Little Girl Blue

"Yeah," Julia agreed, "but the point you mentioned is that he was in control from beginning to end. He knew exactly what he was doing."

"Which is what?"

Instead of answering, Julia finally turned to the display on the dining-room table, half expecting to see, in the eyes of the victims, the agony of their deaths. But the victims" eyes, blue and brown, respectively, were flat and blank. They didn"t reveal surprise or terror; they just looked dead. Slowly, Julia circled the table until she found the small entry wounds, one in the back of each skull. It was perfect, she decided, absolutely perfect. Just like the silver platters on which the heads rested. The platters were filled to the brim with coagulated blood, a gluey paste without which the killer"s trophies would have toppled over long ago.

Julia re-traced her path until she was again standing next to Bert Griffith. He was bent over, staring down at a pa.s.sport lying open on the table. The child they"d been calling Little Girl Blue stared back, a small kid with dark unruly hair and widely s.p.a.ced features evenly distributed on a broad face. Her expression was grave, as if impressed with the importance of the moment.

"Anja Dascalescu," Bert said, stumbling over the last name.

"What?"

"That"s her name, loo. See, over here. Anja Dascalesau. And her country of origin: Romania." He straightened up, and met Julia"s eye. "It"s good," he said. "We gave her a name."

"Not we, Bert. Whoever killed the Mandrakes and set this up gave her a name. We were just along for the ride."

Before she left the apartment, Julia, at Bert"s insistence, visited one more room. Though small, the front room had a huge, heart-shaped bed virtually covered with small purple throw pillows.

"Over here, loo. Check this out."

Julia crossed the room to stand beside Bert Griffith at an immaculately clean window that offered an angled view, between heavy curtains, of Central Park. "How many hours?" Griffith asked. "How many hours you think she stood here, looking out, before she made her move?"

"Long enough, Bert." Julia let the curtain drop. "Long enough to know exactly what she was getting into. Long enough not to care."

SIXTEEN.

PETER FOLEY stood at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-second Street, looking south into the heart of Times Square. He was wearing a lined microfiber trench coat, a duster, that fell nearly to his ankles, and a broad-brimmed wool Stetson so tightly woven it shed the rain as though made of rubber. Foley was particularly fond of the outfit and the vaguely romantic cowboy image it evoked. The boots were wrong, though. Insulated Gore-Tex ankle-highs with thick Vibram soles, they kept his feet dry and ate up the miles even as they diluted the fantasy.

Foley"s destination was a small shop on Seventh Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street. As he"d come from downtown, from Waverly Place in the West Village, he might have approached the shop directly. Instead, he"d detoured to Eighth Avenue, then walked all the way to Fifty-second Street before coming back to Broadway and his favorite view of Times Square. He was looking down a gentle slope, into the brazen forest of neon signs lining both sides of Broadway and Seventh Avenue where the two converged at Forty-fifth Street.

Rain-smeared, the words and images blended one into the other, as if the whole had been designed by a single artist, a surrealist to be sure.

Like most New Yorkers, Foley had a clear memory of Times Square before the renewal project that had begun under Mayor Ed Koch, then proceeded relentlessly, clearing out most of the peep shows and X-rated bookstores, most of the prost.i.tutes, most of the drug dealers, most of the grifters, and most of the muggers. Corporate America had moved into the vacuum: Virgin Records and Warner Brothers, the World Wrestling Federation and ESPN, Planet Hollywood, The Olive Garden, ABC, MTV, and the NASDAQ Market Site. Drawing tourists by the millions, from every country in the world.

It was a disconcerting change for a legion of embittered old-timers who somehow failed to understand, as Foley understood, that nothing at all had changed. Times Square remained the same old wh.o.r.e she"d always been. Yes, she"d had her t.i.ts lifted and her b.u.t.t lipo"d, and she"d put on a h.e.l.l of a fancy outfit, no doubt about it. But the whole area was a rip-off. The stores displayed shoddy merchandise bearing various logos hyping more shoddy merchandise, a gigantic cross-promotion supported by hundred of millions of advertising dollars. The food in the theme restaurants, as if determined to maintain the ambiance, was badly prepared, overpriced, and served in the tackiest of surroundings by surly waiters who spent their inebriated off-time proclaiming their eternal hatred of tourists. It was Brantley, Missouri, comes to the Big Apple, the dead-zero center of the consumer culture, American Gothic for the new millennium.

