The Helper (3 page)

‘So what did he tell you?’

‘The first thing he said was that he didn’t usually approach people out of the blue like this. He said that if I wanted nothing more to do with him after our meeting, then that was
fine by him. He just felt it was his duty to tell me what he’d learned.’

‘Which was?’

‘That there was a chance my Patricia was still alive.’

‘Uh-huh. And did he explain how he reached this conclusion?’

‘He said it was luck more than anything. Back in 2001 he was asked to investigate a list of people from the Towers. You know, the missing ones. Patricia was one of the people on his list.
He didn’t find her. Not alive, not dead. And nobody else who could say she was alive or dead. ’Course, he wasn’t the only one looking. None of the experts could find anything
either. But because Patricia had been seen at work that day, they said she must have perished. Officially, she was declared deceased, and that was that.’

She goes silent for a moment, seemingly gathering her thoughts.

‘Two years ago, Mr Repp took on another client. A totally unrelated case. But this client also worked in insurance. Anyhow, they got talking, and the topic of 9/11 cropped up. The client
told Mr Repp that he knew a lot of people who died that day, and he mentioned a few firms. One of the firms he mentioned was Hadlow-Jones. So when he said this, Mr Repp dug out his old list and
started reading out the names. And then he got to Patricia.’

‘He recognized her name?’

She nods. ‘He wanted to know what the list was. So Mr Repp told him it was the employees of Hadlow-Jones who lost their lives. And this client, you know what he said? He said, “Not
if Patricia Sachs is on there, it isn’t. When I saw her a couple weeks after the attack, she couldn’t have been any healthier.” ’

Doyle stops her with a raised finger. ‘Wait a minute. This guy saw Patricia
after
9/11?’

‘Yes, after. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She was getting aboard a Greyhound.’

Doyle sees a gleam somewhere behind the dim surface of her eyes. He tries to imagine how overwhelmed Mrs Sachs must have felt when confronted with the possibility that her daughter was still on
this earth. With a rope like that dangling before her, she would have been willing to be led anywhere.

‘What else did Repp tell you?’

‘Not much. Not at that meeting, anyhow. He simply gave me his card and said that if I wanted him to look into it further, he would be only too happy to help.’

‘For a fee, of course.’

‘Yes. For a fee. But money is not the issue here. Not if my daughter is still out there somewhere. Alive.’

Doyle would like to differ over the money issue. In his opinion, financial considerations are probably very much at the center of what’s going on here. But, for now, he keeps it to
himself.

‘So you hired Repp?’

She shoots him a sharp look intended to remind him of her mental acuity. ‘Not immediately. I told him I wanted to speak with the man who said he saw Patricia.’

‘Did Repp set that up?’

‘Yes, he did. The man’s name is Pinter. He used to work for Invar Insurance. I have his business card somewhere. The meeting we had didn’t take long. He didn’t know
Patricia very well, but he’d met her on a few occasions, and he was pretty sure it was her he saw at the Bus Terminal. He said he even called her name, and she glanced his way, but then she
jumped on the bus like she was afraid of something.’

‘Did Pinter seem genuine enough?’

‘Absolutely he seemed genuine. Even if he was mistaken about seeing Patricia, I think he truly believed it was her.’

‘Did he explain why he hadn’t spoken up about this before?’

‘You think I didn’t ask him that? I asked him. He said he didn’t even know that Patricia was supposed to be dead. He hadn’t worked with the Hadlow-Jones people in a long
time, and so the first time he heard Patricia’s name again was when Mr Repp mentioned her.’

‘So then you hired Repp?’

‘I did. You wanna call me a fool, then call me a fool. I don’t care. I would give everything I own in the world to see my Patricia again.’

Doyle rests his index finger on the photograph. ‘And he came up with this?’

‘Amongst other things, yes.’

‘Did he say where the picture was taken?’

‘Boston.’

‘Boston? Is there any reason why your daughter would go there?’

‘None that I know of.’

‘Mrs Sachs, how old is your daughter?’

‘I’m eighty-three now. I didn’t have Patricia until late in life. I was forty at the time.’

Doyle studies the photograph again. It’s not the sharpest of snaps. The woman could be forty-three, but she could also be somewhere around thirty.

