Burn

by James Patterson

  “Nobody in particular,” I said, putting my phone carefully away as I motioned to Doyle to follow me down the stairs.

  A hundred different emotions and thoughts swirled through me as I descended. I was revolted, of course, and sad and angry and keyed up, but mostly I was disappointed in myself.

  Starkie was right about one thing. I’d majorly screwed up. I should never have allowed Naomi to go off and start an investigation on her own. I should have forced a partner on her.

  No one had been watching her back, and that was definitely on me.

  As I made the ground floor, I looked down at my vibrating phone and saw that Chief Starkie was trying to contact me again. Instead of answering, I turned off my phone as I motioned to Doyle to follow me toward the super’s ground-floor apartment.

  “What are we doing, Mike? I thought the DT wanted us to wait to be questioned?”

  “Change of plans, Doyle,” I said as I knocked on the super’s door.

  “Oh, that poor girl,” said Meg Hambrecht as she answered, in jeans and a sweatshirt now. “I remember the day she moved in, how concerned she was about her movers hogging the elevator. Not wanting to inconvenience everybody. She seemed so together. Now something like this. It’s just—”

  “Thanks, Ms. Hambrecht,” I said, interrupting, “but I noticed you have a security camera by the buzzer. We’d like to look at the footage.”

  She shook her head rapidly.

  “I’m sorry, but they’re installing a new system, and the building management fired the contractor in the middle of it. The whole thing has been out for a while now, three, four weeks. There is no footage.”

  “Thanks for your time,” I said. “The other detectives are finishing up upstairs. They’ll probably be contacting you in a bit.”

  “Mike, c’mon. What’s up?” said Doyle as we left the building.

  “I’ll tell you what’s up, Doyle,” I said. “I worked homicide for five years. It’s more politically expedient for the department that her death be seen as a suicide. That’s why we have to investigate this on our own.”

  “What about protocol?”

  “Protocol and politics and especially Chief Starkie be damned, Doyle. Naomi was part of our team. She was one of us. If we don’t catch the people that did this to her, no one will.”

  CHAPTER 31

  WE RUSHED BACK TO the Harlem office, and for the next half hour, Doyle and I tossed Naomi’s cubicle, looking for any notes she might have started on the cannibalism case.

  It wasn’t looking too good. There weren’t any notebooks. The only paper in the place was a ream of copy paper for her printer. Everything we needed to know seemed to be on her password-protected computer.

  “Hey, you know, Lopez knows computers,” Doyle said as we stood there staring at the Toshiba’s screen. “He, like, went to school and stuff before he got called for the cops. You didn’t hear it from me, but he even fixes them on the side.”

  “You tell me this now?” I said. “Go get him.”

  Lopez arrived along with Noah Robertson and Brooklyn Kale, who we’d informed on the way over. The gang looked pretty torn up about Naomi.

  “We need you to do all you can, Arturo,” I said. “For Naomi.”

  Lopez sat down in front of the computer and took a deep breath and began clicking away. After a second, he snapped a finger.

  “Hey, we know Naomi had a Yahoo e-mail account through AT&T. The phone company will have her password on file. Somebody call them so we can at least look at her e-mails.”

  Noah Robertson was doing just that when Lopez cried out.

  “Forget it. I got it! Open sesame. I’m in!”

  “Arty, my man,” Doyle said, giving Lopez an enthusiastic high five.

  “What was it?” I said.

  “Chast was a Red Sox fan,” Lopez said, rapidly clicking more keys and the mouse. “Used to drive me nuts. I mean, go join the Boston cops, why don’tcha? I remembered making fun of her at a softball game for wearing a Dustin Pedroia jersey, asking her if it was his actual jersey since the guy is such a shrimp. So I tried DUSTIN plus her birthday and wham-o. Easy beans.”

  Lopez brought up a Word file entitled Current Case.

  “Here it is, I think,” he said. “Looks like a cut-and-pasted note from her iPhone. She probably e-mailed it to herself. It looks like notes from an interview dated yesterday.”

  Lopez read a little bit more and looked up at me.

