As if to accent Jojola’s prediction, a muffled explosion echoed over the hills in the direction Malovo had fled. The Indian smiled and patted Blanchett on the back. “I think that was a good sign,” he said. “Now let’s get going again. We’ve got to cover five klicks and we don’t have a whole lot of time to do it.”
Watching from a different hilltop two miles away, Ivgeny Karchovski and Lucy Karp stood for a moment looking at the burning wreck of a troop transport. A few seconds earlier, the trucks had come hurtling around the bend, fleeing the village. Assuming that Malovo would again be in the middle truck, Karchovski had allowed the first truck to pass the disabled cart and then detonated the IED buried beneath the hay when the second truck drew next to it. The explosion had blown the heavy transport off the ground and flipped it over. None of the occupants had escaped the ensuing flames.
After the explosion, the first transport had not even slowed down and was now heading toward them. The third stood idling on the road as if afraid to pass the same spot.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Lucy asked. When she wasn’t answered right away, she glanced over at her companion and was surprised to see what appeared to be a look of sadness on his craggy face. “Ivgeny?”
The mob boss looked down at Lucy as if she’d interrupted his dream. Then he gazed off in the direction of the village. “I heard Ned get two shots off before the others started shooting,” he said. “I hope he was successful. If not”—Karchovski stopped and looked at the burning truck—“no one survived that.”
Lucy glanced again at the tall man next to her, who looked so much like her father. In some ways they were such polar opposites—lawman and outlaw—but there were many more similarities, including integrity, honor, and, surprisingly, sensitivity.
“Ivgeny, I’m sorry.”
Karchovski faced her and reached out to pat her cheek. “Don’t be,” he replied. “Whatever feelings I might have once had, they died a long time before this night.”
Without saying anything else, he turned and walked to the motorcycle and started it. He patted the sidecar. “Come, beloved cousin, your prince awaits.”
8
AN HOUR AFTER ENTERING IL BUON PANE, BUTCH KARP regretfully turned down the offer of a second piece of cherry cheese coffee cake and joined Detective Neary in the Lincoln.
“One hundred Centre?” the detective asked.
“Yes, master, back to the salt mine.”
The detective chuckled. “I thought you was one of those guys who loves to work…burning the midnight oil all the time. Sees the kids on the weekend.”
Karp knew that the detective was kidding, but the comment struck home. He tried to be a good family man. With the kids he’d always made time to help with homework, attend school functions and sports events. He’d never been afraid to show his affection with Lucy and the boys, or felt he had to prove that he loved them by enforcing the rules he wanted them to live by. He was even teaching a role model class for the twins’ bar mitzvah courses.
And Karp more than loved his wife, he adored her. She was the most interesting person he’d ever met. She knew him better than he knew himself, and knew what to say and do at the right time. Their connection went beyond finishing each other’s sentences to knowing what the other was thinking. Combine that with the fact that after nearly thirty years of marriage they still made love like wolverines, and he figured he’d found his soul mate.
Yet he knew that his family shared him with another love. Like one of those men whose duplicitous lifestyle with two wives and two families in two different cities. Only his other “family” was his job, and more often than not, it got the best part of him. It sapped his energy and his emotional bank. He’d come home after a fourteen-hour day or a seventy-hour week bushed and ready for a little quiet reading and then bed. Too often on weekends, if he wasn’t in the office preparing for trial, he was perusing evidence binders at the kitchen table, or otherwise giving off vibes that he wanted to be left alone. Of course, that would just make him feel guilty, for as much as he may have deserved a little downtime for himself, it would be at the cost of his time with the kids or with Marlene.
Yet it was more than just being a workaholic. The job itself was hazardous to himself and to his family.
Being a prosecutor could be a dangerous job in any jurisdiction. The world was filled with angry misfits and career criminals who might take offense to the notion of being held accountable for their crimes. But there was no denying that being the district attorney of New York—home to eight million people, a significant percentage of them criminals, including gangsters of every nationality—might increase the odds of an attack.
