Chapter 1
My feet pounded on the packed earth, its contrast stark to the dense foliage crowding around it. The sprays of wildflowers strangling their way through the underbrush would've been pretty under other circumstances. Today, they were blurs of yellow, pink and lavender while I rushed by.
Rivers of sweat soaked my shirt in a wide V that yoked front and back. Half-moons bled into full under my arms. My eyes stung with the beads of salty condensation dripping from my brow. My heart punctuated the thuds between footfalls with a mantra: look upset; look upset.
Breath sucked into my lungs like the baleen of a whale. Through my glazed vision I could see it ahead, the area along the path cordoned off by too familiar yellow tape. The crime scene had been plotted. The body found. Law enforcement collected clues that would be analyzed, dissected, assembled to bring into focus the portrait of a killer.
Running was necessary. A certain response would be expected in a matter of seconds. Lessons learned swirled in my brain. Could I pull it off?
I knew what it was supposed to look like, the horror, the shock, the grief. How could I contain the urge to smirk? Would I successfully quell the drive for a fist pump and a loud screech of victory?
David Levine saw me rushing headlong for the crime scene border. I wasn't close enough to hear his voice, but I'm a very good lip-reader. Sometimes you have to be in my line of work.
Who the hell told her to come out here? Jesus!
Obviously, David is Jewish. Yet he has no qualms about using certain religiously oriented epithets. Anything in the Common Era is fair game. He didn't want me here for obvious reasons. I had to show up for only one.
Rick Hamilton used to be my husband. Now, he was dead.
Oh, he was also under the microscope of a certain organized crime investigation being conducted by the FBI. Hence our divorce. Appearances are important, and I had to maintain mine. So here I am.
David's arm restrained me. "Helen, no. You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't see him like this."
Sweat served two purposes. It's virtually impossible to tell the difference between it and tears, particularly when the mineralized moisture stings the eyes and burns them red and raw. I shoved his hand away from me. "I have to see."
Under the yellow tape, I saw something familiar. Rick's face lay side-down in the dirt. The earth around his head was brown-black, soaked with the blood that sprayed from the insult and oozed out with the aid of gravity.
I stopped, hesitated for a beat too long (maybe it looked like shock, at least I hope it did), and tried to crumble to his side where I planned to commit the first unforgivable sin of crime scene processing. Touching the body.
David grabbed me. "No, Helen. You can't touch him."
Dozens of chary eyes pinned me. I clung to David in a measure of self-protection. Surely they didn't suspect...
"It's obvious what happened here, Helen," David's low voice shrouded me in an impenetrable armor, shielded me from the skepticism of my peers. "They were afraid he would tell us what he knew, so they had him assassinated."
Yes. That's exactly what it looked like. It was precisely what it was designed to look like.
Assassins are supposed to be sociopathic monsters. They stay off the radar easier that way. Forget the grid. They're ghosts. That's what we're taught to believe. Police. Television. Books. Assassins are boogeymen, not quite urban legends, but certainly not your next-door neighbors, your friends, your coworkers. They don't have regular lives. They don't have wives, and they certainly don't have children.
They have whores who know better than to get pregnant, or at the very least, take care of the problem quickly and efficiently. Such cold-blooded killers feel no empathy. Emotion is as foreign as the speech of your run of the mill alien from another galaxy. Large men lurk in the darkness. They only shave off the five o'clock shadow every three days. Burly men in black clothes, they drive nondescript sedans with stolen license plates.
If they have homes, there are no white picket fences, no perfectly manicured lawns and definitely not a sturdy porch swing, its perfectly stained oak slats swinging from shiny chains fastened above by hooks skewered into the ceiling. They don't water the begonias potted on the same porch. They don't stumble out in a bathrobe to rescue the morning paper seconds before the sprinkler system kicks on to quench that thirsty idyllic lawn.
No, the world believes that an assassin drifts from seedy motel to cusp of condemned tenement. He lives between cryptic phone calls on throwaway cell phones, or busted up phone booths on deserted corners (before the advent of cellular technology). His contracts are not sought. They sort of roll in unbidden, because his reputation is whispered in all the right circles. And while it is a technicality that he works for someone, the assassin has no boss. The hit must be a one-time deal. Otherwise, the risk to his anonymity is too great. It makes him grow roots, become corporeal, less than legend or ghost. He is real.
