“I don’t have your expertise,” Frankel responded. “But they look exactly the same to me.”
Jeffries thought the couple had been attacked by the fireplace where they had probably been sitting when the killer arrived. “They were fully clothed and the blood spatters indicate they were moved to the bed after their necks were slashed.” The FME brought a finger to his forehead. “Stains on the pillowcases make me suspect the numerals were carved after they’d been, shall we say, laid to rest there.”
“And Sergeant Hawley?” asked Grant.
The pain behind the question was written all over his face.
“I suspect the killer caught him by surprise near the door.”
“While he was looking at Fleming and Dozier?” suggested Frankel.
“Seems more than likely.”
The FME pointed to a puddle of blood on the plastic-covered carpet. “The sergeant would have turned to find the killer right behind him. Once dispatched, his body was placed on top of the others in what seems to be a very precise position.”
“Staged,” said Frankel.
“Quite,” agreed Jeffries. “If he had just been tossed there, his limbs would have been all askew.”
Grant delivered the sign of the cross over his fallen comrade. When the commander looked up, Frankel could see the emotion brimming in his eyes.
“I haven’t done that since I was in first form,” Grant said softly. The Scotland Yard man turned to Jeffries. “Did you find any mark on him?” he asked the FME. The desperation in his voice was audible. “A Roman numeral somewhere?”
“Nothing like that,” Jeffries answered. “We’ll continue to look but I think it’s safe to assume the sergeant was just at the wrong place at the worst possible time.”
Grant turned back to look directly at Frankel. When he spoke, his voice was laced with fury.
“This has to stop. Now.”
Frankel had barely touched the room service tray. Even the chocolate milkshake he’d found on the all-day menu had no appeal.
He had spent the first hour in the tiny but well-appointed room at the boutique Covent Garden Hotel (suggested by the Grants) pacing. He finally realized he hadn’t eaten since whatever had masqueraded as food on the flight and thought it wise to order something.
Once the hamburger, fries, and shake had arrived, it already confirmed what Frankel had suspected.
He’d completely lost his appetite.
Upon exiting the Esher mansion, Frankel and Grant realized they were no further along than when they had left the States.
The crime scene team had found evidence of another car parked outside the mansion but there was no way to tell what the make had been. Seeing as how Prior Silver had never owned a car, and there was no record of him renting one, it seemed likely he had boosted it or found one with a key inside, like Josephine Tuttle’s Hyundai Sonata in Far Rockaway.
In a small village like Esher, where everyone was home wrapping holiday gifts or hoisting hot toddies, it came as no surprise that no one had seen anyone in the vicinity of the Fleming house the previous night.
Maybe I should just get soused like last time I was here with my college buds, thought Frankel.
But he knew that wouldn’t help him forget the image of Austin Grant standing over his dead sergeant, crossing himself for the first time in over fifty years.
The man was taking it personally now.
A few minutes after placing his room service order, Frankel’s cell had rung. He’d taken one look at the number and answered it.
The conversation had been brief.
Once he’d disconnected, Frankel had stared long and hard at his left hand.
A few moments later he had removed the gold ring from his finger and placed it inside his toilet kit.
Frankel was still staring at the shake an hour later, wondering how long it would take the milk to curdle, when the knock came on the door.
He rose and crossed the room to open it.
Rachel stood there.
“You going to just stand there staring or are you going to invite me in?” she asked with a slight smile.
“I can’t believe you actually came,” Frankel replied, opening the door for her. “What did you tell your father?”
“That I was going to visit a friend.”
She stepped inside and Frankel shut the door.
“So, I’m a friend?”
“I’d like to think so,” Rachel answered.
She moved a step closer and gave him another smile.
“I did tell my dad not to wait up.”
Frankel took her into his arms and kissed her for the first time.
And realized that he was starting to take this whole thing personally as well.
19
It had started that night in the rain outside the London.
Once the commander had headed inside, Frankel and Rachel tried in vain to find a couple of cabs. Even with the doorman waving frantically and blowing his whistle like calling a foul at the Garden, there wasn’t a cab in sight, let alone two.
It was the classic New York City situation. On a bright sunny day on a leisurely stroll, you stop at a corner and a dozen taxis descend on you like a school of sharks. The skies open up, you had a better chance of finding Jimmy Hoffa’s body (Frankel subscribed to the under the fifty-yard line at the old Giants Stadium in the swampy Meadowlands theory) than finding an available cab.
Rachel had suggested Uber—but with the theaters having just let out, thousands of soaked patrons were working their apps and when she finally found one, it called for a triple peak surcharge, the same cost as getting to JFK normally. They’d barely had time to debate clicking “accept” when it was gobbled up by some desperate theatergoer and they remained stuck under the London awning.
Frankel grumbled it was enough to drive a man to drink. Rachel thought that sounded like one hell of an idea.
She’d pointed out that Rue 57, a French bistro with a nice bar, was two blocks away and said she was up for braving the storm as they were already soaked to the bone. Frankel agreed, so they splashed their way to the corner of Sixth Avenue and the street that gave the bistro its name.
