“Dad, where the hell have you been? Mommy is-”
“I know, kiddo, I’m listening to my messages.”
“Where have-”
“It’s a long story, Sarah. Tell me what’s going on.”
She pretty much repeated what Pete Vandervoort had described and then started losing it.
“Shhhh, Sarah, calm down, calm down. It won’t help anyone if you lose control. You said you thought Mom was seeing Uncle Patrick again. What makes you say that?”
“She was acting weird, like… like she was before she tried to-”
“Weird how?”
“She was all nervous, always looking over my shoulder when we were together. She started staying in her bedroom all the time, smoking cigarettes. I could smell them through the door. She tried to get me to stay at Robby’s or to come back to your place. Dad, I’m really scared.”
“We’ll take care of it. Your mom’ll be fine,” I said, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. “I’ll be up there in a few hours. In the meantime, put in a call to her shrink, okay? I’m on my way.”
I stayed and listened to the remainder of the messages. They were from Aaron and Carmella, another one from Pete Vandervoort. All wondered where I was and why I still hadn’t picked up my cell. Walking to my bedroom to change, I half-listened to another message, the last message. It was mostly silence, a vague, familiar silence, a chilling silence. Then a snicker.
End of new messages.
I have seldom in my life been thankful for traffic. Being thankful for traffic is akin to joy over an exit wound, but I was thankful for it that day.
With the Belt Parkway jammed in both directions, I hadn’t even gotten out of Brooklyn. And given all that was going on, I’d’ve thought my mind would be cluttered by fear over Katy’s disappearance, worry for Sarah, the news of Mary White’s murder. Then there was the peculiar nature of what Brian Doyle had said about no one having seen Martello on the night of the kid’s murder. Never mind the call from the snickering ghost.
Yet, there in the traffic, the radio blasting “Black Coffee in Bed,” my progress measured by inches, not in miles per hour, all I could think about was Connie Geary and the expression on her face as I drove away that morning. I looked at my sideview mirror as I had earlier, trying to recreate her face with the paint of memory. Her expression was predatory, almost feral. Again, I wondered where it had come from. I wondered if she meant for me to see it. It was always the small details: Connie’s expression, the kid lying to me about his name, Katy seeing… Suddenly, I was short of breath and then the world went away.
Things became so clear to me that I hurt, I ached. I wanted to peel my skin away from my muscle, tear my muscle away from my bone, wrench all feelings away from my heart. Horns filled the air, but I could not move, could not blink, could not… All senses deserted me. I was numb and deaf, dumb and blind. The only thing I tasted was my own bile. I heard the horns again. They were angrier now, even vengeful. Beneath the blare was a distant tapping. Still, I could not move. The tapping grew more insistent.
“Hey, buddy… pal…” The tapping had a voice. “Buddy, you okay?”
The world rushed back in as I turned to see a man’s face pressed against my window. I looked ahead and the traffic had broken up.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry.”
He shrugged his shoulders, hitched up his eyebrows, the corner of his mouth. He tapped the window one more time and said, “Okay, then let’s go.”
I stepped on the gas and drove blind.
ALTHOUGH IN MY heart I now knew who had been pulling the strings all along, I wanted some confirmation, something tangible I could show Feeney and Pete Vandervoort. Too many times in my life I had operated on whims and hunches. Not this time, because if what I suspected was true, was true, then Katy’s life, Sarah’s, and mine were in real danger. Everything, even the murders of Mary White, the kid, Martello-yes, Martello-had been the preliminaries, the overture and first two acts. Before I went rushing upstate, I needed to know for sure.
I called ahead to Vandervoort and Sarah and warned them I might be delayed in getting to Janus. Car trouble, I’d said. The sheriff knew I was full of shit and Sarah believed me out of desperation and habit. I considered telling Vandervoort the truth, but changed my mind. There was too much to explain and if I was wrong, I didn’t want to risk the sheriff shifting the focus off the search for Katy. If I was right about who had her, she’d be safe for now. The last act required me as audience.
Devo was already in the office waiting for me.
“I have it queued up for you, Moe.”
The lights in his office were dimmed and he had me sit in front of one of his computer monitors. He stood behind me to my right.
“The view, I am afraid, is far from sharp, but you can make out a face,” Devo said, then began explaining the mechanics of how he had coaxed the image from the gas station’s security video.
“Just show it to me.”
“What you will see is a continually sharpening image. When the image is at its highest resolution, the frame will freeze.” He touched the mouse.
There on the monitor was the image of a slightly tinted driver’s side window of a 2000 GMC Yukon. Click. I could barely make out the ghostly silhouette of someone in the driver’s seat. Click. Click. Click. In tiny increments the window tinting seemed to brighten and, as it did, the silhouette became less and less ghostly. Click. A human face began to emerge out of the darkness. Click. A few seconds later I could make out a black bulge over the left eye of the emerging face. Click. Then, just before the frame froze, I recognized the face of the mystery man. In that brief second before the fear and resignation set in, I smiled. For now I knew where a bullet I fired in Miami Beach in 1983 had landed. I’d shot out Ralphy Barto’s left eye.
Mira Mira had almost been right. While Ralph Barto wasn’t a cop, he had been a U.S. marshal and a PI. Bullet wound or not, this wasn’t about revenge for his missing left eye. After all, the prick was trying to kill me when I returned fire. No, Ralph Barto was a professional lackey, not a master of the universe. Dead roses, ghosts, and graves were not his franchise. If Barto had wanted revenge, he’d have sought me out long ago, stuck a gun in my mouth, and made like Jackson Pollock. This wasn’t about Ralph Barto, at least not directly, but about his boss, a man who had murdered a little boy and a political intern in coldest blood.
In 1983, Ralph Barto had two bosses: Joe Spivack and Steven Brightman. Spivack, another ex-U.S. marshal, had owned a security firm in the same building where Carmella and I now kept our offices. His firm had done the initial investigation attempting to clear Steven Brightman from any taint in connection to his intern’s disappearance. After I got involved and we cleared Brightman, Spivack went to his cabin upstate and blew his brains out. Spivack’s suicide, along with some other nagging doubts, led me to question my own conclusions about Brightman’s innocence. At Spivack’s funeral, Ralph Barto offered his services to me. I had no way of knowing that he was Brightman’s boy, a mole meant to keep tabs on me. When I got too close to the truth, he tried to kill me.
I could understand Brightman wanting revenge as much or more as Martello, but why now? Why seventeen years later? Something had had to set him off and I wanted to know what that was before we crossed paths.
“Devo,” I said, “do me a favor and get on the internet.”
“Sure, Moe, but why?”
“Steven Brightman.”
“What about him?
“Everything, but especially about his ex-wife.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Connie Geary had made it happen. I knew that without Devo having to look it up. She was in this. I just didn’t know how deeply. She had planted the idea of our date weeks ago. She made the call. She set the time. She made sure we were alone and I was unreachable. She arranged for the car. She picked the restaurant. She gave me the
