Appointments With Death

“YOU know about them, right?” She allowed me barely a second to reply before she added, “Come on.” She punctuated the plea with a hurried sigh, a little huff that I found more plaintive than insistent. “Don’t play opaque shrink with me, please. I don’t have … time. Just tell me you know about them.”

I stole a glance out the window, looking for present danger. I hated that I was frightened again.

I had to resist an urge to run from my own office.

I thought, Maybe this woman is crazy. The idea buoyed me. I wanted “them” to be the F.B.I., or the C.I.A. I wanted her to warn me about brain-scanning devices installed by the government in fluorescent lightbulbs. I wanted my new patient to be nuts.

The horror of psychosis was preferable to the alternative.

It had been more than a year since her husband’s small plane disappeared in the vast Sangre de Cristo range in the southern Rockies. His remains went undiscovered until hikers stumbled across the wreckage in the depths of a north-facing canyon 13 months after the crash.

To me, the lack of speculation in the news media after the funeral was heartening. Although I remained far from convinced that he died accidentally, I had begun to reconsider my conclusion about his manner of death. Perhaps it was too paranoid by half.

But the presence of his widow in my office caused my months of dogged rationalization to evaporate like virga. I was, again, feeling a conviction that Rick Conway, a famous man I’d never met, had been murdered.

I recognized her only because I had watched from afar the day she appeared at a press conference confirming her husband’s death. On television, she’d looked older than her 43 years. In my office, months later, she looked younger.

I was wary even before she said her first words to me. Boulder has no shortage of yoga studios, bicycle shops or psychotherapists. If she were seeking help to cope with her loss, she would have chosen a different shrink. The likelihood that Rick Conway’s widow would show up in my Walnut Street office? Those were Lotto odds.

She sat on the sofa. “I’m Dana Powers … Conway,” she said as introduction, adding the additional surname to the one she’d used to make her appointment. “This is more difficult than I thought it would be. And I thought it would be really hard.”

Her opening felt practiced, as though she’d rehearsed it on the drive down the hill from her summer place up Magnolia. I had once toured the tasteful digs with my wife during a fund-raiser for the Women’s Wilderness Institute.

I played along. I said, “How can I be of help?”

She uncrossed her legs. Recrossed them. She looked at me, forcing a flat smile. She glanced away, shaking her dangling foot from side to side. I thought nothing of any of it. The beginning of psychotherapy is an awkward dance.

I was holding on to a far-fetched hope that this was psychotherapy.

“I kept telling myself I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

I thought: Then go. It’s not too late to change your mind.

“You know what he used to say to the kids?” she said. “He used to tell them that nobody gets hurt in the air. Uh, wrong.” Her eyes glistened with tears at the mention of the kids. My memory was that she had a boy and a girl, college age.

I didn’t know what “getting hurt in the air” meant. In therapy, context lags content. In life, bad news is always a step faster than I am. It would all catch up with me soon enough.

That’s when she pivoted and said the words that made me pray that she was crazy: “You know about them, right?”

Her heel popped out of her fancy pump. I couldn’t ignore the fact that she was much too thin. Or that, in her flirty sundress and short linen jacket, she was not dressed to visit a Boulder therapist. Her outfit indicated another destination.

The swinging shoe slid from her toes and fell to the floor. Oh, God. Do a Venn diagram of (a) women with $500 pumps who get quality pedicures, and (b) paranoid schizophrenics, and you will find precious little overlap between the circles.

Dana Conway wasn’t psychotic.

She said: “I know you know. Just admit it.”

The frustration in her voice was palpable. I wondered what she read in my eyes. Acknowledgment? Terror? The old blank slate?

“I also know you know what they do. Rick? He called them the Enders.”

The Enders? I knew them as the Death Angels. The tag came from an entrepreneur I’d treated in the months before Rick Conway went missing. At great expense, my patient had hired a secretive organization to kill him should injury or illness leave him in a more debilitated state than he chose to endure. The death enforcers’ obligation was to end his life in a way that would raise no suspicion. My patient never sugarcoated the arrangement; he had signed up to be murdered.

During his final session, my patient informed me that the Death Angels were aware that he had disclosed their existence to me. They also knew, he cautioned, that I had a family. He instructed me to destroy my records. He didn’t have to warn me never to mention them to anyone.

The Death Angels discharged their commitment to him less than a week later.

I had been on guard since, dreading the day the Death Angels might come calling.

That day had apparently arrived. I was sitting with the widow of a man whose death, I suspected, had been arranged by the same posse. Dana Conway had somehow learned about the organization of killers, and she was eager to chat about them, with me.

She either didn’t understand the danger, or she was reckless.

Of those two options, I had no favorite.

She said: “I was afraid you would be like this. O.K. You know them as the Death Angels. Same group. Will you help me? No one else has any experience with this.”

That’s because people who have experience with this are called “deceased.”

The widow knew my dead patient’s personal nickname for the assassins. The list of people who could have divulged that information was short. My patient’s son, Adam, 18 when his father died, knew that fact. So did my dead patient’s friend, a lawyer named Jimmy Lee. Easy enough to find out, I thought.