After they were given bar towels to wipe themselves semidry, they’d been shown to a booth, where they ordered Irish coffees to warm the chill. By the time they’d moved on to hot toddies in honor of the season, Frankel knew he was in big trouble.
Not only was Rachel beautiful, smart, and opinionated, there was something he couldn’t put his finger on that differentiated her from any woman he’d ever met. Was it the hint of vulnerability behind her smoky gray-blue eyes that awoke the protective nature in him? The way she laughed with the slightest of rasps that made him want to keep her amused just so he could hear it again? Or that she actually found him interesting to talk to and was still sitting there when their waiter came by three hours later to say it was “last call”?
To say that Frankel had quickly grown infatuated was the understatement of the year, and there were only twelve days left in it.
For the first few minutes, they’d talked about obvious things—the crappy weather and the case. They agreed that sleet and slush sucked, and it should either “warm the fuck up” (Rachel’s words, which pleased Frankel immensely) or “Let It Snow” and give us a “White Christmas” (he resisted the urge to offer a rendition of either song). Their discussion of the Commandment Killer had been brief; both happy not to talk shop at eleven in the evening.
More than once Frankel had seen Rachel’s eyes stray to his left hand and the slightly tarnished wedding band. He told her the same story he’d shared with her father over lunch a couple of days earlier.
“A beach bar in Hawaii. Sounds lovely,” she mused, looking out at raindrops falling in Technicolor, courtesy of reflected holiday lights. “Did you go after her?”
“I learned a long time ago when to stop pursuing a dead end.” He had hoped that would finish the topic, but Rachel seemed extremely interested in Ju
lia.
“How did you two meet?” she’d asked.
“Actually, I arrested her,” Frankel had replied sheepishly. “You’d think that would have been my first clue.”
Rachel started laughing.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Frankel said.
The Tragic Tale of Julia Molinari and John Frankel followed.
“Italian girl,” Rachel observed.
“With all the feistiness and nutso family you’d expect.”
Case in point—the evening they met.
Frankel had been working undercover outside the Garden, trying to break a scalping ring that was driving licensed ticket brokers in Jersey City on a road to ruin.
“There was this one girl who kept trying to hawk a couple of nosebleeds for a crappy game. The Grizzlies were in town and no fan wanted to watch the Knicks go against up against some lousy Canadian team they could actually come out of the stands and play for in the fourth quarter.”
Rachel laughed again. “Vancouver did suck pretty bad.”
Frankel raised an eyebrow.
“My dad’s an avid Liverpool booster, just like my granddad—but it never took with me,” Rachel explained. “Men running around in circles for a solid hour with nothing to show but a scoreless draw. I started watching the Euros play on the telly and once guys like Dirk headed to the NBA, I was hooked. My folks thought I came to America to get a master’s in journalism but it was more about going to the Garden and seeing the Knicks and Celtics battle live.”’
Frankel thought about checking to make sure his jaw wasn’t hanging open.
“So, you were saying?” Rachel asked after taking a sip of the hot toddy.
“Huh?”
“Julia? Outside the Garden?” There was a twinkle in her eye.
He checked. Yup. Jaw definitely hanging. He resumed his story.
As tip-off approached, the pesky but striking willowy brunette had already passed by him a number of times. Finally, absolutely desperate, she thrust the tickets in Frankel’s face, blatantly asking what he’d give her for the pair.
Frankel pulled out his badge.
The girl didn’t miss a beat when she told him she’d take face value.
He’d cracked up. But still ended up cuffing her.
“You can’t be serious,” she had said.
Looking back, he realized he’d been a bit of a hard ass. But he figured he had been teaching Julia Molinari a life lesson. It was back at the precinct when he’d allowed Julia to make her one call that Frankel had gotten his first taste of his future father-in-law.
“What’d I get for the tickets?” Julia screamed in the phone. “I got fuckin’ arrested for the tickets, that’s what I got!”
Frankel could hear the dial tone on the phone. She turned and shrugged. “I was gonna say a thousand-dollar fine or six months, but you hadn’t told me yet.”
And then she’d smiled at him like no other woman Frankel had ever met.
The DA’s office took one look at the case and kicked it (hell, Julia wasn’t making a profit selling the tickets at face) and Frankel promptly asked her to go with him to a Knicks game the following week.
He’d proposed less than a month later.
It had been impulsive—but at the time he thought Julia was the best thing that had ever happened to a kid who grew up among the factories in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Julia had been runway model gorgeous and the sex had been incredible—not that Frankel had much experience in that department, having had only two semiserious girlfriends, who paled by comparison.
“Sounds like you were really in love with her,” Rachel had said after Frankel offered her a more romanticized and less libido-inspired version of the courtship.
“I certainly thought so.”
She indicated the ring on his hand again. “And then she broke your heart.”
It hadn’t happened overnight. Pablo, the building super that Julia had set up bar and house with in Hawaii, had just been the last nail in the marriage coffin.
