Broken: A Leopold Blake Thriller

by Gordon Hopkins

  The van followed the curve of the on-ramp, intending to enter the freeway. Instead of following, in an amazing burst of speed, Jerome cut across, leaping over a hedgerow and a concrete retaining wall and just barely beating the van to the other side. He leapt into the middle of road, threw his arms wide apart and bellowed, “Stop!”

  Brakes squealed and the van shuddered to a stop just two feet from where Jerome stood. The driver stuck his head out of the window and yelled, “What in God’s name is wrong with you? Are you some kind of moron? What kinda brain damage makes a fellow do something so stupid? Do you have any idea how close I came to flattening you?”

  Jerome judged the distance. “Two feet.”

  Mary and Leopold finally caught up. Mary held up her badge and attempted to mollify the angry driver. “Sorry … police … sorry … wait a minute.” Breathing heavily, she bent over with a hand on her side.

  Leopold leaned against the side of the van, trying to catch his breath. Horns were blaring behind them. Several vehicles had backed up behind the van, creating a bottleneck.

  Mary got her voice back. “We need to move this vehicle to the side of the road and let traffic pass.”

  “I’ve been pulled over by the cops before,” the driver said. “‘But you’re the first one ever to do it on foot.”

  Once the van was on the shoulder and the honking had subsided, Leopold asked his bodyguard, “Why did we just hijack this van?”

  “I think the professor’s phone is in here.”

  “You think?”

  “If this is the right van.” Jerome asked the driver. “Did you just pick up a load of electronics to be recycled from Lennox University?”

  “Sure did. Is that why you stopped me? Because it’s legal, you know.”

  “This is great news.” Leopold said. “The killer must have communicated with Davis electronically. That’s why she stole his computer. If he used his phone to contact her, we may have a record of it to help us identify and locate her.”

  Mary said to the driver, “We need to see in the back.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Mary walked around to the back with Leopold and Jerome in tow. She opened up the doors and said, “Oh, shit.” The van was filled with boxes, and the boxes were filled with cell phones. “How the hell are we going to figure out which one was his?”

  “Frannie knows what it looks like.” Jerome said. “Maybe she can help us identify it.”

  Mary and Leopold looked at each other. Then, simultaneously, “Frannie?”

  “She hates being called Frances.”

  With three new passengers, the van pulled back onto the road. Unable to back up, the driver was forced to drive onto the freeway. It took fifteen minutes to find another exit, then another twenty minutes to drive back to the university. Once there, they had to locate Frances. They didn’t have a last name and didn’t know where to look, so Mary called admissions. There were four Franceses enrolled at the university. Apparently, Frances had been a popular baby name nineteen years ago. Fortunately, only one fit her description. She was currently attending an astronomy class, so they drove to the planetarium and waited for class to let out.

  A bell rang, and students poured out the side door. Jerome spotted Frannie and pointed her out.

  Mary approached her. “Are you Frannie?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Sergeant Jordan with the NYPD. We need your help?”

  “My help?” Then she saw Jerome over Mary’s shoulder. She waved at him. “Hello again.” To Mary, “Don’t you think he looks like Ving Rhames?”

  “I always thought so. Do you remember what Professor Ansara’s phone looks like?”

  “I guess.” Frannie shrugged. “It was one of those funky, cheap off brands. Uh, Sceptre, I think. It was silver. Oh, and the screen was cracked. It had a crack diagonally, you know, corner to corner, and then another crack diagonally the other way. It looked like a jagged X.”

  “Well, that narrows it down, anyway.” Leopold said, opening the back of the van. He pulled out the first of the boxes.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Frannie said. “People are supposed to delete everything on their phones before they recycle. There shouldn’t be anything on it.”

  Leopold asked Mary, “If the data has been wiped, do you think it can be recovered?”

  “We won’t know until we try.”

  Leopold handed boxes filled with cell phones to Mary and Jerome. “This may take a while.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  They spent over an hour dumping boxes of cell phones onto the ground and then sorting through them to locate a Sceptre phone with a silver case and cracked screen. Eventually, Leopold located it. There was still a little battery life left but when he powered it up, it was empty.

  “Frannie was right. Everything’s been deleted,” Leopold complained bitterly. He handed the phone to Mary. “Do you think the data can be recovered?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Ahem.” The driver of the van they had commandeered cleared his throat loudly.

  Mary, Leopold, and Jerome spent the next half hour scooping up piles of cells phones off the ground and putting them back into the boxes, then loading the boxes back onto the van.

  They headed to One Police Plaza, and Mary handed the phone off to a technician who, hopefully, would recover the missing data. While waiting for that to happen, she went to her desk and found a report waiting for her.

  Leopold tried to read over her shoulder, but she flipped through the pages too fast. “Good news, I hope?”

  “This is the ballistics report on the bullet taken out of professor Ansara. It matches the gun used to kill Ronkowski. It’s the same person, all right.”

