Storm Rising

by Douglas Schofield

  12

  The cops left Lucy alone for a week. Apparently, as she later decided, even the most callous among them wasn’t brave enough to intrude upon a newly widowed bride’s lonely Christmas.

  When Jack was killed, he and Lucy hadn’t even begun to turn their minds to the holiday, so there was no tree and no decorations. If there had been, Lucy would have trashed them. Ricki and Jeff tried to persuade her to fly down to Coral Gables to spend a week or two with them, but she hadn’t wanted to impose her sorrowful existence on their three-year-old daughter’s Christmas. And, in truth, she hadn’t been able to muster the energy to book a ticket.

  Her bereavement leave from work ran into the school vacation, but Lucy warned her principal, Garrett Lindsay, that she wasn’t sure when she’d be able to resume her duties. She told him in a phone call that he should consider replacing her. He showed up at her house later the same day and tried to persuade her to join him—or any one of a number of teachers who had offered—for a family Christmas, but she wasn’t responsive.

  She spent most of the holiday in bed.

  On December 29, Detective Trousdale called and arranged to visit on the following day. He arrived at her door accompanied by a compact, hard-looking woman carrying a thin leather case … and by Ernie Tait.

  Trousdale introduced himself. “This is my partner, Carla Scarlatti. And of course you know Ernie.”

  Lucy let them in. They followed her into the living room. She offered them coffee. They all declined. Lucy sank onto the couch. The others found seats nearby. Trousdale removed his winter coat; Scarlatti kept hers on.

  Tait led off. “Lucy, I’m not involved in this investigation. This is Jersey City’s case. And anyway, indirectly, I’m a witness. But the chief asked me to be here today.”

  His expression reminded her of the night he’d brought her the news of Jack’s death. She felt suddenly frightened.

  “Why?”

  “So you’d have a familiar face in the room.”

  Lucy glanced from face to face. “Why is that important?”

  “Because this is going to be very difficult for you,” Ernie replied.

  Trousdale took over. “Mrs. Hendricks, I believe you’ve been told how your husband died?”

  “Just that he was run down by a car and then … shot.”

  “From his injuries, and from the tire marks, we think a vehicle backed into him. Because of the pattern of his injuries, the M.E. thinks it must have been an SUV or a van. The bullets—” He stopped when he saw Lucy’s pained expression. “I’m sorry.”

  Lucy took a deep breath and steeled herself. “Please go on.”

  “The bullets that were removed from Jack’s body were .22 caliber. Our ballistics people say they bore certain distinctive marks, called ‘scrubbing.’ That suggests that the weapon was equipped with a silencer. That, plus the wound pattern, leads us to believe this was a professional hit.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean—?” Lucy turned to look straight at Ernie Tait. “Wouldn’t that mean you have to go back over your old cases?”

  “Other than the odd guy who was a Mob associate—which means not a made man—Jack and I never had a case that involved the Mafia.”

  “That Mob thing again, Ernie?”

  Trousdale looked at Tait. “What does she mean?”

  “I visited her before Christmas. Told her about Jack being seen with a Mob guy.”

  Trousdale and Scarlatti exchanged a look. Scarlatti opened her leather case. Distractedly, Lucy noticed the woman had reddened, scaly patches on the backs of her hands. She handed Lucy a plastic evidence bag. It contained what looked like a man’s silver bracelet. It bore a bizarre insignia consisting of three human legs, bent at the knee, radiating in a symmetrical pattern from a woman’s head. Her hair looked like a tangle of intertwined, golden serpents.

  “Have you seen that before?”

  “I recognize the insignia, but not the bracelet.”

  The woman cop seemed surprised. “You recognize that insignia?”

  “Yes. It’s called a trinacria. It’s on the flag of Sicily.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “My father owns a bar in Florida. There’s a Sicilian flag on the wall. What’s this got to do with Jack?”