Right?
Of course that's right. Pop culture says so. The mafia hires assassins to take care of their problems. Who better would another group of sociopaths find than the mother of all psychos?
Wendell Eriksson was the exception to the rule as prescribed by Hollywood and company. He slaughtered men, and sometimes women at the behest of anyone if the price was right.
And he would rock me on that porch swing every balmy summer night, telling me about life and death and everything that happens to a person in between. Wendell taught me things without even underscoring a single word of his lessons. I learned that the very best way to become a ghost is to hide in plain sight. If you want to stay ten steps ahead of the law, join their ranks.
Most important, if you want to be the last person to ever land on a suspect list, you must be very careful. It's not about having a life that is little more than a façade. To be successful, you have to live life like that American dream is real. Embrace it. Wallow in it. Find sane and normal and hold on for dear life.
Oh, and always make sure that twenty people will give you an alibi, no matter what the job calls for or where it takes you.
These were the lessons that allowed my father to be the most prolific hired killer in the history of the world. As far as the authorities could tell at the time of his arrest, Wendell racked up a total of two victims. My adult memory tallied the number a bit higher. And those were merely the people he killed. What shocked the hell out of me was Wendell's little side venture.
He was an adoption specialist.
Apparently, death was too kind for some of Dad's victims.
He read an article in the newspaper to me one night on the swing. "Hell of a thing, Sprout. If I were these poor bastards, I'd wish I were dead rather than live the rest of my life wondering what happened to you."
He tousled my honey blonde hair.
I was nine or ten years old at the time, but the family whose baby was stolen from their home in the dead of night never left my memory completely. I supposed in hindsight that it was part of the reason I wasn't so terribly surprised when additional charges were tacked onto my father's grand jury indictment. Of course they had suspicion and no proof. Dad escaped the noose on that one.
Did I say he surprised me? No, the real mind fuck for me came in another form.
I stood over the gaping hole in the ground and watched my mother's coffin as it was lowered into the earth. Her minister uttered some illogical nonsense about ashes and dust and a resurrection that would one day restore her broken body before she was joined with the righteous for some blissful eternity.
He glossed over the fact that Marie was Wendell's partner in crime. Reverend Denial neglected to mention that Dad had a third side business, one in which Mom was probably the mastermind. It was that part time gig that landed my father in Attica for the rest of his life.
The lessons he taught me...
Those were not easily shed. Give people what they expect. You must always blend in, Sprout. Never draw attention to yourself. If you do, let it be for being brilliant and upstanding, always above reproach. Make it impossible for the world to ever believe you could do something that would shock them.
Yes, Dad was a master at that. To say that Wendell Eriksson, being unveiled as Jersey Third Eye, the most notorious low-risk armored truck thief in the five boroughs and beyond, shocked the neighbors was an understatement.
Even in the bad times, Dad was a raging success. The evidence against Mom was ignored. Not just discarded, it was deemed hateful lies told by the wickedest man alive. How dare he slander Marie Eriksson's good name?
Well-meaning advice poured in, a flood of salt into the already deep wound where my heart had been evacuated. Don't lift a finger to help him, Helen. He's trash. Wendell Eriksson not only deceived his friends and neighbors, but he pulled the wool over his brothers in blue's eyes for twenty plus years.
My dad, the formerly decorated Detective Wendell Eriksson, would stand trial and the city would weep when his death sentence would be commuted to life without the possibility of parole. They were further outraged when his incarceration included isolation from the general population. Can't have the murderer getting a filed down toothbrush stabbed into a kidney. No, that wouldn't be justice.
Ah Wendell's lessons.
On the outside, I was the perfect daughter. Outrage made my voice tremble at the merest hint that I even had a father. My mother became the saint in my speech that the rest of the world created. Yes, of course Wendell dragged her unwillingly into his life of crime.
They had the luxury of ignorance. I did not.
