Sunrise Highway Page 17

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Shit like that happens all the time. It’s probably going on right now, upstairs, at this hotel. Should you and me go break down every door?”

  “Chief, we’re just following the leads where they take us. And there’s a plausible connection to our other cases. If you can find a way to share some of those IAB records, I’m sure we can find a way to share more of our information.”

  Of course, she could have told him more. Pulled him into the process, made him a stakeholder. But something was distinctly holding her back.

  “So you’re playing games with me, detective?” He nodded with a knowing half smile. “I scratch yours, you scratch mine? Let me remind you: I’m a chief and you’re a detective.”

  “And I’m working with a federal task force that could demand records from your department and subpoena individual officers,” she warned him. “But I’d rather not get to that stage.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t.” He gave her a light pat on the arm. “My department likes NYPD telling us what to do about as much as NYPD would like outside interference. I’ll be interested to see what you come up with.”

  He waved toward his fellow chiefs, who were throwing their hands up as if they’d been waiting for him to come back to the table since the first Gulf War.

  “Chief, don’t do this,” Lourdes said. “You make us keep digging on our own, you might not like what we come up with.”

  “Excuse me.” He gave her arm a squeeze. “I need to get back to my friends. And by the way, good luck looking for your sister. I saw the alert with your name on it. I’ll have my guys keep an eye out.”

  24

  APRIL

  1995

  Beth looked surprised when Joey walked into the bedroom wearing the same suit he’d had on in Albany. Like after five years of living here he was still a stranger in this house.

  “What do you think of this?” he said.

  He was showing her a picture he’d ripped out of a magazine at the dentist’s office the other day. Madonna with short blond hair in a leather bra, biker shorts, fishnets, and a blindfold.

  She paused from folding the kids’ laundry on the bed. As hard-bodied and oblivious as she’d been on the night when he first walked into this house and shot her husband Randy in the kitchen downstairs.

  “Why you asking me?”

  “I’m just saying.” He shrugged. “As a look you could try.”

  It didn’t seem that unreasonable. Normal people probably had conversations like this. And as far as he could tell, he’d been pretty much acting the way normal people should act for a long time now.

  “You want me to cut my hair?” she asked.

  “I’m saying, think about it. Be open.”

  “So I could look like her?” She took the page and gave it an incredulous squint. “Like seriously?”

  More like Leslie Martinez, he was thinking. Now Jesperson. All the way back from Albany in the car, he’d been thinking about her and the questions she’d asked. The way she thought she had him cornered and ready to submit. So now he had a little film loop that wouldn’t stop running in his head. Leslie facedown on a mattress, with him giving it to her from behind until she screamed and begged for mercy.

  “But I’ve always had long hair.” Beth tossed her blond tresses self-consciously.

  “Maybe it’s time to try something different.”

  “But it’s how the kids have always known me.” She put stacks of their underwear on the dresser.

  “If you loved me, you’d do it for me,” he said.

  “That sounds like something from a movie.”

  “It’s how people who care about each other talk.”

  It had been months since they’d even tried to have sex. Certainly not much since the wedding two months ago. Her fault, he reckoned. When he’d first moved in, a couple of years after the shooting, they’d been at it at least once a month. Like normal people. Just the way he’d told her husband it would be before he pulled the trigger. Promising to screw the man’s wife, beat his kids, and live in his house once he was gone. The memory of that moment had gotten him off more than her body or even the size of the house. Temporarily relieving his urges and keeping him out of trouble on the street. So he could focus on building his career and elevating himself to where he needed to be. He’d looked at it analytically, and every man who’d ever gotten to be chief had a home and a family. And most of the so-called serial killers out there had been loners and obvious freaks. So he’d accepted that he had to rein himself in because he couldn’t get to where he wanted to be without appearing to be “normal.”

  “It’s weird,” she said, putting the picture on the night table.

  “What is?”

  “That it means so much to you.”

