Kathryn Dance Ebook Boxed Set : Roadside Crosses, Sleeping Doll, Cold Moon (9781451674217)

by Deaver, Jeffery

  He checked street numbers. He was two blocks from the storefront where he’d be meeting Amelia Sachs. Thinking: What else’ve I learned?

  One thing: You damn well better have learned to steer clear of alleys.

  A year ago he’d nearly been beaten to death because he’d been walking too close to a wall, with a perp hiding around the corner of a building. The man had stepped out and walloped him in the head with a billy club.

  Careless and stupid.

  As Detective Sachs had said, “You didn’t know. Now you do.”

  Approaching another alley now, Pulaski veered to the left to walk along the curb—in the unlikely event that somebody, a mugger or junkie, was hiding in the alley.

  He turned and looked down it, saw the empty stretch of cobblestones. But at least he was being smart. That’s the way it was, being a cop, learning these small lessons and making them a part of—

  The hand got him from behind.

  “Jesus,” he gasped as he was pulled through the open door of the van at the curb, which he hadn’t seen because he was staring into the alley. He gasped and started to call out for help.

  But his assailant—Deputy Inspector Halston Jefferies, his eyes cold as the moon overhead—slapped his hand over the rookie’s mouth. Somebody else grabbed Pulaski’s gun hand and in two seconds flat he’d disappeared into the back of the van.

  The door slammed shut.

  The front door of the old grocery store opened and Marilyn Flaherty walked inside, closed the door behind her and latched it.

  Unsmiling, she looked around the bleak store, nodded at the other officers and Wallace. Sachs thought she looked even more tense than usual.

  The deputy mayor, playing it cool, introduced her to the IAD detective. She shook his hand and sat at the battered table, next to Sachs.

  “Top secret, hm?”

  Sachs said, “This’s turned into a hornets’ nest.” She watched the woman’s face carefully as she laid out the details. The inspector kept up the great stone face, giving nothing away. Sachs wondered what Kathryn Dance would see in her stiff-backed posture, the tight lips, the quick, cold eyes. The woman was virtually motionless.

  The detective told her about Baker’s partner. Then added, “I know how you feel about Internal Affairs but, with all respect, I’ve decided we need to bring them in.”

  “I—”

  “I’m sorry, Inspector.” Sachs turned toward Wallace.

  But the deputy mayor said nothing. He simply shook his head, sighed, then glanced at the IAD man. The young officer pulled out his weapon.

  Sachs blinked. “What . . . Hey, what’re you doing?”

  He trained the gun on the space midway between her and Flaherty.

  “What is this?” the inspector gasped.

  “It’s a mess,” Wallace said, sounding almost regretful. “It’s a real mess. Both of you, keep your hands on the table.”

  The deputy mayor looked them over, while Toby Henson handed his own gun to Wallace, who covered the women.

  Henson wasn’t IAD at all; he was a detective out of the 118th, part of the inner circle of the extortion ring, and the man who’d helped Dennis Baker murder Sarkowski and Creeley. He now pulled on leather gloves and took Sachs’s Glock from her holster. He patted her down for a backup piece. There was none. He searched the inspector’s purse and removed her small service revolver.

  “You called it right, Detective,” Wallace said to Sachs, who stared at him in shock. “We’ve got a situation . . . a situation.” He pulled out his cell phone and made a call to one of the officers in front, also part of the extortion scheme. “All clear?”

  “Yep.”

  Wallace disconnected the phone.

  Sachs said, “You? It was you? But . . .” Her head swivelled toward Flaherty.

  The inspector asked, “What’s this all about?”

  The deputy mayor nodded at the inspector and said to Sachs, “Wrong in a big way. She had nothing to do with it. Dennis Baker and I were partners—but business partners. On Long Island. We grew up there. Had a recycling company together. It went bust and he went to the academy, became a cop. I got another business up and running. Then I got involved in city politics and we stayed in touch. I became police liaison and ombudsman and got a feel for what kind of scams worked and what didn’t. Dennis and I came up with one that did.”

  “Robert!” Flaherty snapped. “No, no . . .”

