Burn: (Michael Bennett 7)

by James Patterson

  “I’ve always wanted one of those,” Doyle said as the dog, Radar, stopped in its tracks.

  The black-and-brown shepherd’s sharp ears perked up, and then it suddenly swung around to the left, jumping and straining on Avila’s leash as it started barking like mad.

  Through the string of barks came a scraping sound in the dimness and some movement up on a cement shelf on the left-hand wall that I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Get down from there now! Move, move!” Doyle yelled, gun already out and trained.

  CHAPTER 42

  AVILA SWUNG HIS FLASHLIGHT and spotlit a bearded man standing on the ledge with his hands up.

  “Move!” Doyle yelled again, but before the guy even had a chance to comply, Doyle did it for him. He leaped up and seized him by his lapel with his free hand and hauled him hard facedown into the gravel and cuffed him.

  “What the hell, man?” the guy said, sitting up and spitting gravel as he squinted into Avila’s bright flashlight.

  He was a little middle-aged man. Despite his wild gray hair and Duck Dynasty beard, I noticed that his jeans and jean jacket and even his construction boots were newish and surprisingly clean.

  “What the hell?” the mole man repeated. “What was I doing? I wasn’t doing anything. I was taking a piss. You’re roughing me up and arresting me for taking a damn piss?”

  Avila nudged me and nodded to indicate that the guy was Mr. Hamster in the flesh.

  “Take the cuffs off him, Doyle,” I said.

  “What? Why?” the young cop said, still shaken from being startled.

  “Just humor me, OK?” I said.

  “Sorry about that,” I said as I helped the man back to his feet. “You’re Hamster, right? They call you Hamster?”

  “Some people call me that, assholes mostly,” the guy said as he haughtily brushed himself off. “But I actually have a real name like you and every other human being on this planet, if you can possibly believe it.”

  There was a self-assured, forthright, almost snotty tone in his voice. I thought he sounded well educated.

  “What’s your real name?” I tried cheerfully.

  “What business would that be of yours?” he shot back.

  “Is it Gollum?” Doyle mumbled from behind me.

  I shot a look at Doyle.

  “I’m Detective Bennett and that’s Detective Doyle. We heard that two months ago you saw a dinner along the river around here, a bunch of men with a tied-up girl,” I said.

  The haughtiness suddenly fell from Hamster’s face. He looked at us fearfully for a long second. Then he turned and looked down into the dark distance of the tunnel. After a few seconds, he began to slowly and methodically crack his knuckles one after the other, loud snaps in the dead silence of the tunnel.

  “I’ve been down here half my life, and I never saw anything like that,” he said after a while.

  “What did you see?” I said.

  “They ate her,” he said quietly as he shuddered and looked at me sadly. “They cut her and cooked her and ate her up.”

  CHAPTER 43

  WE CONVINCED HAMSTER TO walk back out into the daylight and take a ride with us to show us where he had seen the men.

  “So, tell me, um, Hamster,” Doyle said as we rolled east toward Broadway in the Crown Vic. “You seem like a pretty informed person. Why the, uh, um, living underground thing?”

  “You read the, uh, um, paper?” Hamster replied as he stared out the window.

  “Not today’s,” Doyle said.

  “How about in general?” Hamster said.

  “Yes, I read the paper. Online mostly these days. Why?” Doyle said, looking back at him.

  “You ever think with all that’s going on today in this sick-and-getting-sicker society that the better question might be why do you live aboveground?” he said.

  Without further ado, Hamster directed us forty blocks downtown, to Seventy-Second, at the other end of the Freedom Tunnel. We rolled over a curb onto a Riverside Park path and down under the steel arches of the raised West Side Highway to a green space along the Hudson.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing as I waited for Avila and Radar to park beside us. Down here under the highway, they’d managed to tuck in a brand-new, elaborate park with basketball courts and baseball fields and a bike path. I’d lived and worked in New York my whole life—actually lived only about twenty blocks away—and had never even heard of this place, or the Freedom Tunnel, for that matter. This city never failed to surprise.