Ending the pretense that this was therapy, I called a friend on my cell. Raoul Estevez, like Rick Conway, was rich and connected. For over a decade, they had poured obscene amounts of money into the same Boulder venture capital pools.

While I placed the call, Rick’s widow stared at me as though she feared I would vanish if she blinked.

I replied to Raoul’s energetic “Hola,” with: “It’s me, I only have a second, got a question. You know a lawyer in the metro area, maybe runs in your crowd, does reinsurance litigation? Somebody you may have met in —”

“My crowd?” Raoul laughed. “Jimmy Lee? Is that who you mean? He’s at Hart & Browns —”

“Him, thanks,” I said. “I’ll call you later.” I killed the call. If Raoul knew Jimmy Lee, then Rick Conway knew Jimmy Lee.

Dana’s eyes went wide. “You’re thinking Jimmy told me? Really? No.” She shook her head. “Not him. You don’t want to know. Trust me.”

You put my family in jeopardy. Trusting you is not an option.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. I waited until we locked eyes. “What I am about to say is not therapy,” I said. “It is advice. I don’t give much advice, because most of the time I don’t pretend to know what people should do with their lives. But I know what you should do: Walk away from what you think you know. Never mention the Enders, or the Death Angels.”

“But —”

“No ‘but.’ Are you in any legal difficulty because of your husband’s death?”

“No.”

“Are you comfortable financially? Set for life?”

“Absolutely.”

“Walk away. Your husband died in a crash. Now walk away.”

She reached into her bag and retrieved a sheet of paper. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I can’t.”

I didn’t care about her evidence. I gave it a cursory glance. Lab results. The laboratory was in Bern, Switzerland. I am a Ph.D. doctor, not an M.D. doctor. The highlighted numbers were gibberish to me. I assumed they confirmed some serious illness. I said, “Your husband was sick?”

“Rick? Actually, not that sick yet, but …”

But it wasn’t for her to decide. The way it worked was that Rick alone determined how ill he’d be when the guillotine blade fell.

Someone pounded on the door. Hard, twice. She jumped as she tried to contain a gasp. I froze. The door to the hallway was always locked. “Are you expecting someone?” I said.

She mouthed, “No,” as the pounding repeated.

I told myself, The Death Angels wouldn’t knock. “Leave,” I said. “Use the back door.” It led to the neglected yard. “Then run.”

“They’ll find me. If not today, tomorrow. You don’t get it. I’m not here as Rick’s widow, wondering what happened. I’m here as an Enders’… client.”

Fresh jeopardy permeated every cell of my body. “You are —”

“Rick and I signed up together a long time ago, after he had that scare on K2.”

I said, “And you’ve reached your … threshold, as well?”

She lifted the paper. “The lab results are mine. But Rick and I added a … restriction to the agreement. Regardless of our health, the second of us to reach threshold could not be … killed until 60 days after our youngest turned 21. My daughter, my baby, turned 21 53 days ago. I’m not ready. That’s why I need your help. There is no one else.”

The pounding resumed. A voice I didn’t recognize called out, “Dr. Gregory?”

That’s me, Alan Gregory. I walked across the room, opened the door. A young man was straining to look past me into the office.

“Hello, Adam,” I said to my dead patient’s son. We’d met once. He had grown into his father’s clone, thin and angular with thick hair and blue eyes that seemed lit by halogen.

“Hi, Dr. Gregory. I’m sorry to bust in. But …”

The puzzle was solved: Adam had revealed to Dana that I’d learned about the Death Angels from his father. I was left to figure out how to tell Adam I could not be of any help.

I could feel Dana moving into place near me.

Adam darted forward suddenly, squeezing into the office. As he turned, I spotted a pistol the size of a bazooka in his right hand.

My eyes jumped from the gun to his eyes.

He said, “Hey, Dana.” He rested his left hand on the side of her face.

The moment was electric. Aggressive? Erotic? Was Adam there to protect her, or to kill her? Was he there as someone who knew what it was like to watch a parent murdered, or had he crossed over and become one of the executioners? I could not tell.

He raised the gun.

I waited to see where he would point it.

He leaned forward. Into Dana’s hair, barely audible to me, he said, “Did you tell him about the baby?”

Stephen White is the author of the Alan Gregory thriller series and the forthcoming novel “The Siege.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/opinion/02white.html

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Guy Walks Into a Bar…

SHE was about 19. No older. Maybe younger. An insurance company would have given her 60 more years to live. I figured a more accurate projection was 36 hours, or 36 minutes if things went wrong from the get-go.

She was blond and blue-eyed, but not American. American girls have a glow, a smoothness, from many generations of plenty. This girl was different. Her ancestors had known hardship and fear. That inheritance was in her face and her movements. Her eyes were wary. Her body was lean. Not the kind of lean you get from a diet, but the Darwinian kind of lean you get when your grandparents had no food — and either starved or didn’t. Her movements were fragile and tense, a little alert, a little nervous, though on the face of it she was having as good a time as a girl could get.