  “Ah, Marilyn . . .” was all the silver-haired man could muster.

  “So,” Amelia Sachs said, her shoulders sagging, “what’s the scenario here?” She gave a grim laugh. “The inspector kills me and then kills herself. You plant some money in her house. And . . .”

  “And Dennis Baker dies in jail—he messes with the wrong inmate, falls down the stairs, who knows? Too bad. But he should’ve been more careful. No witnesses, that’s the end of the case.”

  “You think anybody’s going to buy it? Somebody at the One One Eight’ll turn. They’ll get you sooner or later.”

  “Well, excuse me, Detective, but we have to put out the fires we’ve got, don’t you think? And you’re the biggest fucking fire I’ve got at the moment.”

  “Listen, Robert,” Flaherty said, her voice brittle, “you’re in trouble but it’s not too late.”

  Wallace pulled on gloves. “Check the street again, tell them to get the car ready.” The deputy mayor picked up Sachs’s Glock.

  The man walked to the door.

  Wallace’s eyes turned cold as he looked over Sachs and took a firm grip on the pistol.

  Sachs stared into his eyes. “Wait.”

  Wallace frowned.

  She looked him over, eerily calm under the circumstances, he thought. Then she said, “ESU One, move in.”

  Wallace blinked. “What?”

  To the deputy mayor’s shock, a man’s voice shouted from the darkened back room, “Nobody move! Or I will fire!”

  What was this?

  Gasping, Wallace looked into the doorway, where an ESU officer was standing, his H&K machine gun’s muzzle moving from the politician to Henson at the front door.

  Sachs reached down and grabbed something under the table. Her hand emerged with another Glock. She must’ve clipped it there earlier! She spun to the front door, training the pistol on Henson. “Drop the weapon! Get down on the floor!” The ESU officer shifted his gun back to the deputy mayor.

  Wallace, thinking in panic: Oh, Christ, it’s a sting. . . . All a setup.

  “Now!” Sachs shouted again.

  Henson muttered, “Shit.” He did as he was told.

  Wallace continued to grip Sachs’s Glock. He looked down at it.

  Her eyes on Henson, Sachs turned slightly toward Wallace. “That piece you’re holding’s unloaded. You’d die for no reason.”

  Disgusted, he dropped the gun on the table, held his hands up.

  Mystified, Inspector Flaherty was scooting back in her chair, standing up.

  Sachs said into her lapel, “Entry teams, go.”

  The front door crashed open and a half dozen cops pushed inside—ESU officers. Following them were Deputy Inspector Halston Jefferies and the head of Internal Affairs Division, Captain Ron Scott. A young blond patrolman entered too.

  The ESU officers muscled Wallace to the floor. He felt the pain in his hip and joints. Henson was cuffed as well. The deputy mayor looked outside and saw the two other officers from the One One Eight, the ones who’d been standing guard in front. They were lying on the cold sidewalk, in restraints.

  “Hell of a way to find out,” Amelia Sachs said to no one as she reloaded her own Glock and slipped it back in her holster. “But it sure answers our question.”

  The query she’d referred to wasn’t about Robert Wallace’s guilt—they’d learned beforehand that he was one of Baker’s partners; it was about whether Marilyn Flaherty had been involved too.

  They’d set up the whole thing to find out, as well as get a taped admission from Wallace.

&
nbsp; Lon Sellitto, Ron Scott and Halston Jefferies had established a command post in a van up the street and hidden the ESU sniper in the back room to make sure Wallace and the cop with him didn’t start shooting before Sachs had a chance to tape the conversation. Pulaski was supposed to take the front door with one team, and another one would take the back. But at the last minute they learned that Wallace had other officers with him, cops from the 118, who might or might not be crooked, so they’d had to change plans a bit.

  Pulaski, in fact, nearly walked right into Wallace’s cops outside the storefront and ruined the whole thing.

  The rookie said, “Inspector Jefferies pulled me into the command van just before those guys outside saw me.”

  Jefferies snapped, “Walking down the street like a Boy Scout on a fucking hike. You want to stay alive on the streets, kid, keep your goddamn eyes open.” The inspector’s rage seemed tame in comparison with yesterday’s tantrum, Sachs noted. At least he wasn’t spitting.