They had actually lasted close to a decade. Pretty good for starting out by eloping to Atlantic City because Julia’s father didn’t approve of his only daughter choosing a cop. It might have had something to do with the shady furniture business that Frankel’s father-in-law ran on the Lower East Side. Frankel didn’t really look the other way when it came to how Leo Molinari made his money—he just made sure to discuss local sports teams when they got together on holidays. They couldn’t even agree on Giants versus Jets—with Leo pledging allegiance to the latter because Joe Namath was a great Italian American, even though Frankel had repeatedly told him that the Super Bowl III hero was of Hungarian descent.
In the end, Frankel realized what had brought them together in the first place had been what drove them apart. Julia would always be that girl looking for a quick score while Frankel was making sure everyone played by the rules.
“Now, with Pablo, I think Julia finally found what she was looking for.”
“My favorite band,” Rachel said with a grin.
“U2? Isn’t that a bit sacrilegious? With your family from Liverpool; the Beatles? Aren’t they an Irish band?”
“They’re everyone’s band,” countered Rachel.
“I’ll drink to that,” said Frankel, ordering another round. “Though they’ll have to go into the Octagon with Bruce and the E Streeters. I did grow up off Exit 13 on the Jersey Turnpike.”
The next round of toddies allowed Rachel to reminisce about all the boys she’d loved before. There had only been two—and both had ended with the realization that Rachel still hadn’t found what she was looking for.
The first had been a summer crush—the other reason (besides the Knicks) that she’d headed Stateside. When they met, Tom was an American clerking for a British barrister and Rachel had just finished her undergraduate stint at Oxford. They’d tried the long-distance thing and that had gone well enough, so Rachel had applied to the graduate journalism program at Columbia and gotten in. The pressure of Tom’s looming boards and landing the proper job with the right firm had not been their undoing—the old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder was validated when seeing each other every day on the same continent resulted in Rachel realizing that Thomas Nelson, soon-to-be-Esquire, was nothing but an old-fashioned bore.
Charles Kellerman had been a completely different experiment. Rachel should have known the relationship was doomed from the start. Older by a couple of decades, divorced for five years, and with two teens closer to Rachel in age than their father, Charlie was hardly a snooze. A heart surgeon who literally saved the life of every person who ended up on his table, Charlie knew only one route and that was (as Don Henley sings) in the fast lane. It was ski races down the Vermont slopes in the winter and regattas on the Sound when summer came. Charlie had swept Rachel off her feet and she’d had to strap herself in to try and keep up.
It didn’t help that her mother was so horrified that Rachel had taken up with a married man (“though I kept telling her he’d been divorced for five years”) that Allison wouldn’t discuss it. Though initially infatuated by a lifestyle she’d never known, it hadn’t taken Rachel very long after she moved in with Charlie (a week) to realize this wasn’t for her—he had already lived a full life that she wanted to experience with someone from the beginning.
“Meaning children?” asked Frankel.
“Building something together, at least.”
Hearing Rachel’s story brought to mind the fact that he and Julia hadn’t had kids. He’d often wondered if it were a purposeful or subconscious decision. Whatever the truth, he would never have built something substantial with Julia.
He had ended up telling Rachel as much and she raised her glass.
“Here’s to there still being time,” she toasted.
When they’d emerged from the restaurant at two in the morning, the rain had stopped and the wintry sky was clear enough to see a few stars and a full moon shining down on the city. As a result, there
were plenty of cabs.
“I could walk you home,” offered Frankel.
“It’s forty blocks from here.”
“I’m up for it if you are.” He nodded at the holiday light display hanging off the lamps on Fifty-Seventh Street. “It’s a special time in the city, particularly when you have it to yourself.”
Rachel had said why not. Like Frankel, she hadn’t been ready for this evening to end quite yet.
It took just over an hour to walk the forty blocks to Rachel’s apartment, and Frankel thought it was the most beautiful stroll he’d ever taken through the city.
It was as if Manhattan was putting on a Christmas display just for them. Whether it was giant glistening snowflakes, trees laden with lights and ornaments in every store window or lobby they passed, or Lincoln Center lit up with enough vibrant colors that Santa Claus could see it from the North Pole, it was their own private winter wonderland.
Along the way, they had reminisced about Christmases past, Frankel talking about the yearly trek into the city with his father to Macy’s at Herald Square, where he’d sat on Santa’s lap and asked for things he almost never received. Rachel had told him about some contraption her father brought home that they’d christened Saint Electronick—starting a family ritual that continued years into her adulthood.
It was nearly three-thirty when they reached Rachel’s walkup.
“Thank you,” she’d told him. “That was . . .”
“. . . unexpected,” Frankel had said, getting to say aloud what he’d been feeling for the past few hours.
They stood there awkwardly for a moment before he took a step forward and gave her a friendly but very quick hug.
“Good night, then.” He gave her a genuine smile.
“Good night, John,” Rachel said, returning one of her own.
He’d watched her unlock the door to her building. Then he asked her the other question that had been on his mind the entire evening.
“Will we be telling your father about this?”
Rachel thought about it for a few seconds. She scrunched up her nose. “I don’t think so.”
The Last Commandment Page 17
