Holiday Buzz

by Cleo Coyle

  Oh man. I wish I hadn’t thought of that . . .

  Now I tried to remember if I’d stashed frozen blueberries in Mike’s freezer on my last trip. If I did, I’d make us blueberry syrup. If not, my maple-butter syrup would have to do.

  As the cab pulled up to the modern brick apartment building, I paid the driver then headed inside. The man at the front desk gave me a friendly wave. For going on five months now, I’d been coming here every other weekend, so he knew me well.

  Mike was fifteen floors up, high enough for his small balcony to boast a view of the Capitol Dome and Washington Monument. He was also close enough to the Justice Department to walk to work if he wanted—and close enough to the National Gallery to give me a pleasant way to pass the time on those days (yes, even Saturdays and Sundays) when some urgent matter might pull him away for a few hours.

  As the elevator doors opened, I dug around for my big ring of keys. His apartment door had two locks. Yawning, I undid the dead bolt first, but my fingers were so cold that I fumbled the keys, loudly dropping them twice in the hallway before locating the second key for the lock on the knob.

  Finally, I opened the door.

  The apartment was shadowy, but enough ambient light spilled in from the living room’s windows for me to see the key ring when I loudly dropped it, yet again!

  I let the heavy door swing shut behind me. As I bent down, I came to three important realizations in less than two seconds—

  (1) A very large person had been hiding behind the door and was now surging toward me. (2) I was not wearing my own white parka but Janelle’s too-large black coat with the hood still up. And (3) one exhausted coffeehouse manager plus one half-awake G-man added up to sleep-deprived stupidity!

  “Aaaaah!” I cried as Quinn powercuffed me for the second time in a week. Only this time, he wasn’t so gentle—because he didn’t know it was me. Some unknown perp was gaining access to his apartment at an ungodly hour and his street cop reflexes kicked in.

  In one fluid motion, the cold steel of Quinn’s handcuffs bit my wrist with painful force and jerked my right arm backward to meet my left. With a loud click, my wrists were shackled together. Nearly simultaneously, my right leg was swept out from under me, and I landed with a thud, both of my cheeks kissing the area rug.

  Crap. Not again . . .

  Honestly, I was lucky he brought me down on a luxury floor covering with very deep pile—and that he didn’t break my wrist—although for a moment, it felt like he had.

  “Aw, no,” he murmured as he rolled me over and yanked back my huge hood. “Don’t tell me . . .”

  I blinked at the man’s bewildered face—and the dangling butt of his very large gun. He wore pajama bottoms (and not much else). His caramel brown hair was mussed from sleep, his blue eyes tired and bloodshot. Barefoot and bare chested, he’d shrugged into his shoulder holster in what had to be record time.

  The way the leather straps hung off his broad chest, the guy looked ready for a role in the next Rambo movie. All he needed was a shaggy black wig, rip cord headband, and knife in his teeth.

  “Clare?”

  “Hi, Mike.”

  Fifty-two

  I woke up alone in Quinn’s bed, wearing his pajama top (and not much else). Late morning sun peeked in through the closed mini blinds. Still groggy, I couldn’t decide.

  Did we make love? Or did I dream it?

  I vaguely became aware of something cold on my arm and realized my poor, bruised limb was propped on a towel-covered pillow. A makeshift compress of ice in a tube sock had been secured around my swollen wrist.

  “Mike?”

  “You up?” he gently called, moving into the bedroom.

  Still holding a section of the Washington Post, he peered at me over the rim of his reading glasses—a new addition since he’d begun work in DC. (Only Quinn could make librarian half-glasses look sexy.)

  He appeared much more relaxed this morning, too. No holster, no gun, no cuffs, just a pair of worn blue jeans on his long legs and a New York Raiders sweatshirt over that powerful torso. And that’s when I knew for sure: I hadn’t dreamed it. Mike had made love to me.

  “I’ll start the coffee,” he said.