  “Yessir. I’ll be more careful in the future, sir.”

  “Jesus Christ, they let anybody into the academy these days.”

  Sachs tried to repress a smile. She turned to Flaherty. “Sorry, Inspector. We just had to make sure you weren’t a player.” She explained her suspicions and the clues that had led her to believe that the inspector might’ve been working with Baker.

  “The Mercedes?” Flaherty asked. “Sure, it was mine. And, sure, you were being tailed. I had an officer from Op Div keeping an eye on you and Pulaski. You were both young, you were inexperienced and you might’ve been way out of your league. I gave him my own car to use because you would’ve noticed a pool vehicle right away.”

  The expensive car had indeed thrown her off and actually started her thinking in another direction. If the mob wasn’t involved, she was beginning to wonder that maybe Pulaski had called it wrong about Creeley’s partner, Jordan Kessler, and that the businessman might somehow be involved in the deaths. Maybe, she’d speculated, Creeley and Sarkowski had gotten caught up in one of the Enron-style investigations currently under way and were killed because of something they’d learned about corporate fraud at a client’s company. Kessler seemed to be the only player in the game who could afford a vehicle like an AMG Merc.

  But now she realized that the case was all about corrupt cops, and the ash in Creeley’s fireplace wasn’t from doctored accounting records but simply evidence that they’d burned to make sure they destroyed any records of the extortion money, as she’d originally speculated.

  Now the inspector’s attention turned to Robert Wallace. She asked Sachs, “How’d you find him?”

  “Tell him, Ron,” she instructed Pulaski.

  The rookie began. “Detective Sachs here ascertained . . .” He paused. “Detective Sachs found a bunch of trace in Baker’s vehicle and house that gave us the idea, well, gave Detectives Sachs and Rhyme the idea that maybe the other person involved lived near a beach or marina.”

  Sachs took it up. “I didn’t think that DI Jefferies was involved because he wouldn’t request a file sent to his own precinct if he wanted to destroy it. Somebody else had it routed there and intercepted it before it was logged in. I went back to him and asked if anybody had been in the file room lately, somebody who might have a connection to the case. Somebody had. You.” A glance at Wallace. “Then I asked the next logical question. Did you have a Maryland connection? And you sure did. Just not an obvious one.”

  Thinking inside the box . . .

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Baker told me you’d mentioned Maryland. But I never thought you’d find it.”

  Ron Scott, the IAD head, said to Flaherty, “Wallace has a boat docked at his place on the South Shore of Long Island. Registered in New York but built in Annapolis. She’s The Maryland Monroe.” Scott looked him over and gave a cold laugh. “You boat people really love your puns.”

  Sachs said, “The sand, seaweed and saltwater trace in Baker’s car and house match those at his marina. We got a warrant and searched the boat. Got some good evidence. Phone numbers, documents, trace. Over four million in cash—oh, and a lot of drugs too. Plenty of liquor, probably perped. But I’d say the booze’s the least of your problems.”

  Ron Scott nodded to two ESU officers. “Get him downtown. Central Booking.”

  As he was led out, Wallace called back, “I’m not saying anything. If you think I’m going to name names, you can forget about it. I’m not confessing.”

  Flaherty gave the first laugh Sachs had ever heard from her. “Are you mad, Robert? Sounds like they’ve got enough evidence to put you away forever. You don’t need to say a word. Actually, I’d just as soon you didn’t open your goddamn mouth ever again.”

  III

  8:32 A.M. THURSDAY

  Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

  —LOUIS-HECTOR BERLIOZ

  Chapter 34

  Alone now, Rhyme and Sachs looked over the tables containing the evidence that had been collected in both the St. James corruption scandal and the Watchmaker case.

  Sachs was concentrating hard, but Rhyme knew she was distracted. They’d stayed up late and talked about what had happened. The corruption was bad enough but that officers themselves had actually tried to kill other cops shook her even more.

  Sachs claimed she was still undecided about quitting the force but one look at her face told Rhyme that she was going to leave. He also knew she’d had a couple of phone calls with Argyle Security.

