Gardened of the Damned Read online

  “Bishop Robert Bellini’s office.”

  “This is Detective John Stone of the NYPD. I have an extremely urgent message for the bishop.”

  “The bishop is out of the country at the moment. He will not be back for a couple of days.”

  “I know. I need you to get a message of the utmost urgency to him. Tell him Father O’Neil is dead, murdered, and that Detective Stone needs to talk to him as soon as it is physically possible. His life may be in danger, you understand?”

  “Yes, Detective, I will communicate your message to him immediately.”

  Dehan was frowning at me. “What are you doing?”

  “If Mohamed can’t get to the mountain, then the mountain will have to come to Mohamed.”

  “That’s the wrong way around.”

  “Everything in this goddamn case is the wrong way around.”

  NINETEEN

  Dehan finally made it home that night. We were both exhausted and needed a few hours thinking about something that wasn’t Sean O’Conor, his fiancée Alicia, and the kids who had died in the church of St. Mary’s.

  I was thinking of a sirloin steak, French fries, and a glass of wine, watching some mindless crap on the TV. I pushed open my front door and switched on the lights, and my cell rang. I knew who it was. I had been praying he wouldn’t call till the morning, but it had been a forlorn hope.

  His voice was refined, in a slippery kind of way, with a slight accent.

  “Detective Stone?”

  “I am guessing you are Sadiq Khan.”

  “Yes, indeed. I understand you have been desperately trying to reach me.” He sounded amused.

  “I’m not sure that desperate is quite accurate, Mr. Khan, I am just doing my job, and I have no personal interest in either your safety or your survival. If you haven’t either, then we can end this conversation right here and now.”

  There was a long pause, long enough that I was about to hang up.

  “What is this about, Detective? My secretary mentioned a Catholic priest…”

  I sighed. “Mr. Khan, why don’t you can the bullshit and we get down to business? I am tired and, frankly, bored. You are telling me you don’t know who Father O’Neil is, so how do you know he was a Catholic priest? If you think I am stupid, Mr. Khan, think again and please stop wasting my time. You put money into his program to rescue children who were being evicted from Conor Hagan’s Tiffany Street property. Why does a Muslim businessman invest in a project to teach Catholicism to orphaned kids? There is you, O’Neil, Harragan, and Bellini. I know everything, because before he died, O’Neil told me.”

  There was another long silence, but this one had a different flavor to it and I wasn’t about to hang up.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want what Harragan had.”

  His voice was a sneer. “Well you can only have half of what Harragan had, can’t you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t screw the pretty Latinas now, can you? They’re all dead! You’ll have to make do with the money. You cops are all the same.”

  “That’s cute. I’m getting lessons in morality from a pedophile and a murderer.”

  “I didn’t…”

  I waited. “You didn’t what?”

  “Never mind. How much do you want?”

  “To keep my mouth shut, I want twenty thousand dollars in used bills. Tomorrow at noon, Barreto Point Park, at the amphitheater. I’ll be sitting on the top step.”

  He was sneering again. “Will you have a carnation in your lapel, Detective?”

  “No, but I will have my snub nose .38, and if I even suspect that you have been talking to Bellini, you’ll be joining O’Neil in hell a damn sight sooner than you expected. Have I made myself plain, Sadiq?”

  “How do I know it’s not a trap?”

  “You don’t. You’ll just have to put your faith in human greed. Think you can do that?”

  “And what do I get for these twenty thousand dollars? I want more than silence.”

  I let the smile seep into my voice. “A long and beautiful relationship, outside of Riker’s Island.”

  “I want something, Stone, something concrete. I don’t want this hanging over me for the next…”

  I cut across him. “We’ll talk tomorrow. Noon. I’ll be with my partner. You come alone or there is no deal.” I hung up.

  I played back the conversation. It had recorded successfully. I emailed it to myself at work and cc’d Dehan. Then I called her. She sounded sleepy. I could hear Walker Texas Ranger in the background.

  “No, I will not come and cook you dinner.”

