That Darkness Page 6

  He could have been one of Charles Bronson’s targets in Death Wish, which she had stayed up to watch the previous night—a bit foolishly, and she now stifled a yawn. The tale of mild-mannered, law-abiding Paul Kersey who takes revenge for the brutality exercised on his loved ones raised questions of right and wrong that had not been resolved in the forty years since its release, and, Maggie believed, never would. One sympathized with his motives yet, by the end, he is enjoying the power he had discovered within himself and reveling in his secret activities, thumbing his nose at society’s rules. Maggie could never decide how she felt about Paul Kersey when the credits rolled. Sinner or saint? Or, like all humans, something inconsistent, and in between?

  Society’s real problem with a Paul Kersey or the Mc-Manus brothers or a Judge Hardin might not be so much that they broke rules but that they took it upon themselves to judge the value of another human being, which can never really work well. Say, for instance, a building is on fire and you can only save one person of two candidates: an infant, and a grown person of about forty-five. For the sake of argument assume both humans are equal in terms of health, intelligence, and good citizenship. Ask any person on the planet and they will respond without thinking: Save the baby. There are reasonable presumptions for this decision: By unspoken social contract, adults are responsible for juveniles because they cannot be expected to be responsible for themselves. The adult has already lived half of their life while the child has all of his or hers ahead. The adult has had ample opportunities to experience his or her existence and had reached the point where the chances to do anything truly new curve sharply downward (this realization in itself representing a major cause of the midlife crisis), whereas to the child everything experienced would be magically new. But none of that necessarily made the child more valuable to the world at large than the adult. The adult had already been educated and had gained enough life experience to be competent in his or her chosen field. Society’s investment had already been made. The child might work out just as well but might not, a crapshoot in terms of return on an investment that the society would still have to expend, while sacrificing further gain on its investment in the adult. From society’s point of view, the adult was a better deal.

  Value judgments, Maggie decided, were inherently illogical, because no two people would ever agree on the precise value of anything. That’s why humans dealt with the process by taking a survey, of a jury or a legislature, and had an instinctual loathing for the arrogance of one person taking all this illogic upon him- or herself.

  She picked up the phone and called Patty Wildwood, who had made the mistake of closing one of her homicide cases; her reward had been the assignment to this new one.

  As so often happened, Maggie’s thunder had been stolen during the past two hours.

  “Yeah, we kinda figured it was him.” Patty drawled; sometimes the remnants of her Southern roots were more apparent than other times. “Word on the street is his second-in-command has already taken over with nary a break in product availability. The illegal pharmaceutical companies are run just like the Fortune 500s. When there’s a change in management, the most important thing is to reassure all your customers that the company is as strong as ever and looking forward to an exciting future, and there is no need, none at all, to take your business elsewhere.”

  “Nice to know what you can count on. Know who killed him yet?”

  “Throw a dart at our top ten list,” Patty suggested. “Could be anyone. Including me. I had to interview the kid Johnson beat up for skimming. Twelve years old. If I could have gotten away with it I’d have put a bullet in Mr. Johnson’s brain myself.”

  “You mean that?”

  “No . . . yes . . . I don’t know. I’ll bet the kid’s mother would, though. Provided the kid even has a mother.”

  Maggie told the detective what she had been able to put into action at ICE. Patty had nothing new to report on the blond girl, and Maggie was about to text her brother, make a fresh pot of coffee for Carol and herself, and return to her pile of burglary latents until she remembered the tapings she had collected from the not-so-esteemed Mr. Johnson’s clothing.

  Chapter 8

  Tuesday, 7:55 p.m.

  Despite his grandfather’s advice, Jack expected Viktor to be easy. He warned himself against this assumption. Knowing that the worst possible mistake he could make would be to underestimate his opponent, he gave his own subconscious a stern talking-to, made himself double-check his rearview mirror, release the gun’s safety, and drive around the block three times. Details.

  But it was easy. He simply pulled up alongside Viktor as the guy strolled homeward after delivering the girls’ dinner, flashed his badge, told Viktor he needed to speak with him regarding a Homeland Security complaint, and ushered the trembling Ukrainian into the back of his car. It wasn’t even a police car; Viktor could have opened the door and jumped out at any red light. But after the initial hesitation during which Viktor clearly debated running for it—Jack had hoped he wouldn’t, Jack’s right knee aching with the spring damp—he cooperated fully. The very idea of Homeland Security knowing his name seemed to paralyze the criminal half of him, while the need to smooth over any potential problems kept Viktor the businessman on the hook.

  Only the potential for witnesses caused Jack any real concern. The setting sun threw the streets into a hazy dusk, and he couldn’t know if Viktor had been striding toward a business associate, a girlfriend, or his bar buddies, someone who would notice him getting into a car with a stranger, a stranger with a cop’s stance and an old but clean Grand Marquis with a dent in the rear fender. The homeless guy on the corner could be an undercover agent. The woman tossing the ball to her little boy could be a CI. A patrol car could do a sweep at any second and wonder what brought Jack to West 28th.

