The Betrayer (6 page)

She paused to
consider something, looked around again.

Fiermonte gave
her a moment, then said. “What’s on your mind, Cat?”

“I was wondering
what parks are around here.”

“Why?”

“Certain areas
in the city are designated for motorcycle parking. It’s semi-official, but cops
generally won’t ticket motorcycles that are parked in these places, even if
they’re sandwiched between two cars. A lot of those places are parks. Madison
Square is one; its north and east sides are lined with motorcycles day and
night. But that’s too far away. So I was wondering what parks are around here.”

Fiermonte had
to think. “There’s Seward, down on Canal. And there’s one up on Houston, I
think. Hamilton, or something like that. But they’re both a few blocks away. Anyone
on a motorcycle would have plenty of time between here and there to lose
someone pursuing on foot.”

Cat shrugged. “The
shooter could have been waiting for the rider on the corner of Clinton.”

“An ambush?”

She shrugged
again. “Maybe. It might be worth it to take a look, though, don’t you think?”

“But what exactly
would you be looking for?”

“Another group
of bar people, someone who might have seen something. Jeremy ran with a bad
crowd at one point. If he is using again, then he’s probably back with them. Or
someone from the old days could have gotten in touch with him.”

“I’m not
following your thinking, Cat…”

“I guess I’m
hoping that he loaned his bike to someone. Someone who used it to score some
drugs or something like that, someone he owed a favor to. Someone who knew the
best place to leave a bike so it wouldn’t get towed was a park. For that
matter, his bike could have been stolen off the street by a stranger. Either
case, it’s possible it wasn’t even him getting shot at tonight. But if it was
him, I’d like to know, and sooner rather than later. Since the rider wasn’t
wearing a helmet, maybe there’s someone somewhere who got a good look at his
face.”

Fiermonte
said, “It seems like a long shot to me, Cat. And anyway, it’s almost five, the
bars are all closed. Anyone who might have seen something would be long gone by
now.”

“Customers,
yeah. But bartenders have to stick around to clean up. And parks attract
transients. Plus, early morning deliverymen should be out making their rounds
now. Anyway, we’re down here, Donnie. We might as well have a look.”

Fiermonte hesitated,
thought about that for a moment, then nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll head south,
toward Canal.”

“I’ll take a walk
up to Houston.”

“If you find
something, give me a call. Otherwise, let’s meet back here in fifteen.”

“You got it.”

North on Attorney, east on
Rivington for two blocks, then north again on Pitt, and Cat was facing Hamilton
Fish Park.

Fiermonte was
right — if Jeremy’s motorcycle had been parked there, its rider would have
easily lost any pursuer on foot between here and the crash site. And for the
rider to have passed the Delancey Bar and Grille, he would have had to enter
Delancey either by Clinton Street or one of the streets farther east, and the
distance between here and Clinton was even greater than the distance between
here and Delancey.

Cat stood on
the park’s perimeter for a few moments, looking around but seeing nothing. Just
as she had been in her dream, she was alone now. The few bars she had passed on
the way here were all closed up, but finding another set of witnesses wasn’t
really ever a hope.

Finally, she
began to backtrack, but instead of turning onto Attorney, she continued west on
Rivington, then a block later turned on Clinton. She was just north of Delancey,
and halfway down the block, when she saw something in the gutter on the east
side of the empty street.

She crossed and
approached it, but it wasn’t till she was a few feet away that she recognized
what the item was.

The clear
plastic visor from a motorcycle helmet.

And it wasn’t
till she was standing over it that she saw what appeared to be a small smudge
of dried blood on one of its edges. The edge was chipped, the visor itself
cracked.

She looked around
the immediate area but saw no sign of the helmet. Could this have been why the
shooter backtracked? Had he run up Clinton — as opposed to fleeing in any of
the other directions available to him — to retrieve the helmet to which this
visor belonged?

If so, why
would he have done that?

