14

THE GUYLAND HEISTS

Three days later, shoulder to shoulder, Zach and Goulart pushed out through the doors of the one-six precinct, and Goulart asked “Is that her over there? Is that your Margo Heatherton?”

Zach couldn’t stop himself: his head jerked up and his mouth opened and his eyes widened as he followed his partner’s gesture. But then he said, “No. No. I don’t know who that is.”

“She sure had her eyes on us. And look at her take off.”

The woman had, in fact, been watching them from beside the entrance to the parking garage across the street—and she was, in fact, hurrying away now that Goulart had spotted her. But Zach was telling the truth: he didn’t know her—though he did have the vague sense that he had seen her somewhere before. It definitely wasn’t Margo, anyway. This was a slender, pretty, bird-like woman in her twenties with short black hair and a turned-up nose—nothing like the blond and glamorous Margo. Plus she was wearing a belted purple woolen thing over a pair of jeans, the sort of tatty stuff even Zach knew you bought off the rack in some department store. Not something Margo would ever wear.

“You sure that wasn’t your girlfriend?” asked Goulart. He gave Zach an insinuating look over the top of the Crown Vic just before he lowered himself into the passenger seat.

Zach rolled his eyes at him and got in behind the wheel.

“Just wondering,” said Goulart. “Now that we’re keeping secrets and all. . . .”

“We’re not keeping secrets, Broadway. Damn, man!” Zach made a show of shaking his head and sighing loudly as he put the car into gear and headed into the morning traffic. Goulart was still giving him hell over going to Long Island City without him, without even calling him. They’d been busy writing reports and making phone calls for two days and hadn’t really had the chance to work the bad feelings out between them. As Zach guided the car among the weaving yellow cabs on Second Avenue, he said, “I made a mistake not calling you. I told you that. I already told you I made a mistake. I’ve been sick, all right? Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Goulart was turned away from him, though, looking out the window, tapping one fingertip against his knee, something on his mind, still eating at him. He didn’t say anything until they were on 42nd Street, going by the rising silver slab of the United Nations, the gray-blue sky reflecting off its mirrored windows. All he said even then was, “You hear about that guy in England got assassinated?”

“It was on the news this morning as I was coming in. Some anti-immigrant politician or something?”

Goulart shook his head. “Bunch of savages. They just gun him down, cut his throat while he’s lying there. And now the lunatic lefties are saying it served him right ’cause he was a fascist. And what’s worse, he was a fascist! And now his guys are on the streets with torches practically, looking for any poor schmuck of an immigrant who happens to be walking by. First France, now this. You mark my words: they’re finished over there. The whole continent is going down the drain—and we’re next, if we’re not careful.”

The car dipped into the Midtown Tunnel. The underground whoosh and rumble made them both fall silent again. The grimy yellow walls went rushing past. Goulart’s words had gotten Zach’s mind working. He was trying not to think about the specter on his bedroom chair, trying not to consider the possibility that his meeting in the woods with Gretchen Dankl had actually happened, had not been a fever dream.

She is gone. My country . . . my continent . . . my culture.

You mark my words: they’re finished over there. The whole continent is going down the drain—and we’re next, if we’re not careful.

They broke out of the tunnel’s end into the grayish light of day, and Goulart rounded on him and said, “She thinks I’m on the take, doesn’t she? Rebecca. Abraham-Hartwell. Is that what she thinks? That bitch. She does, doesn’t she?”

Zach had not been expecting this at all, but Goulart had such a great detective mind, it actually didn’t startle him much. He decided on the spot he wasn’t going to lie about it, not to his partner, not for Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.

He nodded. He said, “She does.”

“She got you spying on me?”

“She’s on your phone, your computer. Says you’ve been calling burners—”

“Big surprise. I got CI’s—”

“And setting up e-mail drops. And—what else—oh, yeah, visiting some deserted mansion somewhere in the dead of night.”

“Jesus.” Goulart shook his head, disgusted. “She show you anything? She got anything? Anything real?”

