The Red Queen Dies

by Frankie Y. Bailey

  “I know what we have, Detective.” The flush that temper brought to his ruddy brown face was still visible when Dole turned back to Mrs. Givens. “Who did you buy the lullaby from?”

  “I didn’t know him. He was … he was just a man I went to meet in the park.”

  “Which park?”

  “Why you want to know that?”

  McCabe tapped her fingers against her pant leg, uneasy, on the verge of reminding the lieutenant that Mrs. Givens had the right to a lawyer if this was about to turn into an interrogation about a drug buy.

  But she had opened it up by asking the woman if her niece had been her supplier.

  “Haven’t you seen the billboards?” Dole said to Mrs. Givens. “‘Keeping Watch to Keep You Safe’? The surveillance cameras we’ve got all over the city? The ones that caught the droogie boys’ attack on you? If you bought lullaby in the park, one of our cameras would have picked up—”

  “I’m an honest citizen. You ain’t got no right to harass me because I don’t want to remember being hurt and frightened. My niece said—”

  “I don’t give a rat’s … I don’t care what your niece said. You were a witness in a homicide case. You aren’t any use to us now.” Dole stepped aside and gestured toward the door. “Don’t let us keep you.”

  Mrs. Givens stood up. She was trembling. She glanced at McCabe.

  McCabe said, “Take care of yourself, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Givens nodded, then made her way out, her head bowed.

  In the silence that followed, McCabe said. “You were pretty rough on her, weren’t you, Lou?”

  “I’m getting fed up, McCabe. I’m getting fed up with victims who decide they don’t want to be victims, and witnesses who decide they don’t want to be witnesses.”

  “Maybe the ADA can get around the problem by giving Mrs. Givens immunity on the drug charge. Then he can put her on the stand to explain why she can’t remember clearly what happened. She’s an elderly woman. A jury would understand how upset she was about being attacked and then seeing her rescuer killed in front of her. And with the court ruling about overwhelming forensic evidence—”

  “You think the bozos on the jury are going to care about that? All we need is one bleeding-heart juror who looks at our droogie boys’ sweet little faces … We’ve even got diversity, a black one, a white one, and two Hispanics. Wanna bet their public defender claims the cops profiled them because we don’t like that kind of race mixing. Before their PD’s done, the jury will want us on trial for using our technology to frame the little darlings. Why the hell couldn’t the woman put up with a few nightmares until after she’d testified?”

  “I think she was already scared about testifying.” McCabe reached for her ORB on the conference table. “And then came the nightmares. That can be hard to deal with.”

  Dole touched the console, shutting down the camera and recording equipment in the room.

  He turned and looked at McCabe. “You ever think of going that route, McCabe? You ever think of swallowing some lullaby and forgetting?”

  McCabe stared back at him, her gaze holding his. “Have I ever given you cause to think that, sir? Have I ever given you cause to think that I would take an illegal drug?”

  “You must be dealing with some memories now that your brother’s back in Albany.” He squinted at her. “You look tired, McCabe. Bad dreams keeping you awake?”

  McCabe took a deep breath. She had known “Big Jack” Dole since she was nine years old and he was a patrol cop in uniform. He knew what he was asking. She knew why he was asking. But the questions still made her mad.

  She kept her voice even. “I don’t break the law by taking illegal drugs, sir.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, because I understand your brother’s going to be staying around.”

  “Yes, sir,” McCabe said. “He was invited to join a research team at UAlbany.”

  “Smart guy, your brother.”

  “Brilliant, sir.”

  Dole studied her face. “You know where my door is if you need to talk … off the record.”

  “Thank you for the offer. But there’s nothing to talk about. With Adam and me, it is what it is.”

  Dole ducked his head and smoothed his hand over his freckled, shaved scalp. “What’s the story on that perp you brought in?”

  “We haven’t had a chance to question him yet.”

  “I know that, Detective. I’m asking for your gut reaction.”

  “That maybe he knew the girl who’d lived in that house had been murdered. And he decided to break in and see what he could see. I don’t think he’s our guy.”