  There were scissors in the bathroom. He could force her down and cut the hair himself. Then do it to her like he was doing it to Leslie Jesperson. Who wouldn’t be trying to pin him down or talking about reviving some old investigation then. She’d be sobbing into a pillow and asking him to stop. But then the kids would come running and banging on the door, and then he’d have to put them in their place and next thing you knew the neighbors would be calling 911 and there’d be an awkward conversation with his own officers responding. And then having something on the boss, instead of the other way around. Exactly the opposite of what he wanted.

  Why was this so hard? He just wanted to have a life that looked like other people’s, so he could do what he wanted the rest of the time. In a way, he blamed his parents as well. The lack of structure when he was growing up. He’d been a latchkey kid back in the day. Prone to tantrums from the start, it was true. Prone to lying as well. Prone to getting others to take the blame for what he’d broken. And prone to coming home early from school to skip Little League practice and watch Dark Shadows on Channel 7 instead. A soap opera about a vampire, who could sap the blood and overcome the will of weaker souls. Which is why he happened to be home early sometimes to hear things he wasn’t supposed to hear and see things he wasn’t supposed to see.

  Sometimes he’d go out to Rockaway Beach on his own afterward. He’d stand there and watch the tide go in and out. First one wave would crash in and haul off all the seaweed and abandoned toys on the sand. Then another would come in and overpower it, snatching away everything in the first wave’s grip. Over and over, smashing and then receding, leaving cracked shells and misshapen pebbles in its wake, and then taking them away. Until there was just clean and shining gray shoreline that looked like the back of some giant mammal for a few seconds.

  This was the world. This was life. You had to keep crashing in with overwhelming force. To dominate and demand submission. Maintaining command and control. And never yield. Because there was always a bigger wave out there, ready to rush in and drag away whatever it was that you thought you had.

  “Lie down on the bed,” he told Beth.

  “I’m still doing the laundry.”

  “What, I have to ask you twice now?” He put the strength in his voice, so he didn’t have to raise it or show her a fist. “Get your fucking pants off and lie on your stomach. And don’t look at me.”

  “Joey, come on. The kids are home.”

  “Then I guess you better not make a lot of noise.”

  The key was to overcome all resistance. Like the wave overtaking the sand. He took off his pants and got on top of her. But now things had changed and the thought of Leslie Martinez Jesperson kept him from getting hard. It was the way she said she was going to take him down eventually. Thinking she was the tide, inevitable and unceasing, trying to take away what he had, a little bit at a time. Until the whole beach eroded. A bigger wave had to come down on top of her. To show her what was stronger.

  This was how it should be, with a man and a woman. The strong over the weak. In and out. Conquering the vulnerable with the force of your will and your body. The moon controlled the tides. And the tides were tied to how women acted. And since you couldn’t control the moon or the
tides, all you could control was women. He’d overcome his mother and he’d overcome Amy Nelson before they could take away what he had. So he’d overcome Leslie Martinez or Jesperson or whatever she called herself now, and any other wave of disturbance that came after her.

  “You’re hurting me,” Beth said in a muffled voice, her face mashed into the pillow by his hand pushing on the back of her head.

  No kidding. That was what was finally making him hard. Along with the sounds of the kids scampering around the rest of the house looking for her in frantic concern and the thought that her husband’s ghost was hovering somewhere in this room. I’m fucking your wife and then I’m going to scare your kids, and then I’m going to go downstairs and eat the rest of the apple pie in your refrigerator, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because I am alive and you are dead, and I am the sea and you were a tiny ripple that no one remembers anymore.

  In the meantime, Beth had gone limp beneath him. No longer clenching and tensing, but just lying there like she was surrendering as prey to a larger predator. Without the struggle, the excitement was gone. He pulled out and released, more out of boredom than exhilaration. Then he rolled onto his back and looked up at the bedroom ceiling, spent and disappointed. The ceiling was higher and dingier than he realized. The light fixture was old and one of the bulbs was dead.

