The young detective jerked his head over his left shoulder. “Go ahead. I’ll be outside when you’re ready.”
The kitchen, like the living room, was a museum piece. The floor was a sheet of yellow and green linoleum- the real stuff-and the appliances were from, as my mom used to say, the year of the flood. The wallpaper, a green floral print, had been around since WWII. The table was green Formica with a fluted aluminum border and the chairs were bent tubular aluminum with jade green plastic cushions. We turned right at the ancient fridge and then right again to an open door. The door led down three rough-hewn wooden steps to a small combination root cellar/pantry. In a house built so close to the water, this was the nearest thing you could get to a basement. The room was on the opposite side of the house from the porch, so I hadn’t noticed it when I was here the first time. Windowless, it was dark in here even though the sun was peeking through the kitchen windows. There was a bare bulb overhead in an old ceramic ceiling fixture. McKenna pulled the beaded chain that hung down from the light.
There before us was a kind of makeshift altar and shrine. The altar, complete with a kneeling step for prayer, was covered in candles and old candle wax. Above the altar was a collage of images of Sashi Bluntstone. Most were cut out of newspapers and magazines and glued and lacquered to the wall. Not unexpectedly, Sashi’s eyes had been blackened and blood poured from her ears. But there were other photographs that sat on top of the altar and leaned against the wall. They were of Sashi Bluntstone, her hands and legs bound behind her like the arms and legs of the stuffed bear left in my car. In the photos, she was propped against a blank wall and nude except for panties. She was limp and her eyes shut.
“See those panties?” McKenna whispered, pointing at the photos. “They were on the altar when we found this room. They were bloody, Moe. It was dried blood.”
“Fuck!”
“It gets worse.”
“How much worse?”
“Wrapped inside the panties we found some small charred bones. Human bones. One of the guys thinks they’re from a finger, maybe a pinky, a child’s pinky.”
The world began wobbling so fiercely, it was all I could do not to throw up right there. I managed to make it outside to the water’s edge before giving up whatever I had inside me. Then I plunged my head into the icy cold water. Now the what-ifs weren’t McKenna’s cross to bear. They were mine. And the cold water would have helped only if I’d managed to keep my head under.
TWENTY-SIX
I sat in Dr. Mehmet Ogologlu’s waiting room, thumbing through the magazines and trying very hard to fight my own desire to leave. Nothing new in that, in fighting myself. I’d been doing it for the two very long weeks since I’d thrown my guts up at the water’s edge behind Tierney’s house. Christmas was at hand, the world had stopped wobbling, and everyone had seemed to move beyond Sashi Bluntstone’s kidnapping and murder to the next petty, scandalous, or violent thing the media ran up the flagpole to distract us from what was actually important. Sometimes I think George Orwell got it right. He was just off by twenty years or so. Yes, people had moved on, but I hadn’t. That’s why I was here.
The first week was the roughest, although several days of it are lost to me forever. I spent nearly twenty-four hours at Brooklyn South Homicide on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island following the discovery of John Tierney’s body. There I was interviewed for hours on end by myriad detectives and representatives from the Brooklyn DA’s office. What happened after that I’ve been forced to piece together. I remember I started drinking the moment I walked back into my condo. I don’t know when I stopped or if I stopped, only that Sarah found me passed out and half-dressed on the bathroom floor three days later. She said I hadn’t been answering my phone messages or my emails and that everyone was worried about me. What did that mean, everyone? Isn’t everyone’s everyone different? How many people did my everyone constitute? Three? Four? Two? What was the formula? Thinking about it just made me feel more wretched.
Then, for a few days after that, I sat alone in my apartment. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I was numb. I wasn’t drinking. My body’d had quite enough of that, thank you very much. I played some old vinyl records without listening. I watched a lot of movies on cable, though I couldn’t tell you which ones. I screened my calls, answering only Sarah’s. She called every day. My daughter was back in my life, which was exactly what I’d hoped for when she begged me to get involved that morning at New Carmens. What I couldn’t figure out was the value of hopes realized versus the price paid. I didn’t know how to do that kind of calculus, but somewhere I heard the devil laughing, or maybe it was God.
I waited and waited for the cops to call me back in, but the call never came. It wasn’t going to. That’s what Detective McKenna told me when he showed up at my door, eight days of newspapers cradled in his arms. The first thing he said was, “Christ, Prager, you look like shit.”
“That I do,” I said, staring in the mirror and running my hand over the thicket of gray stubble covering my face. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve dug up every inch of Tierney’s property and taken his house apart, moldy stick by moldy stick.”
“Find anything else?”
“A few things, yeah.”
“Like what?”
“Like ten thousand dollars of the ransom money in a paper bag in one of the kitchen cabinets.”
“How do you know it’s from the ransom?”
“For starters, the parents identified the bag. It’s from a supermarket in Glen Cove. Their fingerprints are all over the bag and the money,” he said. “We also found a length of bloody gauze shoved under a mat in the backseat of his car. It’s the kid’s blood.”
“Fuck! Anything else?”
“Like what, Prager, a map to the pit where he burned her body?”
“Like the rest of the money?”
“No more money. Who knows what that wacky fuck was thinking? Maybe he flung it into Jamaica Bay or ate it for lunch.”
“Any more bones?”
“None of those either. We’re never going to find her ourselves. You know how it’s going to be. Ten years from now, some old fart will be walking his dog in a state park or along a parkway and he’ll trip over something and he’ll look back and see a bone sticking out of the ground. That’s how she’ll be found.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Sure I’m right.”
“What about the way he was living?” I asked.
“Tierney? Oh, it was his house, all right. The mother died like two years ago and left it to him, but that’s when he started going completely over the falls. Had all the utilities shut off because he told his shrink that he was worried Hamas could listen in on his thoughts through their special wires.”
“What’s the deal with Brooklyn South Homicide?” I asked. “They gonna keep me waiting until I start crawling on the ceiling before they call me back in?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Let me shower and shave before-”
“No. I’m here to tell you it’s over. They’re done with you. I’m done with you. Both the Nassau County PD and the NYPD have finished our investigations. We’ll keep looking for the remains, but the case is pretty much over. It’s all on Tierney, not on you. We figure the girl was already dead by the time you showed up and both departments agree that in his house at night in the dark, anyone could have missed the door to the pantry. The police get second-guessed all the time and we’re not about to play Monday morning quarterback with you.”
“But what if she wasn’t already dead? What if I’d just come to you with the list when I got it? What if I hadn’t been so fast to dismiss Tierney as a suspect?”
“Come on, Prager, we went over this a hundred times when you were at Brooklyn South. There’s no way of