She was in a New York bar, drinking beer, listening to a band, and she was in love with the guitar player. That was clear. The part of her gaze that wasn’t wary was filled with adoration, and it was all aimed in his direction. She was probably Russian. She was rich. She was alone at a table near the stage and she had a pile of A.T.M.-fresh twenties in front of her and she was paying for each new bottle with one of them and she wasn’t asking for change. The waitresses loved her.

There was a guy further back in the room, wedged on an upholstered bench, staring at her. Her bodyguard, presumably. He was a tall, wide man with a shaved head and a black T-shirt under a black suit. He was part of the reason she was drinking beer in a city bar at the age of 19 or less. It wasn’t the kind of glossy place that had a policy about under-age rich girls, either for or against. It was a scruffy dive on Bleecker Street, staffed by skinny kids trying to make tuition money, and I guessed they had looked at her and her minder and made a snap decision against trouble and in favor of tips.

I watched her for a minute, and then I looked away. My name is Jack Reacher, and once I was a military cop, with heavy emphasis on the past tense. I have been out nearly as long as I was in. But old habits die hard. I had stepped into the bar the same way I always step anywhere, which is carefully. One-thirty in the morning. I had ridden the A train to West Fourth and walked south on Sixth Avenue and made the left on Bleecker and checked the sidewalks. I wanted music, but not the kind that drives large numbers of patrons outside to smoke.

The smallest knot of people stood next to a place with half a flight of stairs leading up to its door. There was a shiny black Mercedes sedan parked on the curb, with a driver behind the wheel. The music coming out of the place was filtered and dulled by the walls but I could hear an agile bass line and some snappy drumming. So I walked up the stairs and paid a $5 cover and shouldered my way inside.

Two exits. One the door I had just come through, the other at the end of a long dark restroom corridor way in back. The room was narrow and about 90 feet deep. A bar on the left at the front, then some upholstered horseshoe benches, then a cluster of freestanding tables on what, on other nights, might have been a dance floor. Then the stage, with the band on it.

The band looked as if it had been put together by accident after a misfiling incident at a talent agency. The bass player was a stout old black guy in a suit with a vest. He was plucking away at an upright bass fiddle. The drummer could have been his uncle. He was a big old guy sprawled comfortably behind a small, simple kit. The singer was also a harmonica player and was older than the bass player and younger than the drummer and bigger than either one.

The guitarist was completely different. He was young and white and small. Maybe 20, maybe 5-foot-6, maybe 130 pounds. He had a fancy blue guitar wired to a crisp new amplifier and together the instrument and the electronics made sharp sounds full of space and echoes. The amp must have been turned up to 11. The sound was incredibly loud. It was as if the air in the room was locked solid. It had no more capacity for volume.

But the music was good. The three black guys were old pros, and the white kid knew all the notes, and when and how and in what order to play them. He was wearing a red T-shirt and black pants and white tennis shoes. He had a very serious expression on his face. He looked foreign. Maybe Russian, too.

I spent the first half of the first song checking the room, counting people, scanning faces, parsing body language. Old habits die hard. There were two guys facing each other across a table with their hands underneath it. One selling, one buying, obviously, the deal done by feel and confirmed with furtive glances. The bar staff was scamming the owner by selling store-bought beer out of an ice chest. Two out of three domestic bottles were legit, from the refrigerator cabinets, and then the third came from their own cooler. I got one of them. A wet label and a big margin. I carried the bottle to a corner seat and sat down with my back to the wall.

It was at that point that I saw the girl alone at her table, and her bodyguard on his bench. I guessed the Mercedes outside was theirs. I guessed Daddy was a B-grade oligarch, millions but not billions, indulging his daughter with four years at N.Y.U. and a credit card that never stopped working.

Just two people out of 80 in the room. No big deal.

Until I saw two other guys.

They were a pair. Tall young white men, cheap tight leather jackets, heads shaved by blunt razors that had left nicks and scabs. More Russians, probably. Operators, no question. Connected, no doubt. Probably not the best the world has ever seen, but probably not the worst, either. They were sitting far apart from each other but their twin gazes were trained on the girl alone at the table. They were tense, determined, to some degree nervous. I recognized the signs. Many times I had felt the same way myself. They were about to go into action.

So two B-grade oligarchs had a beef, and one was protecting his kid with drivers and bodyguards, and the other was sending guys around the world to snatch her. Then would come ransom, and extortion, and demands, and fortunes would change hands, or uranium leases, or oil rights, or coal or gas.

Business, Moscow-style.

But not usually successful business. Kidnappings have a thousand different dynamics and go wrong a thousand different ways. In my experience, average life expectancy for a kidnap victim is 36 hours. Some survive, but most don’t. Some die right away, in the initial panic.

The girl’s pile of twenties was attracting waitresses like wasps at a picnic. And she wasn’t shooing any of them away. She was taking one fresh bottle after another. And beer is beer. She was going to have to visit the restroom, soon and often. And the restroom corridor was long and dark, and it had a street exit at the end of it.

I watched her in the gaudy, reflected light, with the music shrieking and pounding all around me. The two guys watched her. Her bodyguard watched her. She watched the guitarist. He was concentrating hard, key changes and choruses, but from time to time he would lift his head and smile, mostly at the glory of being up on the stage, but twice directly at the girl. The first of those smiles was shy, and the second was a little wider.

