Command of Silence Read online

  “I did hear it once. I’ll never forget it.”

  “I told Ray, but she says she’s got faith. Gotta keep the faith, huh, lawman?”

  “Right, Cootie. How about I go get my coffee cup filled and let you read that. You want something?”

  “A Coke would be excellent! I don’t get enough Coke. The chicks say it ruins their figure. Well, it don’t hurt mine none.”

  “Coke it is.”

  “And you wouldn’t have any Sunny Doodles back there, would you?”

  “I’ll check.”

  Leo is unfazed by our changes—now. I remember him as a fresh detective, all swagger and smirk, eyeing me and Ray for the first time with naked skepticism. After introducing me to the small group of officers, Ray said, “Before you think of her as mentally ill or a freak (Leo flushed at that), consider this: she survived abuse that would have destroyed most children, or adults, for that matter. It is her genius that she survived. Her genius. Multiplicity is not an illness. It is an adaptation. Remember it.” I didn’t feel like a genius then and I still don’t. But Ray is the one who showed me I am not crazy. That day, Ray explained she was going to take one of my personalities through regression. Leo smirked at that too. He thought he was going to see a show. But, the tough guy burst into tears when he heard the terrified screams of a three-year-old coming out of the mouth of a teenager. The second session, he almost fainted, but he kept coming back. Now, child cases are his specialty; he’s good at it, and we are happy to take some of the credit. When I told the priest how I knew Lieutenant Gianetti, he was shocked (“You allowed people to sit in on your therapy?”), equating that with, I suppose, playing to an audience during confessions. But inviting the task force to sit in on a few of my sessions with Ray was my idea, not hers. I wanted the world to know. I wanted to educate people, because if there had just once been one person—just one—who had come to my rescue when I was one or four or eleven, maybe I wouldn’t have lost so much of my life.

  Cootie let his eyes travel each page, top to bottom. He read all the notes made by Gianetti and the transcripts of all the interviews. He did it rapidly. He doesn’t know how he does it, he just does it. God knows he’s not that bright. He doesn’t understand what he reads, he’s simply a camera. A very annoying camera. The rest of us interpret what he logs into his memory. By the time Leo returned, Cootie was done. He took the Coke greedily and chugged it.

  “No Sunny Doodles or anything else today. The vending machine is bare. Cops eat a lot of crap. Sorry, Cooter.”

  “S’all right.” Cootie shrugged and settled into a slouch. He gulped the dregs of his soda. “Man, I love this stuff. Great seein’ you man. I gotta go.”

  Leo leaned back in his chair, coffee cup in hand, and waited the beat it took for me to come back.

  “Why do you give him that stuff?” I straightened my back.

  “Aw, it’s just a Coke. He likes it. You should keep it around for him.”

  “He drinks it. I get the gas.We do let him have it occasionally, but only as a reward for doing something for us. If you just give him what he wants all the time, our bribes won’t work.”

  He laughed. “You lead a complicated life, Shiloh.”

  We get that a lot.

  “You want coffee?”

  I declined.

  He nodded toward the file. “So what do you make of it?”

  Until I hacked into Cootie’s memory, I wouldn’t know all the details, but I had the gist of what he read. Don’t ask me how this works. I can’t explain it. “I didn’t know that the children went missing at different times. I assumed they’d been taken together.”

  “That is just one of the weird things in this case.” He took a sip of his coffee and scowled. Then he opened a drawer and rummaged till he came up with two packs of sugar. He ripped them open together and dumped their contents into his cup.

  “Not much here,” I said.

  “That’s the problem.” He rummaged again and came up with a spoon. He examined it and rubbed the back of it against his shirt and then stirred his coffee with it. “The family is all accounted for except the uncle.”

  “Michael Keating.”

  He threw the wet spoon back into his desk drawer and tried the coffee again.

  “Do you really like him for this?”

