While the City Burns (Flynn & Levy Book 2)

by David DeLee

  She explained what she had.

  Before she finished, he was stabbing numbers on his phone. “Son of a bitch.”

  Sully’s Bar & Restaurant

  Vesey Street

  Tribeca, Lower Manhattan

  Thursday, November 30th 8:30 p.m.

  TWO HOURS LATER, LEVY pulled open the door to Sully’s bar and stepped inside, bringing with her a strong gust of cold winter air. She brushed the wet splatter of a light snow off her shoulders and shivered. The last time she’d been in this particular bar, the Yankees were playing the Red Sox for the American League Division championship. The Bronx Bombers won that game, won the division, and went on to within one inning of going to the World Series.

  That night, Sully’s had been standing room only, people packed three back from the bar. The cheering had been so loud she’d regretted not bringing her ear protection from the gun range. What a difference a failed pennant race can make.

  Four people sat at the bar now, one of them being Flynn.

  From the jukebox Elton John sang about being a rocket man and on the two flat screen TVs over the bar the Redskins were playing against the Cowboys in a stadium where it was lightly snowing. No one in the bar—and probably not anywhere in New York—cared about a football game between Washington and Dallas. The third TV over the bar was turned to Fox News. On it, the scroll reported how another budget bill had been voted down in Congress, threatening yet another government shutdown, a politician accused of groping an intern announced his resignation, and the Stock Market had closed sharply down. In other words, business as usual.

  The TVs were blissfully muted, leaving Elton John to sing without interference.

  In the darkened back half of the bar—the restaurant section—about half the tables and booths were occupied. The rush of the dinner hour at Scully’s, if there had been one, had come and gone.

  Levy slipped onto the empty bar stool next to Flynn.

  The bartender had a military buzz cut and a large beer gut. He wore a gray sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves. The eagle, globe, and anchor tattoo on his bicep told Levy he was ex-Marine Corp. He put a Coors Light in front of her, remembering her drink from her one visit over a month ago. He gave her a smile.

  She smiled back, impressed.

  “What are you doing here?” Flynn’s shoulders were hunched, his hand around a whiskey glass filled with an amber liquid. Levy had learned his drink of choice was Applejack, an apple brandy mixed with club soda over ice. Flynn had told her it was his father’s drink.

  “Looking for you.” She slapped a folder down on the highly-polished mahogany bar and sipped her beer. “You okay?”

  “Fine. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you look like a guy who just put his puppy down.”

  He eyed the file. “What’s that?”

  “Me making our case.”

  “Which case is that? The one where we think the cop’s actions were justified but we can’t prove it so an overzealous prosecutor’s gonna put his ass in jail or the one where a couple of thugs killed two cops and we think they were hired guns, but again, we can’t prove it. So the real responsible party’s gonna go scot free.”

  “That second one.”

  Flynn straightened up and arched an eyebrow in her direction. “What are you talking about?”

  She waved to the bartender. When he put fresh drinks in front of them, Flynn pushed a soggy twenty dollar bill across the bar.

  “This.” She tapped the file folder and glanced at the TV. The Redskins were winning 20-17.

  “If that’s good news, tell me. If not, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “How about a little of both.” She pulled the file off the bar. “First, the good news. When the riots started, you and Whalen started bantering around the idea people were being paid to come into the city to demonstrate and possibly to cause trouble. I was skeptical. But in the interest of being thorough, I had a friend do some digging.”

  “This that forensic accountant fella you know?”

  “Yes.”

  Levy had asked Chad to do some financial digging for her before, during an investigation she and Flynn worked a little while back. A cop found shot to death, where there were questions if it was murder or had the officer committed suicide. The financials Chad had put together for them had helped to break the case.

  “Am I ever going to meet this mystery benefactor of ours?”

  “No,” Levy snapped.

  Flynn nodded. “The hot date that didn’t go so well.”

