And if there was one talent she possessed, it was how to make picks.
Their first ride would be one of very few that Empress would take with the girls. She needed to see how they worked together. She chose Vea to lead; she would ride behind to watch them. It stirred something in her to hear the roar of their pipes as the five of them sped down the Belt Parkway, along the water, smelling the ocean air and looking at the strings of sparkly pinpricks of light, the Verrazano bridge, that tethered Brooklyn to Staten Island. Leaning into the wind, clutching the bike, looking at the four sets of taillights—her pack—she almost felt normal.
She paid cash for them to roll up into the paid parking garage across from Evan Bisset’s apartment building, the place where he paid rent on a parking spot that cost nearly as much as an apartment in some parts of America. He lived in one of the shiny new glass-and-steel structures that seemed to have sprouted up unbidden near the West Side Highway, casting nasty shadows over the quaint brownstones of Greenwich Village. Empress hated those new buildings—so oblivious to their surroundings, so insistent upon themselves.
She’d done most of the work for the girls: identifying him as a target, finding his address, finding which parking space was his. She’d shown them the pictures of him and his car before they left. So now, they waited, parked at the other end of the level where he would be expected to park.
“Where the fuck is he?” breathed Ainsley.
“Patience, star,” Vea replied calmly. “It’s not like you got someplace else to be now, is it?”
Soon enough, a grey Lexus rolled by, and swung a little too quickly into the spot that they were expecting. They revved their engines.
Evan stepped out of his car, wincing a little at the noise of the four roaring engines echoing in the hard, enclosed space. Their bikes leapt forward down the rows of cars, Khady peeling off to smash the breaker box with a big, heavy pipe, to kill the lights on the level. They’d taped their plates over before rolling into the lot, so that if the cameras caught them at all, they’d have nothing to work with except that they were five people on bikes. And there’d be little-to-no video of the actual thing, provided they were quick enough.
Empress hung back, watching.
As the other three rolled up to Evan’s car, the level plunged into darkness. The only lights were the headlights of the bikes. They pulled up and boxed him in. From where she sat, Empress could see his eyes bulge. Ainsley jumped off her bike first, coming at him with all her tournament moves. But a man boxed in isn’t going to fight like a tournament fighter; he’s going to swing and flail and do his damndest to take at least one of his attackers with him, and Ainsley got knocked backwards into her bike, toppling it over. Vea and Nadia jumped off their bikes, each grabbing one of his arms and pinned him against the hood of his car. Khady caught up to them and struck him across the knees with her pipe, ending the resistance he was trying to mount. Ainsley got up, collected herself, swung a booted foot into his crotch, and then his head, his face, his head again, his stomach, his ribs. Kicking, punching, elbowing, over and over, until his face was bloody and bashed up. Who knew how many broken ribs he had, how much plastic surgery he would need to put his face back together.
“This is what happens to you when you beat your wife, you fuck,” she growled at him.
He spat, and blood and a couple teeth sprayed out of his mouth and landed on the front of his gray Brooks Brothers shirt. “Fuck you,” he mumbled, clearly in pain, with half his mouth not really functional. “I’ll find you,” he continued to threaten impotently.
Those were the last words he said before Khady’s pipe connected with his head. He went limp, and they dropped him on the hood of his car, broken and bleeding out. They got back on their bikes and burned out. It wasn’t entirely pretty or perfect, but they’d gotten it done. And they’d learned for next time.
That would do, Empress thought. It would do.
10
Midtown South
Captain Victor Ramirez was a gaunt, sour-faced man with a head like a gourd that was collapsing inward from the sides; it looked vaguely too small, too narrow, for his hat, which sat oddly atop it. His office smelled like cleaning products and mothballs, the paint was peeling, and the fluorescents were much brighter than Lily was used to. It made McArdle’s old office in Ridgewood seem homey by comparison. Though, probably, the real difference had been McArdle himself.
