Victims (4 page)

She couldn’t really see what he looked like in the dim hall light. She didn’t recognize him, but it didn’t surprise her when he addressed her by name. She wore an identifying name tag just above her detective’s shield. She was a little surprised when he took a plastic credit card from his wallet and used it to open the locked door that led to the hall. He saw her surprise and he shrugged.

“Look,” he said. “There’s a lady in there who’s going to need you. All you gotta do for now is be there, okay?”

He stepped back and let her enter first; his hand on her shoulder directed her to apartment 1-A. He took a deep breath, then rang the bell. It set off a long, soft chiming sound.

There was silence after the sound stopped, and then there was a long, low moaning sound: a wounded-animal sound. Miranda Torres looked at Stein in alarm, but he was watching the door intently.

“Come on, Mrs. Hynes,” he said softly. “Open up.”

They heard chains fall away and locks being undone, and the door opened onto a long dim hallway. The woman stood there, arms dangling at her sides, large black-lensed glasses set into her bandaged face.

Mike Stein called her name again.

The woman shook her head, and her voice was a whispery, painful sound and she said, pleading, “Oh, no. No, no. Don’t come here to tell me this. Please.
Please no!”

She reached out and grabbed at Miranda Torres’ arms and said in a terrible whisper,
“I thought it was the Spanish girl!”

B
ILL GRACE STARED AT
the two uniformed policemen standing in his doorway.

“Yeah, I’m Bill Grace, Officer, what’s up?”

“Listen, Mr. Grace, can we come inside? It’s real hot out here.”

“Sure, gee, sure. C’mon in, I got the air conditioner up high. Want a brew or something?”

When they both declined, Bill Grace extended his hand, indicated the couch. He tried very hard not to let them speak. Whatever they had come to tell him he did not want to hear. He realized that he was doing all the talking, his voice pitched soft and low, his words tumbling over each other, as though he were creating a screen around himself, to protect him from whatever they wanted to tell him.

“I work for the city, too. Fire Department. I’m a fire fighter. We used to call ourselves
firemen,
but you can’t do that anymore. Not with women’s lib and equal opportunity and all that.”

He stopped speaking abruptly. His mouth went dry; he couldn’t swallow. He could feel his heart accelerate. He saw the younger cop glance at the older cop.

He had been in this situation God alone knew how many times. Bringer of bad news: Mr. Jones, I’m sorry, but your wife didn’t make it. Asphyxiation. If it’s any consolation, she went very fast, like falling asleep. But the kids, Mr. Jones—Jesus, that was a tough one. Incinerated. Burned up. How did you soften that one? Whatever these guys were selling, he did not want to buy. No way.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Grace, but there’s been a terrible accident.”

The young cop, his first experience in this kind of situation, caught on: You start out slow and easy. An accident; they’ll find out the details soon enough.

“Your wife, Anna, Mr. Grace. She’s dead and we need you to come and identify her body. She’s in Forest Hills.”

The fire fighter shook his head and let his breath out with relief. It
was
a mistake.
Jesus, what a mistake!

“Look, my wife is a nurse. She’s on duty at St. John’s Hospital in Elmhurst right now, late shift. Hell, I’ll show you.”

He reached for the phone, dialed and began to speak.

“Yeah, hi, Miss Parson. Bill Grace. Okay. Listen, can I speak to Annie for a minute? Something’s come up.”

He knew she wouldn’t be there. But he had to try to make things right. He knew guys like these didn’t make that kind of mistake any more than he did.

Speaking very carefully, he asked, “Well, what time did she leave?”

He caught the young cop’s expression: he had been afraid that maybe they had been wrong. The older cop’s face was blank and cool.

He checked his watch. “She left about eleven? Two hours ago? Thank you. No, no. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing.”

He replaced the receiver, turned and said, “What are you guys telling me?”

All the way from Little Neck to Forest Hills, Bill Grace talked nonstop. About his job, about risks they had taken and how many people they rescued. He was aligning himself with the cops. They were on the same side of things. They were not among the victims.

Abruptly, he spoke about his wife.

“Miss Parson, her supervisor, said Annie had a headache. Jeez, she’s been getting a lot of them lately, migraine, they’re real tough, ya know? But she takes something for it, and that helps. Look, she wouldn’t have gone to Forest Hills, because her mother’s down in Florida. My mother-in-law, she’s visiting
her
mother in a retirement community in Florida...”