  “Shut up and listen. My friend could only dig so deep without a warrant, but here’s what he found.” She slid the file in front of Flynn and opened it up. Print copies of everything that had been on Chad’s flash drive. Bank statements, records of deposits and withdrawals, and spreadsheets, many of them marked with yellow and other color highlighters. “There’s a lot in here, including stuff I don’t fully understand without doing a deep dive into the details, but there’s enough here to warrant further investigation in to Block-by-Block Crusade and Goodall personally.”

  “Great,” Flynn said. He slapped the file closed and returned his attention to his drink. “Guess this is how Elliot Ness felt when all he could get Capone for was tax evasion.”

  “Let me finish. In here,” she tapped the file, “is a list of Block-by-Block subsidiary organizations—”

  “Shell companies.”

  “That show large payouts made recently to activists, civic groups, and questionable faith-based organizations from out of town, from places like Chicago. Philly. Baltimore. Boston.” She emphasized, “Detroit.”

  Flynn wasn’t convinced. “Large scale demonstrations are often augmented by outside groups paid to come in from out of town. Nothing illegal about that.”

  “True. But what if by following the money we could prove a link between Block-by-Block and Tyrell Haywood and Jayden Walker?”

  Flynn sat up. His interest piqued. “Can we?”

  She smiled. “Thanks to your friend in Detroit, we can.”

  “Gillot? How?”

  “As soon as Haywood and Walker were identified as our persons of interest, he went ahead and got a warrant to search their homes and a subpoena for their financial records. He emailed the records to us a couple of hours ago.”

  His attention fully on her once more, Flynn said, “And…”

  “And, they each received a substantial amount of money deposited into their U-Pay CheckOut accounts.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An online payment system. It’s like Dwolla or Stripe.”

  Flynn waved his hand. “Pretend I’m not over forty and have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  She smiled. “It’s basically an online account where you deposit money or pay money out to buy goods or services. It’s all done on the Internet.”

  “Of course, it is,” Flynn said with a sigh. “How substantial are we talking?”

  “Two deposits for five thousand dollars into each of their accounts.”

  “Ten grand total,” Flynn said. “Each.”

  “Ten grand total each.”

  “Sounds like a hell of a payday for a couple guys to come into town for a peaceful demonstration.”

  “That was my thought, but here’s where it gets really interesting. I won’t bore you with the details—”

  “Thank you.” He saluted her with his glass.

  “It’s a convoluted path through a series of shell companies and organizations but ultimately we can trace the payments back to Block-by-Block.”

  “Wait. You can prove that the money came from Goodall?”

  “That it came from Block-by-Block.”

  Flynn waved the distinction away. “Same thing.”

  Levy finished her beer. “Probably, if we can subpoena their financial records.”

  “You mean ask a judge to force Goodall to open his books to us.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the middle of all this chaos.” He pointed
at the TV screen with the news on. A live report coming from New York. Cars were on fire. People were running around. Cops were in face shields and riot gear. “It’ll look like a fishing expedition at best, and a witch hunt at worst.” Flynn’s shoulders slumped. “That’ll never happen.”

  “Didn’t know you to be such a defeatist.” Brooke Prescott had come up behind Levy. She stood wearing a tan cashmere coat with a black scarf around her neck. Her brown hair in its customary thick ponytail draped over her shoulder. Her hair glistened with fine droplets of quickly melting snow. She unwound the scarf and wore a smile on her face. “Anyone want to buy a girl a drink?”

  “Make that a round all around,” Ray Whalen called out, coming up behind Prescott. When he reached then, he said, “Is there somewhere we can go where we can get some privacy?”

  “Booths are in the back,” Flynn said.

  “I’ll send Ashley over,” the bartender said.

  Whalen handed him a credit card.

  Flynn and Levy gathered their drinks and led the others to the dining area in the back. They found an unoccupied booth in the back corner. Levy and Prescott slid into one side, Flynn and then Whalen into the other. Ashley took their drink orders and Whalen ordered an array of appetizes for the table. The drinks were delivered followed shortly by chicken fingers, fried mozzarella sticks, and jalapeno poppers with lime cilantro dip.