Standing by the
visor as if guarding it, Cat scanned the surrounding buildings, looking not at
the doors of each one but rather just above them. She didn’t have to look for too
long before she spotted exactly what she had been hoping to see all along.

A security
camera. One of the many — thousands probably, these days —  scattered
throughout the city.

This particular
camera was mounted above the door of a preschool and aimed toward the sidewalk in
a way that gave Cat hope that where she was standing would be included in its
field of vision.

Cat was waiting in her Mustang
as Fiermonte and Morris, standing once again by the crashed motorcycle, spoke. A
wrecker arrived to tow the motorcycle to the impound lot, so they moved their
conversation to the sidewalk as the driver worked. Cat glanced at her watch. It
was almost half-past five, the sky along the eastern horizon rimmed with a steely
gray.

It took another
ten minutes before Fiermonte finally broke away from Morris and headed toward
Cat’s Mustang. He climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed. The
windows were closed, had been as she waited, but with him in the seat beside
her now she suddenly felt just a little crowded. A little shut in. A trace
amount of panic rushed through her, and she craved a drink.

“He’s going to
contact the owner of the preschool and get a look at their surveillance tape,”
Fiermonte said. “I’ll let you know what it shows, if it shows anything.”

“And the
visor?”

“It’ll take a
few days to get the DNA from the blood.”

“You’ll need
something of Jeremy’s to match it to.”

“Morris will
get a warrant to search the apartment. I’m assuming there’ll be a brush with
some of Jeremy’s hair on it, or a used razor or something along those lines.”

“I could take
care of that,” she offered. “It’d be good for me to do something to help.”

“It’s better if
we let Morris do this by the book.”

“But what if he
finds something incriminating?”

“Yeah, that’s a
problem, isn’t it? We should have a few hours before Morris gets his warrant. Maybe
you could take a quick look around the place first, just in case. For all we
know, Jeremy’s got an Ecstasy lab there. Or worse. You up for that, Cat?”

She nodded,
then said, “Yeah.”

It was her turn
to look at him closely. Something was clearly bothering him.

“What’s on your
mind, Donnie?”

“I should have
told you this sooner, but Jeremy called me a while back. About a month ago, I
guess. He said he’d gotten himself clean and was thinking clearly for the first
time in a long time. To be honest, he sounded a bit manic, talking fast and
saying stuff that was way out there.”

“Like what?”

“That he remembered
things from the night your father was killed, things that he’d suppressed,
apparently.”

“What things?”

“He wouldn’t
tell me over the phone. I asked him if he was working, and he told me he was tending
bar at a restaurant in Midtown. I went there the next day to confirm it. He was
there all right, but he seemed…keyed up.”

“That’s
Jeremy.”

“I know, but
this seemed different. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. I asked him about the memories
and he said he didn’t want to talk about it. I told him he could trust me, but
he just shut me down. I didn’t want to push it, or him, so I backed off and said
I’d like to hear from him once a week — the same day, the same time, every
week. He agreed and checked in with me just like I’d asked him to, right on
time — until this week, that is.”

“Why didn’t you
tell me this?”

“I was handling
it. Or at least I thought I was. Anyway, you have enough to worry about.”

“He’s my
brother, Donnie. He’s my problem.”

“It’s hard to
know what the right thing to do is here. With him, I mean. With you three. But you’re
wrong about him being your problem, Cat. He’s my problem, too.”

“When was he
supposed to check in?”

“Yesterday.”

“Did you go
looking for him when he didn’t call?”

“I was in court
all day. I phoned the restaurant when I got out. It turns out he had quit weeks
ago. Every time he called and told me he was still working there and doing fine,
he was lying.”

Born to suffer,
Cat thought. And to cause suffering.

Nothing new
there.

“Did you go by
the apartment?”

“I was going to
today. I learned a long time ago that if you push Jeremy, he runs. I didn’t
want that to happen.”

“And he hadn’t
said anything more about the memories.”