  “We have him. I recorded the conversation on my phone. I emailed it to you. We have Sadiq Khan in the bag.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “What are you… like… magic?”

  “Must be.”

  “You’re lucky you’re over there, I might embarrass you.”

  “You having a glass of wine?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Good, have one for me. I’ll have one for you. Sleep well, Carmen.”

  “G’night, Sensei.”

  The captain stared at my phone on his desk and listened to the conversation. When it had finished, he shook his head in disbelief. Dehan was grinning at her boots. He looked at her and back at me.

  “I have to hand it to you, Stone, you seem to have a bottomless bag of tricks. You are sailing damn close to the wind. His defense attorneys are going to be screaming entrapment to high heaven.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t induce him to commit a crime, Captain, I simply got him to admit that he had.”

  He nodded. “You’ll need back up.”

  “No, Dehan will be there with me. I don’t want to spook him. It has to look like the real deal. We can bring him in. He’ll be alone.”

  He gave me a look. “Don’t lose this one, Stone. You have dragged triumph from the jaws of defeat. Don’t screw it up!”

  “I won’t.”

  “We won’t.”

  We both looked at Dehan. I smiled. “We won’t.”

  “Okay, so you bring him in, you charge him, right? Tell me you are going to charge him.”

  “We charge him. Let him believe we have a full confession from Father O’Neil, but let him believe also that the evidence is thin against Bellini. If he gives us Bellini, we cut him a deal.”

  The captain sighed. “The bishop. I don’t mind telling you I am going to catch some flak because of this.”

  Dehan fixed him with her eye. “Sir, with all due respect, anyone who wants to defend that son of a bitch isn’t worth listening to. He colluded in the rape and murder of children.”

  “You are right, of course, Detective. But politics is rarely that simple. Anyway, you know you have my full support, whatever the political consequences.”

  We thanked him and left.

  It was a short drive in the spring sunshine. We took Bruckner over the bridge and then Garrison and Tiffany Street all the way down to Viele Avenue. Even the Hunts Point industrial estate looked pretty, in some ghastly way, in the spring morning light. We left the car in the lot outside the park, in the shade of the maples, and strolled down to the water’s edge. We had fifteen minutes to spare, so we sat on the rocks and stared out at the East River. I had that feeling I often had with Dehan, that she had somehow managed to get inside my mind, or she was already a part of it.

  “Will he show?”

  I gave a small shrug. “You heard him. He was real motivated last night.”

  She picked up a small stone and threw it out into the water. It hit the river with a hollow ‘plock’.

  “If we lose him that will only leave the bishop.”

  “And ‘H.’”

  “You know who ‘H’ is, don’t you?”

  I gave a few small nods. “Probably. But so do you.”

  “I think so.”

  “What do we do if Khan doesn’t show, Stone?”

  I studied her face. She looked lost.
She looked as though she was reaching out to me for a way forward.

  “That depends on why he doesn’t show.” I looked at my watch. It was five to. “Let’s go.”

  We climbed the steps of the amphitheater to the top. I sat and Dehan stood staring back along the path toward the entrance to the park. Noon came and slipped into afternoon by five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. At twenty past, I stood and said, “Come on, we have work to do.”

  She was giving me a weird, searching look. “What work?”

  It was a 25-minute drive, though it took a little longer because of the lunchtime traffic. Most people think of the Bronx as a place of ghettos, prostitution and crime. They are right; much of the Bronx is like that, but not all of it. Riverdale is one part of the Bronx that is definitely not a ghetto. And that was where Sadiq Khan had his house, on West 232nd street, opposite Seaton Park. It was a green, leafy suburb of large, luxurious houses and small mansions. It wasn’t Oyster Bay, but it wasn’t Hunts Point, either.

  Sadiq’s house was a three-story, oddly angular building painted an unpleasant shade of sage green. It was set back from the road beyond a sweeping lawn. I could see a C Class Mercedes and a Citroen Clio in the drive. Something told me the Clio was his wife’s.