  Scarlatti ignored the question. She pressed Lucy. “Why would your father have a Sicilian flag in his bar?”

  “Because he was born there!” Lucy was getting angry. She leaned forward. “Answer me, please! What’s this got to do with my husband?”

  Scarlatti looked at her partner.

  “That bracelet you’re holding was found by the medical examiner,” Trousdale replied. “It was stuck in your husband’s throat.”

  Lucy’s hand went to her own throat. Her eyes filled with tears. “They choked him?”

  “No.” His tone was gentle. “He was already dead when it was placed there.”

  “I—I don’t understand.”

  Tait interjected. “Lucy, in the old days, when the Mafia got rid of someone who’d been talking too much, they’d sometimes leave a dead canary in their victim’s mouth. It was a warning—a warning to anyone else who was giving away their secrets, talking too much, maybe thinking about making a deal with the FBI. Things like that.”

  “A canary?”

  “Yes,” Scarlatti answered. “In this case, according to our intelligence people, that bracelet is a known calling card of the Lanza crime family.” There was no gentleness in the woman cop’s tone when she added, “We believe it was left deliberately, as a warning to others. Your husband wasn’t working on any investigations related to Mob activities. Both Detective Tait and the Captain in charge of the Bayonne Detective Bureau have confirmed that. And, just to be sure he wasn’t working off the books with federal law enforcement, we checked with the FBI, the Department of Justice, Treasury—everyone we could think of. They don’t know him. There was no reason for the Mob to kill him because of his police work. So that leaves only one other logical conclusion. He must have been on the Lanza payroll, and he screwed up with them somehow.”

  Lucy sat in stunned silence.

  Involuntarily, she combed her memory for any comment, any sign, any unexplained flush of wealth—anything!—that Jack had ever said or done or shown her that could support this cop’s sickening allegation.

  There was nothing.

  She stood up.

  “Out! All of you!”

  “Lucy…!” Tait, who had been sitting beside her, reached for her arm. She pulled away. Blood boiling, she turned on him.

  “You were Jack’s partner! You come here, into his house, and lie to me about him! You, of all people! How could you be part of this?”

  “Mrs. Hendricks,” Trousdale began. “Please let us just—!”

  “No!” Lucy’s voice rose to a screech. “Get out of my house!”

  They left.

  They returned in force, on the following day, armed with a search warrant. Tait stood by with Lucy, looking thoroughly embarrassed, vainly trying to comfort her, while a team of Bayonne Internal Affairs cops, accompanied by Trousdale and Scarlatti, turned her house upside down. They found nothing, a point Lucy had emphatically predicted when they arrived. She had the puny satisfaction of spitting that prediction back in Scarlatti’s face at the end of the search, only to have her rage reignited when the bitch told her they were taking her laptop. It was returned to her three weeks later. Although the officer who brought it back said nothing, it was obvious to Lucy that they hadn’t found a shred of evidence on the hard drive to support their ridiculous suspicions.

  * * *

  By March, Lucy had still not returned to work, and Garrett Lindsay had finally been forced to “release” her from her position. She hadn’t objected. She knew she was incapable of effective teaching. She met with Garrett at his office one evening, received the paperwork, allowed him a farewell hug, and walked away.

  She was now four months pregnant, still tormented by grief and, with every passin
g day, plagued by the hysterical thought that her child would look so much like Jack that she’d be incapable of caring for it.

  She was stressed, frightened, and increasingly isolated.

  Still struggling with the petty obsessions of the pension board bureaucrats, and without her teaching salary, she was relying on savings and some money from her father and Ricki to meet her expenses. Someone in the Jersey City PD or Bayonne Police had leaked information to the press about the investigation into Jack’s death and suspected activities, forcing her to screen calls from pestering reporters. When she began to suspect she was being followed, she called Ernie Tait. He was concerned and responsive. He promised to make a “confidential inquiry,” as he called it, and he was as good as his word.

