“Who told you we’d be staying here?” she asked.
“My lieutenant,” he said, his smile slipping somewhat, and she knew that was a lie. Jules had spoken to his lieutenant, who had immediately agreed to keep Callahan away from the case. So the detective must have gone to some trouble to access the report that contained their current contact information.
“He thinks the idea that I’m a suspect in your murder is bullshit, too,” Callahan added.
“My murder?” she said.
He laughed. “Whoopsie. What’s that called when that happens … ? A Freudian slip.”
Alyssa called it being drunk and a complete fool. Although his speech wasn’t as slurred as she’d expected it to be. It actually wasn’t all that much worse than it had been when he’d left that message on her cell.
Of course, everyone got their drunk on in their own unique way.
And she knew that, in his current state, talking to him about any of this—even calling him out on his lie about getting their hotel information from his lieutenant—was a waste of her time.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said. “It’s been a long day. I suggest you call it a night, too. There are plenty of cabs out front.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yes. I am going to … I didn’t come here to … I, um, just wanted …” He cleared his throat. “How ’bout I ride up with you? That way I can say what I came to say and …”
She was shaking her head. Not a chance. “You can tell me tomorrow.”
But one of the elevators opened with a ding, and he gestured toward it. “I don’t mind.”
Alyssa didn’t move, and before she could rephrase no fucking way into a less Sam-like and more diplomatic statement, Callahan realized, “You don’t want to be alone in an elevator with me. Am I right? I’m right. You actually think I might’ve killed that woman … ?”
“You’ve had way too much to drink, so, yes, I’m not interested in going anywhere with you,” she said. “As for what I think … You’ll have the opportunity tomorrow to provide the FBI investigators with an alibi.”
“Which,” he said tightly, “I don’t happen to have. I was home—under the weather. Stomach flu. I took a coupla sick days.”
“Really,” she said. Stomach flu or hung over? “You seem well enough now to have a beer. Or twenty.”
“Yes,” he said earnestly. “Yes, okay. I have had too much to drink tonight. And I shouldn’t have called your cell phone and left that message. I was really angry at the time, but I’ve had some time to cool off and, you know, think about it, and I, um, came here to, um, apologize. Both to you and your asshole husband—and okay, you probably don’t think he’s an asshole because you married him. Or maybe you do and you’re sick of his bullshit. But, all right. I shouldn’t have said what I said about you, even if it’s true. The, you know, nice tits part.”
Good God. This was an apology?
He realized that perhaps he shouldn’t have said that. “Sorry. I’m just…” He started over. “I’ve been having some personal issues lately, and my judgment’s been a little … off.”
You think?
He staggered slightly, and Alyssa knew that any minute he was going to start crying on her shoulder. His second—no, make that his fifth wife had left him. Growing up, his family life had been awful. He’d lost all of his savings in the recent stock market crash. …
“Go home, Detective,” Alyssa said again. “You want to try again with your apology at the meeting with the FBI investigator? I’ll certainly be willing to listen. But right now, you’re not doing yourself any favors.”
Another elevator opened, and he backed away, seemingly genuinely apologetic.
So Alyssa got on, and he still didn’t move, except to say, “I am sorry.”
But right before the elevator doors closed completely, she heard him mutter, “Fucking bitch,” so that seemingly was in serious question.
Shaking her head, she used her key card to access the VIP floor where they were staying, checking her phone to see if maybe she’d missed Savannah’s return call, due to slipping into one of New York City’s many dead cell zones.
But no. She put her phone back into her pocket as the elevator opened, and she got out.
Jay Lopez was sitting in the hall outside the entrance to their suite, and he stood up respectfully as she approached, using his own key card to unlock the door.
“How can you be sure,” Alyssa asked, “that I’m not some evil twin robot version of myself?”
He looked startled for a moment, but then smiled as he realized she was making a bad joke. “I’m pretty sure, ma’am, that if I worried about that particular possibility, I wouldn’t be sitting out here. I’d be off trying to sign up as our Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza.”
