The lieutenant wanted to know what was going on in the squad room. Gelo ran through the list in her head. A drunk who'd exposed himself one time too many on Broadway had been brought in by two uniforms and was now in the holding cell, sobering up. Three detectives were out on cases. The unit secretary was yelling at someone on the phone in Spanish. And Hagedorn, making a pitiful attempt at some form of human interaction, was staring at her breasts. Everything was copacetic.
"It's quiet, boss. Where are you?" she replied.
"We've got a homicide on Fifty-second Street," the lieutenant replied.
"We do?" Eloise was shocked. No one had called it in.
"Yeah, East Side."
"Oh." Maybe somebody's homicide, but not theirs. "Who is it?" she asked.
"A young mother. Madeleine Wilson, that restaurant guy's wife."
"Oh fuck. That's too bad."
"Eloise, the language," Woo retorted.
"Sorry, sir," Eloise replied cheerfully. April Woo was a sir to her.
"Look, I'm going to be stuck here awhile," Woo went on.
"Are you working the case?" Eloise took the chance of asking something her boss might not want to tell. She'd never heard of a detective unit CO working a homicide in another precinct.
"No, no," the lieutenant said easily. "I'm just on a look-see."
"Uh-huh." It still didn't sound right to her, but she knew things were not exactly regular in this particular unit.
Eloise tapped her fingernails on the table, and Hagedorn chose that moment to lift his eyes from her breasts to her face and stretch his goofy mouth into a lopsided grin. She rolled her eyes. "You there, boss?"
"Yeah, I want you to work on the Peret case. Find out where the kid went, who served him booze, where he got the drugs, the whole thing. Check his credit card records for that. He may have charged it. Then talk to the girls."
"Sounds good to me," Eloise said.
"I'll fill you in later. Call me if anything comes up."
"Sure thing, boss."
The phone went dead, and Eloise hung up elated. This was the kind of thing she'd returned to the bureau for. If she couldn't be in a counterterror unit, at least she could do something useful until she got what she wanted. "The boss is working a homicide in the Seventeenth," she told Charlie.
Hagedorn mugged surprise. "No kidding."
"That a usual thing?" From the moment that Gelo been assigned this unit, she'd been anxious about working for Woo/Sanchez. Her boss was famous, but not exactly known for being a team player. Going in, she knew that she had a lot to live up to. Charlie took a minute more to stare at her before giving her a serious answer.
"Her husband Mike is the precinct CO; he probably asked for her."
"Of course, I knew that." She knew they were married, anyway, and that they'd worked together in the past. What it all meant for her career, however, was still the big question.
Eloise Gelo had moved up and was in her first few weeks of having an office with a door to call her own. She was still basking in the glory of the promotion, and simultaneously disappointed not to be playing a role in defending the city against the biggest bad guys. The door was nice, but the top half of it was glass, so anyone could look in and see what she was doing at any time. Sometimes the males in the unit stood around, pretending to be having a conversation, but actually gawking at her.
What was the big deal? She was a female, but Woo was a woman, too, and they didn't gawk at her. Eloise looked for a pen to jot down her orders. "Damn." Her pen was missing. She was sure she'd been using it only a few minutes ago.
"Did you take my pen?"
Hagedorn snorted.
"Give it back."
He laughed, but not in an unfriendly way. "I didn't take it. Here, use mine." He held his out, but she ignored the offer.
"Somebody did." She rooted around in her drawer for another one. She'd bought a box of pens only last week, but people seemed to enjoy taking her stuff as a kind of joke. She kept some red nail polish in there to annoy the alternate second whip, an asshole by the name of Tony Bobb, who couldn't seem to get over her being his equal. Tony Bobb was an anal kind of guy half her size and twice her weight, who didn't want to be perceived as a nelly. She always left a lot girlie stuff around in her space to bug him. The red nail polish was still there. It distracted her as she searched for a pen and worried about not being able to fill her new boss's shoes.
Gelo had worked for a lot of male officers, but had never worked for a woman. April Woo Sanchez was unreadable, quite the opposite of herself. Eloise was out there, a straight-up kind of person. She talked out of the side of her mouth like a tough guy, had a conspicuous mane of blond curls, which she piled up on the top of her head, wore bright red lipstick and clingy clothes. She had the figure for it and a name to make a girl cry. Wherever she went, in the department and out of it, she got attention. A lot of it—particularly the kind from asshole officers of every rank—was unwelcome. Eloise Gelo had her own philosophy about her style: I ain't changing for no one. I am who I am. Get used to it. Both the attitude and the name caused her a fair amount of grief from people she didn't give a shit about.
From time to time, however, she got the attention of someone worthy of her respect. Back in'97, when she'd been a detective third grade, her path crossed with that of Lieutenant Steve Whipet, a former marine who was CO of the chopper unit. She was smitten by him right away. Maybe it was the marine thing, a cowboy kind of allure—the short blond hair, the ramrod posture. The take-charge, I-can-get-it-done attitude. Whatever.
