Black Irish (29 page)

He was out there last night
, she thought,
when it was snowing. He cut a long hole in the ice between the yellow huts and lay a piece of
cardboard over it, or something flat. He pegged it down at the corners. He let the snow cover the trap and then led me to it
.

The man didn’t move like the killer in the motel video. And he’d asked her things the killer should know. He was probably Clan, wanting to know if his name was on the list. But hadn’t Billy said there were only four Clan members? Jimmy Ryan, Marty Collins, Joe Kane, and her father. Three dead and one in the hospital. All accounted for. So who was the man on the ice?

A shiver knocked her teeth together in the tight space of the Saab.

After thirty minutes, Abbie started the car, headed south on the 90 and drove home. After standing under a hot shower for twenty minutes, she put on fresh clothes and headed back to the Saab. She drove to the Buffalo Gun Center on Harlem Road and replaced her Glock 19—now at the bottom of Lake Erie—with the same model. Then she drove to headquarters.

Once there, she said nothing to the men around her.
Maybe one of them was holding my head underwater three hours ago
, she thought.

I didn’t meet the killer
, she thought.
I met my competition
.

Abbie and the other detectives divided up the work of searching for the list of assassins. The working theory was that some Clan member must have kept a tally of those brought across the border. Her father was under sedation, so the only chance of finding a list lay with the three victims: Ryan, Collins, and Kane. Perelli had ordered them to check homes, offices, work lockers, everything.

Abbie had chosen Collins’s home. Lawyers were record keepers, she thought. Collins gave her the best chance.

When she arrived at the house on Potters Road, the door opened an inch to her knock and a pale young face appeared in the gap.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Buffalo PD.”

If it was possible for a face that pale to go paler, it did.

“Yeah?”

“I have a warrant to search the house.”

She held it up. The whole Buffalo judicial system—beat cops, judges, prosecutors—had snapped into line. The city was terrified now. O’Halloran had been ordered to stop pursuing the killer on his own and fall in behind Abbie, and to share all information, at the price of his badge if he didn’t. She could have hauled the mayor down for questioning if she’d wanted to.

The young man’s blue eyes went unfocused.

“I … I, um, the house is a mess.”

“Open the door.”

“Can you come back in ten …”

Abbie pushed the door open with her foot, slamming it into the man’s chin. He went stumbling backward, and she stepped into the dimly lit foyer with the ascending stairs ahead of her and a small desk with sympathy flowers sitting on it.

The young man was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, barefoot, rubbing his chin, and looking at her from beneath an overhang of greasy mouse-colored hair. With hatred.

“Who are you?”

“Bobby Collins.”

“Bobby, I’m here to search the house. Don’t get in my way. Are you alone?”

“Yeah. Can I …”

“Yes?”

“Can I get a break if I tell you where the stuff is?”

Abbie stared at him for three seconds before she understood.

“It’s your lucky day. The warrant’s not for drugs. I need to look at your father’s papers.”

A shock of relief spread across the face, followed by the tightening of his mouth.

“Why didn’t you say so?” Bobby said truculently. “You can’t just barge in …”

“Just stay out of my way, Bobby.”

Abbie turned left into an old-fashioned parlor. She got immediately a sense of thick wood furniture gleaming in the shadows. When
the Irish made it in the world, they bought furniture by the gross ton. At least it wasn’t covered in plastic.

“Where’s your father’s office?”

“What office?”

She turned and walked up to Bobby.

“This visit is about to turn from a murder investigation into a drug sting. Let me ask you a question, Bobby: Where’s your bedroom?”

Bobby stared at her from underneath his greasy bangs, his close-set eyes filled with impotent anger.

“The office is that way,” Bobby said, pointing through the parlor toward the back of the house.

It was surprisingly modern. A bare black Ikea-style desk with no drawers, a steel-gray Dell notebook placed on top, metal shelving to the left with folders backed either in blue, red, or yellow, each color occupying two shelves. To the right a small plasma TV hung on the wall, and underneath it was a small couch covered in nubby blue fabric. Marty Collins had been an orderly man. From what she’d learned, the rest of his life was a mess, so perhaps the neatness here was a dam against the rising tide of chaos.