And all the while, just a few blocks to the west and south, the wh.o.r.es, the druggies, and the muggers awaited their turn. Sensing, perhaps, the impermanence of all that hype, seeing right through all that glitter, instinctively appreciating the difference between glitter and gold.

On that note, a satisfied Foley began to march south. It was eleven o"clock, the rain had picked up, and the sidewalks were virtually deserted. Within a few hours, if the temperature continued to drop, the roads would be streaked with ice and the taxis and trucks, the professional drivers, would shut down, leaving the city to the cops and the paramedics.

At Forty-third Street, Foley stopped again, just for a moment. The light was so intense here it seemed to penetrate his skin; he could almost hear the colors. For a moment, he imagined himself part of the show, a statue with its eyes perpetually raised ... in awe? In homage? Or was it only, Gee, folks, we"re in Times Square?

As Foley started off again, a figure approached from Forty-second Street, a man holding an enormous pink umbrella. The man advanced with determined strides, his gaze riveted to the sidewalk, the tip of the umbrella"s staves even with Foley"s eyes. For just an instant, Foley was tempted to play against character, to slap the umbrella out of his way, see what the jerk would do. Instead, he dodged to the side, then continued on. Interaction was not his game.

THE FAT man seated behind the cash register at Pleasure World grimaced when Foley entered the store. "You"re late," he said.

Foley removed his hat and shook the rain off. "Sorry. The weather. You know."

"Bein" late, it"s disrespectful. I hadda keep the f.u.c.kin" store open after everybody else went home." The man"s name was Alfred DeBennedetto and his problem was that he fancied himself a mafioso, a made guy, when he was just a clerk selling j.e.r.k.-.o.f.f. tapes and stroke books to h.o.r.n.y men. Alfred DeBennedetto, who lived all by his lonesome in a studio apartment in Flatbush.

"Fred, I"m sorry. I am. I"m really sorry. I was in Queens and the F train was running late. There was nothing I could do."

DeBennedetto hauled himself up, doing a kind of bench-press off the counter, and grunted his acceptance of Foley"s apology. Then he locked the front door and led Foley into a back room. Once inside, Foley opened his coat to reveal a plastic shopping bag tied over his shoulder. The bag contained three videotapes, which he pa.s.sed to DeBennedetto. The tapes had been copied from evidence that"d come into Foley"s possession two weeks before. Foley routinely copied tapes and photos, using the copies to trade for still more evidence. On this occasion, however, Foley accepted a handful of fifty-dollar bills, stuffing them into a pocket.

"I hope I don"t gotta tell you," DeBennedetto said, "what"ll happen if these tapes come up bogus."

"Have I ever failed to produce?"

"It don"t matter, kid. In my line of business, every time is the first time."

Repressing an urge to laugh out loud, Foley re-b.u.t.toned his duster, slapped his cowboy hat on his head, and exited Pleasure World. He walked directly north, to Forty-fifth Street, then turned east. As he entered the block, a car parked fifty yards away flashed its headlights several times. A moment later Foley was sitting in the back seat, looking into the amused black eyes of FBI Special Agent Raymond Lear.

"This a go?" Lear asked.

"I don"t know. You tell me."

Though Lear"s hand, bearing a thin manila file, came off the front seat, he did not offer the file to Peter Foley, not even when Foley removed the tape recorder and DeBennedetto"s money, then held them up for Lear"s inspection.

As Foley settled back to await further developments, he read the name typed onto an aquamarine identifying tag: ANJA DAS-CALESCU. "What now?" he asked. "Fun and games?"

Lear"s hair, like his eyes, was jet black. Combed straight away from his forehead and lacquer-stiff with hair spray, it didn"t so much as quiver when he shook his head in disgust. "The s.h.i.t"s. .h.i.t the fan, Foley. It"s all over the little tube. Two bodies up on Seventy-third Street. The kid ... what do they call her?" He laughed. "Little Girl Blue. Yeah, they found Little Girl Blue"s pa.s.sport with her photo and her real name on it. Anja Dascalescu."