“Not a thing. It
was almost as if he had forgotten all about it. At that point, I just assumed it
was something he’d blurted out during an episode. Or maybe he’d had a moment of
paranoid delusion or something.”

Cat had seen
her brother in fits of mania. She’d also seen him high to the point of near-religious
euphoria. And though she had never witnessed delusional outbursts, she knew anything
was possible.

What, after
years and years of abuse, could be left of the poor boy’s mind?

Fiermonte took
in a breath, let it out. “I hate to say this, but I was hoping this whole thing
tonight was somehow drug related. A buy gone bad, or maybe he owed the wrong
person money. And maybe you’re right; maybe it wasn’t even him on his bike
tonight. But right now my gut is telling me otherwise.”

Fiermonte
looked at Cat, paused, then said, “Maybe Jeremy does know something — saw it
the night your father was taken but had forgot all about it till now. Or maybe
he’s out of his mind and in need of meds. Whatever the case, we need to find him.
Before he gets himself hurt. Or worse. We need to find him and get him help. Even
if that means going for involuntary commitment again. I made a promise to your
father a long time ago, and I’ll do what I have to do to keep it. Do you
understand me?”

Cat nodded. “I’d
better get going, then.”

“Call me after,
even if you don’t find anything.”

“Will do.”

“And be
careful.”

Cat wasn’t sure
if he meant
don’t get caught
or
keep a sharp eye out
.

It didn’t
matter; she planned on doing both.

Immediately upon entering the
apartment on West Tenth Street, Cat smelled something. Perfume, maybe. Or body
wash. It was faint, and strangely familiar, but there was no mistaking that
whatever it was, it was feminine.

She began to
look around, knew she needed to remain focused on her task, but it was
difficult for her to be here and not be overwhelmed by memories. More so, in
fact, than she had anticipated.

She’d done
so much to leave all this behind.

This had been their
father’s apartment, the place where he had lived after his discharge from the
army back in ’74. Shortly after that he had joined the FBI. He had married late
— in ’80 at the age of thirty-five — and bought the house in Ossining where Cat
and her two brothers were raised.

Growing up, she
had idolized her father — he had worked long hours in the city, was often gone
for days at a time, was a man, her mother reminded her frequently but gently, who
was doing what he had to do in order to support his family. It wasn’t till Cat
was a teenager that she learned what her father actually did to make his
living, the risks he had taken in a war on organized crime, both before meeting
their mother and then after that. At that moment Cat knew exactly what she wanted
to do with her life.

It was during her
childhood that she first experienced the pain-pleasure cycle — missing her
father terribly, craving his company and attention, then having it, intensely
if all too briefly, only to have him leave again, after which the pain would return.
This pattern, burned into her during her youth, was one that she sought out as
an adult — a common story, this she knew. But as aware as she was of this
pattern, of how it had begun and what it meant, she could never really find a
way to break it. Affairs with unavailable men were the best way for her to
recreate this cycle. And for whatever reason, it seemed that unavailable men
were as drawn to her as she was to them.

But she did her
best now to fight this rush of memories, needed to focus on why she was here, but
this apartment, in its strange way, was a keystone in her life. For the longest
time it had been a place of mystery to her, where he father had lived his
second and secret life. Living here, as though he were still a bachelor and not
a husband and father of three, had helped maintain his various covers — and protected his family, all but hidden up in Westchester. Cat had not even seen this
apartment until she was twenty, and only then because her father no longer played
any part in undercover operations. An agent could pull off only a few of those,
at the most. John Coyle Sr., a legend in the Bureau, was a veteran of ten.

Off-limits for
so long, the place where her father had lived without her, had slept, if he
really slept at all, while his life was in danger daily — how could being here
not trigger countless memories for her? Even now, technically, she shouldn’t be
here; even now there was danger in her simply having entered and taken a look
around.