  He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “He’s what’s left over when you check out everybody else. You have a kid that disappears from a playground two blocks from her own building. The next day, an infant disappears from the same apartment where the first kid lives. The baby’s in the nursery, in her bassinette. The mother is in her room, also taking a nap. The boys are at a ball game in the park. The nanny is under sedation in her room, which is up the hall. Everybody is accounted for except the uncle who says that on both days he was hearing confessions. I didn’t think they did that anymore. So if he did know who he was talking to during the afternoon, the seal of confession prevents him from telling us so we can contact anybody to verify that he was sitting in that little box. Pretty damned convenient.”

  “But not necessarily untrue.Would somebody come forward on their own if they knew he was under suspicion? Just to help him out?”

  “Father O’Hagan said he’d put the word out but there hasn’t been a peep from anyone.”

  Leo is a practicing Catholic. He married a girl who had her heart set on being a nun till she met him. He used the priest’s title without thinking. I had had to ask the priest, “What can I call you? I can’t call you Father. It would confuse the children.”

  “What…oh…your…children, I mean…”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it a priest who…hurt you?”

  “No. It was my father. I can’t address you as Father because it would frighten them if they overheard me.”

  “I see. Where is your father?” he asked softly.

  “I trust he’s in hell.”

  He turned his head away slightly so I couldn’t see his eyes. I’m used to that, too. The men who have feelings are the ones who give me hope that there is a reason not to commit suicide, although Hawk remains skeptical. Not about the suicide part. She’d never let one of us do it. She has protected me from the knives, the pills and the razor blades, the lengths of clothesline that the others have kept hidden around and under mattresses and in the back of closets and even in the bottoms of our shoes. She remains skeptical that there is anything good in the nature of men. But that’s her job.

  “My name is Ryan,” he had said, and stopped asking me questions. Now I asked Leo, “Does Michael Keating have a motive?”

  “Other than the obvious?”

  I didn’t say anything and he continued.

  “He is close to the kids. Spends a lot of time with the boys. Takes them to games and that sort of thing.”

  “But not the games in the park on the days the girls went missing?”

  “No. They were at a school soccer game. The coach says both boys played both days. Anyway, sometimes they stay overnight at the rectory. Father O’Hagan has his own apartment, so Father Keating and an old housekeeper rattle around in the rectory by themselves. Since his brother died, Father Keating has devoted a lot of time to the widow and her children. This could be brotherly love, or he’s got other motives. Used to be, that would have been a good thing. Now it’s suspect. What a world, huh? The boys seem to think a lot of their uncle. They were shocked at any suggestions that he was fooling around with them. And they’re city kids—eight and ten—old enough and savvy enough to know what fooling around means.” He drank some more coffee, though he was clearly not enjoying it.

  I nodded. All that was in the file, but it was good to hear Leo go over it.

  “So Claudia Keating discovers she’s pregnant about the same time as her husband is diagnosed with cancer. Pancreatic, so he goes—” Leo snapped his fingers. “About that time, she takes in this woman and her little girl to help with the boys and with the new baby when it arrives. They seem to be getting along. So
Claudia is just home from the hospital, resting while the nanny takes her own daughter to the playground. Miriam is keeping watch on Anna who is playing by herself in the sandbox. She swears that she never took her eyes off the sandbox, but that some mothers or nannies were walking past and for a few seconds they were between her and the box and the sun was in her eyes. She squints and holds her hand up to shade her eyes and her kid is gone. She runs over and asks everyone, and within a minute or two, one of the mothers is on her cell calling 911. We’ve interviewed everyone we could find at the playground. Nobody remembers any strange people around. Just women with children. Then the next day, she is out of commission. They’ve given her something to knock her out, so Mrs. Keating takes her baby out in the buggy. She isn’t gone long, because she doesn’t want to leave Miriam alone too long, even though she is out cold. She takes her cell with her so she won’t miss a call. The housekeeper has the day off but had volunteered to come back at six to cook them supper. Mrs. Keating gets what she needs, goes home. The doorman confirms that was at two. She puts her baby in the bassinette, checks on Miriam who is still out cold, and she goes to her own room and lies down. At three thirty or so, she wakes up and goes to the nursery. No baby. No obvious break-in. Nothing is disturbed. The apartment door is still locked. She calls everybody she knows, including the doorman. She calls 911. I’m telling you, this is the weirdest case I’ve ever been on and we’ve got nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nobody knows anything. No ransom note. No fucking anything.”

