A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

  “Pick it up a little, Eleanor. He’s on a parkway and we’re on the surface streets.”

  The car rumbled past the Parade Grounds and into the circle south of the park. As she lifted it up onto the parkway, Eleanor accelerated, and the Lexus began passing one lesser vehicle after another. It was Mulino who spoke.

  “Timmy Bruder. If this guy worked half as hard at being a cop as he did at being a criminal, he would have had a pretty nice career. I mean, what has become of the job? This guy would rather kidnap kids than catch bad guys.”

  “Armstrong must have had his claws into Bruder for a while,” Leonard said. “Bruder was just a tool. Armstrong was looking for information from the boy. He was looking for information about Christine. Armstrong was working with Veronica Dean. He had been sending emails. Back when he worked for . . .”

  Leonard was going out on a limb, but it was the only explanation that made sense to him. Bruder wasn’t smart enough to go on a kidnapping spree on his own. And when Leonard had mentioned the wristband, Bruder had known what he was talking about. He had been looking for something that only the boy had, after all. All signs suggested that Bruder had done this at Robert Armstrong’s command.

  And Leonard was worried for Eleanor. He didn’t need to remind her how much of this went back to her office. She had known that Robert Armstrong had been stealing from her. And if she had only turned him in then, maybe Wade Valiant would be alive and the boy would never have been taken. For the daughter of McArthur Hill, it would have all been too much.

  Mulino just nodded. “I thought we cleaned house last year. I don’t know what else to say, Leonard. There is always another cop out there who can be turned.”

  Eleanor spoke, her eyes still locked to the road. “What are we going to do when we catch this guy, then? If you have someone who is willing to kidnap a child, who is happy to murder. Have you thought through what we are going to do when we reach him?”

  Mulino sat up in his chair. “I’ve thought about it, yeah. We just need you to drive. Thank you for your help. Thank you for working with us.”

  “The least I can do. After you set up a sting operation to read my email and planted a fake employee in my office. Why wouldn’t I help out a couple of detectives who thought I would engineer a construction accident to kill my own employees?”

  “I’m not a detective. I’m a civilian investigator.” Leonard wasn’t sure that Eleanor thought this distinction mattered much. “We didn’t think you did it.” It wasn’t a total lie. But it was enough to provide a little cover. To himself and Mulino both. “We thought maybe someone did it to you, and that we could find out who. And you know, we were right.”

  Before Eleanor could answer, Leonard’s phone buzzed again. It was the captain. He swiped it on.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Leonard, Bruder just got off Ocean Parkway. He took the exit at Avenue U. He’s headed east. It looks like he’s going to Sheepshead Bay.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” Leonard slipped the phone off and leaned forward toward Eleanor. “Get off at Avenue U. It’s the next one. We’re closing in on him.”

  Eleanor glided the car to the right, and all three of them sat quiet for a moment. Mulino gripped his armrest. Leonard leaned forward, trying to spot mounted sirens on any of the cars ahead of them through the parade of taillights. It wouldn’t be long now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Detective Peralta took the steps carefully back down to the living room of the tiny house. The upstairs had been a bust. A couple of trim bedrooms, not a speck in the small bathroom. Peralta was sure of one thing as she’d dug through the covers and the cabinets upstairs: no one actually lived in this house. The beds sported neatly tucked duvets and there were doilies on the bedside tables, but the closets were bare. The medicine cabinet had been empty, not so much as a tube of toothpaste.

  Even though the house was a front, Peralta was sure there must be something there. Something pointing to Armstrong’s theft, to the abuse of the tenants at 80 Smithdale. If there wasn’t, then Verringer could have answered her questions and been done with it. He could have given her a tour, could have thrown Armstrong under the bus. If the house was nothing more than a place to get mail, it didn’t explain the fact that he was there at all. He had to have stored evidence somewhere. But if the upstairs and the front room were any indication, Peralta was going to have a hard time finding it.

