A chauffeur opened the car’s rear door for their suspect. And a minute later, they were all on the roll as the detectives followed the black Lincoln toward the river, onto the parkway and then down to the dingy commercial district near the docks. And there they watched the passenger bid the chauffeur good night. Dwayne Brox stood on the sidewalk, looking around, but paying no attention to his shadow cops. The detectives’ stakeout car worked even better in this crummier patch of the city. Who looked for cops in a Lexus?
Their man walked half a block to enter the office door of Bargain Rides, and, after a short wait, he emerged from the wide mouth of the garage, sitting behind the wheel of a rented piece of crap that Gonzales would not be caught dead in, not even on a stakeout detail in an auto graveyard. The detective shook his head, saying, “Rich people.”
And his partner nodded.
—
THE CLIENT had favored a toilet this time. What an idiot. But Iggy had withdrawn his objection. He had his own change of plan for this night.
The restroom would ensure privacy and anonymity in this busy truck stop. Lots of foot traffic passed through that door to the toilet. Not bad—providing the drop sight was not also used by local drug dealers. That would pose a complication. Luck was with him when he lifted the heavy ceramic cover of the toilet’s water tank and found it to be virgin territory. The scum around the interior had not been disturbed in years. After leaving a red plastic box afloat in the tank water, he replaced the lid and opened the restroom door to hear the encore of a country music song on the jukebox. Some brokenhearted trucker had fallen in love with lyrics for faithless bitches.
The diner was a double-wide, lots of space filled with Formica tables, plastic chairs and aromas of coffee, chilli dogs and smelly men. The span of window glass gave Iggy a view of the customers’ rides. They had ridden in on every damn thing. Cars and motorcyles were parked in the narrow slots up front, and the big rigs were at the back of the lot near the highway.
Heading for a stool at the counter, Iggy checked out the crowd for newcomers. He saw none of the people featured in a TV news clip of well-dressed civilians entering a SoHo station house with police escorts—the rich bastards branded as persons of interest to the Special Crimes Unit. So the client was not here yet. Gail Rawly must have impressed the fool with the importance of not showing up early, possibly running into the hit man, pissing him off—and, of course, getting killed. Tonight, Iggy was the one to break the rules, chief among them: Never get within a mile of the clients. Never give them a face to remember, should they get caught and feel the need to cut a deal with the cops.
For this occasion, Iggy wore eyeglasses, and his shirt bore the logo of a moving company to help him pass as a long-haul trucker for one of the big rigs in the lot—though his van sat in the tall weeds behind the diner, keeping company with two abandoned wrecks—good as invisible. When he sat down at the counter, he was positioned in line of sight with the restroom and every taker of pisses and dumps. He also had a view of the parking spaces near the door, those sized to fit cars.
He ordered a burger and fries. The waitresses were hustling stacked trays of food, deaf to shouted complaints from some of the tables. So many customers. Too many. He could count on slow service. Timing was everything.
Forty minutes passed before he pushed his empty plate away. A junker with rental plates pulled up to a slot near the entrance. The driver emerged in jeans and a bright-colored T-shirt. Sunglasses at night? He might be the client. The age was right for the youngest one on the news clip, though the guy’s hair was spiked and he had a stubble of beard. Crappy jeans. Low-rent sneakers. This one definitely lacked the polish of the crowd hauled into the station house. But the new arrival’s first stop was the restroom.
Iggy turned his eyes back to the parking lot, where another car had just pulled in. A Lexus, a very nice ride. But the driver and the passenger did not get out. The two men just sat there watching the long span of window glass.
Well, this was promising.
When the customer with the spiked hair left the restroom, he had a brown-paper bag in one hand.
Oh, you moron.
That bag must have been folded up in a pocket when the guy went in there, but now it certainly contained the red box from the toilet tank. There were dark brown wet spots on the brown paper.
