The Demands of the Dead (2 page)

I shrugged. "I liked the work, just not the... rest of it." And now, Hoffman would realize that:

I had not applied for the job.
“I don't remember your file, I'm sorry.” He scratched the wisps of grey and blond hair on his mostly bald head. I couldn't lie to the guy. “I didn't send it” I said, but then added “- yet”.

He looked up at me, then back to his screen. "You have an interesting CV, Mr. Brown.. I assume you retired from the NYPD, and were not dismissed?”

“You can read the letters," I said. My file included a letter from the Chief of Detectives, who had offered me six months of paid leave, promotions, my choice of posting, if I'd stay.

I had heard the news of Shawn's shooting from the NYPD and hit the street running, first to Shawn's apartment, which had already been turned upside down by someone, his computer and files gone. Then to Walter's, which had also been cleaned out and no sign of him. While I was running around in the city trying to find Walter, Mr. and Mrs. Manley, like Maria, had tried to organize the ceremony. Mrs. Manley was composed enough to speak, Mr. Manley numb. “My son was so loved,” she said, “that it was almost impossible to find a place big enough for all of you today. To find a place that would fit all of his friends, we had to turn to you, his friends.” I knew firsthand most of the stories that she proceeded to tell, about Shawn the adventurous little boy, the outrageous teenager, and the adult crusader for justice. Even though they'd found a huge church, it was too small to hold all the people and too small to contain their anger. Mrs. Manley asked me if I wanted to speak, but sitting in the first row, my eyes locked forward, more than a thousand people behind me, I couldn't turn around. I couldn't face Shawn's friends. To them, I was not an unofficially adopted brother of the victim, but a member of the department that murdered him. That whole day, I imagined the rest of my life was going to be like the funeral, turning my face away in shame from anyone who knew him. At the end of the day I went home and quit.

While Hoffman read the letters, I picked up his book and flipped through the introduction.

‘A
paramilitary force
is a group of civilians organized to act in a military fashion and supplement military forces. Such forces arise owing of several factors: first, the influx of illicit capital from contraband and drug activities; second, the easy availability of arms; and third, the need nation-states have for such forces in supplementing their own armies…

‘… paramilitary forces provide services that national armies cannot but that national states require. These include illegal assassinations and massacres of political dissidents who might threaten the state, protection of traffic in arms and contraband, and other counterinsurgency activities. In these cases paramilitaries might be used for activities that are too ‘dirty’ and ‘illegal’ for national armies to perform under international attention and scrutiny… Paramilitaries are used for these activities, while national authorities deny that they are linked to the nation-state…

‘While the use of paramilitaries might be expedient, they eventually contribute to a
crisis
of
hegemony
in which the state finds itself challenged not only from the dissidents or criminals against whom the paramilitaries were used, but also from the paramilitaries themselves as they grow in size and strength and establish a political program. This can lead to 1) a situation of
impunity
in which the judicial and legal systems of the state break down; 2) the systematic
corruption
of the government by paramilitary money, threats, and violence, and 3) The loss of state
legitimacy,
as the state finds itself unable to compete even on the field of violence with the paramilitary forces it has created…’

I snapped the book closed and Hoffman looked up.

"You left your university career to work in the private sector?"

Hoffman ignored my question, countered with his own. "Even though you left the NYPD a year ago, you haven't taken much work up for us. What have you been up to all year?"

Working as
the unpaid investigator for a wrongful death suit that is never going to be filed.
"I had to take care of some family matters," I said.

"So are you available to work now?"

"Yes, Professor."

Hoffman waved me to a chair across from him. I sat, then rocked back in it.

“How much do you know about this position, then?”

“Only that you were looking for someone with a law enforcement background.”
And even that, I didn't really know
– just deduced it from Salant's presence here.

“This job only just came up," he said. "Until now, I was recruiting for a different job, one you would have been even better suited for given your wilderness training. Our client was an agricultural company, interested in categorizing the diversity of native maize seeds and other plants in southern Mexico."

"I know some plants, but that doesn't sound like your area or mine. It sounds like a job for a biologist," I said.

"It would, but it's too dangerous for someone like that, because there's a rebellion there," he said.

He continued: "My area of research is semi-official criminal activity. In 1995, when I still worked for the university, I was commissioned to write a report on paramilitary groups in the Northeastern US, and created an organization called Independent Forensic Services. The foundation liked my report and I worked for different clients since, including the FBI and the United Nations. I liked it better than teaching, so I started full time for Independent Forensic Services. Last year my company was bought out by CRAR, and I brought my files and my clients with me."”

"So, your agricultural corporation client wanted you to do this seed survey in rebel territory, but something else came up?"

“Yes, because now our client's seed survey is conditional on our being able to resolve a new problem in the same place, for a new client: the Mexican government. They want an independent investigation into the deaths of two police officers in a southern state called Chiapas.”

“I never paid attention to Chiapas,” I said quickly, holding back bitterness I knew Hoffman would not understand.
If I had, I might have kept them alive.
I felt the sadness and the rage rising as I thought of Walter, probably somewhere at the bottom of the Hudson.

Then I re-focused. Salant was trying to go where Walter had worked. If I got this job, I could stop him from going and find out why. I said: “But I know Mexico. And I am fluent in Spanish. I know something about Mexican law from my law degree. And I've studied and worked on computer security.
How long do you think the offer will be on the table?”

