Shot in the Dark

by Cleo Coyle

  “How nice,” Matt deadpanned.

  “It’s all good,” Marilyn said, nodding. “That creep Crest is dead, which makes me happy. Crazy Girl goes to the psych ward for therapy, and Doug gets out of my hair. Win-win! Just like you and me.”

  “Right,” Matt said. He was facing the camera and not Marilyn. When I saw his look of disgust, I knew he and Marilyn were history.

  He shook the champagne bottle.

  “It’s nearly empty. Let me get another and we can talk some more—”

  “Don’t you have something stronger?” Marilyn asked. “I told you I want to get crazy tonight.”

  “I have that gin—or how about tequila?”

  Marilyn shook her head. “If that’s all you’ve got, then just bring another bottle of the champagne.”

  As soon as Matt left the man cave, Marilyn lunged for her purse, took out two cylinders of Styx, and poured one in each of their glasses.

  “No!” I shouted and turned to Franco. “I can’t warn Matt! He’s muted his phone, so there’s no way I can call him!”

  Franco let out a string of curses as he reached for his rain slicker.

  On-screen, Marilyn added the rest of the champagne bottle to their glasses and stirred them with a manicured finger.

  Franco popped the door and stepped into the rain. “Get in there and stop them, if you can!”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To my car.”

  “What for?”

  “Hercules!”

  Franco was halfway to the gate before I jumped out of the van. As I fumbled through my purse for the warehouse key, I heard Marilyn welcome Matt back to his man cave.

  “Before you pop that, let’s finish the old bottle. Waste not, want not.” Marilyn laughed.

  “Sounds good,” Matt replied. “Bottoms up!”

  Seventy-nine

  BY the time I got through the warehouse door and upstairs, Matt and Marilyn were unconscious. Matt was unresponsive, his pupils shrunk to pinpoints. Marilyn—a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than my ex—was twitching. Foam flecked her red lips.

  I finished the call to the 911 operator by the time Franco arrived with the OD antidote.

  “Get back!”

  Franco quickly checked their conditions. Then he injected the naloxone into Marilyn’s naked thigh. Ripping Matt’s pants with a switchblade, he did the same for him.

  It took two doses for Matt, three for Marilyn, but Franco’s “Hercules” kit pulled both of them back from the underworld. By the time they were loaded into the ambulance, Matt and Marilyn were still unconscious but breathing on their own.

  As the pair was rushed to a hospital in Brooklyn, Franco and I followed in his SUV. A siren and magnetic bubble light, tossed on his roof, cleared our path.

  Then came the wait, and the waiting room—a bleak space overflowing with distraught people and personal tragedy. I sat in a corner, away from everyone, sick with worry.

  You’d think I’d be an old pro at the overdose game, but the last time—which was also the first time—I didn’t have to notify my adult daughter that her dad was at death’s door.

  “I’m leaving now!” Joy said, fear in her voice as she ended the call. “I’ll book a commuter flight on my phone before I get to the airport. I should be there in two or three hours.”

  During the wait for word, and for Joy, what upset me most was the difference between the past and the present. Matt’s first OD was the result of a hundred bad decisions on his part, including throwing our marriage away for hookup games on every continent he’d visited. But this time, Matt’s suffering was caused by a single bad choice—and it was mine. If Joy’s father didn’t survive this night, his death was on me.

  After several hours, no nurse or doctor had appeared to give me an update or a prognosis. Franco stuck close, though he’d been talking on his phone for the past half hour.

  Finally, he ended the call and returned to my side.

  “I contacted Soles and Bass to give them a heads-up about their Styx-dealing witness, Douglas Farthing,” Franco said, rubbing tired eyes. “Turns out Red Beard is the reason they were too busy to back you up tonight. The man is dead—”

  “Dead!”

  “He overdosed on the same clear cylinder stuff that poisoned Matt and Marilyn. My guess? It’s a bad batch.”

