Inherit the Dead (13 page)

The lonely water
flew past Perry on both sides of the one-lane as he pushed toward the city. He told himself his trip to Long Island hadn’t been a waste of time. He added up what he thought he knew: Julia Drusilla wasn’t telling the whole truth. Someone in the Hamptons didn’t like Angel. Randy Hyde was and had a big dick. And Angelina Loki might never be found. Might be dead.

He saw the hazard lights blinking from half a mile. A car sat on the
right shoulder. He could make out a figure leaning against the passenger side.
No way,
Perry thought. He grinned and tapped the brakes.

The brunette glanced at him as he pulled up behind her Mercedes. Then she turned away. She was smoking a cigarette, still behind the aviator shades. Steam swirled up from the hood behind her. Perry killed the ignition and pocketed the keys. No telling what might happen next.

“Need a hand, ma’am?”

She kept her stare fixed on the water, silent. Perry stopped walking eight feet away. “Or are you just waiting for me to pass so you can resume following me?”

“Who the hell are you?” she asked, without looking at him.

“Come on. You know who I am.”

She turned toward him and, with her cigarette hand, lowered her shades briefly. Perry saw her brittle blue eyes. Then they were behind the shades again. She turned back to the water. “A tow truck’s on its way,” she said. “Move along. I’m fine.”

“How are you, Lilith?”

“Ms. Bates to you.”

“Really? After all that . . . dancing?” Perry stepped closer. Her perfume floated off of her shoulder-length hair.

She turned slowly. “How dare you.”

“You were following me. I want to know why.”

She reached into a vest pocket and snapped out a cell phone. “I’m calling the police.”

“Fine. Just be sure to say it guh-VAN, not GAH-wayne. Hopefully he’s run your plate by now, so he knows exactly who you are,
Ms.
Bates.”

She whipped off her sunglass and took a step toward him. “What the hell do you want?”

“Why would you follow me?

She shook her head, seemingly incredulous, and came another
two hard steps closer. “I was on your tail because you drive like an old lady.”

“Come now, Lilith. You can do better than that. You really should take your car in for a checkup before you tail someone. Hey—maybe Randy Hyde can take a look, huh? Is that who’s coming to save you? Got ol’ Randy’s number on your phone there?”

That stopped her. She took off her sunglasses, then dropped her cigarette on the shoulder and crushed it beneath the toe of one of her rubber-toed duck shoes.

“You’ve been to see Randy?” she asked. “Did he . . . mention me?”

Bingo,
Perry thought. “In fact, he did.”

“What . . . what did he say?”

“That he knew you. Biblically speaking.”

Lilith took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

Perry saw her eyes drift past him. A black SUV, big as a city bus, windows tinted charcoal, rolled past. Perry was looking at it, thinking,
How many cars can possibly be following me,
when he felt something slam into his chest. It was the heel of Lilith Bates’s right hand. “Whoa,” he said, falling back a step as she kept coming. He ducked a roundhouse, sidestepped right, grabbed her by a bicep, and twisted the arm around behind her. She flung a leg back and got him on the knee. “Jesus, stop.”

“I’m not just an artist. I take tae kwon do.”

He pulled her closer and bent her arm a little farther, hoping he wouldn’t actually hurt her. “Your teacher sucks,” he said.

“Let me go.”

“No more dancing?” he asked.

She was screaming now. Perry looked down the road to see if whoever was in the SUV might be watching. It was gone. “I’ll let you go when—Ouch!”

She’d stamped her heel on his right foot. He loosed his grip
enough that she wriggled free. She spun around to face him and took what Perry could only assume was a tae kwon do stance. She slipped her phone out again. “Now I’m calling,” she said.

“Call away,” he said. “But look, you were following me, and you know it. But you seem pretty harmless—”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay, okay, you’re not harmless. But really—”

“Fuck you.”

“We might be able to help each other.”

“Forget it, we’re not—”

“Listen, damn it. Randy Hyde. I want the truth.”

She backed away. She was breathing hard. Perry smelled perfume and sweat. He liked it.

“I’ll ask again: You and Randy Hyde?”

Lilith straightened, pulled some hair out of her eyes. She considered a moment, then said, “Randall and I . . . ”

Randall, huh,
Perry thought.

“We met. On occasion. It was nothing serious.”

“And you weren’t jealous of his relationship with Angel?”

“Are you serious? A man like that. I would never—”

“But you did.”

“It was just . . . fucking, Mr. Christo. Can you understand that? Or have you forgotten what that is?”

“Careful who you bed down with, Lilith.”

“I hope you’ll be a gentleman and keep this to yourself. A woman in my position—” Lilith glanced at the water. “Randall took off a week or so ago.”

“With Angel?”

She shrugged. “Could be. He loved her, after all.”

Christo thought he heard more than a tinge of jealousy in her voice. “I hear Randall loved a lot of women,” he said. “Including you.”

“I really wouldn’t know about that.”

“Tell me about
Randall
. Where he goes, who he sees?”

She chuckled to herself. “Randy never went anywhere but Sammy’s Bar, his garage, and the bedroom of whoever would let him in.”

Yellow flashers were blinking down the road. “There’s your truck,” Perry said. “I’ll wait.”

He left Lilith
with the tow truck after she’d sworn up and down that she had no idea where Angel was, that she’d only been tailing him to find out if Randy Hyde had blown her cover. She was embarrassed and worried about her precious reputation.
Maybe she’ll be helpful down the line,
he thought. And she really was a looker. He had to admit that he kind of liked the way she said “fucking.” Maybe the trip had been more productive than he’d thought.