  He should wear a disguise, he knew, an ounce of prevention and all that. He could put cotton in his cheeks or add some facial hair, wear a bizarre hat or coat or anything that would stick in people’s minds and distract them from recalling his actual face or body. But he would have felt so silly in a disguise, and if, just if he got caught, imagining the utter indignity of his fellow detectives ripping off a fake mustache kept him from even considering the precaution.

  As if embarrassment would be his biggest worry, if he got caught.

  “What is this about?” Viktor asked, after four blocks. An innocent man would have asked right away. But then, an innocent man wouldn’t have gotten into the car, accepted the prisoner’s seat, and then sat there quietly smelling of cabbage and body odor.

  “There are some gaps in our information about your student exchange program,” Jack lied. “It’s a great program—we don’t want to hold you up any—but one of the many changes that came down the pike with this latest administration is some new regs regarding student visas.”

  “My girls don’t need student visas,” Viktor said immediately, a slight w sound beginning the word visas. “They just come here for field trip.”

  “That’s the problem. They come to the US, but they never seem to go home.”

  A pause. “They go on to Washington, DC, from here, then New York. They fly back from there. I only handle this first segment of trip.”

  Jack tapped the brakes for a stop sign, kept going. He didn’t want to give the guy too many opportunities to change his mind. Viktor wasn’t stupid—he should know that American authorities don’t work alone and don’t give you gentle escorts to their offices. But then Jack had no idea how long Viktor had been in the country, since Viktor Boginskaya didn’t seem to have existed for much more than a year or so. Perhaps he hadn’t encountered US authorities nearly as often as he should have. Perhaps he believed Jack represented a rival operation instead of Homeland Security or, if he was an agent, might be a corrupt one who would want his cut of the profit. Most likely he simply believed that, whoever Jack might turn out to be, he needed to ride this out in order to save his business.

  And the actual ride didn’t
last long. Jack parked in the alley behind the building he used, one of the many that Maggie Gardiner might be putting on a list for examination even as he killed the engine. Built during the sixties, vacant, under renovations that had ceased when the owner went bankrupt. But it had been renovated at some point in the past fifty years, to judge by the paint and the windows, so perhaps that would keep her from showing up on his doorstep.

  He would have to make sure.

  No one around. The city had grown quiet on this staid weeknight, though they were only two blocks or so from the Justice Center and one from the restaurant district, off a short street named Johnson Court. The proximity served to reassure most of his clients—with so many government offices nearby, this seemed a perfectly reasonable space to house a new social program. But the location probably meant nothing to the nonnative Viktor, and he did not seem the least reassured.

  Jack gave him the song and dance about new offices under renovation and threw in “pilot program” again, in his friendly, we’re all in this together voice. He couldn’t be sure how much Viktor believed, suspected, or even cared, but the guy didn’t utter a word of protest. It continued to astound Jack how much one’s tone of voice seemed to matter more than what you actually said. He got out of the Marquis.

  Not so much as a rat rustling near the Dumpster—without tenants there to throw out food, rodents had no reason to hang around. A lack of activity in the area kept the alley relatively clean, the only sign of life being the recently painted concrete posts, the city utility workers exercising due diligence on the no-parking zones. Cars passed by out on the main street, people driving home from work or going on dates with no reason to take an interest in one of the city’s many alleys. Downtown patrols had enough domestics and burglaries and disturbances (read: fights) to keep them busy during the evening hours. They would not get curious about cars parked outside empty buildings until after midnight, and Jack would be long gone by then.

  He opened Viktor’s door—unnecessarily, but the kid just sat there waiting, showing no more penchant for escape than his girls did—then gestured toward the steps and the back door. He walked behind Viktor, hand on his holster, watching the guy’s shoulders tense with the fight-or-flight instinct before finally reverting to his first, off-the-menu choice: Ride it out. After a good look around, Viktor climbed the three steps and waited for Jack to unlock the outer door.

  Viktor’s shoes clacked against the tile as they walked up the barely lit hallway and arrived at the third door, its only label a number, 105. No point adding anything else, since Jack’s “cover” changed slightly from case to case and it would only attract attention if, heaven forbid, the renovations ever started up again.

  He huffed a short sigh of relief once they both stepped inside and Viktor automatically headed for the table in the center with its overhead lamp. This left Jack to lock the door behind them, the keyed dead bolt unnoticed in the gloom. Jack had the only key. Not a unique trick after all, Viktor.

  “Please, have a seat. I will try not to hold you up any more than necessary, and we want you to be comfortable while you’re here.”

  Viktor dropped into the metal chair, shaking his head. “People in your country are so much more polite than in mine.”

  Jack sat across from him, pulled over a manila file he had left on the table. “It’s a new policy, as I said. We are trying to foster as many kinds of international cooperation as we can—so, as I said, we don’t want to delay or hold up your program at all.”

  To judge from his expression, neither did Viktor. Jack wondered what kind of bosses he answered to. There must be a few, on both sides of the Atlantic.

