The Big Scam

  17

  VANKO’S PHONE RANG. IT WAS AN APOLOGETIC Ralph Hansen. “Nick, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you right away. The chief inspector has been running me ragged. What’s up?”

  “Sheila Burkhart.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Female agent. Shipped out here. Without a heads-up.”

  “Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry about that,” the SAC said. “Have you talked to her?”

  “She said she was working a serial murder too hard.”

  “Well, it’s a little worse than that. According to the supervisor running the task force, she’s pretty much lost it. I think his words were ‘absolutely obsessed.’ He said there was just one homicide, and she was trying to make it into something more.”

  “You sure he wasn’t just trying to get rid of her? She seems pretty outspoken.”

  “No, it wasn’t anything like that. He said she was a phenomenal worker. That was the whole problem. She became obsessed with finding the killer. A couple of the New York detectives read her the same way.”

  “You mean it’s now become possible to work too hard in this outfit?”

  “Nick, that’s as much as I know about it. Here, I’ll give you the number for the task force. Call the supervisor. He can fill you in. She hasn’t been causing you any problems, has she?”

  “No. In fact she admitted that she had gone a little overboard working the case. She seems a little intense, but, you know, in a good way. I just want to hear what a normal day from her is like.”

  “Call the supervisor. Bill Henken. He can fill you in. But if you think she’s about to start taking hostages, don’t hesitate to let me know.”

  “I’ll give him a call.”

  Vanko was transferred once before getting the supervisor on the line. “I’m calling about Sheila Burkhart. She’s been transferred to my squad.”

  “I’m sorry I had to move her out, Nick; she’s a hell of a worker. One of those people with no life outside the job. Unfortunately, it got out of hand. Did she tell you about her serial killer case?”

  “Just that only one of the victims had been found.”

  “There is only one victim, a twelve-year-old from Spanish Harlem, a year ago. But every time a girl runs away or is missing up there for a few hours, Sheila started looking for a way to link it to the Suzie Castillo case. She runs around interviewing every known sex offender in the tristate area even if they’re just flashers, trying to attribute everything to some serial murderer stalking East Harlem. I couldn’t get her to go home. I mean I had to threaten her so she’d leave at night, then it got to the point where she’d sneak back after I left.”

  “So far, she sounds like a supervisor’s dream.”

  “You saw her. She didn’t look like that when she got here. I mean—God forgive me—she was no dazzling beauty when she reported in, but she looks considerably worse now. She’s lost weight, and I think she forgets to comb her hair half the time.”

  “She does look a little run-down.”

  “Some of the guys were having their wives pack an extra lunch for her because either she didn’t have an appetite or was too busy and would forget to eat, we don’t know. But the final straw was when she moved.”

  “Moved where?”

  “Up to East Harlem. El barrio. Didn’t give any notice to her landlord in Queens, nothing. Left all her personal stuff behind.”

  “Do you think the Castillo girl was a serial killing?”

  “It was a rape-murder, so it could have been, who knows. But these people get caught for other crimes and spend the rest of their lives in jail and never get matched up. The important thing is no one’s killed any more girls since then. There’s enough to do in this city without creating monsters, so we’ve moved on. She couldn’t.”

  “I appreciate the information, Bill.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, she’s great. If I had a dozen like her I’d put myself out of business. It’s just that she needed to get away from that case.”

  After he hung up, Vanko buzzed Abby at her desk. “Did Sheila give you her address?”

  “Ah, let me see. Yes, here it is.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Can this be right—East Harlem?”

  Sheila Burkhart was hunched over her Bureau-issue laptop entering names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers into it. At it for hours, she was unaware that the sun had set and the only light in her apartment was the optic gray glow from the computer screen. Her workstation was a battered Formica and chrome dinette table that had come with the one-room third-floor walk-up. She had pushed the table against the nearest wall, which she used as a bulletin board. Tacked to it was a detailed map of the neighborhood and five crime-scene photos from the Suzie Castillo case, her twisted body proof of the unmistakable violence that had caused her death, her face blue, swollen, decaying. Above them was a school photo of the pretty twelve-year-old. On the right side of the map, as if buffered from the violence, were photos of eight other young girls, supplied to the police by parents.

  A soft knock at the door startled her. For a panicked moment she couldn’t recall where her gun was. Then she reached under the table for her briefcase and retrieved her nine-millimeter. Getting up from the table, she suddenly realized it was dark out. Who could this be? She flattened herself against the wall next to the door. As loudly and violently as possible, she drew the slide back to chamber a round. “¿Quién es?” she demanded, then lowering her voice into a more menacing range, “¿Que quiere?”

  “I come in peace, Sheila.”

  “Nick?”

  “Yes ma’am.” She undid the locks and opened the door. Vanko stood in the hallway’s pale yellow light, a pizza box in one hand and twelve-pack of beer in the other. Seeing the gun dangling from her hand, he suddenly questioned why he had come. He wasn’t any more ready for this than she was. “I’m sorry, this isn’t the right kind of beer?”

