A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

“They have officers doing that, Adam. They have people who are trained specialists. Where would you even start to look?”

  Adam looked at his shoes. The right foot was tapping again. Harder now. His clothes were a mess. He wore a dress shirt that didn’t fit him properly even when it was tucked in. His slacks were one shade of green and his tweed sport jacket was another. He had balled up his windbreaker and was kneading it in clenched fists, his fingernails digging into the hard fabric. His glasses were a little further down his nose than they were supposed to be and his hair was a disaster. That’s what they cultivate at the universities, after all, Leonard figured. But in the elevator of the Ebbets Field Apartments, Adam Davenport didn’t look like a college professor. He looked like the guy who challenges you to five-dollar chess games in the park. The elevator bell rang. They had reached their floor.

  Leonard guided Adam down the hallway and into the apartment.

  “This is home, Adam. You’re welcome to it.”

  Seeing his place through the eyes of a visitor was always hard for Leonard. The place maxed out at about six hundred square feet, the single bedroom tucked off of the main room. There was nothing to it but a couch and a row of bookshelves. The couch was gray and old and Leonard would probably get rid of it and get a new one if he could ever figure out a way to get it downstairs by himself. The bookshelves were double-stacked, disordered. A life of sitting at home in this tiny space reading to himself, piled up against the wall, no room for a television. A window looked out over the playground. They managed to clean it now and again. You could even see out of it.

  “You can have the bed and I’ll stay in here.”

  Adam was staring out the window, watching kids scrambling over a plastic play structure. Energy. Verve. You could almost hear them. “I can sleep out here. I won’t be in your way.”

  “Whatever you want, Adam. Can I get you something? A glass of water? I have some beer in here somewhere.”

  Adam was still staring at the playground. His body still hung heavy, but his face seemed now so narrow, as though hunks of his cheeks had simply been carved away. He was too startled to cry.

  “No. I’m fine. I’ll manage.”

  “We’re going to do our best, Adam. Detective Mulino will. I will. I know it’s hard but there is nothing you can do right now. You should eat something. You should rest. You can heat up a frozen dinner. Whatever you want from the fridge.” There wasn’t much in the fridge. He guided Adam to the couch and sat him down. “I have to go out. I’m going to keep working on the case. Is your cell phone charged?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will call you if I find anything. Everyone has your number. Detective Mulino, the Missing Persons guys. If anyone finds anything you will hear it.”

  “I know.”

  Leonard had sat the man down, but he couldn’t pump him back to life. Adam Davenport was still a statue. And Leonard wasn’t technically going out to work on the boy’s disappearance. But he didn’t need to tell Adam that. He was going back to Hill and Associates. There was much more to find out now. Leonard was a little worried about leaving Davenport alone, but the windows didn’t open up wide enough to throw yourself out and the guy seemed maybe even a little afraid of going outside. It was the best thing for him. Leonard gave him a pat hard on the back, reminded him to make himself at home, and stole back out into his other life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Working late at Hill and Associates, looking across Brooklyn at the Manhattan skyline, felt somehow right to Leonard. Maybe he would stay. Maybe he could go full private sector: get paid well, pick up the pension in a few years, and manage Eleanor Hill’s empire as it grew. Move out of Ebbets Field. Maybe buy a condo in one of her buildings. Wear nicer suits. Maybe he had already sold out, he thought, scrolling through another set of emails. He didn’t have to give what he was handing over to Mulino. What would the detective do, after all? He hadn’t signed a contract and he wasn’t sure he was actually even being paid. He could call the detective the next day and tell him that he liked his new office, his new job. He had done his term serving the city and it was maybe time to serve himself for a change.

  Then he remembered that there was one man dead and another in the hospital. That a seven-year-old boy had been snatched from the street. And that the only reason he was here, now, scrolling through the servers of Hill and Associates, was to find out if this place had anything to do with it. And if this place had something to do with murder and kidnapping, maybe he didn’t want to work there after all. He had brought a flash drive this time. He pulled documents as quickly as he could. He could always go over them later. He had seen most of the transactions the last time around. There was nothing new there.

