CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Clayton Guthrie was willing to accept being lucky. Tough cases needed luck. The graffiti at the crime scene was luck, and saved the hard work of watching V.I. Maskalenko to see if Gagneau liked to visit. After Tompkins took a cab back downtown, Vasquez drove them back to the office. Slow rain fell on Fifth Avenue, and the little detective watched the park slide by past his window.

“If this lead don’t pan out, we’re gonna watch Brooklyn,” he said. “That was the plan until she came along with bail.”

Vasquez laughed. “Brooklyn? All of it, or just Flatbush?”

“Sure, that’s a good joke, right?” he said. “That’s our other lead, but I’m not in a hurry to mix with the Russians.” He looked over his shoulder at the Escalade still trailing them. “Greg, I gotta ask you to clear that up for me.”

The blond veteran looked, then nodded. Linney’s interest in Gagneau didn’t need an explanation—his mother was involved. The younger man wasn’t so different. Before Linney joined the army, Althea Linney plucked Little Prince from the street. He became younger brother and younger son. Linney left the gang behind when he joined the service, but Little Prince stepped right into his shoes. Linney hadn’t made much progress changing Little Prince’s mind about the gang since he’d returned from Afghanistan. Day labor wouldn’t put rims on an Escort, and forget about a Cadillac. Olsen shrugged. Linney was struggling his way forward with Little Prince, and outside help was actually interference.

The Garment District was in full swing. In the rain, the runners had to hold plastic over the clothes. They doubled up—more trips, more jammed traffic, and more chaos. Vasquez parked a block away, but the rain wasn’t heavy enough to drench them before they reached the office. Guthrie ordered pizzas. The little detective flipped through the phone book while Olsen and Linney argued about whether Linney should go back to work, and where Olsen should stay the night.

“Quiet,” Guthrie said when he picked up the phone to dial. “The calls go on speaker, so you gotta be quiet.”

The Park Service kept an information center and ranger station outside Blue Ridge, near Twin Oaks. Guthrie fed one of the rangers a story about an estranged family, with worried parents looking for assurance that their youngest son was alive and functional, and being led to Twin Oaks by a comment from one of the young man’s friends. The ranger offered that the campsites below the old great lodge were a transient haven. Electricity was available in a camper park that boasted a collection of tin-pot trailers and slackers, along with a heavy dose of late-summer campers, nature lovers, and wandering retirees. The campgrounds were a miniature city away from the city. Guthrie clipped a copy of Gagneau’s picture from his computer to send by phone, and asked the ranger to have a look. The first ranger didn’t connect him, but the second, who regularly pushed through the campsites, claimed to recognize him from the camper park. Guthrie drew the rangers into a conspiracy of silence by claiming to need pictures for the worried parents. He cradled the phone and shrugged.

“If you weren’t working to help me, I think I might have some reason to worry,” Olsen said. “Then, I know some other guys who would see it the other way.”

Linney laughed. “You’s a serious liar.”

“So when we gonna go get him?” Little Prince asked.

The little detective looked from face to face in the office, waited a few seconds, and nodded. He stood up and peeled off his suit coat, revealing the pistols holstered under each arm. “I ain’t going to jail with the rest of you,” he said quietly. “So you’re about to make a choice: You step out of the office and don’t come back unless I call you, or you do what I say, when I say, and how I say. All of you follow that?”

Blank stares and silence answered him from around the office, with one angry scowl from Little Prince. The traffic outside seemed loud.

“See, this ain’t Afghanistan. When you shoot someone in New York, that’s homicide. If you plan in advance to do it”—he indicated all of them with a roving fingertip—“that’s murder. You already conspired, just now.”

“Yo, P-Lo, what’s up with this dude?” Little Prince said.

“Shut it, Prince,” Linney said, aiming a frown at the young man and then at Guthrie. “Old man, you got to make that clearer.”

“All right. Greg’s on bond for the Bowman murder. We figure Gagneau for the killer. What if we can’t prove it? Greg goes back to jail on the murder. The first item on my list is getting around that. But let’s say we have proof—and then one of us shoots Gagneau. I’m seriously not explaining to the NYPD how I came to be in that position; to wit, I searched for the man, found him, approached him with a firearm, and, in some ensuing altercation, shot him dead. In New York, that’s murder. Arguing that he killed your mother beforehand is only getting you an injection. Your fiancée?” he said, looking at Olsen now. “Same thing. Am I getting through here?”

“Fuck that shit,” Linney muttered. Olsen’s face turned as red as blood, but he folded his hands in his lap and said nothing.

“See, it don’t matter what Gagneau did, or even if we can prove it. You kill him, that’s murder. Explain why you killed him, that’s evidence against you for being a dumbass. Hide the body and cover up the shooting, and Greg here goes away for the Bowman murder. That’s to make sure everybody understands. Vasquez, you made a speech to HP that puts you in the fire if you happen to be the shooter. You remember that?”

