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  Andrea Russo’s body was spread-eagled across her bed. Her mouth was agape. Blood had coursed out of her mouth and ears and pooled around her head. Her chalky body was beginning to fill with rigor mortis contractions. Reddish purple lividity stains soiled the bottom half of her torso. Stuart’s mouth closed in a narrow tight line as anger swelled in his chest. This was all his fault. He should have prevented this.

  Why the hell her? Why? She was a harmless woman trying to drag herself up out of the slime she’d been born into. He bent down and closed her eyes forever.

  “Take a look at her left hand,” Kahn said.

  Stuart examined the fingers. “The bullet passed between the ring and middle fingers,” he said. “She must have seen the shooter and covered her face with her hands.”

  “The bedroom window is partially open,” Borrelli said.

  Stuart saw the sheen spread over her body, bent down, and rubbed his fingers over the cold chest. He raised his fingers to his nose, smelling the oils and creams of her toilette. He looked at her underpants on the bed and her discarded clothes. He stuck his head into the bathroom. Two used bath towels lay crumpled on the floor. Jars and bottles of body lotions and creams stood on the sink. “She gets undressed, takes a bath, does her thing before going to bed, walks out of the bathroom, and finds the shooter waiting for her. She throws her hands across her face, and bang, the lights go out forever,” Stuart said.

  “The front door was kicked in,” Kahn pointed out. “She hadda hear the crash in the bathroom. She could have made a run for the window or something.”

  “That door was kicked in for our benefit,” Stuart said. “I’ve never heard of a shooter crashing through a door to get to a mark. They’re not about to give their victim a chance to go for a piece and blow them away. That lock was either picked, the door forced, or the perp had the key.” He looked at Kahn. “When the crime scene boys get here, have them take that lock out and check it.”

  She made a note in her scratch pad. Borrelli, Jones, and Whitehouser came in. Kahn withered Whitehouser with a glare. Borrelli said to the whip, “Nobody home in the Terrella house.”

  Jones brushed his hands across his shiny head and said, “And we came up dry on the canvass. There’s nobody around here. It’s like a fuckin’ ghost town.”

  Whitehouser came over to the whip and said, “Lou, the desk officer received a call from an anonymous male who stated that a homicide had gone down at this address.”

  Stuart’s eyes widened. “He said a homicide?”

  “Yeah. I picked up on that, too, so I double-checked with the desk sergeant,” Whitehouser said.

  “‘Homicide’ sounds like a cop talking,” Stuart said. “Nine out of ten civilians would have said, Somebody’s been murdered, or shot, or killed.”

  Whitehouser picked up the phone in his gloved hand and dialed Missing Persons. When the detective at the other end answered, he said, “Lemme talk to Goldstein.”

  “Ain’t no Goldstein assigned here, pal.”

  “Thanks.” Whitehouser carefully returned the receiver. He looked at Kahn pensively and asked, “You catch this?”

  “Yeah, why?” she said, concern just below the surface.

  Whitehouser told them of the phone calls he had received asking who was “catching.” “The caller no sooner finds out that she’s up than the desk officer gets the call.”

  With concern written over his face, Stuart looked at Kahn and said, “It looks like someone wanted to make sure you caught this caper.”

  She bit her lower lip anxiously but didn’t respond.

  Stuart walked outside by himself and stood on the porch, staring out into the gathering darkness. Suzanne and City Island seemed like light-years ago. He wondered why anyone would want to make sure that Kahn caught this case. He had a creepy feeling that something weird was happening, and that Holiday was somehow involved. He kicked the post. Why is it that the scumbags always seem to win? he asked himself. No matter how hard we try, the body count keeps growing.

  He heard the crunch of tires and looked up to see the familiar crime scene unit’s station wagon rolling to a stop in front of the house. He watched as the detectives got out of the station wagon, walked back to the tailgate, and opened it up. As they were pulling out their black leather cases, he stepped off the porch and went over to them. “Got a piece of chalk?” he asked the younger one.

  “Sure, Lou,” the detective said. He snapped open the valise and handed him a piece.