  Something caught Whalen’s eye. He pointed at the TV screen in the back corner. “Can you turn the sound up on that?”

  Ashley withdrew a remote from her apron and aimed it at the TV. A crowd of dark-clothed rioters filled the screen. They were on Fifth Avenue in front of the Public Library. A police car was burning like a bonfire. Bottles were being thrown. As the volume increased on the TV, the sound of glass breaking caught the attention of the people at the bar.

  The crowd on TV chanted, “Burn the cars! Roast the pigs!”

  Cheers erupted from the crowd. They banged on the hoods of other parked cars. More bottles were thrown and broken in the street.

  The reporter had to shout over the chaos. “In the fourth straight night of rioting, the rioters are more emboldened than ever. Storefronts along Fifth Avenue have been smashed. Looting is rampant. I even saw children pushing shopping carts and strollers full of stolen merchandise down the street.”

  One of the diners sitting at a table asked, “Where the hell are the cops?”

  The camera panned around and took in a line of uniformed police in full riot gear. They stood holding shields and wearing helmets with face shields, but they remained unmoving, in a line, awaiting orders to move in.

  Another patron said, “Why don’t they do something?”

  “Okay.” Whalen waved a hand disgustedly at the screen. “Turn it off.”

  Ashley not only silenced the volume, but switched the channel to the football game.

  The cops and Prescott drank their drinks but didn’t speak.

  Finally, Flynn broke the silence. “Okay, so what is this?”

  Whalen said, “I think that’s your cue, counselor.”

  “Detective Levy and the captain called me a little while ago. I meet with them at the station and together we went over what her friend had put together and the information provided by the Detroit PD. There’s a lot there. It’s a good start, but as I’m sure Christine told you, there’s no smoking gun. And quite frankly, nothing my bosses will go near with a ten foot pole.”

  “Then what are we doing here?” Flynn asked.

  “I put a call into a friend of mine in the Attorney General’s Financial Crime Bureau,” Prescott said. “An agent named Harriman. He looked over what we had and agreed we had the start of something. He recommended we proceed with a search warrant application.”

  “Against Goodall?”

  “To be served on Block-by-Block, for financial records and related materials.”

  “You got a judge to sign off?” Flynn asked.

  “With Harriman’s backing,” Prescott said with a smile, “I did.”

  Flynn looked around the table. “So when do we go?”

  “Easy, Frank,” Whalen said. “We’ve got to keep it on the QT.”

  “Gregg’s not onboard with this, is he?” Flynn asked Prescott.

  “I’ve got authorization from the AG.” Translation: she went over DA Pace’s head, too. Gutsy and potentially career suicide. Levy liked her all the more for it. “We need to get this right,” Prescott said, “not politically correct. For Olivarez and Cabot’s family. They deserve that.”

  Levy raised her glass to that. They all toasted.

  “The Chief of Ds and the PC?” Flynn further inquired.

  Whalen nodded. “I’ve run it up the flagpole at One PP. They’re on board, but just the two of them. And the judge, of course.”

  “So if this blows up in our faces, what…we get disavowed?”

  “Something like that,” Whalen admitted. He signaled for another round.

  When the drinks came, Prescott said, “Harriman’s put a team of investigators on it. There’re pouring over what we have so they’ll be ready to move with us on Block-by-Block first thing in the morning.”

  “Then let’s plan this out,” Whalen said, “so we don’t royally fuck it up.”

  Block-by-Block Crusade Headquarters

  521 West 19th Street

  Chelsea, West Side, Manhattan

  Friday, December 1st 7:30 a.m.

  THE NEXT MORNING, FLYNN and Levy met Whalen and Brooke Prescott at a Sabrett hotdog cart down the street and on the opposite corner of the West Side building housing the Block-by-Block Crusade offices. Dawn was just beginning to break, turning the starry cold night sky a deep purple. The temperature had dropped overnight, but weather forecasters were promising a pleasant if seasonable day ahead.