Their paths crossed when she was on a team that needed a bird in the sky to reach a suspect up in the Bronx. Whipet also had a name to contend with. She liked that about him. He was introduced to her as the guy who'd rescued a bunch of people from the roof of the World Trade Center. Back then, there had been only one World Trade Center bombing. And taking a pregnant woman off the tower had been a big deal.
Whipet recruited her from the Detective Bureau and challenged her to take flying lessons. She became the first female copter pilot in NYPD. A lot of people weren't too happy about it, but she never let negativity get in her way. She was good at whatever job she had, and she and Steve had some fun for a while. But he changed after the Fire Department made a rule to shut down access to all tall rooftops in the city. He became a worried man.
After the first tower bombing, the powers that be had decided it was too hard and too dangerous to evacuate people from above. So, in a massive sweep, they'd locked all the roof doors of the office towers in the whole city. Whipet feared that an event on a lower floor anywhere could create a death trap for those working on the higher floors. And that was what happened in the second World Trade Center attack. Everybody above the sixty-fifth floor had no exit. Eloise had been in one of the birds, hovering just out of reach of the hundreds of people frying inside. She hadn't been at the controls, but she'd been there.
In the forty minutes before the first building collapsed, she'd seen the faces of desperate people as they broke the windows to jump out eighty, ninety, a hundred floors above the street. Whipet knew the building well, and it drove him nuts thinking of the dozens of people trapped on the stairs leading to the roof—locked inside where he could not get to them. His unit had been warned off by the FD and by his PD bosses. They didn't want those choppers to burst into flame, trying to save people they felt couldn't be saved. But Steve had believed that he could have rescued some people. While he'd been in the air; he'd shot a bunch of photos. He had his opinions about what he could have done if they'd been allowed to land on the roof.
Afterward, he'd come down to earth to work the site and deferred his retirement for months. Even after he was out, he returned there from time to time. And he still believed that more could have been done. Both he and Eloise continued to have nightmares about it, and the relationship ended. Two years ago Steve bailed for good. He retired from the Department and went somewhere far away with the wife he always said he'd never much li
ked. He and Eloise didn't keep in touch anymore.
After a fruitless search in her drawer for the missing pens, Eloise finally gave up looking. Hagedorn was still offering the one from his pocket, so she took it. "Thanks."
"What does she want?" he asked about the Woo conversation.
"Oh, she wants us to investigate the Peret case, find out where he went, how he got in, who served him booze. And of course where he got the blow."
"This doesn't sound like our kind of case. Are we going after the clubs?" Charlie said excitedly.
"Not clear." Eloise didn't know what else to answer.
"It sounds pretty clear to me. Lieutenant Woo went downtown this morning. The chief has her on something." He rubbed his hands together. "This is great. We've been too easy on these creeps. The plastic trail should make a good start. We could shut them down."
"Right," she said quickly. She was new to the job. She had no idea what he was talking about. Did precinct units do club raids?
"Also his cell phone. His incoming and outgoing calls might place him inside one of the clubs, or more than one. We could get lucky there." Hagedorn was already on it.
"Check," she said. "You work on the credit cards, and I'll see what we can do about that phone."
Charlie returned to his computer, and Gelo tapped her fingers on the pen, wondering when Woo might get back to the shop and tell her what was going on.
Eleven
Come on, little girl. Make it easy on yourself.
These are your knives, aren't they?"
Remy shook her head. The detective with the crappy diet was now calling her "little girl." She hated this guy. She'd already told him they weren't her knives.
"They belong to the kitchen," she said wearily.
"Cam-onnn." His New York accent was an assault from which there was no retreat. "Cam-onnn, answer the question. Are they all here, or are there more?"
"I ... don't . . . know," she said very slowly. "This is Wayne's kitchen. I don't keep track of everything he brings home."
And that was another thing that was upsetting her. Why wasn't Wayne here? Why wasn't he answering these questions? A pile of plastic bags covered the long kitchen counter. Each one had a knife in it. There were seven cleavers of varying sizes, ten butcher knives. Six carving knives of different lengths, some of them very long. More than a dozen paring knives, with and without serrated edges. They were his knives, so why did she have to answer for them? Frankly Remy was shocked by how many there were. She'd known there were a lot of knives in the house. It was certainly clear that Wayne was a fanatic about them. He had his own sets, one at home and one in his car, that he wouldn't let anyone else use. In addition to those, manufacturers sent him new knives to test out in hopes of getting an endorsement. Sometimes he brought these home, too. Altogether it turned out to be a big number to account for.
She made a disgusted noise. Until today the knives had always been beautiful tools to her. Just that morning after she'd washed up the breakfast dishes, the stainless steel blades had been shiny and the handles as dry as she'd left them the night before. She liked things clean. Since then, all the knives had been removed from the various drawers and locations where they were kept. They'd been labeled and bagged, and she knew they were headed for a laboratory somewhere to determine who had touched them and if there were traces of Maddy's blood on any of them. They all had Remy's fingerprints on them—that was a given.
"I told you I was in here the whole time. No one would have been able to come in and put them back," she said irritably.
Sergeant Minnow cleared his throat. "What did you say your duties are, little girl?"
"I told you a dozen times. I'm the cook." Remy wasn't changing that story.
"I thought you were the babysitter."