  She stepped aside and invited him in. “You know what I love most about New York? Men keep bringing me food. Looks like somebody called my old supervisor.”

  Switching on the light, she set down the gun and took the pizza box from him, the odor of cheese and sauce displacing the dank, mildewy air. “How crazy did he say I was?”

  He looked around the room. “Pretty crazy.”

  “Pretty crazy by their standards or by yours?”

  “They said you moved here.”

  “Sounds like you’re about to agree with them.”

  “I probably will, but give me a minute to make it look like I’m judging you fairly.” He cracked open two cans of beer and handed one to her. The apartment was dismal. The living room, if it could be classified as that, was no more than an extension of the kitchen. Against the far wall was an aged purple velvet couch, its arms threadbare, a folded blanket and pillow at one end. A low table sat in front of it crowded with stacks of folders. She moved them onto the floor and put down the pizza.

  He took a sip of beer and walked over to the kitchen table, scanning the stacks of documents and the half-finished page on the laptop screen. Next to it was a small box with young girls’ photographs. Each had a pinhole at the top suggesting that at one time they had been tacked to the wall. He looked at the map and photos on the wall. He noticed something curious about Suzie Castillo’s school picture. He studied the photos of the eight other girls on the opposite side of the map. Three of them shared the same unusual characteristic, which he decided not to tell Sheila about. The last thing she needed was encouragement.

  All four faces in question were distinctly Hispanic, each exceptionally pretty with striking chiaroscuro features. All the reports of Sheila’s abnormal behavior made him wonder if she was driven by some sort of delusional fantasy about their beauty. Then, taking another swallow of beer, he decided that if anyone was overwrought, it was him.

  He stared at her until she felt his gaze. She had a way of listening to him that made him feel that the only thing more important than what he was about to say
was that it was him saying it. He wondered if she was that receptive to everyone, which made him realize that he didn’t really know her. It was too soon to be doing this. For two people who were so straightforward, coming here was turning out to be unbelievably awkward.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “I’m a big fan of obsession. It’s made my job a lot more interesting, but in a good year, there are more than a thousand homicides in the city. Why are you letting this one eat you up?”

  “One? I guess we know whose side you landed on.”

  “Do you think I came here because I’m on someone else’s side? You were transferred from the task force so you wouldn’t work this. You’re the one who told me it had ahold of you. And it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.”

  Calmly, she said, “This guy has killed more than one girl.”

  “Okay, then where are the victims?”

  Sheila pointed at the eight photographs on the wall. “Right there.”

  Vanko went over to the kitchen table and picked up the box of pinholed photos. “Then who are these? Weren’t all of them on the wall at one time?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “They found their way home, didn’t they?”

  She collapsed on the couch, trying to decide if this was the same man whose honesty she had found so rare when they met. She knew he was, and that made his judgment about her more reliable than her own. She studied his crooked face for a long time. He didn’t seem to mind. This was someone she would always be able to trust. “This is eating me up because they are all so beautiful. At that age, they are as perfect as they will ever be, and even if he’s only killed Suzie Castillo, that’s reason enough.” Her tone gave a final surge of protest. “And just maybe I was put here to get a little crazy.”

  “And who’s making sure you don’t become a casualty?”

  Her eyes softened and she looked down. “I do keep having nightmares. The usual stuff: chasing this shadowy figure, shooting and missing, out of ammunition, being shot at with no place to hide. But they always end the same way: I stumble across another body.”

  “I’ve had dreams, too. Mine mostly involve car crashes. Do you know what the worst part is for me? That I’m always alone.”

  She stared at him for a few moments. “Yes.” Then the corners of her mouth curled mischievously. “Well, Nikko, to answer your question about who’s making sure I don’t become a casualty, I believe that unfortunate torch has been passed to you.” She flipped open the pizza box.

  He spotted a package of paper napkins in the kitchen. Taking out two, he walked to the couch. With a flourish, he shook one out and covered her lap with it. Her thighs registered the paper’s frail pressure, anticipating something more—the weight of his touch. But it never came. Long ago, after declaring loneliness a vice, she had ordered herself to disconnect from those feelings and had pulled a shield between herself and any future expectations. There were other, more “noble” ways to burn each day from the calendar. It hadn’t been a perfect diversion, but it worked well enough—until now, when a single moment of anticipation had extinguished a fairly reliable system of denial. But he had given no indication of feeling the same way. She began to wonder if he had come because he was a man, or because he was a good boss.

  He sat down across from her, spreading a napkin across his own lap. She watched as his hands settled onto it. Then she realized he was waiting for her to start.

  Nick Vanko stepped into his apartment and flipped on the light. The sound had an unusual hollowness to it, as if the one-bedroom loft had been stripped of its furnishings during his absence. It always looked the same, no matter what he was doing. The furniture, most of which had been purchased as floor samples, was arranged like a set for some glossy magazine. He thought of Sheila’s apartment and smiled.