“You made your point, viejo!” she snapped. “We can’t touch him! So what are we doing?”

“We’re waiting on pizza,” Guthrie said. “We don’t do anything else until after we eat.”

*   *   *

On the drive north to the park, Vasquez stayed on the east side of the Hudson River. The rise and fall of the Catskills folded the city away into a distant box after they slipped past Yonkers and Mount Vernon. A neat manicure and ranks of ancient estates polished away the wildness of the mountains, leaving it like a well-behaved dog wearing a ribbon and hat and refusing to go out to play. Olsen slept in the backseat of the Ford. Linney and Little Prince trailed them in the Escalade. Guthrie brooded quietly in the passenger seat, watching the road signs and fences.

Farther north, the Escalade became a comfort to Vasquez because it reminded her of the city. The boroughs were straight lines and hard surfaces. She was a child of the city; when she said concrete, she wasn’t talking about philosophy. The Adirondacks shimmered like a hallucination when gusts of wind swept the edges of trees and shrubbery into motion. Dim light from the cloudy sky left the countryside colorless and distant, except when the road was swallowed by dips in the ground or surrounded by an onslaught of trees. Everything was too far away. When Vasquez was little, her family flew down to Puerto Rico for vacations, but they never ventured far from Barranca, Papì’s village on the coast. Driving into the park took her farther from the sea than she had ever been in her life.

Earlier, Guthrie had used the ritual of eating to make sure that everyone was calm before questioning the two veterans about Gagneau. After the pizza boxes were empty, the little detective asked, “Do you suppose Gagneau’s armed?”

Linney laughed; the two veterans looked at each other, and both nodded. “The real question is whether he’s got a chopper,” Linney said. “Slip loves full auto.”

“He’s a fair shot?” Guthrie asked. “Would he go for a head shot?”

Olsen shook his head. “Once I gave him all day to line up on a cow, and then he shot her in the ass. I never saw him miss the long side of a cream-colored Toyota in the dark, though.”

“Captain, you tripping,” Linney said.

The big man grinned. “So maybe he could be a little better than that.”

“This ain’t time for jokes,” the little detective said. “If he’s a good shot, we’ll need to do things differently.”

“No, then,” Olsen said glumly.

“How does he eat and sleep?”

“Slip eats,” Linney said. “Always had candy in his pocket, too.”

“He wanted to stay in the rack late. He hated A.M. roll-outs,” Olsen said.

The little detective grunted and searched the computer file from Arlington for a minute, then shrugged. “Too bad. He ain’t a diabetic.” He’d peppered them with questions about Gagneau’s personal habits for almost an hour, without seeming satisfied. None of the answers provided a breakthrough.

During pauses, Guthrie gathered equipment. He cornered Little Prince and tricked him into handing over his pistol “just for a look”—a Glock with an obliterated serial number—then wouldn’t give it back. Little Prince’s appeal to Linney fell on deaf ears, getting a shrug and a comment: “You knowed he was a liar, all right?”

Guthrie stuffed the trunk of the old Ford with equipment. Besides camping gear and food, he had a box of wireless walkie-talkies, handcuffs, Tasers, and pepper spray. Little Prince grumbled some insults about “police shit,” but changed his tone when the little detective handed him a model 1911A1 Colt. Five Colt pistols and five M1 Garands came from the holdout while Little Prince and the veterans went to pick up food. On the way out of the city, they stopped to get body armor and blue bullets for the firearms.

Vasquez drove into Essex County around the northern tip of Lake George. A wild tangle of mountains rose in the northwest, with the sun dropping slowly down onto their green ridges through thinning clouds. From a distance, the slopes were velvet-smooth, but they blocked the path to Mount Marcy like walls. Twin Oaks nestled within a small, split ridge, an old lodge built as a summer house by a rail baron in the nineteenth century. The lodge had endured through family convulsions until finally drifting into disuse and obscurity. Long Island stripped the city vacationers from the Adirondacks once vacations became less about getting away and more about being seen, but a web of campsites still surrounded the secluded valley, scattered along winding country roads.

Deep in the park, past the first ridgeline, they were enclosed in green space. Trees thickened around the road, then disappeared like suddenly swept curtains when the road turned corners and looked down upon hollows. Sunshine lit the open meadows, but beneath the arching trees was cool, dim twilight that summer couldn’t erase. Olsen woke and sat up in the backseat when the road began snaking back and forth. Guthrie handed him a thermos of coffee over the seat.