  “Mike, it looks like she’d already spoken to the complainant yesterday. Hudson Du Maurier the Third.”

  Doyle looked at me from the other side of Lopez.

  “Don’t tell me,” Doyle said. “It’s time we have a talk with Mr. The Third.”

  CHAPTER 32

  AS DOYLE AND I went to Du Maurier’s address, I sent Brooklyn and Noah and Lopez on a scavenger hunt to see if they could find the sometimes sidewalk artist at one of his usual hangouts on the street.

  Doyle and I had just parked in front of Du Maurier’s building on Lenox when my phone rang. It was Brooklyn Kale.

  “We got him,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Rucker Park.”

  “Stay there. We’re on our way.”

  We headed north. She didn’t have to tell me the address. Rucker Park, at 155th and Frederick Douglass, is probably the most famous public basketball court in the city. Started in the ’50s to give city kids something to do in the summer, the league and tournaments associated with the park had been a stepping-stone for such legends as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Dr J.

  There was quite a crowd when we pulled up, had to be a few hundred people in the aluminum stands. There was also an MC and even boom cameras and lights as two brightly uniformed three-on-three teams went at it. As I pulled behind Brooklyn’s double-parked cruiser, the crowd exploded in laughter and Bronx cheers as some lumbering six-five fifteen-year-old blew a slam dunk.

  I sat in the back of the cruiser and shook Du Maurier’s hand. Du Maurier was a slim, neat, diminutive light-skinned black man in a dusty, threadbare tuxedo. His strange getup struck me as a cross between a magician and Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. He nervously clutched a folding easel to his chest with both hands like it was an instrument he was about to play.

  “You wanted to talk to me about something?” the seventy-something man said, rocking back and forth as he stared out at the crowd. He didn’t give me any eye contact. I wondered if he was maybe autistic.

  “If you could be quick about it, please, Officer. That’s MTV filming in there. I don’t see these kinds of crowds that often.”

  “That can wait, Mr. Du Maurier. I need your attention. I also need you to be perfectly honest with me. Did an officer speak to you yesterday? A female officer?”

  “Yes, she did. A young woman with reddish-blond hair,” the street artist said, rocking even harder now as he began to bite a thumbnail.

  “Detective Chist, no, Chast was her name,” he said, flicking a quick look in my direction. “I told her about what I saw a few nights ago, those men in the abandoned building by the subway.”

  “Where did she speak to you?”

  “At my apartment. Twenty-three forty-one Lenox Avenue, five J.”

  “There’s a problem, Mr. Du Maurier. Officer Chast was found dead this morning. She was murdered.”

  The old man stopped rocking momentarily as his eyes went huge.

  “Murdered?” he said. “What? How? By who?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I said. “Now, specifically tell me what you talked about.”

  Du Maurier grabbed at his hair as he stared intensely at the cruiser’s floor mat.

  “Just how I saw the men sitting around the grill, about the tied-up girl. I gave her the license plate number I took down.”

  “Do you still have the license plate number?”

  He stared at me almost fearfully.

  “No. I gave her the paper I had written it on. Holy moly.”

  He was
really tugging at his hair now. I wondered if he was going to rip some out.

  “You don’t think I had anything to do with her death, do you? Please, I wouldn’t hurt anyone. Ask anyone. I can’t believe I’m caught up in this. I was just trying to be a good citizen, a good citizen.”

  “It’s OK. Calm down, Mr. Du Maurier,” I said, patting the little old man’s shoulder as he began to weep. “I just have one more question. This building where you saw the men. What’s the exact address again?”

  CHAPTER 33

  THE BUILDING ON LENOX was old and crumbling and had a creepy, vaguely Gothic look to it.

  Standing on the sidewalk in front of it with Doyle, I saw that instead of a front door, it had an aluminum riot door with a thick laminated steel padlock. On the hood of the rolling gate, there was a sticker with the name of the Realtor, Luminous Properties, along with a phone number. But even after two calls during which I let it ring a long time, no one picked up.

  “What do you want to do now?” Doyle said, giving the steel gate a savage, frustrated kick.

