Devil's Bridge

by Linda Fairstein

  “Seen enough, Detective?” Cormac asked.

  He leaned against the brick wall and lit up a cigarette. He blew out the match and put it in his pocket.

  “Probably so,” I said.

  I ran my flashlight over the two-by-fours that blocked farther access to the fort’s other starred points. At the bottom of the left corner, opposite Cormac Lonigan, were ashes. Anthill size but undisturbed, as though recently deposited. There were three or four spent matches around them.

  “Is this your place, Cormac?” I asked.

  “Nah. Like I said, I just come down near the office, the room behind it.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Usually so.”

  He started to walk back in the direction from which we’d come.

  I pressed my right hand against the wooden boards directly above the ashes. He heard the boards shift and turned to look at me.

  “Don’t lean on that, Detective.”

  “Who put this up, Cormac?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t come back here.”

  But somebody else did. Somebody who wasn’t careful enough to pick up his matches or grind the ashes into the stone floor.

  I examined the boards with the flashlight. The nails on the left side of the CAUTION sign looked shiny and new. The ones to the right, where Lonigan had been standing, had already begun to rust from the dampness.

  I banged on one of the long pieces of wood, about chest-high, with the heel of my hand. It cracked in dead center.

  Cormac Lonigan shouted at me to stop.

  I pulled at the wood and the end of it snapped out of the board behind, three shiny nails coming with it.

  “Why stop?” I asked.

  “Because that part of the fort’s been blocked off for years,” he said. “There’s fallen granite inside and the ceiling’s unstable. A man could get hurt in there.”

  “I’m a sucker for two things, Cormac. One is exploring old forts,” I said, ripping at the other end of the board, oblivious to the splinters and nails, “and the other is getting hurt.”

  I lifted the flashlight from my belt, where I had tucked it when I started to pull at the jerry-rigged wall. I shined it into the space behind the separated boards.

  “Give me a hand here, kid,” I said.

  I couldn’t see anything in the blackness beyond, but Cormac didn’t wait to hear that. He threw his cigarette to the ground and bolted away from me.

  The flashlight dropped from my hand as I turned to give chase.

  The kid was faster than I was, but the second’s hesitation when he stooped to pick up his backpack cost him the lead.

  He was halfway up the thick stone steps to the pedestal base when I grabbed both ankles and brought him down.

  He slid back toward me on his belly. I took a handful of hair at the nape of his neck to lift his head up a couple of inches and turn it to the side, slamming his right cheek against the solid granite slab. I expected the ringing in his ear would last for a month.

  THIRTY-NINE

  “Cat’s got his tongue,” I said to Mercer, who had rushed to the bottom of the staircase when he heard me shout his name.

  There was a three-inch-long scrape on Cormac Lonigan’s cheek, and blood on his upper lip where there had previously been a smirk.

  Mercer pulled him to his feet by the collar of his denim jacket.

  “Who are you, kid, and what’s behind that wall?” I asked.

  “You know as much as I do,” he said.

  “Where’s the lady?”

  “I don’t know anything about a lady.”

  “Where were you Wednesday night?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Wednesday night, Cormac, where were you?”

  “Left here on the last ferry. Went drinking with Pete. Ask him.”

  “I don’t want to ask him. I’m asking you.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “It’s true,” Fitzgerald said. “I live in Queens and we—”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Hand me your phones, both of you.”

  They each removed their Android phones from their pants pockets. I told Jimmy to take them and start dealing with the information on them—last numbers called, texts sent, contacts listed—as soon as we got upstairs.

  “You two want to help yourselves—you want to do anything that would save you from having me throw you out a window of the green lady’s crown—you start talking.”

  “I just work with the guy,” Fitzgerald said. “We didn’t do nothing.”

  Cormac Lonigan didn’t speak.

  We would separate the two of them as soon as we emerged from this black hole and answers might come faster. I just wanted five minutes to look behind the boards.

