Saints Of New York (58 page)

'How
d'you mean?'

'It's
slower. It's more methodical. There's a hell of a lot of waiting and looking
and more waiting after that. I figured it might be a little more fast-paced.'

'You
wanna do Starsky and Hutch shit, right?'

Radick
smiled. 'It's a job of patience and persistence, and being able not to get
frustrated when you don't get what you want.'

'Dad's
spoken to me about it,' Caitlin replied. 'He told me one time that he worked on
a case for fourteen months. He got a compelling witness, someone who would
stand up in court. He got wiretaps and search warrants and hard evidence on a
multiple homicide case that would put the guy away for like two-fifty or
something, and then the guy had a stroke and died thirty-six hours before they
were scheduled to bust him. He said that a lot of them went like that - not
that the perp always dies, but that there's some glitch or some legal
technicality that makes the whole thing fall over.'

'You said perp.'

'Yeah, a perp.
You know what a perp is, right?'

Radick
laughed. 'A cop's daughter. Here I am, lying in a bed with a cop's daughter,
and we're talking about busting perps.'

Caitlin
smiled. She wriggled out from under Jimmy and sat on the edge of the bed. 'You
want some coffee?' she asked.

'Sure,' he said.

She
hesitated for a second, and then she looked over her shoulder at Radick.

'You think he's
going to be okay?' she asked.

'Okay? How d'you
mean?'

'Like,
he's not going to do anything stupid on this case is he? This guy he's
obsessing about for the killings?'

Radick
shook his head. 'Frank? No, I don't think so. He knows how close he's come to
getting fired from the department. I don't see him doing anything to risk
that.'

Caitlin
nodded and stood up. 'You're right,' she said. 'He wouldn't jeopardize that,
would he? He doesn't have Mom, he sort of doesn't have me and Robert anymore,
but hell, even when he had us we always came second.' She seemed pensive for a
moment, and then she smiled. 'He's a cop, nothing more than that. Not a bad
thing, but just the way he is. Without his job I don't think there'd be any
reason for him to get up in the morning.'

Radick
watched her as she walked from the bedroom. She looked great. Best-looking girl
he'd ever dated. This one was a keeper, no doubt about it. One in a million.

He
smiled to himself and turned over. He hoped Frank was okay. A weekend alone. He
hoped he stayed off the sauce, sitting around the house obsessing about Richard
McKee and dead teenage girls. Radick respected the man, no question. Respected
him, but would do everything he could not to wind up like him. Some things you
could admire from a distance without ever wanting to become them.

He
listened to Caitlin making coffee in his kitchen, and then wondered if he
should call Frank on the cell. Maybe later. Just to make sure he was okay. Just
to make sure he wasn't planning anything crazy.

It
was very much the house of a single man. The refrigerator was
barely stocked, same with the
kitchen cabinets and the freezer in the back utility space. Three bedrooms, a
large one at the front of the house, two smaller rooms on the left and right of
the passage that led to the bathroom. It was meticulously clean and neat, just
as Ron had said it would be.

Frank
Parrish walked around looking for the obvious, and when he was done with the
obvious he looked for everything else. He walked the carpets in all the rooms
with his shoes off, feeling for indentations and ridges - the index of uneven
floorboards, a trap, a hatch of some sort. He tested beneath the linoleum in
the bathroom, and then carefully tugged back the plastic paneling on the side
of the tub to see if there was anything behind. He went through every room,
every section of upper-floor ceiling to determine if there was a trap for the
attic. There wasn't, but that didn't necessarily mean that there was no crawl
space; it was simply a matter of determining how such a space could be accessed.
The smaller rooms had the kids' backpacks on the beds. These were stop-over
rooms for their weekends there. McKee's bedroom he checked more thoroughly than
all of them. Here was the TV, the DVD player, a collection of discs in a unit
beside it. Action movies, regular stuff, nothing of any interest, but he did
check inside each box to ensure that the advertised disc matched the one
within. He went through the wardrobes, checked for false bottoms and tops,
looked under the bed, lifted the mattress, pressed along the edges to make sure
that nothing had been hidden there. He came away with nothing but frustration.

Parrish
headed downstairs, beginning to feel a nagging sense of doubt. The kitchen also
gave him nothing; he pulled back the freezer and washing machine, but however
closely he looked he saw only a freezer and a washing machine.

In
the back yard there was nothing but a flagstone path, a small section of grass,
a couple of yards of scrubbed earth.

Parrish
stood for a while looking out of the kitchen window.

Think. If I was
him, what would I do? Where would I keep things that I didn't want anyone to
find?

He
went back to the sitting room. He moved the sofa and table away from the walls
and tugged up the carpet a good three or four feet towards the center of the
room. He upended the sofa and used a screwdriver to loosen sufficient staples
to get his hand under the canvas backing. He felt nothing but padding and
wooden struts. But there was something here. He knew it. He just
knew
it.

Parrish
replaced everything as he'd found it. He wondered if there was an inspection
pit in the floor of McKee's lock-up garage, or if the man had another property,
a trailer somewhere outside of the city, a safehouse, a bolthole, a private
fucking cinema . . .

The
cupboard beneath the stairs was narrow and awkward, but Parrish managed to take
everything out of it - paint cans, a vacuum cleaner, a box of blankets - and he
kneeled in there and tapped the walls. They were all solid, no doubt about it,
even the underside of the risers above his head were solid wood. No paneling,
no false ceiling, no secure box padlocked and wedged against the wall. Parrish
put everything back. He sat on the hall carpet and felt that overwhelming sense
of disillusionment and failure he had been dreading. He tried to resist it, to
slow it down, but it was upon him.

