PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI
“Sensational. . . masterful. . . brilliant.”
—New York Post
“I very highly recommend this book. . . It's a great crime drama that is full of action and intense suspense, along with some great twists. . . Vincent Zandri has become a huge name and just keeps pouring out one best seller after another.”
—Life in Review
“A thriller that has depth and substance, wickedness and compassion.”
—The Times-Union (Albany)
“This book is truly haunting and will stay with you long after you have closed the covers.”
—Beth C., Amazon 5-star review
"The action never wanes."
--Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinal
"Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting."
--Harlan Coben, bestselling author of Six Years
"Tough, stylish, heartbreaking."
--Don Winslow, bestselling author of Savages
Moonlight Falls
(A Dick Moonlight PI Thriller No.1)
Vincent Zandri
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Prologue
Four Years Later
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
ALSO BY VINCENT ZANDRI
Permanence
The Innocent
Godchild
The Guilty
The Remains
Scream Catcher
The Concrete Pearl
Moonlight Mafia (A Dick Moonlight Short)
Moonlight Rises
Blue Moonlight
Murder by Moonlight
Full Moonlight (A Dick Moonlight Short)
Moonlight Weeps
Moonlight Breaks Bad
The Shroud Key (A Chase Baker Thriller)
Chase Baker and the Golden Condor (A Chase Baker Thriller, No. 2)
Everything Burns
For Lola, when we were whole…
“He reached out and took the knife to slaughter.”
Genesis 23:10
Prologue
Man’s life is flashing before his eyes.
He’s a little amazed because it’s happening just like it does in a sappy movie. You know, when they run real fast through some homespun super-eight film starting with your birth, moving on to toddler’s first step, then first day at kindergarten, first communion, first prom, first Gulf War, first marriage, firstborn son, first affair, first divorce . . .
So why’s the life flashing by?
Man’s about to execute himself.
He sits alone at the kitchen table inside what used to be his childhood home, pistol barrel pressed up tight against his head, only a half-inch or so behind the right earlobe. Thumb on the hammer, index finger wrapped around the trigger, hand trembling, eyes closed, big tears falling.
On the bright side of things, it’s beautiful sunny day.
Outside the kitchen window, wispy clouds float by like giant ghosts in a heavenly blue sky. Bluebirds chirp happily from the junipers that line the perimeter of the north Albany property. The cool wind blows, shaking the leaves on the trees. The fall air is cool, crisp and clean. “Football weather” his mortician dad used to call it back when he was a happy-go-lucky kid.
On the not so bright side, a bullet is about to enter his brainpan. But then, as much as the man wants to enter the spirit world, he’s not entirely insensitive. He’s thought things through. While he might have used his service-issued 9mm to do the job, he’s decided instead to go with a more lightweight .22—his backup piece. To some people, a pistol is a pistol. But to the man, nothing could be further from the truth. Because had he chosen to “eat his piece” by pressing the pistol barrel up against his mouth’s soft upper palate, he’d guarantee himself an instant death.
A good death.
Problem is, that “good death” would leave one hell of a spatter mess behind for some poor slob to clean up after his soul has left the building. So instead of choosing the safe “good death,” he’s opted for the more thoughtful no-mess, easy-clean-up kind of suicide—the assassin’s death. Because only a professional killer with a steady hand knows that a .22 caliber bullet hasn’t got a chance in hell of exiting the skull once it’s made jelly filling of your brains.
Outside the window, the wind picks up.
The chimes that hang from the eaves make a haunting, jingly ghost music.
The super-eight memories inside his head have ceased. His life story—the entire thirty-six year affair from birth to this very moment of truth have officially flashed before his eyes.
Roll credits . . .
Man swallows a lump, thumbs back the hammer. The mechanical action reverberates inside his skull.
There’s no stopping him; no penetrating the resolve of the already dead. He’s happy with himself for the first time in he can’t remember how long. So happy, his entire body weight seems to empty itself from out the bottoms of his feet. That’s when a red robin perches itself on the brick ledge just outside the picture window. Just a small scarlet-feathered robin that’s beating its wings and staring into the house with its black eyes.
“Don’t look,” the man whispers.
He plants a smile on his face a split second before he pulls the trigger.