  “Then he’ll keep. I need you back out in the field.”

  “Yes, sir. We saw Pettigrew and Yin heading out as we were coming in. Pettigrew said it was a busy morning.”

  “It just got busier. We’ve got another corpse.”

  McCabe took in the twist of the lieutenant’s mouth. “Is it a woman, Lou?”

  “A white female. Appearing right now on camera.”

  He gestured for McCabe to precede him out the door.

  3

  A scream greeted them as they walked into the emergency room at St. Peter’s Hospital.

  Pettigrew and Yin stopped, saw the woman who had screamed was clutching a limp child, saw a nurse was rushing toward her.

  Yin picked up the conversation that they were having, pushing the image of the child out of his head before it could settle there. “So, are you going to ask her out?” he said.

  They had been discussing the cooking class Pettigrew was taking. Or more specifically, the woman who was teaching the class that Pettigrew was taking. She was the only woman in whom Pettigrew had expressed interest in recent memory.

  Yin, married for twelve years, was always interested in his divorced partner’s social life, or lack thereof.

  “I’m not sure that would be appropriate,” Pettigrew said. “She’s the teacher, and I’m a student in her class.”

  “Sean, it’s a cooking class at a nutrition center. She’s probably glad even to see a man in the class.”

  “That doesn’t mean she wants to date the one she sees. Anyway, there’s another man, an older guy who’s taking the class with his wife. He used to work for—”

  “Sean, the teacher. The pretty, really nice teacher who didn’t get mad when you set the kitchen on fire.”

  “I didn’t set the whole kitchen on fire. Only my unit.”

  “Sean, are you—”

  “I’m thinking about it, Walter. The class meets two more times.”

  Pettigrew held up his badge for the nurse at the admitting desk.

  The vic they’d come to see was dozing when they stepped into the curtained cubicle. He opened his swollen eyes and blinked up at them.

  Looking at his face, Pettigrew was reminded of raw meat. “Mr. Jorgensen,” he said. “Sorry to disturb you, sir. I’m Detective—”

  “Get lost.” The sheer antibacterial mask that had been applied to Jorgensen’s face rippled as his swollen lips moved, “I got nothing to say.”

  Yin said, “You should rethink that. If you know who—”

  “I got nothing to say to the cops.”

  Pettigrew rubbed at his chin with the back of his hand. “You’re ‘Swede’ Jorgensen.”

  “Used to be him,” Jorgensen said, and closed his eyes again.

  Pettigrew glanced at Yin. Yin shrugged and said aloud, “If the guy’s busted up by thugs and he doesn’t want to talk to us, it’s his funeral.”

  Pettigrew looked again at the man’s battered face, the muscular body gone to fat outlined beneath the sheet. “You were a terrific baseball player, Mr. Jorgensen. We’ll get back to you if we come up with anything.”

  On the way back to the station house, Yin took out his ORB and pulled up the information on Jorgensen. “His current address is a boardinghouse.”

  “How does that happen?” Pettigrew said. “How does a guy who was one of the greatest pitchers in the
league end up like that?”

  “He played for the Yankees for a while, didn’t he?” Yin said. “Maybe he got zapped by that curse you’re always telling me about.”

  “They almost broke it in 2014. This year, we’re back in the series. All they have to do is hold on and—”

  “And the champagne will flow and Yankee fans will dance in the streets.”

  “It’s got to happen,” Pettigrew said. “Sooner or later, it’s got to happen.”

  “Keep the faith, partner,” Yin said. “Getting back to Jorgensen, curse or no curse, he pissed somebody off.”

  “So what could a broken-down ex–baseball player do to piss someone off enough to get a visit from two thugs?”

  4

  McCabe and Lieutenant Dole had joined Pete Sullivan in the Communications Center. The center was home to the 911 system. It also housed the interfaces for the surveillance cameras that watched what was happening in the city twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and for the sensors that registered the sounds of gunfire or explosions and pinpointed the locations.