And
with it came the sound of an engine, a car engine, and it slowed as it reached
the front of the house, and for a second Parrish believed that it couldn't be
happening. The car stopped.

Parrish
got up and hurried to the front door. Through the spy hole he saw McKee's SUV,
McKee exiting even as he looked, and Parrish felt his heart stop dead. He ran
back to the kitchen, grabbed his holdall, his flashlight, his screwdriver, and
rushed back to the under-stair cupboard. He crammed himself in there, pulled
the door to as best he could even as he heard the sound of McKee unlocking the
front door.

'Stay
there!' McKee shouted. 'I think it's in the back.'

Parrish
willed his heart to stop beating. He felt dizzy, frightened, utterly panic
stricken. His pulse surged erratically; he felt it in his temples and his neck.
His legs were beginning to protest the awkward space, the onset of cramp, that
sudden and unbearable pain that would force him to move, to fall forwards out
of the cupboard and into the hallway.

He
shifted his foot. It touched the door and the door inched open a fraction.
There was no handle inside, nothing to grab onto and close the door again.

McKee
hurried past. Parrish saw his legs as he went through to the kitchen. He closed
his eyes and held his breath.

He
heard the sound of cupboards opening. He willed the cramp to go with everything
he possessed. The pain was building slowly, his muscles tightening with every
second. There was nothing he could do to stop it. Any moment now it would grip
him like a vice, and it would take everything he possessed to not make a sound,
to not move.

'Got
it,' he heard McKee say, and then he was coming back down the hallway, and for
a split-second Parrish believed he might just walk right on past the open
cupboard door, the door that had been firmly closed when he left the house
earlier that morning.

But
McKee did not walk past. He slowed, and then he stopped. Here was a precise and
meticulous man. Here was a man who didn't leave doors ajar.

Parrish
imagined the frown, the moment of curiosity, McKee's certainty that he had last
seen the door shut tight, and then he would reach for the door. He would open
it, and there he would find Detective Frank Parrish of the New York Police
Department's 126th Precinct crouching beneath the stairwell with a flashlight,
a screwdriver, a holdall full of tools and keys and assorted housebreaking
equipment. What would he do? What could he possibly say?
Hi there, Mr McKee . . . well, let me say first and foremost that this isn't
what it looks like?
McKee knew him. He knew his
name. There would be no point in running. If he ran, what would he say later
when McKee reported the incident?
McKee's a liar.
I was never in the guy's house . . .?

The kids, Alex
and Sarah, sitting in back of the SUV waiting for their dad, their
innocent
dad, to come right on out with whatever
they'd forgotten, would see him.

Parrish
could see the headlines. He could hear the IAD investigators. He could feel
the shame and humiliation that he would suffer until his final dismissal. He
knew this was it, this was how it would end, caught crouching in a cupboard
after having committed felony BE and an illegal search of a suspect's
house. Not only that, but McKee would sue the PD, then he would sue Parrish for
harassment, mental cruelty, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and while Parrish
reached the very lowest level of his life, McKee would be exonerated and
rewarded for his undue suffering . . .

Parrish
closed his eyes. He held his breath.

McKee
kicked the door shut with his foot and hurried out of the house.

Parrish
waited until he heard the car pull away and then he let out an anguished gasp
of pain.

It
was then that he realized he was trapped beneath the stairs.

C
arole
Paretski had thought long and hard about the discussions she'd had with
Detective Frank Parrish. There was something unspoken - she knew that. And
though she believed that Parrish's partner was unaware of it, she knew that
Parrish suspected her husband of so much more than reading stroke mags and
watching
Barely Legal
porn films. She had misjudged the man she'd married, considered that he'd
become someone else, and that did nothing but fuel the fundamental concern she
felt for her daughter.

Sarah
was fourteen. She was becoming a woman. She was pretty and bright and blonde,
and she trusted her father without question. Richard had never given her any
reason to do otherwise, but Carole believed that Richard harbored dark thoughts
about Sarah - the kind of thoughts that grown men should never harbor about
teenage girls, especially not their own daughters. There was an aura of
malevolence that she felt around her ex-husband. She
sensed
it, and she trusted her own instincts. That malevolence was directed at her,
and not only because she had divorced him, but because she was the one that
withheld Sarah from him. She was the mother and, as is usual, the courts had
not only granted her custody, but they had directed Richard to pay alimony. To
Richard's mind, it was as though the courts had believed her more reliable,
more ethical, more honest, a better parent than he, and for this he resented
his ex-wife. Carole believed that Richard would not have been at all concerned
if she came to harm. He would never do anything to her directly, he was too
much of a coward. But if she were to disappear from the scene then he would be
only too pleased. Since the divorce she'd tried to imagine him otherwise, but
it was not something that she could so easily escape. The meetings with Parrish
had reminded her of everything that she disliked about her ex-husband, and the
thing she liked least of all was that he still had access to the kids.

At
nine-thirty that morning she concluded that the only way to allay her fears was
to go over there. She had a key, had always had a key - one of those things she
had insisted on when they'd at last concluded the visitation rights. Each
possessed the other's house key for use in case of emergency. They were still
parents, and despite the divorce, despite the animosity and acrimony, despite
everything that had gone between them and everything that was yet to come, Alex
and Sarah were still their most important consideration.