  Beth sat up on the side of the bed. “Do you ever think there might be something the matter with you?” she asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “It’s just sometimes, I don’t know where your mind is.”

  He stood up to look for his pants. “There’s nothing wrong with my mind. Or my body. The problem is you.”

  This was what he wanted. It was what made him different and better than the Zodiacs and the Son of Sam types, who idiots like Leslie Jesperson might think were the same as him. But they weren’t the same. He wanted to have a normal relationship and a normal home. Not just as a cover, but as part of another life. In a separate compartment.

  There was a knock at the door. “Mom, I can’t find my science book.”

  Stacy, the oldest child. The one who cried the hardest the night her father died and the one who’d been the coldest and most suspicious since Joey had moved in.

  “Your mother will be with you in a minute,” he said sharply. “We’re talking.”

  There was open defiance in how the girl stomped away across the landing and in the way her mother looked over her shoulder at him now, brushing her hair out of her eyes.

  “She could use a father, you know,” she said.

  “Her and everybody else,” he grumbled, pulling his jeans on one leg at a time.

  It was no good, he realized. Living here with the family and the ghost under the roof. Better to tear it all down and start over. Or better yet, get rid of the family and keep the house. Give himself a better chance to get it right this time. In and out with the tide. Once this Leslie Martinez Jesperson was off his back.

  25

  SEPTEMBER

  2017

  The retired detective lived in what looked to Lourdes like a creepy old farmhouse on a deserted stretch of road not far from the Long Island Pine Barrens. If B.B. wasn’t already with her, she would have radioed for backup before entering.

  The ex-detective himself spooked her even more. He seemed like someone who should have been dead. Or who already was dead but didn’t know it yet. He reminded her a little of one of those ancient rock stars you saw sometimes late at night on cable TV. Faces like splintered old wood, molasses-colored hair spilling from the tops of their shrunken heads, eyes hidden behind tinted glasses, and withered mouths telling stories of superhuman drug consumption and surviving impossible falls down steep flights of stairs.

  “Remind me how you guys found me again?” William Rattigan looked from Lourdes to B.B.

  Lourdes took a deep breath. “We’re looking at a bunch of old murder cases out on this part of Long Island,” she said, repeating what she’d already told the retired detective on the phone virtually word for word. “Most of them are unsolved cases where the bodies were found in the vicinity of Sunrise Highway. Others were solved cases from the same general area. In looking at the files, your name came up as lead investigator several times.”

  “Because I was the best!” William Rattigan grinned, showing teeth as mismatched and discolored as Indian corn. “All the unsolved cases must have been from after I left. Because when I was on the job, we had a ninety-fucking-four percent confession rate! Beat that, NYPD!”

  They were in an ancient bachelor’s basement. It smelled like mildew and brands of liquor that weren’t manufactured anymore. Dented gray file cabinets were pushed up against fake-wood-paneled walls with footprints along the baseboards, as if Rattigan liked to lie sideways on the stained carpet and pretend to walk to walk on them.

  “You know what you people should investigate?” Rattigan’s hand shook as he pushed in a flesh-colored hearing aid. “You should investigate why I was forced to retire at the height of my game! I made these people what they were! Kenny Makris? He was a fucking little pissant ADA when I gave him his name! Joey Tolliver? He was a fucking juvenile delinquent when I found him! And Tommy Danziger? Don’t get me started. Okay?”

  “Okay.” B.B. raised his hands and offered a tolerant smile, all gentlemanly Italian charm, glad not to be the aggrieved and disrespected party for once. “We can get into all that. But right now, we’re looking for some other kinds of information.”

  “What do you want to know?” asked Rattigan, calming down a little now that a male cop closer to his own age was talking to him.

  “Most of these murder victims were prostitutes working in the area,” B.B. explained. “We started looking for patterns of violent johns, who could have been victimizing them.”