  Hamster got out of the car, his big eyes blinking through the tangled gray mop of his hair as he looked around. We listened to the cooing of pigeons nesting in the crevices of the raised roadbed above as we waited.

  “This way,” he finally said.

  We followed him across the baseball field and the bike path and stood right beside the lapping shore of the Hudson. Above some anchored white sailboats bobbing on the dark, choppy water, rose-gold sunlight glinted off a glass high-rise on the New Jersey shore. It was quite pleasant and peaceful along the shore with the wind blowing.

  “There!” Hamster yelled, pointing north a couple of hundred feet to a fenced gap in the pale curve of the stone riprap that edged the shore.

  We walked over along the path and then made a left over the jagged rocks toward the rusted fence. Behind it, between the rocks, was the concrete base of an old pump house. With one edge of it open to the water, it looked like a little dock.

  A perfect place to party, hidden from the path, with a water view, I thought. And a well-used one, judging by the broken beer bottles and used condoms and trash and burn marks that covered the area.

  “This is where they were,” Hamster said. “It was the middle of the night, and they had a grill with them, and they sat there on folding chairs like it was a picnic.”

  “A grill?” Doyle said.

  “A charcoal grill, swear to God,” Hamster said.

  “Could you identify these people if you saw them again?” I said.

  “No, it was too dark, and I was too far away to see faces. Just what they did. I thought they were going to rape her at first, but this was way worse.”

  And you didn’t call the cops why? I thought but didn’t say.

  “Detective, I think they found a body around here,” Avila said, looking around. “About two months ago. Badly burned, in a suitcase, of all things.”

  “Did you guys find it?” I said to Avila.

  “No, you did, I think. NYPD. They mentioned it at dispatch.”

  Doyle and I looked at each other.

  “Midtown South, probably?” Doyle said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “I need to get out of here,” Hamster finally said, cracking his knuckles again as he started climbing back up the rocks toward the bike path. “You can arrest me if you want, but I need to get the hell away from here now.”

  CHAPTER 44

  THE NEXT DAY WAS Naomi’s wake.

  Mary Catherine and I had been scrambling on such short notice to set it up. Not only did it turn out that Naomi’s only family, her stepmother, Monica McKeon-Chast, lived in South Florida, but the poor sixty-something had stage-four bladder cancer. I’d offered to somehow transport the body down to the feisty retired RN, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  Naomi’s life was being a cop, she had told me in one of our several phone conversations. “She’d never forgive me if she wasn’t buried in New York City.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Monica how completely crappy the department was being to Naomi. My request for an honor guard, standard operating procedure for an in-the-line-of-duty death, had been flatly denied. The department, aka Starkie, was still treating the whole thing as a suicide.

  Which was a complete disgrace. But then again, so was Starkie.

  Mary Catherine and I arrived early at Riverside Funeral Home on Amsterdam Avenue, carrying two large flower arrangements. Needing all the help we could get, we’d also brought along Jane and Julian
a, whom I’d taken out of school for the day. The girls had been up late arranging a collage of pictures of Naomi that we had gathered from her apartment. Naomi with her college volleyball team, at the beach, at barroom birthday parties, her police academy photo. The girls had scanned them all onto a laptop and set it all to music, and it had come out amazing. They had really stepped up in trying to give poor Naomi a loving memorial. I couldn’t have been prouder of them.

  We met director John Harrison in the somber, tasteful space’s carpeted hall, and he led us into the wood-paneled room where Naomi’s closed coffin had already been set up. After we placed the flowers behind it, I walked around with Mary Catherine and crossed myself as we knelt.

  “I’m going to find the people who did this to you, Naomi,” I whispered into the steeple of my fingers after my prayers.

  I was setting up the In Loving Memory cards by the sign-in book when Arturo texted me that he had just picked up Naomi’s stepmother, Monica, from LaGuardia.

  What? She isn’t due for at least another hour!

  I looked at my watch and stared at the rows of still-empty seats and went into full-blown panic mode.

  Where the heck is everybody?