  “Walk him back inside the fort, Mercer. I dropped my flashlight there.”

  We made our way through the dark passage, past the office and sitting area. Jimmy and Walter brought up the rear, with Pete Fitzgerald in tow.

  “Look, Detective,” Walter said. “This is going too far. I’ve got no business in here. We’ll have to wait till the ranger gets back to enter this part of the property. That’s the rules.”

  “If you’ve got no business being here, Walter, then Cormac has even less,” Mercer said. “You got anything to say, anything to explain his actions, be sure and tell us. If not, you’re just along for the exercise.”

  We reached the end of the long corridor with the boarded-up wall. I bent down for my flashlight and shined it on the broken barrier.

  Mercer braced himself against the left side of the archway—his foot on the brick wall—and pulled on the board below the one I had broken. Three more planks, from waist-high to the floor, came loose, and the dark hole expanded.

  “You got the kid, Jimmy?” I asked, before ducking inside.

  “He’s going nowhere.”

  “You got no right to hold me,” Lonigan said.

  “I’ll think of one before it’s time for a cocktail,” I called back at him. “I promise you that.”

  I stood up straight and pushed a few pieces of wood aside so that Mercer didn’t cut himself. I shined the light ahead and could see that this side of the star’s interior was badly deteriorated. Large chunks of the cement ceiling had fallen to the floor and been crushed on hitting the uneven stones. The wall was crumbling in places, allowing for some daylight to filter in.

  “Watch your step, Mercer. It’s like a minefield in here.”

  We went eight or ten steps forward, taking care not to trip over the bricks and granite pieces that made movement difficult.

  In another twenty feet, the area looked as though it had been swept clean of debris. I crossed the smooth stone floor and then, a few yards later, right before the corridor seemed to end, the minefield started as abruptly as it had ended. The granite was piled higher than what we had just walked through.

  I placed one hand on the wall to secure myself and climbed along the stones to get to the very end. Here, beneath the archway, there was another barrier, but this one was more permanent. Instead of wooden boards, this hole had been bricked in ages ago.

  I turned back to Mercer and crept along on the rubble until I reached the area that had been cleared.

  “Dead end?”

  “Totally.”

  Mercer crouched down and asked me to focus the beam of light in front of him. He ran his forefinger over the rough stones and back again. “You could sweep all day, but the dust just keeps on coming. It seeps down from the ceiling and blows in through the cracks.”

  “I hear you.”

  I was studying every inch of the space.

  “See this?” he asked me. “Let me hold the flashlight.”

  When he angled the light, I could almost make out footprints in the gray sand that had once been a concrete block.

  “And there,” he said, pointing to the far wall. “It looks like the outline of a—well, like a sleeping bag.”

  “No need for us to guess,” I said, “when som
ebody right here knows more than we do.”

  I wanted to get my hands on Cormac Lonigan. I balanced myself on the uneven debris on the flooring and lowered my head to get back to the others. Mercer followed.

  “We’re out of here,” I said to Jimmy and Walter. “Mercer, why don’t you throw some cuffs on Mr. Fitzgerald?”

  “I didn’t do nothing. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Pete Fitzgerald was the weaker link. I was pretty sure of that. I’d always found there was a direct correlation between notching the cuffs a little tighter on the dumb accomplice—the guy along for the free drinks and the ride—and successfully squeezing some nuggets of information out of him.

  “Jimmy,” I said. “You go back to Walter’s office and take Fitzgerald with you. Get whatever you can from him, and then I’ll give you a plan for their phones.”

  “Done.”

  “Walter, if you even think of opening your mouth to anyone about what we got going on here, there’ll be nothing I can do to save your sorry ass,” I said. “You can read about it in tomorrow’s news if you want to keep your job.”

  “Whatever you say, Detective,” Walter said as he started up the steps after Jimmy.

  Cormac Lonigan, alone with us, was looking to Mercer Wallace for protection. “What about me?”