Orderly men like lists
, she thought.

She began with the desk. Beside the chair was a rolling set of three drawers. In the top one she found office supplies, envelopes embossed with “Collins & Sons” in raised green lettering, and a datebook for 2011. She flipped through it. His last appointment had been three days before, a meeting with a Mrs. Kleinhan. “Estate” was penciled in next to it. The other two drawers were filled with case folders, mostly civil, a few drunk-driving charges and an assault, but no names she recognized. The full range of County life: house purchases, wills, divorce petitions, property liens. Marty Collins had been the protector of every significant family in the County that had the money to guard its interests with a two-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer. Abbie guessed that his current workload was represented by the drawer files, while older cases went up on the metal shelves.

She went to the doorway and called Bobby’s name.

“Yeah?”

“I need to talk to you.”

He came padding down the stairway. He looked sick. Abbie had heard the toilet upstairs flush three times in the last twenty minutes. Bobby had no doubt been disposing of his secret stashes.

“Did your father have a place where he kept special things? His will, family pictures, jewelry, anything like that?”

Bobby leaned on the stair banister. “How would I know?”

“How would you know? Do you work, Bobby?”

“Here and there.”

“I’ll take that as a no. If I had a son who was a shiftless drug addict, with no job and no prospects, I’d sure as hell find a place to keep things away from him.”

Bobby’s face was as blank as the wall behind him.

“A safe maybe?”

His eyes betrayed him. They glanced to the left.

“Where is it?”

He sighed. “In the living room, behind the ugly picture.”

The ugly picture was a family portrait. Abbie glanced at it. Happier times—both sons alive. Bobby even looked presentable in a corduroy blazer and a striped tie jammed all the way up to his neck.

“The combination.”

“How would—”

She turned to look at him.

“It’s 5-29-17,” he said. “JFK’s birthday. He used to use my birthday, but he was a spiteful fuck. I’m not the bad guy here, you know.” Bobby turned and headed back to the stairs.

The safe popped open. Abbie reached inside and pulled out a will, two gold watches, a Navy medal of some sort, and an old Bible. She glanced at the other items, turned them over, and pulled the medal out of its presentation books. No marks, no lists of any kind.

She pulled the Bible open.

It was a King James and it smelled of candle wax. Probably an heirloom from the old country, pressed into the hands of a departing ancestor by a parish priest. She flipped hurriedly through the pages.
There were no notations in the front. There was a half-completed family genealogy that seemed to end with Marty’s father. The pages were clean, a few with their corners turned back. She straightened one of the corners and checked the passages. The story of Job, one in Revelations. But no pen marks. She turned it to the light. No indentations along the lines or under individual letters.

She paged through the back, looking for pen marks or pages with the corners bent back. Nothing. As she flipped to the last pages, she found three lined pages with the heading “Favorite Passages.” On the first page, in black ink, someone had made a list of citations. At the head of the list were the letters “PPFO.”

The length of the numbers varied. The first read, “12-4, 8-6, 32-2, 14-9.” Space. Then “2-4, 8-8, 27-1, 19-12, 12-18.” A second column listed a similar set of numbers. There were fourteen sets in all.

Abbie looked at the first set of numbers and flipped back to page 12. It was part of the preface to the translation, and her index finger slid down to the fourth line. Her lips moved as she mumbled: “Matters of such weight and consequence are to be speeded with maturity: for in a business of movement a man feareth not.”

“In a business of
movement
,” she said to herself.

If this was a simple page-and-line code, it would require three numbers: page, line, and the position of the letter in the line. There were only two numbers in each series. There was something missing.

Abbie checked the next reference. The line read: “Everlasting remembrance. The judgment of Aristotle is worthy and well known: ‘If Timotheus had not been, we had not had …’ ”

She snapped the book closed and rushed out of the office, pulling out her cell phone as she headed toward the front door. Once outside, she punched in a number and hurried toward the Saab.