Yet taking even the sheer size and demographics of his jurisdiction into account, the amount of violence he and his family were subjected to went beyond the pale for other district attorneys as far as he could tell. Trying to look at it objectively and come up with an explanation why this would be, he reasoned that New York City had become a symbolic target for terrorists and criminal masterminds. Therefore, its law enforcement agencies, including the DAO, were simply on the front lines of a war the rest of the country wasn’t experiencing. Yet.
“Maybe,” Marlene had said one night shortly after the attack on the stock exchange, “they see you as a symbol, too—a face and a name they can visualize as the threat to their plans, or a human being who represents a way of life they want to destroy.”
As far as Karp was concerned, he was just doing his job, enforcing the laws of the State of New York. Nothing personal about it. If the DAO couldn’t prove its case, then he didn’t care if it was Osama bin Laden himself, he wouldn’t let the case go forward.
Lucy argued that the seemingly constant maelstrom of violence surrounding the family wasn’t as simple as he was trying to make it out to be—a hazard of the job. Some of the violence that had been directed at him, and his family, had nothing to do with the DAO and was too extreme just for coincidence. “There’s a reason why our family is in the center of all this,” she’d argued. “Like it or not, believe in God or not, call it fate or karma, but we’re supposed to be involved. I believe that David Grale is right. The world is headed for a final confrontation between good and evil, a battle, as they say, of biblical proportions.”
“So you’re basing this upcoming Armageddon on the prognostications of Grale, the Avenging Angel of Gotham City?” he’d asked. “And that we have been drafted into the Army of God without so much as a by-your-leave?”
“Something like that,” Lucy had said, sticking her tongue out. Since childhood, she’d been preoccupied with the spiritual side, especially her mother’s Roman Catholic heritage, though Marlene was, at most, a Christmas and Easter Mass Catholic. Lucy, on the other hand, had even considered becoming a nun and claimed that she received “visits” from a fifteenth-century martyr named St. Teresa of Avila who offered wise advice and comfort.
Karp considered these manifestations to be psychological. His daughter even admitted that the saint appeared in times of stress and danger. But whereas she believed in a supernatural cause, he thought it was her mind’s way of functioning at a higher level when under pressure, a sort of survival mechanism having more to do with her adrenal gland than with guardian angels.
There were times when Karp considered whether he should walk away from the DAO. Move to someplace safe and warm, like Beverly Hills, where he could teach law, and enjoy more quality time with his wife and the boys. But he stayed because he loved what he did, knew he was good at it and that it was important. He didn’t see evil in the supernatural sense that Lucy did, but he knew it existed in the hearts and minds of some people and that he had a responsibility to help combat them.
“Uh, sorry, I didn’t mean nuttin’ by that last comment,” Neary said, glancing over at Karp with a worried look on his face. “It was a stupid joke. And hey, thanks for gettin’ me that piece of coffee cake. It was even better than I remembered.”
“Don’t worry about it, Al,”
Karp replied. “I know you were only yanking my chain. You just hit a little closer to home than I probably care to admit; maybe I need a wakeup call.”
The detective smiled and nodded. “Happy to be of service. Next stop, the salt mine.”
They drove the rest of the way to Centre Street in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Neary with the pitiful performance of his beloved Yankees. Karp rewinding The People vs. F. Lloyd Maplethorpe in his mind. Lying in bed the night before, going over what he knew of the case, he’d wished that he’d been more involved with the actual trial strategy.
Karp had no problem with Reed being assigned to the Maplethorpe case. Stewbie was one of the most senior prosecutors in the Homicide Bureau and an excellent choice. And it wasn’t like he’d been on his own. His trial strategy had received the critical vetting by the bureau chiefs and other select assistant district attorneys who met every Monday morning to review important cases. It was an intensive process in which the ADA presented his case, as well as demonstrated that he had anticipated the tactics a defense attorney might use. Then they all tried to pick it apart.
