Back in the Ford, he prayed that Claire’s remarkable hearing didn’t extend as far as a grunty engine on Deer Lane. He put his foot gently on the gas pedal and rumbled to the corner in first gear. Part of him was dying to transmit his news to Silvestri, Marciano and Patrick, but he decided not to call them from Major Minor’s love retreat, doing a brisk Sunday business. Better to turn back into the northeast and depart the way he had come. It wouldn’t kill him to wait.
Not such a long walk at zero Fahrenheit after all, Chuckie baby! And no need for a flashlight on the house side of the ridge, because you have a tunnel that doesn’t surface until way down the reserve’s slope. Someone – was it you, or long before you? – dug deep below the ridge, made the distance shorter. In Connecticut, hundreds of miles from the Mason-Dixon Line, it certainly wasn’t dug for escaping slaves. My bet is that you dug it yourself, Chuckie baby. On the night that you snatched Faith Khouri all you had to do was get out; by the time you returned with her, we had left the neighborhood. That was one of our mistakes. We should have maintained the watch. Though, to be fair to us, we wouldn’t have caught you returning; we were watching Ponsonby Lane and your house, we didn’t know about the tunnel. So that time the luck was with you, Chuckie baby. But this time the luck is with us. We know about the tunnel.
Since he was ravenous and wanted a little more time to think, Carmine lunched at Malvolio’s before summoning his cohorts.
“I now understand the full significance of an old cliché,” he said as Patrick, the last to arrive, came through Silvestri’s office door.
“Which old cliché is that?” Patrick asked, sitting down.
“Pregnant with news.”
“Behold three expert midwives, so give birth.”
His words crisp, his sequence of events logical and correct, Carmine led his audience step by step through the things that had happened after he saw Eliza Smith.
“It all sprang from her – what she said, how she said it. My catalyst. Culminating in a fall down a hillside – talk about luck! I have had so much luck on this case,” he said when the tale was over and his audience had managed to close their jaws.
“No, not luck,” Patrick objected, eyes shining. “Pigheaded, hardassed determination, Carmine. Who else would have bothered to follow up on Leonard Ponsonby’s death? And who else would have bothered to look in an evidence box thirty-six years old? Chasing up a crime marked unsolved because you’re one of the very, very few people I can think of who know that when lightning strikes the same place twice, something is conducting it there.”
“That’s fine and dandy, Patsy, but it didn’t amount to enough to take before Judge Thwaites. I found the real evidence by sheer accident – a fall on a slippery hillside.”
“No, Carmine. The fall may have been an accident, but what you found was no accident. Anyone else would have gotten up, then brushed his clothes” – Patrick picked dead leaves off Carmine’s ruined jacket – “and limped away. You found the door because your brain registered a wrong noise, not because the fall uncovered the door. It didn’t. And anyway, you wouldn’t have been on the hillside in the first place if you hadn’t found our face in a picture taken about 1928. Come on, take some of the credit!”
“Okay, okay!” Carmine cried, throwing up his hands. “What’s more important is to decide where we go from here.”
The atmosphere in Silvestri’s office almost visibly fizzed with elation, relief, the wonderful and inimitable joy that comes with the moment a case breaks open. Especially the Ghosts case, so dark, so haunting, so tediously long in the breaking. No matter what hitches were to come – they were too seasoned to believe that none would – they had enough of the answer to move forward, to feel that the end wasn’t far away.
“First off, we can’t assume that the legal system is on our side,” Silvestri said through his cigar. “I don’t want this shit getting off the hook on some technicality – especially a technicality his defense can pin on the police. Face it, we’re the ones who usually wear the rotten eggs. This will be a big trial, coverage nationwide. That means Ponsonby’s defense won’t consist of two-bit shysters, even if he doesn’t have much money. Every legal shit heap who knows Connecticut and federal law will be clawing to get on Ponsonby’s defense team. And clawing to plaster us with rotten eggs. We can’t afford a single error.”
“What you’re saying, John, is that if we get a warrant now and bust in through Ponsonby’s tunnel, all we’ll really have is something that looks like an operating room in a doctor’s house,” said Patrick. “Like Carmine, I’ve always believed that this turkey doesn’t have a blood-soaked, filthy killing premises – he has an O.R. And if he’s only one-half as careful about leaving traces in his O.R. as he is on his victims, we might come out of it with nothing. Is that the way your mind is going?”
“It is,” said Silvestri.
“No mistakes,” said Marciano. “Not one.”
“And we’ve already made carloads of them” from Carmine.
A silence fell; the elation had died completely. Finally Marciano made an exasperated noise and burst into speech.
“If the rest of you won’t, then I’ll say it. We have to catch Ponsonby in the act. And if that’s what we have to do, that’s what we have to do.”
“Oh, Danny, for God’s sake!” Carmine cried. “Put another girl’s life in jeopardy? Put her through the horrors of being abducted by that man? I won’t do it! I refuse to do it!”
“She’ll get a fright, yes, but she’ll get over that. We know who he is, right? We know how he operates, right? So we stake him out – no need to stake anyone else out -”
“We can’t do that, Danny,” Silvestri butted in. “We have to stake everyone out the same as we did a month ago. Otherwise he will notice. Can’t be done without a full stakeout.”
“Okay, I concede that. But we know it’s him, so we give him extra-special attention. When he moves, we’re there. We follow him to his victim’s home and we let him grab her before we grab him. Between the grabbing, the tunnel and the O.R., he can’t possibly walk out of court a free man,” said Marciano.
“It’s circumstantial, is the problem,” Silvestri grumbled. “Ponsonby has committed at least fourteen murders, but our body count is four. We know the first ten victims were incinerated, but how are we going to prove that? Do you read Ponsonby as the confessing type? I sure as hell do not. Since sixteen-year-old girls run away from home every day, there are ten murders we’ll never convict him for. Everything rides on Mercedes, Francine, Margaretta and Faith, but nothing ties him to any of them beyond a supposition as frail as blown glass. Danny is right. Our only hope is to catch him in the act. Bust in there now, and he’ll walk. His lawyers will be good enough to persuade a jury to let Hitler or Stalin walk.”
They glared at each other, faces perplexed and angry.
“We have another problem,” Carmine said. “Claire Ponsonby.”
Commissioner Silvestri was not a profane man, but today – a Sunday too – he was breaking his own rules. “Shit! Piss!” he hissed. Then, in a bark, “Fuck!”