Kill Again

by Neal Baer

  He entered the battered, scratched metal car and was about to press number thirteen when he noticed all the other buttons were lit. He hoped otherwise every morning but was almost never pleasantly surprised. The “meat wagon” would once again stop on every floor. Today, though, Nick smiled, thinking it would give him time to think about last night. He’d thought about Claire a lot over the last year. Seeing her was even better than he’d imagined. Then he forced himself to think about Rosa Sanchez and the business at hand.

  Before Claire had left Nick’s apartment, she’d called Rosa’s mother, who told her that, yes, she paid for Rosa’s cell phone as another number on her own account. Maria gave her blessing to track Rosa’s cell, saying she’d sign whatever papers Claire needed.

  But there would be no signature required for this transaction, for officially it would never exist. Nick wasn’t about to leave a paper trail.

  As soon as Claire left, Nick had called Dave Banion, a detective and old pal who worked in TARU, the department’s Technical Assistance Response Unit. Banion assured him he’d have what Nick needed when he showed up at work this morning and nobody would ever know.

  The elevator doors opened and Nick walked into the oak-paneled suite of offices occupied by the chief of detectives and his large staff. He nodded hello to Sergeant Patrick Young, the chief’s sixty-year-old secretary and gatekeeper, who was waiting out his time to retire here at the reception desk. Nick walked through a second door into the room that housed a large bull pen of more modern work areas on a newly recarpeted floor, each cubicle occupied by a detective dressed in business attire. The bland colors and ever-present fluorescent lighting made Nick think that if the people in this room weren’t wearing guns, this could have been the office of any corporation.

  As he reached his desk in the corner of the large room, Nick spotted a large, sealed, white envelope, labeled only with his name, placed on the far right corner. He knew it was from Banion, who had clearly covered his tracks by putting it in the early morning interoffice mail so no one would know who sent it. Nick sat down and picked up the envelope, knowing that by opening it he would be committing his first act of betrayal against the chief. It was a breach of trust that, if discovered, would probably mean the loss of his job.

  Especially if he—and Claire—were wrong and Rosa had violated her parole. But he was pretty confident that wouldn’t be the case. It took Nick less than a minute to open the envelope, read its contents, and realize that once again, Claire was right. He had clear evidence that Rosa Sanchez was the victim of a kidnapping. He needed help. And he needed to keep this from the chief for as long as he could.

  Nick stepped onto the elevator and, just as he noted that the button for the sixth floor had already been pushed, a hand appeared between the closing doors to force them open.

  “Morning, Nicky,” came the voice of Chief of Detectives Tim Dolan.

  “Morning, Chief,” he said.

  His boss wore a bluish glen-plaid suit, red paisley tie, and black Johnston & Murphys. At six-foot-three, Dolan was known throughout the department as the Big Man, though his shaved head and natty clothes long ago earned him the nickname Kojak, after the seventies TV detective. Dolan made a show of waving off the nickname, but secretly he loved it.

  Nearing sixty, Dolan had been a cop for thirty-nine years, all but the first four spent in the “Bureau,” as cops called it. As its chief, he commanded an investigative force of five thousand that was second in size only to the FBI and, under the previous administration, had run circles around the “feebs” on almost every level when it came to antiterrorism. Respected by nearly all his troops, Dolan made no secret of his preference for the street and a good crime scene over office politics. He was known as a “cop’s cop,” a breed of boss most police officers thought was in danger of extinction.

  Dolan hit the button for the garage level, noticing the lit-up sixth-floor indicator. “Where you headed, Nick?” he asked, knowing that Nick had no business being on a floor where active cases were being investigated.

  “Down to IT,” Nick replied without a hitch. “I wanted to discuss ordering new software.” He hated lying to the chief but couldn’t risk the truth.

  Dolan looked at him. “IT is on the fourth floor,” he said.

  Nick feigned sheepishness. “My finger must’ve slipped,” he said with a grin. The button on the panel for the fourth floor was just below that of the sixth.

