Monster Read online

I'm walking down one of the side streets near where Sarah and I live. Here are the homes of the younger professional couples, blue collar workers and elderly people who have lived here since it was a working class neighborhood three decades ago. Some of the streets are still cobblestone, the city having opted not to pave them for reasons nobody knows, but bicyclists want explained. Sarah is on the other side of the street keeping pace with me as we scout for houses with "for sale" signs planted in their front yards. It's fall and the leaves are just beginning coat the lawns with specks of auburn, saffron and gold.

  "Hey, over here," she says, her voice clear in the morning air.

  I look over and she is standing, arms akimbo, next to a small sign that says "open house today." I look both ways and cross the street. There is no traffic at the moment because everyone who would be driving is currently in church. The rest are reading the paper, drinking coffee and contemplating Sunday afternoon football games. Sarah is gone when I reach the other side, and as I look around for her I notice the front door of the house is open. I walk across the lawn kicking up the fallen remnants of spring's rebirth and listening to the crinkles and cracks they make under my shoes.

  Inside the house, shafts of light are staked through the windows into brightly glowing squares on the floors and furniture. I listen and hear nothing.

  "Sarah?" I call out, hushing my breath to listen.

  "I'm in here," she says back. Her voice seems to come from everywhere.

  I walk through the living room and pick up a few of the framed family photos scattered on mantels and end tables. Though the family depicted in them is large, only one woman is common in them. She ages more in each photo as the quality of the photographic paper improves. In one very sharply focused picture she is alone on an easy chair holding a Yorkshire terrier, her face a determined smile. When I enter the kitchen, the woman is sitting at a round wooden table with a mug before her and a soggy tea bag resting in the bowl of a teaspoon. She smiles as my feet slap against the linoleum floor.

  "You're here for the open house?" she asks, smiling and tilting her head.

  I nod. "Yes, have you seen my girlfriend? I think she's in here, somewhere."

  "Oh, I'm sure she's in one of the other rooms by now," the woman says, lifting her mug for a sip. "Why don't you look around? I'm sure you'll like it."

  "Okay," I say and walk out of the kitchen through a door leading to a dining room. I stop and look around at the highly polished table and the high-backed chairs.

  "Sarah, where are you?" I ask in an even, but loud tone.

  "I'm in here, now," she says.

  "Where?"

  Nothing. At the back of the dining room is a small hall leading to the right, and I follow it to a door which opens into the back yard. I look around and see a garage at the back of the yard. The windows on the garage are dark and dusty, and the door doesn't look to have been pulled open in years. It would take a couple of weekends to get that back into usable shape, and with winter coming it would have to wait till spring. I walk across the back yard and turn to look back at the house: the blue on the back side of the house is pale from years of facing the rising sun. Just to my right is a square of cement about ten feet on a side. Set directly in the middle is a rusted iron door which has leached rust into the cement around the frame.

  I pull the door upward and the light from the morning sun streams around my shoulders and down the staircase, creating an elongated shadow of myself with a small balloon head. At the bottom of the steps I'm surprised to find that the chamber is bathed in gray light that reaches into the corners, apparently all of it squeezed in through the open door above me. The floor is a low pile carpet in apartment tan and the furniture is velour-upholstered davenports and wicker chairs. Against the far wall, ensconced between a pair of lamps, is what appears to be a sarcophagus, a seven-foot long, three-foot high construction of smooth marble. I look back over my shoulder, suddenly expecting the iron door to slam shut and the room to be bathed in a crimson glow, but there is nothing but silence and gray light.

  Next to one of the lamps is a lectern with an open register upon it. Reading the names I recognize most of them to have been from the same family. I pick up the pen and sign the next available space, take one last look around, and leave the underground chamber. The door makes the barest of noise when I let it drop into the frame. I head back into the kitchen and the woman is now rinsing her cup in the sink.

  "So, you saw where Edgar is, now?" she says without looking over her shoulder.

  "Edgar?"

  "My husband," she says and nods at the cement square visible through the window above the sink.

