Vendetta

by Nancy Holder

  “Yes.” J.T. cleared his throat. “That is what I ordered, because that is what I want to drink.”

  “It’s cool, man. I’ll just go check on that.”

  His beer came and he petulantly sipped it. Someone at the next table over ordered the popcorn-ball sundae and J.T. wondered why that was considered to be cooler than a light beer.

  He was on his second beer when Tess and Cat came back. The thrill of their victory was tempered with some consternation, which they explained to him: security footage had revealed Claudia McEvers and Angelo DeMarco here, together, arguing. Clues were always good, hence the thrill of victory. But their consternation was due to the fact that they had decided they had to tell the two FBI agents whom they didn’t trust about the footage. They had to stay on the books. It would be an easy thing for Robertson or Gonzales to check with Turntable and discover that NYPD had already been by, but had not bothered to let them know what they had found.

  “What were they arguing about?” J.T. asked.

  “We don’t know,” Tess said. “There was no audio, and no one we’ve interviewed so far witnessed the fight. So we need to canvass the club.”

  “Can I help?” he asked, but Tess shook her head.

  “We have to do this one a hundred percent kosher.”

  Then they talked to the other patrons and the waiters, showing them Angelo’s photograph. The club was filling up, and soon he lost sight of them in the crowd. He watched the guy who had ordered the popcorn sundae make a face and push it away. With some petty satisfaction, J.T. ordered another beer. He listened to surf music and got out his smartphone, performing a net search for Tori Windsor’s funeral. Her death had been kept out of the papers, so it was no surprise to him that he could find no information about a service or internment. He did searches on Angelo DeMarco and the rest of the DeMarco family, but only came up with superficial stories about their charity work and business dealings. All of it was very dry and gave no insight into what they were like as people… kind of like Claudia McEvers’ apartment.

  “Zilch,” Tess announced about an hour later as she and Cat sat down at J.T.’s table. “I decree that we are now off-duty.” She waved a hand for service.

  Then Cowabunga Chris appeared with a tray containing two Mexican beers decorated with lime wedges, two shots of tequila, and a salt shaker.

  “Compliments of Surfer Joe.”

  “Nice,” Tess said, clinking bottles with Cat. “Hang ten.” Then she placed the bottle to J.T.’s lips, tipped it back, and he swallowed down some beer. She held up the lime wedge and the shot. He opened his mouth and it all went down the hatch. She beamed at him.

  “Good, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And think how good your coffee will be with the French press.” She yawned. “I’m dead. I need to get some sleep.”

  “So, you can come back to my place,” he ventured. He was still shy about inviting her.

  She yawned again. “I’m really tired… and it’s awfully far away.”

  He was disappointed, but he tried not to show it.

  Then she grinned her mischievous Tess grin at him. She patted the French press. “My place is closer. So what do you say we break in this bad boy in my kitchen?”

  J.T. felt as if his head had just exploded. He had never been to Tess’s apartment ever. He didn’t even know the address.

  “That’d be great.”

  Tess put her arms around his neck. “Cowabunga,” she whispered.

  * * *

  Cat went home to an empty apartment, no return messages, and made herself go to bed. Investigations were equal parts maximum overdrive and hurry-up-and-wait, and she owed it Angelo DeMarco to rest up when she could so that she’d be on the money when it was time.

  Vincent didn’t show, didn’t call. They had left things in such a weird place, he standing before Tori’s grave and she having sent him there. Vincent often shut down when he was dealing with strong emotions—or not dealing with them—and when he did, there was no space for her. He was aware of it and he was trying to change. Years of living in hiding, protecting a terrible secret, had shaped him just as her mother’s murder had shaped her. Tess and J.T. were their trusted confidantes, but these horrible things had not happened to them.