  He had been given a generic login when he started, and a generic password: 74Hill. Likely the year she was born. There had been no security on the drives. He had been able to pull out every document he wanted.

  Hopefully, with the lax security, he would be able to get into the email server as well. If he were in, he could read not only Hill’s emails, but anyone’s. When 74Hill didn’t work as her password, he tried Hill74, then 74Eleanor, and finally got through with Eleanor74. His boss was careful about a lot of things, but not so much digital security. He searched for any documents with Wade Valiant’s name and got the usual claptrap: HR forms, tax receipts, payroll. All of which he’d already seen; it was what the company had given over to the PD after the man had died.

  But when he searched the emails, he began to find more, all from just over a year ago. Valiant had been emailing with someone in the back office of Hill and Associates. Bob Armstrong. Leonard didn’t recognize the name. But it didn’t make sense for a site worker to be sending emails to someone in the office. They were all in Armstrong’s account; Valiant didn’t have a company address. Valiant was updating Armstrong on construction progress. What was ahead of schedule. What was behind. Who was keeping up his hours and who was slacking on the job. Maybe, at first, the sort of thing a foreman would report to the back office.

  But the emails back from Armstrong were stranger. It looked as though Armstrong was ordering materials through Valiant: “Get me two tons of one-thirty-second of an inch copper wire for Friday.” Or another: “Delivery at six a.m. Tuesday, glazing panels for four hundred windows.” There was no reason for the corporate office to be ordering supplies from a construction worker. There was no way that Wade Valiant could have procured two tons of copper wire.

  Armstrong had been the chief of operations. Overseeing staff, managing budgets, pushing paper. The job that Leonard had just been hired to do. It had been vacant for over a year. There was a reason, then, that Leonard hadn’t heard of him. But it was only when he searched the emails again, this time looking for anything with Armstrong’s name in it instead of Valiant’s, that he really found something.

  About a year before, Hill and Associates’ outside accountant had noticed a number of anomalies in the financials. The accountant had contacted Armstrong, who wrote back that the clerical errors would be corrected. Then the accountant emailed Eleanor Hill, forwarding Armstrong’s response. Hill had written to a law firm, and that was where the emails got interesting.

  Leonard recognized the name of the firm. It was where Christine Davenport had headed after leaving DIMAC. Where she had gone to conduct quiet internal investigations into the shenanigans of corporate clients. Find the bad apple and report it. Fire the person quickly so that no one has to tell the government. Of course, she had found much more than she had expected to. She had uncovered more than your typical pump-and-dump.

  An investment banker named Veronica Dean had been placing big bets against companies. Gambling that the companies would fail. And the companies—a water taxi firm, a chemical plant, a string of restaurants—had each suffered a catastrophe just after the investor had placed the bet. Davenport had confronted the traders. She had been on her way to solving the whole conspiracy. But then she had been killed. And only Veronica Dean had gotten a
way.

  Leonard turned back to the emails in front of him. There had been no grand conspiracy this time around. The law firm had run the numbers from the accountant. It had requested records; it had put its best minds to the problem. And it had figured out what the accountants had suggested from the very beginning. Robert Armstrong had been stealing from the company. The orders emailed to Valiant were fakes. Also on the system were a series of dummy invoices: extra wiring, plumbing materials, steel, glass, and concrete. When you are putting up a forty-story condo building, an extra two tons of copper wiring is easy to miss. Armstrong had been paying the fake invoices with company money and collecting on the other end. Probably paid a cut to Valiant for being the beard. Maybe Valiant didn’t even understand the scope of the scam. There are plenty of guys on the sites who will walk off with extra plaster for their home repairs, after all. It’s the cost of doing business.