Veering off 27 toward the LIE, Perry saw a state cop pull someone over and found himself thinking again of Gawain. Barney Fife had shot the face off of a bad guy. Perry felt certain then that Gawain had his own ex-wife. But it was about the only thing Perry felt certain about after a confusing morning. That and the delicious chowder. He chose, for now, to believe Lilith Bates, and her reason for tailing him. But what about that Toyota? That wasn’t so easily explained.

A restless sleep, your body still aching from the cramped confines of sleeping in the car in that damn motel parking lot. But you stayed on his trail to the local precinct, then saw that crazy woman having a fight with him on the side of the road before the long ride back to the city tailing his beat-up Datsun through Nassau and Queens and finally the Manhattan streets, driving around until he found a parking space that was good for a few hours, the PI too cheap to put his junk heap in a lot. Then you followed him to his lousy brownstone and waited, sitting in the rental until he came out and then it starts all over again—following, watching, waiting. But you do it because it’s what you have been dreaming of and waiting for. It’s your future and it’s so close you can almost touch it, almost taste it.

P
erry felt hungover from not enough sleep. All night, his mind had been running through the case: from meeting Julia Drusilla to the drive out east to see Angel’s not-so-grieving father to speaking to Randy Hyde and Lilith Bates, and checking out the Memory Motel. At some point he had managed to make himself interesting enough to explain why that crazy Lilith Bates had been following him. Now, after meeting with Arthur Gawain, he was back in the city to meet his old friend at the 19th Precinct.

Located on East Sixty-seventh on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the 19th Precinct serves one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the country. More than 217,000 people packed into approximately 1.75 square miles. Nearly twelve hundred per city block.

All things being equal, more people means more policing. But not all populations are created equal. This one also happened to be one of the richest in the nation—the chosen locale for foreign consulates and ambassadors, the city’s most elite prep schools, and the kind of New Yorkers who believed that jeans were for south of Twenty-third Street. The only kind of “spree” going down in the 19th on a usual weekday morning would be of the shopping variety, committed on
Madison Avenue by ladies in coats that cost more than Perry made in half a year.

But just as not all populations are created equal, not every weekday morning was the usual. Perry had been on the job long enough to read the energy of a station. This morning, the house was hopping.

Bumper-to-bumper squad cars lined the south side of Sixty-seventh Street, red lights flashing from the tops of the RMPs. Uniformed officers poured from the station to take their places behind the wheels of their radio motor patrol units. Others stayed busy filling the backs of two flatbed trucks with metal crowd-control barricades.

Where was Watson? They were supposed to meet outside so Perry could skip the always-pleasant experience of announcing his always-memorable name at the front desk of his old precinct—not that he cared.

He started to take in the action from the front of the neighboring building until he noticed the sign at the entrance:
KENNEDY CHILD STUDY CENTER
. Man alone outside a day care. Way to blend. He moved west and leaned against the side of the precinct’s brick exterior, pretending to fiddle with his phone like any other multitasking pedestrian.

The experienced officers looked put out by whatever mission they were on, but comments shared among the rookies revealed their eagerness.

Perry spotted Henry Watson hop out of an unmarked fleet car halfway down the block, easy to spot since Henry was a good head taller than everyone else. As he walked, Watson popped a white square of gum from a foil packet in his pocket.

Perry called out to his friend. “And they said you couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Watson caught Perry’s gaze and smiled, then flashed him five fingers as he pulled one of the uniformed officers aside. He needed five minutes.

As Perry continued to listen in on the action, he started to piece together the reason for all the activity outside the precinct.
For once, a protest that actually makes some sense.
Protest scheduled for noon. Ninety-first Street outside the Russian Consulate. Hunter College sophomore. Body found in “the guy’s” bed last weekend. He’s some kind of attaché.
Like a briefcase?
No, numbskull—it’s some kind of diplomat thing. GHB, the date-rape drug, in her system.
We can’t touch him.

Only four syllables, but each one dripped from the young officer with anger.
We can’t touch him.
Perry knew the feeling. He’d felt it on the job more times than he should have, including on the case that first brought Watson and him together. Watson was working homicide in the Bronx, Perry in downtown Manhattan. Two different boroughs, two missing girls, two sets of grieving families. No reason to make the connection.

The girls had been missing for more than six years when Perry got word: police in Portland, Oregon, had cleared four unsolved murders with a DNA hit. Now the defendant was ready to give up more names and dates. Girls in six states across the country—totaling either sixteen or eighteen. He wasn’t certain, but he knew it was an even number. He liked to kill in pairs.

Among the names the suspect was dangling were Kerry Lighton, a struggling artist who painted by day and stripped by night, and Tonya Barton, a for-hire “escort” who dreamed of becoming a nurse once she kicked her heroin habit. Perry was the detective on Lighton’s case; Henry Watson was the detective on Barton’s.

All those dead women. Six states, but not one of them with an active death penalty. The killer was already serving four consecutive life sentences without parole. So the district attorneys in the five remaining states cut a deal: life sentences to run concurrently with Oregon’s in exchange for information about the location of the bodies. It would bring the families “closure,” they explained.

We can’t touch him.
Perry and Watson drank together for six hours after the sentencing hearing.

Four minutes after he’d flashed five fingers, Perry’s old friend, Watson, waved him into the precinct, patting him on the back as he entered. It was all the greeting they needed.

“Is that Nicorette I saw you chewing?” Perry had recognized the packaging when Watson first popped the gum on the street. He realized it had been too long since the two men had talked.

“Feel like an eleven-year-old girl, all the gum I’m gnawing these days,” Watson said. “Maria didn’t want me smoking around the baby. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I know she’s right but, man, I’ve tried everything. The patch. The electric cigarette. Acupuncture. Meditation. Self-help recordings. All kinds of crap Maria brings home from the natural-food store. Hypnosis.” He lowered his voice for that last one. “I got newfound empathy for all those junkies I pulled in over the years.”