  “Thanks,” Stuart said, and walked back onto the porch. He raised the chalk to the faded wood shingles to the right of the door and etched in a memorial cross.

  Herta Renard’s three-story house was a stone’s throw away from the Triborough Bridge. This evening the second floor of the house was filled with the cries and moans of their lovemaking. They lay on her canopy bed. Patrick Sarsfield Casey, her married lover of twenty-eight years, was on top of her. She closed her eyes and bit his earlobe, allowing herself to be swept away by the rhythm of his violent thrusts. As their passion grew, their sweaty bodies came together and parted faster and faster until at last their shrill cries of pleasure choked in their throats.

  He collapsed on top of her, gnawing her bare shoulder.

  “I love you, Patrick,” she said, arching her hips into him and scissoring him between her legs.

  “Me too.”

  At fifty-five Herta Renard had the tight body of a thirty-year-old woman. Wisps of gray colored her short black hair. Over the years they had made a life together, seeing each other two times a week during the day and two nights a week for twenty-eight years. He rolled off her and glided his hand over her breast. “If I’m forced to retire, I won’t be as flexible with my time,” he said.

  “We’ll manage; we always have.” She looked at him with questioning eyes. “Has Martha ever given you any indication that she knows about us?”

  “No, never.”

  “All these years together and she—” She stopped midsentence upon hearing the phone inside the bedside commode ring. Years ago he had had the unlisted “phantom” phone installed on a separate line. They never used it; only the Job had the number. Whenever he visited Herta, the sergeant manning the borough’s operation desk knew where to reach him if Martha was looking for him or the Job needed him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Leaning across her body, he opened the commode’s door and pulled out the offending instrument. “Yeah?”

  “The c of d just gave you a forthwith.”

  “Where?”

  “Aperitivo.”

  Aperitivo restaurant on Manhattan’s West Fifty-sixth Street was rumored to have the best spaghetti carbonara in the world. Plush burgundy banquettes lined the walls, and paintings of Italian villages with narrow stone streets hung from the rococo molding.

  Chief of Detectives Kevin Hartman, a big man with deep blue eyes and thick jowls, was seated by himself on a banquette in the rear of the restaurant facing the entrance.

  Louie, the dapper owner of the restaurant, greeted Casey as he walked in. “Good to see you,” Louie said, shaking hands. “The man is waiting in the back for you,” he said, leading Casey by the long bar into the dining area in the rear.

  As Casey slid in next to the c of d, Louie asked, “What can I bring you from the bar?”

  “A double Glenfiddich on the rocks.”

  “Better make it a fuckin’ triple, Louie, he’s gonna need it,” Hartman said, adding, “And bring me another Absolut with a splash of Black Label.” As Louie walked off, Hartman looked at Casey and asked, “How’s Herta?”

  “Good.”

  Hartman steepled his hands in front of his face as his cautious eyes swept the restaurant. Patrick Sarsfield Casey did the same thing, inching closer to the chief of detectives. Hartman whispered, “Stuart is looking to hurt my nephew. Isn’t that guy a team player?”

  “He’s solid people, Kevin.”

  They fell silent when Louie came over with their drinks.

  Th
ey touched glasses. Casey guzzled his Scotch, then said, “Maybe your nephew really stepped on his cock this time and did something that can’t be swept under the rug.”

  “Bullshit. Short of a fuckin’ homicide, anything can be covered over, you know that.”

  “Times have changed, Kevin. There are a lotta people out there looking over our shoulders, trying to turn us into a headline.”

  “How good do you know Stuart?”

  “We go back a lotta years. I knew his ol’ man.”

  Hartman nodded and drank, lowered his glass, and then raised it back up to his mouth and finished off the drink. He held the empty glass up to Louie, who nodded and walked back into the bar. “You and me are fast coming to the end of the road, Patrick Sarsfield Casey. Soon we’re gonna have nothing but time on our hands.”

  “I could win my suit.”

  Louie walked over with their drinks; they fell silent as he served them. When he left, Hartman raised his glass to his mouth and said, “The rumor going around the Big Building is you lost. The decision is supposeta be coming down next week.”

