The Judas Heart Read online

  The Judas Heart

  Ingrid Black

  A Saxon & Fitzgerald Mystery

  Copyright @ Ingrid Black

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The last time Leon Kaminski and I had crossed paths, I’d almost shot him. It would’ve been a mistake if I had, but I doubt that would’ve been much consolation to his family afterwards.

  In those days I was a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigations, working out of upstate New York. I was part of a team hunting a basket case known to the press as the White Monk who’d murdered three women in the woods round Saratoga.

  It was my last case as a Special Agent, though I didn’t know it at the time. It was one of those things that only become significant in retrospect.

  I don’t get along with woods. Don’t get along with mountains or fields either. Take me more than ten minutes from the nearest deli and I’m lost. Some people like to sleep within range of the sound of waves washing the shoreline. I like to sleep with the sound of traffic coming in through an open window: the shriek of tyres, howling sirens, raised voices.

  I need to be reminded I’m alive.

  Consequently I was already freaked out before we even got out of sight of the road. What made it worse was that it was late in the year, dark too early; one of those days when the day barely seems to have roused before it’s closing down and putting up the shutters.

  Soon I got separated from the others.

  Great start.

  All I could see were shadows, with more shadows behind. Sound was muffled in the trees. Things scurried. Branches snapped. The birds sounded like human voices, mocking.

  Then there were no birds either.

  That was worse.

  I didn’t know where I was going. Didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew was what I was looking for. That was a local man called Paul Nado who, it was rumoured, knew the geography of these woods better than he knew the layout of his own yard.

  He also had priors for indecent assault, and no alibis for the time of the three killings. He fitted the profile. He matched the witness description. The few friends he possessed also said that Nado had been obsessed since he was at school with the original White Monk, the ghost of a monk from way back who was supposed to haunt the area and who had given the killer we were now hunting his ridiculous alter ego. Nado even used to dress up in an old white robe like St Francis and sneak around peering into people’s windows after dark.

  More to the point, he’d gone AWOL after being questioned by police investigating the three killings. Nado looked promising - and, as it turned out, more than promising. He was indeed the White Monk.

  The only problem at that moment was finding him.

  How long could a being hide out there in the woods without being caught?

  I didn’t want to find out.

  That’s why I was getting ready to throw my hard won reputation as a hard ass to the wind and call for help. Instead I saw a figure through the trees, walking silently.

  Nado.

  It had to be.

  I reached for my gun, cocked the hammer, got ready to call on him to freeze.

  And if he didn’t, I knew what I had to do.

  I didn’t intend taking any chances.

  Then the figure turned round and looked in my direction, like he could sense the gun trained on him, and I saw that it wasn’t Nado.

  Wasn’t the phantom White Monk either, which in a way was a bigger relief.

  It was JJ.

  JJ was what we always called Kaminski, though I never did find out why. Nicknames obey strange rules. Sometimes they just stick and then everyone forgets where they came from. Kaminski himself always hated it and begged us to stop using it, but we never did.

  Probably because of the begging.

  He was part of the same FBI team. In fact, it was his profiling work which had led the way to Paul Nado’s door. He’d thrown himself into that case like no other agent I’d ever known. He breathed it. It consumed him. But where the hell was he going now?

  “JJ?” I’d whispered.

  Then louder.

  “Jesus, JJ, are you trying to get yourself killed? What are you -?”

  Kaminski simply looked at me, smiled, and raised his finger to his lips to shush me.

  Then he turned and disappeared into the trees.

  That was the last time I ever saw him.

  By the time I’d made my way back to the others, it was completely dark and the search had been called off an hour. “Where’s JJ?” they said. And when I told them what I’d seen, some of the other agents thought I was crazy. No change there then.

  He must’ve got lost, they reckoned, and enjoyed a good laugh at his expense.

  It wasn’t that cold, after all.

  It wasn’t like he’d freeze.

  Next morning, when Kaminski still hadn’t returned, that’s when they started to believe me. That’s when they stopped laughing.

  Not surprisingly, his disappearance caused something of a stir. That’s me using deliberate understatement. His disappearance sent the whole unit into turmoil for a time. Some of the other agents even wondered if he’d become Nado’s latest victim. Maybe he was following a lead. Maybe he’d heard something and gone after the White Monk by himself.

  He’d always craved the credit for closing a case.

  Maybe this time he’d just taken his thirst for glory a step too far.

  The only problem with that theory was that, at the exact time we were combing the woods, Nado himself was on a Greyhound bus heading towards Michigan, where the big hero later turned himself in after seeing his ugly mush on the TV news in his motel room.

