kind of yard. In the other direction, a short flight of stairs led down to a steel fire door. Following his ears, Raney went to the fire door, and pressed his face to the cool metal. The shouts and banging were louder. He opened the door.
A gust of oily warmth flowed past his face as he advanced down a short corridor. It was lit by an overhead bulb, and Raney put away his flashlight. To the right a red door, locked and bolted; ahead a stout wooden door equipped with a padlock and a hasp hung half open. Raney stepped past the door in a fast crouching movement, pistol out.
Moving deeper into the room, he saw the cot and the ropes hanging from it, and his stomach thrummed with tension. He turned and saw the furnaces. Someone had removed the filter panel from one of the sheet-metal ducts leading up from the new oil furnace. From this space, as from a stereo speaker, came the banging noise. Raney could make out what the voice was saying now. He ran out of the furnace room, through the corridor and the door and up the service stairs.
Marlene lay in a heat duct two feet square, her head filled with Alonso’s bellowing and banging. “You come outa there! You’re in real trouble! I’m not your friend any more! Come outa there! COME OUTA THERE!” Over and over again. And banging with some hard object. Her head was splitting. She could see him by the light coming through the vent he had removed, see his arm and shoulder and part of his head, and the tool he was using to bang with.
He could not, of course, come in and get her, but neither could she escape. The vent was just wide enough to allow her shoulders to fit snugly in the diagonal dimension. She had ascended from the furnace room by pushing with the sides of her bare feet against the sides of the duct. In this way she had made a slow progress to the second floor, where Alonso had found her.
When she had entered the ductway, Marlene had counted on there being an unscreened heat vent from which she could escape. In fact, there were none open on the path she had chosen. In her horror and her blind rush to escape, she had not stopped to consider that, nor had she considered what the rough screws and edges of sheet metal that projected into the duct would do to her flesh and to the soles of her feet. Every time she pushed down against the metal it felt as if she was walking on fish hooks.
Beyond her head lay the blackness of a vertical duct, but she no longer possessed the energy to climb it, nor could her bleeding feet bear the agony of a descent. She was stuck here until Alonso figured out how to tear the wall and the duct apart to winkle her out. That shouldn’t be hard; he was smart and clearly strong enough. Before he got her, she decided, she would go down the duct head first. Let him have the finger. Then the banging stopped suddenly and she heard Alonso’s voice raised in furious reproach. And there was another voice.
Raney slid off the safety on his pistol and held it high in both hands as he moved forward. The banging and shouting was coming from one of the rooms on the second floor. He approached the doorway slowly over the litter of construction debris that lay all around. The room was lit by a single dim bulb hanging from wires from the ceiling. By its light he saw a huge man in black kneeling at the wall, yelling and banging something metallic within the wall. It did not occur to Raney to question why his quarry should be doing ductwork at this hour. He came up softly behind him and said “Hey, you!”
The man looked over his shoulder. His mouth dropped open in surprise. Then a furious scowl came over his face and he rose with astonishing swiftness and waved a fourteen-inch pipe wrench at Raney.
“You better get outa here! Nobody’s allowed in here but me,” he shouted.
Raney kept the gun trained one-handed and flashed his shield. “Police officer. Put that wrench down and put your hands against the wall! Move it!”
“You better get outa here,” said the giant again, as if he hadn’t heard. He moved a step closer. Raney looked in the pale jerking eyes. The Bogeyman was maddened with fear, but Raney had the odd feeling that it was not fear of Raney’s gun.
Raney clicked the Browning’s hammer back and pointed the weapon at the man’s face. Looking down at the muzzle of a cocked 9 millimeter pistol usually had a sobering effect on bad guys, but the giant seemed not to notice it. He seemed, in fact, to be working himself into a tantrum. His face was crumpled and red, and to Raney’s amazement he had started to cry. “You’re in real trouble if you don’t get outa here,” he bellowed. “I mean it!”