  The quiet began buzzing in the back of his head like an approaching army of cicadas. Maybe a movie would distract him. He had a collection of more than two hundred black-and-white videos. There was something about the old movies he loved—the lighting, the preposterous sets, the two-dimensionality. But most of all it was the stories’ stark moral dilemmas. He pushed David and Lisa into the VCR. As the credits rolled, his thoughts raced to the final scene, which he had seen a dozen times. David, a young man in a mental facility who is unable to let anyone touch him, falls in love with another patient, Lisa, and just before the final credits, in another of Hollywood’s miracles, lets her touch him. It should have been the perfect distraction, but happy endings sold tickets only because they were so elusive in real life. He turned off the VCR and opened a couple of windows to let in the street noise below his SoHo loft, but tonight it was disappointingly quiet.

  He and Sheila had finished the pizza and half the beer. Despite the dreary surroundings, they fell into a relaxed conversation about growing up in places as diverse as Iowa and New Jersey. For someone so obsessed, her sense of humor was uninhibited, and the more they talked, the more incisive it became. Little, it seemed, escaped her notice.

  But then an unexplainable silence descended between them. Thinking back, Vanko realized it was simply the point at which a man and a woman, having fulfilled the routine social requirements of an encounter, would have moved on to the physical, would have found a way to touch. Even though both Nick and Sheila suspected the other felt a similar attraction, neither could ask the other to ignore their own unattractiveness. Years of uneasy glances had led them both to fear that only attractive people could feel the warmth of intimacy. To test this hypothesis and fail would leave them without hope.

  He had sat parked outside her apartment for a while, thinking about how the evening had ended and wondering if he had missed some cue. Had there been any? Some neighborhood children were playing barefoot around an open hydrant to escape the August heat, their clothing pasted against their chubby brown bodies. Unnoticed by the others, one delighted boy fired his massive squirt rifle at them. Parents sat on cars parked on the sidewalk watching them, placidly smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.

  Until tonight, the car accident had been the perfect coupling of crime and punishment for Vanko. At the mirror the first time, instead of pity, he found his mangled image redemptive. A normal progression toward wife and family was over, undeserved, forfeited by a few moments of self-indulgence. But now that desire had been reawakened, his self-imposed exile was in desperate need of revocation. He wanted to touch her. Just grazing her skin would have been enough, even casually, an accident they both would have known was intentional. Unlike visual recollection, aggraded by a million freeze-frames a day, touch was the sense of darkness. He wanted that single, isolated pressure, so distinct, so retrievable, a private channel to reconnect with her on demand. Vanko could still see her profile and, although it remained uncommonly plain, it aroused him. He needed to feel her.

  The evening ended all at once. No “It’s getting late,” not even “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She walked him to the door, not even shaking his hand, as if she, too, suffered the same fear. They both knew when the evening, along with its invisible borders, had been exhausted. To venture any further might threaten whatever came next.

  Vanko hadn’t noticed when the four teenage boys came up to his car. One of them knocked on the window to get his attention and threw his palms up angrily. Vanko understood that to mean LEAVE.

  He passed a fruit market that was still open, a storefront church, a laundry where the women stood around outside to escape the heat of the dryers. Graffiti was everywhere, some of it exceptionally colorful and well drawn. He stopped at a light. Four or five pairs of old sneakers hung from its crossbar. On a brick wall next to a bodega was a mural of a young brown-skinned man with a black, seagull-shaped mustache. Above the huge head were the words “In memory of Enrique Rabadan.” Toward the bottom, now mostly worn away, were the dates his life began and ended—twenty-one years in all. At the next corner was a wrecked NYPD car. A front-end collision with a white airbag hanging limply from the dashboard. The bumper had fallen off and
lay immediately underneath. Vanko could see that it had been there for a while. It reminded him of those images in Afghanistan after the Soviets had left, their destroyed tanks along the roadside like some monument to the nation’s indomitability.

  The humidity felt like it was pouring in the open windows, so he closed them before dialing his sister’s number.

  “’Lo.”

  “Nancy, it’s Nick.”

  “Mmmm, hi.”

  “You were sleeping.”

  He could hear her turn over. “It is almost one in the morning. Anything wrong?”

  “No, nothing. It’s nothing. Sorry, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “No, it’s all right. Just let me slip downstairs so I won’t wake the kids.”

  After a minute, she said, “I don’t know which is more surprising, you calling this late or not knowing what time it is. What’s up?”

  “I’ve met someone. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Just recently. I’m not sure how she feels.”

  “So you’re calling in the middle of the night trying to get me to tell you some woman I don’t know is interested in you.”

  “That’s what I love about you the most, the way you beat around the bush to spare my feelings.”

  “As firstborn, that’s my job. So, who is she?”

  “She’s an agent. Sheila Burkhart.”

  “Interesting that you put her profession before her name.”

  “Meaning what, Doctor?”

  “Like it’s something you had to get off your chest. Is there something wrong with a woman having that job? Christ, Phil sells insurance. No, wait a minute. This isn’t a test run to see how Mom and Dad are going to react, is it?”