  **********

  It was a year to the day before the mystery of Kaminski’s whereabouts was finally cleared up, when the man himself was discovered hanging out in a trailer park in North Carolina which, if you knew Kaminski, was the last place in the world you’d have expected to find him.

  A five star hotel in Vegas, maybe, but not a trailer park in North Carolina. Not a trailer park anywhere.

  What I heard is that he’d had some kind of breakdown, that the strain of working the White Monk case had caused him to crack up; and looking back, I could see that all the signs had been there. And I say I heard about it because by that time, I’d left the FBI too.

  I’d had enough.

  I guess that case took its toll on all of us.

&nbs
p; The straw that broke the camel’s back.

  I’d called him personally a few weeks after he was brought back to the city to ask if he was alright, if there was anything I could do to help. The conversation was strained. He was on medication. His voice kept drifting in and out like the stations on a cheap radio. He said he was fine. He said he simply couldn’t take it anymore. He thought if he just walked and kept walking, he wouldn’t have to deal anymore with all the crap that came with being in the FBI and having your head invaded by those dark images and memories. He just wanted to get away, he said.

  To disappear.

  To stop thinking.

  I could relate to that.

  We’d promised to keep in touch, but of course we never had. I’d written a book about my experiences and moved on. As for him, I never did hear what he was doing, though a couple of years ago I’d seen a news report from back home about a murder case which quoted a Special Agent Leon Kaminski, so whatever it was made him crack up they’d managed to put the pieces back together again. Like Humpty Dumpty.

  Unless there was another Leon Kaminski out there, taking up where the old one had left off. Maybe the FBI makes replicas of us all and stores them in a huge basement in Quantico, ready to take over when the real one’s used up.

  Nothing would surprise me.

  Nothing, that is, except for what happened when, by chance, I caught sight of Kaminski in Dublin one day about ten years after I’d last seen him.

  Chapter One

  Someone once said the best cities are those that a man can walk out of in a morning.

  How long it should take a woman to walk out of them, the author of the quotation never got around to explaining. I guess women didn’t count in those days. Or maybe he thought women should be too busy preparing a banquet for twelve and dreaming up new ways to please their man when the lights go out to have much time left over for mere walking.

  It could be that he even believed encouraging women to take to the road was a dangerous practice because once they started, how could you be sure they’d come back?

  If so, he had a point. Sometimes the view is better far from home.

  Dublin certainly fits the definition, whoever’s doing the walking. There may be more people living here than in Boston, my home town - plenty more, and every year the city grows. But it rarely feels like it. Dublin remains what they call in the guidebooks compact.

  That means small.

  I don’t hold that against it. I’ve never exactly been a giant myself. And good things, as my grandmother always used to assure me before I got too old to be reassured by lies, come in small packages.

  Besides, there are more than enough places to hide out in Dublin if that’s what you need. As in any city, you could live here a lifetime and still find roads you hadn’t noticed before leading to places you hadn’t expected. Hidden places. Secret corners. There are nearly sixty pages in the city’s A to Z guide, from Abbey Cottages to Zoo Road and all points in between - and that day as it passed five o’clock and headed sluggishly to evening, I could have been anywhere in those sixty pages.

  I could have taken any turning in that maze of possibilities.

  Instead I was making my way up into the heart of the city, away from the river, towards the place where I’d arranged to meet Grace once she finished work, and taking my time about it because it was summer and the city was stretching out around me lazily and contentedly as a cat, unselfconsciously itself, and there was no sense in hurrying anywhere

  when the day was like this, the streets glinting golden from the slowly descending sun, the squares all leafy shadows and silence, the tower blocks turned into cathedrals of glass and chrome, shining like promises, the whole place tingling with life.

  The plan was to catch something to eat before heading to the theatre later to watch some hotshot young American actor I’d never cared for in some play I didn’t want to see – Shakespeare, of all things. Not my scene at all. And that might’ve been why I was taking my time as well. The upshot was that at that precise moment when I could have been anywhere I was actually emerging out of the soothing coolness of Crown Alley into the bright glare of Temple Bar Square. A couple of minutes later, or earlier, and I might never have seen him.

  Likewise if I’d take a different route that day.

  So call it chance.

  Call it a sixth sense.

  Whatever you call it, there I was.

  It was Sunday, which meant the book market was just winding down for the day. There were stalls laden down with old paperbacks, and more books in rickety cases standing at angles on the cobblestones. First editions. Only editions. People were milling around.

  It was a scene I’d witnessed a hundred times before, and there was nothing very extraordinary about this one, except... except that something made me look over, and I found myself looking at my own face staring out from the picture on the back of one of my books.