  This situation was depressing enough. No way could we have this dying woman see her dead stepdaughter’s coffin in an empty room.

  Mary Catherine and I started calling people, everyone, anyone. I called up the Harlem crew, Miriam Schwartz, several old partners. Since this was a three-alarm Catholic emergency, I got the Holy Name principal, Sister Sheilah, on the phone and told her the situation and hung up and called Seamus.

  “Father, listen,” I said when he picked up. “I need help. I need a bagpiper yesterday. Riverside Funeral Home, Amsterdam Avenue.”

  “Done. I know just the man,” Seamus said without missing a beat.

  I could have kissed Brooklyn when she arrived ten minutes later with Robertson and seven other cops from the Twenty-Eighth Precinct, all of them in dress uniform. Right behind her was Doyle in a suit and tie with his pretty blond wife, Erin, and three couldn’t-be-cuter miniature Doyles in little suits.

  I went out the funeral home’s open doors when I heard a shriek of metal, just in time to see Sister Sheilah getting off the Holy Name school bus with Eddie’s entire seventh-grade class. Behind the bus stopped a taxi, and out popped Seamus and Rory Murphy, one of Seamus’s drinking buddies, carrying an accordion.

  “An accordion?” I whispered to Seamus as I spotted Arturo and Naomi’s stepmother turning the corner. “I said a bagpiper, old man! A bagpiper!”

  “Ya gave me fifteen holy minutes’ notice!” Seamus cried as Rory started up “Amazing Grace” right there on the sidewalk. “You’re lucky it’s not that Times Square Naked Cowboy fella in his skivvies!”

  CHAPTER 45

  AFTER THE BURIAL THE next day, we had a little gathering at a place I loved called Emmett O’Lunney’s Irish Pub, near Times Square on Fiftieth between Eighth and Broadway. We almost knocked down the proprietor, Emmett, an old Bennett family friend, carrying a case of wine past the spacious restaurant’s wood-paneled foyer.

  “Mike Bennett?!” ever-friendly Emmett said with a wide smile and a wink. “Where have you been hiding yourself? I was going to put out an APB on you. I haven’t seen you in what? A year? You’re not cheating on me with another bar, are you? No, wait, you’re on the wagon?”

  “Emmett. What kind of Irishman do you take me for? No and heck no,” I said. “It’s a…well…a long story. Suffice it to say, I’m back now, and I’ll be more than glad to help you get rid of a little Guinness back inventory.”

  Emmett’s dark-haired beauty of a wife, Debbie, was behind the bar pouring me a perfect pint when my phone rang. It was a call I’d been dreading. It was my family lawyer, Gunny Chung, calling me back.

  “Mike, haven’t heard from you in too long,” Gunny said in his calm, kind voice as I went outside to take his call. “How is everyone? How’s Seamus and the kids? Have you driven off that saintly young lady, Mary Catherine, yet?”

  “Not a chance, Gunny. Forgive me for getting right to the point, but I have a problem. It has to do with Chrissy’s adoption. I had a visit at the apartment last Wednesday from two men, a young guy and his lawyer. The young guy claims to be Chrissy’s father.”

  “Hmmm,” Gunny said after a long pause. “What did they want?”

  “The man said he wanted to see Chrissy,” I said. “He said he had just found out that he was the father and that he had a right to see her.”

  “What did you say?” Gunny asked.

  “What do you think?” I said. “I said I don’t know you from Adam and get the hell out of my house. I mean, these people are off base here, right? I went through Chrissy’s file. All the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted on the adoption contract. We’re good, right?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Gunny said after another thoughtful pause. “Do you think the guy could have been her biological father?”

  “Well, actually, yeah,” I said. “He’s blond and he does look like her. Does it matter? This guy doesn’t have a claim for custody here, does he? I mean, coming here after all this time, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Well,” Gunny said. “Probably not, probably not.”

  “Probably? What do you mean, Gunny? Help me here. Please, I’m going nuts.”