  “Mercer’s not about to help you, kid,” I said. “Forget about him. After all, you and I haven’t finished our conversation.”

  I pushed Lonigan backward until he fell against the staircase and righted himself, sitting on the third step from the bottom.

  “Let’s begin with what you dragged your friend back over here to get—or do—about an hour ago.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Mercer reached for the backpack and Cormac Lonigan groaned. He started to pull items out of it. First was a long-sleeved shirt and after that a pair of clean underpants. Then, rolled up in a ball, was a single bedsheet.

  “I don’t have any gloves, Mike,” Mercer said.

  “Just open it up.”

  There was a sharp pain in my gut. I needed to see if there was any blood on the sheet.

  Mercer laid the fabric on the stone floor and opened it up slowly. A white strip of plastic fell out of the ball and landed a few feet away from me.

  Lonigan had his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

  The sheet was faded beige cotton, sized for a twin bed. I didn’t see anything resembling a bloodstain as I glanced at it. There were other body fluids I was worried about, but they wouldn’t be visible to me anyway.

  “You weren’t carrying a tarp,” I said to Lonigan. “There’s no tarp in the shed that you came back to pick up. It was this sheet.”

  I wanted to grab him by the throat and choke him till he spit out the truth about Coop, but that would reduce me to the level of the beasts who had her.

  I took a step toward him. He recoiled at my approach. I stopped to pick up the plastic strip by its tip.

  “You are in one shitload of trouble, Lonigan,” I said. I was trying to control my voice so he couldn’t hear the quiver in it. “Chicago Single Loop Riot Cuffs. Available online for what? Like three dollars a pop.”

  The half-inch-wide disposable strips of choice for temporary restraints. They were favored by police who had to arrest protestors or nonviolent criminals and by amateurs for more shades of gray than I could count.

  If this sheet had been used to conceal or cover Coop, then this strip had been on her wrists, in all likelihood. I passed it to Mercer and watched him pocket it. The lab could provide the answer to that question.

  I wanted my hands to be free.

  “You better talk now,” Mercer said. “My partner is not a patient man.”

  “Take off your jacket and hand it to Detective Wallace,” I said.

  He slowly removed the denim garment and passed it over to Mercer.

  “Check the pockets,” I said. “Then we’re going to help you put on your clean shirt and shorts so we can keep the ones you’ve got on. Sorry I can’t help you with a pair of pants, but you won’t feel a chill till the sun goes down.”

  I wanted the lab to have everything.

  “This is crazy,” Lonigan said, closer to tears than I seemed to be. “I didn’t do nothing. I don’t even know what was supposed to go on.”

  “Pockets are empty,” Mercer said.

  But I wasn’t paying attention to him. I was totally absorbed by the body art that covered the kid’s arms from the shirtsleeves to his wrists.

  These were not tattoos. They were full-on tableaux of vibrant designs, chilling in their imagery of weapons and blood. But that was only Lonigan’s left arm.

  “Every picture tells a story,” I said to Mercer.

  From just beneath the short sleeve of Lonigan’s T-shirt on his right arm was a soft, wispy pattern that grew larger in size as it wound around and around his arm. Black and white tufts of hair, it looked like, with a dark tubular center.

  It was a feather.

  And when the feather came to a tapered end on Lonigan’s forearm, its point rested on a huge gray boulder.

  A stone.

  And just below that was the striking design of a compass, with each direction inked in a red color as bold as blood.

  The arrow in the center of the compass pointed due west.

  “That damn psychiatrist was right,” I said to Mercer. “This has nothing to do with Alexandra Cooper.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Featherstone. Due west,” I said, reading Lonigan’s art aloud to Mercer. “The Westies. Mickey Featherstone and the fucking Westies.”

  Cormac Lonigan glared at me.

  “Then this is about your father,” Mercer said to me. “About your father and about revenge. It’s not about Alex and some demented rapist.”