  And I was looking good, if I say so myself.

  It sure is amazing what they can do with computers these days.

  The book was a study I’d written a few years ago on criminal profiling, and I felt a little irritated as I always do when I see my books for sale in second-hand stores. Not least because it’s another book that someone somewhere didn’t want. Didn’t want it so much that they just had to get it out of the house. What can I say? I’m a delicate flower of innocent maidenhood. Rejection hurts. The other reason it bugs me, of course, is because I don’t get a cent on the resale. Your book can go on being sold for ever, with everyone else getting a cut on it each time, and none of it ever gets back to me. It offends my sense of fair play.

  What am I saying? To hell with fair play. It offends my pocket.

  So it was the book I noticed first rather than the man leafing idly through it. He was standing leaning up against the side of the stall, using the shelter of the overhead canopy as a shadow for reading. He had the book in one hand, and with the other he was shielding his eyes from the sunlight. It was a very JJ way of standing.

  At first I couldn’t say for sure that it was him. I’d spent the day playing poker with Thaddeus Burke and some of his friends down by the quays, and, yes, I’d been drinking a little too. The fog of whiskey had combined with the thicker fog of the heat. I’m not at my best in summer as it is. My brain doesn’t function properly once the temperature hits 20 degrees. My head felt simultaneously light and heavy. The two together could easily make me believe I was seeing things, or at the least that I couldn’t immediately trust what I saw.

  Plus there is something about Dublin itself, I’ve always thought, that makes misidentification a constant danger. In Dublin, I’m constantly half-seeing people who look half familiar, and I’m never sure if they really are who I think they are at all.

  There was a moment of uncertainty like that when I first saw the figure holding my book. And yet I felt sure it must be him. He looked a little older than I remembered, but then that could be because he was older. So was I. So was everyone. He looked a little more crumpled too, a little darker at the edges. Even, I found myself thinking, a little sadder. He’d dyed his hair but he looked like he didn’t much care anymore what he looked like, and that wasn’t like him at all.

  All the same, I knew there could be no doubt. It was him alright. No one else could be so JJ-like without being JJ.

  For a moment I found myself wondering if he was waiting here for me. But that was absurd. I hadn’t even known I’d be coming this way myself. How could he have known it?

  And he soon disproved that theory, anyway, because he looked up and saw me standing on the other side of the square, and there was no mistaking his surprise. He stared like I was the one whose presence here was unlikely, not his – and then in a gesture that made me shiver with the memory, he lifted a finger and placed it flat against his lips.

  Ssh.

  Then he looked up suddenly at something high up behind my back, and his eyes widened, before taking the same finger that he’d placed ag
ainst his lips and pointing up with it, urging me to look. And like the fool I was, I turned my head to see what it was.

  All I could see was the grey facade of an old building. A long-haired redhead in a white dress was sitting on the ledge of a window near the top, one leg dangling out, and smoking a roll-up cigarette which, from the abstracted expression on her face, suggested there was possibly more in it than tobacco. What was I supposed to have seen? What had he -?

  As I turned my head back towards him, I saw what the pointing had been for.

  My book now lay discarded on the cobblestones.

  Kaminski was gone.

  I had no idea which way he’d fled, but there was an alleyway to the left of where he’d been standing which led away from the square, and I took that, running quickly, hardly knowing why or what I would do or say if I caught him. I had no right to do or say anything.

  I’d have to figure those little details out later.

  It wasn’t long before I saw him. He wasn’t running but he had quickened his pace so that he had now almost reached Dame Street where the road shimmered hotly with traffic.

  “JJ!”

  He glanced back, and for a moment looked like he might stop.

  But no. He was on the move again, and I saw his hand shoot up above the other heads, like a child in school eager to answer a question from the teacher.

  He was hailing a cab.

  The crowd seemed to thin out as I got nearer the road, almost as if they were clearing a path for me. It meant I had a good view of him as his cab pulled to the side of the kerb and he slipped smoothly into the back seat, slamming the door.

  “JJ, wait!”

  The cab pulled away, leaving me standing, breathless and uncomfortably hot, watching as it accelerated down Dame Street towards Trinity College.

  My first thought was to hail down the next cab, and yell: “Follow that car!”

  I’d waited my whole life to do that.

  I guess that’s what comes of watching too many bad movies.

  But there weren’t any other cabs around. And even if there had been, I was too astonished to act fast enough. Of all the reactions I could have imagined to the sight of me, that was the last one I could’ve expected. I hadn’t let myself go that much, had I?