Burn: (Michael Bennett 7)

by James Patterson

  “Bennett here,” I said.

  “I want you in my office today at ten,” Starkie said, none too happy sounding. “You got it? Ten a.m. My office. This is not a request.”

  “What’s this about?” I said. “Am I going to need a union rep? What the hell is it about?”

  “Ten a.m.”

  I decided to take Doyle downtown with me. If I was going to be ambushed or reprimanded by Starkie on some trumped-up garbage, I figured at least I’d have a witness along.

  But there was a surprise waiting for me when I got off the elevator on Headquarters’ dreaded tenth floor. A good one, for a change. I smiled. Every dog really does have its day, after all, I thought as I came down the corridor.

  Beside Starkie’s office door, in a conference room, I spotted Starkie with a small crowd of people sitting at a table. I was smiling because of some of the friendly faces I’d spotted in the crowd. One of them was my old boss, Miriam Schwartz, who gave me a wink. And another one was the police commissioner, Ricky Filkins.

  I really was overjoyed to see Filkins. We went way back. The short, pugnacious, legendary cop had been my first precinct commander when I was a rookie in the early ’90s. The ex-marine lieutenant and Vietnam vet was a cop’s cop, tough and demanding but fair. He, too, had a huge family—seven kids. We’d tipped back more than a few together in Upper East Side bars on St. Paddy’s Days over the years.

  I’m usually not one for kissing butt and taking advantage of the whole friends-in-high-places thing, but in this case, with Starkie gunning to make my work life a living hell, I quickly decided to make an exception.

  I walked around the table and greeted the commissioner warmly.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” the square-jawed, flattopped Filkins said, smiling widely as he gripped my hand like a vise. “Heard you did good things out in California, Mike. Making the department look good even in exile, huh?”

  “Ah, you’re making me blush, boss,” I said. “It was nothing. I mean, somebody had to show the feds what to do, right?”

  “Who’s this?” Filkins said, gesturing behind me to Doyle, who looked like I’d just transported him to the top of Mount Olympus.

  “This is my partner from the ombudsman squad, Jimmy Doyle.”

  “The ombudsman squad. Yeah, I heard about your new assignment,” Filkins said, glancing across the glossy table at Starkie, who had taken the opportunity to thumb at an imaginary spot on his tie.

  “You must be an impressive young investigator, son,” Filkins said as Doyle shook his hand. “I know Mike Bennett, and I know he doesn’t truck with any dead weight.”

  “I, uh, try, sir,” Doyle managed to spit out.

  “Well, sit, gentlemen, please,” Filkins said, offering us the seats on his right. “Unfortunately, Mike, we’re going to be reassigning you again,” the commissioner said after we were settled. “That’s the reason I had Chief Starkie call you in. Something’s come up, a real pain in my ass that I need you on.”

  Miriam cleared her throat.

  “You’re going to be loaned back to Major Crimes, Mike. Starting now,” she said.

  “Major Crimes?” I said, taking the opportunity to turn and look at Starkie.

  There have been many times in my life when I’ve been overcome with the irresistibly joyful urge to give somebody the finger. But getting to watch Starkie sit meekly in his seat like a neutered dog as I sat there smiling at him was an even more exquisite pleasure.

  “Miriam will fill you in on the deets. We need you ramped up to speed pronto, Mike. What do you say? You want your old desk back?”

  “You know me, Commissioner,” I said as I smiled again at Starkie. “I’m always here to do whatever the department needs me to do.”

  CHAPTER 48

  AFTER THAT UNEXPECTEDLY AWESOME departmental meeting, I shook the commish’s hand one last time and quickly headed with Doyle and Miriam Schwartz out of Starkie’s office for the Major Crimes Division’s new digs down on the fifth floor.

  “Miriam, I love you,” I said as I briefly embraced my loyal lady boss in the elevator. “I’m not kidding. Call your husband, Daniel, and tell him you’re sorry but your thirty years plus together just isn’t going to cut it. You’ve found another man.”

