Deadly Enterprise Page 8

  “Uncle Mike!” Mike’s mental inventory of the space was cut short by the excited cries of Tony and Jenny, Darren’s kids. Mike marveled at how much they both had grown since he last saw them. They gave him hugs and then hovered a few feet away, waiting to see if “Uncle” Mike had any treats for them. Mike dipped a hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of individually wrapped caramel candies.

  “Now, don’t spoil your dinner with those. Save them for later,” he admonished. The children each reached out to grab the offerings, spilling several of the candy cubes on the floor, then scrambling after them.

  “All right, you little animals. Get washed up for dinner and put those in the candy drawer!” Darren called after them as they hustled around the corner into a narrow corridor that Mike knew led off to their bedrooms.

  Mike walked around the side of a half-wall into the kitchen, where Marie was busy over the stove with a wooden spoon dipped into a large pot of sauce. Mike held out his arms and Marie carefully set down the spoon on a paper towel and gave him a lingering hug, then a kiss on the cheek. “It’s been too long, Mike. How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Mike said as he held his left arm out in front of him, not quite perpendicular to the floor. “I’m on the mend from my surgery and nearly back to normal.”

  “You look thin, Mike. Have you lost weight?” Marie looked concerned, as if any drop in poundage signaled severe illness or psychological trauma.

  “Yes, actually,” Mike said, patting his stomach admiringly. “I’m down about fifteen pounds in the last three months.”

  “Well, we’ll fix that right now,” Marie said with a smile, turning back to the food preparation. “I’m fixing you a proper meal. None of that cheap restaurant food for you here. We’re so happy you could come by.”

  “I’m happy, too,” Mike said as he removed his overcoat, hung it on a familiar hook at the corner of the entrance hallway, and walked to the alcove off the kitchen where a dining table was set up for five. Over the next two hours, Mike was treated to antipasto, a mozzarella and tomato salad, chicken parmesan with a side of spaghetti, freshly made breadsticks, and homemade cannolis. And a bottle-and-a-half of a nice Italian Chianti that Mike had brought along. Over their food, Darren and Marie bragged up the accomplishments of the kids, gave Mike updates on their respective parents and nearby relatives, and grilled him about his relationship with Michelle. They wanted to be the first ones invited to the wedding, but Mike let them know that there had been no discussion about marriage and there would not be any in the foreseeable future. Mike gave a detailed account of his shoulder surgery and his rehabilitation progress. He avoided a discussion about Darren’s recovery. By the time he finally put down his fork for the last time, he had to loosen his belt.

  “Well, that will put a huge dent in my healthy diet,” he said without a shred of guilt. “Marie, that was the best meal I’ve had in a long time. If I lived here full-time, I’d weigh a ton!”

  “No, you would not, Mike, because I’d put you to work and burn those calories right away.”

  “That may be true, Marie. I really do miss spending time with you and the kids. I can’t believe how much they have grown up.”

  “Before you know it, Tony will be applying to college,” Marie said with just a hint of apprehension in her voice.

  “So, he’ll get a basketball scholarship to St. John’s, right?”

  “I wish!” Darren bellowed a little more loudly than he intended. “They are great kids, but I don’t expect that either of them will be the star athlete in their high school.”

  “Maybe not, but I bet they can both take care of themselves, being the offspring of a brawler like you.” Mike pointed at Darren and made a fist in a mock assault. Darren reached out his hand and engulfed Mike’s fist.

  As he was getting his coat on and preparing to leave, Mike pulled Darren aside, out of Marie’s earshot. “Are you sure you don’t need anything? Is there a college fund for the kids? I’d be happy to put in a little contribution.”

  Darren stiffened. “No, Mike. Thanks. Like I said, I’m doing fine. We’re doing fine. I appreciate the thought, but it’s not necessary. I’ll let you know if that changes.”

  “You’d better, you suborn Irish bastard. It’s a good thing you married an Italian wife. At least she has some common sense in her.”