  The color drained from Casey’s face. “Win some, lose some,” he said in a husky voice.

  “You have forty-three years on the Job, so you’ll be getting out with full pay,” Hartman said.

  “Yeah,” Casey agreed glumly.

  Hartman rolled his glass between his palms, his eyes on the ice cubes. “Your salary is eighty-five large. Not a bad pension. ’Course, taxes is gonna eat up a lot of that eighty-five.” His eyes slowly roamed the crowded restaurant. He raised his glass and held it in front of his mouth, then said, “I can delay the decision long enough for you to file for three-quarters. A tax-free disability pension is a pretty nice cushion to have.”

  “I really appreciate that, Kevin. But we both know that Whitehouser has a problem, and that if it isn’t Stuart who steps into him, it’ll be some other boss. These guys have busy shops to run. They can’t allow some guy with a perpetual hard-on to run around their squads grabbing a handful of pussy whenever the mood hits them.”

  “Why the hell do you think I put him in the Seven One?”

  Patrick Sarsfield Casey took his time considering the question. He took a slow pull at his drink and then said, “Busy shops mean grade money for the detectives who work there. Most of the detectives in the Seven One are second and first grade. And Stuart has commander’s money. I figure you’re going to see that Sonny Boy gets promoted, and then you’ll wangle him three-quarters on some bullshit disability.”

  “You gonna do the right thing with Stuart for me?”

  Patrick Sarsfield Casey pursed his lips, moving them in and out, mulling over the question. He finished off his drink and held up the empty glass to Louie. “I’d have to go before the medical board. What’s my disability?”

  “Heart. A guy your age is guaranteed to have something wrong with his ticker. I’ll take care of everything.”

  A waitress came over to take their order. She had a heavy brogue.

  Patrick Sarsfield Casey smiled at her and affected a brogue. “Where you from, darlin’?”

  “Limerick. And you?”

  “The Bronx.”

  Paddy Holiday left the bar and strolled over to the curb, where he lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the gutter. He wore a troubled expression and kept looking up and down the street as though he were expecting company.

  “The bastard can’t figure why we haven’t scooped him up for questioning,” Stuart said to Sergeant Warren Edmonds, whip of the Seven One’s anticrime unit. Stuart had radioed him from the latest crime scene.

  Every fiber of his cop instinct told him that Holiday had a hand in Andrea’s murder. He wanted to take a look at the bar to see if Holiday and any of his friends were around.

  Stuart and three anticrime cops were huddled inside the Seven One’s lend-lease surveillance vehicle, a battered gray van decorated with a whirling mass of black graffiti. The blackened one-way observation ports were concealed by the black swirls. They had parked the van on Lincoln Road, two blocks east of the bar. The NYPD’s Motor Transport Division rotated undercover vehicles on a biweekly basis among precinct anticrime units. This was done so that the vehicles did not become known to the precinct’s resident scumbags.

  “Do you think he did the Russo homicide, Lou?” Edmonds asked.

  “He’s no shooter,” Stuart said, watching Holiday through the porthole. “But he sure as hell is involved.”

  “Are you going to bring him into the house for questioning?” Edmonds asked.

  “Waste of time,” Stuart responded. “He’d only ask for his lawyer. He’s not going to tell us anything until we have him by the short hairs. Look at ’im out there, pacing up and down, expecting us to squeal to a stop, leap out of the car, and drag his ass into the house. Well, I’m going to let him stew. Let his concern grow into fear. Then I’ll have my long-overdue talk with him.”

  Holiday walked to the corner and rested his shoe on the rim of the street lamppost. He bent over and tied his shoelace. Straightening, he tossed his cigarette away and cut diagonally across the street to the other corner, where he checked out the cars parked along the curb.

  “What’s he up to?” Edmonds said.

  “Dunno,” Stuart said, watching through the porthole.

  Holiday reached into his yellow windbreaker and drew out a cellular phone. He opened it up and punched in a number. “Whaddaya doin’?” he asked the man who answered at the other end.

  “We barbecued in the backyard. We’re cleaning up now. I figured it’s gonna be cold in a few weeks, so might as well take advantage of the good weather.”

