‘He strikes me as being good at what he does.’
‘He is, but that’s being good at policing a small town with small-town problems.’ He opened the door of his truck. ‘Thing is, we have a bigger problem now.’
‘Anna Kore.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You don’t think he’s up to finding her?’
‘That’s not for me to say.’
‘Is that why the FBI is here?’
He shook his head and grinned. ‘Nice try, Mr. Parker. I just fix cars.’
I stayed behind him for a mile or two, and he flashed his hazards at me when he turned off the main road. I drove on and thought about the message on my cell phone. Allan had barely spoken to me, and I couldn’t find anything in the few words we had exchanged that might be open to doubt or suspicion, which meant that the person who had sent the anonymous text message, probably using a proxy website, was referring to something outside my sphere of knowledge. Then again, it might simply have been an attempt to muddy the waters, just as the packages sent to Randall Haight might be, in which case it was possible that one person, or group of persons, was responsible for both.
I was starting to wish that I’d never heard from Aimee Price, or met Randall Haight, even without the further complications suggested by the presence of the FBI agent, Engel. Engel was a heavy hitter. If he had left his Boston lair for Pastor’s Bay, it was because there was something in the circumstances surrounding the girl’s disappearance that interested him. But all that really interested Engel was organized crime and terrorism, and I had no desire to face mobsters or terrorists unaided.
I stopped at a gas station and made another call, this time from a pay phone, because the gentlemen I was calling in New York didn’t like calls from cell phones.
Then again, the gentlemen in New York weren’t really gentlemen at all.
13
The apartment was on the second floor of a grim building on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. It wasn’t the ugliest block on the avenue, but it was close. Fourth had been rezoned in 2003 in the hope of creating Brooklyn’s Park Avenue, with tony upscale living environments replacing body shops. Unfortunately, corners had been cut by City Planning early in the process, and the first condos to be built following the rezoning eschewed retail units and storefronts on the first floor in favor of vents and parking garages. The planners had eventually realized their mistake, but it was too late to undo the initial damage, so Fourth was now an uneasy mix of boutiques, restaurants, and urban brutalist façades.
To the man checking the numbers on the building’s intercom, it seemed that the only thing Fourth had in common with his beloved Park Avenue was the traffic, every lane of it. Given the choice, he’d take somewhere on Fifth or Seventh farther up the Slope in a heartbeat. Then again, that assumed he actually had some interest in living in Brooklyn, which he hadn’t. People could talk all they wanted about how it was the new Bohemia, but he wasn’t buying, he hadn’t cared much for the old Bohemia, and everything that he needed could be found on the island of Manhattan. As far as he was concerned, the other four boroughs could be cut with a big blade and towed out up to Greenland, apart from the strip of Queens containing JFK, and they could run ferries to that. As for Jersey, that was why there was water separating it from Manhattan. In his darker moments, his proposals for renegotiating Manhattan’s relationship with New Jersey included filling in the tunnels and blowing up the George Washington Bridge before pointing big guns west, just in case those left on the other side got any ideas. Admittedly, somewhere else to dump bodies would have to be found, but into every life a little rain had to fall.
There was no camera embedded in the intercom panel beside the main door to the building, and no names beside the buzzers. He pressed the number that he’d been given, a woman’s voice asked his name, and he gave it, or he gave a name. In this business, nobody really expected anybody to use their real names – not the middlemen, not the johns, and certainly not the girls. His personal experience of such matters was limited, but through choice and orientation rather than any naïveté about the ways of the world.
He was buzzed in and took the stairs to the apartment, avoiding the elevator. Lights came on as he walked, a vague concession to eco-consciousness in a building so poorly constructed that he could almost see the signals changing outside through the joins in the walls. Most of the apartments he passed were silent. An earlier check of the building’s records had revealed an occupancy rate of about sixty percent, and there were already signs of wear and neglect on the carpets and fittings.
The apartment he sought was at the end of the corridor. He knocked at the door, watched the spy hole darken, and was admitted. The woman wore a red sweater dress over a pair of dark-blue jeans. Her feet were bare, and she smelled of cigarettes. Her hair was platinum with red streaks, as though she’d recently suffered a head injury and hadn’t got herself together enough to wash out the blood. He figured her for mid-thirties, aged by a hard life. That was the way of her business. It had worn her out, and now she had either moved up the ranks to active pimping or had taken the maid’s role for a cut of the money.
‘Hi, honey,’ she said. ‘Just through here.’
To the left was a bathroom and a closed door, but she showed him into a living area to the right. There were two more doors off the living room – one open, one closed. The first one led into a narrow kitchen. There was a pack of tortilla chips on the counter, and a half-eaten sandwich alongside a glass stained with milk. The other door was closed, but he thought that he could hear another television playing faintly behind it.
‘Are you a member of the law-enforcement community?’ she said.
‘No, I am not.’
‘I have to ask,’ she said.
‘I know how it works.’
It was a myth that an undercover cop had to identify himself as such if asked, especially as anyone with half a brain could see that such a requirement might deliver a fatal blow to the whole concept of undercover operations, but he was surprised by how many in the woman’s line of work still considered it a myth worth believing. Technically, a lawyer might argue entrapment, but equally the definition of ‘entrapment’ was somewhat nebulous, particularly in a situation like this, where the intention to commit a crime was obvious from the start. It was all moot in the end. Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.
He produced an envelope from his coat pocket and laid it on the table, just as he had been instructed to do when he made the original call. The woman glanced inside, gave the bills a quick flick with her fingers, then placed the money in a drawer below the TV.
‘You mind if I frisk you?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘There’s been trouble in the past – not for us, I assure you, but for others in the same business. They’ve had guys produce knives, ropes. We’re concerned about safety, yours as much as ours.’
He wasn’t quite sure that was the case, but he allowed her to pat him down inexpertly.
‘Thanks for being so understanding,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have a good time.’
‘Can I see the girl now?’
‘Sure. She’s right through here. You’ll like her. She’s just what you ordered.’
He followed the woman down the hall and past the bathroom to the closed door. She knocked and opened at the same time, revealing a pleasantly furnished bedroom with low lighting. There was another TV here, with a DVD symbol bouncing around the screen. The room was heavily scented, but not enough to fully mask the stale odor of sex.