  The detective stood in the living room, turning toward the kitchen. A pantry door between the two rooms hung slightly open. She hadn’t called the precinct to report that Verringer had run off. Now it was almost too late. She might as well check the cabinets. Verringer wasn’t coming back here. And five more minutes wouldn’t make a difference. Either he was wandering around the neighborhood, or he had made his way to a car and was already gone. If they needed to, they could find him soon enough. There was always the DMV database, the IRS if it came to it. You can get the mail for your shell company wherever you want, but in this day and age, you can’t really stay off the grid. Finding anything that was hidden in this house—or confirming that there was nothing hidden at all—was more important. Peralta started in on the kitchen, tearing open a cabinet.

  It was empty. So was the next one. There was silverware in a couple of drawers. The stove didn’t look as though it had been run in months. Maybe someone got takeout now and again, but like the bedrooms, the kitchen wasn’t being used for anything but show. She turned back toward the living room and pulled the pantry door all the way open.

  It wasn’t a pantry. There was a narrow stairway down to the basement, most likely a mechanical room. Maybe Peralta would get lucky and find a couple of boxes of documents down there. Or maybe she would be unlucky. She drew her gun and put her hand on the railing. Something about the house had rubbed her the wrong way from the moment she had come up the walk. It had been too clean, too neat. If Verringer and Armstrong were truly doing something more than just letting places go to rot, there would be a record of it somewhere. And maybe someone would stay down there to guard it.

  Peralta stepped as cautiously as she could, but her footfalls were still audible on the stairs. If there was someone down there, she wasn’t going to be able to surprise him. And if she couldn’t surprise him, she might as well come in hard. She drew in a breath and shouted.

  “Police! Anyone down there I want to see your hands up!” She rushed down the stairs, no longer concerned with the noise, and placed her back against the wall, gun out, to survey the room as soon as she landed.

  The place was a disaster. Folding card tables propped up against the rough basement wall, a single light bulb dangling from a ceiling outlet. In the corner there was a furnace and a water heater. But this wasn’t just the mechanical room. On the tables were mounds of binders and a half-dozen laptops. A couple of power strips were stuffed with plugs. They snaked behind the furnace, maybe hot-wired into the low-water shutoff valve. Peralta marveled that the whole hand-rigged operation hadn’t yet caught fire.

  She opened the nearest binder. Printouts of leases, letters, some emails, some in English and many in other languages. The computers were running too. Another trove of data. They would have to get another team in here to figure out what was going on. Maybe her friend from Frauds could help. It would be nice for him to get out of One PP, she figured. He would be able to put it all together. Leonard had told her that Hill and Associates had screwed over some overseas investor. The investor had paid money to 80 Smithdale. Armstrong was working for Smithdale and had a beef against Wade Valiant.

  There were pieces to fill in, and from the look of this room there was a lot else going on. But it was pretty clear that Robert Armstrong was up to something. Maybe he had pushed Manny Reeves off the building; maybe he had paid Reeves to do Valiant in. She had more than probable cause to nab her man. She thought, for a moment, of the innocent man who was being held by the Homicide Squad. Gabriel Smyth had been beaten or badgered into confessing to killing Valiant. Findin
g Armstrong was important for two reasons: not only to catch the real killer, but to free an innocent man from jail.

  There was a noise upstairs. Footsteps. Had Verringer come back after all? Peralta turned away from the machines and started up the stairs, quiet. Her back hugged the wall as she crept further. The door above her was still half open. Her fingers felt warm as she trained her gun on the door. If anyone did open it, she would have only a moment to decide whether it was someone trying to kill her. If she chose wrong, then she could shoot an innocent civilian, stand trial, spend the rest of her life in jail. If she chose wrong the other way, she’d be dead.

  Whoever was upstairs took another step. Not right by the door. Peralta guessed maybe in the living room. There was a voice too. A deep one, speaking slowly. She couldn’t hear anyone answer. Maybe he was on a phone? Two more steps and she would be able to turn the corner. She kept her gun on the door. One more step.