The detective worked to control his own growing anger. He understood that it was something of a standoff. This monster probably knew where Marlene was, might be the only person who knew, which precluded blowing his brains out.
As he thought of this it flashed briefly through Raney’s mind that he might have permanently lost his taste for shooting people in the head. He could shoot him in the knee, but one, he might miss; and two, there was no guarantee that this jerk couldn’t take him apart standing on one leg; and three, he might pop an artery in the guy and have him bleed to death, and then he would have to explain why he went into this with no backup, telling no one where he had gone.
No, the important thing was to find the woman. In a reasonable tone he began, “Look, fella, this is a gun. I’m a cop. Just keep quiet, back off and tell me where you have her and I’ll get out of your hair.”
At that moment there was sound behind the Bogeyman, a scrape of metal, a little cry, and Marlene Ciampi staggered, naked and bleeding, into the room.
Time seemed to slow down. The sight of Marlene’s nude body caught Raney’s attention, as evolution had designed. His pistol wavered. Alonso moved like a snake, faster than anyone that large had a right to move. The pipe wrench flashed out, breaking Raney’s thumb and sending the pistol skittering away. It went off when it landed, the shot reverberating through the room and sending up a cloud of dust. Marlene screamed. Raney yelled, “Marlene! Run!” and launched himself at Alonso, his left fist clenched in what he expected would be his last punch in this life.
“V.T., you seen Butch?” asked Guma, eyes wildly searching V.T.’s little office as if his chief might be hiding behind the furniture. V.T. looked up from his work. “Have you been swimming, Raymond?”
“No, it’s raining like a sonofabitch outside. Where is he? I gotta see him right away.”
“I think he’s in court.”
“Which one?”
“Beats me. It’s People v. Tighe. Look it up on the calendar.”
Guma made for the door, and V.T. called after him, “What’s the crisis this time?”
“I got a lead on Marlene,” he said, and told V.T. what he had learned at the meeting with the Bollanos.
V.T. whistled softly. “That’s really interesting, Raymond. I just had a cop named Raney in here a half hour ago, desperate to have a look at the material I’d pulled together on Mrs. Irma Dean. Wanted the address of a building she owned. So it looks like our girl was really on to something. The only problem was, why would Dean want to kidnap Marlene? She hasn’t been active in that case for months now.”
“Maybe she found out something new.”
“Maybe. But Raney came in here with this idea that Irma Dean is also the mother of the guy that Karp is now trying for a double murder, and I looked, and sure enough, Irma Tighe was married for seven years back in the fifties to a man named Francis Tighe. Issue, one son. She called herself Denise Brody, in those days.”
“Holy shit! That’s weird! How come Marlene didn’t realize this a long time ago?”
“Beats me, but now that I recall it, when I gave her the file she seemed really distracted, like she didn’t even want it any more. I just touched on the high points with her—money, mostly. I’m sure I didn’t mention the connection. Not that there was any connection to make, because that was before Karp got involved with Tighe.
“Another thing: you say, ‘weird.’ It’s weirder than you think. The original Mr. Tighe was something of a sinister figure: He had a police record from upstate. Ran some kind of spiritualist racket with violent overtones. Black masses, orgies, grave robbing—the whole nine yards. Accused of statutory rape, no conviction, but they got him on an extortion charge in Plattsburg and he served nine months.”
He tapped a folder on his desk. “It’s all here. After Daddy Tighe died in ’fifty-nine, Mom and son moved to the City, where she took up with and married a businessman named Horace Dean. A son from that marriage, too, but he’s institutionalized, according to my info. Anyway, Mr. Dean died after a couple of years, in ’sixty-six, that was, and left her with three buildings on the West Side, but no money. He had a family from a previous marriage, who fought the will. She got a loan on one of the buildings for ready cash, but she needed an income. That’s when she hooked up with Andrew Pinder and started this day-care operation.”
“They let this lulu run a day-care center?”
“Why not? She had no record. She was the widow of a respectable businessman, with property. She was vouched for by pillars of the community. Just to make sure, she started using her middle name, Irma, but that’s no crime.”