  Pete Sullivan was in charge of the Comm Center day shift. His handlebar mustache twitched as he glanced up from his monitor. “This definitely falls into the category of ‘not good.’”

  McCabe looked at the camera-eye view of the crime scene. “This vic looks a lot older than the other two. Maybe this isn’t our guy’s work.”

  Sullivan said, “That’s not what I meant. Look at her face.” He panned in, giving them a close-up of the dead woman’s face. “Recognize her?”

  McCabe leaned forward. “She looks like … that can’t be who I think it is.”

  “Unless she has a clone,” Sullivan said. “I think we have a match.”

  Behind them, Dole said, “Wanna share it with me? Who do you think she is?”

  “She looks a whole lot like Vivian Jessup,” McCabe said.

  “In the now-deceased flesh,” Sullivan said.

  “Vivian who?” Dole asked.

  “Jessup. She’s an actress,” McCabe said. “She won a Tony last year. I think it was her second or third.”

  “See that pendant around her neck?” Sullivan zoomed in.

  Dole said. “What is that? A rabbit wearing a jacket? Standing on its hind legs?”

  “The White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland,” McCabe said. “That was Jessup’s first role as a child actress.”

  “She played a rabbit?” Dole said.

  McCabe smiled. “No, sir, sorry. She played Alice. In a movie musical. Then later, as an adult, she played the Red Queen, one of the other characters, on Broadway.”

  “That’s what they call her,” Sullivan said. “The Red Queen. Not just because of that role but because of the red hair. That hair’s one of her trademarks.”

  “It could be her,” McCabe said. “She was here in July. She was interviewed about a play that she’s writing, set here in Albany. She was working with one of the theater profs at UAlbany on some kind of lab for students.”

  “That would explain why she’s back,” Sullivan said.

  Dole cursed. “If we’ve got a dead Broadway actress, we’re going to have press from the City all over this. As soon as it goes out over the wires, they’re going to be on the next fast train.”

  McCabe looked again at the monitor. “Do we already have officers at the scene?”

  “A couple,” Sullivan said. He panned away from the body to a boat ramp and then to two uniformed cops standing on the bank of the rushing stream, backs turned to the camera. They seemed to be deep in conversation.

  “Were they the ones who called it in?” McCabe asked.

  Sullivan shook his head. “The call came from an emergency box.” He cued the playback.

  “Hey, listen, you’d better get some cops out here.” The voice was male, juvenile, and frightened. “There’s a dead woman down by the creek.”

  “I’ll dispatch a car immediately. May I have your name and—”

  “No way! I’m not getting mixed up in this shit. I’m supposed to be in school.”

  “That’s it?” Dole said.

  “Afraid so,” Sullivan replied.

  “Got cam on that box?”

  “Not in that location.”

  “Okay,” Dole said. “Review the surveillance and give us whatever you have on the crime scene.”

  Sullivan leaned back in his chair. “I can tell you what we have right now. Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Dole said. “How could you have nothing?

  “The area under that bridge is a blind spot.”

  “Then what the hell are we looking at now?”

  “Footage from the mobile cam the uniforms set up when they located the body.”

  “All right,” Dole said. “But what about the cameras on the traffic lights? On the bridge itself?”

  “We have cameras in both places. But they went down a couple of weeks ago, after the solar flares.”

  “And they haven’t been fixed?” McCabe asked.

  “The techs have the ones on the inhabited portion of Delaware and the side streets back online. The others on the bridge are on the list,” Sullivan said. “In case you missed it, the budget increase we asked for hasn’t been approved yet.”

  “Sorry,” McCabe said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “We’re going to get all kinds of blowback on this one.” Sullivan tugged at his mustache. “Vivian Jessup, and the damn cameras are out. Nobody’s going to take into account that we’ve got equipment all over the city to keep functioning. Priority goes to maintaining and enhancing coverage of those areas where we’ve got people and property to protect. We’re supposed to make sure Joe Elk from Buffalo doesn’t get mugged when he’s walking back to his hotel from the convention center.”