  She heard another noise from outside. A car engine, brakes squealing. The noise gave her enough cover to take the last step and whip around the corner from the basement pantry. Standing in the living room was a white man who looked to be in his late sixties, his hair a mess, a slight stoop in his right shoulder. Robert Armstrong. As soon as Peralta busted up the stairway, Armstrong turned; the cell phone he had been holding dropped to the floor. Peralta kept her eyes on his hands. Both were empty. She couldn’t shoot.

  “Put your hands above your head. Above your head!”

  The old man’s eyes flashed fear, then shut halfway. He put his hands up, slowly. He was watching her gun instead of her eyes. That was good. His hands were above his head, but he was shuffling. He was maybe ten, fifteen feet away from her and he was slipping a little bit toward his right. A little bit toward the door. One half-step at a time. His eyes darted from her gun to the door. He was measuring how far away he was.

  “Stop moving. Stand still.” Peralta didn’t have handcuffs. She didn’t have her radio. She was in plainclothes. It was a privilege of the promotion that you don’t have to walk around with all of the trinkets of police work all the time. Except now, when a pair of handcuffs might have been worth something. There was a pair in the car. Maybe she could march him out to the street.

  Through the corner of her eye, she saw that there was a car outside. It had skipped up the pavement and was parked right in the middle of the lawn. Its headlights were on, blaring bright into the night and onto the house. An RMP. A marked car. The lights were running hot on its roof, but the sirens were off. One of the local units had responded after all. The precinct cop would have handcuffs, pepper spray, all sorts of goodies to make Robert Armstrong compliant without having to kill him.

  Peralta circled away from Armstrong and toward the front door. The man had stopped shuffling. His hands were still over his head. His eyes, though, were still alert. Still darting back and forth between the door and the gun, sometimes looking out the window. Peralta looked out herself. There was someone getting out of the RMP. She couldn’t see much through the glare of the headlights. For a moment, she thought she recognized the cop getting out. He was pulling out his gun too. It would be over in a moment.

  Peralta had made it to the door. Keeping her gun hand on Armstrong, she reached down with her left hand and unlatched it. They were both squinting; the headlights of the car were the only light cutting through the midnight darkness. She opened it. The cop was close now, right on the stoop. She turned to Armstrong.

  “Okay, Mr. Armstrong. I want you to walk very slowly. The officer outside is going to cuff you and we are going to take you to the precinct. And then we’re going to find out where your friend, David Verringer, has gone off to.”

  Armstrong started shuffling again, slowly toward the door. Watching Peralta’s gun. Peralta kept her eye on Armstrong but called out to the cop outside.

  “Okay, I want you to cuff this guy so we can take him in. You think you can do that?”

  The voice that answered her was all too familiar. “No. I think you can put your gun down and step away.”

  Peralta turned toward the voice, worried for a moment that she was taking her eye off Armstrong. Standing not five feet from her was her partner, Detective Timothy Bruder. There was no reason for him to be in a sector car. There was no reason for him to be in Sheepshead Bay. But most of all, there was no reason for him to be pointing a nine-millimeter handgun directly at her heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Eleanor tried to keep her focus as she pulled the car up Avenue U. It wasn’t easy. Mulino was tapping his foot and kept checking his holster for his gun. Leonard, in the back, was calling out directions to her, directions that he was getting over the phone from the captain in the precinct. It was dark and there weren’t as many streetlights this far into Brooklyn. Not so much traffic either. What exactly had she volunteered for? She was chasing an armed detective who had kidnapped a boy. She had another armed detective in her car. Suppressing the worry that she was about to be caught in a shootout, she focused on the road. She kept to the speed limit.

  “Here. Take a right here.” Leonard was jabbing between them, one hand still pressed to his ear. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Eleanor usually was picky about that sort of thing but it wasn’t the time to bring it up.