The girl stood up. She butted the lip of her table with her thighs and shuffled out from behind it and headed for the corridor in back. I got there first. The sound from the band howled through it. The ladies’ room was halfway down. The men’s room was all the way at the end. I leaned on the wall and watched the girl walk toward me. She was up on high heels and she was wearing tight pants and her steps were short and precise. Not drunk yet. She was Russian. She put a pale palm on the restroom door and pushed. She went inside.

Less than 10 seconds later the two guys stepped into the corridor. I guessed they would wait there for her. But they didn’t. They glanced at me like I was a part of the architecture and shouldered in through the ladies’ room door. One after the other. The door slammed behind them. The music played on.

I went in after them. Every day brings something new. I had never been in a women’s bathroom before. Stalls on the right, sinks on the left. Bright light and the smell of perfume. The girl was standing near the back wall. The two guys were facing her. Their backs were to me. I said, “Hey,” but they didn’t hear. Too much noise. I caught them by the elbows, one in each hand. They spun around, ready to fight, but then they stopped. I am bigger than the Frigidaires they had been dreaming about back home. They stood still for a second and then pushed past me and pulled the door and headed out.

The girl looked at me for a moment with an emotion I couldn’t read, and then I left her to do what she needed to do. I went back to my seat. The two guys were already back in theirs. The bodyguard was impassive. He was watching the stage. The band was finishing up. The girl was still in the bathroom.

The music stopped. The two guys got up and headed back toward the corridor. The room was suddenly crowded with people standing and moving. I went over to the bodyguard and tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. He took no notice. He didn’t move at all, until the guitar player started backing away off the stage. Then he got up, the two movements perfectly synchronized, and I knew I had gotten it all wrong.

Not an indulged daughter. An indulged son. Daddy had bought the guitar and the amp and hired backup musicians. The boy’s dream. Out of the bedroom, onto the stage. His driver at the curb, his bodyguard watching all the way. Not a team of two from his rival, but a team of three. An adoring groupie. The boy’s dream. A classic honey trap. A last-minute tactical conference in the bathroom, and then action.

I shoved my way through to the back and got to the street well ahead of the bodyguard, just as the girl was hugging the boy and turning him through a half circle and pushing him toward the two guys. I hit the first one hard and the second one harder and got blood from his mouth all over my shirt. The two guys went down and the girl fled and then the bodyguard showed up. I made him give me his T-shirt. Bloodstains attract attention. Then I left through the front.

The obvious move would have been to turn right, so I turned left, and I got the 6 train at Bleecker and Lafayette, heading north, the last-but-one car. I settled in and checked the faces. Old habits die hard.

Lee Child is the author, most recently, of “Gone Tomorrow.”

__________

Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07child.html

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Body of Work

THE scrabble of rodents on the roof is only mimicry, the work of wind and weeping willows.

James Brecht thinks the sound is made by slithering ropes dangling from a hovering helicopter. He fears a SWAT team might soon descend.

When I note that we can hear no engine noise or rotor blades, Brecht says, “You guys have stealth choppers. Hush-mode flight. Quiet as dirigibles. I know all about it, Harry.”

I have told him my first name, in hope of establishing a bond.

Now I risk stoking his paranoia. “But we have stealth ropes, too. Made of frictionless nanofiber. You’d never hear them.”

“Frictionless? How do you hold onto them?”

“Very tightly, Jim. And with nanofiber gloves.”

People believe anything if you use words like nano and quantum.

On the sofa, Nora Sparrow believes none of it. Her gimlet-eyed stare conveys her wish that I would be more earnest, more solemn, less myself, more Denzel Washington. But she says nothing.

My conversation with Brecht rivets her. Of course, she is allowed no other entertainment, restrained as she is by the chain that links her left ankle to a ringbolt in the floor.

Brecht sits in an armchair, dressed in black, hair as overstyled as that of the more exuberant contestants on “American Idol.” I could take him out in two seconds, if he did not remain so diligent about keeping a thumb on the BOOM button of the remote detonator.

Nora’s gaze never strays to her kidnapper’s right hand. She wears a vest packed with enough explosives to take the house off the real-estate market forever.

In the armchair across the coffee table from Brecht, I say, “This is just a date gone bad, Jim. I’ve had dates turn out worse.”

I am so alive, as I will never be again. His thumb is on the button, and I am so alive.

He is concerned about my bona fides. “So you do nothing but hostage negotiations?”

“I’m a homicide detective first, a negotiator as needed.”

He pretends calm, but his eyes shine with a desperation as poignant as that of a politician hooked up to a polygraph. “Homicide detective? I haven’t killed anyone.”

Raising my eyebrows, I point to the naked dead woman standing in a corner of the living room, supported by a metal armature.

“Not tonight,” Brecht says. “I haven’t killed anyone tonight.”

“Which puts you in a strong negotiating position,” I assure him. “As long as no one dies tonight, you’re holding all the cards.”

Post-mortem, the blonde in the corner had been treated with antibacterial solutions and preservatives before being submerged in a polyurethane bath that sealed her in an airtight glaze. Brecht had been enchanted by an exhibition of cadaver art in a city museum. He thought he might be talented enough to create better work than he saw in that display — and if not better, at least more erotic.