  “I’m all for protecting tourists,” McCabe said. “But this is one of those times when I wish our surveillance system really did live up to the hype.”

  “If I had known Vivian Jessup was going to wind up dead on that boat ramp, McCabe, I sure as hell would have moved those cams to the top of the list.”

  “I know that, Pete. I know we’re dealing with budget and solar flares.”

  Dole, who had been listening with his ORB in his hand, said, “So what it comes down to is that either our perp got lucky or he knew somehow that the cameras on the bridge were out.”

  Sullivan shook his head. “No way he could have known that for sure unless he’s one of our techs or a cop in that zone. The cameras are still in place. It looks like they’re on. They’re just not transmitting.”

  “I need to alert the commander. We’d better get Jacoby in on this, too.”

  He stepped away from them and started making his calls.

  McCabe said. “Pete, this location … the K-9 training facility is out there. Where’s the crime scene in relation to that?”

  “You’ve got the farm with the community garden and the dog park—”

  “And the horse patrol has stables there,” McCabe said. “But where is—”

  Sullivan tapped the screen. “The road down to this ramp was put in last spring. Compliments of Ted Thornton. He wanted a convenient boat ramp on the Albany side of the bridge. He paid, and the city approved.”

  “I must have missed that.”

  “Most people did. They put it in while some construction was going on up on Delaware. They put a couple of picnic tables down there and stuck up a sign about it being a public ramp, in case anyone noticed and asked questions.”

  McCabe nodded. “Okay. So you’re the killer and you’re driving around with a body in your car and you see a side road—”

  “No problem about the dog park being nearby,” Sullivan said. “Nobody likely to be down there walking their dog at night. No hikers following the ‘yellow brick road’ through the woods and over the old bridge. And probably no cops hanging around at the facilities.”

  “The ‘yellow brick road,’” McCabe said, her head coming up.

  “The bricks … when they wer
e building the old turnpike road, the bricks they used had a yellow hue—”

  “I know about that. When I was a kid, a teacher told us that Albany once had its own yellow brick road and that a portion of it was still visible.… If the victim is Vivian Jessup—”

  “Wrong movie. She was in Alice.”

  “I know that. But both Alice and The Wizard of Oz were stories about little girls who—”

  “But what do the first two victims have to do with the stories? They were in their early twenties, not little girls. The first vic was found beside her car after she left a club. The second vic got a flat tire on her way home from work. And if this is Jessup, even if the killer knew about the yellow brick road, he didn’t dump her body there, either. He left her on the—”

  McCabe held up her hands. “Okay. You’re right. I’m having a wacky brainstorm. So the killer manages to find Ted Thornton’s new road down to a boat ramp. But if it is our guy, why did he move the body in the first place? He didn’t move the other two.”

  Lieutenant Dole spoke behind her. “McCabe, you’re assuming he killed her somewhere else.” He held up his ORB. “Jacoby put me on hold. Get moving and take that kid Baxter with you. The CO was in a meeting, but he’s on his way. As soon as he gets here, we’ll be over there.”

  Sullivan said, “I hope Jacoby can keep Clarence Redfield away from this. That’s all we need, to have Redfield threading about this.”

  “See you at the scene, Lou,” McCabe said.

  She was already going over what she had seen on-camera as she started down the hall in search of Baxter. If it was Vivian Jessup … if she was the third victim … then a Broadway actress had become the victim of a serial killer while visiting Albany.

  That was not going to thrill the mayor.

  Even with the fast train—ninety minutes instead of the two and a half hours it used to take—cosmopolitan types from Manhattan had not been making Albany their destination of choice. City dwellers had not rushed to relocate to Albany to take advantage of the cheaper real estate market. Most of them seemed uninterested in even coming up to spend a day or a weekend in the capital. The mayor had been spending serious money—much of it from corporate benefactors like Ted Thornton—on a campaign to sell the attractions of Albany to the rest of the Northeast, particularly the residents of the Big Apple. She was determined to convince tourists from downstate that Albany was New York’s “vibrant, historic capital” and should be more than a station stop on the way to Montreal.