“It’s not a laugh. It’s normal,” I said. “Margo would be quite happy if I sold paper clips for a living.”
“Well, look at you, fished out of the East River. She might be right. I don’t know, sometimes I think people who do what we do for a living don’t have any business getting ourselves involved with civilians. Helen was all about cute and stupid things the kids did at school that day, while I’m sitting there sucking in exit wounds and bloated floaters. ‘How was your day, honey?’ ‘Oh, fine, you know, just another romp through mankind’s butcheries.’”
“My old man used to describe his job as toxic.”
“Your old man was right. That’s exactly how I feel sometimes-like I’m slowly being poisoned. And it’s not only the victims but the nut monkeys out there, the ones who are doing this shit. You get to thinking the human race in general is toxic. You’ve got your crazy butchers, you’ve got your perfectly normal-seeming butchers. Kids shooting other kids. Parents killing their own kids, for Christ’s sake. Helen wanted us to adopt a baby. She loved the idea of raising a child. Jesus. In this world? I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.”
“Hell of a responsibility.”
“Forget it. I used to think how unfair it’d be to Helen, we adopt a kid then I get killed on the job and leave her to raise the kid on her own. Look what happened instead.” She laughed. It wasn’t a particularly joyful laugh. “If some poor kid had to count on me these days, God help her. Or him. They’d go back to the agency and demand a new placement.”
“Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself.”
Megan looked at me a moment without speaking. “That’s exactly what my shrink says. I’ll tell you what I tell her: sure, I’m hard on myself, but there’s no way in hell I’m too hard on myself. I deserve all the crap I throw at myself.”
“I’ll bet your shrink doesn’t agree with that.”
“That’s an easy bet to win. Anyway.” She flipped open one of the folders on her desk. It contained the police sketch of my attacker.
“That’s not him,” I said. “I don’t know where you got it, but it’s no good.”
“Michelle Poole worked with our sketcher on this.”
“It’s no good.”
“I had a feeling. The girl didn’t seem very sure of herself.” Megan picked up the sketch and studied it.
“Thurman Munson,” I said.
“Thurman what?”
“Former Yankees catcher.”
“That’s who threw you into the river?”
“That’s who the sketch looks like. But like I said, the sketch is no good. The guy this sketch doesn’t look like was stalking Michelle Poole. I guess she told you that. I saw him that day. At the Quaker meeting.”
“Could be he was first stalking Robin.”
“I was hoping to get a chance to ask him that question, but he decided to show me how fast he could run.”
“I guess he didn’t run fast enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“You caught up to him.”
“Right. Lucky me.”
“So, are you up to a session with a sketcher?” She picked up the phone and put in a call. She covered the mouthpiece. “Twenty minutes. Can you wait?”
“I’m in no hurry.”
She told the person on the phone that twenty minutes was fine, then she hung up. I asked her for some of that fine NYPD coffee, and she fetched me a cup. I discarded a couple of easy jabs about the burnt mud. Megan told me that she had spoken with Edward Anger from the Quaker meeting and that he was in the clear. Out-of-town alibi for the evening Robin was murdered. She also told me that Allison Jennings had given Gallo the same two names I’d gotten her to cough up. They’d both cleared as well.
“I wasn’t real keen on those two anyway,” I said. “Though it wouldn’t have been the first time that a long shot came in. But Anger. I guess I was holding out some hope for him. Sometimes the excessively gentle ones-well, you know.”
“A name like that was too good. But the alibi’s fine. Anger’s out.”
“So what do you think, Megan? I mean about Riddick and Robin. Are they copycat jobs, or is it possible that Fox was innocent all along?”
She was shaking her head before I’d even finished the question. “It’s him. The case is too strong. We got the fibers from Nikki’s plaid skirt off of Fox’s scissors. That was huge.”
“You never recovered the skirt itself.”
“Doesn’t matter. We had the receipt. We got the positive ID from the clerk at Liana who sold it to her. Nikki’s neighbor saw her leaving the building wearing it, a green-and-black plaid skirt. Fragments of the same skirt end up in Fox’s bedside scissors? Plus the blood on the scissors?”
“But the defense leaked the story that it was all just sex play. A game of dress-up. They said Nikki got nicked by the scissors when Fox was hacking her out of the skirt.”
“Of course they leaked the story. We got the DNA match on blood that was on the scissors as well as the semen the M.E. recovered from Nikki’s body. No question she had sex with Fox just before she was killed. Or possibly it was even while they were having sex. A man who likes to pretend he’s in bed with a schoolgirl and he’s attacking her with a pair of scissors? I wouldn’t put anything past him. If the defense was so confident about their version of things, they could have put Fox on the stand and had him tell the tale. Uh-uh. He’s our man, Fritz. And ladle in the case for Cynthia Blair. Fox was desperate to keep a lid on that affair. And I mean desperate. When she told him she was going ahead with the pregnancy, that was pretty much her death warrant. You heard the testimony. Fox’s attitude toward fathering children was lethal.”
The sketch artist showed up, and we got to work. The good ones employ a relaxing technique of mild hypnosis. This was a good one. We moved into Joe Gallo’s office so we could have some privacy. Megan took the sketcher out into the corridor, where she briefed him on what we were looking for. The two came back in, and Megan pulled the blinds. I was instructed to close my eyes and think about the ocean. It took me a moment to clear the beach and to locate the big open expanse the sketcher was looking for, but I eventually got it. The sketcher moved me into a trancelike place. He had a voice like one of those classical DJs. I expected him to introduce Rachmaninoff any minute. I heard my disembodied voice talking with him, and I heard myself describing the man who had thrown me into the East River. An image of his face floated in my head crystal-clear, and I calmly ran down his features. When the blinds were opened and I opened my eyes, I was handed a sketch that looked 70 percent like Ratface. I worked with the sketcher until we got to about 85 percent, then I had to beg off. My head was really doing a number. I didn’t want pieces of my skull breaking off and littering Joe Gallo’s desk. The sketcher told me I was a good subject and took off. Megan told me to drink a cup of water-it had appeared miraculously on her desk-and she left the room and came back a minute later with a large brown envelope. Several copies of the sketch were in the envelope.
“I’m not giving these to you.”
“No, ma’am.”
She handed me the envelope. “You’re not to distribute these.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I don’t generally find ‘ma’am’ to my liking.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Megan walked me to the front door and followed me outside. Megan wasn’t dressed for outside, and she hugged herself tightly. She looked like a woman in a straitjacket.
“That conversation we had. About the job. The part about it being toxic.”
“What about it?”
“I’d like that not to go anywhere.”