Foley shrugged. He"d caught the news as it flashed across the face of the New York Times building. It wasn"t what he"d wanted, but there was nothing to be done about it. He would have to count on Ray Lear"s ambition. DeBennedetto was the last piece of a year-long federal investigation into the distribution of child p.o.r.nography. The feds had pursued it from the opposite end, targeting customers who"d ordered the material from an offsh.o.r.e website. Though they"d subsequently traced the website to a mobbed-up crew working out of Ben-sonhurst, the hard evidence necessary to make arrests had eluded them. That is, until Lily Han introduced Lear to Peter Foley and he showed them how to work the other end of the conspiracy.

"You wanna give me an explanation?" Lear finally asked.

"Not especially."

Lear put the file back on the seat, turned away from Foley, and folded his arms across his chest. His problem (as Foley knew) was that if he waited more than a few minutes, Alfred DeBennedetto would be gone, along with the tapes. "I can"t give you the file," he finally said. "I can"t take a chance."

"You think I killed them?"

"I think you"re the craziest human being I know, or ever want to know."

"That"s not an answer."

"Look, you can read the file in the car, even make a few notes, but you can"t take it with you."

Relieved, Foley managed a grim smile before exchanging the tapes and money for the file. A moment later, as Lear used the radios to instruct his waiting troops, Foley went to work, jotting down names, addresses, dates, phone numbers. The doc.u.ments he examined had been copied from an Immigration and Naturalization Service file. They pertained to the adoption of a Romanian citizen named Anja Dascalescu by an American couple living in New York City. The name of the couple was Norton, not Mandrake, and the question Foley asked himself was how Anja had pa.s.sed from the Nortons to the Mandrakes without anyone noticing.

"You"re gonna have to come out." Lear turned on the car"s defroster and a rush of hot air washed over the fogged windshield. "There"s no remaining anonymous. Not anymore."

"Turn DeBennedetto," Foley replied. "Then you won"t need me."

"Your name"s in the warrant."

"Redact it." Foley continued to write, only the tiniest portion of his attention given over to Lear.

"No. I want you on the witness stand, as a New York City police officer. I want to seal every crack. We"re going to be in a federal court. We can"t finesse your existence. One way of another, you"re going to testify."

Foley closed his notebook and pa.s.sed the file back to Lear. "But what," he asked, "if I did it? What if I killed those two people? Don"t you think a murder conviction would negatively impact my testimony? Credibilitywise?"

IT WAS a quarter past two o"clock when Foley turned off the light next to his bed and buried his face in the pillow. He drifted off almost immediately, spiraling down to a vague fantasy which quickly expanded into a sharp-edged, full-color dream. He was on vacation, in Maine, with his wife, Kirstin, and his daughter, Patti. It was his and Kirstin"s fifth anniversary.

Foley was sitting on a blanket, watching Kirstin as she shepherded four-year-old Patti, who was exploring the rock-studded beach. Overhead, a few puffy clouds drifted across an intensely blue sky, a sky bled of all impurities, a sky that hadn"t been seen in New York City for two hundred years. From off in the distance, Patti"s excited voice announced some precious discovery that required his immediate attention: "Daddy, daddy, daddy."

"Not now," Foley replied as he lay back on the gaily striped blanket. "Daddy"s tired now."

But Patti continued to insist, repeating the same three words, over and over, until they became purely elemental, a complement to the calling gulls, to the rush of wind through the pine forest just a few yards behind him. Still, overwhelmed by a sudden, inexplicable lethargy, he did not respond.

Then it was night and it was raining and he was on his feet, panicked. He heard Patti call, heard the spatter of rain on the ocean, the harsh slap of waves breaking on the sand, the hoot of an owl in the forest. There was no moon in the sky above him, no stars, not even clouds; the beach, a swatch of black velvet that might have been inches from his eyes, lacked all depth. Nevertheless he staggered forward, toward the sound of his daughter"s voice.