  “Let’s use your head to bash a hole through the gate,” I said as I looked up and down the block. “On second thought, let’s take a walk.”

  We walked the two blocks back to Du Maurier’s building. My theory was that Naomi had left the man’s apartment and headed straight to the abandoned building. As we walked, I searched for security cameras that might have picked Naomi up. But there was nothing. It was another dead end.

  We were heading back to the abandoned building when I suddenly stopped in front of a hardware store. I stared at its plate glass uncertainly. I had an idea. But it was pretty radical even for me.

  “What is it?” Doyle said. “Is your Spidey sense tingling?”

  Instead of answering him, I went in. Doyle grinned from ear to ear when I came back out of the store two minutes later with a pair of eighteen-inch bolt cutters.

  “I think they must have skipped this lesson at the academy,” Doyle said as I knelt down at the front door of the abandoned building.

  “Yeah, well,” I said as the teeth of the cutters finally bit through the thick padlock. “Sometimes, Doyle, you just have to improvise.”

  It was surprisingly dark inside. I passed the beam of my flashlight over the ruined floors mounded with crumbled plaster and garbage and busted pipes. The heavy smell of burnt wood and rot was almost sweet.

  We could hear birds flapping around on the upper floors as we came up a sketchy staircase. There was a loud, hollow rattling sound as Doyle kicked a bottle back down the stairs behind him.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

  We walked across a dusty third-floor landing through a doorless threshold into a space that had probably been an apartment. A column of sunlight fell through a gaping hole in the structure’s roof.

  “This must be the room that Du Maurier saw through the hole in the roof,” Doyle said as he circled the beam of light, staring up at the hole. “It lines up. I can see the windows of his building.”

  I looked around at the walls, the floors.

  “Anything strike you as strange, Doyle?” I said.

  “Just about everything,” the rookie said, shrugging. “This place gives me the damn creeps.”

  “The floors, Doyle. Look at them.”

  Doyle looked down and then his eyes suddenly brightened.

  “You’re right. Downstairs, it’s a landfill, but up here, the floors are clean. Broom-swept, looks like. Someone cleaned up this joint recently. What the hell do you think happened?”

  I looked up at the column of light. As I watched, a tiny plane high up in the blue of the sky crossed the hole in the ceiling.

  “I think Naomi interviewed Du Maurier and then came here and interrupted somebody cleaning up, and it cost her her life.”

  CHAPTER 34

  AS I WAS COMING back out into the bright street from the shadows of the building, I got a call from Mary Catherine. It took me by surprise. She hardly ever called me at work.

  “Mike, finally I caught you,” she said quickly.

  There was something in her voice. She definitely sounded strange, subdued and yet sort of frantic, which was not like her at all. My adrenaline and blood pressure immediately spiked. What now? I was still as paranoid as hell about everyone’s safety since my brush with the Mexican cartels.

  “What is it?” I said quickly. “Is it the kids? Is everyone OK?”

  “No, no. They’re fine, Mike. Everyone’s just fine. It’s just…It’s too complicated to explain over the phone. Any chance you could swing by the apartment?”

  Come home? I thought, squinting. She sounded overly polite, like there was someone there with her. We had a visitor or something? I couldn’t for the life of me think who it could be. And why the mystery?

  “Actually, I’m kind of in the middle of something, Mary Catherine. Can it wait?” I said.

  “No. You need to come home now.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “You’ll understand when you get here, Mike. Thanks. Bye now,” Mary Catherine said, and hung up.

  Five minutes later, I weaved through the crosstown traffic on 145th, racking my brain as to what Mary Catherine’s call could possibly be about. Was it one of the kids? They were in trouble? Had Sister Sheilah, the principal of Holy Name, finally decided to make a house call? I couldn’t figure it out, and not knowing was really driving me crazy.

  Speaking of crazy, I was at 123rd and Amsterdam when I caught a nasty snarl of traffic caused by an almost-jackknifed eighteen-wheeler trying to back up in the middle of the avenue.