“Circumstantial stuff,” said Zach. He kept his eyes on the highway, on the gigantic movie-star faces smiling from the billboards, the ashen expanse of the factory flatlands beyond. “She says the Chevalier was tipped off that the Coast Guard was coming for them, that they killed Abend’s girls and dumped them overboard because they got a tip.”

“Oh, and she thinks I did that? I tipped them?”

“And she’s . . . concerned, you know, about the way Abend stays ahead of us. The warehouse. The storage bin. The Brothers Grimhouse.”

“So you went out to Queens without calling me,” Goulart sneered. “So I wouldn’t tip him off.”

“Fatboy Mooch told me Abend’s got half the force on his payroll. I thought if there was any chance you’d gone rotten, I better go it alone.”

“You think that lowlife Kraut piece of shit has enough money to buy me with? Fuck you too. Partner.”

“Yeah. I deserve that,” Zach said flatly. “I let Rebecca get in my head.”

“The bitch.” Goulart frowned out the window, but he nodded to himself at Zach’s apology. You had to say this: the Cowboy was a straight-up guy and everyone knew it. He made mistakes like everybody, but he was a man about it and never dodged the consequences. After he’d had a few minutes to chew on it, Goulart made an offering. “Your head’s probably all messed up over that Margo Heatherton piece blackmailing you or whatever she’s doing,” he said.

Zach laughed. Goulart. “That’s probably it.”

Goulart laughed too. Nodded out the window some more. Tapped his knee with his fingertip some more. Then he said “I’m sick, Cowboy.”

Zach glanced over at him. “What do you mean?” But he could tell by the look on his face exactly what Goulart meant. “You mean like sick-sick?”

“Might be.” Goulart let out a long sigh. “That’s why the e-mail drops. Been communicating with my doctors that way. Even staying clear of the ‘Feeb’ plan till I’m sure. You just never know who’s listening in. As we see. And I didn’t want anyone telling me I had to stand down, that I wasn’t up to the job, whatever.”

Zach took his time finding the right tone to answer with. Not pity—Goulart would hate pity. They were both men, and death was death. “It’s bad then,” he said.

“Might be, might be. They just don’t know yet. They’re doing, you know, tests.”

“How bad? Might it be.”

“Bad like you might as well drop me off right here.”

They were driving past a vast cemetery, endless crowds of graves, stones and steles rising—when Zach glanced up at them in the sideview mirror—rising against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline, so that they seemed a small, visual echo of the city towers—as if the vaunting monuments of the living were reflected by the dwindled markers of the dead.

“Man!” Zach said. “Man. I’m sorry, partner.”

“Eh.”

“I’ll pray for you. I’ll get Grace to pray, better yet. God’s more likely to listen to Grace.”

“Well . . .” said Goulart, shrugging it off. “Just figured you should know, at this point. Where all that circumstantial crap is coming from. All the skullduggery on my end. That’s why.”

Zach nodded, his lips in a tight frown. He wished now he’d told Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell to go to hell.

They drove on in silence.

They had a list of homes that had been hit in the Grimhouses’ Guyland Heists. Thirteen of them, from garish mansions in Kings Point to grand old estates way out beyond the Hamptons. They had no clue what they were hoping to find in any of them, so it seemed a waste of time to phone. But they thought: maybe if they went out there, talked to the homeowners, saw the crime scenes with their own eyes . . . well, maybe something stinking of Abend would jump out at them.

Anyway, it was the best lead they had at this point. The Frenzies—the forensic teams—were still combing the Grimhouse murder sites for clues. They had what was left of both brothers and were dissecting and weighing and pondering the scraps. Other Task Force Zero agents were out canvassing underworld informers. In the wake of Zach’s face-to-face with Abend in Long Island City, there was excitement in the shop, an unspoken hope that for the first time, they had their all-but-invisible quarry in sight.