  “I heard that!” came Marie’s voice from the next room. “And it’s so true!”

  Mike laughed and swooped into the room, lifting Marie off the ground in a bear hug before giving her a kiss and letting her down gently. “I’m going to have to walk home to burn off that dinner.”

  “You be careful out there, Mike. Those streets aren’t safe at night.”

  “I’ll be fine, Marie. I promise. I’ll just walk to the 7 line.”

  “Come by any time, Mike,” Darren said, extending a hand. Mike took the offered handshake and pulled Darren into a hug.

  As he banged hard on the man’s back, he replied, “I’m sorry I was away so long. I’ll definitely make it a point to get back to visit sooner next time.”

  “And you can bring that lovely girlfriend of yours,” Marie chided. “If you’re not scared that we’ll tell her the truth about you.”

  Mike busted out with a huge laugh. “Thanks. I’ll consider that. I’m sure Michelle would love you guys.”

  After one more round of hugs, Mike exited into the brisk winter air. All around the neighborhood, lights were on and the figures of people filled the visible windows. Smoke rose up from several chimneys. Mike shivered slightly, partly from the cold, and partly from a twinge of guilt. No matter what Darren said, Mike would always blame himself for his partner’s injury, and the damage it had done to his life. He turned up his collar, dipped his head against a slight breeze, and started off toward the subway stop. He made a mental note to find out about college scholarships that were available to the kids of injured cops.

  Chapter 15 – Don’t Ask Questions

  Monday, March 4

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Jason was at his desk sipping a cup of coffee and wishing there was a bagel next to it. He was working the phone, following up on a new case. The stiff in question had been a homeless man well known to the residents of a neighborhood in upper Manhattan, near the George Washington Bridge. He was found in the park area by the river and the autopsy confirmed the cause of death as heart failure, likely triggered by exposure. There was no suggestion of foul play. Jason was trying to track down the next of kin to advise them and make arrangements for the body. It was neither glamorous nor pleasant, but it was unfortunately a frequent part of the job. He was happy to see Ray walk over and wave to him, giving him an excuse to break off the call. After saying good-bye, Jason turned his attention to Ray. “What?”

  “We got another arrest record for Christine Barker. This one’s for solicitation.”

  “What? Where did you get that?”

  “From somebody named Sophie down in the records room. She sent up a new file.”

  “You really need to make an effort to get to know Sophie,” Jason said.

  “Yeah, well, there are a lot of people up here I don’t know yet.”

  “How come we didn’t have this in the original file?” Jason asked, not really expecting an answer.

  “Because she gave a different name and she had no ID, so they booked her as ‘Christine Baker’ – B-A-K-E-R – and the record didn’t get connected to the correct file. Her prints eventually got matched, but the files were never merged.” Ray handed Jason several sheets of paper with the file information about Christine Baker.

  Jason reviewed the new file for several minutes at his desk, then called Ray back over. “Hey, take a look at this and tell me if it looks odd to you.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the dates and times. She was brought in at 23:02 on January 9, which makes sense if she was arrested for solicitation. Then, then the next entry is a release two days later, on January 11. No charges. They just cut her
loose. Why would they hold her so long and not book her?”

  “No clue.”

  Jason scanned the file. “I also don’t see any record of her being interrogated. Wouldn’t it be standard practice to talk to the suspect if you’re going to hold her that long?”

  “I would,” Ray said absently, “but who knows. Things get crazy in lock-up. Maybe they just forgot about her. Who knows.”

  Jason scowled but did not reply. He knew Ray was probably right. He spent the next half hour looking at the file and looking up information in the NYPD database. Then, he called out to Ray, “I think we got something.”