Four Years Later
Albany, New York
140 miles northeast of New York City
I’m escorted into a four-walled basement room by two suited agents—one tall, slim and bearded, the other shorter, stockier, clean shaven. The space we occupy contains a one-way mirror which I know from experience hides a tripod-mounted video camera, a sound man and sever
al FBI agents, the identities of whom are concealed. There’s no furniture in the room, other than a long metal table and four metal chairs. No wallpaper, no soft lamp light, no piped-in music. Just harsh white overhead light, concrete and a funny worm smell.
As I enter the room for the first time, the tall agent tells me to take a seat at the table.
“We appreciate your cooperation,” the stocky agent jumps in.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch my reflection in the mirror.
I’m of medium height. Not tall, not short. Not too badly put together for having reached the big four-zero thanks to the cross-training routine I put myself on not long after my hospital release. Nowadays, my head is shaved. There’s a small button-sized scar behind my right earlobe in the place where the fragment of .22 caliber hollow-point penetrated the skull. I wear a black leather jacket over black jeans and lace-up combat boots left over from my military service during the first Gulf War. My eyeglasses are rectangular and retrofitted from a pair of cheap sunglasses I picked up at a Penn Station kiosk. They make my stubble- covered face seem slightly wider than it really is. So people have told me.
Having been led to my chair, I am then asked to focus my gaze directly onto the mirror so that the video man or woman stationed on the opposite side of the glass can adjust the shooting angle and focus.
“Please say something,” requests Stocky Agent while removing his suit jacket, setting it over the back of an empty chair.
“There once was a cop from Nantucket,” I say to break the ice.
But no one laughs.
“You get that?” the taller agent barks out to no one in particular.
“Okay to go,” comes a tinny, hidden speaker voice. “You gonna finish that poem, Mr. Moonlight?”
“Knock it off,” Stocky Agent orders. Then turns back to me. “Before we get started, can we get you a coffee? A cappuccino? You can get one right out of the new machine upstairs.”
“Mind if I burn one?”
Tall Bearded Agent purses his lips, cocks his head in the direction of a plastic No Smoking placard to the wall.
Stocky Agent makes a sour face, shakes his head, rolls up the sleeves on his thick arms. He reaches across the heavy wood table, grabs an ashtray, and clunks it down in front of me as if it were a bedpan.
“The rule doesn’t apply down here,” he says. Then, in this deep affected voice, he adds, “Let’s get started, Mr. Moonlight. You already know the routine. For now we just want to get to the bottom of the who, what, where’s and how’s of this train wreck.”
“You forgot the why,” I say, firing up a Marlboro Light. “You need to know the why to establish an entire familiarity with any given case.”
Stocky Agent does a double take, smiles. Like he knows I’m fucking with him.
“Don’t be a dick, Dick,” he says.
I guess it’s important not to take life too seriously. He laughs. I laugh. We all laugh. Ice officially broken. I exhale some smoke, sit back in my chair.
They’re right, of course. I know the drill. I know it’s the truth they’re after. The truth and almost nothing but the truth. But what they also want is my perspective—my take on the entire Scarlet Montana affair, from soup to peanuts. They want me to leave nothing out. I’ll start with my on-again/off-again love affair with my boss’s wife. Maybe from there I’ll move on to the dead bodies, my cut-up hands, the Saratoga Springs Russians, the Psychic Fair, the heroin, the illegal organ harvesting operation, the exhumations, the attempts on my life, the lies, deceptions and fuck-overs galore.
As a former full time Albany detective, I know that nobody sees the same thing through the same set of eyeballs. What’s important to one person might appear insignificant or useless to another. What those federal agents want right now inside the basement interview room is my most reliable version of the truth—an accurate, objective truth that separates fact from fantasy.
Theoretically speaking.
“Ask away,” I say, just as the buzzing starts up in the core of my head.
“Just start at the beginning,” Stocky Agent requests. “We have all night.”
Sitting up straight, I feel my right arm beginning to go numb on me. So numb I drop the lit cigarette onto the table. The inside of my head chimes like a belfry. Stocky Agent is staring at me from across the table with these wide bug eyes like my skull and brains are about to pull a JFK all over him.
But then, just as soon as it all starts, the chiming and the paralysis subsides.
With a trembling hand, I manage to pick up the partially smoked cigarette, exhale a very resigned, now smokeless breath and stamp the cancer stick out.
“Everything you wanna know,” I whisper. “You want me to tell you everything.”
“Everything you remember,” Tall Agent smiles. “If that’s at all possible.”
Stocky Agent pulls a stick of gum from a pack in his pants pocket, carefully unwraps the tin foil and folds the gum before stuffing it into his mouth.