  “Yeah, so far so good.” Rattigan nodded, hiking his pants halfway up his flannel shirt.

  He was one of those alcoholics who got skinnier and more desiccated as they got older, Lourdes noticed, rather than bloated and immobilized. By her count, he must have been about eighty years old, only about a decade and a half over Sullivan’s age. But physically he seemed like he was pushing closer to a hundred.

  “And one of the leads we’re pursuing is that there was a police officer who’d been violent with some of the girls,” she interjected. “It’s unclear whether your IAB would have brought him up on charges.”

  B.B. looked down at his polished shoe tops and did that disapproving little tut-tut wag with his chin. Like he didn’t like her timing. But with the way this Rattigan looked, they could end up questioning a pile of dust and bones if they didn’t keep up a brisker pace.

  “I don’t know anything about that.” Rattigan adjusted the ’70s-style aviators that hid the expression in his eyes. “I’m not aware of any working girl ever lodging charges against me. I always paid full price. Not that I ever really had to…”

  “Hey, hey, no one’s saying you did anything, Detective Rattigan.” B.B. put his hands up reassuringly, the barren light bulb in the basement catching the glint of his many rings. “We’re just looking for you to assist our investigation.”

  “Oh yeah, right, okay.” Rattigan snuck a quick look at Lourdes, as if making sure she wasn’t about to claw him. “I just get touchy sometimes after the way these guys forced me out.”

  “And how was that?” Lourdes asked.

  A lesson she’d learned from Sullivan. If somebody doesn’t want to talk about your main subject, get them to talk about whatever they want. Then circle back.

  “They accused me of ‘mishandling evidence.’ You believe that?” Rattigan shook his head at B.B., the shellacked quality of his hair convincing Lourdes that it was a wig after all. “They said I tampered with evidence in the Stephanie Lapidus and Angela Spinelli cases and gave me the option of retiring early or getting put under the microscope by some fucking state investigations commission. They sacrificed me to help their own careers. How’s that for gratitude?”

 
“Who sacrificed you?” Lourdes asked. “What are we talking about? Orient me here, detective.”

  “Oh for Chrissake.” Rattigan’s glasses almost flew off as he snapped his head toward B.B., getting even more worked up. “Will you tell this dizzy broad what’s what?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about either, old man.” B.B. shrugged. “We’re not from around here, remember?”

  “Fucking Kenny Makris, Joey Tolliver, Steve Snyder, and all the rest of them.” Rattigan threw his mottled hands up in frustration. “They made me pay for their sins. Fucking Steve Snyder. Who’s talking about running for Congress now! In my district. Who I arrested when I was a patrolman and he was a thirteen-year-old punk shoplifting at E. J. Korvette’s. And fucking Joey Tolliver! Which is ten times worse. I was with that kid since he was a little shitbird witness in the fucking Bird Dog case.”

  “What’s the Bird Dog case?” Lourdes turned to B.B.

  Rattigan froze with his arms in the air. His shoulders tilted forward and he bent at the waist. Lourdes could detect some eyeball movement behind his tinted lenses. A general air of gravity and incredulousness had pervaded the room.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Rattigan’s jaw went up and down a couple of times, like he was trying to break apart something too dense to swallow.

  “No, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Lourdes glanced at B.B. “Do you?”

  B.B. stooped his shoulders and tugged on his collar, back into his beleaguered I don’t get no respect mode.

  “Was this some big Long Island case?” She turned back to Rattigan.

  Something had changed in the last few seconds. He’d taken the beat you never wanted a subject to take in an interrogation room, making himself just still enough to do an internal inventory and calculate where he stood in relation to the rest of the world.

  “I don’t think I want to talk to you guys anymore,” he said.

  “Why, what happened?” Lourdes asked. “Did we say something wrong?”

  “I’m just thinking about what’s right for me.” Rattigan was looking down, touching the side of his phony hair over and over.