  “Yeah, well, you should love me, Mike,” the stylish, affable, silver-haired sixty-year-old said, smiling, as she stiff-armed me away. “Favors don’t come cheap when that shark Starkie is involved, believe me.”

  “You’ve been working behind the scenes, haggling on my behalf the whole time, haven’t you?” I said. “And here I thought all rabbis had to be men.”

  “Can the blarney charm cease forthwith before I change my mind, would you please, Mike?” she said with a laugh. “This is going to cost you more than words, words, words. I want dinner, and not potluck back at that Upper West Side shoe you live in with all those kids, either. I’m thinking you need to help me brush up on my French after what I just pulled. You know, words like Per Se or Jean-Georges?”

  Major Crimes’ office space was brand-new. Fresh white paint on the walls, glass-partitioned offices. In all the cubicles were new computers and sleek blond-wood desks and even those futuristic ergonomic chairs. I couldn’t wait to park my butt in one and get to work.

  We went into Miriam’s glass fishbowl office and I sat on a leather couch next to Doyle. The full-length window by my elbow had a spectacularly dramatic view of the low neon sprawl of Chinatown. I smiled down at the familiar vista as Miriam lifted a fat file off a conference table in the corner and came back.

  “Catch,” she said as she dropped it in my lap.

  There were photos in the folder. The first one showed the inside of a small store. By its front door was a horseshoe of glass-and-wood display cases, each and every one of them smashed to smithereens. Shattered bits of glass carpeted the floor next to an overturned advertising sign that had sparkling diamond earrings over a caption that said, How Badly Do You Want to Play Golf This Weekend?

  “I see,” I said, sitting up. “So this is about that jewelry heist out in Brooklyn?”

  “Did you see that act of deduction, Officer Doyle?” Miriam said. “Observe closely, young man, and maybe one day you, too, will make detective first grade.”

  CHAPTER 49

  “YES, MIKE, IT’S ABOUT the jewelry heist,” Miriam continued, “except you got the noun form wrong. It’s not jewelry store heist singular. It’s jewelry store heists plural.”

  “How many have there been?” I said, shuffling through the photos.

  “Four, we think. But it could be as many as seven. We looked at the usual suspects, Mob crews and high-end-robbery guys who might have gotten out of prison recently, but no go. These guys are new, and they’re fast. They got in and out in about three minutes. We got there in five, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of them.”

  “But what’s the major problem?” I said, showing her the shot of the trashed store. “I mean, this is bad and all, but this store isn’t exactly Tiffany’s, is it? Aren’t these people just a bunch of smash-and-grabbers?”

  “We think smashing the cases was a front. What we left out of the paper was that in the back of the store at the time of the robbery was the owner’s brother-in-law, a clerk from a ritzy Madison Avenue designer-jewelry shop who’d stopped in to get some pieces reset. The thieves put a gun to his head and walked out with a briefcase with almost a million in diamonds and black pearls.”

  “Not bad for three minutes’ work,” Doyle said.

  “If you can get it,” I said.

  “Oh, they get it, Mike. And they’re damn good, too. In the last six months, they hit two places out in Jersey and one in Greenwich, Connecticut.”

  “How do you know they’re the same people?”

  “The same way you know it’s Mozart playing on the radio,” she said. “The excellence in execution. These guys are real craftsmen. In Connecticut, they bypassed alarms and actually busted a safe after they defeated motion and ligh
t detectors and a fifty-thousand-dollar glass security door. And we have no leads. The commissioner is under enormous pressure with the upcoming Midtown diamond show. Merchants are coming in from all over the world, France, Russia, Antwerp.”

  “Not exactly the best time to have a crew of mysterious, highly professional jewel thieves picking up steam, is it?” Doyle said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Miriam agreed.

  “And I’m supposed to catch them, huh?” I said, piecing through the evidence. “Mike Bennett to the rescue?”

  “In two weeks or head back to the ombudsman office.”

  “For real?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “That’s the deal I cut for you. It’s not the best, Mike, but even a rabbi like me can only do so much. What did you do to Starkie, anyway? That guy really freaking hates you.”