  I pulled in and parked in front of them. I killed the engine and we climbed out. Dehan peered through the windows at the front and I rang the bell. There was total silence apart from the sporadic singing of the birds.

  If they had kids, they’d be at school. Maybe his wife was shopping, but if she was, why didn’t she take her car? And why was his car still in the drive? And if both cars were in the drive, why was nobody answering the door?

  Dehan wandered back to me with her hands in her back pockets. “There’s nobody at home, Stone.”

  I shook my head and pointed at the Merc and the Citroen. “Nobody is answering. That’s different. Besides, I think I hear somebody shouting, or calling out, don’t you?”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, I thought I heard a woman shouting ‘help’.”

  “Good, me too.”

  I went around to the kitchen door at the back, smashed the glass with my elbow, and reached in to unlock the door. It grated on the shattered glass as I pushed it open. Dehan had her piece in her hand as she followed me in. The glass crunched under her boots. It sounded really loud in the stillness.

  The living room was empty. There were no pictures on the walls, no ornaments, no bookcases. There was a gray carpet, a gray sofa, a vast glass and brass coffee table and a TV the size of a cinema screen. A curving staircase, also carpeted in gray, led to the upper floor. We climbed it, listening for some sound, some sign of life. There wasn’t any.

  We came to a landing. The door to the bathroom stood open, and I saw a mug with four toothbrushes in it. I touched Dehan’s shoulder and pointed at it. She nodded. She looked a little sick. The first door we opened was obviously one of the kid’s rooms. It was painted pastel blue and there was a princess bed with a lace net hung over it. Mrs. Khan and her two daughters were sitting on the floor. The girls were wearing school uniforms. Their ankles and their wrists, like their mother’s, were bound with duct tape, and they had duct tape over their mouths. Their eyes were huge and they looked terrified.

  Dehan put her piece away and I showed them my badge. Then I knelt and cut the tape from their wrists and ankles. As Mrs. Khan pulled the tape from her own mouth, she started crying and shouting at me in a language I didn’t understand.

  I held her shoulders and said, “Mrs. Khan, listen to me. Listen. Detective Dehan is going to take you downstairs. Do you understand? And she is going to call an ambulance. Go with her. Take the children and go downstairs.”

  She was incoherent, and the kids, taking their cue from their mother, also began to cry. Dehan gathered them up and led them down to the living room. I went to the master bedroom.

  He was there, if you could call it him. The bed was saturated with blood. He was naked and badly bruised all over. His body was a pasty gray color because he had pretty much been exsanguinated, but you could see large, yellowish patches where the bruises would have been. His face was grotesquely disfigured and he had several teeth missing. He was also bound hand and foot with tape, as the rest of his family had been.

  The blood had come from a single wound. He had been castrated. His entire penis and testicles had been removed and lay next to him on the bed.

  I took my phone and dialed the captain.

  “Stone. What news?”

  “Khan has been murdered and castrated at his house in Riverdale. You’d better talk to the local precinct to sort out jurisdiction. Then we’ll need a CSI team and a meat wagon.”

  “Stone…?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Looks like we are running out of people to prosecute.”

  “Can you even get to the bishop now?” He sounded mad.

  I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Sure.”

  TWENTY

  With that almost maternal care that seemed, on the surface, so at odds with her brash manner and her aggressive attitude, Dehan had sat them on the sofa, wrapped them in blankets, and made them hot, sweet tea. When I got down, the three were shivering with shock and clinging to each other, crying.

  I gave Dehan a nod and we stepped into the kitchen.

  “They’re on their way. He’s in the master bedroom. They did a job on him. He was castrated…”

  For a moment, she almost looked mad. She stared into my face, but her eyes made little shifts, like she was trying to read my features. I gave her a blank page. After a moment, she said, “Completely different to Father O’Neil’s murder.”

  “Yes.”

  “This was vengeance.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Or punishment…”

  I nodded. “Or punishment.”

  She sighed. “So where does this leave us? Bishop Robert Bellini and ‘H’ get away?”