  Cat knew exactly what it felt like to watch someone who loved you die right before your eyes. She stared at the ceiling, trying not to see all the blood gushing from her mom’s wounds, or Tori’s bloodless pallor after Sam Landon’s henchman had drained her dry. She remembered something one of her instructors at the police academy had told her: “If you become a cop, you will see terrible things, unbelievable things, and you will not have the luxury of looking away. You will have to examine, study, and memorize gory, awful details. They will be your clues, your cases. You owe it to the public, the people you will swear to serve at your graduation, to know that you can stare straight into hell. If you can’t, then you should not be a cop. You should walk away now, no harm, no foul.”

  She and Tess both had stayed.

  “And we’re still here,” she murmured. “We’ll find you, Angelo.”

  * * *

  Blackness.

  No, moonlight on snow.

  As Gabe raised his head, something slid off his face—a blanket—and he pulled himself up to his elbows and looked out over the frozen lake. Painfully he rolled over onto one side and inspected the silhouette of the Ellison lake house. It appeared to be intact, although he knew that the skylight, at least, had been destroyed.

  There was a rock beside his elbow. And something white beneath it. Disoriented, he moved the rock and picked up the white thing, which was a piece of paper. He tried to read it but it was too dark. He scooted in the snow, realizing that he was half-frozen, until the moonlight hit the words on the page, written in black marker.

  I AM SAFE. TURNED LASERS ON. DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE. LEFT YOUR CAR IN GARAGE. GET OUT OF THERE ASAP I WILL CONTACT 21992

  He felt in his pockets to find his wallet, phone and car keys. His blood was beginning to pump faster; he grabbed onto a pine tree and pulled himself up. The world swam and the lake slid onto its side. He took a moment to assess his surroundings, listening for telltale movement, and heard only the rush of the wind.

  The beautiful Bugatti—or what was left of it—was a charred hulk facing away from the garage, as if it had started to drive off and then caught on fire.

  “No, Celeste,” he whispered.

  Staying to the shadows, he staggered to the garage and studied the closed doors for a moment before making the connection that 21992 was the key code. The one he thought he had memorized. He punched it in and the same garage door they had used rose up.

  He smiled.

  She had taken the Rolls. The Morgan was still in the garage. She must have had the presence of mind to drive the Bugatti out and douse it with gasoline or some other accelerant. They must not have looked too hard for bodies.

  Unless she had had some contingency for that. He smiled grimly at the thought.

  And there was Shannon’s sedan, unharmed. He clicked it open and slid in, utterly baffled. What had happened? He cautiously backed out, then turned the car around, braced at every juncture for an attack.

  He didn’t know how he found his way to the paved road, and from there to Preston, but he did. He wanted to take a break but the little village was shut down for the night and he was still afraid of an ambush.

  He started the drive to New York City—six hours—checking his phone for messages. Finally one came in, from Celeste.

  I have the pin.

  He swore, then reminded himself that he was lucky to be alive. The pin had been a freebie… or, as he had suspected, some kind of lure. He still didn’t know Celeste’s part in all of this—if she had been an innocent bystander, somehow complicit—

  To people crashing into her house and shooting at her?

  But… he didn’t think that they had hit her.

  Gabe kept driving, though he felt
eyes on him, guns pointed at him. The fear was replaced by anger. The anger by a promise.

  Whoever did this is going to pay.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Cat and Tess met at the precinct the next morning and Tess made a show of guzzling the contents of her travel mug and smacking her lips.

  “The French press is it,” she proclaimed. “But I have even better news. We got up super-early because we couldn’t stop thinking about your Rikers smear job and we went to J.T.’s place. He was able to look at the raw footage from the range of dates you gave him. It turns out that you see a whole bunch of information when the recording initializes. Whoever slapped that fake date and time stamp on that footage forget to erase a line of code visible during initialization that includes the actual date and time. Which was about six months ago. Which is when you said it was taken. It is irrefutable proof that it is not from the night before last and that someone is trying to frame you.”

  “Whoa, J.T.!” Cat high-fived Tess.

  “So while he was doing that, I decided to look at Robertson and Gonzales. They’ve had numerous complaints lodged against them. IA cases that were inconclusive. But the evidence suggests that we are dealing with two very dirty, mobbed-up FBI agents.”