  “Or someone wanted Red Beard dead . . .” I turned to face him. “You heard what Marilyn said about Doug’s ‘new boss.’ This boss bribed him to frame Carol Lynn. She also said the boss paid in cash and Styx. That’s where he got the bad batch. And I believe it was intentional. Doug Farthing knew too much, and he had to die.”

  Franco gave me a hard look. “What the hell are you doing investigating Styx, anyway? Does Mike know what you’re doing, because that’s his job—and mine.”

  “I’m not investigating Styx. I started out trying to find out who murdered one of my customers. Now I’m trying to clear another, an innocent young woman, of a homicide charge. Along the way, I found out some pretty ugly things about a dating app called Cinder—”

  “Cinder?!” Franco threw up his arms. “I’m investigating them, too!”

  It took time, but I told Franco everything I knew about the “happy endings” Cinder app.

  “An ending is what I’m planning for Cinder,” Franco swore. “And it won’t be happy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What I’ve been working on, night and day, Clare. I’m about to bring an end to that company. By morning I’ll have an arrest warrant for its CEO, Sydney Webber-Rhodes, for narcotics trafficking—”

  “What?!”

  Franco finally told me what he’d been doing, and it wasn’t cheating on Joy. The OD Squad confirmed that dealers were selling Styx through the Cinder app—women, because Cinder lets the ladies make the first move, and they moved toward the guys with drug codes on their profiles.

  “I put myself out there as a high-rolling Cinder guy with an interest in candy. That’s code for—”

  “Drugs. I know.”

  “That mugger Quinn brought in gave us key information, and I was able to narrow down my hashtag descriptions to wanting Styx and my focus on one particular female dealer. This past Friday afternoon, we finally connected on Cinder, and made a date for Saturday night. That’s why I had to cancel on Joy.”

  “So Mike didn’t know what you were up to?”

  “No, this came up after our morning briefing. I was planning on giving him a full update at our next scheduled briefing on Monday . . .”

  Franco went on to describe how he met up with his female suspect, and brought her back to a luxury condo, which had been seized from a dealer last year—and wired by the NYPD for just such a sting operation.

  “She made the offer, and I bit. She brought the drugs up to the condo, where backup members of our OD Squad were waiting for her . . .”

  According to Franco, the intense interrogation went on all night Saturday, and most of Sunday, until finally the woman confessed.

  “She said as far as she knew, she was working for Cinder.”

  “Why did she think that?”

  “Because her buyers never paid her directly. They deposited their drug payments in the Cinder Treasure Chest—”

  “Oh, my God. Franco, your drug dealer’s statement solves the mystery of the excess money in Sydney’s Cinder account.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I overheard Sydney and Cody discussing it. They couldn’t figure out where extra funds were coming from, well over one hundred thousand dollars, and now we know—the money was payment for Styx.”

  “And that’s exactly why we’re about to arrest the CEO and shut the app down.”

  “But Sydney sounded genuinely perplexed about that money. It looks more like a setup to me.” I
thought it over. “This woman you arrested, this female drug dealer—if her buyers were paying Cinder, then who paid her? How did she get her money from the drug sale?”

  “For every drug transaction, she received a cash payment from a man she described as tall and attractive. She assumed he worked for Cinder, and she couldn’t tell us his real name. She only knew him as Captain Hook.”

  “Captain Hook?! That must have been Robert Crenshaw. I read a Wired article that referred to him as Captain Hookster.” I shook my head. “Franco, I’m sorry but I don’t think Sydney is guilty of narcotics trafficking. I think she’s been set up. This looks like payback. A vicious game of revenge played by Crenshaw—the man now lying in the morgue.”

  “If he’s in the morgue, we can’t exactly question him, although we can investigate his background.”

  “I’ve done some of that already. What I want to know is who killed him, because the clock is ticking. The police are holding an innocent woman for that crime—a dear friend of Tucker’s who’s been struggling with mental instability. She’s now living through the worst nightmare of her life. And the only way to help her is to find Crenshaw’s real killer.”