An equally glossy and dead brunette is wired to a straight-backed chair to one side of the fireplace.

“Why don’t I take the vest of explosives off Ms. Sparrow,” I suggest, “and wear it myself? You let her go, earn some good will.”

Suspicion narrows his eyes. “Maybe you want to die. If you want to die, then you’re no good as a hostage. I know Nora here doesn’t want to die.”

Nora Sparrow remains silent.

Brecht had overpowered her in a parking lot, subdued her with chloroform brewed from an Internet recipe, and brought her to his home. While he was out of the room, Nora regained consciousness on the sofa, chained to the ringbolt.

On the coffee table had been a few magazines, two of which featured mailing labels with his name and street address.

When Brecht reappeared, he had Nora Sparrow’s purse, through which he’d searched for a cellphone and for items that might be used as weapons. Returning it, he directed her to repair her makeup, which had been smeared during the parking lot struggle.

He left the room again, to change from his abduction clothes to an outfit more conducive to romance. As he told me, “I begin with them on the sofa, then move them to the bedroom.”

Although a smooth seducer, Brecht was not hip to the latest telecom gear. Nora’s compact, complete with powder puff and mirror, was also a phone, a camera, a text-messaging device, and most likely a nose-hair trimmer. Left alone, she alerted her husband to her situation and location. Brecht caught her at it, but too late.

As police cars arrived, Brecht strapped the vest on his captive. “Usually,” he had revealed to me, “I put it on them if they’re uncooperative. It’s an attitude changer.”

When he allowed me to enter his house, instead of continuing to deal by phone, I hadn’t known if he wanted to live. Sometimes an ordinary psychopath asks for a face-to-face meeting only because I’ve gotten under his skin, and he wants me to die with him.

On his walls, prints of famous paintings tell me that he wants to live. “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” by Vermeer. “The Redeemer” by Leonardo da Vinci. “The Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein. Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus.” They are masterworks and transgressive. The naïve art lover might admire these paintings for the brilliance of composition and technique, but the architects of Auschwitz would recognize and approve of the intention behind each.

I say, “You must have Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Étant Donnés.’”

He is not surprised. His kind often sense that I know them by their spoor. “I have a book, 160 photographs of ‘Étant Donnés,’ every detail in extreme close-up.”

Nora Sparrow remains silent, and I am so alive.

Those serial murderers who are drawn to deathworks, from literature like “Finnegans Wake” to the art of Picasso, are certain that life is mere chaos, out of nothing into nothing. They kill for pleasure and as a statement of their freedom from meaning, but the meaninglessness of life does not inspire in them a wish to be released from it.

If they are less educated than Brecht, their décor might feature posters from bloody horror films and a Nazi flag. Or a peace symbol, an image of an ascending dove, always ascending, idyllic paintings of fantasy landscapes. Each of them reduces the complexity of life to an ideology fully expressed in a single word. For the guy with the film posters and swastika, the word is horror. Life is horror. For the one with the rising dove, the word is peace. He brings peace to his victims. For Brecht, with his highbrow art, the word is void.

Those with nothing on their walls, those who make no effort to justify their actions with faux philosophy, are the most dangerous. They have internalized the void and do not fear death.

Outside, sudden rain falls with a mad-crowd roar.

Brecht glances at the ceiling. I watch his Adam’s apple move as he swallows, swallows.

Nora remains silent, watching me. She knows she has no role in this because to Brecht she is not a person; she is a thing.

Lowering his gaze, he looks at neither of us, but at the preserved blonde in the corner. His expression might be mistaken for depraved desire, but it is something else.

“What will happen to my girls?” he asks.

“How many are there?”

“Five in other rooms, seven in all.”

“You won’t be allowed to decorate your cell with them.”

The offense he takes is obvious in his tight lips, his silence, and now I know him. His thumb is on the button, but I know him.

“I can almost guarantee the university will display them for awhile. If not the school, then the museum where you saw the others, and in conjunction with a sampling of images by Marcel Duchamp. I’ll make it happen.”

His eyes meet mine. “Why would you?”

“Because we live at a pivot point in history, and too many make their choice without knowing the stakes. I’m all for showing them what’s at stake.”

His smile belongs to a carved god in a stone temple. “More will choose with me than with you.”

“You may be right,” I say, “in which case you’ll be a prince in prison, with adoring correspondents.”

He regards his captive. “You think Harry’s sincere?”

THE blinded windows cannot reveal the lightning bolt. Thunder comes not in a roll but in a crash that rattles the house.

Nora Sparrow remains silent, knowing that the wrong word can shake Brecht like thunder shook the night. She merely shrugs.

To me, Brecht says, “What a coincidence, I get an educated hostage negotiator.”

“There are no coincidences, Jim.”

“Oh, Harry, on the contrary, that’s all we have. In the chaos and calamity, sometimes a beneficial coincidence. Will you write the program notes for the exhibition of my girls? I’ll want approval.”

“You’re the art professor, Jim. You should write it yourself.”

His thumb is on the button. Nora remains silent. I am so alive, as I will never be again.

