Читать книгу Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 4-6: Blood Brother, In the Blood, Little Girls Lost - J. Kerley A. - Страница 38

It was a big gun, a .357 Colt Python, blue steel, the bluing dulled with age. I hefted its weight in my palm, then handed it back to Waltz, who gently set the weapon on the table.

“This was Vangie’s father’s service weapon?” I said. “He was a cop?”

“Sergeant John Edward Prowse. Killed in action in 1962 when she was seventeen.”

“She never told me,” I said, suddenly feeling as if parts of Vangie had been in code.

Waltz reached in his shirt pocket, pulled a badge polished as bright as a new dime. “And this was her father’s tin.”

“She gave you his badge?”

“To help keep me safe, she said, a second shield to cover my back.”

“When did this happen?”

“In 1973, when I made detective. We’d grown up in Queens, neighbors, though I was just a scruffy kid to her. At least until we grew up.”

“You and Vangie were … lovers?”

A catch came to Waltz’s voice. He pushed past it. “The most beautiful years of my life. Then it sort of ramped down into friendship.”

“But you still held the torch?”

The misery in his eyes told the story: Then, now, always.

“Did you know she was coming to New York?”

He stood, wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “No. And that’s totally out of character. She always called. For a few days we’d be together and I’d pretend I wasn’t heartsick that she’d go away again, back to that damned Institute.”

Waltz hung his head. Rain hammered the window.

“I never knew much of her history,” I said. “Because of my past, I never ask people about theirs.”

“Her father was ambushed by a sociopath when she was in high school. Her mother had died years before, the Big C. She and her father were all each other had, always there for one another, a team of two.”

“His death must have been devastating.”

“She retreated inside herself for a month. When she emerged, her first reaction was to join the force, follow in his footsteps.”

“What happened?”

“She pulled all her courage together and went to the jail to visit her father’s killer. To spit on him, she later told me, and to claw out his eyes if she got the chance.”

“Sounds like her.”

“She thought she’d find some hulking, tattoos-tained monster with bloodlust in his eyes. She found a forty-three-year-old actuary with a wife and three kids, house in the Connecticut ’burbs. He barely acknowledged her, too busy listening to the voices between his ears. A drooling, gun-slinging doper she could understand – and hate – but a white-collar guy who said a dragon lived inside his spine? That she couldn’t fathom.”

“Vangie didn’t join the force, I take it.”

“She had been considering biology before her father’s death. She shifted to Psych, immersed in it – this was a senior in high school, mind you, reading all night, writing papers of professional depth. She got attention, grabbed a full ride at Princeton.”

“And pretty much re-invented the field of aberrational psychology,” I said.

“She couldn’t not do it,” Waltz said. “She was amazing.”

“What happened when you saw the body was Vangie’s?”

I needed to ask, did it quietly. Waltz closed his eyes.

“It was an explosion of cold in my face. My knees nearly went, the room swooped around. I realized if our history was known, I couldn’t work the case. So I reached inside and grabbed on to something, you know?”

Like the day I found out Jeremy was a mass murderer. I said, “Yeah, I know.”

“We found the recording saying contact you. I chilled the investigation and pulled every sting I had to get you here, to find out if you could help. Someone killed one of the best people on the planet and I need justice.”

I stared into his eyes. “We can get justice, Shelly. But you’ve got to believe in my ability to find the truth.”

Waltz walked to the window and parted the drapes, looking into the wind-blown ghosts of rain.

“How do I know I can I trust you?”

“Because Vangie did.”

He closed his eyes, nodded, said, “Tell me the whole story.”

It took a half an hour. I’m not sure how many of my conjectures he bought, but he asked no questions until I’d finished, starting with the one he found the most troubling.

“You say your partner, Nautilus, saw a photo of your brother in Evangeline’s office? Naked.”

I nodded.

“It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t have entered a relationship with a … with a …” Words failed and his face dropped.

“Jeremy said Vangie had called him her Sirius. Like the Dog Star. It jives with the reference in Vangie’s recording. That she needed a ‘serious’ … then she stopped.”

“Dog star?” Waltz frowned. “Needed a Sirius …?” His face went white and I thought he was headed to the floor again.

“What is it, Shelly? What?”

Waltz grabbed his coat from the back of the couch, started pulling it on. “I’ve got to take you somewhere.”

Rain whipped the window. Lightning flashed.

“Outside? In that?”

“Get your goddamn coat on.”

We ran to his car, drove from Brooklyn into Manhattan, wipers fighting the rain. I knew by the streets and buildings we were near where the Twin Towers had stood. Waltz U’ed in the street, pulled up beside a small fenced-in area bathed in the yellow glow of streetlamps.

“This is a dog park, right?” I said, perplexed.

“A dog run. It was named after an explosives dog that died on 9/11. The dog’s a local hero.”

“Explosives dog? You mean a bomb-sniffer?”

“Exactly.”

We got out of the car. The rain had dropped away to a chilly mist. Waltz pulled me by my sleeve to a metal plaque on the gate of the run. I couldn’t read the words. He got out his flashlight, snapped it on. The plaque showed the outline of a retriever followed by a dedication date and a few lines of type. Above the dog and inscription were three simple words …

SIRIUS DOG RUN

“My God,” I whispered. “The bomb-sniffing dog’s name was Sirius.”

Vangie had grown up in NYC. The first years of her career had been here. She visited often, subscribing to the New York Times, the Post, and the New Yorker to keep a foot in the old neighborhood. Surely she’d seen news stories on the incident, the park dedication.

If so, “I need you to be my Sirius, Jeremy,” equated to “I need you to sniff out a bomb, Jeremy.”

But Jeremy wasn’t tuned to explosives, he was calibrated for mental dysfunctions. His life among the violently insane, his intellect, his supranormally tuned senses, his self-awareness, all combined in the ability to detect pathological mental conditions in others, to know how those people would act in a range of conditions.

Question: Why would Vangie want my brother to find a madman?

Answer: Because something unspeakable would happen if the madman went undetected.

Waltz had arrived at the same conclusion. He touched my arm.

“Do you understand what may be happening, Detective Ryder?”

“I think so, Shelly.”

“Where do we go from here?”