As she sat down, Ramirez launched into a clearly prepared speech. “Look, Sparr, I don’t know if you’ve got any ideas about who you are, but you’re not the first detective to ever break a case. I don’t know why you’re wanted here on this biker thing. I have people working on it. I didn’t want or need to bring you in.”
Lily was blindsided by the hostility but recovered quickly. “Sir, I didn’t want to be here either. Who asked for me to be moved?”
Ramirez was circumspect. “That information is apparently above both our pay grades, Detective.”
Lily sat regarding him coolly. She knew his type: the type who got off on throwing people off balance with low-wattage aggression. The worst thing to do would be to feed it. “Well, we’re in the same boat, then, sir. Who’s my partner?”
“I don’t have a partner for you,” Ramirez replied. “McArdle tried to foist your partner from Queens onto me, but I already have one cop I don’t need, and I’d just as soon not take two. You’ll report to Detective Chernov. He’s in charge of the investigations. You’ll have access to the case files. But no bullshit, Sparr, and no showboating. You clear everything you do with him. Any questions?”
“Yes. Am I going to be assigned any other cases while I’m here?”
“Well, you might solve the thing tomorrow. I wouldn’t want to start you on something else you might not finish.” She was convinced that it wasn’t the march of time that caused the paint to peel from the walls in this office, but Ramirez’s sarcasm. They probably had to do a new coat every year.
Detective Dan Chernov was kinder than Captain Ramirez, though not much more welcoming. He looked to be in his early thirties, with dark curls like her brother’s and a liberal covering of stubble that looked two days old. He began their conversation by grumbling about not being able to smoke in the building anymore. She supposed he was handsome, but he looked utterly world-weary. Too world-weary for someone not much older than herself.
When she asked if they had run histories on all of the victims to look for a common thread, he was dismissive. “This isn’t a serial killer case. We don’t even know that it’s all the same group of bikers.”
When she asked for maps of the incidents, he showed her the map of their activity in Midtown South, but didn’t have a complete one for the rest of the city. “Any information you want pulled, Officer Ray can help you.” He gestured to a young cop at a desk on the other side of the glass of his office. “And if you want to go question anyone, just clear it with me first. I don’t want to cover old ground.”
This struck her as odd. If someone was questioned, even if it didn't yield much of anything, it ought to still appear in the file. But she bit her tongue for the moment, and, sitting wedged at a child-sized desk shoved into a corner, which had no computer and only a small lamp and an in/out box, began to get acquainted with her new assignment.
She rang Miri after work and said tiredly, “I’m coming up.” Her place was on the Upper West Side, a ten minute subway ride from Midtown South if things were running on time. Miri had inherited her father’s condo after he passed some years ago, a smallish but well-designed place with a lot of open space to it. She’d inherited his two jewelry stores, too, which, since she had no interest in jewelry, she’d promptly sold off.
Lily arrived at Miri’s door at the same time as the sushi delivery guy. She and Miri bickered a little about who was paying as Lily insistently shoved a bunch of bills into his hands and sent him packing. She came inside to find a bottle of sake sitting in a pot of hot water on the stove and two small sake cups sitting on the coun
ter near the stove. She smiled appreciatively at her. “You know me too well.”
Miri took a potholder and poured the hot sake into the small serving bottle while Lily unpacked box after box of Japanese food: shumai, gyoza, California roll, Alaska roll, a large spider roll with the deep-fried soft-shell crab feelers sticking out the ends, a sunshine roll stuffed with yellowtail and mango, two miso soups, a vegetable tempura appetizer… “Jesus, Miri, are we expecting half your synagogue for dinner?”
Miri smiled, slightly embarrassed. “I didn’t know what you’d want.”
“Come on. I’d be so happy to see sushi, I’d eat whatever two rolls you bought me and be thrilled about it.”
“Well, I didn’t know what I wanted either.” Her small smile was half sheepish, half playful. Miri poured off two brimming cups of sake from the serving bottle. She turned up the volume slightly on the Billie Holliday playing in the background, humming along with “Oooooh, what a little moonlight can dooooo….”