He kept talking until they got out of the car and he was led through the crowd into the wide-open area designated as a crime scene. Someone uncovered Anna Grace’s face.

Bill Grace knelt down.

“Hey, babe, what the hell? What’s happened here?”

He embraced her, and the blanket fell away. He held her close, combed her long dark hair with his fingers. Finally a hand pressed his shoulder hard, and he looked up, surprised, puzzled.

“Mr. Grace,” a detective said softly, “I’m sorry, but I haven’t asked you officially. Do you identify this woman as your wife?”

He turned back to her and for the first time realized that she was covered with blood. Her face and arms and clothing were covered with blood.

“Annie?” he called softly. “Annie?” This couldn’t be Annie. “My God, Christ, Annie, what happened?”

The detective nodded to the men with the stretcher: Okay, she’s been identified.

“C’mon, Mr. Grace. C’mon, Bill,” a voice said with easy familiarity. “Let’s go inside your mother-in-law’s apartment and see what we can get sorted out, okay? It’ll be okay,” the man said senselessly, because nothing would be okay, but Bill recognized it as the kind of thing you say and he nodded and walked away from the body and went with the detective.

There were a lot of people in Mary Hynes’s apartment. He looked around for his mother-in-law and saw her standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She looked like the Invisible Man in the movies. It was a joke of some kind; her face was hidden behind bandages, and she whirled away and ran into her bedroom and slammed the door. He could hear her sobbing.

He accepted now that something terrible and irrevocable had really happened.

He asked the strangers in her living room, “Who did this to them? Who hurt them like this?” He called, “Mary, who hurt you? Who hurt Annie? Mary, for God’s sake!”

He pulled open the bedroom door and could not believe how small she looked. She was lying on the bed, her back to him, her knees drawn up, her bandaged face in her hands.

“Oh, Mary,” he said. His voice was as hoarse as if he had entered a room filled with smoke. His mouth tasted of ashes. “Mary, my God, what did they do to you? How did... what...”

It was so confusing. It made no sense. Annie out there covered with blood; Mary in here bandaged. There seemed to be no time sequence. Nightmare time, events crossing and slipping and merging.

He was astonished at her rigidity. His hands seemed to be pressing on stone as he tried to turn her toward him.

“Mary, please, Ma, tell me what happened, please!”

There was a soft, muffled sound coming from beneath her bandages, a gagging, choking, anguished sound. Someone pulled Bill Grace away. A doctor. Someone had sent for a doctor.

“She’s in pain, son. Let me take it from here.”

“But what happened? I don’t understand. Who did this to her? Why is she bandaged? What happened? It doesn’t make sense.”

He turned to a familiar face, a neighbor, a friend of his mother-in-law. “Mrs. Ferris? What’s wrong with Mary?”

“Billy, come into the other room. Come, please.”

He walked with her, focused on her so intently that others milling around Mary Hynes’s living room were background.

“She told us she was going to Florida, Mrs. Ferris. Why is she here? Who did this to them, to Annie and Mary?”

“Billy. Mary didn’t want you kids to know. She...”

“To know? To know what? What?”

“She had some... cosmetic surgery done yesterday morning.”

“Cosmetic surgery?” He repeated the words carefully, phonetically, as though he had never heard these words before. They made no sense.

The neighbor went on. “She was going to go down to Florida next week and then come home and you’d see how good she looked. Rested. She wasn’t going to say anything. She had the surgery yesterday morning. That’s why she’s bandaged like that.”

“But... but... Annie? Someone hurt my wife, out there, right out there, in front of Mary’s apartment.”

He turned abruptly to the triple windows, pulled back the filmy curtains, raised the narrow-slatted blinds. The crowd on the sidewalk turned and looked up at him.

“There. Right out there. It doesn’t make sense. Why was Annie here? Did she know Mary was home? Did Mary see... out the window... Did...”

For a split second, he thought he saw his brother’s face, out there, on the sidewalk, in the crowd, and then, time whirling, spinning into an incomprehensible sequence, his brother was in the room, beside him, wrapping his arms around him, holding him. His eyes closed tight. He knew it was all a mistake. He was at the scene of a fire; the room was gutted and charred and black and the corpses were strangers. All he needed was a whiff or two of oxygen and he’d be fine.