And yet . . . yet for all that, there was an underlying sense throughout Extraordinary Crimes that they had hit—if not a dead end, then a dark alley with a brick wall waiting in its shadows. Suddenly they were hearing silence on the streets, an epidemic of silence. The sort of thing a lawman sensed but couldn’t prove. No one knew anything. No one said a word. Which was the sort of crap that didn’t actually happen too much anymore, not at the upper reaches of corruption at least, not since wiretaps and conspiracy laws had broken through omerta, the code of silence that used to keep gangsters mum. Nowadays, much of the time, thugs had no honor and everybody talked.

But Dominic Abend was no ordinary thug. In fact, it was beginning to seem he was not even a gang-leader, not in the usual style. There seemed no center to his organization. No headquarters, no crew, no specific turf. Rats and rivals never knew which shoulder to look over to spot the threat. He was like a flu-bug or a heat wave or maybe like an idea whose time had come—one day it was business as usual, and the next day he was the air you breathed and you were dead of him. No one wanted to talk about him, not even in general, not even in theory. Even Fatboy Mooch, who would talk about anything, had reached his limit and was nowhere to be found.

But if Abend was in fact searching for something that had been ripped off by the Grimhouses in one of the Guyland Heists, then it stood to reason one of the houses hit in the heists was his or was connected to him. So Zach and Goulart were heading out to the Island in the hope of escaping the Abend Fever of shut-uppery that seemed to have struck the five boroughs and their under-city.

They interviewed homeowners and housewives.

They asked: “What was the most valuable thing you lost in the robberies?”

“Well, as I already told the other detectives. . . .”

They casually examined the mansions as the owners spoke, looking for telltale signs of their man.

“Was there anything special about the jewelry that was taken—any heirlooms, anything with a history?”

“My mother’s necklace. She bought it on her honeymoon. . . .”

They searched for anything German, anything European, anything just out-of-place.

“Did you happen to own a dagger of any kind, or a ceremonial sword?” Zach asked at each location.

“No . . . no . . . nothing like that.”

“Would you look at this picture? The bald man at the edge of the crowd—he look familiar to you at all?”

“Never seen him.”

This went on for more than a week. The travel was what slowed them down. The first four houses took them all the way out to Huntington, at which point they had to head back. Then there was the day NYPD uncovered a couple of storage units owned by the Grimhouses. They’d already been ransacked, of course—the brothers would have given up everything under Abend’s torture. And then there was the weekend before they could go out to the Island again.

Mostly, the entire enterprise felt like a big fat waste of time; but there was one house—all the way out near Westhampton Beach—one of the last houses they went to—where Zach, at least, felt as if they had touched on something, though he wasn’t sure what.

The place was a three-story shingled mansion, right on the water. The sort of house that had a name. Its name was Sea View. You approached it by a driveway lined with perfectly manicured, perfectly spaced cypress trees—until you reached a fountain in a circle of flowers on the rolling lawn. There was a curtain of black oaks protecting the long, gabled façade. The curtain opened in the middle to reveal the white portico before the front door.

“How much you think a place like this would set you back?” said Goulart as they stepped out of the Crown Vic—both of them sorely aware of how paltry the junker looked parked beside the silver-blue Bentley in the raked, pristine gravel of the cul-de-sac.

“Twenty-five, thirty million,” Zach guessed. “How the hell should I know?” It was the sort of conversation they’d been having for days so as to avoid talking about the results of Goulart’s medical tests, none definitive yet, but each so far more ominous than the last.

Shoulder to shoulder, they walked to the door, their shoes crunching on the gravel.

Sea View was the home of one Angela Bose—the first name pronounced with a hard G, the way the Germans do it, which right there had both detectives on the alert. According to newspaper reports of the burglary, Miss Bose was an eccentric and reclusive young beauty, already at twenty-seven a leading donor to local charities, who single-handedly supported many of the homeless shelters and rehab centers between Montauk and Queens. The local gossip was that she had retired from the wayward party-days of her teens about a year and a half ago. Chastened by suffering, she had come here to live with her father, a European businessman, likewise reclusive. But when Zach called her on the phone, she told him “Come out anytime, I’m here all alone.”

“She had a slight accent—could’ve been German,” he told Goulart—and again, alert, they exchanged glances.