Daddy, daddy, daddy.

Foley awakened to find himself seated at the edge of his bed. The rain had changed to sleet; it rattled against the window, the noise primal and threatening. Foley listened for a moment, then glanced at the LED readout on his alarm clock. It was exactly 3 A.M." but he didn"t consider returning to sleep. Instead, he rose and wandered off into the kitchen where he brewed a pot of coffee, poured himself a cup, then took it to his computer, the big Gateway and not the Mac. There was much to do and little time in which to do it. First he would find the Nortons, then Christopher Inman, the INS officer who pa.s.sed on the adoption. Hopefully, by mid-morning, he would know enough to decide his next move.

As he waited for the Gateway to boot up, Foley opened a desk drawer and removed a photo, the same photo he"d shown Wallace Carpenter a few days before. Foley was in the photo, kneeling alongside a little girl whose arm encircled his neck. But it wasn"t Patti Foley in the photograph, not the Patti he remembered, the six-year-old who would never grow up. It was Patti at ten, a computer-aged Patti who might or might not exist, a Patti he would never know. Unless he found her.

SEVENTEEN.

DRIVEN B Y a prostate-compromised bladder, Robert Reid hauled himself out of bed, pulled on the flannel robe thoughtfully provided by his niece, and set off for the bathroom. As it was barely seven A.M. and he"d only gotten to sleep a few hours before, he stumbled from Julia Brennan"s guest bedroom in a forgivable fog, nearly running over Julia who was standing in the hallway outside her daughter"s room.

"Couldn"t sleep," Julia explained. "You?"

"A message from ..." Reid"s voice rumbled up from his chest, a fair impression of James Earl Jones. "It who must be obeyed."

"It?"

"My prostate, dear. Now, if you"ll excuse me."

Julia shifted, allowing her uncle to pa.s.s. "I"ll put up some coffee."

"Great," Reid answered, though he"d been looking forward to several additional hours of sleep. Well, comforting his niece was the reason he"d come back to her home after the press conference given by Manhattan North Detective Commander Harold Clark. Though Clark had acknowledged C Squad"s efforts, Julia"s name hadn"t been mentioned. Nor had she been present on the dais. She"d lingered, instead, at the back of the room, just another schmucko detective in a wrinkled suit.

The coffee was bubbling down into a carafe when Reid walked into the kitchen. A small gla.s.s of orange juice rested on the table before his chair. He drank the juice gratefully, then settled back to study his niece. They"d driven from Clark"s press conference in separate cars, arriving at Julia"s to find Corry still awake. Her presence had forced a delay of the heart-to-heart he and Julia were about to have.

"He was really p.i.s.sed off," Julia said.

"Clark?"

"Yeah, and Borough Commander Flannery. They worked me over before the press conference."

"How bad?"

"About as bad as I deserved. I didn"t notify Clark before we served the warrant." She was standing with her back to Reid, reaching into the cupboard for a pair of coffee mugs. "Clark expressly ordered me not to do anything major without letting him know. When he confronted me, I couldn"t deny it. Flannery didn"t say a word, but I could read the message in his eyes. He was disappointed. I"d been advertised as a team pk er, and I turned out to be just another hotdog."

Reid was about to reply when Julia spun to face him. By all rights, he decided, especially with no makeup, she should appear haggard, defeated. Because she was a team player, had realized from her first days in the Academy that she couldn"t hope to advance unless she merged her own interests with the interests of the job. There was no way she would have deviated from that understanding unless powerfully motivated. Meanwhile, Julia"s eyes were clear, her forehead placid. If anything, she seemed perplexed.

"I put out that bulls.h.i.t name," she announced. "Little Girl Blue. I thought it up and I put it out there. It wasn"t right."

"I don"t get it."

Julia shook her head, jammed a hand into her hip. "She deserved a real name, not a Daily News headline."

"I hear you, Julia." Reid scratched his beard. "But I"m having trouble understanding why calling Harry Clark would have prevented the child"s name from coming to the surface."

