“Why is everyone so young?” I asked.
“Dick Wolf does the hiring,” she said.
Her office had a glass door that she shut to drown out the curses and laughter.
“Did he really get his car broken into outside the building?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“That’s crazy.”
“That’s Queens.” She rummaged around on her desk, shuffling forms and e-mail printouts and files and unopened envelopes. Atop the windowsill were three mugs: a DA seal, Fordham, NYU law. A matted teddy bear dressed as a fireman. A photo of her father, and another of her and her sister in bathing suits on the beach. A brass Gordian knot, dangling on a string tacked to a shelf holding legal books. The screen saver on her computer faded in and out hypnotically, rotating images of a green countryside.
“Ireland,” she said, noticing my stare.
“Is that where your family’s from?”
“County Kerry. My dad’s side. My mom’s Italian. I’ve never been to either place, but if I start saving up what’s left of my salary at the end of every month I should be able to afford a trip when I’m seventy-five.”
She found what she was looking for, a set of keys for her file cabinet. She opened up a drawer full of compact discs and transcripts. I glanced inside but she closed it.
“Not ours.”
“Love letters?” I asked.
“Wiretaps.”
From the next drawer down she produced our box of evidence. It looked bigger than when I’d last seen it, and as she started taking out files and laying them on the desk I realized that she had contributed to its growth.
“This is what Richard Soto came up with.” She handed me a list of old cases, fifteen pages of names, dates, locations, brief descriptions, and the names of the arrested party, if any. I glanced through it and was about to ask her a question when I looked up and saw her staring at the photo of her father, a tissue loosely crumpled in her hand.
She said, “I miss him so much.”
I almost said “I do too.” But I didn’t. I laid a hand on the files and said, “Let’s talk about something else.”
OVER THE NEXT SIX WEEKS we met frequently, either in person or on the phone. During her lunch break we would meet at the Chinese place near the DA’s office; Isaac would take his place three tables away and commence to consume mind-boggling amounts of pork fried rice. We gave him our fortune cookies.
We decided to start from scratch, laying out a fresh timeline of the killings, examining it for patterns. We had the footprint cast reexamined, and were told that the person who’d made it was probably taller than six feet. Samantha asked how big Victor was, and I had to confess that, although one person had told me he was short, in truth I didn’t know. Now that I think about it, that was how we spent the bulk of our time, at least at first: outlining what we did not know.
“Did he go to school?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he have family?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know, exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
“How hard were you looking for him?”
“Not very,” I admitted.
“Well,” she said, “now’s your chance to redeem yourself.”
We picked up where I’d left off: calling churches, but this time with greater success. Through dumb luck or diligence, we found a Father Ver-laine, at Good Shepherd in Astoria, who gave us our first sign that Victor had been a real person and not a figment of someone’s imagination. We drove to the rectory and found the priest; he was doing a crossword puzzle, and he greeted us cheerfully.
“Of course I knew Victor,” he said. “He had a better attendance record than I do. But I haven’t seen him in a year or two. Is everything all right?”
“We want to make sure he’s safe. Nobody’s heard from him in a while.”
“I can’t believe he would ever do anything wrong,” said the priest. “His conscience was cleaner than anyone’s, with the possible exception of the Holy Father.”
I asked what he meant.
“Every time I opened the confessional window I’d find him on the other side.”
“What did he confess?”
The priest clucked his tongue. “Those are matters between a man and God. I will tell you that he had far less reason to be there than most people, including the ones who don’t come to confess at all. I told him once or twice not to be so hard on himself, and that if he didn’t, he’d be in violation of the sin of scrupulosity.” He smiled. “All that meant was that I found him in there the next day, confessing to me about that.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a photograph of him, would you?”
“No.”
Samantha said, “Could you describe him?”
“Oh, let’s see. He was small, about five-foot-four and on the thin side.
He sometimes grew a little moustache. Always he wore the same coat, no matter how hot or cold it was. That coat had seen better days. You’re probably not old enough to rememberhow old are you?”
“Twenty-eight,” she said.
“Well, then you’re definitely not old enough, but I’ll tell you that he looked a bit like Howard Hughes.”
“Was he unwell?”
“He didn’t seem especially healthy. He often had a cough. I could always tell he was there, because I’d hear it coming from the back pews.”
I said, “Did he have any obvious psychological problems?”
He hesitated. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than I have. My office forbids it.”
In the car, Samantha said, “That’s a start.”
“He said he was small. Doesn’t that rule him out?”
“Not really. Footprinting isn’t an exact science. A photo would be more helpful, so we could ask around the neighborhood. What about that cough? He might have gotten treated for it.”
“It sounds more like he wasn’t treated at all.”
“But if he was, then there’s a record of him somewhere. Based on what you’ve told me, the picture I’m getting, people like him, they fall through the cracks. They don’t have a regular doctor. They show up at the emergency room.”
“Then let’s call the local emergency rooms.”
“I’ll work on it. You’d be surprised how hard it is in this state to get medical records. Did he have a job?”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“He had to pay for things. He paid his rent.”
“The building manager told me he paid in cash. His apartment was rent-controlled from back in the sixties. He was paying a hundred dollars a month.”
She whistled in admiration, and for a moment she wasn’t the arm of the law but just another New Yorker envying someone else’s lease. “Still, that’s a hundred dollars he had to come up with every thirty days. Maybe he panhandled.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “But how does that help us? There isn’t a panhandlers’ union we can call.”
“You know what else,” she said, her gaze wandering toward the sky and away from me. I sometimes got the impression that when we were talking she paid attention to me only long enough to start thinking on her own. In this she differed from her father, who had takenor seemed to takea real interest in my opinion. I have to give her credit for her honesty. From the outset, she never pretended she was doing this for anyone other than him. Certainly not for me.
“The paper,” she said. “He had to buy lots of it; you’d think he’d be on good terms with whoever sold it to him. And food. Why don’t you tackle that. I’m going to keep chasing down the witnesses in the old cases and see what I can come up with. Here. I pulled some of the old mug shots from those cases and made copies for you so you can show them around. Don’t worry. We’ll get something.”