  “Long story,” I said.

  “And how ironic. Here we are without any time,” Miriam said. “So what’s it going to be, Mike? Are you going to catch these guys for me or what?”

  I flipped through the file some more. Then I put it down and stood and stared out the window at Chinatown for a moment, the swirl of traffic, the bright Chinese signs beside the gray tenement fire escapes.

  “After all you’ve done for me, Miriam?” I finally said, grinning at her. “It’s the least I could do. After all, diamonds are a girl’s BFF, right?”

  CHAPTER 50

  YOUNG DOYLE WAS UNCHARACTERISTICALLY demure and silent and looking none too happy as I drove him back uptown toward Harlem later that afternoon.

  “Come on, Doyle, just say it,” I said as I weaved around a cackling, shirtless homeless guy doing jumping jacks in the middle of the intersection of Spring Street and the Bowery.

  “Say what?” he said.

  “How pissed you are that I’m abandoning the ombudsman squad ship.”

  “Well,” Doyle mumbled from where he was scrunched up against the door, “you said it, not me.”

  “Come on, Doyle, you heard what Miriam said. A new senior supervising detective will be reporting for ombudsman duty first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, a new one? Great. The fifth one this month. That’s just dandy,” Doyle said. “Pardon me for not partaking in your hopeful optimism there, Mike. You were the only one to ever even attempt to lift a finger to get the unit to do something useful. And here I was getting psyched because we were actually doing some investigating. What an idiot.”

  I did feel pretty bad for the kid. He was a good, talented, hardworking cop. I remembered what it was like trying to make the leap from patrol, how difficult it was to find a challenging investigative gig.

  “Come on,” I tried. “Never say never. They could send somebody good.”

  “Yeah, right,” Doyle said. “Believe me, tomorrow morning some ass-covering lifer is going to get in there and go into that office, close the blinds, and bust out a pillow. It’s going to be nothing other than Harlem situation back to normal, straight back to all screwed up.”

  My phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize, and I was going to let it go until I realized with a cold jolt that I did recognize it.

  It was the number of Holly Jacobs, the lovely Harlem woman who was being stalked by her psychopathic boyfriend.

  I fumbled Accept and stuck the phone up to my ear.

  “Holly? I’m here. It’s Mike Bennett. Are you there? What’s up?” I said.

  There was silence on the line. I checked to see that the connection was still good and was putting the phone back to my ear when she spoke, her tense, terrified voice barely higher than a whisper.

  “He’s here,” she said. “In the hall right outside my apartment’s front door. Help me, please. God help me. I don’t want to die.”

  I gunned it north up to Holly’s apartment. I slalomed through the logjam of Midtown midday traffic with the siren blazing while Doyle worked the phone, calling the other members of the ombudsman unit and the local precinct.

  We got to 116th and Morningside Park in what had to be a record-breaking twenty minutes. Two precinct cars and an unmarked were already double-parked out in front of Holly’s building.

  Please, God, let this lady be OK, I thought as I screeched up beside them and hurried in with Doyle.

  “Hey! What is this? What the hell is this?” some officious silver-haired Hispanic guy in the middle of the lobby, holding a little yelping black dog, wanted to know. “I’m the super. Who the hell are you people?”

  I didn’t have time to explain, so I just juked around him and took the stairs two at a time. When I reached the top landing and heard the radio chatter and saw a bunch of uniformed cops and Arturo Lopez and Brooklyn Kale standing in the hall out in front of Holly’s apartment, my heart sank. I thought, That’s it. I’m too late. She’s dead.

  But I was wrong.

  Thank goodness.

  Holly came out of her apartment a second later with a bulging garment bag and a set of keys. They jangled in her shaking hand as she attempted to lock her apartment door.

  “Holly,” I said gently, taking her keys and locking the door for her. “Thank God you’re OK. What happened?”

  “I’d just come home and was putting on some pasta when I heard something at the front door, like some rattling and clicks at the lock.”

  “There’s some scrapes near the keyhole,” Arturo said, nodding. “Someone was definitely messing with it.”