  When he phoned her back, he said, “It’s not the police, Lucy. It’s the press.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Do you have a copy of today’s paper?”

  “Which one?”

  “The Star Ledger.”

  “No.”

  “You’re on page three. Looks like you’re coming out of a drug store.”

  When she picked up a copy of the paper, she realized the photo had been taken three days earlier after she’d picked up a prescription. It appeared with a regurgitated story about the continuing investigation into Jack’s murder. The headline read:

  DEAD COP MAY HAVE BEEN INVOLVED WITH ORGANIZED CRIME

  The last straw came with the break-in at her house, and the indifferent attitude of the cops who responded.

  The following night, after she hung up from her regular call with Lucy, Ricki had persuaded Jeff to help her mount a rescue operation. Jeff called an old classmate who practiced with a firm in Trenton and hired him to take over Lucy’s fight with the pension board. By the time he got off the phone, Ricki had packed a bag and was ready to drive north.

  By the middle of April, Lucy was living in Coral Gables.

  But even then, the torment didn’t stop.

  Unable to stop herself from picking at the scab, Lucy began each day by obsessively checking New Jersey media websites. Articles kept appearing. One suggested that authorities were “worried that Detective Hendricks had compromised significant investigations”—without naming one. But it was a later story in May that plunged her into the deepest despair. Someone at an obscure small-market weekly paper in southern New Jersey—a journalist wannabe who gloried in the byline “Fred Tantrum, Investigative Reporter”—tried to burnish his CV with a story asking how it was that Jack and Lucy Hendricks, lowly wage earners that they were, had been able to afford “a pampered week in the Presidential Suite of a luxurious Mob-built hotel in sun-bathed Key West, Florida.”

  PART

  II

  FORZA

  13

  Speed equals smarts. Modern life, it was said, was a fast-paced blur of information and communication, of aggression and retreat, of beating that clock, outwitting that competitor, exposing that fraud, filing that patent … that story … that lawsuit …

  Therefore, the most valuable citizens must be the quick-witted, the quick thinkers, the quick studies. It stood to reason: The people making the fastest connections must be the smartest ones.

  Wrong.

  Making fast connections didn’t mean making the right connections. It had been shown, time and again, that quick thinkers made more wrong decisions than deliberative ones. And if intelligence was directly related to reaction time, the modern world was in deep trouble, because a Swedish university study had shown that average human reaction times had declined steadily between 1884 and 2004.

  If reaction time truly equated to intelligence, then the average IQ of today’s population was thirteen points lower than it was during the Victorian Age.

  IQ had nothing to do with making fast connections. It had everything to do with making the right connections.

  Lucy was about to experience a live demonstration of her own intelligence.

  In May, with the weather becoming warmer and the days longer, she began alternating her gym workouts with a five-mile run around and through Stephen Gregg Park. One evening, late in the month, she was pounding south along her usual route on the waterside leg of Park Road. As she passed the first baseball diamond, she noticed a silver-colored car.

  It caught her attention because it was approaching too fast, well above the park’s fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit.

  And, because it was traveling in the wrong direction on a one-way road.

  Abruptly, the vehicle’s nose dipped. Tires yowling, it swerved, climbed the curb, and came to a shuddering stop, blocking Lucy’s path. Doors flew open and two men jumped out, one from behind the wheel and the other from the rear seat.

  Lucy’s instincts kicked in. The bleachers to her left prevented her escape in that direction, so she pivoted right and darted into the roadway, sprinting for the opposite curb. Beyond it lay a low, grassy ridge, a thin curtain of scrub and gnarly white pines, and then the Newark Bay walkway, frequented by cyclists.

  The rear-seat man had anticipated Lucy’s move and was already moving to cut her off. He was obviously fit because he moved with blinding speed. In a second, he had her wrapped in powerful arms. He lifted her off her feet and carried her toward the car. Her frantic attempts to kick free were neutralized when the driver rushed over and seized her legs. Before she could scream, or even catch her breath, she found herself face-down on the floor in the rear compartment. The first assailant piled in after and pinned her there. The other man jumped behind the wheel. With a bone-jarring bump, the car reversed into the road and squealed away, back in the direction from which it had come.