She checked her
watch, saw that she’d been here for fifteen minutes already. Had she really lost
track of that much time? She decided that she’d better get to it and do a
serious search. She needed to find something that would tell her without a
doubt that Jeremy had been living here. The perfume could have meant he had a
live-in girlfriend, or it could have meant that he had simply spent last night
with some stranger. If that were the case, Cat thought, maybe she had more in
common with her troubled kid brother than she realized.

But the
presence of lingering perfume could also have meant that Jeremy had simply sublet
the place to a woman, or maybe a couple, for the quick cash.

Then Cat saw the
framed photograph of their mother in the bedroom and knew by this that Jeremy
was living here. He carried that photo with him everywhere he went, wasn’t
likely to have left it behind had he leased the place out. She remembered
visiting him in the hospital after his first breakdown, when he was at last
diagnosed as bipolar. This was just months after their father had been killed. Jeremy
had asked her to get the photo of their mother from his place — he was staying
with some friends in a dive on the Lower East Side — and bring it to him. He
had landed in the hospital after crashing a car he and one of his roommates had
stolen while high. Fiermonte, Cat later learned, had pulled some strings to get
the charges dropped, then arranged for Jeremy to enter a treatment center — his
first of many.

Cat looked at
the photo for a moment, at the woman she barely resembled, then continued her
search. She found, however, nothing of significance — no computer, no hard line
phone so she could check the caller ID or press redial, and no cell phone. She
saw a few books, noticed that among them was a copy of Sun Tzu’s
The Art of
War
. She picked it up and looked at it, instantly recognized the well-worn
copy as Johnny’s, given to him by their father. She opened it and read the
inscription, then closed the book and returned it to where she had found it.

She wondered how
Jeremy had come to possess it. Had he found it when they emptied out the house
in Ossining prior to selling it? She wondered, too, why hadn’t Johnny taken it.
But then she understood.

It carried a
memory he could not bear.

She checked the
closet next, saw only clothes — Jeremy’s clothes, another good sign — then
checked the toilet tank, found no drugs in a Ziploc bag stashed there.

She checked
every drawer, every possible hiding place in the tiny apartment, and found no
drug paraphernalia whatsoever, not even common household items that could be
used as paraphernalia. She was relieved to know that there was nothing for
Morris to find, but more than that, she was heartened by the fact that there
was actually a possibility that Jeremy had gotten himself clean.

Of the three
us, she thought, who would have ever believed it would be poor Jeremy who
turned himself around?

If this was all
that she came away with, then it had been worth the risk of coming here — and worth
enduring the memories this place churned up, memories of the father she had
loved so much and lost too soon.

She was about
to give up and get out of there when she noticed a notepad on the kitchen
table. The top sheet was blank, but there was something about the way the
notepad had been placed in the exact middle of the table. She thought about
this for a moment, then retrieved a pencil from a nearby kitchen drawer and
began to draw back and forth across the paper with the side of the pencil tip.

A game from
their childhood, a way for she and Jeremy to leave secret notes for each other
after their mother had passed.

A suddenly
lonely and heartbroken boy turning to the only woman left in his life.

What had been
written on the page that was torn off had left an impression on the page below.
And it was beginning to emerge.

A ten-digit
number.

A phone number,
she quickly realized. The area code was 917. A New York area code.

She continued
darkening in the rest of the page, and something else emerged.

An eight-digit
number.

Some kind of
code, perhaps?

And then one
more thing showed itself.

The final
thing.

She looked at
the page — white hollow letters on a field of scribbled gray.

She had often
helped her brother with his homework when he was a boy. School was difficult
for him; it wasn’t that he didn’t have the smarts — he did, clearly — it was
simply that kids were cruel and he was an emotional child, sensitive, not tough
enough. Not his father’s son, nor his brother’s brother.

Jeremy had
always belonged to their mother, and then, after her death, he had belonged to
Cat. For a while, anyway.

Having helped
him with his penmanship, Cat could easily recognize his handwriting. His
thoughts had been too fast for his hand back then, and were, clearly, still too
fast now.

Hamilton
Park, north of Delancey, midnight.

