Next of Kin

by James Tucker

Her eyes widened. “You’re going after Dietrich Brook tomorrow?”

  “Malone’s orders.”

  “You don’t think he’s guilty?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you think there’s something to do with the paintings.”

  “It’s only a hunch.”

  She caressed the back of his neck. “Be careful.”

  Later, as Buddy lay in bed, he knew he’d sleep deeply. He had the premonition that tomorrow he’d break the case wide open. He’d need to be mentally sharp and physically strong. It would be a day not for mercy but for agility and relentlessness. He’d have to match his adversary in every way. No, not match. He’d have to destroy his adversary, or everyone he cared about would be taken away.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  At 7:50 a.m. Buddy pulled his Charger into the loading zone in front of Vista School. He got out and walked Ben inside.

  The headmaster himself greeted Ben by the security turnstile. “Welcome to Vista, Ben!”

  Ben gave Mr. McConnell an uncertain smile and shook his hand. He turned to Buddy and waved.

  Buddy said, “You’ll be all right?”

  Ben nodded. “Will you pick me up?”

  “Mei or I will be here at three o’clock.”

  Ben waved forlornly. “Bye.”

  Buddy’s heart felt like it was cracking. He tried to smile. He hoped nothing would happen to Ben today at school. He said, “Goodbye, Ben.”

  He watched the headmaster lead Ben to the security desk and help the guard issue him an identification badge. Ben turned around, watched him for a moment, then followed the headmaster through the turnstile before disappearing into the hallway to the classrooms.

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Twenty minutes later Buddy joined Vidas and knocked on the door of Dietrich Brook’s condominium, a CSU team in tow.

  The door opened.

  Buddy placed his hand over his chest, two inches from the Glock in his shoulder holster. Then he dropped his hand when he saw the beautiful Lydia Brook.

  “Mrs. Brook,” Buddy said. “Detective Lock, NYPD. Here’s a warrant allowing us to search your home. Please step aside.”

  Vidas held up the warrant he’d picked up from Judge Conrad an hour earlier.

  Buddy expected Lydia Brook to complain or show anger that her privacy was being invaded. But instead she nodded and moved away from the door. He watched as she strode into the kitchen, picked up a mobile phone, and pressed two buttons. She whispered briefly into the phone, and didn’t look at him again. She just turned and disappeared farther back into the condo, away from the search team.

  Buddy guessed they had ten or fifteen minutes before Brook’s lawyer, Robert Kahler, found another judge to halt the search. His problem was that a textbook search of Dietrich Brook’s enormous condominium would take two or three days rather than thirty minutes. They had almost no time to find Dietrich Brook’s mistake—if, that is, Brook had made one.

  “You take the common areas,” he told Vidas, “I’ll do the bedrooms.”

  Vidas nodded, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, and charged into the great room and kitchen.

  Buddy hurried toward the master bedroom. He moved deep into the condominium, the way Lydia had gone. He looked around. Large room, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over SoHo. Wood floors partly covered by a Persian rug. Large paintings on the two walls without windows. Lydia was there, standing by the windows, staring outside. She started when he entered the room, but she didn’t turn toward him or leave.

  Ignoring her potential objection, he took out his phone and photographed the paintings. He went into an enormous walk-in closet with built-in cabinets and drawers. He opened the cabinet doors and saw more clothes hanging in perfect order than he’d ever seen outside a department store. He didn’t search further. Dietrich Brook wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t have hidden incriminating evidence in his closet. He’d have known it was the first place Buddy would search.

  Buddy walked through the closet and into the bathroom. All white. A large window overlooking the neighborhood with a sheer blind lowered. His and hers sinks. Spotless. He opened the drawers under the vanity, saw Lydia’s hairbrushes, creams, and perfumes. He went to the next column of drawers and saw Dietrich’s hairbrush, comb, toothbrush, bottle of Advil, and bottle of cologne.

  He picked up the cologne. It was Zizan, made by Ormonde Jayne of London.

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Buddy’s chest tightened. He held up the bottle and saw the bourbon-colored liquid inside. He pulled off the cap and sniffed. The scent.