“So if Marlene wasn’t on to her racket,” said Guma, “why the snatch?”
“The son, Felix. To protect him.”
“What, to blackmail Karp? But why the call about the Mafia?”
“According to Raney, a diversion—and it worked.” V.T. leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips thoughtfully. “But, I’ll tell you—I could kick myself for not making the connection at the time, but Marlene thought she was being hexed, that somebody was using witchcraft against her.
“So maybe it wasn’t blackmail at all. If Marlene was right about Dean, if she was kidnapping children and using them ritually, as—I don’t know—human sacrifices to get the dark powers on her side, then who better to use than the consort of her son’s chief tormentor?”
Guma rolled his eyes. “V.T., do you realize how fucking crazy that is? This is the twentieth century in New York, for chrissake!”
V.T. folded his arms. “I rest my case,” he said.
As Karp left the courtroom after the verdict in Tighe he realized that he had no idea of where he was going or of what he was going to do with the remainder of the day. He would drop his briefcase back in his office and get something to eat. Then there was the evening. And the weekend. And then the rest of the month. And his life. Even his workaholism had failed him; he had no spirit left for putting more asses in jail. Several people passed him and congratulated him on the conviction. He nodded and mumbled conventions.
Then Roland Hrcany was standing in front of him, a sardonic smile on his lips.
“The winner and still champeen,” Hrcany said. “You wouldn’t believe the points the books are getting on you. You want to shave it a little one time, we could make a fortune.”
“Sounds good. What’s another shit-canned felony more or less?”
“Right,” said Hrcany, falling into step beside Karp. “Listen, I came up here to get you. We pulled off that sting operation on the fencing ring. Got about a million in stolen goods and most of their mid-level management. There’s a black dude we picked up. He’s down in the pens. Says he knows you personally and needs to talk to you.”
“Yeah, they all know somebody. Not tonight, Roland. I’m whipped.”
Hrcany said, “Yeah. A wacky story, anyway. About one of his burglars went into a house after some antique dolls and got, I don’t know, captured by some demon worshippers. Some shit like that.”
Karp stopped walking. His stomach churned. “Let’s see this guy, Roland,” he said. “Now.”
Before she knew it, before the pain from her bleeding feet could even register in her brain, Marlene was out of the room and running down the hallway. She did not know where she was going, except that she was not ever going back to that furnace room. She heard thumps and cries behind her, but she did not spare a thought for what was happening to Jim Raney.
The hallway appeared to end in a blank wall. The thumping stopped. Her teeth chattering with terror, Marlene threw open what appeared to be a closet door and went in, shutting the door quietly behind her. Blackness. Marlene stumbled forward. Now she could feel her feet again and was nauseated by the pain. She stepped again and her foot came down on air and she fell into the dark, stifling a cry. She was on a stairway.
Gingerly, she rose to her feet and, walking on the uninjured outsides of her soles, she descended a winding series of short flights. There was a light ahead, coming from a slit under a door. Opening this, she found herself in a dimly lit corridor. A metal fire door stood open to one side, and looking through it she saw her former prison. She went the other way, through a safety-glassed door that, to her delight, led out of the building.
She was in the open air: night, clouds above, lit by the eternal glow of the City, and the smell of recent rain. Her heart lifted as she scented freedom and she limped on. To either side high wooden fences walled off a narrow yard-like space between the building she had just left and the dark loom of one ahead. She tripped over something that clattered and spun away on the concrete. It was a plastic riding horse with wheels, suitable for ages three to five. She was in a play area for small children. Toys and wooden blocks were scattered around a grassy patch and the lumpy surface of a large sandbox. Marlene at last knew exactly where she was.
The back door into St. Michael’s day-care center was locked. Marlene went to the sandbox and picked up a child’s building block, a foot-long slab of solid maple. As she looked back along the concrete path she had traveled she gave a cry of dismay. A perfect line of dark, crescent-shaped bloody footprints led from where she now stood back into the darkness whence she had come. Alonso would be along shortly and he would know precisely where she had gone. She smashed a pane of glass in a small window near the door, twisted the window catch, and climbed in.