  “Then I saw the knob turn,” Holly said, “and I knew it was Roger. That’s when I ran into the bedroom and called you. I can’t take this anymore. I’m going to my sister’s in Maryland for a few days—maybe longer, who knows? My nerves are shot.”

  “You see anyone?” I said to Arturo and Brooklyn.

  “We just missed him,” Brooklyn said. “We were the first ones here, and when we were coming up the stairs, we heard running footsteps and then the alarm on the roof door went off. I went up there and looked around, but all the roofs on this entire block are connected, with plenty of fire escapes to get down to the street.”

  “See, he’s still out there,” Holly said. “I need to get out of here before this man kills me.”

  “We’re going to find him, Holly, OK?” I said. “We’re getting closer. We just missed him this time.”

  “And he just missed me, too. I need to get to the train station. Please, someone help me catch my train.”

  CHAPTER 51

  BACK DOWNSTAIRS ON THE sidewalk, we watched Holly drive off in a cruiser with a couple of uniforms for Penn Station. I was glad to see her go. She was smart to get out of town for a while. This nut, Roger, who was stalking her wasn’t just slippery, I thought, scanning the benches and trees of Morningside Park across the street. He truly seemed quite determined to do her some harm.

  “So, Mike, you want to tell them the big news or shall I?” Doyle said glumly.

  “What news?” said Arturo.

  “Well, it seems like the powers that be are transferring me to a different squad,” I said sheepishly.

  “What?” said Arturo in dismay. “But you just got here! And we’re actually starting to make this team work for once, really starting to help the people in this community.”

  “Where are you going?” Brooklyn said.

  “Back down to One Police Plaza. My old squad. Major Crimes,” I said.

  “They want him on that diamond heist that happened out in Brooklyn,” Doyle said.

  “Oh, I see,” Brooklyn said. “The real powers that be in the city, i.e., the rich and fabulous, need the department’s top DT to watch their family jewels. Meanwhile, the Hollys of the world are off fending for themselves, running for their lives.”

  As with Doyle, I couldn’t blame Arturo and Brooklyn for being pissed. In the brief time I’d spent with these misfit young cops, we’d already developed some pretty special chemistry, become a pretty effective, tight-knit team.

  “And what about Chast’s murder?” Arturo said. “You said we’re the ones who need to find
her killer, that she was one of ours. You think some new guy coming in is going to let us continue her investigation?”

  “Well, being back to Major Crimes is actually good news on that front,” I argued. “I’ll be able to facilitate any new information or leads between you guys and the Major Crimes Division detectives who caught the case.”

  They didn’t seem like they were buying it. They stood there staring at me, sour and upset. I stared back, not knowing what to say. Though I wanted my desk back at Major Crimes more than anything, in the end my Catholic guilt got the best of me. What else was new?

  “Fine, you win. OK. Let me make a phone call,” I said as I headed for my cruiser.

  “To who?” Brooklyn said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Just keep your eyes peeled for Roger Dodger, you pains-in-my-butt.”

  Miriam answered the phone as I sat down behind the wheel.

  “Hey, Miriam. It’s Mike. Quick question. Is there any way you can delay the new ombudsman unit supervisor, say, a week?”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “I still have a couple of cases outstanding up here that I’d like to get a crack at closing before I leave.”

  “Does this mean you want off the diamond heist?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “I’ll do both.”

  “Both?” she said. “Aren’t you biting off a heck of a lot here? I don’t have to tell you how hot this diamond case is. You’re going to be busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger.”

  I’ll be busy, all right, I thought. I didn’t even mention the personal stuff going on with my daughter Chrissy.

  “I got this, Miriam. Trust me. I won’t let you down, I promise,” I said.

  “Well, if that’s what you want, Mike,” Miriam finally said. “It’s your blood pressure.”

  CHAPTER 52

  THE REST OF THE afternoon we spent scouring southwest Harlem for Roger. We hit several parks, showed his picture around to a few soup kitchens and food banks. But we came up empty again. It was quickly becoming a bad theme.