  “I don’t see why.”

  Her face flushed and her open hand shot out, gesturing toward the stairs. “He was our last chance, Stone! He could have given us the whole ring! He could have told us the whole story!” I gave her a moment. She blurted, “You shouldn’t have opened up to Hagan like that! I’m sorry! I have never criticized you before, Stone, but that was a mistake and it may have lost us the case!”

  I nodded. “I can see how you’d think that.”

  Far off, the wail of a siren stained the air with tragedy. It was incongruous against the green lawn and the spring blue of the sky.

  Minutes later, they crammed in to the driveway, with their lights flashing, and began to disgorge men and women in uniform who went, with mechanical precision, about the task of processing a scene where four lives had been destroyed. The yellow tape went up, the ME arrived with her black bag, the CSI team climbed into their plastic suits and tramped, like something out of a sci-fi B movie, around the wreckage of Mrs. Khan’s home. And meanwhile, Mrs. Khan and her two little girls sobbed and struggled to assimilate the impossible.

  I showed Lisa, the ME, up to the room. It was bad enough to make her stop in the doorway and wince. Dehan came in after her. She shook her head and turned to stare at me, like it was my fault.

  Lisa said, “I can tell you straight away the cause of death was exsanguinations. Anything else will have to wait till I get back to the lab.”

  I met Greg, the CSI team leader, on the stairs on his way up. We stopped and his team filed past us, headed for the two bedrooms.

  “I’m guessing there was more than one of them, Greg. Nobody seems to have put up a fight, and they were able to bind him, the wife and the kids without resistance before separating them into two rooms. We didn’t find any sign of forced entry, so I’m guessing maybe they waited till the family was leaving for school and work. The doors are open, they’re all out in the drive, and they came up, blocked the exit, and forced them back in to the house, maybe at gunpoint.
Mrs. Khan will confirm that later, right now she is in no state.”

  He listened carefully, then gave a nod. “Okay, see what we can find.”

  He went on up after his team. I knew they wouldn’t find anything.

  When we got back down, Mrs. Khan had settled a little and was drinking her tea. Dehan went and sat next to her.

  “Can you tell me what happened, Mrs. Khan? I know it’s hard, but the sooner you can tell us, the sooner we can catch whoever did this.”

  It was as I had thought.

  “We were going to school.” She gestured at her daughters. “I always drive them. Is not far. Sadiq…” Her eyes flooded and her face flushed. Her breath shook. Dehan took her hand. “… He said he had an important appointment at midday. We were all standing together, in the drive, and then a big SUV came into the drive. It blocked our way, there was no way out. And two men got out. They were very big. They wore black sweatshirts, black jeans, all black, and black balaclavas over their faces. They were holding guns. They forced us inside. Upstairs.”

  “Did they say anything?”

  “Nothing, not a word. One of them bound us and locked us in the bedroom. Then he went next door…” Her face collapsed and she started to sob. “We heard horrible noises, Sadiq screaming…”

  We called her doctor and had him come out to sedate her. Then we called her sister to come and take care of her. After that, we stepped out to the Jag and I negotiated my way past the patrol cars and the meat wagon onto the road. I headed east toward the Deegan Expressway.

  We drove in silence, but it wasn’t the silence I was used to. It was an uncomfortable silence. Eventually, I asked her, “Have you lost confidence in me, Dehan?”

  She looked away from me, out the side window.

  “I don’t know.” She turned to face me for a second, and then looked away again. “I don’t understand. I get why you left Father O’Neil to sweat. It made sense to me, and there was no way we could have known he was going to run to Father Sullivan.”

  “But…?”

  “But I don’t get…” Now she shifted in her seat to face me, gesturing back at the house with her hand. “You knew that Conor Hagan would react like this! I didn’t! It didn’t cross my mind. But you! Shit, Stone! You are the sensei! You knew! And now I am asking myself, why the hell did we go there and have that conversation with Hagan? Why the hell did you show him those photographs?”