  A mistake, but not enough for court or to forge a connection to the murders. Yet his internal compass pointed closer to Dietrich Brook.

  After replacing the cap and setting the bottle in the drawer, he closed the drawer and glanced at his watch. Five or ten minutes remaining.

  Within the vast condominium, where would someone hide the tools of murder?

  He hadn’t seen all of the condo, but he’d seen enough to know there would be closets and drawers and hundreds of hiding places. He considered all those places, and then he decided.

  Leaving the master bathroom, he walked out through the closet, past Lydia Brook, and out into the hallway. He returned to the great room, passed Vidas and some of the CSU team, and kept going. He entered the second, narrower hallway he’d used when he interviewed Dietrich Brook in the office. He passed the office and came to another open door. He looked inside. Here it was.

  A girl’s room. Must be Hayley’s. He walked in and saw a cream-colored rug over the wood floors. Large windows. An expensive-looking duvet on a queen-sized bed. Modern and old-fashioned European paintings on the walls. A corkboard with ticket stubs and playbills for shows on Broadway. A signed and framed Vampire Weekend poster on the wall. He looked more closely. A lift ticket for Buttermilk in Aspen, Colorado. Photographs of Hayley and her family. Of Hayley and friends.

  Nothing to arouse suspicion, he realized. But wasn’t that the point?

  Whatever Dietrich had hidden would have to be out of Hayley’s reach. She couldn’t discover the tools of murder or she’d know the truth about her father.

  Beyond her reach, Buddy thought. And looked up.

  The condominium was a converted industrial building. Brick exterior walls, thick wooden beams extending across the rooms, exceptionally high ceilings with exposed ductwork painted black as the metal ceiling. A maze of wires and track lights and lights suspended on wires.

  He walked out into the hallway and called for CSU.

  “Yes, sir?” asked a young man of about thirty. Clean cut with brown eyes behind thick eyeglasses.

  “You don’t have a ladder, do you?”

  “We don’t. Why do you ask?”

  Buddy pointed skyward. “I wanted to get up near the ceiling.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Think there’s a utility closet?”

  The young man’s eyes widened. “I don’t know. If there is, it would be toward the core of the building.”

  “The core?”

  “The center. Where the elevators and the plumbing run from the basement up to the roof.”

  Buddy said, “Help me find it. We have five minutes or less.”

  The CSU guy shook his head. “I don’t understand. We’ll be here for a couple of days at least.”

  “Nope. Our warrant will be thrown out. You don’t think a billionaire under suspicion of murder hasn’t lawyered up?”

  Now the CSU guy understood. “It would be this way,” he said, motioning Buddy farther along the hallway, which turned right and dead-ended at two large doors.

  Buddy opened the first door, but it was a gym. Which told him something. The man who’d killed and broken into Ward’s house and escaped from the Carlyle couldn’t have been frail. Not even out of shape. Dietrich Brook was thin but strong.

  The CSU guy opened the second door. They looked inside and saw an eight-by-eight-foot utility room. Electrical systems, security-s
ystem control panel, telephone riser, audio system, and leaning against the far wall, a tall stepladder.

  Buddy charged into the room, picked up the stepladder, and carried it out through the doorway and into Hayley’s bedroom. He set up the ladder in the center of the bedroom, looked at the junior detective, and said, “Stay here, by the base, okay?”

  “Um. Okay.”

  Buddy gripped each side of the ladder and climbed as fast as he could, the ladder swaying under his shifting weight. At the second-highest rung, his feet were nearly ten feet above the cream-colored rug. The ladder was unsteady, but he wanted to have the best view.

  He found patches of light mixed with shadows. He couldn’t see clearly and had no flashlight to point into the shadows. With a gloved hand he grasped and angled one of the pendant lights hanging by a wire from the metal ceiling deck. Turning it almost horizontal, he aimed it at a patch of shadows. Shit! The light was too hot to hold. He let it drop and it swung helter-skelter to his left.