A maid answered the mansion door—a pretty Spanish girl in a black maid uniform with a frilly white collar and apron. She told them she would fetch Miss Bose and left them in the foyer.

“You think her boyfriend spanks her in that uniform?” Goulart asked as he watched her go.

Zach cracked up. “Would you shut up, Broadway. God Awmighty.”

“Look at this place.”

Zach did. They’d seen a lot of fine houses these last few days, but this had to be one of the finest. No flash, just clean elegance. Persian rugs over parquet floors with walnut inlay. A straight-through view from the foyer to the tumultuous surf visible through the picture windows in the grand back room. A switchback staircase with a white balustrade and a walnut banister going up to one balcony and then another. Gold designs painted straight into the white, white walls.

It sure is purty, Zach was about to drawl aloud, but before he could get the words out, he caught a whiff of something—something dark, fulsome; offensively organic. The word blood went through his mind, and he thought of a great red, thick, rancid pool of blood, before he shook the word and the image off and told himself to stop this crazy nonsense—whereupon Angela Bose appeared from around a corner and said “Welcome, Detectives. Come this way please.”

Was this another symptom of his fever: this maddening patina of the uncanny that lay over ordinary things? Moment to moment, Zach was not sure whether Angela Bose was one of the most beautiful glamour-queens he’d ever laid eyes on, or the product of some sort of artifice—makeup or plastic surgery or something—disguising a face and figure that would otherwise have appeared withered and unpleasantly overripe. She seemed to change even as he looked at her—which could’ve been a trick of the beach-light pouring through the wall of windows in the back room, catching her at different angles as she turned gracefully from one of them to the other. Or maybe, even at twenty-seven, she had simply reached that precise second when a woman’s perfect youth trembles on the brink of ending. . . .

Or maybe he was just going loony.

Whatever it was, Zach got the idea in his head that, despite the strong and chiseled and regal features beneath her shoulder-length auburn hair, and despite the sleek figure in her white blouse and white slacks, Angela Bose was secretly a shriveled cadaver that had somehow been inflated to a semblance of vitality and loveliness as a tick is bloated with blood. He kept catching the aroma of blood in the room. And the aroma of corruption.

The maid placed a tray of coffee and china on the low table set among the cushioned wicker chairs, but Angela Bose poured for them herself. She spoke without condescension or self-consciousness, but Zach could see that her manners were elegant and ladylike as if she were, as he put it to himself, highborn.

“Could you tell us if the thieves took anything really valuable?” he asked her.

“There was a gold brooch that I was quite fond of, handed down from my great-great-grandmother,” she said. “Of tremendous sentimental value, though the insurers only assessed it at eight or nine thousand dollars. And they stole a drawing by Bosch that I do believe is worth something. I suspect they made off with that by accident, though, because they took a lot of worthless prints and watercolors besides—probably for the frames.”

“Excuse me asking, but what sort of accent is that you have, ma’am? Is that German?” Zach said. He sipped his coffee from a cup decorated with roses.

“Dutch, actually. My family has been in the Netherlands for some four hundred years. What about your accent, Agent?”

“West Texas. My grandpappy was a moonshiner and that’s all I know.”

She smiled graciously—though damned if there wasn’t something skullish and awful about it too. Or was this just more creepy stuff from his imagination?

“You ever hear of a fellow named Dominic Abend?” said Goulart, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

“No. No, Agent, I don’t believe so.”

Goulart unfolded the photo from his jacket pocket and showed it to her. She looked it over—and Zach could have sworn she recognized it, but at this point he didn’t trust his own instincts.

“No,” she said. “It is not a very good picture, of course. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen this man.”

Outside, on the beach through the picture window, a green wave rose against the blue sky and crashed down upon the yellow sand. The white froth of the surf seemed to be reflected by the thin white clouds above.

“You live here with your father?” said Zach.

“No. Pa-pa lives in Amsterdam. He visits me from time to time, and the house is in his name.”

“Which is?”

“His name? Herman Bose. Von Bose, actually, but he doesn’t like the aristocratic pretension. He owns a shipping company. I’m curious why you should ask.”