  “You always were the outdoor type,” Holiday said, tucking the phone between his chin and shoulder as he lit another cigarette.

  The man lowered his voice. “How’d everything go?”

  “Like it was supposeta.”

  “Good.”

  “I still don’t know why you wanted to get that other person involved.”

  “That was personal, Paddy.”

  “I just hope it don’t cause problems.”

  “It won’t.”

  Holiday could hear the tumult of children playing in the background. “You sure you didn’t leave any paper trails around the Big Building?”

  “Hey, Paddy, gimme a break. I’ve been doing this shit for a whole lot of years.”

  Holiday sucked in a mouthful of smoke and blew it out his nose and mouth. “When’s our friend’s life gonna become a nightmare?”

  “In a couple of days. I’ve already set the thing in motion.”

  “My people want this done right.”

  “It will be.”

  “I’m surprised that our friend hasn’t been around to see me. After that thing happened today, I figured he’d be around to haul my ass into the Squad.”

  “He knows the first words outta your mouth would be ‘I wanna call my lawyer.’ So he probably figures why waste time goin’ through the motions.”

  “Stay in touch.” Holiday punched off.

  In the tree-lined backyard of 11 Cherry Oak Lane, Syosset, New York, off-duty police lieutenant and devoted husband Ken Kirby folded up his phone and tucked it into the pocket of his shorts. Deep in thought, he walked over to the glass-topped picnic table and picked up his half-full can of Miller Lite. As he guzzled beer, his gaze wandered over to his third wife, who was dishing macaroni salad out of a large blue bowl into plastic storage containers.

  In the four years I’ve been married to this one she’s put on four sides of beef, he thought. Lowering the can, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and belched. Why do I let these women suck me into marriage? He was fantasizing about a young policewoman he’d just hooked. He looked at his watch; she was working a four-to-twelve in the Tenth. Plenty of time to change, give her a call, and drive in. This new one was a world-class blow job. His thoughts turned to his last girlfriend. He was glad he’d thrown Kahn into the snakepit with Stuart. Who the hell did she
think she was, dumping on me? She knew I was married from the get-go, and now she gives me that “You’re a married man” bullshit. I’m gonna fix her ass real good.

  He drained the can and walked up behind his wife, slipping his arms around her waist. “How’s it going, honey?”

  “Who was that on the phone?”

  “My one and only mistress,” he said, nuzzling her earlobe.

  She stiffened, her voice taking on a sarcastic edge. “It seems that your police department is calling you in a lot lately. I never realized just how important you were.”

  “Honey, when the Job calls, I gotta go.”

  Stuart watched Holiday walk back inside the bar.

  “He always walks outside to make his phone calls,” Edmonds said.

  “He’s a cautious prick,” Stuart said. “You guys maintain any kind of a regular surveillance on Holiday and the bar?”

  “Not really, Lou,” Edmonds said. “We check ’im out during our travels around the precinct. But like you know, we’re mainly concerned with jump collars. I got ten people assigned to the unit, and each one of ’em gotta get on the sheet with two felonies a month, so we don’t have a whole lot of time to play detective. But, Paddy, we give ’im a look-see each tour.”

  “Do me a favor, keep looking in on the retiree. I’m particularly interested in any visitors he might have.”

  “My pleasure, Lou.”

  The sergeant’s portable radio crackled, “Lou, you on the air?”

  Stuart recognized Borrelli’s voice. Edmonds handed him the radio. Stuart keyed the transmit button. “Yeah?”

  “You have a visitor, you’d better get back,” Borrelli transmitted.

  Stuart looked at the sergeant. “Let’s head back to the barn.”

  12

  Patrick Sarsfield Casey sat with his feet up on the pull-out leaf on the side of Stuart’s desk, sipping Glenfiddich from his flask and staring out at the buzz of activity in the squad room.

  The Saturday night mayhem had begun around six-thirty. The detention cage was filled with prisoners, and the overflow was stretched around the squad room, manacled to chairs and pipes. The detectives were occupied with the phones and their paper while uniform cops prepared their arrest reports.