Alyssa laughed. “Yeah, but first you’d have to find Don Quixote.”
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“Yeah,” she told him. “It was not a good night.”
He was holding the door open just a few inches, and he didn’t open it further and she knew her not good was going to get worse.
Sure enough—“Zanella and Gillman mixed it up a little,” Lopez reported. “Just about fifteen minutes ago. Gillman’s having some … issues.”
Terrific. Maybe Gillman and Mick Callahan could start a support group.
“I’ve spoken to Lt. Starrett about it, at some length,” Lopez continued. “I’m sure he’ll fill you in. I just wanted to give you a heads-up, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” Alyssa told him, as he opened the door for her.
Whatever had happened, it was now quiet. There was a single light on in the living room, and someone was in the guest bathroom. She could hear the fan running.
Two of the bedroom doors opened, and both Sam and Robin looked out at her as if they’d been waiting and listening for her return.
Well, in Robin’s case, for Jules’s return.
“He’s a couple of hours behind me,” she told him. “He’s safe. He’s with the Transit Police. They’re looking for our John Doe, who wandered out of the hospital.”
“Aw, shhhoot,” Sam said as Robin said, “Thanks.”
Robin closed his door as Sam opened theirs wider, and sure enough, Ash was burbling over in the portable crib that the hotel had provided.
“Hey, baby,” Alyssa called to him. “Mommy’s home. I’ll be right there. …”
“Let me get some clothes on,” Sam said, closing the door behind her, as she shrugged out of her jacket and went into their bathroom to wash that dreadful hospital off of her hands. “And I’ll go out and find Jules. Watch his back.”
Said the man who was looking a little gray-green just from the effort of getting out of bed.
He was also the man who’d used the bathroom sink to wash out not just several of Ash’s onesies and bunny suits, but also the blouse Ash had spit up on, during the airline flight east. He’d hung them all neatly over the shower curtain rod—except for her blouse, which was carefully drying on a hanger.
He’d gotten the stain out, completely.
“Thank you for doing this,” she told him, gesturing toward the drying laundry as she met his eyes in the mirror.
He shrugged it off. “No big. Do you want me to go … ?”
“No, Jules is fine. Your shirt’s on inside out.”
He usually didn’t wear a T-shirt to bed, and it was obvious that he’d quickly pulled this one on when he’d heard her coming in.
“It looks worse than it is. The bruise,” he said, not trying to play games, which was nice. “It’s about as subtle as a tattoo saying I’m an asshole.”
“Funny, that’s the very word Mick Callahan used to describe you,” Alyssa told him. “He was down in the bar, waiting to ambush me.”
“Son of a bitch,” Sam said, then looked at her hard. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It was just… not what I needed.”
“I’m gonna kick his ass—”
“Also not what I
need,” she told him. “Really, Sam. He’s coming in tomorrow to be interviewed. I want you to stay far away from him.”
From out in the other room, Ash’s babbling had taken on a tinge of anger.
“Na-na-nah,” the baby said, with a hint of tragedy in his voice. “Ning-a-nang.”
“Whoa, you hear that?” Sam asked. “He said it. Ning-a-nang.”
Sam had told her, just yesterday, that Ash had been trying out a whole bunch of new sounds—including ning-a-nang when he was mad.
Alyssa hadn’t quite believed him. She’d never heard Ash say anything like that. But Sam’s theory was that the baby was never all that angry when his momma was around.
“Ninga-ninga-ninga-nang!” the baby shouted now, definitely PO’ed that they were taking so long to go over to him.
Alyssa had to laugh. “I heard that,” she said, following Sam out of the bathroom. “What are you saying?” she asked Ash, but then nearly ran into Sam’s broad back.
He’d stopped short.
