Above the hiss of the rain, I could now hear the heavy clomp of footsteps coming up the stairs. A dark figure barged through the opening in the wall, slid to a stop on the wet paving, and stood there staring into the empty corners of the park.
With the gun held down by the side of my leg, I stepped up behind him and said, “Looking for me?”
He jumped and spun around to face me.
It had only been four years since a grieving sixteen-year-old boy had watched me as I dropped my father off at his father’s funeral. But wild eyed and seething, rain matting his hair and running down his face, Angelo Cass now looked a hundred years older. He had a knife in his hand.
“I told you you’d regret mocking me.” He waved the knife in my face. “You are the spawn of evil, and evil must be—”
I slammed my left forearm up into his wrist, pushing the knife out of my face, and rammed the gun up under his nose.
“In case you don’t recognize it,” I said, “what you’re smelling is gun oil.”
His eyes crossed and watered as he tried to look down at the gun pressed up under his nose.
“Nine millimeter,” I said, “Ten rounds—” I thumbed off the safety. “—and just a twitch of my finger and it’s gonna go bang.”
His eyes bulged and he strained his head back away from the gun.
I leaned into him and kept the muzzle jammed up into his nose. “So unless you want that dysfunctional brain of yours scattered all over the park, I would suggest you drop the knife.”
He stretched both arms out to the side, still looking down cross-eyed at the gun under his nose, and opened his hand. The knife slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground.
I had Angelo on his face — legs spread-eagled, fingers laced at the back of his neck — when all hell broke loose.
Up above on Charter Street, a BPD cruiser, light bar pulsing blue and white, gave the siren a couple of whelps and screeched to a stop. And Lenihan’s unmarked, detachable bubble flashing red on the roof, screamed into a U-turn down on Commercial. Two uniforms, guns drawn, came charging down the steps from Charter as Lenihan bolted up the steps from below. And within fifteen minutes, there were cruisers clogging both streets and enough cops in the park for a St. Paddy’s Day parade.
Working the scene under battery-powered halogens, a pair of CSU techs had bagged the knife, while two detectives from the A-1 hooked up Cass, read him his rights, and hauled him off. They had wanted me to come back to the station, but Lenihan convinced them they’d be busy enough getting Cass booked and bedded for the night. Said he’d bring me by first thing in the morning to make a full statement.
One after another, the cops and the crime scene techs climbed into their cruisers and vans and pulled out, leaving the streets clear and the park empty. Lenihan and I were sitting over on the Jackson Ave side of the wall across the walkway from the door to my building. It had stopped raining.
“So,” I said, “your buddy the statie over at Logan came up with the list?”
“Yup. Said the night guy on the desk at Inter City Rental gave it to him off the computer.”
“Just like that, no problem?”
“Nope. No problem. Just a matter of knowing who to ask, how to ask, and when.”
“Sure,” I said, “also helps to be wearing a state police uniform and a badge that says SERGEANT when you’re doing the asking.”
“Can’t hurt,” he said. “Anyhow, said he’d fax over the seven names, addresses, and plate numbers, but I had him read me the seven names over the phone. And one of them was Angelo Cass. The ‘Angelo’ part didn’t sound right to me — I didn’t know about the son then. But Cass? Too much of a coincidence. So I called in and had one of our guys run it through the mill.”
“And?”
“And it seems young Angelo started racking up a record shortly after his father got whacked. Punched out one of his teachers — no formal charges, but that got him expelled. Then a couple of disorderlies — no finding — a disturbing the peace — a year’s probation on that one — then he gets into it with a cop in Downtown Crossing, takes a swing at him, gets arrested, calls the judge an f’ing pig at his prelim, and tries to go over the rail after him — in handcuffs, yet. That earned him a broken nose and a three-to-five at M.C.I. Cedar Junction. And guess what? They turned him loose just last week.”
“Aha,” I said, “so that’s why he said something about the lawyer working me too hard the first time he called me, said I should have stayed on the police force.”
“Yup. He was inside when you got your license and set up shop. He thought you were still working for that lawyer over on State Street. Anyhow, all that’s what I was trying to tell you when you called for the troops then hung up the phone.”
“Sorry about that, but I was kind of busy.”
“Yeah, I’d say. But you already had it worked out it was him, huh?”
“A little late, but yes, I finally got it. My dad’s funeral was two years ago, and Zeke’s father’s was the week before last. So the only funeral he could have seen me at four years ago was his father’s. And if I hadn’t been working so hard trying to prove to him how tough I was, I’d have gotten it as soon as he said it.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Slim, that was a lot of spooky stuff, all that spawn of evil must be punished crap.”
“And that’s another thing I should have picked up on right away. I should have known he was referring to my father when he said I was the spawn of evil, and Angelo has to be the only person I can think of who ever would have had a reason to think of Dad as being evil.”
Lenihan stood up and paced back and forth in front of me. “I guess I can see him thinkin’ the only reason his father winds up getting killed in jail is because your father arrested him, and I can understand him redirecting his grief over the loss of his father into hate for your father. But what I don’t get is how he gets from there to goin’ after you.”
I shrugged. “Not sure. Probably some sort of perversion of what the shrinks call transference.”
“Translation, please, for those of us dummies who majored in Criminal Justice.”
“Hey, easy on the ‘dummies’ stuff, I’m doing CJ nights at UMass myself. What I meant was, he knew I’d been a cop, too, so when the object of his hate died, he just transferred his hate from my father to me.”
“Hmm—” He cocked his head to one side and shrugged. “—makes sense, I guess.”
“What do you think will happen to Cass?” I said. “He never really got around to hurting anybody.”
“Hard to say, but he’ll get a preliminary hearing sometime in the next twenty-four hours, at which time, if I had to guess, the judge will send him down to Bridgewater for a series of psych evals. Whether he stands trial for stalking and assault with a deadly weapon or just gets institutionalized for a couple years will probably depend on whether or not the dome-doctors find him non compos mentis.”
“So, what’s your guess? Think he’ll wind up doing the hard time?”
He shook his head. “Who knows. Even if they find him mentally competent to stand trial, between overcrowded prisons, overburdened courts, and some of the over-the-top judges in this state, it’s anybody’s guess. But either way, it’s better than even money he’ll be back out on the street in a couple a years.”
“Now there’s something to look forward to,” I said.
A crescent-shaped slice of new moon had climbed out of the clouds and rode high above the harbor like a lopsided smile.
Lenihan looked down at his feet, glanced up at me, then turned and stared out at the harbor. He stuck his hands in his pockets, took a deep breath, and held it.
“Okay, Lenihan,” I said, “what’s the problem?”