The two men parked outside must have noticed that, too. They stepped out of their car as the fool with the paper bag left the diner, his identity confirmed—by cops. The idiot client was being bent over the hood of his rental as they handcuffed him.
Iggy raised one hand to signal the harried waitress for his check. So far, everything was going well.
—
THE RED PLASTIC BOX had been dusted for fingerprints and then opened. The suspense was over long before the lawyer’s arrival.
And the lawyer’s laughter.
Dwayne Brox was not so cheerful. Judging by the pouty mouth, his arrest and detention had inconvenienced him, and worse—the surrounding detectives annoyed him. He resented every question that pulled his attention away from Mallory. Despite the fact that she had yet to even glance at the suspect, he was fixated on her.
Lonahan followed Gonzales out of the interrogation room. The partners were in a grim mood for good reason, though their stakeout had not been a complete waste of time. They had singled out the right suspect, and now the squad could end surveillance for the other investors on the shortlist.
Riker stared at Brox’s cheap clothes and cheaper sneakers. The last time he saw this young man, it would have cost him a year’s rent money to buy the creep’s outfit. But here and now, if he shut his eyes, the detective could imagine gnats circling the guy’s head. He christened the suspect as Bug Boy, but he called him “Dwayne . . . where do you get your disguises? A flea market? Is that where you shopped for your hit man, too?”
Brox looked up, as if he had just discovered Riker in the room with him, and then he glanced at the less interesting contents of the red box from the diner’s toilet tank—a goddamn ham sandwich.
The lawyer, dubbed Shifty Little Bastard, also eyed the red box. He smiled at his scruffy client and then, since expensive suits always preferred to speak to equally good tailoring, he ignored Riker and said to the cop seated across the table, “Detective Mallory, if you can’t make a case for ham on rye as contraband, my client and I will be leaving.”
“Not yet,” she said. “Your client’s not very tidy. He didn’t wipe all his prints off the toilet-tank cover. We know he was expecting to find something else . . . proof of death.”
The attorney waved one hand to say that he could not be bothered with trivialities of life and death. “Since you had no cause to take my client’s prints for comparison—”
“Wrong. I’ve got this.” Mallory laid a warrant on the table. “I had a government witness talk to the judge who signed it.”
Technically true—though Chester Marsh had lost his government job, and all the talk had been on tape. Riker had gone shopping for a newly minted assistant DA to play that snitch’s interview for a judge on the cusp of senility. The kidnap connection to Andrew Polk’s former clients was tenuous, but the judge was up for election this term, and the old man had wanted to be seen as a candidate who came out on the side of kidnapped children everywhere, but especially the blind ones. The judge had signed three warrants, one for each suspect on the shortlist, and the powers granted were so broad that they were damn near embarrassing.
“I can take your guy’s fingerprints,” said Mallory, “his financial statements—anything I want.” One red fingernail trailed down the lines of the warrant’s text. “Oh, and here? It says I can take the little weasel’s blood if I want it.”
Taking no offense on the part of the little weasel, the lawyer smiled at her and said, “But you had no cause for arrest—or we’d be discussing charges and an arraignment. So far, you have noth
ing but—” His eyes strayed back to the ham sandwich in the red box. “Well, actually nothing at all . . . We’re leaving.”
“But first,” said Mallory, “a little blood.”
—
DWAYNE BROX arrived home, yawning, wearied by the tedium of waiting hours for a lab technician to draw a blood sample from his vein. The lawyer had balked at this, insisting that a DNA swab would do, but the warrant had spelled out blood, and only blood would satisfy Detective Mallory. However, all in all? Great fun!
Upon entering his bedroom, the light switch would not work. How tedious—but a burned-out bulb could wait till tomorrow. Dwayne found his bed by the crack of light from the hallway. Too tired to undress, he flopped down on the mattress and—
“It’s about time,” said a rough voice from the dark. “I’ve been waitin’ for the cops to let you go.”
Dwayne’s eyes were open now and blinded by a low ball of light as bright as the sun. He shut his eyes but the light persisted, burning through membrane. “Who’s there?”