  Dolan grunted, seeming satisfied, and checked his watch.

  “Everything okay, Boss?” asked Nick as he pressed the correct number.

  “I got a helluva day with the mayor,” answered the chief, who gave an exaggerated shudder, then relaxed. “How’re the girls?” he asked with real concern as he straightened his tie. Nick appreciated the chief’s interest, but was even more grateful that the elevator jolted to a stop on the fourth floor and the doors were opening.

  Nick stepped off the car. “I need a crash course in surviving teenagers. Don’t let Hizzoner double-talk you,” he finished as the doors closed on a smiling Dolan. Nick breathed a sigh of relief and waited for the next elevator car up.

  Arriving at the sixth floor, Nick walked a few yards down the hall to a door with a small placard labeled MAJOR CASE SQUAD. Ironically, this was the place Nick would have gone every day if not for his screwed-up eyes. Working behind that door was one of the most prestigious assignments a detective could get. But for Nick, the sign might as well have read “Do Not Enter,” because of his vow to stay away from active cases.

  Ignoring the vow, he opened the forbidden door and walked in without hesitation.

  It was still early. The standard issue metal desks occupying the office were mostly empty except for the two guys Nick knew he would find there. One of them, his old friend Detective Sergeant Tony Savarese, jumped out of his seat like a bald jack-in-the-box before Nick could even close the door.

  “Nicky, are you nuts?” Savarese said, giving him a punch on the shoulder. Savarese and Nick had met more than twenty years ago, and he wore the same blue blazer and red-and-blue-striped tie today as he did back then. “What are you doing down here?”

  “I gotta talk to you and the boss,” Nick replied, returning the punch.

  “He’s gonna shit a sofa when he sees you,” Savarese said under his breath, escorting Nick to the squad commander’s office.

  They made it about halfway there when Deputy Inspector Brian Wilkes stuck his head through the doorway. “You know, I thought I heard a voice,” said Wilkes in his trademark gruff Brooklynese. “But I couldn’t have, because that would mean someone was being a naughty boy.”

  A big, crooked smile appeared on Wilkes’s round, freckled face topped with flaming red hair, giving him the appearance of an aging jack-o’-lantern.

  “Get in here, you crazy-ass mother-forker,” said Wilkes, hugging Nick, pulling him across the threshold into his office, waving Savarese in as well. Wilkes, always a straight shooter, thought the chief’s edict was horseshit, though he’d actually brokered the deal in the first place. “How the hell are you, and what are you doing down here busting your parole?”

  Nick glanced around the office, filled with nondescript furniture that was just a little less worn than the metal stuff out in the squad room. There was an old but clean sofa against the southern wall, below windows that presented an expansive view of the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan. An aging but well-preserved wood desk faced the doorway, a computer monitor atop it in one corner. The wall and a matching credenza behind the desk were covered with awards and photos. One of those pictures was of Nick and Wilkes, both smiling.

  Wilkes motioned Nick to a chair, and they sat together for the first time since that day nearly a year ago when he’d accepted his new position.

  Nick glanced out the window. “Nice,” he said to Wilkes. “Beats the view from your old office.”

  “Yeah, I sure got sick of looking at you sorry freaks,” the inspector replied. “Now what are you doin’ down h
ere breakin’ my balls and the chief’s law?”

  “I need your help.” Nick launched into the story of Rosa Sanchez, getting as far as her rape at the hands of the corrections officer when Wilkes put his hand up.

  “Whoa, whoa, hold the friggin’ phone,” Wilkes interrupted, remembering the case well. “She was one of that guy’s play toys?”

  “Yeah,” Nick answered, not surprised that Wilkes would know of Jack Storm, despite the fact that the names of the Rikers sexual assault victims were never reported by the media.

  Wilkes’s shit detector was on full alert. “Didn’t I read somewhere that those women were all released and put into counseling at Manhattan State?”

  “Yes,” Nick replied, shifting in his seat, knowing what was coming. Wilkes hadn’t gotten to this position because he was an idiot.