Ashton had pulled himself up, so that he was standing in the portable crib, his tiny hands gripping the top rail as he gazed at them, wide-eyed—as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d managed to achieve.
“Has he done this before?” Alyssa whispered.
Sam shook his head. “Holy shit,” he mouthed the word he didn’t want their son to hear. He started to laugh. “He’s on the verge of both talking and walking. We are so screwed.”
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
SUNDAY, 01 FEBRUARY 2009
“You okay?” Jenn asked Sam as they went up the steps into the vestry of yet another church shelter.
“I’m fine,” he said shortly.
Broken-rib-day-two sucked. Although it was probably day three that was the absolute worst. At least it had been for her brother, but Jenn wasn’t about to tell Sam that.
They were out and about, in the company of the youngest SEAL, Tony, searching for the homeless man who’d had Alyssa’s picture. The man had gone AWOL last night, disappearing from the hospital. Despite a pretty huge search effort, he hadn’t yet turned up.
Jenn was taking Sam and Tony on a tour of all the shelters and soup kitchens she’d visited, back when she was trying to return both that photo and the man’s treasure-filled sock.
Their first stop had been the place where she’d actually found him back in September, but unfortunately, he wasn’t there now. The volunteer workers knew him, but hadn’t seen him in quite a few weeks.
So on they went.
The day had started off weird and had just kept on getting weirder.
Dan had already left the hotel by the time Jenn got up, and it wasn’t as if she’d slept in.
True to his word, he’d gone with Lopez to see about putting security systems in Maria’s office, as well as in both Maria’s and Jenn’s apartments. They were doing the actual installation themselves, with equipment that could be tied into one of the big-name security company’s grids—if that’s what Maria decided that she wanted. For now, all three systems were going to be connected directly to a mainframe that the Troubleshooters team would monitor from the hotel.
That seemed like relatively good news. Jenn knew that being away from both her home and office was a hardship for Maria, who took her job very seriously, and worked around the clock.
But it was the only good news of the morning.
The first bit of weird if not outright bad news came directly to Maria, who got a call from her father, reporting that Frank, her younger brother, had disappeared. After well over two years without leaving the house, months since he’d come out of his room, he was gone. No note, no missing clothes besides a pair of jeans, his combat boots, some long underwear, a sweater, his winter jacket and a Glock automatic pistol. Maybe a hat and gloves—Maria’s parents weren’t sure. The Glock, however, they were sure of.
It was missing from its case in their bedroom closet.
They didn’t know exactly when Frank had left. Last time anyone had seen him had been quite a few days ago.
Which was before Maggie Thorndyke went missing. And okay, yes, no one had actually pointed that out, but Jenn knew they were all thinking it.
In the “That’s Crazy” column was the fact that Frank didn’t seem to have a motive for killing Maggie. He’d loved his sister—or at least he had back when Maria and Jenn were in high school.
But a lot had happened to him since then. So Alyssa and Jules both quietly passed around a recent photo of Francis “Frank” Bonavita to the members of their teams, advising that he was believed to be armed and dangerous.
Weird and/or discouraging news item number two was the fact that the lab tests on Maggie’s cell phone had come back. The only fingerprints and DNA on the thing belonged to her. Which meant whoever had made that call to Maria had been careful and used gloves and probably even worn a face mask.
It confirmed that the crime was premeditated, although Jenn didn’t really think much confirmation was needed. The caulking around the drawer and the postcard sent through the mail took care of that.
Although, tipping heavily on the weird scale was the fact that the caller had said Check your mail, not Check your bottom desk drawer. Jenn had pointed that out during breakfast, and Jules had agreed that it was definitely a question they were pondering. His best guess—and he admitted completely that it was only a guess—was that the killer knew the office schedule. He knew when the mail arrived, and he also knew that it was sometimes ignored until later in the day. Using Maggie’s phone to call had been a risk, but one he’d been ready for. Because—Jules theorized—for some reason, the killer wanted his so-called gift discovered while the Troubleshooters team was there.