  “I can do that—”

  “Don’t you move, Cosi. I mean it.” He whipped off his glasses, shaking them like Rambo the Librarian. “You’re not going anywhere . . .”

  Smiling, I leaned back on the pillows, my eyes moving over the bedroom. The Justice Department had provided these digs for Quinn’s temporary special assignment.

  As corporate complexes went, it was nice enough, with luxury amenities like a fitness room, rooftop pool, and business center. The place came fully furnished and even boasted hardwood floors and an appliance-filled kitchen. But the decor was hotel homogenous, the art on the walls bland and corporate—pasty landscapes and framed splotches of color to match the carpeting.

  With his East Village one-bedroom being sublet to another cop, Quinn displayed very little of himself here: a few snapshots tucked in his dresser mirror (his kids, some family members, and me), personal toiletries, clothes, shoes. That was it.

  I did my best to bring in more touches of homey-ness—hand-thrown pottery and quilted pillows from our outings in Maryland and Virginia; some fun posters from the Folger Shakespeare Library; and a few framed pictures I’d taken of his OD Squad downing muffins and red eyes in my Village Blend.

  “Here we go . . .”

  Mike was back fast with two steaming NYPD mugs. The coffee was my Holiday Blend. (I sent him freshly roasted bags on a regular basis.) By now, the man knew the drill on grinding and brewing, and the rich, nutty, slightly spicy aroma was heaven-sent.

  I sipped and sighed as he presented me with a white paper bag.

  “I got us some breakfast. That little French place around the corner . . .”

  Inside the sack were freshly baked croissants—chocolate, cherry, almond, and apple. Oh, nice, they’re still warm!

  As I used one hand to stuff my mouth with flaky pastry and cinnamon apples, he took tender hold of the other and removed the ice-filled athletic sock. It was then that I realized he’d secured the thing by linking his cop handcuffs around it.

  “So were you trying to be funny?” I asked. “Or is this one of those ‘hair of the dog that bit you’ remedies?”

  “Whatever works.” He smiled. “And this did. The swelling’s down . . .” But his smile faded as he examined my arm’s exhibition of the color purple. Now he looked burdened with guilt.

  “Mike, please don’t feel bad. I should have called you. And honestly . . . most of these bruises didn’t come from you.”

  It took him a second to process that. “Someone else did this to you?”

  I nodded.

  His expression went stony. “Who?”

  “It’s kind of a long story . . .”

  Now his blue eyes were blazing. “Tell me.”

  I did, bringing him up to date on everything that had happened and finishing with the assurance that because of my discoveries, Lori Soles would have “St. Nick” Bacque back in custody, hopefully by the time I returned to New York.

  Quinn’s expression—or rather, his lack of one—failed to change as I talked. I could guess what he was thinking, but frankly I didn’t want to.

  This was what he’d been like early in our relationship. The man’s “cop-curtain” would come down, he’d clam up, and I’d play twenty questions with myself on what was going on behind his interview-room stare.

  As our time together progressed, I lost patience with the guessing games and insisted he open up, trust me with what he was feeling.

  “So . . . ?” I said, giving him the look—the one that said, Tell me what you’re thinking or I’m going to scream!

  He folded his arms. “You really want to risk wrecking a pleasant weekend by knowing what I think?”

  I flopped back on the bed and stared at the stucco ceiling. “You think I was stupid to risk going into Nick’s bak
ery.”

  “Not stupid, just—”

  “Reckless. Wrong.”

  “Yes. Both.”

  I sat up and met his eyes. “But do you think I’m wrong about Rita’s killer? Do you think her homicide was simply her ex-husband, making it look like the basher? Do you really think it has no connection to M’s murder?”

  Mike rubbed the back of his neck. He hesitated before answering, and in the silence, the words M’s murder began to echo through my brain, bringing back a memory from last night’s party . . .

  TUCKER: What sort of acting have you done?

  DANNI: I appeared in an episode of that serial killer cable show Wexler. I played a girl named Emily. I knew my lines, but I always missed my cue . . . The other actor would say, “Hey, Em,” and I’d be waiting to hear “Hey, Danni.”