  “So this came from that crazy shrink, Waters,” Wilkes said, referring to Claire. “And for her you risk coming here?”

  “Worst that can happen is forced retirement and a pension, right?” Nick said.

  “Yeah, for you maybe,” Wilkes replied, sitting back in his chair as if resigned to his fate. There was never a question he’d help Nick, and both of them knew it. For Wilkes it was simple: he wouldn’t be sitting in that chair if not for Nick Lawler.

  “For me it’ll be running some precinct in a Staten Island cornfield,” Wilkes said. “This better be worth it.”

  “You’re damn right it’s worth it,” Nick said a bit too harshly. “Whoever cuffed this woman was impersonating a cop so he could grab her in broad daylight—”

  “Okay, okay, Nicky, take it easy,” Wilkes interrupted, his hands up as if he were being arrested. “We’re in. So let’s calm down, huh?”

  Nick took a breath, not expecting to blow like that. “Sorry, Boss. Pot finally boiled over.”

  “Forget it,” Wilkes replied. “I knew it would have to be something good for you to risk coming here. Just tell me it ain’t some fantasy the good doc dreamed up and you bought into after too much time riding a desk.”

  Nick reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and took out three sets of stapled papers. He gave one each to Wilkes and Savarese and kept one for himself. “You’ll want to shred these when we’re done,” Nick said.

  “Don’t tell me that,” Wilkes answered, his nose already in the papers. “Or where the hell you got these.”

  “These” were a series of street maps that tracked the location of Rosa Sanchez’s cell phone throughout the previous day. The maps were color printouts with dots tracking her path with data beside each dot and a line drawn by computer from one dot to the next.

  Banion had come through with flying colors.

  “It’s all legal,” Nick offered.

  But Wilkes’s face turned to stone. “I don’t care if the chief justice of the Supreme effin’ Court signed the warrant himself,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be doing this shit, Nicky.”

  “There was no warrant,” Nick said. “We’re looking for her as a victim, not a perp.”

  Wilkes didn’t budge. “She’s a convict on probation who’s in the wind. Which makes her a perp, which also makes her guilty until proven innocent. And that means we’d need a warrant,” Wilkes said almost all in one breath, rapid-fire, realizing the huge jackpot of trouble Nick was putting them in.

  “Seems kinda hinky, don’t it though, Boss?” Savarese said, flipping a page of the maps. “Guy collars this woman, then takes her on some magical mystery tour through every borough?”

  Wilkes looked up from the papers. “I never said he wasn’t right, you idiot.” He turned to Nick. “Please tell me you didn’t have the service provider ping her phone.”

  Wilkes had good reason for asking. Pinging would have meant Rosa’s cell service provider actively sent a signal to her phone requesting its Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, a routine procedure used by the police to track fugitives and other persons, usually after considerable resistance from the cell phone companies that didn’t want to end up on the wrong end of an invasion of privacy lawsuit.

  “Couldn’t,” Nick told them, “because her phone was turned off. Those maps were all done by triangulation.”

  Triangulation used calls made to or from a mobile phone to determine its location based on the strength of the phone’s signal bouncing off towers within its range (usually, most mobile phones can hit at least three towers from any urban location). Unlike pinging, triangulation could be done using data from past calls and, though not as precise, could give the phone’s approximate location.

  Which, surprisingly enough, seemed to be in the middle of the East River.

  Wilkes’s features softened as he tried to find some reason for the seeming randomness of Rosa’s movements. “Okay, so at ten-fourteen in the morning they’re going over the Williamsburg Bridge, presumably into Brooklyn and heading north, because thirty-four minutes later they’re at Vernon Boulevard and Forty-First Avenue in Astoria.”

  “Right by the Triborough,” Savarese said, using the old moniker for the bridge linking three of the city’s five boroughs. The bridge had been renamed several years earlier for assassinated former senator Robert Kennedy.

  “Hey,” Wilkes cut in, realization dawning, “all these calls were made to Rosa’s phone from the same number. We know whose?”

