C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN
L
ee stopped by the precinct the next morning after his boxing lesson, to see if there were any developments in the case. There weren’t—the lab had determined there was no sign of sexual assault, and so far no helpful DNA had shown up.
“You okay, Doc?” Butts said. “You look a little rough.”
“He called again last night.”
“That jerk who claims to know something about your sister’s disappearance?”
“Yeah.”
“How long has it been since you talked to anyone who worked on your sister’s case?” Butts asked, sniffing at a white bakery bag.
“It must be about three years now.”
“You might try finding the guys who worked the case,” Butts suggested. “Look ’em up, see what they have to say. Tell ’em about the phone calls. Anyways, couldn’t hurt, right?”
“The primary on the case was a Detective Brian O’Reilly.”
“O’Reilly?” Butts said, digging a doughnut out of the bag. “Think I heard of him. Came from a line of cops. His dad was a captain back in the day.”
“That’s him.”
“Rumor was, he used to drink heavily.”
“Still does, far as I know.”
Butts shook his head. “Bad habit to get into. Can’t let the job get to you like that.” He bit off a chunk of doughnut and chewed thoughtfully. “I think he retired about a year ago. Lives in the Bronx somewhere. Moved in to look after his mom or something like that.”
Butts turned out to be right. According to his personnel file, Detective Brian O’Reilly had left the force two years ago, taken an early pension and moved back to Woodlawn, where he’d grown up. Lee tracked down his phone number, which was unlisted, and called to ask if he could pay a visit. The detective was guarded over the phone, but Lee persuaded him it wouldn’t be a long visit, and he finally agreed. With the weather continuing to break, the air warm and foggy, Lee took the long subway ride to the borough that took its name from a seventeenth-century Scandinavian farmer, Jonas Bronck.
Brian O’Reilly lived in a five-story brownstone just off Katonah Avenue in Woodlawn, a predominantly Irish neighborhood in the North Bronx. Unlike the South Bronx, this part of the borough was almost entirely white, mostly lower middle class. His street was just around the corner from the Emerald Isle Bakery and Murphy’s Pub. When Lee rang the buzzer, O’Reilly appeared at the door almost immediately, as though he had been watching through the lace curtains in the front room.
“Come on in, then,” he said, after glancing both ways up and down the street. What he might be looking for Lee had no idea—maybe years of being a cop had left him with an instinct for surveillance.
Brian Seamus Timothy O’Reilly’s thick body sagged with years of defeat. In the years since Lee had seen him, he seemed to have aged decades. His skin had the ruddy sheen of a heavy drinker, and his square Irish face wore a permanently stunned expression, as if he had never gotten over the things he had seen in his years as a cop. Even his voice was sad. His tone was soft, every sentence descending in volume and pitch, as if sliding down a slope of hopelessness. If he wore his philosophy of life emblazoned on a T-shirt, Lee thought, the front would read, W
HY BOTHER
? The message on the back would be, I
T’S NO USE ANYWAY
.
He shuffled down the front hall into the kitchen, flicking on the fluorescent light over the sink.
“Have a seat,” he told Lee, indicating a cane-backed chair at a white enamel table. Surprisingly, the house appeared to be in good repair, not in the derelict condition Lee would have expected in the home of a drunk. The curtains on the windows were cheerful and freshly washed, and the floor had been recently swept. He concluded that someone was looking after O’Reilly—a son, perhaps, or a daughter.
“Want a drink?” O’Reilly asked, reaching for a bottle of Jameson on the counter.
The last thing Lee wanted right now was a drink. But if he was to get anything at all out of the man, perhaps the best strategy was to play the role of drinking buddy. Then maybe he could slip his questions in without spooking the retired detective.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
O’Reilly grabbed a couple of tumblers with one hefty hand and poured them both generous double shots. He slung his doughy body into one of the cane chairs and plunked the glasses down on the table. He slid one of the tumblers toward Lee, then knocked back his drink in one gulp. Wiping his mouth with his sleeve, he leaned back and closed his eyes.