  Cat considered. “Did you find anything that could link them to Reynolds? Or even Muirfield?”

  “Not yet. But I got their addresses, and Robertson’s house is a little closer than Gonzales’. Maybe we should take a little drive, see if there’s anything to see.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Just then, Cat’s landline intercom buzzed. It was the main switchboard. She pressed the connect button. “Yes?” “There’s a Claudia McEvers on line one, detective.”

  Cat and Tess just looked at each other. Then Cat said, “I’ll take it.” She gestured for Tess to listen in on her own landline. “This is Detective Chandler.” “What the hell did you tell those two?” Claudia hissed.

  Cat decided to be as forthright as possible and see what shook out. “We said that we saw security footage of you at Turntable with Angelo, and it looked like you were fighting.”

  The woman swore. Colorfully. Tess, who was listening in, pretended to plug her ears.

  “Okay, I have to meet with you,” the woman said. “I have information you should know.”

  I hope it includes an explanation of what Angelo was giving you money for.

  “Can you tell it to me over the phone?” Cat pulled back her chair to sit at her desk so she could type.

  “No. Only face-to-face. And only if you swear not to tell Robertson and Gonzales that you are coming to see me. After we talk, you can decide what to do.”

  That sounded promising. And a little ominous.

  “All right. Where?”

  “There’s a diner near the Javits Center,” McEvers said. “It’s called Mars. By the water. When can you meet me?”

  Cat typed in “Mars Diner” and found the address. She checked her schedule and Tess gave her a shrug indicating that she had no hard appointments. “Forty-five minutes,” Cat said, and Tess nodded. That allowed for delays and traffic. There was a lot of construction going on in the area.

  Claudia grunted disapproval. “Sooner would be better but I’ll make it work. Don’t bring anybody but your partner. I see you with the Feebs, any other PD, or DeMarco’s people, I’m leaving.”

  “Are you in danger?” She caught Tess’s eye and Tess raised her brows.

  There was no reply from McEvers. Cat figured that meant yes.

  “Do you want protection? If you can give us some indication of—”

  “See you in forty-five minutes.” McEvers hung up.

  “Wow,” Cat said.

  “Awesome,” Tess shot back.

  They got their purses and coats, and soon Cat was negotiating the traffic.

  “I swear these are the exact same vehicles we were inching along with during the blackout,” Cat said. She pointed at a boarded-up storefront window. “I hope those guys were properly insured.”

  “I’m dying to get the skinny on the blackout,” Tess murmured. “I wonder what’s up with Claudia.”

  “She didn’t need to check her schedule to meet up with us. If she doesn’t have the day off, maybe she’s been fired. Or on the run.”

  “I noticed that too,” Tess said. “Look.”

  She pointed to a white storefront with a neon sign of a bumpy planet surface with the word Mars shooting in 3D letters from the planet’s surface. mars was also painted in futuristic 3D letters around the front window.

  They could double-park in the street but traffic was heavy. Much of the parking in the area had been cordoned off because of the construction, but they found a police-legal place to stash the squad car and got out. They walked into the diner, which had a sci-fi theme, the walls painted bright red with a mobile of planets hanging from the ceiling and oilcloth on the tables stamped with 1950s rocket ships. A cute Japanese couple was sitting at one of the tables and a woman was seated by herself with a large pile of paper at her elbow. There was a row of stools at the counter and behind it stood a girl dressed in a silver space-commander top complete with blue epaulets texting on her phone.

  There was no Claudia McEvers, in other words. Cat checked the time on her phone. They were fifteen minutes early.

  It began to snow, coming down pretty heavy.

  They took the table farthest from the door so they could have privacy. They sat undisturbed for five minutes. The texting girl came over and they ordered a couple of sodas. That held them for another ten minutes. Then Tess added an order of “Rings of Saturn,” and the order came up five minutes later—a startling stack of onion rings. Tess looked worriedly at Cat.

  “I’m ordering onion rings. Nerd food. Oh, my God. Be honest. Am I turning into a nerd?”