  In all, Armstrong had walked about a quarter-million dollars out the door. A big hit, but not so much that the company would have to report it publicly. Just tell your investors why the dividend is going to be a little smaller this quarter. Make a claim on the insurance, pay the lawyers, and fire the guy quietly. Turning him in to the police would mean that he’d be charged. If he were charged, that would be public. And that kind of publicity is bad for business. So Eleanor Hill, Leonard pieced together, had swallowed her pride and done what was needed. Gotten rid of Armstrong and made it a clean slate. Valiant hadn’t even been fired. But someone had spoken to him, surely. And Eleanor must have known who he was when he turned up dead. Another thing she should have told the police.

  The emails back and forth to the law firm, however, were not from Christine Davenport. There was a different lawyer involved. It seemed from reading through the correspondence that it was just a coincidence. A run-of-the-mill case to a bunch of suits in a midtown tower. No police angle. No reason to notify the new hire that something unusual was going on.

  Leonard looked out the narrow window, over the heap of downtown Brooklyn and across the river to the bright towers of Wall Street. It was late, but the lights were on in Lower Manhattan. Leonard figured that most of it was show. They kept the hallways and the offices lit for the janitorial services that came through at night, and to make the rest of the city think, when they looked up at the office buildings from their plates of gnocchi at the outdoor café, that the bankers must work really hard. They must really deserve their compensation. Leonard was alone in his building. No one else in this tower was working late—and Leonard realized that he wasn’t even working at what was supposed to be his real job. He had found out some small scandal after all. There had been some real dirt inside Hill and Associates. Some theft. And maybe something Wade Valiant had done a year ago had come back to haunt him on the job site. But Leonard was tired. And from all appearances, the embezzler had been cleaned up and sent packing.

  He had a thought before shutting down and logging out. He wanted to make sure that Christine Davenport hadn’t been involved in the law firm’s investigation after all. She hadn’t shown up as sending any email from the firm, but there was no harm in running her name to see if anyone had mentioned her. He put in her full name; there were no emails on the server with a hit. Just to check, he tried Christine. There were a couple of hundred—he read the first two and realized they were about someone else. It would be too much of a slog. Maybe, though, just the last name. And when he tried that, he got a single hit.

  It was a strange email. Short and to the point: “Robert. We have to be careful. There is a lawyer out there named Davenport. She has been investigating us. She has figured too much out already. Call me.”

  The first thing that was strange about the email was the fact that it mentioned Davenport even though she hadn’t been investigating Armstrong at all. The second thing that was strange about the email was the fact that it meant Armstrong had been tipped off. It was sent a full week before he was fired, in the middle of August the year before. But neither of those were the strangest thing about the email. The strangest thing about the email was who it was from.

  Because it was from Veronica Dean.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Ralph Mulino spread the papers over his desk. All six of them had the Davenport kid on the front page. Both tabloids, two free subway papers, the Staten Island Advance, and even the Times, though in that case, “front page” meant front page of the Metro section. Mulino noticed that the Daily News had a little more meat on Davenport himself: he worked on the community board, he had clashed with the protesters, he had clashed with the developers. That’s the thing about being reasonable in a political fight. Both sides decide you’re against them. If any of Adam Davenport’s so-called enemies had taken it upon themselves to kidnap his son in retribution, they would be sweating a little now.

  The long night before hadn’t seemed to do any good. One homeowner after another had been just about like Ms. Gray. They liked Adam. They liked the boy. He was new, but he was welcome. That’s the way it was on the townhouse blocks. They don’t want any new buildings, but they don’t have any grief with the people buying the ones that are already there. If people from Manhattan are driving up prices, that only means that there are better comps for their own places. Whether they plan to sell and use the proceeds to retire to Florida or hang on until they pass and leave the place to their kids doesn’t matter. They all mentioned that he hadn’t bought his raffle tickets for the block party yet. But none of them seemed worried to be visited by a detective. None of them gave any of the usual tells: cutting him off, trying to leave, acting too defensive or too outraged. The whole block had calmly condescended to him, recognizing that he was subtly accusing them without stooping to actually feeling accused.