‘You get anything else from Repp?’

‘Several more sightings. The last one in Chicago.’

Doyle sighs. It’s all so neat, so convenient.

‘Mrs Sachs, when people disappear like this, just dropping off the edge of the world, it’s not on a whim. They have reasons. Big reasons. They’re throwing away a life, usually
because they’re so sick of it they need to start a new one. Was it like that for Patricia? Did things get so bad?’

Mrs Sachs shifts in her chair. She’s uncomfortable, and Doyle knows it’s not because of the seat. This is deep, personal shit he’s asking her now, but it has to be put out
there.

‘Patricia made a big mistake. The man she married was a bum, a parasite. He was also a control freak. She didn’t talk to me about it much, but I knew Joe made her life miserable. One
time, I saw a bottle of anti-depressants in her bag. I think . . . I think he even beat her sometimes. If she wanted out, then who could blame her? So what Mr Repp was suggesting, about her running
away from it all, it didn’t seem so crazy.’

‘Did you speak with her husband about the disappearance?’

‘Not in any depth. Joe doesn’t do depth. Far as he’s concerned, Patricia is dead. He got a lot of money from it, and he’s happy with that. It tells you everything about
him you need to know.’

Doyle hesitates before voicing his next words. Dashing the hopes of desperate mothers is not his favorite pastime.

‘Okay, let’s suppose that Patricia did survive somehow, that nobody she knew saw her leave the WTC, and that she then decided to use it as the ideal opportunity to change her life
forever. She would then have to go into hiding. She couldn’t go home, couldn’t pack a bag, couldn’t go anywhere she might be recognized, couldn’t take any money from an ATM.
She would have to go it alone, using only what she had on her. That’s a tough stunt to pull off.’

Mrs Sachs nods all through this, as if to say,
Yes, yes, don’t you think I haven’t already considered all this?

‘But not impossible,’ she says. ‘People disappear all the time, don’t they? They fake their deaths and just go. They leave everything behind them.’

Doyle hears the touch of agony in her last sentence, and he knows he has to reach out for it.

‘I think that’s why you came to see me today, isn’t it, Mrs Sachs? If Patricia is still alive, if she has run away from her past life, then she has run away from you too. She
has left you behind, left you with all the hurt of believing your daughter has suffered a tragic death. Do you really think she could do that to you, to her own mother?’

Mrs Sachs raises her face and catches some of that spring sunshine herself. It glints off the wetness in her eyes.

‘I’m not very well, you know, Detective. I have diabetes and high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. I don’t know how much longer I have to live. I have few friends and no
family, unless Patricia is alive. When Mr Repp came to see me I was overjoyed. I was filled with hope. But you know what? You’re right. The pain of believing that Patricia could abandon me in
this way, without a word or a message of some kind – well, that’s come to hurt even more than believing she died on that awful day, along with all those other poor souls. So now I need
the pain to end. If she’s alive, then maybe she can tell me why she did this. If not, well . . . Either way, I need to know the truth. It’s all I have left.’

Doyle taps the photograph a few times. ‘I’ll look into it,’ he says. ‘You mind if I keep this for a while?’

When she shakes her head, he reaches for the envelope. Before he can withdraw his hand, Mrs Sachs takes hold of it.

‘Thank you.’ Then she gets up from her chair and shuffles away.

Doyle looks with sadness at the retreating form. And even when she has disappeared from view, he continues to stare for several minutes.

He jumps when he hears the booming voice.

‘We got a homicide. And it’s messy.’

For the briefest of moments Doyle experiences a surge of excitement. This city isn’t the murder hot-spot it once was. In fact it’s become pretty tame lately. A
homicide landing on one’s desk these days is almost a cause for celebration for an NYPD detective.

So when he looks up and finds the square-jawed face of Lieutenant Cesario pointed decidedly in the direction of the only other two detectives in the room, his disappointment is almost enough to
make him cram his gold shield into his mouth and swallow it.