It was a relief to be around Miri’s energy again: serious, thoughtful, considerate, gentle, and not least of all, happy to see her. They sat on stools at the butcher-block island in the kitchen, sipping sake and digging into the ridiculous overabundance of Japanese food in front of them while Lily talked about Captain Ramirez’s hostility and Detective Chernov’s seeming lack of interest.
After her third cup of sake, Lily felt a need to be much more comfortable than she was, so as she was spinning the yarn of her day, she padded in her stocking feet into Miri’s room and began rifling through one of her dresser drawers. “… and the files are so weird. There’s a lot of stuff that seems like it ought to be there, but….”
After several moments of rifling, she called, “Miri, what happened to that pair of flannel pajama bottoms I left here?”
“You took them home to wash them, remember?”
Crap. She had.
"I’d offer you some of mine, but I think they’d be about a foot too long on you.”
“Whatever. Do you have any gym shorts or something? I’m so completely done with these pantyhose right now, and these pants are really uncomfortable without them.”
Miri came in, fished up a pair of gym shorts that she’d not been able to wear for quite some time, handed them over, and walked back to the kitchen.
Lily peeled out of the stockings and tossed them onto the bed along with the slacks, slipping into the shorts as she walked back to the counter. They swam around her waist a bit, but it was still an improvement, no matter how incongruous they looked with her pale pink tailored shirt. “And anyway,” she resumed, as if there hadn’t been a break for a wardrobe change, “it was just really strange. I mean, why wouldn’t the file indicate whether a witness or person of interest has already been questioned, even if they decided they didn’t find anything worthwhile?”
Miri shrugged. “I don’t know how they do things there. But you were always more meticulous about your case files than everyone else. The D.A. barely had to do anything but show the jury the Woodbine folder, and that’s about you, Lil. I’m not the report-writer here.”
Lily sighed. “I just wish I knew who moved me, or why I’m supposed to work on this thing.”
Miri squeezed her hand. “You’re a good cop, Lil. There’s got to be a reason why someone wanted you there.” She paused. “So, did you start looking at your dad’s files?”
Lily shook her head. “No, that’s extracurricular, and it’s going to take me some time to get up to speed on the thing I’m supposed to be working on. I don’t think Captain Ramirez would be overly thrilled with—”
She suddenly felt a sharp nip at her ankle. She kicked reflexively, and Miri’s big, fat, furry bruiser of a cat went skittering across the hardwood into the living room. Her head, which had been feeling pleasantly fuzzy from the sake, cleared measurably. “Ow!” Lily complained. “Miri, your cat’s an asshole, you know that? He always does that!”
“Aw, it’s not his fault. He was raised wrong.” Miri looked at the big, furry dope. “She didn’t mean that, Felix; you're not an asshole.”
Lily’s purse chose this moment to start vibrating and singing: “Baby you’re a fiiiiiire work!”
Miri lifted an eyebrow. “Your ringtone is Katy Perry?”
“Shut up,” Lily grumbled. She glared at Felix a moment more. “Asshole,” she whispered again, then pulled out her phone and answered it. “Sparr.”
“Hi Detective, it’s Officer Ray.”
“Hi, Ray. What’s up?”
“Well, I got the results you were looking for on the victims in our precinct,” she said. “I’m still working on getting the other ones for the other precincts; I need to make a lot of calls and…”
“That’s okay, Ray. Let’s start with Midtown South. What’d you find?”
“Well, I did what you said and ran them to see if any of them had any prior arrests.”
“And?”
“Almost of all them do.”
Interesting. “For what?”
“Well, here’s what’s weird. It’s all stuff like, um…rape, assault, DV, some child abuse priors...”
“How many?”
“How many what?”
“How many have priors?”
“Oh. Sixteen out of twenty-two.”