  Missing Persons had spared two uniforms for the hotline. It was ringing to OCCB, and the uniforms were madly jotting down every call that came in. Since it had been in the papers, they were ringing steadily all morning. One guy in Ocean Hill said he had taken the child and eaten him. Someone from Bedford Park promised she knew where he was—she’d had a vision, and the boy was being held in a log cabin somewhere outside of Poughkeepsie. The boy had been seen, apparently, in Coney Island, Highbridge, the American Museum of Natural History, Tottenville, Brownsville, and Phoenix. The general public was always eager to seem important, even if it meant confessing to a heinous crime or coming across as a full-fledged loony. The uniforms handed the tips to Mulino to review before phoning them to the detectives working the case. You had to work more of them than you wanted to, though, because if it turns out that the one you scrap is the real lead, and the boy ends up dead, you are an easy fall guy. But Mulino figured it was safe to hold off on sending anyone to Phoenix.

  The two new uniforms at the cubicle only drove home the fact that he was without his own detectives. Peralta had been sent to work with the murder squad and hadn’t so much as called in. Ambitious, that one. Maybe she would prove something to those guys and they’d take her on full time. But the homicide detectives were old, hardened, and most of them were at least a little bit racist. They’d take Peralta on because they were told to for this case, and because after all she had been working it. But Mulino figured she’d be back in a couple of days, with the murder solved or not. Bruder, he couldn’t fathom. His overtime paperwork was on his desk, along with a note reminding Mulino that he was on an eight-days-on, two-days-off schedule. Today and tomorrow were his regular days off. And why would he put aside his personal time just because there is a missing child out there waiting to be found, hopefully still alive. Bruder acted as though he were working at the DMV.

  “Did you see Licata in the Daily News?”

  Leonard Mitchell was hovering in the doorway. Mulino gestured to the papers spread across his desk. “I saw all of them.”

  “It should get us some movement.”

  “I dunno, Len. I hit a lot of the activists yesterday. I don’t like them for this. What would be the point? Guy’s not going to change his vote be
cause you scare him.”

  “He might move to New Jersey.”

  “Then you just get another new one in his house.”

  “Anything come in on the hotline? Anyone offering a ransom?”

  “Only forty or fifty of them.”

  Leonard stepped inside the office. He closed the door behind him, gentle but secure. “I was at Hill and Associates last night. I’ve got to go in now, too. But I found some things out. I don’t know how much it means to the kid being taken. But it has something to do with Valiant.”

  “I’m listening.”

  As Leonard spoke, it all started to come together for Mulino. Someone corrupt at the real estate firm. Lining his pockets, but at the same time working with Veronica Dean. Feeding her information on the bad deals, maybe. So she would know which pension funds were taking on risk. Small little bets for a speculator to make. Or he was helping her with the sabotage. Wasn’t one of the little disasters from last summer a crane collapse too? Maybe this wasn’t Robert Armstrong’s first trip down the road.

  Mulino still had questions. “So where is this guy now? They fired him, what’s happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to try to find out from Eleanor.”

  “See if you can do that without tipping her off.”

  “This guy has something to do with Valiant dying. Valiant was in on the fraud. Did Eleanor mention that the guy who died was helping her director of operations steal from the company all last year?”

  “No. She didn’t tell us much about him at all.”

  Leonard looked vindicated. “I didn’t think so.”

  Mulino leaned back in his chair. Once you’re in charge, any pushback feels like insubordination. “Look, Len. I’m working on the missing kid right now. Valiant is important, but tomorrow he is still going to be dead. If I have the chance to find Adam’s boy, then tomorrow we have good news. So go in to work, do what you have to. Figure out anything you can. But when you figure it out, call Detective Peralta. She’s on the murder. I don’t mean to be a pain about it. But I’ve got four hundred tips to go through on the missing kid. And none of them look like they are any good to me, but it’s all we have so I guess I’ve got to do that.”