  “We knew that, already.”

  “But now we have proof. That’s the important thing.”

  The technician Mary had handed the phone to reappeared. He dropped the phone on her desk.

  “That was quick.” She said, surprised.

  “It was easy. The guy who had this phone deleted the files but forgot to clear the cache, so the whole internet history is still in there. It’s a dumb mistake people make all the time.”

  Mary had changed phones more than once and had never cleared the cache. She didn’t even know how. Was her phone history still floating around somewhere? “Good job. Thanks.”

  He gave a curt nod and departed.

  Mary powered up the phone to see what she could see.

  Leopold peered over her shoulder eagerly. “Well?”

  “Give me a chance, will you?” She snapped.

  “Sorry.”

  There didn’t seem to be much on the phone. “As far as I can tell, he only over used this phone to exchange text messages with one number, and to visit one website.”

  “What website?”

  “Something called ‘Rose of Allah,’ whatever that is.” She skimmed through the pages. “Good grief. It’s a dating website.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Judge Berkovitz sat at his desk in his chambers and glowered as he flipped through the pages in front of him, his face growing darker and darker. Finally, he looked up at Mary and said, with genuine incredulity, “Oy, a brokh. You really expect me to issue a warrant based on this?”

  Mary knew already the battle was lost, but she wasn’t the type to give up without a fight, even when the fight was hopeless. “Yes, Your Honor. Rose of Allah is a dating website that caters to Muslims. Professor Davis Ansara signed up with Rose of Allah and made a date with a woman named Zahra. We don’t have her full ID. That might not even be her real name. When we get the records for Rose of Allah, we can identify her. I believe she is the killer.”

  “Feh. I don’t see anything here that supports that statement.” The Judge waved a hand over the papers on his desk. “A man joined a dating service and then he was murdered. You haven’t shown me anything that indicates these two events are related. You might as well ask for all the records from the p
ublic library because he had a library card.”

  “There’s more to it than that. The gun that killed Professor Ansara was the same gun that killed Donald Ronkowski.”

  “That doesn’t strengthen your case. It does the opposite, in fact. I’m hard pressed to believe a college professor from New York and some dumb kid from Nebraska were dating the same woman, let alone murdered by the same woman. Even if they were, you haven’t shown me any evidence linking Rose of Allah to this supposed ‘black widow,’ who seduces men and then kills them.”

  “Both men had their computers stolen, obviously to hide electronic communication.”

  “It’s the twenty-first century. Everyone communicates electronically. My Bubeh has a Facebook account.”

  “This is about more than just the murder of two men. Three men have committed acts of terror in the city. There may be more in the future.”

  “So now you try to scare me into pissing on ‘just cause’ and the Constitution?”

  “These men were recruited, and someone at Rose of Allah did the recruiting.”

  “Prove it.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do. This is a Muslim-owned business with exclusively Muslim clientele. People whose only crime is being Muslim and not wanting to be alone on a Saturday night. Their list of clients would make a nice list of potential suspects, would it? Despite what some people think, New York City is not a police state.”

  Mary could feel her face turning red. She struggled to maintain a calm demeanor. She knew the consequences of losing her temper with a judge. “I’m only interested in Zahra, whoever she is. No one has any intention of doing anything with any of the other names on the client list.”

  “So you say.” The judge said, skeptically. “But once you have it, you have it. I’m not giving the NYPD carte blanche to collect the names of Muslims. Have you even talked to anyone at Rose of Allah?”

  “Of course not. The moment we do that, they’ll know we’re onto them.”

  “That’s what I thought. Your request for a warrant is denied.”

  “But …”

  “This is not happening. You might as well just accept it.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Mary calmly left the Judge’s chambers. She calmly took the elevator to the ground floor of the court house. She calmly walked through the lobby and out the front door. She calmly walked down the street and located her parked car.

  Then she shrieked, “Son of a bitch!” and punched the driver’s side door, leaving a massive dent and scraping her knuckles bloody.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Mary and Leopold had lunch at a ridiculously overpriced bistro in Manhattan. It was expensive enough that the menus didn’t have prices. Jerome joined them. Normally, when Leopold had a meal with someone, Jerome didn’t eat. He just hovered close by, but out of sight. Leopold was used to this arrangement, and Jerome actually preferred it, as that was how he was trained, but it made Mary uncomfortable. Somehow, it didn’t seem right for a man she considered a friend to stand off to the side like an employee, which he was. Jerome was a professional and worked hard to keep the lines between work and friendship from blurring. Still, Mary didn’t like it, so Jerome ate with them this time. Mary picked up a salt shaker from the table but, remembering her blood pressure, set it back down without using it. She speared a bit of chicken and lettuce from her chef’s salad, imagining it to be Judge Berkovitz’s eye, and popped it into her mouth, grinding angrily.

  She swallowed and grumbled, “Damned pompous gasbag.”