  “Adoption disputes by birth parents after the fact are usually thrown out, Mike,” he said. “But there have been a few very special instances in which the birth parents have won custody. Do you remember the Baby Jessica and Baby Richard cases from the nineties?”

  “No,” I said. “Refresh my memory.”

  “Well, in both cases, custody motions were filed by biological fathers who claimed they had never been made aware of the adoption. That’s why back when you and Maeve adopted Chrissy, I wasn’t pleased that we never received information about Chrissy’s birth father. Getting the birth father to sign away his rights is the first thing that needs to get done—so that a situation just like this can never come up.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “So you’re saying, worst-case scenario, this guy might have a claim?”

  “Unlikely, but I won’t lie, Mike. It’s possible.”

  “How did the Baby Jessica and Baby Richard cases turn out?”

  “In each case, the birth father won, Mike,” he said quietly. “The children were taken away from the adoptive families.”

  CHAPTER 46

  AMONG A CLATTER OF plates and some amped-up Irish music, Alberto Witherspoon sat in the restaurant part of O’Lunney’s among the Times Square tourists, watching the cops at the bar.

  When he’d heard the joint’s name from their contact, he’d thought it would be some Hell’s Kitchen old man bar, but it was actually very nice, clean lines and bright, shining wood and jazzy sconces and chandeliers. And the food was terrific. Even though it was well past noon, he’d ordered the all-day Traditional Irish Breakfast of bangers, rashers, baked beans, eggs, grilled tomato, and black and white puddings. He poured some HP Sauce, this bottled brown Irish ketchup stuff that was on the table, all over his black pudding and took a bite.

  Amazing. Just what the doctor ordered. He must have been Irish in another life.

  It was too bad he wasn’t there to give a Yelp review.

  Overall, it looked good for them, he thought. He’d already been to the cop’s burial. It had been a pitiful turnout, really. No family to speak of and only a few cops. Definitely not the tear-jerking lines of cops you’d see if they thought the female cop had been shot in the line of duty. He’d thought maybe more NYPD would show up at the after-gathering, but again, pathetic. Naomi Chast had been one big fat zero as a human being.

  Which was ironic, considering the struggle the little bitch had put up when he jumped her with the chloroform in the Lenox Avenue house. She’d bitten him in the hand and kneed him pretty good in the family jewels. When she’d finally gone out, he had taken her gun and waited for her
partner, cursing himself for not locking the gate from the inside while he cleaned up. But after another couple of minutes, he’d realized there was no partner, no backup.

  The suicide idea had been the boss’s call after Alberto had read him the personnel file they had gotten from their guy in the mayor’s office. The copette was half a wing nut, apparently, already unstable. All it took when he finally got her back to her apartment at 3 a.m. that morning was to forcibly sit her tight little ass down at her desk, hand in hand with her service weapon, and give her a little push.

  He was going over that memory again and again, sipping the last of his Irish coffee, when his Galaxy smart-phone jingled.

  And? was the text from the boss.

  Alberto looked back over at the bar, at five measly cops gathered together to mourn the loss of Naomi Chast. Two of them were watching last night’s Yankees game while another one looked like he was playing Angry Birds on his phone. They looked bored.

  Long live the memory of Naomi Chast. Or maybe not.

  We’re good to go, Alberto leisurely texted back.

  A guy bumped into him in the joint’s front vestibule as he was leaving, brown-haired white guy, tall, decent shoulders, forty or so.

  “Jeez, sorry, buddy. Didn’t see you there,” the guy said affably, patting him on the shoulder.

  It was one of Naomi’s cop buddies from the burial, Alberto realized. He reminded Alberto of an armored-car guard he had smoked in San Francisco in the early ’90s. The same deep, almost royal-blue eyes and Dudley Do-Right look on his pale, chiseled face. Alberto hated cops. It would be a pleasure to send this one to the great beyond, too.

  PART THREE

  BACK ON THE BEAT

  CHAPTER 47

  A MESSAGE TO CALL Chief of Detectives Ray Starkie was on my cluttered desk when I came in on Monday morning. I decided to answer it. Reluctantly.