"I look after the kids sometimes, but that doesn't make me a babysitter."
"You took them to school this morning."
"Yes."
"Did you do that to be with Mr. Wilson?"
"Please." She made an impatient gesture.
"I asked you a question."
"I went with him because he asked me to," she said sharply.
"Do you do everything Mr. Wilson asks?" Minnow said this with a straight face and a suggestive tone.
Remy didn't see it corning. She didn't see a lot of what he said coming. She closed her eyes.
"Would you do anything he asked you?" he repeated.
She scratched the side of her nose. "No," she replied.
"Oh, what wouldn't you do?"
"He wouldn't ask—" she started to speak, then shut her mouth. She didn't want to say any more about what Wayne wouldn't ask. He'd asked her to make up with Maddy and to keep quiet about their relationship. She didn't want to talk about him.
"Okay, little girl, play it your own way. But we're going to find out everything anyway. We're going to rip this thing wide open, so you might as well come clean."
She didn't say anything.
He softened his voice. "So you're the cook and you don't know how many knives are in your kitchen. Cam-onnn. You expect me to believe that?"
Finally Remy spoke. "Look, this is a kitchen for a bigger staff. There are duplicates of everything. Wayne brings knives and other equipment home to test. We got a lot of stuff here." She shrugged.
He wanted to talk about knives. She could talk about knives.
"Well, look at them carefully."
She looked at the awesome array. "I've never seen some of these," she murmured truthfully.
"Which ones?"
She sat back, putting distance between them. She didn't want to poke at the blades inside their little plastic cases. She wished she could shut down against this whole stupid barrage. Her body ached to close in around itself and seal off the trauma. Her eyelids drooped. "Give me a break," she muttered.
"A nice lady died here in a very shitty way. She fought hard for her life. Nobody gave her a break." The detective started cracking his knuckles loudly. He sounded mad enough to start breaking hers.
"I found her. I wish I hadn't. But I don't know anything else." Remy held back her tears.
She'd been dog-tired a thousand times in her life. Fatigue was an old enemy. Anybody who'd ever manned a grill or a fry station during peak hours in a popular restaurant knew the dangers of fatigue. People got hurt when their attention wandered. Every line cook had to fight it, and everyone had his own way to cope. Cocaine, alcohol, amphetamines were the commonest combatants. Or coffee. Diet Coke, Cigarettes. They were all addicted to something. Remy's thing was Coke, the liquid kind. Since the cops started taking turns with her hours ago, she'd swallowed down almost a case of Diet Cokes. But the caffeine hadn't helped her. She didn't feel a kick, a buzz, anything. The questions kept coming, and she didn't want to give' in just because she was tired. She knew Wayne hadn't done it, and didn't think Derek could have, so who else was there?
"How about these?" he demanded.
White lights flashed in her eyes as Minnow pushed the plastic bags aside and added six more to the collection on the marble counter. These, Remy knew, were hers. Her precious knives, which she'd bought before she met Wayne, had cost over a hundred dollars each. They'd been removed from their newspaper wrapping, and like the others, they'd been bagged and labeled. The sight of her beloved tools, hostage to a murder investigation, was more than a little frightening. She had a sinking feeling that she wouldn't be seeing them again anytime soon. "They're mine," she admitted miserably.
Behind her, the wall phone kept ringing. She'd been told not to pick it up, but she wished someone would. Her head was spinning with all the noise and activity in the house. It made her so nervous how police were working the house, packing things up in boxes and taking them out. She didn't know what they were taking. They kept moving her around so she couldn't see what they were doing and took turns talking to her. Sometimes there were two of them, sometimes one. The Chinese woman who'd been nice to her earlier was gone. Several men in civilian clothes looked a
s if they didn't have anything to do. They stood around talking on their cell phones. Nobody asked her the right questions.
"What were they doing in your knapsack?" The annoying detective forced her to pay attention to him.
What were her own knives doing in her own knapsack? What a dumb question. Remy drew in her breath. "I had a class," she said.
"Oh yeah, what kind of class?"
"I told you I go to cooking school. We use our own knives there."
"You carry them back and forth?"
She nodded.
"What class did you have?"
She took another breath. "Butchering."
He let out a nervous giggle as if it were some kind of sick joke. "No kidding. What kind?' '
"All kinds. I could butcher a cow if I had to. A pig, a lamb. A chef has to know the cuts of meat." She knew her cuts.
"You know what I think? I think you know a lot more about this murder than you're letting on, little girl."
"I know a lot about food," she said miserably. She glanced at the wall clock, wondering who was going to pick up the children. "Can I go now?"
He shook his head. She sighed and asked for another Diet Coke.
Twelve
By the time April emerged from the Wilson house, the number of Department vehicles had diminished and the number of eager reporters had grown. It took her a few seconds to locate Woody in the crowd. He was buried in a clot of bystanders across the street, talking with a pretty, dark-haired girl in charge of a heavily laden stroller. The stroller was stuffed with a wild-haired toddler eating raisins out of a plastic bag, a plastic tricycle, and a net sack filled with sand toys. April hurried toward them.
Questions barraged her from all sides as she dodged through the crowd of reporters.
A Clean Kill Page 6