  Ж Ж Ж

  Twenty minutes later, Jason and Ray were sitting in Captain Sullivan’s office in the corner of the third floor of the ancient precinct house. The floor had been gutted and turned into open space for desks for the detectives’ bullpen. Sullivan’s space was enclosed by glass on two sides. The third side was covered floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, stuffed with books, binders, and dozens of photographs of Sully standing with celebrities and politicians, usually wearing an ill-fitting tux. The fourth side of the office was the front of the building with a window looking out on 94th Street. Sully had blinds on the inside of his glass walls so that he could get some privacy when needed, but for this meeting the blinds were up, giving Jason and Ray the feeling of being in a fishbowl. The spectators in the bullpen could not hear the conversation, but by the redness in Sully’s face, everyone could see that he was not happy.

  “I told you two knuckleheads to close out this case. Nobody is going to blink if you call it an overdose and drop it.”

  “Captain, we’re happy to drop it as soon as we finish the investigation.” Jason was acting as spokesperson, and despite what Sophie said, Sully was not cutting him any slack. “There have been some odd circumstances surrounding the case, one of which is the absence of the files on the three dead girls with similarities in their cases. We’re still trying to get those.”

  “I don’t give a shit about odd, Dickson. I care about closure rates and resources and this case is a drag on both!” Sully, whose face turned deep shades of crimson when he got angry, looked like he was going to blow steam out of his ears.

  “Fine,” Jason soothed. “We now have a lead, so if this one doesn’t pan out, we can dump the case without any worry.”

  “What?” Sully growled, clearly not happy, but unwilling to refuse to listen.

  “One of the times that Christine Barker was arrested, she was busted with two other girls, both of whom had multiple arrests for solicitation. One of those girls was later arrested during a drug bust where she was hanging on the arm of a courier known to be a bag man tied to the Gallata crime family.”

  Sully dropped his head and shook it slowly from side to side. “So fucking what? Half the hookers in Brooklyn work for pimps who work for the Gallatas, we know that. Why should that be significant?”

  “It’s significant,” Ray jumped in, prompting a frown from Jason, “because the theory that somebody pumped her full of smack and dumped her in the river just got more plausible if she was working for some Gallata goon. All she has to do is look at one of those guys funny and they’d off her just for the sport.”

  Sully stood up from his chair, which seemed to elevate his head only a foot or so. He pointed a stumpy finger toward Ray. “Do not – and I will repeat that for you since you are new around here – DO NOT think that you are going to make a name for yourself by going after the Gallata gang like some federal cowboy. You will NOT take an overdose case and turn it into some crusade against vice and organized crime. Do you understand me, Detective?!”

  The volume of Sullivan’s tirade was sufficient to penetrate the glass walls and reverberate around the bullpen, prompting every head in the room to turn and watch. The captain sat back down in his chair, his face puffy and a bead of sweat hanging on the end of his bulbous nose.

  Jason stepped in, as Ray looked like a dog that had just been swatted across the nose with a wet newspaper. “Cap, we’re not going after the Gallatas and this is not a crusade about anything. We just want to ask around and see if we can make contact with any of the other working girls. See if we can get any confirmation about her being a heroin user or whether she was having any problems with any of her, um, handlers. That’s it. If it’s a dead end, then we’re out. Right, Ray?” Jason glared at his partner and nodded his head slightly.

  “Sure. Right. Out,” Ray said.

  “Fine!” Sully shouted. “But I’m making a call downtown first to make sure you two morons aren’t sticking your heads in somewhere they’re gonna get cut off.”

  Jason nodded, grabbed Ray by the arm, and headed for the door. “That’s great, Sully. Thanks.” He hustled Ray to his desk, while every eye in the place watched. Then, he changed his mind about talking in the bullpen and loudly said that he was hungry and since there was no food allowed in the building still, he was going to go find someplace not rat-infested to get a bite. “You’re hungry, right Ray?” The two detectives left the mostly silent room.