  “Well, Coffee Lady, you’re the one who’s been gathering the facts. Do you have a theory?”

  “Marilyn Hahn seemed certain that Doug Farthing’s ‘new boss’ was the killer. If I had to guess, I’d say Sydney is that boss and she killed Captain Hookster—or sent one of her Tinkerbells to do it.”

  “You sure it wasn’t Peter Pan?”

  “I’m serious, Franco. I overheard Sydney talking to her staff the night of Crenshaw’s murder. She knew her app was being sabotaged. She knew about the unexplained deposits. She even hired digital forensic investigators. If she discovered Crenshaw was behind setting her up for drug trafficking, then she had the strongest motive for wanting him dead . . . except . . .”

  “Except? What?”

  “The timing doesn’t work. If Sydney began putting together the truth about Crenshaw’s sabotage on Saturday night, how could she have the time to plan the perfect crime? In just a few hours, she would have to bribe Doug Farthing and set up Carol Lynn. It seems a stretch . . .”

  Franco agreed. As we fell silent, wondering what to do next, worry suddenly clouded his face. “Clare, how much of my undercover work does Joy know about?”

  “She knows about Joan. She saw the note from her. Who is she, by the way? Another undercover cop? One of your perps?”

  “Joan?!” Franco rubbed his shaved head in frustration. “Joan’s not a woman. It’s an acronym for a multi-jurisdictional task force, Joint Operation Anti-Narcotics!”

  “And all that expensive man stuff? The fancy suits?”

  “Swag confiscated in prior drug busts, used for our undercover stings.”

  I opened my laptop and called up the phone video that Matt sent.

  “Was this Soho Lounge date part of your sting?”

  Franco watched the screen in increasing distress. “Please tell me Joy didn’t see this.”

  “She did. Matt shot the footage on Saturday night. He sent it to both of us.”

  Franco pounded his palm. “Now I’m wondering why I saved that guy.”

  “You saved Matt because he’s the father of the woman you love.”

  Franco blew out air. “I thought Joy was too far away to be touched by any of this. I was sure I could pull off this undercover sting without her knowing. You have to understand, it was part of my job—I was meeting up with two or three women a night.”

  “I do understand. And you have to understand that none of this was Matt’s fault. It was yours for not trusting Joy, or giving her the chance to trust you. Now she’s convinced you were cheating on her. And she’s devastated.”

  He hung his head. “Man, I really screwed up.”

  “To be fair, Joy did, too. She should have talked to you, face-to-face, and I think she would have, eventually. But that video wrecked her.”

  “I’m so sorry . . .”

  “Don’t apologize to me. Save it for her.”

  Franco looked up, just as my daughter entered the waiting room.

  Their eyes met and Joy turned to flee. Franco rose and ran after her, catching her by the elevator. She resisted, refusing to listen. But soon they were talking—and finally, after several long and intense minutes, they were filling each other’s arms.

  I sat back in exhausted relief. Those two were in love, no question about it. Thank goodness they figured that out!

  I thought they made a strong couple and would make an adorable bride and groom. Sure, we had a long way to go. Mike was skeptical. And Matt was nakedly hostile. But it seemed to me, Mother (that would be me) knew best.

  As the pair continued their intimate talk, I finally gave them their privacy and spun the laptop to face me. The video Matt shot was on a continuous play loop, and I watched it again on the larger screen. On the tiny phone, details were harder to make out, and I wondered if another look at Franco’s date might reveal a clue.

  Unfortunately, Franco’s female suspect didn’t ring any Tinkerbells for me. But I kept watching the video anyway.

  As the pair strolled down the busy sidewalk outside the Soho Lounge, the background details were much easier to observe, including the grand glass entrance to the Soho branch of the Equator gym and the stylish crowd, some smoking or vaping as they talked and laughed with one another.

  Two men in particular caught my attention—one tall, the other short—slapping hands and gripping wrists in a disturbingly familiar bro shake.