Juicy Fruit. I can smell it from all the way across the table.
By all indicators, it’s going to be a long night.
“I think I’ll take that cappuccino after all,” I say.
For the first time since entering the interview room, I feel the muscles in my face constricting. I know without looking that my expression has turned into something miles away from shiny happy. I’m dead serious.
1
One Month Earlier
It all began with a choice.
Rather, not a choice, but a really bad decision—the decision to stay with Scarlet Montana for more than her allotted forty minutes. It was the last thing either one of us needed, but the first thing we wanted.
Or I wanted, anyway.
In my right mind, I’d spend an hour tops on a soothing massage, collect my forty bucks, make a swift exit. I swear on my dad’s cremated remains that’s exactly the way I planned it on my way over through the rain. It’s the reason I didn’t take the collapsible table with me; the reason I didn’t bring my oil belt, opting instead to shove a small plastic bottle into my gym shorts.
Get in quick, get out even quicker.
Just enough time for a quickie massage, while yours truly kneeled over the spot where she lay on her belly on the living room floor, only a white bath towel covering her heart-shaped glutes. In a professional manner, I’d allow my well-oiled hands to do what they had recently been trained (and nearly licensed) to do. At the same time I’d act as a kind of psychiatrist—a well-trusted sounding board to this thirty-eight year old woman who could no longer stand the sight of her life partner, Jake, the man who had given up any possibility of a happy marriage for the title of Albany Chief Detective.
Now instead of a wife, he had a second in command (my former A.P.D. partner, Mitchell Cain); instead of kids he had the South Pearl Street precinct full of upwardly mobile young cops; instead of a cozy suburban home life he had his late evenings, early mornings and more frequent days and nights spent away from home altogether.
As for the beautiful Scarlet, she might have had yours truly at her beck and call. But then instead of a family, she had a huge helping heap of loneliness sprinkled with despair.
Maybe I should have stayed put, ignored Scarlet’s phone call. Maybe I should have stayed true to my significant other, Lola, the brown-haired, brown-eyed lovely who was slowly but surely becoming my legit love interest. Maybe I should have listened more closely to my built-in shit detector and not dropped everything to answer the call.
My brain. . . it couldn’t always be trusted to make the right choice.
Braving a violent thunderstorm, I made the mile-long trek to her house on foot in less than ten or twelve minutes. This had to be just around nine o’clock.
Why?
Because I’d been right in the middle of my incline presses when I took the call. Jogging through the downpour across the lawns and suburban driveways in gym shorts, tennis shoes and gray t-shirt, I must have looked like the most insan
e neighborhood night-crawler you ever saw.
My intentions were good.
I promised myself I would stay with Scarlet for no more than forty, maybe sixty minutes. Considering the way I felt about Lola, I would fight to stay in control. Just a nice massage, an understanding listen, then a quick “Hang in there baby, everything’s gonna be just fine.” Maybe a hug, a peck to the cheek and then like lightning, I’d be gone in a flash.
Would I ever learn?
Why couldn’t I restrain myself?
Why couldn’t I just be satisfied with listening to her soft voice? Why did I have to stare into her soft green eyes? Why did I have to gaze upon her ocean of thick auburn hair and picture myself swimming in it? Why did I have to picture my lips touching her thick, heart-shaped lips? Why did I have to imagine them running the length of her sweet neck all the way down her back? Why did I have to gently slip my hands underneath the white towel to cup her perfectly carved glutes, to caress her milky white breasts?
Why was it that every time a despairing Scarlet Montana called me over to her lonely home I could not be content with concentrating on my new career while she pontificated upon the horrors of being married to the top cop in Albany?
So here’s how it happened with Scarlet inside the living room of my former department superior: our eyes connected, sort of like two deer that hopelessly lock horns. We jumped up from the floor and by the time we made it up to her second-floor bedroom not a stitch of clothing was left on our backs.
That’s exactly how it went down, only with one further significant fuck-up added to the mix.
That is, a series of fuck-ups.
The first being my incessant need to get down with Scarlet just because she rang the dinner bell. The second being the stupid decision to suck down one of her husband’s tall-necked Buds just before falling into a post-sex deep sleep on her queen-sized Serta. The third being the very sudden and unexplained homecoming of said husband. The fourth being Scarlet’s failure to wake me before I was jarred awake to the rattle and hum of an abruptly triggered overhead garage door.