  Cat cocked her head. “A cross-species DNA mutation may have commenced.”

  Tess dipped an onion ring into the ketchup. “This is nerd food, Cat. It’s fat and salt. Add sugar, and those are the food groups.”

  Cat smiled and pulled out her phone. McEvers was now ten minutes late. Cat got up to check the bathroom and wandered down the hall toward the kitchen. A door led outside and she pushed it open. Sheltered from the snow by an awning, a young red-haired man in a white apron was sitting on the concrete steps smoking a cigarette. He looked very startled, put out the cigarette, and flashed her a very uncertain smile.

  Hmm, she thought. What was that all about? Just a simple case of smoker’s guilt? Maybe he was trying to quit.

  She shut the door and went back to the table. Before Tess had a chance to suggest it, she dialed McEvers’ number. It rang at least twenty times, but there was no voicemail. They called the precinct to see if they had any messages and checked the voicemail on their desk phones. No McEvers.

  “Yeah, I’m getting concerned, too,” Tess said, reading Cat’s mind, as good partners did.

  Cat stared at the onion rings. About half of them were gone. “You’ve eaten a few of these, right? Maybe you’re pregnant.”

  She ducked as Tess made a fist.

  Then Tess slid out of the booth. “I’ll look around.”

  Tess went out the front door. Cat waited. The cute Japanese couple paid and left. The woman with all the pages of paper was nursing a cup of coffee.

  Tess came back, shaking snowflakes off her coat and taking off her knit hat. She reported that she had nothing to report. It occurred to them that it was actually lunchtime and they ordered two cheeseburgers, which seemed to annoy the texting girl, who took it out on the other diner by pretending not to see her requests for more coffee.

  “Okay, so no-show. Won’t be the first time,” Tess said, “but I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  “So do we call G and R?” Cat asked. Tess scowled. “We can say that we heard from her. That’s all.”

  “Okay.” Tess nodded.

  Cat called Gonzales. He picked up.

  “Hi, this is Detective Chandler. We were wondering i
f there was any follow-up on that security footage from the Turntable.”

  “Oh, sorry, we forgot to get back to you on that,” Gonzales said. “We interviewed McEvers. She said she was there as his bodyguard that night and he had a couple of drinks. That was the cause of the argument. Mr. DeMarco terminated her and she left.”

  Cat’s brows shot up. “When was this?”

  “About three hours ago. Something go down on your end?”

  “Yeah, she called us and she wasn’t happy, but she wouldn’t say why. She said she wanted to meet us but we haven’t heard from her since.” She winced at the almost-lie-by-omission, and Tess nodded encouragingly. “Do you have another number for her? We’d like to see if we can get anything more out of her.”

  “So would we, but we can’t find her,” Gonzales said. “What number did she give you?”

  Cat’s bad feeling got worse. She read him the number. He said, “That’s what we’ve got.” He thought a moment. “Now we have probable cause to go in without her permission.”

  We already went in without her permission, she thought.

  Cat said, “Okay, well—”

  “Hold on.”

  He went away for so long that she thought about hanging up. Tess looked at her questioningly, Cat shrugged, and they both waited.

  “We just got another ransom note. It says Angelo’s not feeling so good. It’s one point five million now.”

  “How did it arrive?” Cat asked, and Tess sat forward. Cat held the phone out so Tess could hear.

  “It was sent to Angelo’s email account.”

  “The IP address—”

  “Scrambled. It ricocheted all over the world. To Mars and back.”

  Mars. She and Tess stared across the phone at each other at his use of the word. Coincidence? Some kind of code? A test?

  “Hello?” It was Tony DeMarco. “Did he tell you what just happened here?” “Yes, Mr. DeMarco,” Cat said. “You know we’re doing everything we can, sir—”

  “No, I don’t know that!” he shouted. “I find out my security detail’s been letting my diabetic son get drunk in bars and sneaking around God-knows-where and no one has a clue where he is!” He trailed off in a flurry of expletives.