Silent Night

EIGHT

‘Is there anything you can tell us about why this happened?’ Josh asked the young female doctor gently, sitting beside her. Archer had joined them, squatting on his haunches in front of them. It was still busy across the lobby, office workers, cops and CSU forensic investigators everywhere, but the trio were far enough away that they could have a quiet private conversation in the corner.

The woman looked at Josh and nodded.

‘Call me Maddy.’

‘Can you tell us why this happened, Maddy?’

‘Do you know who my father was?’ she asked.

Josh looked at Archer.

‘No. I’m afraid we don’t.’

‘He was very well-known in our circles. Both here in the States and around the world. He was a pioneer in his field. He gave a lecture at a conference in Washington two months ago and over three thousand people attended. He had dinner that night at the White House.’

She paused, looking down at the lukewarm cup of coffee in her hands.

‘My mother died of lung cancer when I was five. The physician attending her didn’t test for it early enough. If he had, she possibly could have survived, or at least lived a whole lot longer. My father could never move past what happened to her. It ate away at him every day. And once he became truly established in his field, much of his career objectives completed, he began trying to find a cure.’

‘For cancer?’ Josh asked.

The doctor shook her head. ‘No. There are many different types. There isn’t just one cure for all. It doesn’t work like that.’

She paused.

‘Cancer is a shocking sickness. It’s something we all fear. It seems to appear out of nowhere and can strike in any part of your body. You have to remember that in the grand scheme of things, modern medicine is still in extreme infancy. We’ve made more advances in the past hundred years than we did in the previous thousand, but it’s still not enough. Thousands of scientists and doctors have tried to come up with ways of combating the disease. Only a few treatments have been proven to work.’

‘Like chemotherapy,’ Josh said.

‘Yes. That’s one. Using radiation to kill the cancerous cells. It’s one of the most commonly used and the one most people are aware of. But ask anyone who has ever endured chemotherapy treatment about their experience. I guarantee it won’t have been pleasant.’

She paused and sniffed.

‘Chemo annihilates the cancerous cells, but it also kills other cells too. That’s why some patients lose their hair for example. It works but it destroys healthy cells in the process. My father was desperate to find a middle ground for treating lung cancer, given what happened to my mother. Something that could combat the cancer without affecting the patient in other ways. He was convinced that it was possible.’

She paused.

‘He tried many different things. None of them worked. He ended up down so many blind alleys, forced to go back and start all over again at square one. Time and again the same insurmountable problem cropped up that he just couldn’t navigate around.’

‘Which was?’

‘The strains he developed were too weak. They either didn’t work, or the cancer just overran them and ate them for lunch. So he decided to use an even stronger pathogen as a base. Something that if he could engineer and cultivate correctly, he knew for sure would annihilate the cancerous cells.’

‘Which was?’ Josh asked.

‘Tubercle bacillus.’

‘What’s that?’

She looked at him.

Then, for only the second time, she glanced at Archer.

‘Tuberculosis.’



Twenty four blocks downtown, the N Train carrying the three men from the Astoria diner swept into Times Square 42nd Street, the main transport hub in Midtown Manhattan. It eventually ground to a halt with a screech and the doors slid open. People started exiting the train and the three men carrying the bags joined them.

Moving down the platform, they walked up the stairs to the next level, the access floor for the various lines headed to different parts of the city. There were several cops up there, as well as some MTA employees and it was busy as hell, people walking in all directions, focused on getting to their destination.

No one paid any attention to the three men.

Anonymous in the crowd, the trio walked into the middle of the concourse and came to a halt, facing each other, all of them fighting the churning nervousness in their guts.

This was it.

Bleeker looked at his two companions.

‘Do what you need to do, then leave. Don’t hang around. We meet at the safe house, pack our shit and then we’re out of here.’

The men nodded.

Then they parted and headed off in three different directions.

The bags containing the shoeboxes held tightly in their hands.



‘This is bullshit!’ the skinny drug dealer shouted. ‘Bullshit, man!’

He was being led out of a Harlem tenement building on West 134 towards an NYPD Ford Explorer parked against the kerb. Several people were watching from the street, as well as an audience from the windows of apartments in the building, some of them wolf-whistling, others shouting abuse at the two detectives. Jorgensen had about ninety pounds on the dealer and almost carried him to the car, a large bear-paw of a hand enveloping the man’s upper arms on each side.

Arriving at the vehicle, he pulled open the rear door and pushed the drug dealer inside, sliding in after him and pulling the door shut. Behind them, Marquez had just stepped out of the building carrying a plastic bag stuffed full of various items. She walked around the front of the car to the driver’s door, then climbed inside and shut it, turning to face Jorgensen and the smaller man, the three of them alone and the interior of the car quiet.

‘You can’t do this, man,’ the skinny guy said, his hands cuffed behind him, sitting in the middle seat of the car. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Oh really?’ Marquez said.

She pulled something out of the plastic bag.

It was a large, thickly-packed transparent bag of marijuana leaves. The bag was about the size of a pillow case.

‘Then what do you call this?’

Pause.

‘That isn’t mine.’

‘What about these?’ Marquez said.

Reaching into the bag again, she pulled up a second thick bag of marijuana and a .45 handgun.

Cantrell swallowed.