“Not long. They'll find someone else, or just do it in-house, in a day or so. “Do you have a passport, by the way?”

“With a few stamps in it,” I said. He started tapping his fingers on the desk and moved his gaze to his computer screen. I got the message, started to get up.

I needed to talk to Maria.

By the time I got home she would be on her way. I made a sandwich, went to my computer, and got back to the job that had led to the year-long gap in my employment record, the gap Hoffman had noted.

Homicide investigators have case files, but most of them did not keep up with technology and were too attached to paper. Because I did, my case file was on my computer. But then, I'd spent too much time trying to teach information security and crime pattern analysis to detectives and not enough time closing my own murder cases.

I opened my files on the Manley murders. At the NYPD, the files were closed. But here in my apartment, they remained to be solved. I had no warrants, no resources, no backup at all. But then, I also had no constraints.

Detective Victor Salant, who fired sixteen shots into Shawn Manley, for example, did not have an email password I was able to guess, which was why I had to follow him. But his partner, now State Trooper Charles Brewer, who fired eight shots, used his own birthday. Thomas Carr (12 shots), also a State Trooper now, used his wife's birthday. Shawn's fourth shooter (14 shots), briefly a Patrol Sargeant in the 30
^th
, Salvatore Rossi, used his mother's maiden name. His email trail had come to an abrupt end a few months ago, when he died of a heart attack at home.

I made my daily survey of their emails: forwarded jokes in Brewer's, dirty pictures in Carr's but nothing illegal or otherwise usable. Then their bank accounts: Still no money trail, no suspicious transactions. I knew that there was something bigger than these four goons behind the assassination of Shawn and the disappearance of Walter. Someone would slip, and I thought it would be Salant. His uncrackable password, his international job search – he had something to hide.

As I keyed in my own password, a 13-character string of randomly generated letters and numbers, I made a plan to focus on Salant, get something on him and find out what really happened. If I could just convince Mr. Manley to file the suit.

If I couldn't, there were perhaps other paths to justice.

My email was empty, except for a single message from someone calling themselves [email protected]. There was no subject and the text was a single line: “Nosotros los muertos exigimos mucho mas que la venganza.” What was really odd, though, was that the message was encrypted with my public key.

Public key encryption, as I tried to teach the higher-ups at the NYPD, works through public and private keys. Your public key is more like a lock – if someone encrypts a message with your public key, it can only be decrypted with your private key. Your private key is a file that resides on your computer, or on a disk, or on a dongle, somewhere you keep very safe, and you can't use your private key without its password. Your private key is like your ATM card, and its passphrase is your PIN. Someone sending a message encrypted with your public key is like depositing it into your account, so that only you can read it.

The trouble was, my public key was not public at all. It was not on the web. Only three people ever had it, and two of them were dead.

So, Maria was sending me an encrypted message that I shouldn't be thinking of revenge, just at the moment I was thinking of revenge. Was the woman a mind-reader too?

Then I heard her footsteps in the hallway and then her key turning in my door, so I could ask her myself.

The girl of my dreams stepped into the room. The door swung shut behind her and she reached back to lock it without looking. She looked at me, and at the room, tentatively, like she was waiting to be invited in. Most of my life I'd known her and she still didn't get that she owned this place. Maybe not a mind reader after all.

When I got up to hug her, she put her head to my chest. I smelled her cocktail of perfumes and shampoos and creams and lost track of what I was thinking about. But she remembered. The word
ex
appeared between us and broke our embrace apart like a chaperone.

“I have the car,” she said.

“I'm ready to go,” I said, at the same time.

I let her borrow my Chevy Caprice because her mother had a parking space at her house, and she found it useful to have it when she was visiting. Some of her friends cited this as evidence that we were not doing a very good job of being
exes
. That, and the fact that we visited each other's parents. And that we drove to Jersey once a month to visit Mr. and Mrs. Manley. Those, and the fact that I was still in love with her. And would always be.

She let me drive, filling me in on the latest news about her amicably divorced parents and her research. Because we were in the car, and because of where we were going, it was not the time to tell her I was just in her building, following one of our friend's killers. So I found a related topic.

“Do you think I'll be able to convince him to sue?”

Whether she was driving or I was, Maria rarely kept her eyes on the road. Instead, she turned, shoulders and face, towards me for nearly the entire drive. She adjusted her long black hair, putting it down from the ponytail it had been in, as she answered.

“Do you know what you'll do, if you can't?”

“So that's no, then.” I said, looking back on the road. We were out of the city and it was good driving – light traffic and we were starting to see pine, oak, and chestnut trees along the road.

Maria's quick temper rose. “I haven't seen them since the last time we went down there either. I don't know anything more than you do. I just got the sense that even though you, and me, and Mrs. Manley, all want to fight, he wants to grieve and let go. And...”

“And what?”

“And I'm not sure if he's wrong. The city will settle for money, but he has money. We won't get the truth and we won't get justice, so what's the point?”

“It seems Mr. Manley's despair is contagious.”

Maria shrugged. “He sees things as they are, not how they should be.”

Now I was getting angry. “So we have to just accept things as they are?”
Is that what Shawn and Walter died for?
I left that last unsaid, but Maria was too sharp to miss it.

“Mark, you know I don't believe that. All I'm saying is you need to prepare for the possibility that the suit won't happen.”