“That’s better,” he said. “Now, what can I do for you? Has there been a break in your sister’s case?”
“I’m afraid not,” Lee said, sipping his own drink. This was harder than he’d thought it would be. He could feel the pain of the man across from him. It was palpable, like the scorching blast from a furnace.
O’Reilly squinted at him through bloodshot eyes. “You know, I just about killed myself on that case.”
“I remember.”
“I put in eighteen-hour days. Couldn’t sleep, stopped eating.”
“I know, I just—”
O’Reilly leaned forward, his elbows on the table. His meaty forearms were blotched, the skin mottled dark red.
“You ever get a case that gets under your skin?” O’Reilly said. “That just won’t let go, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself you’ve done all you can?” He got up and lurched over to the counter, grabbed the bottle of whiskey and filled his glass.
Lee stood up. “Look, I don’t want to . . . maybe it’s better if I leave—”
“Sit down,” his host commanded. “Now that you’re here, we’re gonna talk about it, so we are.” He poured himself more whiskey but left it on the table. Resting his fingers on the lip of the tumbler, he stared down at the tawny liquid as if it held the answers to the questions that tormented him.
“So,” he said, “you want to know if there’s anything I can tell you about your sister’s disappearance.”
“But first I want to see if you can help me with something.”
The detective straightened up in his chair. “What’s that?”
Lee told him about the mysterious caller, omitting no detail. O’Reilly listened carefully and appeared to sober up as Lee talked. The detective’s long-honed investigative instincts seemed to be taking over—his expression became sharper, more focused.
“You got a recording of this asshole?” he asked when Lee had finished.
“As a matter of fact, I do.” He pulled the tape recorder out of his jacket pocket, placed it on the table, and pressed the Play button. The familiar metallic voice snaked out of the machine, its flat quality emphasized by the recorder’s tinny speaker.
“Why, hello. I hope you haven’t forgotten about me. I certainly haven’t forgotten about you.” Then the brief, loathsome chuckle, which made Lee dig his fingernails into his palms.
O’Reilly listened intently, hunched over the table, his body motionless. When it finished, he said, “Play it again.”
Lee rewound the tape and pressed the Play button, and again the reptilian voice filled the room. He couldn’t help noticing the involuntary clenching of his fists, the rage churning in his stomach.
“Okay,” the detective said when it was over.
“You have any idea who this might be?”
O’Reilly leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, his expression unreadable. “Don’t get excited,” he said, “but I might know something that could help. But first, how about another round?”
This time, Lee didn’t hesitate. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Make mine a double.”
O’Reilly smiled for the first time since he had arrived. “That’s more like it. We’ll make a goddamn cop outta you yet.”
C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN
E
dmund sat at his desk preparing his notes for the next day’s class. He loved writing his lectures—if only he didn’t have to actually deal with students. People were so messy, so unpredictable. He sought refuge in numbers and the music of Bach, both of which were pure and beautiful, instead of complicated and ugly, like life.
He stared out the office window at the stark landscape of the campus in winter. The buildings lay silent, their sharp right angles in muted tones of white and gray. Winter was his favorite season. He enjoyed its purity; it was, he thought, the season most like mathematics. If only people could be like numbers—malleable, distant, perfect. He understood that language intuitively. But people were different—always behaving in illogical ways, driven by passions and desires and
needs
. Numbers needed nothing—they just
were
. They had always been there and always would be, long after human civilizations had annihilated one another with their petty greed and unruly passions.
Edmund smoothed the paper on his immaculate, orderly desk and sighed with pleasure. The sight of columns of figures had always had a calming effect on him. Black on white, squiggles of ink that held the secrets of the universe. Mathematicians had an understanding of the world no one else possessed; he knew that, and it made him feel superior.