“It would be something, wouldn’t it, Harry?” he whispered. “Such an exhibition.”

He is all appetite and pride. Nothing else is left in him. He is one of the hollow men, with his scampering-rat, dry-grass whisper.

“It will be something, Jim,” I promise. “It will be.”

Nora remains silent. I do not ask, Are you ready? But she nods.

“How do I know you’re not lying to me, Harry?” Brecht wonders.

“A hostage negotiator depends on trust. Lying is too risky. You’d hear the lie, Jim, you’d know. You wouldn’t have to wonder.”

I rise from my armchair.

His thumb is on the button. “Will I be at the exhibition?”

“No, Jim. You’ll be in prison. But you can read about it in the newspapers. Big news.”

The world turns, but we are at the still point where past and future meet, and there is only the moment, and the decision of the moment, and the consequences of the decision.

I ask for the key. Brecht throws it. I snatch it from the air.

He is appetite and pride, both insatiable. Death offers him no nourishment, but prison and notoriety can be an endless banquet.

Kneeling at the ringbolt, I free Nora Sparrow from the shackle.

She rises as I rise. I remove from her the vest of explosives.

I tell her, “Leave.” When she hesitates, I slip into the vest.

She remains judicious in her actions, but she does not turn away from me. She moves backward to the door, opens it.

I shout, “Hostage coming out!” She repeats it in a shout.

When I tell her to close the door behind her, she reluctantly obeys, in respect of my experience.

I turn to Brecht, giving him one more chance to do the deed, proof of my sincerity. He rises, gives me the remote detonator.

I open it and remove the batteries. Then I handcuff him.

Outside, as I escort the prisoner to the porch steps, one of the approaching officers says to me, “Great job, Detective Sparrow.”

Brecht gasps at this revelation.

“She’s a successful painter,” I tell him. “You wouldn’t know her name. Her work is too life-affirming for your taste.”

He has snatched a woman who knows what a hostage must do to survive, and whose husband possesses the skills and the knowledge of art necessary to negotiate her release.

They lead Brecht away to contemplate whether there are only coincidences or none at all.

After bomb squad officers take my vest, I meet Nora in the rain. Soon, torrents of words will come from her. Now she remains silent.

I am drunk on life. But I do not feel so electrically alive as I felt when all I love hung in the balance. I hope I will never feel as alive as that again.

After a kiss, she says, “There won’t really be an exhibition?”

“No. Funerals, burials and prayers, but no exhibition.”

A rattle, as of a legion of skeletons, is only the wind in the weeping willows. The end is our beginning.

Dean Koontz is the author, most recently, of “Relentless.”

___________

Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14koontz.html?ref=opinion

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A Prison of Her Own Making

“NOT for nothing, Mike, but it’s a little early for ‘Strangers in the Night.’”

“It’s never too early for Frank.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Just don’t think of this as a precedent,” Mike says, and soon after his gray ponytail dips beneath the bar, Sinatra’s ’60s hit skids to a halt.

Darlene O’Hara smiles appreciatively, palms her vitamins and swallows them with grapefruit juice and vodka. It’s Tuesday, 8:03 a.m., on a perfect June morning, three minutes after Milano’s has opened for business. On the overhead TV, NY1 broadcasts day-old images of Lucas Browning, the so-called GQ Killer, being processed for the parole violation that will send him back to jail barely three weeks after doing 23 years for strangling a Romanian model in Riverside Park. The screen cuts to a shot of his gaunt, longtime girlfriend, Allison Osai, standing outside the courthouse with a dozen microphones in her face.

Why O’Hara, a respected 34-year-old N.Y.P.D. detective, has chosen for the second time in three months to start her day in this semi-legendary downtown dive is a mystery. If pressed, she’d cite boredom or maybe something about the impressive effect of one drink on an empty stomach, not that people can be trusted on the subject of themselves. While O’Hara enjoys another long sip, the radio on her belt crackles to life as the dispatcher reports a 911 call about an assault in progress at 148 Forsythe. O’Hara puts down her glass and focuses as best she can on the legitimate hope that the call is false. After all, most 911’s are. Then she hears the dispatcher report three more calls to the same address, and the sirens racing by on Houston Street.

“Mike, you got any coffee back there?”

Twenty minutes later, O’Hara follows a clattering stretcher into the small medical suite off the lobby of a recently renovated but otherwise empty building. A patrolman waves the emergency technicians through the door labeled Marc Stein, M.D., and O’Hara heads for the other, which frames the thick back of her partner, Serge Krekorian.

O’Hara has never been inside a therapist’s office. From the two elegant chairs facing off at the center of the room to the white noise purring from an appliance in the corner, every detail contributes to the oasis of calm, and the framed photograph of the interior of Belfast’s Ulster Museum is a portrait of quiet. The only off note is the woman sprawled beneath the desk, her once beige blouse stained crimson and her legs bent in a position not even Gwyneth Paltrow’s former yogi could sustain.

“What do we know, K?”

“Beyond the fact that you’re loaded?” asks Krekorian. Although O’Hara doesn’t respond, he shares what he’s learned.