  Hey, Em, I thought. Or Hey, M . . .

  I grabbed Mike’s shoulders. “Oh my God! Moirin isn’t M’s real name! I’m sure of it!”

  “Oh?”

  I explained my theory, starting with the thespian-challenged Danni Rayburn and ending with one of my staff meetings.

  “Last Friday, before the first Cookie Swap, Esther, Tucker, and I sat around a café table, discussing funny holiday hats. When Esther called her Moirin, she didn’t react. Then I addressed her as M, and she realized we were talking to her. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen that happen.”

  “So what’s your conclusion?”

  “Her real name must have been something like Emily, Emmaline, or Emma. She was clever to ask people to call her M. She could maintain a false name while being called something that sounded like her real one.”

  A tiny, amused smile lifted the corners of Quinn’s mouth.

  “Mike?”

  He rose without a word, went into the next room, and came back holding a cardboard shirt box with a stick-on bow.

  “What’s this?”

  “An early Christmas gift,” he said. “Something you asked for.”

  I blinked, trying to remember. “I didn’t ask you for any—”

  “Yes, you did. Open it.”

  Fifty-three

  I lifted off the box lid, confused at the stack of typewritten pages. From the first paragraph, I could see it was a transcript from a police interview.

  “What is this, Quinn? Don’t tell me you’re writing your memoirs. Is this DC assignment going to your head?”

  “Zip it, Cosi—and keep reading.”

  I did and, after a few pages, my jaw dropped. “Where did you get this?”

  “CARIN.”

  “Excuse me? Carin who?”

  He smirked. “Jealous?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Not unless you think I want to share French pastry in my bed with an international network of asset-tracing experts.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “CARIN is an acronym for the Camden Assets Recovery Interagency Network. I have a friend there who hooked me up with a CAB contact.”

  “And when we say cab, I take it we’re not talking about a taxi driver?”

  “CAB stands for Criminal Assets Bureau. They work out of Dublin.”

  More alphabet soup. “Boil it down, Quinn, or we’ll be in this bed all day.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Promise.”

  “We’ll see. Talk to me . . .”

  He did.

  Mike’s years of working on narcotics crimes had put him on cases with tendrils that reached into international jurisdictions. Because drug dealers moved money and assets around the world, members of CARIN sometimes asked Quinn for help.

  Now, because of me, he asked them for help.

  First he phoned Lori Soles, requesting e-copies of M’s fingerprints. He sent the prints to his contact at CARIN, who put him in touch with an agent at CAB, a division of the Irish police—also known as the Garda. Within days, Quinn was sent a confidential police interview transcript from a Dublin “Book of Evidence” procedure over five years before.

  “But this transcript is not about Moirin Fagan . . .” I continued to page through it. “It’s from an interview with a woman named Emma Brophy.”

  “That’s right. It’s like you just told me, Cosi.” That little smile was back. “M’s real name wasn’t Moirin. It was Emma.”

  I scanned the paperwork, trying to glean what crime M had been charged with. “This police interview is about stolen property, but she wasn’t the one who stole it.”

  “That’s right. Keep reading.”

  I did, and the whole story came together. M (aka Emma Brophy) had been working in a late bar, what the Irish call their nightclubs. The place was a magnet for the young, wealthy set.

  There was also valet parking, and one of the club owners, who had family connections to an organized crime network, set up an international car-theft ring.

  When a luxury car was parked, a copy of the key was made. Someone in the ring followed that car for a period of days, waiting for a chance to drive it straight to a dock, where it was shipped to another country for resale.

  A low-level member of that ring was also a bartender at the club and played in a local band. This young man began dating Emma (M), who had no idea about his criminal activity.

  Cormac began giving M things—a flat-screen television, electronics, designer dresses. She had no idea they were stolen. And the club owner had no idea Cormac and his valet buddy were making copies of more than just a car key. When they got their hands on a house key, they started letting themselves in and taking pricey items. This sloppy greed is what got them caught.