  Stunned, I froze the image.

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing . . .

  The tall man was Robert Crenshaw, just hours before his murder. The smaller man was the Critter Crawl guru himself, Tristan Ferrell.

  Eighty

  AS we waited for word on Matt’s condition, I channeled my worries into an online investigation of the “Critter Crawl” fitness guru . . .

  Two hours after Joy’s arrival, I was still searching while my daughter (thank goodness) was sleeping. Cocooned in Franco’s big coat, her head on his warm thigh, she needed the rest, emotionally and physically, after the draining week she’d had.

  Meanwhile, I was using the search engines like slot machines, and I thought I came up a winner—until I showed Franco the results.

  He was less than impressed.

  “I don’t see anything incriminating in that handshake,” Franco said, after I showed him the key part of Matt’s camera phone video. “There could be a dozen reasons Tristan Ferrell said he didn’t know this guy when you asked him. Ferrell was looking for ‘Angels’ to invest in his business, right? They could have just met Saturday night at the Soho Lounge.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say, so I dug deeper. I got to thinking that if Robert Crenshaw used an alias, maybe Tristan Ferrell did, too.”

  “Go on.”

  “After Hookster, Cindy started to go by her middle name Sydney. Crenshaw falsified IDs to become Crest, then Krinkle. And I found evidence that Tommy Finkle—”

  “Stop. Who is Tommy Finkle?”

  “According to the Wall Street Journal, Finkle is the other cofounder of Hookster, a friend and frat brother of Robert Crenshaw.”

  I showed Franco how difficult it was to find images of Tommy Finkle—the business pages mentioned him by name, but he kept out of the limelight and let the lawyers do the talking during the class action suit.

  “I hit a dead end, until I remembered that Crenshaw and Finkle were in a fraternity together. I checked the archives of the fraternity’s web page, and there he was—”

  I turned the laptop to show Franco a decade-old picture of Tommy Finkle, a butterball with baby-fat cheeks, but clearly recognizable.

  “Tommy Finkle, cofounder of Hookster, is now Tristan Ferrell. Franco, it all fits. When I took Tristan’
s Critter Crawl workout class, he went on and on about his ‘painful failure in the business jungle’ and how it sent him to a real jungle to regain his balance or some such. And from what I’ve uncovered, it’s clear he found a new identity, too.”

  For a moment, Joy stirred and Franco lovingly stroked her chestnut hair. Then he burst my balloon by pointing out the obvious. The connections I’d found, while suspicious, were not proof of anything.

  He shook his head. “Sorry, there’s no evidence of wrongdoing that I can see. Even if we tried to question Ferrell, he’d lawyer up fast and that would be that . . .”

  As I considered that bit of bad news, a night nurse interrupted to deliver something far more positive—

  “Mr. Allegro is out of danger,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. Thank you, God . . .

  “The doctor will give you an update when she’s finished her rounds. One of you can see the patient after that, the rest of you in the morning.”

  “It should be Joy,” I rasped to Franco. “She’ll lift his spirits.”

  For a long moment after that, I sat in numbed silence. Then all the fears and feelings I’d been trying to ignore overwhelmed me, and I quietly broke down, sobbing into my hands.

  Franco curved his big arm around my shoulders and squeezed, a silent but sweet and deeply appreciated reminder that I wasn’t in this alone.

  * * *

  • • •

  SHORTLY after the nurse stopped by, the doctor gave us another encouraging update. Then Joy was permitted to visit her dad.

  After she left the waiting room, my mind went back to Franco’s discouraging words about Tristan Ferrell.

  While I had no proof of wrongdoing, I couldn’t stop thinking about Haley Hartford. Ferrell not only denied knowing Crenshaw, he never answered my question about why he’d hired Haley—with a cash bonus and double her salary at Cinder.

  Detectives Soles and Bass claimed Mr. Ferrell had an alibi the night Haley was killed. He was supposedly “at his place of business, with plenty of witnesses, until midnight . . .”