It was a utility room. By the gray glow coming from the yard she could make out large sinks, mop buckets, an automatic washer and dryer. She opened the dryer, found a T-shirt, ripped it into strips and bound her feet. She heard a door slam. It was some distance away, but it revealed that someone else was in the building. Maybe Raney had brought some back-up.
Then she heard a familiar bellow and the sweat broke out anew on her face. A glance around the little room showed nothing that could help her; she was not going to hold Alonso off with mops and brooms. Then the glint of dim light on the glass of an electric meter gave her an idea, something from an old movie. She went to the fuse box attached to the meter, yanked out all the fat cylindrical Buss fuses and threw them to the corners of the room. Then she hobbled out.
Outside the utility room door lay the glistening floor of the center’s great ballroom of a main play area. It glowed in the light of the red emergency lamps like an anteroom to hell. As she started across the floor, she saw a huge shape appear at the entrance to the playroom. Clever Alonso! He had seen where she was going and had run around the corner and come into the child-care center from the front. Now he was between her and the only door out; she knew she could never make it back the long way she had come. He would catch her climbing out of the utility room or in the yard, among the children’s toys.
Looking down, she saw to her horror that her feet were bleeding through their bindings, not footprints any more, but quarter-sized blotches. Even in the dimness they were visible against the pale linoleum. Alonso was clicking a light switch on the other side of the room. He was calling her, shouting threats. Suddenly, Marlene remembered the last time she was in the center, a century ago. A nice young woman was showing her the play equipment in a little room. There were windows in that room, windows that had shown the color of green trees on the street.
She moved cautiously through the door to the equipment room and closed it silently behind her. The room was filled with cold blue light from a streetlamp and Marlene felt an involuntary sob of frustration burst from her throat. There were windows but, this being New York, they were barred by heavy ornamental iron grilles. She heard heavy footsteps on the linoleum. They were slow and deliberate. Alonso was moving in the darkness from stain to stain, tracking her by her own blood. She looked desperately around the shelves, and all at once she saw her only, thin chance.
“I hear you got something to tell me, Matt,” said Karp when the guards brought Matt Boudreau into the interrogation room.
“You mind if I sit down first? I had a hell of a day.”
“Suit yourself,” said Karp. The tall man slumped into a chair and arranged his ankle-length leather coat around his legs.
“About the doll …” Karp suggested.
“Yeah. Hey look, man, I was just there with a friend. Dude say, you know, pick yourself up a color TV, a VCR. I thought it was gonna be like some kinda flea market.”
“I’ll do what I can, Matt. No promises, but you give us some help on this other thing, I’ll personally talk to the judge, all right?”
Boudreau flashed a gold and ivory smile. “Yeah, talk to the judge. OK, you know Junior Gibbs? No? Real little fella. OK, Junior and me been tight for a long time, you know? Hey, we walk down the street together, big an’ little, it’s a trip, dig? The ladies dig it, you understand?
“OK, so Junior brings me stuff from time to time, see if I can get a price for it. So, about two weeks ago, he comes to my apartment. He don’t look so good—nervous, and all. And he shows me this, like, fancy doll. Like it was an antique, dig?
“Now, you understand, I do not deal in this kinda shit, no way. Stereo stuff, fur, jewelry is my main line. Silver. But no antiques. So I tell this to Junior, and he says, no, this doll is worth like ten, twelve grand. And he says, it’s true, because this lady D.A. told him.
“So I told him, ‘Shit, man, you tellin’ me a fuckin’ DA told you to rob this doll? They gonna put you under the jail, man.’ Then he starts tellin’ me ’bout all this devil shit…. I din listen no more man. I got no time for that, you know? They’s enough shit goin’ down on the street, I don’ need to worry ’bout no devils, you understand?