“Who do you think? . . . Did the cops like the ham sandwich?”
No, this should not be happening. He had an agreement! Dwayne raised one hand to shield his eyes before he opened them again. He could see nothing of the man beyond the light, nothing but the afterimage of a sun. “You can’t be here! You’re not even supposed to know my name!”
“And I wouldn’t . . . if you weren’t such a fuckup. You made all the news channels, kid. I was watchin’ TV when the cops hauled you in the first time, you and your rich buddies. You know why they gotcha again tonight? You’re an idiot.”
“Are you insane?” No, actually the intruder displayed rather good cognitive reasoning, as evidenced by the ham sandwich. If not for that substitution— “All right. The toilet-tank thing? Bad idea. But police might be parked outside right this minute.”
“Yeah, they are. Good thing they wasn’t watchin’ the roof. So what’d you tell ’em?”
“Get out!” Ah, that might be the wrong tone to take with a hired killer, not exactly the servant class. More politely, Dwayne said, “You should leave . . . now.”
“So you don’t want this?”
The plastic bag came flying at him from the dark side of the light, and it landed on the bed. Dwayne had come to recognize a disembodied human heart on sight. This one was smaller than the others.
The heart of a child.
22
Dwayne Brox, bound hand and foot, sat on a kitchen chair as Iggy covered his eyes with a black silk necktie.
“Is this necessary? You probably burnt out my retinas with that damn—”
“That’ll wear off.” Iggy sat down to read files on the client’s laptop computer. “You’ll see just fine when you pay the balance on the kid’s heart.” The procedure for shuttling funds from one account to another was chimp-simple. Gail Rawly had introduced him to online banking, but Iggy still insisted on cash in the hand. He had no faith in his partner’s guarantee that some offshore banks were still cop-proof.
“So, Dwayne, you and me, we got time for a talk. . . . What’s your game?”
“You don’t need to know. I’m paying extra to avoid stupid questions.”
A bonus? Gail must be skimming even more than usual.
Done with the probate file, Iggy leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “This was your folks’ apartment? My condolences, kid, ’cause they didn’t leave you much.” The place was heavily mortgaged. A balloon payment had come due and gone unpaid. “So that offshore account—that’s all the cash you got? Damn.” He had opened that file with a password obligingly supplied by Brox. Moron. What was the point of a complex foreign account number, if it could be accessed with a name? And who the hell was Chekhov? The balance line had him worried. “Three hundred K. That’s it? And what’ve you got left after you pay for the kid and the bonus, huh?” He said this with a sneer in his voice, as if he already had the answer.
“A hundred thousand.”
That would net Gail Rawly a bundle of money in addition to padded commissions for every hit and heart. “A hundred K. That’s chump change—a working stiff’s idea of money. But you keep spendin’ like you own the whole town.” According the credit card accounts, this ditzy twit went everywhere in limos, and he was probably running a tab with a bookie. The sports pages of his newspapers were inked with notes on point spreads. “Big spender. That tells me you expect a windfall. Or maybe you plan to off yourself when you hit bottom. Which is it?” The most dangerous client was one with nothing to lose.
“I’m not suicidal. Does that cover it?”
It bothered Iggy that this guy had no fear at all. This was hardly normal behavior when a hit man came calling. “Can’t be a life-insurance payoff. The hits were random targets. So . . . you got a beef with the mayor?”
“You could say that.” This was the tone of a tease. “But you’ll have to be content with the money.” The little creep had the kind of smile that would beg perfect strangers to smack him.
“Wadda you do with the hearts?” Iggy thought he knew.
—
MAINTAINING THE RAWLYS’ happy marriage required sleeping in separate rooms. Mary slept soundly and snored loudly.