  Chapter 16 – Class in Session

  “DETECTIVE MIKE STONEMAN” was written in neat block chalk letters on the blackboard that covered the entire front of the classroom. Mike strolled across the length of the space, his hands clasped behind his back, scanning the faces in the tiered rows. The half-desks were arranged in rising semi-circles up to the top of the room, some twenty feet or so higher than the bottom of the pit, where Mike held court.

  “Anyone?” he asked with a low, booming voice. He glanced up at the top row of seats and made eye contact with Jason, who was reclining slightly, watching the show. Jason nodded, and Mike returned the recognition with an almost imperceptible incline of his chin. Mike knew that Jason could answer the pending question, but he was looking for one of the young aspiring detectives to answer. The cops taking Mike’s class were mostly studying for the detective’s exam, but there were also a few veterans in the room looking for a refresher.

  “Come now, you’ve all handled evidence at crime scenes dozens if not hundreds of times. Don’t tell me that none of you know how to properly collect DNA samples.” Mike had reached the end of the room and turned, keeping his front to the class, and began slowly pacing back the other way. Finally, a female officer with copper-red hair raised her hand. She was sitting in the front row and Mike had noticed her in one of his other classes. She had bright eyes and sat up in her chair, even when she wasn’t answering a question. “Okay, Officer Swanson, tell me what you’d do here.”

  Officer Mary Swanson licked her lips, took a breath, and looked directly at Mike as she started to speak. Mike liked that – someone who looked him in the eye. Even if her answer wasn’t perfect, he would praise her confidence and nudge her in the right direction if she started to stray from the correct path. Not because she was an attractive woman, but because she had balls. Good police work often started with a take-charge attitude and self-confidence. People followed instructions if you sounded like you knew what you were talking about – even if you didn’t. Mike listened intently, returning the officer’s gaze, as she walked him painstakingly through each detail of the process she would use to collect samples from the hypothetical crime scene. She would place each in a plastic evidence bag, seal the bag, place a tamper-proof evidence seal on the bag, initial the seal, and deposit the sealed bag into a pouch for later transport to the crime lab.

  “And then?” Mike prompted.

  “Then I would continue to patrol the scene, looking for additional evidence.”

  “And where do you think you might find some?”

  Officer Swanson hesitated, but then charged forward. “Next I would check trash cans in the dwelling, looking for material that might contain DNA from the suspect, like a cigarette butt or a used tissue.”

  “Okay, Officer, let’s say you find a tissue in a waste can, what would you do?”

  “I would extract the item from the can with the tweezers.”

  “What twe
ezers?” Mike pressed.

  “I have–” Officer Swanson stopped talking, looked down at her notebook on the half-desk, then continued. “I would have left the tweezers that I used to pick up the hair sample in the evidence bag, so I would need to get a fresh pair from the evidence kit and use that to extract the tissue.”

  Mike smiled a benevolent, fatherly smile. “Of course you would, Officer Swanson. All of you, I’m sure, have been at a crime scene without a proper evidence collection kit. You have latex gloves in your pocket or in your squad car, but if you don’t have a kit and don’t have a tweezers, what can you use, besides your hands, to collect bits of evidence without contaminating them?”

  Jason watched as the cops in the room called out ideas, while Mike walked to the blackboard and scrawled down the items. When there were a dozen ideas in the list, Mike stopped and let the students argue among themselves about which options were superior to others. He was particularly impressed with one young Asian officer who suggested searching the kitchen drawers for unused chopsticks. “It’s an apartment in Manhattan, so there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance that there are stray chopsticks in the silverware drawer,” he said confidently.

  “In the end,” Mike said, cutting off the discussion as it was nearly the end of the class, “the point is not which of these options is the absolute best, but what options you have available. If you search the silverware drawer and discover that this is the one apartment in New York with no leftover chopsticks,” he paused and nodded at the Asian officer, “you’ll have to make do with a different option. Be creative, as you all seem to be,” Mike gestured to the long list of items on the blackboard, “and make sure to record your actions or include the item in the evidence bag, unless . . . ?”