  He looked down at the junior detective. “Take off your windbreaker and hand it to me.”

  “What?”

  “For Christ’s sake. Do it now!”

  The guy unzipped his navy-blue CSU windbreaker and handed it up to Buddy. Buddy took the jacket, folded it, and put one hand on each side of the fold. Then he took hold of the same pendant light and aimed it into the shadows above the room. He saw, brightened by the light, aluminum ductwork painted black, PVC pipe painted black that surely held the electrical wires that coursed around the ceiling of the giant condominium. He saw dust on all of the foregoing. He saw the tops of the wooden beams that crossed the entire living space and rested atop the wooden columns and the brick exterior walls and the interior walls. But he saw nothing suspicious.

  After easing the pendant light down, he turned the opposite way, in the direction of the windows, and used the windbreaker to cradle another pendant light. He picked it up and aimed it toward other shadows and other darkness. He saw more ductwork and PVC pipe suspended by wires extending from the deck above. He saw fabric above the beam where the beam met the exterior brick wall. Straining to see, Buddy held the light up and over, as far as he could. The light wouldn’t quite reach.

  A duffel bag and . . . rope? Climbing gear, maybe. He wasn’t exactly sure what climbing gear looked like, but was it something a teenage girl would hide on a structural beam directly over her bed?

  They heard shouting coming from the main part of the house. He thought he heard the word quashed.

  Time was up.

  The CSU guy was perspiring. He’d heard what Buddy heard. He said, “Someone’s shut down our search.”

  Buddy said, “Not yet.”

  “They’re calling us to the elevator. They’re saying we have to leave. Immediately.”

  “Then do what you’re told.”

  The guy looked at him, pushed up his eyeglasses, and left the room.

  Buddy ignored the people calling for him. He thought if he got his hands on the duffel before he had actual notice his search warrant was quashed, the duffel’s contents might be admissible in court. His blood boiled through his body. If he could just . . .

  He dropped down the ladder, then moved it to the side of the room. He pulled at Hayley’s bed, yanking as hard as he could, one end of it and then the other, to the center of the room. He picked up the ladder and carried it around the bed until it was stationed beneath the stash. He began climbing the ladder.

  “Stop right there, Detective.” A loud, deep voice.

  He ignored the command.

  He heard Vidas’s voice say, “Leave Buddy alone, for Christ’s sake!”

  The deep voice came again: “Stop now, Detective! We’re NYPD, just like you.”

  Buddy continued climbing.

  “Get him down!”

  Buddy reached up into the ceiling space, hands probing the shadows for the stash.

  Then they grabbed his legs.

  He tried to pull out his phone and take a photograph of what he’d seen, but he was unsteady up that high. He reached for the ceiling beam, but two NYPD uniformed officers pulled him off the ladder as if he were some kind of heavy package.

  “Let go of me!” he yelled, thrashing at them.

  The two officers half dropped, half set him on the floor. One of them—a boy cop with acne—laughed.

  Vidas stood by, red-faced. He made a fist and was about to hammer one of them.

  Buddy caught his eye and held it. He didn’t need his partner arrested.

  Buddy got to his feet and turned on the two cops. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  “NYPD,” said a voice behind him. “The court of appeals quashed your search warrant. You’re done here, Detective.”

  Buddy swirled around and saw a middle-aged captain. The name on his left breast pocket read “Copley.” Short graying black hair, skinny build, thin lips.

  Buddy pointed up at the ceiling. “Know what’s up there, Captain Copley? Maybe all the evidence we need to convict the owner of this condo for murder one. Murder one for multiple victims. But what do you do? You hurry over here to fuck with my search warrant.”

  The captain shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “You going to be insubordinate?”

  “You’re not in my chain of command.”

  “You want me to take this up with the commissioner?”

  Buddy raised his chin. “I wish you would. You can explain how you let a serial killer go free.”

  “I don’t see a serial killer here, Detective,” the captain replied, looking around the bedroom before taking hold of Buddy’s upper arm.