  From a distance he had guessed Viktor to be in his mid-twenties, but now he thought midthirties would be more on the money. The slight build made him seem younger, but there were wrinkles beginning at the edges of his eyes and a few strands of gray in the sandy hair. He wore a thin but bright red raincoat, not the sort of thing Jack would pick to make his way through the streets unnoticed, but then Viktor had this hiding-in-plain-sight thing down. His striped, collared shirt and Lee brand jeans were only slightly too big, just enough not to be worn that way on purpose. He appeared to have gone to the same dentist as the dead girl. Either human trafficking didn’t pay as well as one would think, or Viktor worried enough to ruin his appetite. But he did sport a gold watch on his wrist, blinged out with very real-looking diamonds, and had applied Polo instead of bathing.

  “Who are you?” he asked Jack.

  “My name, as I said, is Renner, I’m from Homeland Security, and we are trying to complete our records regarding student groups visiting the United States. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Sure,” Viktor said automatically. No one ever responded negatively to that question. Everyone thought they understood.

  Jack pointed out that while airport Customs had checked the girls’ passports to come into the country, there didn’t seem to be any record that they left. He couldn’t actually prove that since he didn’t have access to Customs or immigration databases, but it seemed a safe assumption since he knew at least a few of the girls were currently living with their pimps on both sides of the city. Another rested on a slab at the morgue. They, at least, had never reached the Big Apple and weren’t likely to.

  Viktor again gave his story that they flew home from New York—the largest international hub in the country, where tracking one particular girl or group of girls would prove difficult. Or so Viktor, no doubt, assumed.

  “All I do,” Viktor went on, “is show the girls the sights of Cleveland, help some contact relatives in the area, then put them on a bus headed for Washington, DC, for the second stage of their journey. Then I never see them again.”

  That phrase, Jack thought, is the first true thing he’s said. Viktor rattled off names, bus companies, his boss in New York, even what airport the girls were supposed to leave from, all of it fictitious and all of it irrelevant. Jack had listened to many lies from many people and had developed a feel for it. Viktor needed to spin a tale, any tale, so that by the time Jack checked it out, Viktor would have packed up his belongings and his gold watch and moved on to a new name and maybe a new city. Any career criminal knew that nothing lasted forever. You had to be ready, like a Gypsy, to cut your losses, fold up your tent, and move on as soon as things got too hot. Maria Stein had become a master at this.

  As Jack would have to, someday.

  Did that make him a career criminal too?

  Focus. Friendly voice or no, Jack wasn’t getting anywhere. So he changed tactics.

  “As I said, Mr. Boginskaya, we are not interested in delaying or cutting off your operation, not only for reasons of increased international cooperation—we’ve had a lot of bad press lately over disputed Russian adoptions and the last thing we want to do is put up another roadblock between your children and ours—but also for the obviously profitable aspects.”

  He let that sink in.

  “Profit?” Viktor said. “There is no profit. They are just schoolchildren. A charity sponsors their trip—”

  “I don’t want to waste your time.” Jack let his voice get less friendly. “So please don’t waste mine. I know where you keep the girls and I know who you’re selling them to. I know about the pimps on Dennison and Quincy. I know about Shaw Murdoch and his bar and what happens in the basement. But relax, Viktor. I don’t want to stop you. I want to buy in.”

  He let that sink in.

  He could see the wheels turn in Viktor’s mind, see a sense of relief as the late-night meeting, the single man instead of a team of agents in labeled Windbreakers, the cozy setting all now made sense. Then a sense of concern as new plans formed: What would his bosses think, would Jack’s cut have to come out of his own or would they make a new allowance . . . and that having a colleague inside Homeland Security could present all sorts of new possibilities. They could expand, increase product quantity, maybe open up in other cities.

  “Would you like a drink?” Jack
asked, startling the guy. “Let me guess—vodka, right?”

  Viktor straightened up, pulled his dignity over him like a cloak. Even his accent faded and his words became clearer: “I drank enough of that stuff as a kid to last me a lifetime. Do you have a good Scotch?”

  “Glenlivet?”

  “That will do. On the rocks.”

  Jack went to the sideboard, poured the drinks. He left the. 22 where it was, for now.

  With a little alcohol in him and the possibility of a fruitful business deal, Viktor relaxed enough to complete the gaps in Jack’s knowledge of the operation. The girls were rounded up from the remote areas of the oblast Kirov by a married couple. They were given fake passports, using the names of real girls. If the US complained that these girls entered the US but didn’t exit, the Russian authorities would investigate, find that the real girls were in their own homes, right where they should be, and report that the passports had been fake to begin with and the incident would be written off as human smuggling, nothing they could do. The ones in place like Viktor would move and change their names and start all over again. In Russia the couple would move on to another oblast, find another remote area with young people desperate for a change.

  So Viktor was merely a cog in a large machine, and removing him would not break the process down for long. The world would never run out of predators. But even if one cannot defeat the enemy one can at least refuse him safe passage. The alternative, to do nothing—Jack could not accept that. He needed his life to add up to more than nothing.

  “How many in each group?” Jack asked. “Hey—do you want to get something to eat? It’s getting late and I’m starving.”