“At 7:30, Patricia Costello, 48, unlocks her office, and prepares for her day. A couple of minutes after 8, someone — we got no doorman, no video, no tenants — enters her office and attacks her with a knife. People on Forsythe hear screams and call 911, and Dr. Stein runs in from next door in time to get badly cut himself. Before the ambulance arrives, he describes the perp, who ran off, as tall and thin, wearing a blue and white Nordic ski mask.

“Stein’s a tough old guy,” says Krekorian, “but he’s 83. Who knows if we’ll get anything else.”

O’Hara turns from Krekorian to the less judgmental eyes of the victim. O’Hara heard the name but is still surprised to see a face so much like her own. Are there really Irish shrinks? With her lovely auburn hair and delicate, empathetic features, she looks like O’Hara might in a dozen years, if she takes care of herself, and although Costello’s skin is so translucent it barely serves as a barrier, the dozens of slices on her hands and arms prove she put up a ferocious struggle.

“A junkie?” asks O’Hara without much conviction.

“Doubt it. Costello was a psychologist, which meant she couldn’t write prescriptions. If the killer was after drugs, he’d have gone into the office marked M.D. Unless, of course,” says Krekorian pointedly, “he was too messed up to know better.”

The condition of the room bears Krekorian out. The place hasn’t been torn apart. The only items on the floor are two open Netflix envelopes that must have been knocked off the desk. Both disks have slid far enough out of their sleeves to reveal the titles. One is the I.R.A. movie “Hunger,” the other “The Shawshank Redemption.” O’Hara wonders, Why would anyone rent “Shawshank?” It’s on TV more than “Jeopardy!”

There’s a commotion behind them and O’Hara and Krekorian step up to the door as the E.M.T.’s wriggle the stretcher bearing Stein through the tight corridor. Before they can roll him past, Stein, who has bandages on his hands and face, manages to free one arm and stop the stretcher. Stein addresses both detectives but his eyes reach out to O’Hara. “Patricia was an E.R. nurse before I talked her into going back to school,” he says. “I was her intern adviser at Cornell and I offered her this space. I’m the reason she was here this morning. I need to know you’re going to find who did this.”

With Stein gone, the two detectives return to Costello’s office, where O’Hara expects her partner to launch into her again. Instead he nods toward the window and says, “I think we got something behind curtain number one.”

Krekorian pulls on latex gloves and draws back the heavy drape. Behind it is an ancient leather suitcase, as eccentric and dilapidated as your most insane relative. With the curtain no longer holding it back, it lurches forward and topples into the room fast enough for Krekorian to have to jump out of the way. Ignoring protocol, which requires they wait for crime scene specialists, Krekorian unhooks the ancient latch himself with a rubber fingertip and pries the case open. Inside, inexplicably, are three plastic toy soldiers, a pack of Sharpie pens and a rusted enamel bedpan.

“I guess you should have picked curtain number two,” says O’Hara.

One pen is missing from the pack, and she scans the desk for a note.

“Check it out,” says Krekorian and when O’Hara turns around, points toward the lower right of the museum photograph, at a tiny 17th-century painting of a Madonna and Child. Stepping closer, O’Hara sees that the infant in the mother’s arms has been given a thick black moustache. “Jesus Christ,” says O’Hara.

“I assume, “ says Krekorian.

There was no appointment book on Costello’s desk, but after securing a warrant for her home laptop, Paul Alvarez, in the computer lab at 1 Police Plaza, easily finds the file containing the names, addresses and appointment times of every patient Costello billed in the last two years. On the three previous Tuesday mornings, she’d scheduled meetings with a patient named Steve Montgomery.

Twelve hours after Costello’s murder, O’Hara and Krekorian walk up to a well-kept but dated white house in Babylon, on Long Island. No lights are on inside or out, and through the living room window they can make out an old lady alone on the couch peering out at the dusk. “This could be our guy,” whispers O’Hara. “He still lives at home with Moms.”

There’s no bell and when they finally get the woman to the door, she won’t open it. “Stevie isn’t home,” she barks. “And I don’t know when he will be.”

On the ride back to the city, Alvarez calls O’Hara again with fresh information pulled from the victim’s hard drive. “In the last several months, Costello was a frequent visitor to a Web site for Catholic singles, seeking ‘friendship only.’ A lot of her exchanges were with a guy who called himself ‘Modest Jack,’ whose I.P. address is in Cumberland, Me. There’s no indication they ever met.”

Depressing, thinks O’Hara, but not much of a lead, particularly since they’d already grilled Costello’s husband for hours and ruled him out as a murderous cuckold.

“I’ll keep that in mind, “ says O’Hara. “but while I got you, could you a take a look at her Netflix queue?”

“For real?”

“Humor me.”

When they get back to the precinct, Stevie, who got the heads-up from his mother, is waiting for them. Unfortunately, he’s neither tall nor thin and looks more like Bob Hoskins than Anthony Perkins. And instead of a browbeaten son who finally snapped, he’s a partner in a downtown advertising agency. He claims he saw Costello three times, which matches the record, and that they talked about the impact of a possible divorce on his 7-year-old daughter. He didn’t want the bill going to his home or office, so he had Costello mail it to Long Island.