  There was no doubt.

  Rhyme now glanced at the small rectangle of white paper sitting in her briefcase open in his lab: the envelope containing Sachs’s letter of resignation. Like the glaring light of the full moon in a dark sky, the whiteness of the letter was blinding. It was hard to see it clearly, it was hard to see anything else.

  He forced himself not to think about it and looked back at the evidence.

  Gerald Duncan—dubbed “Perp Lite” by witty Thom—was awaiting arraignment on the infractions he had committed, all minor ones (the DNA analysis revealed that the blood on the box cutter, on the jacket fished out of the harbor and pooled on the pier was Duncan’s own, and the fingernail crescent was a perfect match).

  The 118th Precinct corruption case was moving slowly.

  There was sufficient evidence to indict Baker and Wallace, as well as Toby Henson. Soil at the Sarkowski crime scene and the samples Sachs had collected at Creeley’s Westchester house matched trace found in Baker’s and Henson’s homes. Of course, they had a rope fiber implicating Baker in Creeley’s death, but similar fibers were found on Wallace’s boat. Henson owned leather gloves whose texture patterns matched those found in Westchester.

  But this trio wasn’t cooperating. They were rejecting any plea bargains, and no evidence implicated anyone else, including the two officers who’d been outside the East Village social club, who claimed they were innocent. Rhyme had tried to unleash Kathryn Dance on them but they were refusing to say anything.

  Eventually, Rhyme was confident, he could find all the perps from the 118th and build cases against them. But he didn’t want eventually; he wanted now. As Sachs had pointed out, the other cops from the St. James might be planning to kill more witnesses—maybe even make another attempt on her or Pulaski. It was also possible that one or more of them were forcing Baker, Henson and Wallace to remain silent by threatening their families.

  Besides, Rhyme was needed on other cases. Earlier he’d gotten a call about another incident—FBI Agent Fred Dellray (temporarily sprung from financial crimes hell) explained that there’d been a break-in and arson at the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology operation in Brooklyn. The damage was minor but the perp had breached a very sophisticated security system and, with terrorism on everyone’s mind, any burglary of a government facility got attention; the Feds wanted Rhyme to assist in the forensic side of the investigation. He wanted to help but he needed to get the Baker-Wallace extortion case wrapped up
first.

  A messenger arrived with the file on the murder of Duncan’s businessman friend, engineered by Baker when the man refused to be extorted. The case was still open—there’s no statute of limitations on murder—but there’d been no entries for a year. Rhyme was hoping to find some leads in the older case that might help them identify perps from the 118th Precinct.

  Rhyme first went into the New York Times archive and read the short account of the death of the victim, Andrew Culbert. It reported nothing other than that he was a businessman from Duluth and had been killed during an apparent mugging in Midtown. No suspects were found. There was no follow-up to the story.

  Rhyme had Thom mount the investigation report on his page-turning frame and the criminalist read through the sheets. As often, in a cold case, the notes were in several different handwritings, since the investigation had been passed on—with progressively less energy—as time passed. According to the crime scene report, there’d been little trace, no fingerprints or footprints, no shell casings (death was from two shots to the forehead, the slugs ubiquitous .38 Specials; a test of the weapons they’d collected from Baker and the other cops at the 118th revealed no ballistics matches).

  “You have the crime scene inventory?” he asked Sachs.

  “Let’s see. Right here,” she said, lifting the sheet. “I’ll read it.”

  He closed his eyes so he’d have a better image of the items.

  “Wallet,” Sachs read, “one hotel room key to the St. Regis, one minibar key, one Cross pen, one PDA, one packet of gum, a small pad of paper with the words ‘Men’s room’ on the top. The second sheet said ‘Chardonnay.’ That’s it. The lead detective from Homicide was John Repetti.”

  Rhyme was looking off, his mind stuck on something. He looked at her. “What?”

  “I was saying, Repetti, he ran the case out of Midtown North. You want me to call him?”

  After a moment Lincoln Rhyme replied, “No, I need you to do something else.”

  It’s possessed.