“Anyway, he on me an’ he on me, and finally I tell him, I give him two hundred an’ a half for the doll. Maybe I could sell it somewhere, give it to some fox, whatever, and, like, him and me are tight, like I said. Then the crazy motherfucker say, he goin’ back for more. He say they got a bunch of dolls, man, and it’s a easy take off, because while they’re doin’ this devil jive, voodoo or some shit, there ain’t nobody watchin’ the house.
“Oh, yeah, the other funny thing was, it’s like some kinda care center for kids, this place. They got all these kids in there watchin’ the voodoo. They got this other kid tied down on this table and all these weird dudes jumpin’ around and pouring shit on her, and cuttin’ her and jackin’ off on her. An’ this old bitch runnin’ the show, like a preacher in front of the church, you know? That’s what he said, man. I din believe half of that shit myself.
“And Junior, he ain’t no bigger than some damn kid hisself, so he could slip in easy. Anyway, the thing of it is, I saw where somebody kidnapped this lady D.A. and then when Junior din show up….”
“When didn’t he show up?” asked Karp.
“He was spose to come over my place last Wednesday. But he din show. I akst around, but nobody seen him. And that’s like unusual, ’cause Junior, he don’t travel much, you unnerstand? A homeboy. He ain’t been to Jersey his whole life. So I figure somebody grabbed him, too. Maybe the same folks who grabbed the D.A. So I figure, you know, I’d like tell you.”
But not until you were in trouble yourself, thought Karp uncharitably. He turned to Hrcany, who had come into the room during Boudreau’s tale, and said, “Roland, call Balducci. He’s probably home now, but get him! Ask him if he still has that fancy doll he picked up in that trash-bag case. If he’s got it, get him to bring it here. If he hasn’t, ask him if it was marked in any way, any kind of identifying mark. Matt, where’s the doll you got off Junior?”
“In my place, if I ain’t been ripped off yet.”
“OK, Roland, get the address and the key and send Brenner along with Matt here to get it.”
Hrcany looked bemused. He squinted at Karp and said, “You believe this horseshit?”
“I don’t know what I believe any more, Roland,” said Karp. “But I want to see both those dolls.”
Alonso, bent almost double, followed the bloody smears across the floor of the playroom. That was another thing he would have to clean up. He had so much to do, he couldn’t hold it in his head all at once. He had to get the witch tied up again; that was the first thing. His Mommy said. Tonight she had to go away. Then Brother would be OK. The witch was hurting Brother. That made Alonso feel bad, as if it was somehow his fault. Maybe it was. Everything was Alonso’s fault. No matter how hard he tried, it never was enough. That’s because he was bad. And stupid. Not like Brother. Felix was perfect.
Then he had to wrap up the policeman and take him away to the garbage. The policeman wasn’t supposed to be there, so it was his fault. What else? Fix the window. And the lights. Alonso didn’t think he knew how to do that. His Mommy would be mad. So many things to think about. He could never do it all. He would get a spanking. Hot tears came into his eyes and splashed down on the floor. Another thing: clean the floor.
He straightened up and cocked his head. That was a funny sound: a clicking, buzzing sound, like some kind of machinery, but irregular. The sound grew louder. He saw a white shape in the shadows coming toward him. The witch. Running? No, not running, faster than running, impossibly fast, with a noise of wheels.
Karp stared at the two dolls on the table in front of him as if waiting for them to confess. They were as silent as the three men in the interrogation room with him: Hrcany, amused, Brenner, carefully neutral, and Balducci, irritated and inclined to show it.
“Can I go now?” Balducci said. “I got dragged away from a wedding rehearsal for this bullshit. My daughter’s getting married tomorrow, I don’t need to be working nights.”
The doll that Boudreau had told them he got from Junior Gibbs was a bride, wrapped in a white confection of satin and Alençon lace. At the mention of weddings, looking at the doll, Karp experienced a flash of pain so intense that it clouded his vision and choked his throat.