  Five years of grief and depression hadn’t prepared Lucy for the cataclysm of mind-numbing terror that engulfed her in the few seconds it had taken to abduct her off the street.

  But five years of brooding introspection had.

  Five years remembering Jack’s imperturbable confidence.

  Five years remembering his loving protectiveness.

  And five years remembering the strict lesson he had drummed into her: “Curb your fear. If you don’t, you won’t be able to think. Your physical strength might not save you. Your brain will.”

  She stamped down on the fear and gave herself an order:

  Think!

  She could tell by the car’s initial maneuver that it was traveling south.

  It didn’t make sense. These men must have known her running route, but instead of rolling up on her from behind and snatching her off the sidewalk, they’d taken the risk of speeding north on Park Drive, against the warning signs.

  Either they hadn’t noticed the signs, meaning they didn’t know the park … or, they were stupid.

  “What are you doing?” Lucy gasped. “What do you want with me?”

  “Shut up!” her rear-seat captor rasped. Then he added, in a more moderate tone, “Please.”

  “Please? You want me to please shut up while you kidnap me? Who the hell are you?”

  “This is just a delivery. We won’t hurt you.”

  “You’re already hurting me!”

  “Sorry, ma’am.” He adjusted his body, loosening the pressure on her back and neck.

  Please?

  Sorry, ma’am?

  Delivery?

  While Lucy processed their baffling verbal exchange, she felt the car make a sharp left. She waited for the sharp right that she knew would eventually lead to the park’s southeast exit.

  It didn’t come. The car rolled straight on.

  Straight on signified one of two possibilities: Either these two goons were heading into the dead-end tangle of footpaths next to the basketball courts to “deliver” her to someone waiting there, or they really were just plain stupid.

  Considering that it was still light outside, and there would probably be local guys shooting baskets on the courts at the end of this road, Lucy went with stupid.

  When they’d started out, the man in the back had been half-sitting, half-lying on t
he seat, holding Lucy to the floor with a rough hand on the back of her neck and a knee on her lower back. When he’d eased the pressure on her, she’d noticed a cylinder lying under the front seat a few inches from her nose. It was a pressure can. She could just make out the lettering on the label:

  Prestone Windshield De-Icer

  The business end of the container was a combined nozzle and ice scraper.

  She moved her left arm, pretending to try to get more comfortable.

  “Don’t move.”

  “My arm’s going to sleep!”

  “Sorry.”

  He released her for a few seconds while she pretended to get more comfortable.

  The car kept going.

  Lucy knew they were rolling deeper into the cul-de-sac.

  Her minder must have noticed they were running out of road. He jerked upright, releasing his grip on her neck. He pounded on the back of the driver’s seat.

  “Idiot! You missed a turn back there! This is a dead end!”

  The driver cursed. The car slowed to a stop, then started to move forward again.

  Lucy slid her left hand under the seat. She gripped the spray can. By flexing her wrist, she could tell it wasn’t empty. She adjusted it in her fingers so the nozzle was in the right position.

  “You can’t go up there!” her captor barked. “It’s a walking path!”

  “Shut up! I’m just getting turned around!”

  Lucy felt the car stop, then go into reverse.

  She made her move.

  She twisted around, almost wrenching her spine in the process.

  She caught her distracted abductor by surprise.

  “What are you doing? Stay put!”

  As he reached for her, she sprayed a blast of de-icer directly into his eyes. He let out a bellow of pain and lurched backward.

  The car rocked to a stop. The driver craned to see what caused the commotion. Lucy clawed her way upright. “Thanks for the ride!” she hissed. She swung with all her strength, stabbing him in the face with the blade of ice scraper, yanked on the door latch behind her, and threw herself backward out the car.