  "Uhh, yeah. I guess I did," I say, looking around the kitchen. "Has my girlfriend come down?"

  "Down from where?" she asks as she grabs a towel and dries the inside of the tea mug.

  "Isn't she upstairs?"

  "I don't know who you're talking about," she says as she sidesteps to a cupboard and pulls open a cabinet door. She places the cup onto a shelf and turns around. "You'll be okay with people coming over to visit Edgar and me, when we're gone, won't you?"

  "What?" I ask. "Where's Sarah?"

  "I only ask because it's a term of the sale. If you want to buy the house, you have to be okay with our relatives coming over to visit us. I'll be down there with him when I'm gone and I guess the kids will want to come over once in a while," she says, staring at me.

  I look over my shoulder and make a half-turn toward the doorway. "Sarah, are you in here?" I call out.

  "You can look at it as a joke. As my husband always used to say: You can't expect to buy an old home without some skeletons in the closet," she says and snorts out a small laugh.

  "I don't know that I'm going to buy this house, but

  "Nick, wake up, dammit," Sarah said angrily.

  Nick shook his head and rolled over toward the buzzing clock radio and tapped the alarm off. "When did you switch it from the radio to buzzer?"

  Sarah shook her head angrily and fell back onto her pillow. "Jesus, Nick, what the hell's going on in your head that you can't wake up to an alarm anymore?"

  Nick looked over at the clock. "I guess it's Monday."

  Sarah rolled onto her side away from him and pulled the sheet up over her head. Nick rubbed his eyes, slid out from the covers and trudged across the apartment for the bathroom. After dressing and downing a cup of coffee, Nick walked back into the bedroom, flipped on the overhead light and announced in a firm, loud, nearly-devoid-of-anger voice: "Time to get up: It's Monday."

  He then turned, stepped through the living room and banged out the front door and spilled onto the street.

  Officer Claypool drank his coffee in silence while Nick flipped through the previous night's wrongdoings and acts of stupidity. Two public drunks, one vandalism, an abandoned car set afire: nothing of importance. Nick shook his head and turned the pages of the accident reports, barely letting the fender benders register. He hung the clipboard back on the wall.

  "Hey, wait a second," Claypool said as Nick moved toward the door.

  "What?" Nick asked quickly.

  "Another bad morning, huh?" Claypool said with a slight smile as he rounded the corner of the desk and walked up to Nick. He held a brown manila envelope out. "Detective Tagget dropped this off for you."

  Nick looked down at the envelope and took it. "Thanks."

  Claypool shrugged and turned around. Nick went back to his car and drove it several blocks before stopping at the edge of a nearby park. He turned down the radio and picked the envelope up from the passenger seat and ripped it open. A yellow sticky-note was attached to the top sheet of paper.

  "Do not let anyone know you received these reports. Against policy. Call the NYPD white collar crime unit and ask for Lt. Derrick Morgan. Tell him you want their releases on art thefts."

  Inside was a stack of police reports. He checked the first and last one and saw they covered the previous seven months. He scanned the top couple in the stack, each
detailing stolen artwork from one area or another. Nick didn't recognize very any of the stolen paintings, but the reports, which he recognized as the ones not publicly released, listed the insured value of the paintings, their owners, from where and when they were stolen, and how the case was resolved. None were solved.

  Nick looked at the loss figures on a couple of reports and whistled: some were several million dollars. Most were of just one or two pieces. In many cases, the work had been returned after a few weeks. There was no mention on any of the reports of ransoms being paid for the return of any of the paintings. Nick stared out the window of his car and smiled. This was the way he imagined it was done at the New York Times or Washington Post: someone in a high place giving out just the right information at just the right time.

  "Big city, here I come," Nick said, shoved the car into gear and tore through the city streets for the newsroom.

  He walked up the steps to the city room with his head high and his spirits buoyed by dreams of instant fame, Pulitzer prizes and a spot on the investigative reporting staff of a premier paper. He crossed through the room and stopped at his editor's desk. John made a few keystrokes and looked up at him through his glasses.