  Leopold looked up from his club sandwich. “What did I do now?”

  “Not you. That stupid judge. Lecturing me like I was child. He wouldn’t give us the client list, phone records, internet records, not anything.”

  “I’m not entirely sure I blame him. Depending on how much business that dating service gets, that client list could have hundreds of Muslims on it, most of whom are perfectly innocent of any wrongdoing. I can understand if the judge was worried about how it looks.”

  “I’ll tell you how it looks.” Mary temper was rising. “It looks to me like the judge is more concerned about bad press than about protecting people.”

  “Still, I can see why he wouldn’t want to issue a warrant without good reason.”

  “I have a good reason.” Mary snapped. “Someone at Rose of Allah is recruiting domestic terrorists. I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. We just have to try another tactic.”

  “Such as?”

  “When in doubt, follow the money. If the dating service was created for the purpose of recruiting, then most likely the owner or a major investor is either the person behind this or can lead us to whoever is.”

  “Good thinking, only the judge wouldn’t let us have the financial records, either.”

  “Would you excuse me a moment?” Leopold stood up, taking his phone out of his pocket. “I need to make a phone call. In private.”

  Jerome watched his employer walked out the door and stand out on the street in front of the restaurant’s massive picture window. He could see him clearly but not hear him.

  “He’s up to something.” Mary said.

  “He’s always up to something.” Jerome said, not taking his eyes off him.

  “Don’t you ever want to just kill him?”

  “That would probably negatively impact my salary.”

  “Still, though, he drives me crazy and I can get away from him, sometimes. You have to be around him all the time. Isn’t it just so … frustrating?”

  “Life is frustrating. I don’t let it get to me.”

  “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How do you keep it from getting to you?”

  “Is this just idle curiosity or are you looking for some practical advice?”

  “The second one. My … uh, a friend told me recently that I might have some anger issues.”

  Jerome smiled a bit. “Might?”

  “I just told you I have anger issues. You think pissing me off is the thing to do?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Anyway, yes, I’m looking for advice.”

  “Have you thought about meditation?”

  “God, no. Hippy dippy granola flower power shit? I don’t see myself sitting on a Persian rug listening to sitar music while trying to commune with the goddess earth mother through a crystal.”

  “It’s not like that, you know.”

  “I just not a very spiritual person.”

  “Meditation isn’t about spirituality. It’s about focus. It teaches you techniques for controlling your mind and body. Think of it as a kind of biofeedback. You learn how to control things like your heart rate and blood pressure.”

  Blood pressure. Mary wondered if he’d guessed the real reason she was asking. “I’ll think about it.”

  Leopold finished his call and came back to the table. “Sorry about that. So where were we? Oh, yeah. I think we ought to pay a visit to Rose of Allah and check out the operation.”

  Mary complained, “That’s exactly what I wanted to avoid. The moment police show up, whoever is behind this will know we’re onto her and she’ll vanish.”

  “Maybe there’s a way we can do it without arousing suspicion?”

  “How.”

  “By employing a technique I like to call good, old-fashioned bullshit.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  The office for Rose of Allah was located in the trendy East Village neighborhood. The real estate was pricey, but its close proximity to New York University meant a younger, more ethnically diverse population than many other Manhattan neighborhoods. It also had the highest density of bars in the city. The office was a converted bakery. A large window that had once displayed bagels and cakes and every sort of pastry now held a red neon rose. There was no other signage. Mary walked up the steps leading to the front door and entered the building, with Leopold fo
llowing. A young woman sat behind a desk near the front door, acting as receptionist. Nearly all the office was visible from that vantage point. It had the open floor plan, deliberately mismatched furnishings, and funky decor of a typical internet startup. Behind the receptionist, there were several desks with computers. Workers sat typing intently, apparently oblivious to the interlopers. On the far wall was a painting of a rose and the words “Rose of Allah” were repeated in several languages, including English, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu.

  The receptionist flashed a friendly but professional smile, “May I help you?”

  “I’m Sergeant Jordan with the NYPD.” Mary showed her badge to the young woman. “I need to speak to whoever is in charge here. It’s an important matter.”

  Her smile faltered a bit. “Just a moment, please.” She picked a telephone receiver and whispered into it. “There are police here. They say they want to talk to someone in charge.” There was a pause, then, “I didn’t ask.” Another pause. “Okay.” She set the receiver down.”

  “Someone will be with you in a moment.”

  Even before she had finished speaking, a man appeared. A young man, dressed in business casual, he put out a hand. “Hello. My name is Danny Masood. I’m the manager here. What seems to be the problem?”

  Mary shook his hand. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Masood. It’s about one of your clients.” She took out a picture of Professor Ansara and handed it to the manager. “Do you recognize him?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.” He handed the picture back. “We get a few walk-ins from time to time, but most of our matches are made online. I actually get to meet very few of our clients.”