Gail was a light sleeper, frequently awakened by the baby monitor on the nightstand. It was a lifeline to his daughter’s bedroom. The listening device reassured him that she was still breathing. He had faced the terror of her asthma attacks too often. Though most incidents were controlled by her inhaler, some had required the mad dash to a hospital. And Daddy’s girl was heir to other horrors of the night. He was Patty’s hero, the one who rescued her from every bad dream. Gail was compulsive in his daddying, and when he detected the amplified whine of a mosquito, he would leave his bed on the run to vanquish the invader before it could touch her.
Who was that?
Gail threw off his sheet and sat bolt upright in alarm mode. He heard it again, a man’s voice, a whisper. “Gail, we gotta talk.” He switched on his bedside lamp. There was no one in the room. The voice had come from the baby monitor. In seconds, he was at Patty’s bedroom door. A gun in his hand. Turning the—
What the hell?
Illuminated by the tiny bulb of a bunny nightlight, Iggy Conroy sat in the chair next to the pink canopy bed of the sleeping princess. “I didn’t wanna wake the whole house with a phone call.”
How polite.
Biting back anger, Gail lowered his revolver and issued sign-language commands to shut the hell up! Iggy silently followed him out of the bedroom and down the hallway to the den, where a long wire trailed from each of the French doors to prevent a break in the electrical circuit for the burglar alarm. Iggy was brilliant at breaking and entering. He had also defeated the motion detectors in the baseboards.
Gail walked to his desk, laid down his gun and rested one hand on the cover of his laptop. Warm to the touch. So Iggy had spent some time in here tonight—a waste of time without a password and a thumb drive.
The dangerous guest sat down, not at all contrite. This most even-tempered man was angry, though it only showed in the tension of his face and his fists. The baby-monitor stunt must have been revenge for something.
“What’s up?” Gail’s measured tone implied that having his house broken into might be a common occurrence. Was Iggy wearing cologne? Now Gail was frightened. The odor of cigarettes was bad enough, but all perfumes were the princess’s enemies, possible triggers for asthma, and this man knew that.
No, hold on. Easy now. It was only a trace of scent, not Iggy’s cologne; he never wore any, but it smelled like trouble. A familiar brand. Expensive. Who had this man been hugging tonight?
Iggy reached out to drop a cell phone on the desk. The plastic back was missing and so was the battery. “That’s the client’s burner.”
“Please tell me he’s still alive.”
“
Yeah, but I had a little chat with him. I know about your—” Iggy spat out the words, “—bonus money. That’s why you let that idiot call the shots tonight. The toilet drop site? Of all the stupid— Well, he got his heart delivered in person.”
“A change of plan. Smart move,” said Gail. How fucking crazy are you? A face-to-face with a client?
“I watched him move the fee into your account,” said Iggy. “Pay me now. And then shut everything down, the account, too. I don’t want no tracks. We’re done with that little prick.”
“No problem, nothing easier.” Gail did not want this man’s voice raised in anger that might wake the princess. He sat down at his desk to search a drawer for the thumb drive. Once it was inserted into the laptop slot, he was able to open the account in the Cook Islands. The client’s payment was indeed there on the screen as a recent deposit. “I’ll get your money before the end of the week. You could’ve had it in three seconds if you’d let me set up an offshore—”
“Cash. Get it now.” Iggy turned to the painting that concealed the wall safe. “It’s all there. I counted it. But I didn’t take any. That would’ve been . . . rude.”
Gail opened the safe and stared at his emergency stash, what he kept on hand for the road, should the need to run arise. Reluctantly, he removed the banded packets of bills and put them into Iggy’s hands. “So . . . you followed the client from the truck stop?”
“Naw. After the cops cuffed him and took him away, I knew I’d have lots of time to kill. Hours and hours . . . Relax. They let him go.”
Inwardly flapping like a duck, outwardly calm, Gail settled into the chair behind his desk. “How did you know where—”
“I saw his mug on TV. That was the first time the cops hauled him in, him and his rich friends. I got all their names off follow-ups on the Net. Addresses, too, but those came from a society blog.”
Blind Sight Page 26