  With egg sandwiches and coffees in hand, steam rising from the cups and the hot sandwiches clutched in foil wrappers, they moved away from the cart to eat and strategize. A man in a dark suit and black cashmere overcoat rounded the corner and strolled in their direction. He had his collar popped against the wind and his hands buried in his coat pockets.

  He came up to them and flashed a smile in Prescott’s direction.

  “This is Daniel Harriman,” she said, introducing him. “The lead investigator from the AG’s office I told you about last night.”

  “FBI. Retired.” Harriman removed his hand from his pocket and gave firm handshakes all around. “Formerly the Special-Agent-in-Charge of the New Haven field office.” An impressive assignment. It meant he’d been responsible for all FBI operations throughout the State of Connecticut. “I have five investigators ready to help with the seizure of documents, files, computers, whatever. They know what to grab, depending on the scope of the warrant.”

  “It’s fairly broad,” Prescott said, handing him a copy of the folded documents.

  “We’ll need to move fast to keep anyone from destroying evidence,” Levy said. Which was why they’d decided to execute the warrant so early in the morning, before the majority of employees would be at work. Less people in the office meant less people they had to keep an eye on. The less chance anyone could destroy evidence before they could stop them.

  “I’ve got two RMPs parked down the street and a couple of patrolmen to help with that,” Whalen added.

  Harriman nodded his approval. “What’s the layout?”

  Since Flynn, Levy, and Prescott had just been there the day before, they gave him a quick rundown. “They occupy the entire second floor. Elevators open up on a forward reception desk with a small waiting area. Once past reception, there are a dozen cubicles. Individual offices line the back wall along with a conference room, and at the far end, an employee kitchen.”

  “Do we have a location on Goodall?” Levy asked.

  Whalen smiled. “I planted a couple of uniforms on the building early this morning. Goodall arrived,” Whalen checked his watch, “about twenty minutes ago. He’s up there now, with his attorney—”

/>   “Sonny Tillman,” Flynn provided.

  “And a small group of people,” Whalen said. “We don’t know who they are, probably his inner circle.”

  “Here to do damage control after we exposed Kevin Wills’ fabricated story,” Flynn said.

  “Or planning their next rally,” Levy offered.

  Flynn didn’t add you mean riot.

  “What do we do about Goodall?” Prescott asked. “He won’t take this quietly.”

  “If he interferes, arrest him,” Whalen said. “We’ll hold him on hindering an investigation.”

  “Works for me.” Flynn smiled. Now they were getting somewhere.

  A group of three men and two women approached from 10th Avenue. The men wore dark suits, spit-shined black shoes, not quite military haircuts. The women were equally stern looking in dark business suits, their hair pulled back in severe ponytails. They had Fed written all over them. And while they might not be anymore, Flynn would have bet his pension that like Harriman, every last one of them had been.

  “Your people?” Flynn asked.

  “Yup,” Harriman said. “We good to go then?”

  They were.

  Flynn threw his coffee cup in the trash and led the way across the street.

  Inside the lobby they met a uniform sergeant named Hicks. He had five fresh-faced cops in a group behind him. Through the lobby’s glass front they saw two police cars parked on 20th Street, sirens off but with lights flashing.

  Whalen stationed one officer at the elevator bank in the lobby. “No one goes up. Detain anyone who comes down. Until further notice.”

  Harriman hit the call button and the elevator opened with a ping. Everyone piled inside, turning to face forward as the doors slid shut. They rode the elevator up in silence. When the doors opened on the second floor, Flynn was the first one out, with Levy and Whalen close behind him.

  There was no one at the reception desk. Newspapers and a bundle of interoffice envelopes and mail cluttered the top of the woodgrain counter. The lighted Block-by-Block logo behind the receptionist’s desk was dark.

  Flynn waved to the left as he went right around the reception desk. Prescott and Levy followed him, while Whalen went with Harriman and his team around the opposite side.