Yet, you missed something, Karp thought, then shook his head.
In the tradition of other celebrity murder cases, Maplethorpe had hired a dream team of famous attorneys, headed by Guymore G. Leonard. Tall, tan, and handsome as a movie star (and in fact he had appeared in several cameo roles in films produced or directed by former clients), Leonard was known for his fringed leather coats, cowboy hats, ostrich-leather boots, and his flair for the dramatic in and out of the courtroom. A darling of the media, he could always be expected to toss out a great quote, and seemed to regard gag orders handed down by judges as a personal attack on his constitutional right of self-promotion. He lived on a ranch in Montana, and only rarely took on cases—preferring to rake in the proceeds from books, lectures, and consulting—unless they were the sort to place him firmly in the spotlight, as well as pay his outrageous fees.
Leonard was assisted by two other attorneys, Mark Hayvaert, a short, pugnacious man who looked and acted like a bad-tempered bulldog, and Jeremiah Hyslop, a Harvard law paper-pusher whose main purpose was to flood the court and prosecution team with motions and demands, which of course had to be answered. The purpose was, of course, to distract, delay, and keep the prosecution team responding to each trivial motion instead of focusing on trial preparation.
Leonard and his colleagues were attended by a large retinue of legal assistants, private investigators, and forensic experts, including psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists—all with their individual area of expertise—and blood-splatter and ballistics experts. There was even a professor of linguistics whose sole purpose had been to throw doubt on one of the prosecution’s star witnesses, Harry Gianneschi. The professor had testified that Gianneschi had “misinterpreted” Maplethorpe’s comment “I think I killed her.”
Against this formidable army, Reed had been assisted by a young assistant district attorney only recently assigned to the Homicide Bureau. Her main function was to keep track of testimony and witnesses, and to know where to get her hands on documents and evidence.
Still, it should have been enough, Karp thought as Neary turned right on Canal and headed into Chinatown. It was a simple case, and boatloads of spurious motions and superfluous experts didn’t change that fact. Sometimes less is more.
Karp didn’t make a habit of second-guessing his assistant district attorneys. He believed in his mentor Garrahy’s maxim: Pick good people, train them well, put them through their paces at the Monday meetings, and then let them do their jobs.
Neary swung around the block so that they were heading north on Centre Street as they pulled up to the Criminal Courts Building on the right. “Out in front or the Franklin Street side?” the detective asked.
“Out front would be great,” Karp replied. Sometimes he took the private elevator from the Franklin Street entrance of the courts building, an entrance used only by judges and other authorized court personnel, to an anteroom next to his eighth-floor office, which he could enter without even passing his receptionist. It was handy for arriving unseen, but usually he liked to enter the building the same way everybody else did, through the front door on Centre Street. It sort of got his head in the game. But the detective wouldn’t have understood, so he just explained, “I want to pick up a copy of the Times.”
“What for? Parakeet cage needs a new liner?” Neary replied with a snort. “Planning on going to the Fulton Fish Market and bringing home a little something in the sports pages for supper?”
Karp laughed. “Actually, I like the crossword puzzle,” he said truthfully. Word puzzles and watching movies were a habit he’d picked up from his mother.
Neary pulled over to the curb in front of the Criminal Courts Building next to a dark green newsstand. “Thanks, Al,” Karp said, getting out. “Oh, and I think I’ll walk home tonight.”
“Clay ain’t gonna like that.”
“I’ll break the news to him as gently as I can. But consider yourself off the hook.”
“Thanks, Mr. Karp, I wouldn’t mind getting home to the old lady while she’s still awake.”
There’s that twinge again. “I understand,” Karp said, closing the door and turning toward the newsstand just as the vendor greeted him.
“Good morning…m-m-motherfucker shitface…Butch. What will it be today? The…crap crap craaaaap…New York…oh oh nice tits…Times?”
Karp grimaced as shocked tourists on the sidewalk looked from the vendor to him and back, as if he’d encouraged the profanity.