All in a familiar
manic scrawl.

Cat knew for
certain now that her kid brother was living here. She knew, too, that he was the
unknown male being shot at this morning on Delancey. Shot at by a professional.
Her gut tightened once more.

She tore off
the page, pocketed it, then thought about it and grabbed and pocketed the entire
notepad as well. The indentation left by her brother could have easily gone
down a number of sheets. And so, too, the scribbles she’d made.

It would be
better if no one knew, or even suspected, that she had been here.

Nearing the
door, she smelled the strangely familiar perfume again. She paused to try to
identify it. It took a moment for her to realize that it was Chloé, or
something very close to it.

The perfume
their mother had worn.

Cat waited till
she had driven out of the West Village and was heading up Eighth Avenue before reaching
for her cell phone and calling Fiermonte.

“I’m bringing
you something,” she said when he answered. She was reminded suddenly of her
girlish need to please her father, how that had been both the defining and driving
force of her childhood. It was the reason for everything, from why she had run
track in high school (which her father had done when he was at school) to why
she had entered the FBI.

“We’d better
not meet at my office,” Fiermonte said.

The flatness of
his voice sent a tiny wave of disappointment through her. What, really, had she
been expecting?

“There’s a diner
on the corner of Fifth and Twenty-Third,” he continued. “Give me a half hour.”

“I’ll be
there.”

“Listen, Cat, I
just talked to Morris. He got a look at the surveillance video.”

“That was
fast.”

“It’s a
preschool. They open early.”

“Does it show anything?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“It’s not
good.”

“What do you
mean?”

“I’ll tell you
when I see you.”

As he had done
earlier, Fiermonte was leaving her hanging, though she understood the reason
why: cell phones could too easily be eavesdropped upon. Not that there was
reason to suspect that anyone would be listening to them on purpose, but there
was no point in risking it.

She had to
remind herself that no matter what the security camera had captured, Jeremy had obviously survived it, was alive when he dropped
his motorcycle outside the Delancey and then took off on foot.

Suddenly the
idea of her kid brother being dead filled her with a deep, draining dread, just
as it should. There was no hint of relief at all now. Her recent visit to her
father’s apartment had been the reason for this change, there was no doubt
about that. The memories of their shared childhood, the photograph of their long-deceased
mother, not to mention the smell of something similar to her perfume — how
could these not have rekindled familial feelings and instincts that had been
lost long ago?

How could she
not care now about the boy she had tried, so unsuccessfully, to mother once?

Cat was
expecting the call to end there, but it didn’t. What Fiermonte said next caught
her off guard, more so even than his foolish confession in that downtown bar a
week ago.

“You don’t by
any chance know where Johnny is these days?” he said. There was something in
his voice now. Urgency, Cat thought. Whatever the preschool camera had recorded,
it was clearly a game changer.

“No. I know
he’s back in the country, but I have no idea where he’s living or what he’s
doing. Why?”

“I think we need to find him. I think we’re going to need his help on this.”

“Jesus, Donnie.”
This was all she could think to say.

“Is there any chance
at all that Jeremy might have gone to Johnny recently? Or maybe went to him
this morning, after he got into trouble?”

“I doubt that.”

“You sound pretty
certain.”

“They haven’t
spoken to each other in years.” She paused, then: “You know how Johnny is.”

Of the three
children, Johnny was the one who most saw the world in black and white. He was
also the most independent, and the harder of the brothers for Cat to reach when
they were young.

His father’s
son, and clear favorite.

It had always
made sense to her that she lost track of him now that they were adults.

“Any idea where
we might start looking for him?” Fiermonte asked.

Cat didn’t
answer. Her silence rang for several seconds.

“What?”
Fiermonte pressed.

“You won’t like
my answer, Donnie.”

“Shit.”

She knew by this
that Fiermonte understood who it was they would need to contact first if they
wanted to find Johnny. And, like she, Fiermonte didn’t dare say the man’s name
over the phone.