As he studied his lecture notes, his hand crept unconsciously to the long, thin scar that snaked from his forehead to his chin, his fingers tracing the raised line of skin. When people were rude enough to ask about it, he told a different story each time. He once told one drunken young graduate student at a faculty cocktail party that it was a dueling scar he’d received defending the honor of the Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein. He had no idea whether Schleswig-Holstein had a duchess or not, but it sounded like the kind of place one might engage in a duel. The graduate student was getting his doctorate in psychology, so Edmund figured he wasn’t very bright. Sure enough, the idiot bought the story entirely—Edmund overheard him repeating later it to a group of people at the party.
Another time he told an old lady in line behind him at the grocery store that he was a Croatian who had been tortured by a guard in a Serbian concentration camp. That shut the old biddy up quickly enough; she avoided eye contact with him after that. He didn’t plan his stories; they just came out when people intruded on what he considered to be a private matter. For him, lying was as natural as breathing. He lied not because he had to but because he could. It gave him power over other people. Besides math and Bach, that was the only thing that made life worth living.
As to how he really got his scar—well, that was a scene he had buried deep in the underside of his brain. It was so many years ago, and yet it could burst into consciousness at any moment—a look, a sound, an angle of the light. Or a smell . . . how he remembered that smell! Couldn’t forget it, even if he tried. And he had tried. God, how he had tried. The odor of his own burning flesh . . . even now it sickened him, made his stomach heave and push at his esophagus as though it wanted to jump out of his body. And his father had laughed at him for vomiting that day—mocked and belittled Edmund, in his Devon accent, thick as clotted cream.
You’re lucky I didn’t cut your little pecker off! You disgusting little bugger! If I ever catch you doing that again, you’d better watch out!
His fingers traced the raised edges of the scar. He did watch out after that—his father never did catch him doing that thing again. Oh, he did it plenty of times, but never when his old man was around. His father was stupid; Edmund had nothing but contempt for him. His mother was the brains in the family—he had inherited her mind, her gift for logic, her work ethic. He’d adored her and would have done anything for her. So when she left his father for another man, abandoning him and his sister, he never forgave her. He hardened his heart, chipping away at his love for her until there was nothing left, like a sculpture that had been whittled away to nothing.
His sister accepted their mother’s invitations to visit, but not Edmund. He knew his father was a nobody, a lout and a bully, but he was damned if he was going to see his mother in the arms of another man. It was around that time he started exposing himself to the girls in school. First the younger girls and then the ones in his class—until finally a teacher caught him in the act. And then it was off to boarding school, which he rather enjoyed—at least it got him away from his father.
But his urge to do dark things persisted. It grew over time, like an evil vine, until it threatened to choke all that was light and good about him. He set fire to his roommate’s bed over an argument, bullied the younger children and tied firecrackers to the tails of cats. He stole whatever he could get away with and lied whenever possible, just because he could.
But then he discovered mathematics, and his world changed. Here was something he was good at—really good at, “scary good,” as his sister said. He was graduated a year early, finessing his S levels. Accepted by King’s College at Cambridge at the age of seventeen, he had his doctorate by the time he was twenty-three. Everyone called him a genius. A “success story,” an example of what hard work and talent combined could do. He had “turned his life around.”
But the darkness inside him remained, and his fantasies continued to grow. Always a part of him, they began to take on a life of their own. The higher he rose in academic circles, the more they demanded attention. They wouldn’t let him alone. Putting an ocean between him and his homeland hadn’t changed a thing.
As much as he lived for mathematics, he could feel the dark urges in his soul pulling him down into their undertow.
Psychopath.
That’s what those idiot psychologists called him. But they were the lowest rung on the food chain. The social sciences were for idiots—he only had respect for real science. And behind science—and music, his beloved Bach—lay mathematics.
Edmund looked at his watch, the hands at a perfect 180-degree angle. It was six o’clock. He looked out the window at the pallid waning moon, low in the darkening sky. A smiled played at the corner of his mouth as he thought about the careful preparations he had made. It was time to go hunting again.