The Park Service station was a small information center and visitor bathroom, with a narrow parking lot overshadowed by trees. Guthrie rented campsite number three, perched on the mountainside above the camper park, which sat on a horseshoe of flatter ground. They collected some brochures containing simple maps of the surrounding campsites and connecting roads, with pictures to entice the visitors, and a fee schedule for the wary.

With a few hours of late-afternoon sunshine remaining, Little Prince took a video camera to the camper park to film license plates. The young thug had the only face that Guthrie was sure Gagneau wouldn’t recognize; the risky job was his by default. Guthrie filled his ears with repeated warnings about not making anyone suspicious, and took his pistol to make sure he wouldn’t get reckless.

Campsite number three perched well above the camper park, with access along a secondary road that wound around a shoulder of the mountain and hugged narrow crevasses on both sides. The camp pitched above the road on the shoulder of a narrow shelf. The Park Service had installed rough wooden foundations to make the sloped site more useful. The view of the valley was clear, but the area was exposed to wind and sun.

The mountainside loomed above them. Beyond the ridgeline, a narrow lake divided the hollow from the true crest. A generous patron had dignified the cleft with the title of valley; the lake it contained was the focus of the great lodge, called Twin Oaks—first as a hunter’s haven, then for the fishing, and finally for swimming and lounging. While it was far smaller than Tear of the Clouds, that was a point in favor for a man with a fortune smaller than Rockefeller’s. Guthrie and Olsen studied maps and looked over the ground while the sun slowly sank behind the mountain above them.

The Escalade rumbled up the hill to the campsite before nightfall. Vasquez and Linney had raised a pavilion on one of the wooden foundations and wrapped it with cheap mosquito netting. A charcoal brazier provided their campfire. During the afternoon of waiting, Vasquez had practiced following Guthrie around Manhattan electronically, using his license plate for the starting resource. The little detective used cash for almost everything, but the data companies still had his fingerprints. E-Z Pass and ATM withdrawals pinpointed him, while skeleton keys provided by Fat-Fat could pull pictures from their security cameras. No one stayed invisible in the city.

A cloudy sky and lingering damp made the evening cool, but the insects in the north woods gathered like an army as the light failed. In the wilderness, they had an edge, and often won their arguments. Guthrie and Vasquez studied videotape, writing down license tags, while Olsen and Linney grilled steaks. Eventually, the detectives sat in small pools of light cast by the screens of their laptops, and quiet conversation swirled around them, almost disembodied.

“This kid Slip been crazy when you met him?” Little Prince asked.

“Nah,” Linney said. “He was solid when I landed in Alpha.”

Crickets screamed outside in the darkness, trying to match volume with frogs. “Then after all this happened, it occurred to me what drove the sergeant crazy,” Olsen said.

“Captain, you the slowest fucker I ever met,” Linney said.

The big man chuckled, but his voice was serious when he spoke again. “He told me he lost a brother on nine/eleven. So he goes to war. What happens when Uncle Sam bombs his girl, then?”

“Bitch.”

“You bet.”

“Slip been real serious, real quiet,” Linney said. “Street legend stuff. The rifles used to go, ‘You know what Slip did?’ Like that. I can’t put him together with killing a girl. That don’t make no sense to me. Like this: My second rotation after I broke in with Alpha, I went with recon. I thought he was outta his mind. Slip never said shit. He’s like, ‘Stand here, and look that way. Squawk if you see anything move.’ Then he splits.”

“For real?” Little Prince asked.

“Word. Ain’t say shit. Don’t blow it. He’s watching you, or somebody watching you, until he trusts you gonna do what he said. I prove out on OP, and then he’s ready to see me on sweeps.

“Okay, like the Pashies did a hit-and-run on a village post in Marshan in oh six and we went after them. That was a blistering hot day—not a cloud, unless you count dust. Slip pulls two pair of fire teams and we bounce a hundred meters at a time. I get the idea at the beginning he wants to get in front of them, and he knows where he’s going, but he drags us through every bush and pile of rocks on the way. Makes it a memorable experience, right? We go up a cliff and down a crazy dirt-bike trail on the other side.”

“You’re talking about Mar Sharif,” Olsen said. “Oh six was the second time we rolled over that ground.”

“I don’t get it,” Little Prince said. “You ain’t had trucks? Helicopters?”

“You ain’t never gonna catch no Pashie like that—too much noise,” Linney said.

After half a minute, the crickets sounded thick. “Been a hot-ass day,” Linney muttered.

“Yo, what happened?”

Linney shrugged. “We freaked that shit. They’d been working for the devil long enough; we made ’em pay the taxes. How many rifles we took?”

“Twenty-three,” Olsen said. “That was four less than the time we rolled over Mar Sharif in oh five.”

“You took they guns?”

“No shit, we took they guns. See, new fuckers being born all the time, but they only so many guns—and they ain’t free.”