  Leo never got used to these cases in which he specialized. I wondered when he would burn out. I belched. Damn it Cootie! I heard the kid laugh.

  I nodded. “So you don’t mind if we put our nose in it?”

  He shook his head. “Just tell me anything you come up with.” Leo isn’t territorial. He orders his team to just skip the pissing contests when it comes to kids.

  “It says here the baby was a newborn. I don’t know much about this stuff, but Mrs. Keating was strong enough to go out so soon after giving birth?”

  “Strong or not, she did it. The drugstore isn’t far. They get ’em in and out and up on their feet in no time these days. My Tina walked out of the delivery room. I felt worse than she did after Tony was born. I was a wreck.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Are you going to arrest Michael Keating?”

  “I’ll let you know. You know him?”

  “No. O’Hagan hired me. Well, actually, Claudia Keating hired me and the senior padre delivered her check. He came to see me this morning. Have you checked him out? He told me he had spent a lot of time with the family during and since the husband’s illness. He paints himself a model of virtue. Expensive clothes and all.”

  Leo snorted. “He and his virtue were playing tennis the day Anna went missing.”

  “Chilly for tennis, isn’t it?”

  “Indoor court. One of those pricey deals on the pier. And he was at a benefit lunch for Catholic Medical Missions when Charlotte disappeared. He was the keynote speaker and sat at a table on a raised platform in front of four hundred people.”

  “O’Hagan told me that Mrs. Keating was afraid you were going to arrest the nanny.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “He said it was the way you questioned her.”

  “We have a situation where a woman and her kid are in a fenced playground. I can’t think how you get a kid out of there without someone noticing. So it occurred to me that she didn’t have her daughter when she went in. She could have slipped in and people who recognized her assumed that Anna was running around somewhere.Then she sounds the alarm.‘My kid is gone!’ Everybody goes nuts. She has an excuse to go nuts. And then the real kidnapping takes place the next day. Charlotte.”

  “Why? There has been no ransom request. And where is Anna?”

  “Maybe she has friends taking care of her. Maybe that was to throw us off the scent of the real kidnapper, the one who took Charlotte. Maybe she gave Charlotte to someone. Just walked her over to the door and handed her out.”

  “It says here you took a blood sample from her that day, and she had taken almost enough pills to kill herself. It would have been impossible for her to have gotten up and taken Charlotte, even as far as the apartment door.”

  “I know. That’s the one kink in our theory. But maybe she has a tolerance for the stuff, or maybe she took the pills after she took the kid.”

  “If there’s no ransom demand—”

  “They could get their money on the other end. Selling the baby on the black market. And in a week or two or three, when it all dies down and leads are cold, she’ll say she is overwrought and wants to go back to Russia, and she’ll take the train to Little Odessa in Brooklyn where her Uncle Boris and Aunt Natasha are taking care of Anna and they’ll live happily ever after on all the money they got for selling Charlotte to a baby broker. Do you know how much a rich couple will pay for a white baby, no questions asked?”

  Leo’s cell phone rang. “Gianetti. Yeah, I’m here, Feeney, where the hell are you? You left half an hour ago to pick up a couple of burgers. What’d you have to do, kill the goddamn cow?” He slapped his hand over his phone and said to me, “You’ll be talking to her. Tell me what you think and about the priest too.”

  “Which one?”

  “Both of them.” Back into his phone he barked, “No I don’t want any goddamned mayonnaise! Who puts mayonnaise on a hamburger?”

  The padre showed up at four o’clock with a cab to take us to the Keating apartment building. I couldn’t get in the cab, so I gestured for him to go first. He hesitated, then I saw him decide to drop the chivalry and just get in. The woman who climbed in after him surprised him with one of her iridescent smiles and an extended hand. “Hi! I’m Hester!”