  "Got something for today?" he asked.

  Nick shook his head. "No, but I need to talk to you after deadline."

  John nodded, yawned, and resumed staring at his computer screen.

  Nick walked over to his desk, pulled out the stack of files and began reading. The top reports were all from a half-year ago. Each detailed a theft of a painting from some wealthy collector. In each case, the painting was returned and the case closed. One of the paintings that had been stolen, a Pissaro, had been valued at just over $3 million. Nick sighed and drank deeply from his coffee. His phone rang.

  "News room, Nick Case."

  "What's wrong with you, Nick?" Sarah asked, her voice a hush in his ear.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know what I mean. You can't sleep. You can't wake up. You sleep walk. You're starting to drink almost every night. And now you're storming out of the apartment in the morning like it's my fault you can't wake up," Sarah said, her voice flat.

  Nick swiveled on his chair and stared out at the crowds working their way off buses and down the street.

  "Me? I don't know what's wrong with me," he said softly, "but you don't have to be a jerk about it in the morning. I can't help it I'm not sleeping very good, but you don't have to bust my balls about it."

  "Is there something wrong? Is there something I should know about?"

  Nick stared blankly at the facade of the building directly across the street and took a sip of coffee. He looked over his shoulder but no one was paying attention to him.

  "No, everything's fine," he said. "I just had a weird dream last night is all."

  "About the monster?"

  "No. Just a weird dream. I'll tell you about it later. You were in it."

  "Are you sure there's nothing wrong, Nick? You're acting strange anymore."

  Nick licked his lips and stared down at the stack of police reports on his desk. "No, I don't know. Listen. This isn't the place for me to talk about this--"

  "Is there something to talk about?"

  Nick rolled his eyes in frustration. "No, but this isn't the place or the time for it. I'm fine, I'm just, ... I'm just having bad dreams. That's all. Listen, can we talk when we get home?"

  Sarah sighed on the other end of the phone. "I guess so… hey--.”

  "What?"

  "I love you," she said.

  Nick flicked his eyes to either side to see if anyone was around. "I love you, too."

  They said good-bye and hung up.

  Nick set aside the police reports and dialed information for New York City, obtained the appropriate police bureau and asked for Derrick Morgan. He was put on hold until a generic public affairs officer came on and Nick explained what he wanted, saying that he had heard about some art thefts in New York City that matched the same characteristics police he knew found. After a half-an-hour, and three more officers, Nick was told that whatever reports they had would be faxed to him by the end of the day. Nick hung up the phone triumphantly and looked at the wall clock: it wasn't even 10:30 and he was pulling the first strings that would tie his story together. In a week, maybe two, he would have enough to write the story and sit on it until Tagget gave him the go-ahead. Surely, things had to be close or Tagget wouldn't have tipped him off. Everything was in his grasp, all he needed was to begin lining up the local sources for interviews and background.

  And then he saw Sophia leftover’s name listed atop a police report filed at one of the city's precincts. Two months ago she had had two Josh Sammers nudes stolen from her studio. Their value had been estimated at two-thousand dollars apiece, and each had been returned just weeks ago and the case closed as solved, stolen property returned. The investigating officer had even written at the bottom of the report that the thieves "either had a guilty conscience or couldn't fence the product." Nick rolled his chair away from his desk and stared out the window, desperately wanting both a drink and a cigarette.

  "Hey, Nick. You wanted to talk after deadline?" John said from next to him.

  Nick turned and looked past John's waist at the news room and the other reporters who were either on the phone, typing, or engaged in conversations over coffee. His stomach sank.

  "Never mind. I thought I had something, but it turned out to be nothing," Nick said, looking up at John and loosening tie.

  John raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "That'll happen."

  Nick watched as John walked back to his desk. Nick swiveled his chair and looked through the window. Outside, pedestrians were crossing sidewalks and office-workers were heading for early lunches. Nick shook his head and swore under his breath as he called up Google and typed in Sophia ’s name.

  "What the fuck did you just get yourself into?"

  SIXTEEN