“Dr. Reinholdt. So nice to hear your voice, too. I have something for you. Can I drop it off in ten minutes?”

A
FTER LEAVING THE
B
IBLE WITH
D
R
. R
EINHOLDT, SHE RACED OVER TO
Mercy Hospital. Her father had been moved to a private room that had opened up on the third floor. There was a cop sitting by his door, working on a crossword puzzle.

“Are you alone?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“Put the book down, okay?”

He nodded and slid the book of puzzles under his seat.

Her father’s face looked thinner. She stayed by his bedside, holding his hand. The flesh felt papery. A few times she saw his pupils jerk behind his eyelids.
What are you dreaming of, Dad?
she thought.
Who’s chasing you now?

Her phone rang.

“It’s Billy. Listen, I need to talk to you.”

She hadn’t spoken to him since the night at his house. She felt a rush of longing for him.

“Don’t turn on the charm, Billy, it’s really not necessary.”

He sighed. “Sorry, Ab. Come over when you can. Listen …”

“Yes?”

“The other night. Did you try and get in my windows before coming through the front door?”

“Your windows? Why would I do that?”

“So that’s a no?”

“That’s a no.”

Silence from the other end.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Just get here when you can, okay?” He hung up.

She wanted to go to Billy, but the thought that she might never see her father again kept her at the bedside. Finally, twenty minutes later, she kissed her father’s sunken cheek, checked that the cop was watching the hallway, then dashed for the elevator.

As she strode through the parking lot, her cell rang again. She recognized the number: Reinholdt.

“Detective?” His voice sounded fluty with excitement.

“You’ve cracked it.”

“Half a day in the Buffalo Public Library. I was afraid that the code didn’t refer to the Bible, and I was right.”

“What is it?”

“Why was there no other book in the safe, Detective?”

Abbie rolled her eyes.

“I don’t have time for parlor tricks, Doctor.”

“It’s a simple question.”

Abbie stopped and rubbed her forehead. She thought hard.

“I have no idea.”

“Because Marty Collins carried the text in his head. He surprised me. Come by and I’ll explain.”

She jumped in the car. Billy or Reinholdt? She was approaching Cazenovia Park Road. Right meant Reinholdt, straight ahead meant Billy.

Billy had a gun. And she had to have the list. She made a quick right, punched the gas, and felt the Swedish turbo kick in.

She found Dr. Reinholdt at the farthest table in the Historical Society library, sitting in the middle seat. In front of him was a single
sheet of paper. He was sitting up as straight as his round body would allow. He looked like a governor waiting to sign an execution order.

Abbie pushed the doors open and the smell of books washed over her.

“Doctor, I don’t have a lot—” she said, hurrying toward him.

“I have everything ready for you.” His voice was calm again.

She walked quickly to the table and came around to where he was sitting. Reinholdt nodded as she moved behind him, tilting her head to read the document, but it was turned over to its blank side.

“A brief synopsis,” he said.

“Doctor, with all due respect—”

Reinholdt continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

“At first, I thought like you that there was a number missing. And there is—but it isn’t the last number, it’s the
first
. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“The page number is missing. The document the code derives from is so short that it doesn’t require page numbers. The two numbers are actually the line and the letter position within the line.”

Abbie straightened up, intrigued despite herself.

“A poem?”

“Excellent. My first instinct as well. And if it was a poem, who would have written it?”

“Yeats?”

“Bravo. The cliché Irish poet, I’ve always found him rather unbearable with his mooniness and pathetic love affairs. I tried all the classics, ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ ‘Easter, 1916,’ the obvious choice. It’s about the uprising that began the Irish revolution.”

“I know what it’s about. Doctor, please, what did you find?”

“I found out it wasn’t Yeats.”

“Then who was it?”

“
PPFO
. How obvious could it be?”

“Not very, apparently.”

“P … P … F … O. What is the founding document of the Irish revolutionary movement?”