  I drummed my fingers on the wheel, waiting patiently for an authority figure to arrive and resolve the bizarre traffic situation.

  For about one point three seconds.

  I threw the cruiser into park and got out and threaded my way forward through the maze of honking taxis and work vans. I really, really needed to get home to see what was going on.

  “Sir!” I yelled as I got to the rumbling semi’s driver-side door. “What are you doing?”

  “This move is called backin’ up to make a furniture delivery,” the young, thin, bearded trucker said with a southern accent.

  “See, there’s your problem right there,” I said. “This is New York City, sir. Backing up eighteen-wheelers is strictly forbidden. You need to go around the block and try it again.”

  “On one of these narrow side streets?” he said in dismay. “Hell, I ain’t got a shoehorn for this rig. Thanks for the advice, but you need to get out of my way and let me work, friend.”

  “It’s not advice, friend,” I said, showing him my shield.

  There was a cacophony of happy horn honks and applause from the backed-up traffic as the rumbling truck finally pulled away. A big Sikh taxi driver with a handlebar mustache and an orange turban leaned out of his yellow Honda Odyssey and gave me a fist bump as I walked back to my cop car.

  I shook my head in wonder as I got rolling again.

  I put a cartel head out of business, I get demoted. But I get a truck to move and suddenly I’m Derek Jeter?

  Only in New York, I thought.

  CHAPTER 35

  ALL THE KIDS WERE in the living room when I finally burst through the apartment door. Besides Chrissy and Shawna down on their bellies by the coffee table playing Sorry!, everyone was looking shocked and subdued. Which didn’t make sense, especially the subdued part.

  “Guys, what is it? What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Mary Catherine won’t tell us,” Eddie said somberly.

  Juliana took a break from nervously biting a thumbnail to point at the kitchen.

  “They’re waiting in there, Dad,” she said.

  They? I thought, rushing down the hall toward the kitchen.

  Inside, I found two men sitting at the island as Mary Catherine poured them coffee. One was a handsome blond, blue-eyed guy in his late twenties who kind of looked like a taller, thinner version of the actor Ryan Gosling. The other one, older, balding,
middle-aged, and round, wearing silver-framed eyeglasses, reminded me of Karl Rove or maybe Benjamin Franklin.

  At first when I saw their dark business suits, I pegged them as cops, feds maybe, and almost passed out because what were the feds doing in my kitchen? But then I noticed how incredibly well tailored their suits were and I freaked out even more because I couldn’t think who the hell they were.

  “I’m Bennett. Mike Bennett,” I finally spat out. “What is this? Who are you people? What’s going on here?”

  The two guys looked at each other; the younger blond guy blushed a little and looked down, seemingly embarrassed. Besides the actor resemblance, there was something about the guy that seemed vaguely familiar. Then the older gentleman cleared his throat as he stood and offered his hand.

  “Mr. Bennett, how do you do? My name is Peter Pendleton,” he said with a cultured southern accent as I halfheartedly shook his hand.

  “Sorry for the intrusion,” Pendleton said, smiling affably. He laid a pudgy manicured hand on the blond guy’s shoulder. “Allow me to introduce my client, Robert Bieth.”

  “Your client?” I said, dazed.

  “Yes, Mr. Bennett. I’m Mr. Bieth’s lawyer,” the southern gentleman said, maintaining his friendly grin. “I know this must be a bit of a surprise, but we came here today to talk to you about your daughter. About Chrissy.”

  “What!” I said, on the verge of passing out. “Chrissy? Why? Who are you?”

  The lawyer opened his mouth. But before he could get out another word, the young blond guy suddenly stood up. There was emotion in his face now, I noticed. Instead of embarrassment, it seemed like a kind of sadness.

  “Chrissy’s my daughter, Mr. Bennett,” he said. “I’m her father. Her real father. I came here to see my daughter.”

  CHAPTER 36

  HAVING BEEN A COP in some very crazy situations before, I’m not usually the type to get that fazed by surprises. But, boy, was this one mother of an exception. I suddenly felt dizzy, like all the blood in my body was draining out of my head.