  Every family needs a prom queen and Hester is ours.

  Chapter 4

  Ray Martinez owes me her career. I owe her my life. We both made a good bargain. She was an intern doing her time on the worst ward in a state asylum when she found me locked in a maximum security cell. I was fourteen. I was thirteen when they locked me up, but they didn’t have anything secure enough in the children’s ward, so I landed the corner suite in the women’s wing, forgotten by just about everybody except the orderlies who brought me my food and meds and escorted me to the showers twice a week. Dr. Martinez asked that I be assigned to her. The head shrink was overworked and under-interested and waved her off with a Fine, waste your time if you want to. I was lucky that Ray wasn’t a sadist, because she’d had free rein. She could have done almost anything.

  The first thing she did was slowly dry out my drug-soaked brain. Then she introduced some life and color into my space. She brought me books, plants, paper and crayons (pens, pencils or anything pointy were against house rules), even a small battery-powered radio that got reception only intermittently, and a blue lava lamp, which fascinated me and which I still have. Then she observed, listened and kept me company. Gradually, she figured out that I was not schizophrenic, brain-damaged, retarded or possessed by demons—all diagnoses that had been made by various people since my arrival. She first gained the trust of Hester and then Cootie. After several weeks she met Bethy and June and Sula and then everyone. She thought. Hawk was the last to show, and Ray said she was the only one who scared her. She still does. It was Hawk, she realized, who had landed us and kept us in lockup, drugged to our eyelashes. She also soon learned that Hawk did us a favor. I was safer in my cell than I would have been in the asylum’s general population. As soon as Ray had a clearer picture of what she was dealing with, she explained it to us and asked if we would be her PROJECT. “This place wasn’t my first choice. Yours either. If you will trust me and forgive me when I make mistakes…I promise I will not abandon you. We’ll figure this thing out and then both of us can get out of this hellhole.”

  I didn’t know at the time how hard it had been for Ray, a lesbian, Mexican-American med student, older than all her classmates, to find her way into psychiatry. She had
to work her way through college and medical school, and the six more years to become a shrink. She was not physically imposing. On the short side, a little plump, but that look was deceiving. She was strong as granite. When we got to know each other, she told me she worked out and took martial arts classes. “So I can defend myself with you crazy people in here.” She wasn’t kidding and we took no offense. She didn’t mean just the Company. The asylum was a dangerous place for the weak and unwary. Ray was neither. Her glossy black hair she kept short. She had large, warm brown eyes, still does, and a smile she still shows rarely, but that can light a room. I marveled at her stamina. I still do.

  I agreed to be her study subject and she said she would get us out of the asylum as soon as she could and treat us free of charge for as long as we wanted. It took three years, but she was as good as her word. When she began to publish articles about her work with us, her reputation soared. She now has a lucrative private practice; she sits on the boards of numerous hospitals and clinics; she’s written two books and is in demand world-wide for lectures and seminars as well as the occasional talk show. And she is still on call for us twenty-four/seven, though we don’t need to call her much anymore.

  Only recently did it dawn on me that she would have treated us for free anyhow, but by striking this deal, she made me feel like a partner instead of a charity case. Ray is a good human being. That was really the beginning of our therapy and being able to function: meeting one good human being.

  I wondered how much Ray knew about this particular case. Since Cootie had read the police file, I presumed that now I knew more than she did—still precious little. The file was thick enough. Statements by a gaggle of people with varying degrees of involvement with the family. But something was missing, or wrong, and we’d have to sit for a while ruminating on Cootie’s memory, and I’d have to ask the questions myself to gauge the answers before I could figure it out.

  Back in my office, while I waited for O’Hagan, I chewed on the tough slice of pizza I’d picked up on the way back from the station and started a fresh notebook. Even when the case is only a surveillance to determine who is sleeping with whom, I keep a notebook. Usually, I am holding the pen, but if we switch and somebody else makes an entry, it doesn’t matter because I know everyone’s handwriting and we always note the time.