Janek sat back. "Unfortunately this brings me to the part that doesn't figure. The second intruder places a pillow on top of Dietz and shoots him in the head."
"I like the idea of two separate crimes. But you're right-killing Dietz doesn't add."
"It might, if we knew more. We've got a way to go on this. I keep asking myself what the intruder or intruders were trying to do-really trying to do. On this deal, everything makes sense up to the shooting.
Then it falls apart. I can't think of any reason why either person, assuming there were two, would bother to kill a man already asleep."
Aaron thought about that awhile. "Gotta find the girl if only to eliminate her. Maybe in the end it'll turn out she's just a psycho."
"Maybe," Janek said without much conviction.
"Imagine," said Aaron, "a pure psycho killer. After all these brilliant ideas, wouldn't that be a gas?"
There was an aura of darkness around Dakin, always had been, as far back as Janek could remember. Even from his first days as a police cadet, he had heard rumors about the chief of Internal Affairs, the man other cops called "The Dark One."
Shortly before graduation from the academy, Janek attended Dakin's famous lecture, affectionately called T amp;C by the students. Its long title was "Temptation amp; Corruption: The Dilemma of Police Work."
Attendance was compulsory.
Every seat, Janek remembered, was filled that hot summer afternoon. The lecture hall, cooled only by fans, was stifling. Two hundred cadets, dressed in crisply ironed blue shirts, black ties, sharply creased dark blue trousers and gleaming black shoes, sat attentively as The Dark One alternately scolded and exhorted, admonished and implored, like a preacher conjuring up the eternal fires of hell.
Janek would never forget his first impressions-Dakin's tine red hair, fiery yellow eyes, angular body, reed-thin voice, tortured gestures and pale waxen skin. There was nothing dark about The Dark One's complexion, but there was something very dark about his soul. He never smiled. He discoursed about concepts (right and wrong, good and evil) as though they had no connection to living human beings. Dakin's passion burned like a pure blue flame exuding chilly, forbidding fumes.
He was humorless, pitiless, steely, intimidating, respected and friendless. He was a cop's cop" and a legend. Janek feared and disliked him.
Years later, he and Timmy Sheehan would confront Dakin at a special departmental hearing, and although Dakin held the rank of chief and Janek was only a lieutenant, Janek would manage to defeat and discredit him, driving him into a bitter, involuntary retirement.
Now, at 5:45 A. M., Janek sat in his car, parked in Cort City Plaza, across from the stark gray apartment tower where Dakin lived, waiting for the dawn to break.
Dakin's morning routine never varied. A lifetime bachelor, he would emerge from his building at six, stride briskly to the newsstand by the Baychester Avenue station a mile away, buy the Daily News, then walk briskly home. It was common knowledge that the best time to approach him was during this daybreak outing. But even then, depending upon the substance of one's mission and the quality of one's entreaties, one always risked dismissal.
Unfastening his eyes from Dakin's door, Janek glanced around. Perhaps, he thought, he might learn something about his quarry from a brief study of his neighborhood.
Cort City Plaza had been built on a forgotten strip of the Bronx separated by a narrow inlet from Pelham Bay Park. Until the day that someone envisioned it, it had been a swamp. Now it possessed the dismal aura of a hundred similar high-rise satellite communities constructed on the outskirts of major cities. In such places it didn't matter which part of the country one was in, because the satellite town always looked the same: bleak, gray, uniform, built on the edge of a great metropolis yet cut off from its rich offerings by high-speed roads on which cars hurtled day and night.
There was nothing in Cort City Plaza, it seemed to Janek, to become attached to; no corner of beauty to inspire a painter or a poet. The only texture was the lack of texture. The landscape was rubble and weeds, the spirit cheerless and forlorn. Yet such a place might well suit The Dark One, Janek thought; here he could brood in anonymity over the loss of his terrifying power and the awful spectacle of his fall.
Promptly at six, Dakin emerged. Janek locked his car and hurried over.
"Morning, Chief"
Dakin's yellow eyes sliced him like razors. "It's you, he snickered.
"Been expecting you."
"Can I-"
"Walk on my right. Hearing's better that side."
Janek positioned himself to Dakin's right, then glanced at his profile.
The thin red hair had mostly bleached to white, but the skin was pale as ever, the body was still ramrod straight and the voice was as reedy as the day Janek had heard it deliver T amp;C at the Police Academy twenty-two years before.
"You got something for me. Spill it."
The imperial manner, too, was still intact. It was as if the heroic days of Dakin's reign had never passed, days when the only thing that mattered was the merciless rooting out of corrupt cops. As they walked together toward the subway station, and Janek began to summarize his interview with Tania, another part of his brain thought back upon the Dakin legend.
There were the stories, told and retold countless times, of how, arresting a cop for corruption or malfeasance, Dakin would call the man aside, place his arm fraternally across his shoulder, then gently recommend that the poor slob blow his brains out. "It's the only honorable way. Spare your family and colleagues the disgrace," Dakin would counsel in a whisper. More than a dozen men, according to the legend, had followed that withering advice.
At the height of his power he had been master of the sting, dangling enticing goodies in front of desperate cops to tempt them down crooked paths. The better the man, so the stories went, the more elaborately Dakin would contrive to sting him. It was as if he had to prove that there was no such thing, as an incorruptible cop… except, of course, for himself. He, Dakin, was untouchable, inviolate, perfect in his virtue. Unable to face the darkness in himself, he hid behind a facade of rectitude, and from there searched out the weaknesses in others.
Looking at him now, Janek understood the role he'd played: He was our Robespierre.
"So, that it?" Dakin said when Janek finished summarizing. They were less than a hundred yards from the subway station. The towers of Cort City Plaza, blocking the rising sun, cast lengthy shadows on the stony terrain.
"That's it."
"When're you going to arrest him?"
"Who?"
"Sheehan, of course." "I'm not going to," Janek said.
Dakin gave him a sharp glance. His amber eyes flickered wildly. "I expect someone sure as hell is!"
Janek shook his head. "No one's going to arrest Timmy. Mendoza's got a new attorney, a brainy young woman with lots of brass. The information's been passed to her. It's up to her to decide what to do with it."
"You're kidding me!"
"I'm not."
"Who cares about Mendoza?"
"I would guess Mendoza does," Janek ventured.
"He's crap. It's us. We're what the case is about. NYPD. Who we are and what we stand for. Nothing less."
Janek exhaled. "I know you feel that way. But to me, that's just a part of it."
Dakin shook his head. Under his left eye a little muscle began to twitch; like an insect it jumped beneath the pale, sallow skin.
"I-" Dakin started to say something, then, unaccountably, he stopped. He stared at Janek, spat at the ground, then plunged forward toward the newsstand.
As Janek watched him buy his paper, he thought back seven years to the last time they'd met.
It was across an oval table in a nondescript conference room in the Headquarters building. A special departmental hearing was in progress.