After Steve Montgomery leaves, O’Hara sees that Alvarez has e-mailed the movie list, prints two copies and hands one to Krekorian.

“She had good taste,” says Krekorian.

“If you like convict movies.” says O’Hara. “‘Papillon,’ ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,’ plus the two at her office. It’s like she’s got some kind of fetish for men behind bars.”

“So do you — bartenders.”

For the 10th time that day, O’Hara calls Costello’s husband. “Sorry to disturb you again, but I need to ask you something. Those prison movies you ordered from Netflix. Did you pick them, or Patricia?”

“Patty,” he says, his voice catching. “I guess that’s what happens when your father and brother were in the I.R.A. and the heroes in your life spend half your childhood in jail.”

“Your wife was from Belfast?”

“Just east of there — Donaghadee.”

“She ever do any work with inmates? Pro bono — something that might not show up on her billables?”

“Quite a bit. Remember Lucas Browning? She’d been in talking with him for several months before he got out. Not that it did him any good.”

“Really? Was he ever in her office?”

“Couple times. She swore he wasn’t dangerous. She didn’t even believe he killed that model.”

“So what?” says Krekorian when O’Hara gets off the phone. “Browning’s been in Rikers since yesterday morning. Even his arms aren’t that long.”

O’Hara tracks down Gerry Baginski, the officer who arrested Browning on Monday, at home in Long Beach. Baginski tells O’Hara he responded to a complaint of a disturbance in a coffee shop at 103rd and Third Avenue.

“His girlfriend claimed he hit her,” says Baginski. “Didn’t look like it to me, but you know the drill — once I hear that, I have to arrest him. As Browning bends over to be cuffed, two vials of meth fall out of his shirt pocket.”

“What did he say?” asks O’Hara.

“What they all say. That it wasn’t his. And had no idea how it got there. Had a funny look on his face as he said it.”

As anyone who reads the papers knows, the one thing Lucas Browning has going for him is his girlfriend, Allison Osai. In jail, Browning fought with inmates and guards and repeatedly got caught with smuggled heroin, turning what could have been nine years into 23, but Osai never missed a visit. She famously spent more than two decades sewing an elaborate quilt of the sun rising on Mount Fuji and timed it to be completed the day Browning got out. When O’Hara pushes on the door of Osai’s apartment in Spanish Harlem on Wednesday morning, it opens just enough for her to see a corner of the quilt on the far wall before it hits the end of the chain.

O’Hara identifies herself as N.Y.P.D., and a tall emaciated Asian woman who had probably once been beautiful lets her in. The tiny apartment is in shambles and Osai looks as if she hasn’t closed her eyes in three weeks. “They took my boyfriend,” she says, as if that explained everything.

“What are you going to do now?” asks O’Hara.

“I waited 23 years. I can wait two more.”

Osai sits at a ruined card table in front of an overflowing plastic ashtray. When O’Hara sits across from her, she relights a crumpled Newport, picks up a pen and scribbles furiously on the back of an unopened Con Ed bill.

“The meth the cop found on Lucas,” says O’Hara. “Was it yours?”

Osai sneaks a coy glance at O’Hara. “I don’t do drugs.”

“Then where did his come from?”

“You’re going to have to ask Lucas that, ” says Osai, suppressing a grin.

“The reason I’m asking you, Allison, is that I just read the results of Lucas’s drug test from Rikers. It’s dirty for heroin, clean as a whistle for meth.”

“Same difference,” says Osai. “Either way he violated. Either way he goes back.”

“But why are you the one sending him? You put in 23 years to give up in a month? What happened?”

“Just between friends?” asks Osai.

“Yeah,” says O’Hara. “Just between us girls.”

“Men are so weak.”

“No argument there. That’s why you planted the drugs?”

“I had to. Lucas wasn’t strong enough to make it on the outside.”

“Sure it wasn’t you who couldn’t deal? What with all those frisky females waiting to pounce?”

Osai flicks ash off the tip of her cigarette and goes back to her dark hieroglyphics.

“Like that shrink, Patricia Costello, who was trying to help Lucas get back on his feet.”

“On his feet? Puh-lease. That’s the last place she wanted him.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe, “says Osai, pausing for a second to appraise her work.

“One question, Allison, what was the deal with the bedpan in the suitcase?” Osai puts down her pen and looks up from the blackened envelope.

“Oh, that? That was to make the killer look crazy.”

•

Six months later, on a bitter December morning, O’Hara hustles toward the cluster of self-conscious regulars waiting for Milano’s to begin dispensing early morning cheer. O’Hara, who is dressed more carefully than usual and is as nervous as a girl on a first date, feels the tug but keeps heading east and south until she enters the lobby of 148 Forsythe, where the crime scene tape was long ago packed away. Glancing at her Casio, O’Hara hurries into the medical suite off the lobby and down the tight corridor that leads to the office of Marc Stein, M.D. When she stands at the open door, Stein, whose stooped body looks like a gnarled stick and whose cheek is creased with a long pink scar, looks up without smiling.

“You’re late,” he says and gestures toward the empty chair across from his. Then he gets up and closes the door.

Peter de Jonge is the author of “Shadows Still Remain.”

___________

Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opinion/07jonge.html

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