Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

'What about that bottle you keep in your desk for emergency situations like this one? I know it's there, because I've seen it in all the cop movies.'

'They've never shot any movie in here. I don't have any bottle in my desk.'

'In that case, I guess I'll have coffee.'

'You know where it is. Go help yourself.'

MacWhorter was in a decidedly strange mood, I thought as I shuffled out of his office, down a grimy corridor, and through a swinging door into the squad room, where I poured myself a cup of coffee from a pot sitting on a hot plate. I exchanged a little friendly banter with some of the cops going off duty or coming on, then went back to MacWhorter's office. He was sitting in almost the same exact position as when I had left him, but he had pushed the desk lamp off to the corner of his desk, so that now his face was half hidden in shadow. I doubted that his sudden change in mood, the shift to good cop from bad, was due to lack of sleep, so I wondered just what he thought being civil to me was going to accomplish. His first question surprised me.

'Where's Garth? I don't often see one of you without the other, even since he moved to Cairn. It's like the two of you are joined at the hip.'

'He's off with his wife on a skiing vacation in Switzerland.'

'Garth skis?'

'He's taking lessons. As far as I've heard, he hasn't broken anything yet.'

'He ever talk about me?'

I sipped at my coffee, said, 'Nope.'

'I'm a good cop, Frederickson.'

'I've never heard anybody claim otherwise.'

Now he leaned forward in his chair, so that his whole face was caught in the bright cone of light cast by the desk lamp. Something in his green eyes had changed, but I couldn't tell what I was seeing there. He somehow seemed more vulnerable to me. 'I wouldn't be a cop at all if it wasn't for your brother, Frederickson,' he said in a voice that had grown hoarse. 'I owe him big-time.'

'I see. That explains why you always have such nice things to say about the two of us.'

Anger flashed in his eyes, but it was almost instantly gone, supplanted by something that looked very close to shame. It occurred to me that it was costing Felix MacWhorter something to say whatever it was he was trying to say to me, so I decided to keep my smart-ass remarks to myself, at least for a time, and listen.

He stared at me for a few moments, then said, 'Your brother and I were partners a whole lot of years ago. It was right after he came on the force. We were the same age, but he had more experience in law enforcement than I did.'

I nodded. 'He was a county sheriff in Nebraska, where we come from. He did a hitch as an MP in Vietnam, then heard how much fun I was having in New York and decided to join me.'

MacWhorter shrugged, then glanced over my head at the wall behind me-or something else, perhaps his past. 'We worked out of Fort Apache up in the Bronx. At the time the precinct was … a little dirty. There were a lot of cops on the pad. Most of it was small-time stuff-free meals, a couple of drinks, maybe a Christmas turkey. That kind of thing. But there was also some serious shakedown action going down, money changing hands, a little cash in envelopes that eventually became more cash in envelopes offered to cops for 'extra services,' maybe keeping a closer eye on some store that had been robbed a few times. Anyway, I was having money problems, so I started taking some of the envelopes that were offered to me. One day Garth caught me at it, and he told me to stop. I told him to fuck off and mind his own business, because I needed the extra money, and because I was really earning it by keeping an eye on the stores when I was off duty. He said that was a protection racket, not police work, and that he'd have to fight me if I didn't stop. Hell, I had fifty pounds on him, and I'd won the division boxing championship the year before; no country hick was going to tell me what to do. So I fought him.'

'What happened?'

'He beat the shit out of me.'

'Yeah, well, Garth was always pretty good with his fists. Fast hands.'

'He dogged me after the fight, stuck to me like flypaper when we were on duty to make sure I didn't take any more money from shopkeepers. I knew that if I tried to, Garth would kick my ass again.' 'And?'

'And it turns out your brother was working for Internal Affairs- mind you, he'd volunteered to work for IA, to help clean up the precinct. Who ever heard of such a thing?'

'It doesn't surprise me. Besides being good with his fists, Garth has always had a strong sense of justice. He took being a cop very seriously.'

'Better than a third of the cops in that precinct got canned or transferred because of your brother, Frederickson. A few lost their pensions. I'd tried to go on the pad, but I got off scot-free because your brother decided that since I was his partner I was a problem he'd solve personally. He saved my career.'

'And so you show your thanks by spending the rest of your career bad-mouthing him. I don't understand you, MacWhorter, and I don't understand why you dragged me down here in the middle of the night to tell me this.'

He flushed, shifted in his chair, and looked away. 'I'm trying to explain something to you, Frederickson, and it isn't easy for me. So cut me some slack. Garth had saved my ass, and I hated him for it; he'd shown himself to be a better man than I was, and I hated him for that. I felt ashamed, and I couldn't stand it. All I could allow myself to think about was the fact that your brother had ratted on his fellow officers. Most cops hate Internal Affairs, and Garth had volunteered to do their dirty work for them. He'd hurt people who were friends of mine, cops who'd thought Garth was their friend. He was a rat and a traitor, and just because he'd saved me from myself didn't alter that fact. That's the way I had to look at it in order to live with myself. Hell, I knew he resigned because the department screwed him over, betrayed him, and almost got both of you killed. But I still had my head up my ass. I couldn't forgive him for being a better man and cop than I was, for dropping the dime on my friends and saving me, and so I chose to keep trying to convince myself that he'd left and teamed up with you because he wanted to cash in on your fame. Then I started moving up in the ranks, and I started to see things differently-especially when I was given command of this precinct. I damn well wished I had a Garth Frederickson working for me. But I didn't behave differently. I'm a proud man, Frederickson, stubborn, and maybe even a little bit stupid at times. For a man like me, old attitudes die hard. Somewhere along the line all the mixed feelings I had about this thing turned into confusion. I'm not a man who enjoys spending much time looking into my own head, Frederickson, and the confusion I felt only made me more resentful of your brother. Somewhere along that same line I guess I started to take it out on you.'

I paused with my cup of coffee halfway to my mouth, and I wondered if the astonishment I felt showed on my face. 'My God, this is an apology.'

The heavyset man smiled thinly. 'Let's not get too carried away. I still think the two of you mess way more than you should in police business, just like I damn well know you're doing now. Let's say I'm calling for a truce. You know more about this Raymond Rogers than you're telling me. I want to catch a mass murderer, and I'm asking you to help me, if you can. You get no more threats and disrespect from me, and I want no more bullshit from you. Tell me what's going on. Deal?'

'Deal,' I said, pulling the wooden chair I was sitting in closer to his desk. 'The people who were working me over a little while earlier when Lou so conveniently showed are a fun couple by the name of Henry and Janice Sparsburg, nationality unknown but I believe American. They're professional assassins who go by the noms de mort of Punch and Judy. You can probably get more on them from Interpol, which is where I got my information. Their most distinguishing characteristic is that they've both had about a half dozen face lifts too many-plastic surgery is part of their thing. From a distance they look twenty years younger than they are, but the illusion fades rapidly the closer you get. Up close, they look grotesque. Think Dorian Gray. You could send out a call to post extra plainclothes cops at all the shelters in the city, because that's where Punch and Judy have been hunting up to now, but it's probably a waste of time. Now that I've made them and know what they're up to, they'll probably change their strategy. They're the people who killed the man you found in the Dumpster. They're working for the people who ran Rivercliff, and I have a hunch-only a hunch-that's the CIA. The good doctors at Rivercliff were conducting illegal experiments on human beings for years, and Rogers, who has to be our ice-pick killer, is only one of a dozen patients who escaped from the place after he went ballistic and started slicing and dicing his keepers. Besides Rogers, there are still eleven patients and a Rivercliff shrink by the name of