The veterans told stories as the darkness thickened into night, taking turns correcting and adding details. The detectives tracked lists of license plates culled from Little Prince’s video of the camper park. They muttered briefly about each dead end they uncovered. Long past nightfall, Guthrie stood up and stretched. His back crackled. “Run this one,” he said, and handed Vasquez a scrap of paper.

“What is it?” Olsen asked.

“Let her study behind me,” Guthrie said.

He floated forward into the soft light thrown by the grill. He stripped the wrapper from a candy bar and spitted it on a wire, then roasted it above the charcoal. He drew it back and caught a bite when the chocolate started to sizzle.

“Yo, gimme one of them,” Little Prince said. Linney and Olsen crowded the grill with him.

“That thing’s been rolling around in my head since we had that conversation, Greg,” the little detective said.

“About what?”

“Gagneau. I know why he kills those girls. I don’t reckon it matters, but that FBI agent in Virginia wanted this. He’s looking for Gagneau, without knowing who he’s looking for. His bosses in the Bureau don’t believe Gagneau exists, because he’s not a sex killer. They can’t believe anybody would kill that many people for anything but sex. So he can’t exist. He’s a figment of our imagination.

“Anyway, the Bureau guy puts about a hundred bodies on Gagneau, without looking at all the other bodies we’ve connected to him. But I’m not sure he’s crazy.” He warmed the candy bar for another bite. “I remembered there was another man used to run through here who killed for the same reason as Gagneau. Might’ve killed someone right where we’re standing.”

Little Prince laughed. “You got ghost stories, right?”

“You wish,” Guthrie said. “This was three or four hundred years ago. Some of the old names don’t translate so well, but my great-uncle called him ‘Cuts Through Bone.’ The old people said he killed half a hundred in fair combat, and more than that by murder.”

“Indian, right?” Little Prince asked. “That ain’t like now. Back then, they murdered for nothing.”

Guthrie shook his head and finished off his candy bar. “They did things different, but not for nothing. But the old people told the story, I think, to point out he did something wrong. Cuts Through Bone was a big man for the Onondaga. I guess I forgot most of the story, since I used to could say it out right, the way it was said to me. My great-uncle started like this: ‘The brother of Cuts Through Bone was killed in the dark of the moon of Falling Leaves.’

“Back then things were different, right enough. When a man got killed, his woman was entitled to a replacement, because it really was the other way around. He belonged to her. So Cuts Through Bone’s brother was killed, and his sister-in-law wanted a new man. There had to be some sort of resemblance. Maybe they sounded alike, or walked alike, or ate the same things, or liked the same jokes. That was a mark from the spirits that they would become similar in all ways. The selection took time—months or years, even, because the new man had to learn his responsibilities, even if he was replacing a chief or a shaman.

“While that learning was going on, if anybody got dissatisfied with him, that was that. He could sing his death song. They’re gonna kill him. A terrible kind of death that an imposter deserves—burned alive or cut slow in little pieces. And Cuts Through Bone killed his adopted brothers. He killed so many that nobody wanted to be his brother—forty, fifty times. He might wait until they started the ceremony to finish the adoption, then rush in and knock him.

“My great-uncle said he ain’t done it from malice,” the little detective said. “Sure, when he wound a man’s guts around a stick, he meant it to hurt. But he killed them because he was sure they weren’t his brothers. Even though he tried, again and again, to let the spirits bring his brother back. So I thought that would be why Gagneau keeps killing the girls. He tries to let one get close, then realizes she’s an imposter and loses it.”

“Bitch,” Linney muttered.

“You bet,” Olsen echoed.

“I don’t see what you’re talking about,” Vasquez said. A frustrated frown marked her face, dimly lit by the glow of the computer screen. She tapped slowly at the touchpad.

“Okay, what have you got?” Guthrie dusted his hands on his pants.

“A black Volvo registered to Michael Watson in Brooklyn,” she said. “Buyer info has an SSN and an address in Brooklyn. Receipts stack up, with nothing today. You were talking about this?”

Guthrie nodded. “Where’re the receipts?”

Vasquez recited names and addresses—bodegas, laundries, gas stations, pharmacies, liquor stores. She shrugged.

“Ain’t about every one of those addresses in Little Russia?”

Her eyes fastened on the screen again and her finger tapped. “Damn,” she muttered.

“So check the DMV. What’s he look like?”

“I don’t—” Vasquez shot him a glance. Her hands grew busy, then she said, “Viejo, why you put me through that? No, wait—I know. I’m a smart girl. I’ll figure it out.”

“He’s down there,” Guthrie said. “In the morning, we’ll go take a closer look.”

The two veterans rushed over to see Vasquez’s computer screen. Michael Watson’s DMV photograph looked a lot like Marc Lucas Gagneau.