Zach gestured with his coffee cup. “This Dominic Abend we’re looking for is German. I’m just casting around for any possible connections.”

“Of course.” She smiled again—politely this time—and her bright blue eyes went up and down him. It was not a mere sexual appraisal, he thought. She seemed to be taking his full measure. When she was done, she inclined her chin slightly as if to say she knew him now, she knew who he really was, deep down.

“There wasn’t any kind of weapon stolen, was there?” he asked her. “A dagger. A sword. Something like that.”

Her eyes were still lingering on his face so that when she lied—and Zach felt sure she was lying, sure enough that his heart raced—he thought he could see a look of irony in them. She seemed to be sending him a message that went something like, Forgive me, but now I must lie to you, even though we both know I am lying. It is simply what must be done.

“No,” she said aloud. “There was nothing like that. I have given a full inventory of what was stolen to the local police, you know. I’m sure they would happily share it with you.”

Driving back into the city, Zach spoke only after the Crown Vic was on the expressway, only when he felt he had put some distance between the rear fender and Sea View, as if he was afraid Angela Bose would overhear him.

“You get the feeling she was lying?”

Goulart rounded on him in surprise. “No! Did you? I thought she was being totally straight with us.”

“Really?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, the whole accent and everything had me on the lookout, but there’s a lot of these European types out here. Especially recently, with all of them escaping from the apocalypse and so on.”

“I thought I saw something in her eyes when she looked at Abend’s picture. Like she recognized him.”

Goulart shrugged and shook his head: he hadn’t spotted it.

Which bothered Zach. Because Goulart was such a mind reader. And he, Zach, had thought it was so obvious. But then he’d also thought he smelled blood and corruption. He also thought he’d been attacked by malicious giant cockroaches and that he was being haunted by a German college professor. . . . So, yeah, maybe Angela Bose was lying and maybe Goulart was on the take and covering up for her, or maybe Goulart was just not at his observational best because he was distracted by his medical problems, or maybe Goulart was lying about his medical problems too. . . . Or maybe Zach was just going out of his ever-loving mind. Hard to say at this point which scenario was more likely to be true.

“Can I ask you something?” he said after another while.

Goulart grunted. “Sure.”

“Not sure how to put this exactly, but . . . all you been going through? The medical stuff and all.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever give any thought to the big picture? God and the supernatural and like that.”

“You’re not gonna preach to me, are you, Cowboy?”

“No, no, not at all, I’m just . . . curious, I guess.”

He heard Goulart take a deep breath in and out through his nose. “Well. . . . Who the hell wouldn’t give it some thought, right? In my position. The way I see it: sure, maybe there’s a god, and maybe not. But maybe the thing is: it doesn’t make any difference. You ever think of that? I mean, maybe there’s a god and this is all just his train set or something. Maybe we’re like a TV show he watches in his spare time. Because he likes the sex scenes and the car chases. ‘Nuclear war? Yeah, that was cool. Great special effects. Wonder what else is on.’”

“Well, what about . . . ?” Zach stopped.

“What? No, go ahead. This is good. We’re sharing. It’s like we’re partners. Gives me a warm glow. Kiss me, you beautiful son of a bitch.”

Zach gave a crooked smile, but he pushed on too. “Well, to be honest, I was thinking about the practical side of it. You think there could be . . . supernatural stuff? Here on Earth, I mean. Evil stuff. Or even supernatural good stuff. I mean, Grace, she’s always talking about miracles and God’s will and the Enemy’s schemes and all that. Angels. Demons.” He eye-checked Goulart to see if he would laugh at that, but he only gave a small snort. “I know, but she really believes in it. My mama did too. And they weren’t stupid, either of them. I mean, sure, women, you know, are crazy and all that, but they’re not always wrong about things. And Grace—well, she knows people. She understands the world, in some ways. In some ways better than I do. She gets a lot of stuff right.”