In this moment, Felix crept up and nipped at her exposed calf again. “Son of a bitch!” she yelped, nudging him away with her foot.
“Uh, Detective?”
Lily sighed frustratedly as Miri spirited Felix into her room and shut the door. “Sorry, it’s not you, Ray. That’s a lot. Did they go to trial?”
Ray paused awkwardly. “Uh, I don’t know.”
“Okay, well, that’s the next thing we’re going to need to find out: whether they went to trial, and what happened. I’ll probably want to take a closer look at the ones without priors tomorrow.” She looked at the clock over the oven and realized it was closing in on eight. “Ray, what time is your shift supposed to end?”
Ray paused awkwardly again. “It was supposed to be over an hour ago. I just wanted to let you know what I found.”
Lily smiled. It was impossible to tell whether Ray was dedicated, or displeased with Chernov’s handling of the investigation, or thought Lily was somebody she had to impress. Either way, she felt obliged to thank her profusely for her efforts and encourage her to go the hell home for the night.
“Sixteen out of twenty-two of the biker victims in Midtown South had priors for rape, domestic violence, or child abuse,” she said out loud to Miri after she hung up the phone. “Does that strike you as weird at all?”
Miri nodded. “Very.”
11
If It Be A Sin to Covet Honor
Maggie showed up at the Tisch Ballroom in a blue silk Versace evening dress with a plunging neckline and a criminally low back. Her hair was up, curled and perfect, with little tendrils twisting down around her face and the nape of her neck—the studied-unstudied look that took about four hours from start to finish.
A jazz combo played unobtrusively in the corner of the room, and cadres of tuxedoed waiters glided around with trays of canapés, wine, and champagne. The lights had been lowered in the room to that level where everything looked like it was covered in a layer of honey and everyone was twice as attractive.
She made her way over to plant air kisses on the hosts’ cheeks, rave about the décor and how excited she was to hear the dramatic reading, how much she loved the theater, how she’d be sure to call upon them when she was ready to reach out for next season’s opera funding, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could get some kind of program going to get disadvantaged children from underprivileged communities in to see some of these types of cultural events?
She caught Tommy León’s eye, and he excused himself from whatever conversation he was involved in and sailed over. “Maggie,” he said enthusiastically (he was nearly always enthusiastic). “You look fantastic.”
“You clean up pretty well yourself, Mr. Mayor,” sh
e joked, meaninglessly adjusting his boutonniere, a white rose. She had it down to a science, how much eye contact to allow in order to make such a gesture jovial and familiar, rather than flirty, and she stayed just on the former side of that line.
He smiled. It wasn’t hard to understand why the people of New York decided they’d be able to deal with looking at him for the next four years; he’d gotten his father’s dark hair and square jaw, his skin a few shades lighter olive, but he’d managed to snag his mother’s sea-green eyes.
“Where’s the Deputy Mayor? Is she joining us this evening?”
Tommy nodded with a wry smile. “Yeah, she’s around somewhere, terrorizing someone.”
“You don’t say,” Maggie replied mischievously. She winked and sailed off to find her brother. He was just coming back in from the balcony, with Ibrahim Briskman on his arm and a glass of champagne in hand.
“Lawrence! Ibrahim!” She kissed each of them quickly on the cheek. What a couple. Ibrahim was quite a bit older than her brother, but the Israeli technology guru was good-looking and energetic, and she couldn’t deny that they seemed happy. “Lawrence, you guys are donating to this thing tonight, right?”
Lawrence shrugged. “I imagine so. I brought my checkbook.”
“Wonderful! Just remember, I’m going to need you to pony up for City Harvest next month too. They’re going to need about $250K to remain solvent for this quarter.”
“Didn’t I just pony up for that last month?” he complained mildly.
“No, that was the United Way. After-school programs in underserved communities.”
Ibrahim grinned broadly. “Maggie, I swear to God, your brother could learn a thing or two from you about multi-tasking.”
“I multi-task just fine,” Lawrence replied suggestively.
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