He knows he shouldn’t be surprised. It has been like this for months. Ever since the events of last Christmas. Cops died then. Other people died too, but the cops are what matter most to
the members of this squad. They lost colleagues, friends, partners. Doyle himself lost his partner. He went through hell that Christmas. It almost seemed worth it when he came out of it to a
hero’s welcome. But of course it didn’t last. Questions started to get asked about his involvement in the case. Even the cops who had at first applauded Doyle started to wonder about
his integrity, especially when there were certain officers who had never been slow to spread poison about him. All the media attention he was getting didn’t help matters either. For some,
this was pure jealousy: they had worked their asses off for twenty years and still never seen their faces on Fox News.

In his logical moments, Doyle realizes he can’t blame the other cops. Not really. He tries putting himself in their shoes. He tries picturing a cop who is a relative newcomer to a
precinct, who arrived with a prior history involving the death of a female partner, and who has now just been at the epicenter of a series of events that has taken out several more cops. Whatever
that officer does to redeem himself, whatever explanations he provides, he will always be remembered as the man associated with members of service losing their lives. Death taints in that way.

I wouldn’t work with me if I were them, he thinks.

He hopes it will all blow away eventually. With that in mind, he has tried to stay below the radar. His superiors haven’t argued with that. The new lieutenant hasn’t really known
what to make of Doyle, and so the man has played safe. All the low-key cases have come Doyle’s way. Cases nobody else can be bothered to spend any time on. Cases like that of Mrs Sachs.

So, for now, he puts aside his hopes and turns his attention to his current DD5 report, trying to remember how to spell ‘pseudonym’ and then giving up and changing it to
‘alias’, trying to ignore the voice of Cesario as he summarizes what little he knows, trying to block his mind to the detectives behind him tugging on their coats and moving toward the
door, trying to convince himself that it will be a crap case that he wouldn’t want anyway.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees the legs of Cesario as they turn and propel him back toward his office. But then they stop. Cesario’s shiny shoes twist around to point at Doyle.

Doyle’s gaze moves up from the shoes. Over the sharp gray suit. Onto the dazzling teeth set into a tanned face beneath a fringe of perfectly sculpted gloss-black hair.

He wonders what the man’s flaws are. Nobody is that perfect. He looks too much like a movie star playing the part of a cop. Maybe if I yell ‘Cut!’ Doyle thinks, he’ll
relax into his normal self. He’ll start calling everyone darling before mincing off to adjust his make-up.

And who the hell has a tan this time of year, anyway?

‘Go after them,’ Cesario says.

Well now you’re just being too nice, Doyle thinks. You can’t even do me the courtesy of allowing me to hate you. What kind of spiteful behavior is that?

‘Go,’ Cesario urges. ‘The more bodies we have on this, the quicker we get it off the books.’

Doyle almost smiles. Cesario is throwing him a bone. But he’s also trying to come across as not being a soft touch. This is purely an operational decision, he’s saying; don’t
go getting all teary-eyed on me now.

Doyle takes it. It’s the best he’s going to get. And who knows? Maybe this is the start of something. Maybe this isn’t a homicide at all, but a subtle way of getting him to a
surprise party where the police commissioner will jump out of a cake and welcome him back into the fold.

Yeah, right, Doyle thinks as he grabs his coat.

It’s messy, all right.

Blood everywhere. It never ceases to amaze Doyle how much blood there is in the human body, and how far it will travel once someone opens the faucet. It’s on the floor, it’s on the
books, and – yep – it’s even on the ceiling. And the source of all this mayhem? The pale crumpled form of a young girl. She looks small and unreal – a mutilated
mannequin.

Doyle stares at her for a good while. It’s something he always does at a murder scene, and he doesn’t know why. It’s like he’s trying to make some kind of connection, as
though simply looking at her will give him an insight into what kind of life she lived, and therefore why that life was taken away from her.

He is slow to become fully aware of the other people in the bookstore. Gradually he notices the glances, picks up the muttered remarks and the muted snickers.

‘Long time no see, Doyle,’ says a Homicide South detective called Kravitz. The correct name for his outfit is the Manhattan South Homicide Task Force, but Doyle and most of the other
people gathered here know it as Homicide South.

Doyle shifts his gaze to the man. He is thin and tall – at least six and a half feet. His hands are buried in the pockets of a black overcoat. Behind him, almost hidden in his shadow, is
another Homicide dick called Folger. He is short, squat and balding, and he is grinning idiotically at the barbed humor lurking in Kravitz’s greeting.