There was only one man on the planet as far as he knew who sold newspapers, or anything else, with an accompanying stream of obscenities. However, Dirty Warren, the smiling vendor gazing at him through thick, smudged glasses, had an excuse for his over-the-top verbiage. The little man suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, a misfiring of some of his brain’s circuits that caused facial tics, body twinges, and outbursts of inappropriate language that fell like pornographic commas into the middle of his sentences.
At least that’s his excuse for most of it, Karp thought as he walked up to the stand. There were times when the skinny little man with the Pinocchio-shaped and perpetually drippy nose got angry or agitated, and then the cursing seemed a bit more deliberate. In fact, he’d once asked Dirty Warren, an apt nickname given his words and hygiene, if that was the case.
The newspaper vendor had looked genuinely shocked and without so much as cracking a smile replied, “I don’t…oh boy oh boy, kiss my ass dickweed…cuss.”
Ever since, Karp had wondered if Dirty Warren was trying to be funny that day or if he really didn’t realize what his affliction sounded like. He did know that there was a lot more going on beneath the filthy orange stocking cap that Dirty Warren wore no matter what the weather than appearances and mannerisms had initially indicated when they first met.
Dirty Warren was peering at him innocently, his watery blue eyes magnified behind the glasses. “Good morning, Warren,” Karp replied. “Sure, a copy of the Times, please.”
“Thanks. Hey, I got one for you…whoop whoop butthole…this morning,” Dirty Warren said.
“Go ahead, give it your best shot,” Karp replied. He and Dirty Warren had been playing a game of movie trivia ever since they’d met years ago, with the newspaper vendor asking questions and Karp answering. So far the score was Karp, approximately a million, and Dirty Warren, zero.
“Who played David Filby in the…hoo hooo…1960 version of The Time Machine?”
“I hope you didn’t stay up all night thinking of that one. The answer is Alan Young.”
“Okay…anus sphincter…smart guy, who played Filby’s son, James?”
Karp rolled his eyes. “Boy, I hope you’ve got more game than this the next time you bring it. The son, James Filby, was also played by Alan Young. And even though modern remakes are supposed to be off-limits for our little contest, you might be interested to know that Young also appeared in the 2002
version of The Time Machine. What was his role?”
Dirty Warren’s unshaved jaw dropped. He wasn’t used to fielding questions himself. “I don’t…shit vagina…know.”
“He’s the florist. Geez, I think you owe me a free newspaper or something.”
“Fuck you, Karp!”
“Warren, I thought you didn’t cuss.”
“Twat penis balls!” Dirty Warren yelled, and started hopping up and down on one foot, his face contorting under a tsunami of muscle spasms. Only with great effort did he calm himself. “Aw, I knew you’d get that one. I was just seeing if I could catch you…oh boy oh boy whoop whoop monkey asses…in a senior moment.”
“Senior!” Karp snorted, then grinned at the vendor, who grinned back.
“Yeah, old as the hills and…whoa lick my scrotum ass-banger…twice as dusty, as my dad used to say.”
“Well, if I’m going to be insulted, and you’ve got nothing better than softball trivia questions, I think I’ll leave,” Karp said with a wink, and turned to go. But prompted by the movie—with its underground-living, evil Morlocks—he was reminded to ask the vendor, “Any word from David?”
Dirty Warren scratched beneath the stocking cap. “Nothing…except that he’s in one of his moods.” The little man peered around the side of his newsstand as if watching for spies. “But I’ll tell you this. There’s been some other folks…fuck me naked…asking around about our dark friend. They’re offering big money for any information about him or that piece of terrorist shit…shit shit oh my God shit…he’s entertaining. And these folks with the money ain’t nice like you and me…asswipe motherfucking pig…not by a long shot.”
Karp scowled. “Do me a favor, if any of these folks come around again, give me a call,” he said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his wallet, which he opened to find a business card. “My office and cell are on this. I’ll trust you to be discreet.”
Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) Page 9