Idly, nervously, he fingered the fabric of the bridal doll, pulled at the ribbons that held its veil. The veil came loose in his hands. He turned the doll over. The high-necked gown was closed with a row of miniscule buttons down the back. He flicked at these with his fingers and they came open, revealing a white porcelain neck.
“Balducci, you ever look under your doll’s clothes?” he asked.
The men laughed, and Balducci, flushing, said, “No, I never did. It’s a doll, for cryin’ out loud. And I told you—it don’t lead anywhere.”
“There’s a number on this one,” Karp said quietly. “Maybe there’s a number on the other one.” The three men rushed to look where Karp was pointing. On the nape of the bride’s neck, where the porcelain met the fabric of the body, a six digit number in black ink was inscribed. In a moment they had unclothed the Lucy Segura doll enough to see a similar number in the same place.
“Well, look at that!” said Hrcany.
“It don’t prove anything,” Balducci snapped. “It don’t prove she owned the doll. It could be like an antique dealer’s number.”
“It could,” agreed Karp.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Balducci. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll take both of these down to that doll guy and get them checked out. Maybe there’s records, from auctions or something.”
Brenner said, “You gonna skip the wedding?”
Balducci clapped his hand to his forehead. “Oh, shit! Yeah, well Raney’ll do it. I’ll call him tonight. That OK, Butch?”
“Sure. Fine,” said Karp absently. He was recalling a conversation he had had with Marlene in her loft. He had been right about Marlene’s case, hadn’t he? The evidence wasn’t there to connect Lucy Segura to Mrs. Dean. It was a fantasy, ludicrous in comparison with the evidence he had just used to convict Felix Tighe. He had been right; why then did he feel so massive a sense of despair?
These thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of Guma, who threw open the door to the interrogation room and announced his presence with a loud sneeze.
“Christ! I’m catching a cold!” said Guma, rubbing his eyes. When he saw Karp he brightened. “Butch! Damn it, man, I been looking all over for you. I missed you after court and I been sitting in your office for a couple of hours. A cop came by looking for Roland and said you and him was doing something up here. What’s going on?”
“Not much, Goom. Playing with dolls. What’d you want to see me about?”
“Nothing much. I just figured out what happened to Marlene. It wasn’t the wise guys who got her. It was that bitch with the day-care center.”
Karp felt his face break out with cold sweat. He cleared his throat heavily and asked, “What’d you find out Guma?”
“She never went to the day-care center the night she disappeared.”
“What do you mean? Where did she go?”
“That I don’t know yet. What I do know is that Dean is definitely running a kid sex racket out of that place.”
Karp frowned. “How do you know that, Guma?”
“Informants,” said Guma, too quickly.
Karp’s eyes grew steely. “What kind of informants, Guma? What is the bullshit, anyway? I got a judge and a minister who say that Marlene left for the center. She never got there.”
“Yeah. But it turns out that both the judge and the minister are well known baby-fuckers themselves. Maybe they’re Dean’s customers too—”
“Are you crazy!” shouted Karp. “Rice and Pinder? That’s impossible!” But even as he said it, Karp knew that it wasn’t impossible at all. Marlene had sensed it at some level, the existence of a criminal conspiracy involving people with credentials so lofty that even to suspect them would be to bring down the wrath of the establishment. Which meant that they could do virtually anything —exploit children, murder children, kidnap an assistant district attorney—with no fear of getting caught. Immoral certainty. And Karp had played his role as part of the establishment, of the conspiracy of ignorance that made it possible.
“The other thing is,” Guma went on, “V.T. and Raney think that Irma Dean is Felix Tighe’s mother. V.T. thinks she could have been snatched because of her connection with you and the murder trial.”
Karp gaped. “V.T.? What the fuck does V.T. have to do with this? Dean is Tighe’s moth … ?” Then he stopped. Events were obviously out of his control. Instinct took over. When the game plan broke down, when all else failed, go for the basket. Karp stood up. “Fuck all this! Brenner, Balducci—get the dolls! We’re going to see Mrs. Dean.”