What reason that was? No one had a clue.
Weird and/or discouraging news item three was encouraging at the outset. A New York City webcam was positioned on the corner, looking down the sidewalk directly in front of Nicco’s, the restaurant where Maggie’s cell phone had been found.
The FBI, under Jules’s direction, had requested and obtained archived footage from that camera.
The discouraging part was that there had been some kind of glitch in the archival system and the digital recording for the past month had been scrambled, with seventeen minute segments randomly mixed and completely out of order. The footage was clearly time and date stamped, but someone was going to have to sort through all of it and pick out the bits that were pertinent. In other words—Jules had said—they shouldn’t hold their collective breaths, waiting for a close-up of the killer’s face.
Which they might already have in a photo that Jules had gotten from the hospital where their man had been admitted but walked away. His eyes were closed, but it was a good enough likeness, and they were leaving it, with a contact phone number, at all of the shelters.
“His name’s Winston. I don’t know if that’s a first name or last. It’s all I ever got out of him. He used to be a regular here,” the tall man with the prison tatts on his knuckles told Sam now, as Jenn and Tony hovered in the background. “But not so much anymore. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him.”
“About how long?” Sam asked.
The man scrunched up his face as he thought about it. “Since New Year’s—maybe even Christmas? Sorry, I can’t be more specific. We get a lot of traffic through here.”
“I appreciate even that much info,” Sam said.
Jenn spoke up. “What does it mean?” she asked. “In your experience? When someone like Winston suddenly stops showing up?”
“Usually, it means he’s dead,” the man said somberly. “Mortality rate on the streets is high, particularly in winter. But it could also mean that he found Jesus or, more accurately, Jesus found him. That some Good Sam plucked him off the street and put him in an in-patient program. Or he caught a case—accidentally on purpose, you know?—and went up river for a little state-supported vacation for these colder months.”
“I’m sorry.” Jenn shook her head. “I don�
�t know. Caught a case … ?
“Got his … self arrested,” the man told her. “For something with a nice little two to three month jail term. Which someone like Win would spend in the psych ward, first detoxing, then getting his head shrunk. If the doctors are good enough, they might even find the right cocktail of meds to bring him back to earth. Only he’ll walk out of there in the spring, with a pile of prescriptions he can’t possibly pay for—and a half-year wait for the paperwork to go through if he tries to get his meds through the VA. And by the time they get around to reviewing his file, he’ll have already slipped away again, and be back on the street, talking to himself.”
“He’s not an in-patient,” Sam said. “And he’s not in prison. I saw him just last night.”
“Another possibility is that he got himself a warm place to sleep,” the man told them. “Somewhere the police haven’t found yet—because once they find these places, they clear ’em out, regular. Could be someplace only he knows about—like there’s a broken window, lets him get into the basement of a building.”
“How well did you know him?” Sam asked. “Did he ever show you a picture of a woman—”
But the man was already shaking his head. “Took me two months to pry the name Winston outta him. And then, like I said, he’s been gone.”
“Thank you,” Sam held out his hand, and the two men shook. “If you see him—”
“I’ll give you a call.”
With that, they all trooped back out into the cold.
“That was good,” Jenn said.
Sam wasn’t as enthusiastic. “You know how many basements there are in New York City?” he asked.
And yes, the information they’d just received definitely fell into today’s even good news is bad arena, but wasn’t it about time they got lucky? “If we start by searching the basements near the office,” Jenn began, but Tony interrupted.
“It’s not that simple,” he told her. “Even if we find a broken window, we can’t just enter the building without the cooperation of the super or owner. So it’s not just a matter of you take one side of the street, I’ll take the other. It requires a team of at least three per building. One person to find the superintendent, one to watch the window, and one to watch other escape routes. I’ll tell you this, if I were setting up camp in a basement? I’d make sure I’d have at least one other way to get out.”
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