  Buddy shrugged him off, more violently than he intended. Buddy walked through the doorway, out into the hallway, and into the great room. He turned and made no eye contact with members of the CSU team. He went out into the foyer and pressed the button for the elevator. As his temper cooled, he asked himself if there’d been anything important on the beam over Hayley’s bedroom. Maybe. But maybe the duffel had been filled with old clothes or drugs. Or the contractor who’d remodeled the space for the Brook family had forgotten it.

  A gold mine or a dead end.

  He heard a chime and the elevator doors opened.

  “You’re following the wrong leads, Detective.” It was Dietrich Brook, dressed in a long gray overcoat and black leather gloves. Brook’s voice rose. “Find the killer! My God, what’s the matter with you?”

  Buddy stared at him.

  Shaking his head angrily, Dietrich Brook walked out of the elevator and past Buddy.

  Buddy got into the elevator. He smelled vetiver.

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  At two thirty that afternoon Mei began to put her desk in order. She was going to leave the gallery and take a taxi downtown to pick up Ben from Vista School.

  But at that moment Ms. Anta Safar emerged from her office behind the exhibition space. Ms. Safar was dressed as usual in tight black pants, black boots, and a black blouse.

  Mei smiled at her.

  Usually Anta Safar returned her smile, but not today.

  “You’ll need to stay late,” Anta Safar told her. “You’ll be meeting with a potential client.”

  Mei tensed. “But I have to . . . I have something I need to do. In a few minutes I—”

  Anta Safar didn’t blink. “You must attend, Mei. Jessica is on vacation for the next week, and I have a conflicting meeting with a curator at the Met.”

  Mei nodded, realizing she had no choice. She hadn’t told Anta Safar about the attempts on Ben’s life, or even that Ben had come to live with her. She also hadn’t told Anta Safar about the bullets she’d fired into the door of the storeroom, and her often scatterbrained boss hadn’t noticed the damage. Mei said, “Who’s the potential client?”

  Anta Safar said, “A rich collector named Dietrich Brook.”

  Mei tried to hide her shock. To be sure they were discussing the same person, she asked, “We’re meeting with the Dietrich Brook whose relatives were r
ecently killed?”

  Anta Safar nodded. “Yes, that’s right. Have you read about them in the Gazette?”

  Realizing she’d been holding her breath, Mei exhaled, then took in another gulp of air. Her face was flushed. Her heart pounded. She clasped her hands together and asked, “When is our appointment with Dietrich Brook?”

  “He’ll be here soon,” Anta Safar said curtly before disappearing into the hallway that led to her office.

  Mei pulled out her mobile phone and called Buddy. He picked up immediately.

  She said, “Where are you?”

  “Almost at the Polish Institute for Holocaust Studies in the Bronx. Ward and I are meeting with a researcher who might tell us if the killer is related to one of the Nazis’ victims.”

  Mei pushed the phone tightly against her ear. “I have to meet with Dietrich Brook in a few minutes.”

  “What?”

  “He wants to discuss buying or selling paintings—I’m not really sure which.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she lied. “It’s the middle of the afternoon and there are lots of people out on Fifty-Eighth. Security cameras cover the exhibition space, and I’ll call 911 if necessary, but I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  Buddy didn’t respond.

  She continued, “So I can’t pick up Ben from school. Should we have him take a cab?”

  “No,” Buddy told her. “I’ll have Vidas do it. But you should know that Dietrich Brook won’t make your appointment.”

  “You’re going to arrest him?”

  “Maybe soon. But right now Ward’s goon is watching him. Won’t let him near you.”

  This made Mei feel better. Her meeting, she realized, wouldn’t happen, no matter what Anta Safar wanted. Relief filled her.

  Buddy said, “When you leave the gallery, go straight home and wait for Ben. Okay?”

  “I’ll be there,” she promised.

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Ben watched through the large plate glass window of the Vista School lobby. He looked out on to West Twenty-Eighth Street, afraid that instead of Mei he’d see Uncle Carl or Uncle Dietrich or someone else from his extended family. He checked his watch. It read 3:05 p.m. He sensed someone behind him and turned around.