  Close to Christmas, Cormac came by Emma’s place. He handed her a wrapped gift and told her not to open it. He said this wasn’t a gift for her, and she should put it under the tree and leave it there.

  By now, Emma suspected that her boyfriend was into shady dealings. So, after he left, she did open it, and found a handgun.

  She rewrapped the gift, pretended everything was fine, but pressed her boyfriend for answers. He’d had a lot to drink that night and—in vino veritas, Cormac confessed his criminal activities, and she let him have it.

  Emma told Cormac she was shocked and disgusted. She demanded he quit breaking the law. While she didn’t want to rat out her own boyfriend to the police, she was sickened by what he’d done. She went to bed conflicted and woke up in a terrible jam.

  On a tip, the police raided her place, and Cormac fled, climbing a trellis to the roof. He got away clean and is believed to be at large in Eastern Europe.

  In the meantime, the police arrested Emma Brophy as the receiver of stolen goods. She spilled everything that her boyfriend told her about the criminal ring, including how it operated, and who was involved.

  The recovered gun was connected to a murder. When M learned that, she knew what she had to do. She forged a deal with the Garda, agreeing to wear a wire and get people in the ring to admit guilt, including Cormac’s older brother. She would also testify against them.

  In exchange, she asked for the police to help her and her younger cousin, who worked at a Dublin bakery. The girls were best friends, and they wanted to relocate to America. According to Quinn, officials helped Emma and her cousin with the proper paperwork to begin a new life across the pond.

  “So where did they set her up?” I asked, flipping through the pages.

  “It’s not in there,” Quinn said. “And my contact wouldn’t tell me. I got the impression no one in the Garda ever recorded that information. After Emma agreed to build a case for these officers, they dropped all charges against her and got her out of the country clean.”

  “Okay . . . so Emma came to America about five years ago. Yet her landlord, David Brice, told me she came to the city to live with him only two years ago. Where was she for the other three years?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’m just trying to get a picture of her life. A timeline . . .”

  Mike shook his head. “The picture is clear enough. What you want to know is here.” He tapped the papers.
“Cormac got away clean. He’s still at large.”

  “You don’t think . . .”

  “I do.”

  I stared at the papers and understood the logic of it.

  “The violence of M’s murder does fit a crime of passion,” I admitted. “And Lori Soles told me M wrote in her diary recently about some Letter changing her life—a letter Lori has yet to find. Maybe this Letter was from Cormac. M must have known her killer, and what you’re suggesting does fit all the evidence, except . . .”

  “What?”

  “Why would Cormac kill her in a public place like the Cookie Swap? Why risk it? And why use a rock from the park, for heaven’s sake? It’s so stupid.”

  “Given the guy’s stupid moves in the past, I wouldn’t put too much stock in his suddenly getting smarter.”

  “But what would killing M get him? Revenge? Seems to me it would just increase the likelihood that he would get caught.”

  “Revenge killings are common enough. The Garda agree.”

  “So they’re looking for Cormac now?”

  “Not just Cormac. The Garda is also looking at known associates of people whom Emma Brophy testified against. If any of them traveled to America over the last six months, they’re going to be looked at, maybe questioned.”

  “Then there’s nothing more I can do to help.”

  “No, Cosi. But it’s because of you we have this lead. I’m sending a copy of what you’re holding to Lori Soles. She and Fletcher Endicott will likely work with Irish officials on pursuing leads on this side of the ocean. You did a good thing, asking me to get involved. Lori and Endicott may have dug this up eventually—but your curiosity saved the investigation valuable time.”

  I nodded. But feeling “good” about anything connected with M’s brutal murder wasn’t in the cards for me. Mike seemed to sense it. He leaned closer, his voice softened.

  “You know, what I said to you earlier, about what you did last night—it wasn’t entirely fair.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You may have been wrong to risk your safety, going into that scumbag’s bakery. But you were right about Nick being a criminal.”