The Whites: A Novel Read Free Page B

guy’s driver’s license. “Bannion it is, first name—”
    “Jeffrey,” Billy said, then: “Fuck me sideways.”
    “Why do I know that name?” the CSU tech asked, not really interested in an answer.
    Jeffrey Bannion . . . Billy immediately thought of calling John Pavlicek, then considered the hour and decided to wait at least until daybreak, although Big John might not mind being woken up for this one.
    Eight years earlier, a twelve-year-old boy named Thomas Rivera had been found beneath a soiled mattress in the tree house of his City Island neighbors, the Bannions. He had been bludgeoned to death, the bedding atop his body spattered with semen. John Pavlicek, back in the late ’90s Billy’s partner in anti-crime but at the time of the murder a detective assigned to the Bronx Homicide Task Force, was called in when the body was found by a cadaver dog three days after the boy went missing.
    Jeffrey Bannion’s oversized, learning-disabled younger brother, Eugene, admitted to the jerking off—the tree house was where he always went for that—but said that when he discovered the boy, he was already dead. Nineteen-year-old Jeffrey told Pavlicek that he himself was sick in bed that day, said Eugene had already told him that he had done it. But when the cops turned the lights on the younger Bannion, Eugene not only stuck to his story but couldn’t even begin to speculate on how Thomas Rivera had come to be in the tree house or talk about what kind of weapon had done the deed, no matter how much trickery or cajoling the Homicides employed, and it made no sense that a fifteen-year-old that dim could hold out on them.
    Pavlicek liked the older Bannion for it from the jump, but they couldn’t shake his sick-bed story, and so the younger brother went to the Robert N. Davoren juvenile center at Rikers, a Bloods, Ñetas, and MS-13 petri dish, where he was placed in Gen Pop without the requisite psych eval, a big oafy white kid who tended to throw indiscriminate punches when he was freaked, and his murder, only five days into his incarceration, racked up nearly as many headlines as that of the boy he had allegedly killed.
    Within days, despite Pavlicek’s full-bore campaigning, the Rivera homicide was marked “closed by arrest,” formally shutting down any further investigative work. Shortly after that, Jeffrey Bannion packed his bags and moved in with various relatives out of state. At first, Pavlicek tried to swallow his frustration by burying himself in other jobs—although he never lost touch with Thomas Rivera’s parents and he never lost track of Bannion’s whereabouts—but when he learned, through connections, of two incidents of assault in which the vics were preadolescent males, one in each of the small towns Jeffrey was living in at the time, neither investigation leading to an arrest, his obsession with nailing this kid returned in raging full effect.
    Eventually Bannion moved back to New York, sharing a house in Seaford, Long Island, with three friends. Pavlicek, still on him like Javert, reached out to both the Seventh Precinct in neighboring Wantagh and the Nassau County Detective Bureau, but either Jeffery had kept his nose clean or he had gotten even slicker with age. The last anyone had heard of him—and most galling of all—was that he had recently applied to the auxiliary PDs of a dozen Long Island townships and had been offered training by three.
    “My supervisor wants to know how long we have to be shut down for,” the returning Transit detective said.
    “We’ll be as fast as we can be,” Billy said.
    “He says we got to mop that blood up out there by five-thirty, same for removing the body. That’s when the commuters start coming in earnest.”
    Clean it up or preserve it . . . Clean it up or preserve it . . . Somebody will complain; somebody always complains.
    As another mob staggered off the latest 2 train into Penn Station, a teenage girl stared goggle-eyed at Bannion for