  “A little too early to celebrate, Mercer. The Westies aren’t sexual predators,” I said. “All the Westies like to do is kill.”

  FORTY

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked Cormac Lonigan.

  “You’re a cop, is all I know.”

  “What was your mother’s name? Before she married.”

  “Shauna. Same as it is now.” He was back to smirking at me.

  “I’m Chapman. Mike Chapman. My father was Brian,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  He looked me in the eye and spit, intentionally missing me by less than an inch.

  We were standing where the end of the dock met Liberty Island. He had removed his jeans and underwear—torn boxer shorts—when Mercer had pointed a gun at him. Now he was dressed only in the long-sleeved shirt and jockeys that had been in his backpack.

  “You put the bracelets on,” I said to Mercer. “I’m afraid I might pinch him.”

  “What’s the order of play?” Mercer asked me as I heard his metal cuffs click into place.

  “There’s a head on that boat.”

  “You serious?”

  “Lift up the cushion on the bench in front of the cockpit,” I said. “Three steps down and there’s a toilet. Put Mr. Lonigan down there on the seat, close the bench back up, and I’ll tell you what’s next.”

  “Who’s calling Peterson? You or me?”

  “We’ll flip a coin for it, Mercer. Now, hurry up.”

  The Westies had been put out of business, I thought, almost two decades ago.

  They were a notorious Irish-American gang that came to power in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s, when much of the area on the far west side of Manhattan, from 40th to 59th Street, was a dangerous slum. Founded by two sadistic mobsters, Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan, the small band of twenty or so members took racketeering to a new level of violence.

  I didn’t know what to do first. I couldn’t imagine Coop in the hands of any of these men, or their descendants. But I couldn’t think straight.

  My father had killed someone. He’d shot someone in self-defense. It was a story I’d heard over and over again in my childhood. I’d
been eight when it happened, on the night of the birthday of one of my older sisters.

  Mercer climbed out of the small head after securing Cormac Lonigan inside and stepped on the bench to get back up on the dock.

  “We’ve got to let Scully know what’s going on,” he said.

  “I feel like I’m paralyzed, Mercer. I can’t move.”

  “What do we have?”

  I was trying to put the facts together. “That’s just it. You tell Scully and this gets ratcheted up to a level that lets the bad guys know we’re after them, without the first clue about how to find them.”

  “He’ll flood Hell’s Kitchen,” Mercer said.

  “The Irish mob’s been out of there since before you and I came on the job. It’s so expensive there now, so gentrified, you probably couldn’t find an Irishman within ten miles of Hell’s Kitchen.”

  “Where did they go when they broke up?”

  “Woodside,” I said. “Mickey Spillane took them to Woodside.”

  “Spillane?”

  “Not the writer, dude. The gangster.”

  “So, Queens,” Mercer said. “Where Cormac Lonigan and Pete Fitzgerald live.”

  “Yeah. And call Jimmy. He’s got to keep Fitzgerald isolated and get the tech guys downloading the phone information.”

  There were four long wooden crates on the dock. I sat on the first one, leaned forward, and held the top of my head with both hands. It felt like it was going to explode.

  Mercer phoned Jimmy North and told him to keep Fitzgerald in lockdown and call TARU about the two confiscated devices.

  “It’s almost four thirty, Mike. I’ve got to check in.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes. Think it through with me. If I do anything to make Coop’s situation worse than it is, I won’t be able to live with myself.”

  “Fifteen and out, Mike. This is bigger than you,” Mercer said. “If it does have anything to do with the Westies, then I’m pretty useless. You know how they operate and I don’t.”

  “That’s what I can’t get past.”

  “Why would they have brought Alex here?” he asked. “And why only for one night, or for two?”

  “Because this is just a staging area, I guess. Someone on the work crew is involved. Maybe a relative of Lonigan’s, maybe just someone who knew the island was pretty much off-limits these days, with no one to guard it at night.”