"I had to do it on my own." Julia waved him off. "It was like he was stealing my collar. No, not like that. I take it back." She hesitated, looking for the right words, then continued. "Look, Clark didn"t deserve to be there. He and Flannery, all along they were betting C Squad would come up empty. He even told me that we"d offended the civilians with our little investigation and we should back off. I couldn"t let him in at the last minute. He just didn"t deserve it."

Reid nodded, though he didn"t believe a word of what she was saying. That sort of principle was utterly irrelevant to a career-minded cop, to a heretofore single-minded woman who"d been a single-minded little girl. He and Mary-Margaret had been prepared no, expecting to take responsibility for their niece after Paulie deserted his family. Lord knew, Julia"s mother, addicted as she was to equal measures of self-pity and alcohol, hadn"t been up to the task. But Julia had risen to the occasion, somehow putting meals on the table, groceries in the cupboard, somehow getting herself off to school every morning. Robert Reid could not recall ever coming over to find the apartment dirty; Julia even rinsed the vodka bottles. At age eight, at age nine, ten, eleven, twelve .. . until the day of her marriage. Always responsible, always in control.

"So, where do matters stand right now?" he finally asked.

"I"m on vacation." She filled the two mugs, carried one to Reid, then returned to the kitchen counter.

"In January? You"re on vacation in January?"

"In January, with Corry in school. Nice, right?" Julia opened the refrigerator, removed a carton of eggs and a pound of bacon. "They want to keep me away from the reporters."

"If I remember, Clark thanked C Squad, then announced he was organizing a special task force to investigate the murders. Doesn"t that effectively isolate you?"

"You think it"s overkill, do ya?" Julia shook hear head, her tone now flat. "The way it looks right this minute, I can forget the detectives. I"m not going anywhere in the division unless Clark retires." She began to arrange slices of bacon in a large flying pan, carefully overlapping the slices. Watching, Reid thought it was easier for her to speak of her humiliation while she busied herself with mundane tasks, while her back was turned. "You had to see it, Uncle Bob. In that apartment. You had to be there. Games upon games." She shifted the pan to a burner on the stove, twisted a k.n.o.b, adjusted the flame. "The Mandrakes were prost.i.tuting the girls for between one and two thousand dollars a trick. We know because we found their books. They were also videotaping the s.e.x, then selling the tapes to a New Jersey outfit, Patterson Distributing. We found a bunch of tapes in the Mandrakes" bedroom."

"What about blackmail? They weren"t blackmailing the Johns? With those videos?" He pushed himself up, the sharp tug in his lower back so familiar he almost welcomed it, and crossed the kitchen to refill his coffee mug. "Hard to believe."

"Blackmail is definitely a possibility, but there was no client list, Uncle Bob. And trust me, we looked very carefully."

"Did they have a computer."

"No computer. Sales to Patterson Distributing, customer visits, the records were kept in an old-fashioned ledger. There were entries for the cost of groceries, for the rent, but nothing to indicate they were blackmailing the Johns."

"And nothing to indicate what happened to the other girls, either?" Regaining his seat, Reid carefully modulated his tone as he approached the heart of the conversation. If she didn"t want to talk about it, he"d back off, wait for a better time.

"Nope." Julia took a package of English m.u.f.fins from the cupboard, then a cookie sheet from a cabinet beneath the window. She carried these to the kitchen table and sat across from her uncle. "When you saw me this morning? Standing by Corry"s door? I"ve been having nightmares, of Corry gone. I wake up and I know it"s stupid, but I have to check on her. I can"t stop myself." She tore open the package of m.u.f.fins without taking her eyes away from Reid"s. "I think of Corry going to school, that long subway ride into lower Manhattan. I think that sometimes she comes home late, after a rehearsal or a basketball game. Anything can happen ..."

From upstairs, they heard a door close, then Corry"s feet on the stairs, a flurry of thuds as she skipped her way down that brought the conversation to a halt. Reid turned to the door an instant before Corry"s face appeared. She was as close as he would get to a grandchild, this girl tilting on the cusp of womanhood. He loved her dearly, and he, too, worried about her.

"You made bacon," Corry exclaimed as she charged into the room. "G.o.d, it"s like we"re getting normal again."