But no one seemed to realize that, and for the first time in his life, Bill Grace passed out.

C
APTAIN WILLIAM O’CONNOR, SQUAD
commander of the 112th Precinct detectives, rubbed his eyes. It was 10
A.M.
and he had been on duty since he was called to the crime scene at 1
A.M.
He was alert and sharp, but his eyes ached. It was the new glasses. He couldn’t see with them and he couldn’t see without them. He opened the top drawer of his desk and found his old scratched glasses. They didn’t have sharp focus, but they were comfortable and familiar.

Detective James Dunphy brought him a mug of hot coffee, set it down carefully on the desk blotter.

O’Connor took a cautious sip, smiled and said, “See, there are compensations working with a girl. Your little lady out there make us a fresh pot or what?”

He was kidding. Everyone was careful these days about what women should or should not do around the squad room. No one even suggested they take their turn at the coffeepot. Hell, who wanted to hear from their damned indignant female lawyers yelling male chauvinism?

Dunphy jutted his chin toward the report on the captain’s desk.

“Hell, I’m grateful the girl likes to type. And is good at it. My brother John, at the Forty-sixth, in the Bronx, he got a woman partner, first thing she says to him,
first thing,
she tells him, ‘I been a secretary for five years, buster, and I don’t type anything anymore for anybody except myself.’”

The men had been friends for twenty years, had gone through the Police Academy together and had watched the changes take place not just in the outside world, but within the Department. They agreed, however, and without discussing it at any great length, that Dunphy had gotten lucky. If he had to work with a female, he couldn’t do better than Miranda Torres. She was good; she was tough; she didn’t make waves; she didn’t hold back information; she understood the partner relationship. In short, Torres seemed to be a stand-up-guy kind of girl.

The only mystery surrounding her was who the hell was her rabbi. She’d been on the job six years. She had a degree in criminal justice from John Jay. She’d been assigned right from the Academy to undercover narcotics work in East Harlem, and she’d made third grade by the end of her second year on the job. That was legitimate. That was not unusual. But, one week before being transferred to the 112th, Miranda Torres was promoted to detective second grade. This was guaranteed to cause hostile feelings among her new colleagues. Her promotion canceled the squad’s vacancy in that grade. Not only had she used up the available promotion, but some guy in plainclothes lost a slot in third grade.

Everyone knew that these days it wasn’t necessarily an individual who was transferred to a prime assignment, awarded a promotion, given a medal. The recipient of these Department perks was more often than not a representative, a statistic to satisfy the endless demands for equal opportunity, affirmative action for the underprivileged and overlooked of history.

By squad calculation, Miranda Torres was someone’s idea of a triple whammy: she could be cited as being female, Hispanic and black. However, when O’Connor asked around, it did not add up. Torres was no activist, and the organizations were not pushing loners.

The black organization would not settle for Miranda because in her case black was questionable, at least visually. She was bronze with a high-cheeked American Indian look. And she had been born a woman. If the women wanted in, they had to take care of themselves. And she was a Puerto Rican Hispanic. Let them claim her.

The Hispanic organization wasn’t backing her or even settling for her. They were also concerned with male promotions. Women were taking jobs away from men. Women didn’t need any help.

The women’s group wasn’t happy with Miranda’s promotion. Let the Hispanics claim her, or the blacks. Their ideal candidate would be someone no other organization had claim on.

She was not a member of the Holy Name Society or any other religious organization affiliated with the Department. She was floating out there alone, unattached in a department that was virtually run by its separatist organizations.

No matter how much discreet and serious inquiry was set in motion, the only word on Miranda Torres was, Who the hell knows? Which in police parlance meant, Watch out. She’s connected somewhere, somehow, in some way to someone apparently strong enough, big enough, to maintain not just a low profile but no discernible profile. The available information on Torres, the official record, proved her an excellent narcotics cop with an outstanding activity record. However, word was that she and her partner had been made or were in imminent danger of being made. That, in itself, did not explain her transfer to the 112th. Rumor was that her partner was an alcoholic who was drying out for a while before reassignment. Whatever the story, Torres maintained a silence about anything that wasn’t strictly official knowledge.