  “Okay.” She turned the car onto a quiet residential street. Detached houses. Square lawns. Matching white vinyl fencing. Once upon a time, someone must have gone up and down the block taking a vote, getting uniform support for the brand of fence. It was dark; the streetlights were cast too far apart to flood the whole street. She pulled the car slowly down the road.

  Mulino had his right hand on his holster now, his left across his chest holding the handle of the door. He was crouching in his seat, getting ready to whip open the door and take cover behind it. When you’re driving there is nowhere to crouch, but Eleanor slipped a little lower into her seat. She could sense that her hands were beginning to sweat. Nothing on the street looked unusual at all. Her headlights revealed only a few cars parked along the curb.

  Leonard held down the phone and spoke. “This is the block. We are getting close. I don’t know that we’re going to get any more precise than that.”

  “Look.” It was Mulino this time, pointing to an ordinary sedan parked on the left curb about midway down the block.

  “What?”

  “That’s Detective Peralta’s car. See the antennas on the back?”

  In the darkness, Eleanor hadn’t noticed the cluster of antennas on the rear of the car. She saw them now. She thought, for a moment, of how many details in her city she missed on a typical day. She had never paid much attention to the police. Not like her father, who had been obsessed with them, who had seen them as an occupying army to be extracted from his fiefdom. McArthur Hill would have been able to recognize an unmarked detective car, just as he had been able to spot an undercover cop trying to infiltrate a rally or a protest. The house across the street from Peralta’s car was bathed in light, but Eleanor couldn’t see the source of it. She slowed the car some more.

  “Stop the car.” Mulino was leaning on the door. They were almost at the house across from Peralta’s car. Eleanor was only too happy to oblige. She pulled the car onto the right-hand curb. There were three unfamiliar cars ahead of them, the last directly in front of the house with the lights on.

  Leonard hung up the phone. “The captain is sending a couple of units. It isn’t going over the scanner. They’ll be here in about twenty minutes.”

  “Okay.” Mulino drew his gun and opened the door. “Guys, I’m leading the way. That light is going to be them. Open your doors. Slip out. We are moving one car at a time. Stay behind me and stay behind the cars. If there are people out there with guns drawn, just come back here and wait for the units from the precinct. If it’s all clear up there, I suppose I could use your help.”

  Mulino led Eleanor and Leonard as they stalked up behind the first car, then another. In the dark, they ducked behind an SUV on the right-hand cu
rb; a hedge blocked their view of the house. There was an empty space, big enough for two parked cars, and a gray Volvo parked at the gate in the front lawn. Mulino stole ahead and ducked behind the rear wheels. Leonard was crouching, nearly to his knees, hiding behind the hedge before taking the last fifteen feet to reach the car. Eleanor was right behind him. Her heart was pounding now. She could feel her pulse in her wrists, her knees, her neck. She had never felt what she was feeling now, as though her blood was racing through her body and draining out of it at the same time. She was overwhelmed with this new and sudden brand of fear.

  Mulino slipped toward the front of the Volvo. Crouched behind the left front wheel, he peered over the hood toward the house. He raised his gun onto it as well. Eleanor had never seen a detective carrying a revolver. She had only ever seen officers carrying nine-millimeter handguns. The weapon Mulino was holding over the hood looked almost like a toy to her, almost silly.

  Leonard gestured to Eleanor. Time to move. She ducked and ran forward, eyes shut as they stole toward the car, hoping to duck in before anyone saw them. She made it behind the Volvo quick and out of breath, only a few feet behind Mulino. She could hear Leonard behind her. He had made the open dash as well. He was ducking almost at the rear bumper of the car. Eleanor looked across the trunk toward the light cutting through the night.

  There was a marked police car splayed across the lawn. What had looked like floodlights were its brights, saturating the lawn and house. The picket fence was torn to vinyl shreds. The rear tires had dug up the lawn. The driver’s door was open. There was a man standing next to the car. She could see him only from behind, just an outline in the darkness. But she figured that it was the detective from the precinct. And she could see that he had a gun.