Dad said Morse code was a lost art. He employed it at his arraignment hearing. He tapped out the name to what I later learned was an offshore bank. Conveying the account number to me was a little trickier, but he managed that too.
A brilliant guy, my father, despite his flaws. The look in his eyes when they met mine before he was led out of the courtroom after being denied bail told me everything I needed to know. Don't get involved, Sprout. Live your life. Stay in the shadows. Make me proud.
Lessons learned. Dad got his wish. I was nineteen at the time of the incident when life as I knew it ended. I turned 38 last week, and I haven't seen my father since that arraignment hearing. I didn't go to his trial. I didn't beg for leniency at his sentencing hearing. There were no baked goods wrapped with loving care and addressed to a certain inmate at Attica after New York State put a halt on executions. I had so successfully distanced myself from Wendell Eriksson by then that nobody seemed to remember that he had a daughter. Not even the media vultures.
My father did everything right. In the end, it didn't matter. My sainted mother tried to kill him, to presumably make off with their lifetime of ill-gotten gains. He stepped up and carried the consequences, so I wouldn't suffer. He let the world canonize a woman who wanted him dead, but ended up taking her life instead of his.
That's my dad. A stand up cop. A doting father. A ruthless killer. A man who made mistakes so I would learn from them. Thanks to his sacrifice, I won't make the worst mistake he made. I will never take money in exchange for services rendered. Thanks to Dad, I don't need a paycheck.
Had I done everything right, or was Rick's death conjuring questions about my past, about the long dead relationship I had with a father who no doubt still loves me very much?
Even though a week had passed, the memory hadn't faded. If it were possible, the damned nightmare had become more vividly etched with each passing hour.
Those were not the thoughts that should've been running through my mind right now, as I stood over another gaping wound in the ground, listened to a godless invocation this time (Rick and I never were keen on religion). Questions that were muted two years ago when Rick was arrested for money laundering were etched into every face around me now. My abrupt divorce was compelling evidence of my ignorance of Rick's business practices.
And I was ignorant. It violated Dad's cardinal rule. Compartmentalization was absolutely necessary. Never could one sully the life of perfection with something so easily traceable. While a husband didn't necessarily have to be boring, it was a plus in my case. Banking. It doesn't get much duller than that.
My mind won't stop thinking. Why are they looking at me this way? This case is a no-brainer. Rick laundered money for Sullivan "Sully" Marcos. He got caught. Two years into interrogations and negotiations, Sully got worried that Rick was going to cut a deal and had him killed. Open and shut.
Right?
I don't pray, but the eyes skewering me gave me great temptation to utter one simple plea to the great unseen being in the cosmos. Please let them believe the obvious.
Thunder rumbled overhead. Ominous. A symphony of umbrellas whumped against the air in preparation for the coming rain. Its earthy smell hung heavily around me.
David perched his umbrella over my head. I hadn't brought one, an outward sign of my grief, but not really. It, like everything else was a calculated reaction to Rick's brutal murder. I was too overwhelmed to remember the little things.
The officiant concluded the ceremony without ashes and dust or even a single may God have mercy on his soul. I watched the casket slowly sink. This is the part I don't want to see. It brings back too many memories of Marie and what she selfishly did to my father.
I stepped away from David's shield. Another stepped forward. And another. And more until I was surrounded by stern faces with the words-confess your crime-etched into the withers of their foreheads.
"Agent Eriksson, we need to talk." Mark Seleeby. Head witch hunter in the crusade to use any means at his disposal to prosecute Sully Marcos.
"Not today, Mark."
"Yes. Today. Right now."
Our eyes met. Mark isn't a particularly large man, and I'm too tall. "Not without an attorney."
"Agent Eriksson, you aren't under arrest, so you aren't entitled to one. I can have you brought before the office of professional-"
I turned abruptly, tuned Seleeby out. "No attorney? Not in this lifetime."
David stood behind me, chin tucked to chest. Guilt radiated from under his umbrella. He knew what was coming. Had he seen this too? I pulled the badge and the side arm out of my purse and thrust them under his nose.
"Consider this my resignation."