“Hey,” said Goulart in a broad-minded tone—because you never disrespected your partner’s wife, and he’d always liked Grace, all the guys did. “It’s as good a way of describing things as any. There may not really be a devil, but the world behaves exactly as if there was. So if you believe in that stuff—yeah, you’ll never go far wrong.”

Zach grunted thoughtfully in response, but in fact the answer wasn’t much help to him. Was it possible there were ghosts and magic daggers and marauding cockroaches, or not? That’s what he wanted to know.

The sun went down beyond the windshield, and the blue of the sky began to deepen. The expressway street lights came on, and so did the oncoming headlights, and so did the diamond-like gleams of house windows that were splayed to the left and right of them in the Island towns.

“The thing is,” said Goulart, “when you look into the abyss. . . . ’Cause that’s why you’re asking me this shit, right? ’Cause let’s face it, I’m looking smack dab into the abyss.”

Zach answered with a gesture so he wouldn’t have to lie—because, of course, that wasn’t why he was asking at all.

Goulart went on: “All I can tell you, pard, is that from where I’m standing? The abyss is awful abyssy. You know? Awful dark. And in all that dark, who the fuck knows? Right? Could be angels and demons playing checkers with our souls. Could be dirt and nothing all the way down.”

“What the hell is taking them so long with those tests of yours?” Zach blurted out, because he really did care about the New Yorker and wanted him to know it.

“Ah!” said Goulart and he waved the question away.

Once again Zach had to push down the thought that his partner was hiding something. Or that he knew more than he was telling. Or that the whole sickness story was a deception. Because if any of that was true—if any of his instincts and paranoid suspicions and weird feverish perceptions were accurate—then what about the rest of it? Those giant cockroaches? The executioner standing on the bridge? The corpse smoking a cigarette in his bedroom chair? And that night—in Germany—in the Black Forest. . . .

He had to be crazy, had to be. His mind had to be messed up by fever. There was no other reasonable explanation. But then how the hell was he supposed to be a cop—how the hell was he supposed to be a human being—if he could no longer trust his own observations? If he no longer knew what was real and what was madness?

It was full night when they parked in one of the angled spaces outside the one-six. Shoulder to shoulder, the two detectives walked wearily across the street and up the three concrete steps to the precinct’s front doors. Goulart pulled one of the doors open and went through first—and Zach caught the edge of the door with his hand and was about to follow when he felt someone’s eyes on him.

He paused. He turned, the door still in his hand. He saw that woman again—the woman they had spotted watching them days ago, the slender pretty girl with short black hair, wearing her belted purple sweater. She was back. Watching them again—watching Zach, anyway—from just down the sidewalk now, only a couple of dozen yards away.

She didn’t hurry off this time. She went on standing there, a little outside the glow of a street lamp. She went on staring at Zach, so that Zach realized she had meant for him to feel it, that she had been beckoning him silently.

Zach called into the building after Goulart, “I’ll catch up to you,” and let the door swing shut. He walked back down the steps and headed toward the woman.

She waited for him to reach her. She stood with her hands in her belted purple sweater-thing, her shoulders hunched, her chin tucked in. Maybe she was simply huddling against the cool of the autumn night, but Zach thought she looked nervous too. He felt a little nervous himself, come to think of it. He had that sense again—that sense he had had earlier—that he had seen this woman somewhere before, and that it mattered.

He stepped up to her and before he could say anything, she said, “It’s odd that we can do that, isn’t it? Feel someone staring at us. Scientists say it’s just a superstition but . . . I find it really quite odd.” She had a clear, bell-like voice and a distinct British accent.

“You wanted to speak to me?” Zach said.

“You are Mr. Adams? Mr. Zach Adams?”

“Agent Adams—I am, yes,” Zach said. “And you are?”

“Forgive me—Agent, of course. My name is Imogen Storm. I’m a journalist. I work for a website called Bizarre! It’s important that I speak with you.”

“Bizarre!” Zach repeated, deadpan. He did not know whether to be amused or alarmed. “What do you want to speak with me about?”

The woman drew a deep, unsteady breath. She really was nervous. She said, “I want to speak with you about Gretchen Dankl. The werewolf.”