  “Claire Waters,” Nick replied. “She tried Rosa every couple of hours.”

  “So the doc’s next call wasn’t until one-twenty in the afternoon,” noted Savarese. “Rosa’s phone was in the South Bronx, Mott Haven, most likely on Walton Avenue.”

  Wilkes took up the thread. “Then Ocean Avenue and Lincoln Road by Prospect Park in Brooklyn at two forty-two in the afternoon, and Battery Park at three fifty-six . . . What the fu—?” he finished, catching himself as he turned to the last page.

  “This makes no sense,” Savarese said, eyeing the final location, deep in the middle of what appeared to be a huge park at the southern end of Staten Island. “North Mount Loretto State Forest, six thirty-three p.m. Why there?”

  Nick saw the concern on Wilkes’s face and knew he’d convinced him. “To me it says desperation,” he said with more confidence in his voice. “Guy kidnaps girl, guy looks for place to rape or kill girl, guy drives all over the five boroughs until he finds just the right spot. If you look at the maps, other than when she’s on the Williamsburg Bridge, every one of these locations is near or next to a park.”

  “He’d have to be a moron to think he could hide a body in Battery Park,” Wilkes muttered, his mind churning, his eyes never leaving the maps.

  “Unless he thought he could take the Staten Island Ferry, which would make him a real moron or someone from out of town,” Nick followed, alluding to the ferry’s closure to vehicles since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Wilkes poked the last map. “You think this is where he dumped her?”

  “If this guy is the idiot we think he is,” Nick said, “he threw Rosa’s cell in the trunk of his car and forgot to turn it off. Claire said she tried Rosa again after seven and it went right to voice mail. Phone probably ran out of juice by then.”

  Wilkes was too good a cop not to admit something was out of whack here. “If your girl was legitimately collared by a real cop outside the hospital, she would’ve been brought to a precinct for booking, not dragged all over town.”

  Savarese placed his finger on the last page of the map. “Probably worth sending a radio car out there for a look-see, Boss.”

  “Radio car my ass,” Wilkes growled. “All I need is Dolan asking why I sent patrol into the woods at the ass end of Staten Island looking for a ghost and, even better, where I got the tip. You and me, Tony, we’re gonna have to do this. Ourselves.”

  He stood up, then eyed Nick. “Not a peep about this to anyone, capisce? No calls to me or Tony or anyone in the office, nothing. I’ll text you from my personal cell phone when we figure out if this is anything, and not a moment before. You understand?”

  Nick pursed his
lips and gave an affirmative nod, but Wilkes wasn’t done. “And one more thing. I don’t want you telling Doctor Waters a goddamned thing. You don’t call her, you don’t even answer her calls until I say you can.”

  “Got it,” Nick said, just glad Wilkes wasn’t booting him out of the office.

  “Right now I don’t give a shit about you or Doctor Waters,” Wilkes said. “I’m just covering my sorry ass and making sure you and I are talking the same language. So I’m asking you—are we clear, you sonuvabitch?”

  “Crystal,” answered Nick.

  CHAPTER 6

  It was just before two in the afternoon when Claire said good-bye to her last patient of the day and closed the door to her office. She grabbed her purse, pulled out her cell phone, and checked to see if Nick had called while she was in session.

  One look at the display told her he hadn’t.

  What happened to him?

  She considered the possibilities. Perhaps Nick hadn’t gotten anywhere. Or maybe he had, but got caught by his superiors.

  Or maybe he changed his mind.

  Claire regretted involving Nick, but what choice did she have? She was certain that Rosa was in danger—if she wasn’t already dead or badly hurt.

  Claire stared at her phone, as if that would make Nick call her. She put the phone back in her purse, which she then set down beside her desk. Then she opened the door to her office, intending to walk down the now quiet hallway to get a glass of water.

  She was about to close the door when she heard muffled ringing.

  She nearly tripped as she hurried back to her desk, clumsily snatching her purse and rummaging through it until the phone was in her hand. She pushed the button to answer it. “Hello,” she said, before the phone was to her ear.