‘Well, Pinocchio?’ Jorgensen asked him.

‘They aren’t mine either. You planted that shit.’

‘Do you even understand how finger-printing works, numb-nuts?’ Jorgensen said. ‘That’s how we found you. You’re telling me that if we run one layer of dust over those bags and the gun that your prints won’t show up?’

‘Don’t matter. You’re gonna take me to jail anyway!’ Cantrell said dramatically.

‘Listen!’ Marquez said, firmly, looking him in the eyes. ‘You’re right. You’re going to get charged for the weed and the gun. And I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve worn a set of handcuffs.’

Cantrell didn’t answer.

‘However, luckily for you, we’ve got much bigger shit to deal with today,’ Marquez continued. ‘If you start co-operating, I’ll make sure that this is just a mark on your record. Nothing more. I promise. I’ll say we found just an ounce of weed and no gun. But unless you want to spend Christmas in orange overalls, you better start talking.’

‘About what?’

‘Tell us about the shoebox,’ she said.

Cantrell looked at her, then at Jorgensen beside him. He closed his eyes.

‘Oh shit.’

‘Exactly,’ Jorgensen said.

‘You know about that.’

‘Yes. We do.’

‘Goddamnit. I knew that shit was a mistake.’

‘It would be pretty hard for it not to be,’ Marquez said. ‘A man died last night because of you.’

Cantrell frowned. ‘What?’

‘Don’t play cute,’ Jorgensen said. ‘Your prints are all over that box. You just admitted you knew about it. A family man is now lying on a slab at the morgue because of what you did.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t kill anybody.’

‘You placed it in the Park!’ Jorgensen said.

‘Yeah, only because some white boy paid me to.’

Marquez flicked a look at Jorgensen. ‘Someone asked you to put it there?’

Cantrell nodded. ‘Yeah. I had no idea it could kill anyone. It was only a box. Otherwise I’d have told the guy to find someone else. I’m not a murderer. Never killed anyone in my life.’

‘Right. Start from the beginning,’ Marquez said. ‘What happened?’

‘Yesterday, some guy calls me up. He’d heard that I was a good man for fixing things. See, funnily enough you were right about this not being the first time I’ve worn these bracelets. I did six months upstate last year for a misunderstanding between me and a gentleman from the local precinct. But take a look at me.’

He glanced down at his body, then looked up at Jorgensen.

‘Unlike you Detective, I ain’t built for confrontation. A guy like me in a place like that better have something to offer. Otherwise things are gonna get real unpleasant real fast, you know? So I became a fixer. That was my job in the yard. Take something one guy wants, trade it with something another guy wants and keep a tiny profit. Made me useful and saved my ass, if you know what I mean.’

He paused.

‘Anyway, this guy calls me yesterday. He said I’d been recommended by a man I shared a cell with in the joint.’

‘What was his name?’

‘The dude from prison? Hurley.’

‘Is that his real name?’

‘That’s what the boys in the yard called him. The guy on the phone said he had a proposition for me. Four hundred bucks for one job. He had a box he wanted me to deliver beside a trash can in the Park.’

Jorgensen frowned. ‘And you didn’t think something might be suspect about this?’

‘I don’t know what the city is paying you, man, but four bills for one gig is good money,’ Cantrell said, looking up at him. ‘I wasn’t asking questions. And besides, I’ve done this before. You guys are always tailing someone who needs to keep his business going and a man has to feed his family. I figured there was a gun or some drugs inside for someone else to pick up.’

‘Why didn’t you ask what was in the box?’ Marquez said.

‘Wasn’t any of my business,’ Cantrell said. ‘Gentleman told me best not to look, so I didn’t.’

Marquez looked at Jorgensen, both of them assessing what Cantrell was saying.

‘OK, so where did you get the box from? Did you pick it up from somewhere?’

‘No, he gave it to me.’

‘You saw him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He was a white boy. Kinda fat. He was covered up though, from the cold. Had one of those stupid hats on, with things coming down over his ears.’

‘What about his clothing?’

Cantrell thought for a moment.

‘Nothing special. His jacket was red. Like the ones those guys with axes wear.’

‘Lumberjacks.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

Marquez nodded, pulling her phone. ‘Keep going.’

‘Anyway, the man gave me the box. It was all wrapped up with string. Told me not to open it and to place it at the drop-off point. A trash can in Central Park, halfway along the fence down at Sheep Meadow. He paid me on the spot too, which was kind of dumb. Most guys in my position would have just taken off with the cash and whatever was in the box.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘I got a reputation to uphold. All a man has in his word. In my business, most guys lose it real fast. And once it’s gone, it ain’t ever coming back.’

‘It saved your life,’ Marquez said, pushing Redial and lifting her phone to her ear. ‘Would you recognise this guy if you saw him again?’

Cantrell nodded, flashing a smile. ‘You make the weed and gun just a bump in the road, I’ll point him out in a crowd for you, Detective.’

Marquez nodded as the call connected to Briefing Room 5 at the Bureau.

‘Rach, I need your help,’ she said. ‘We need to track someone from last night using the city camera system.’

As she spoke, Cantrell turned to Jorgensen.

‘She calls the shots, huh?’

Jorgensen looked down at the smaller man.

‘You have no idea.’