Deadfall

by Linda Fairstein

  The three contestants smiled at Trebek. One nodded as they all began to write their wagers on their electronic tablets.

  “I’m feeling good about it,” Mike said.

  “That’s just because so many monuments are dedicated to war heroes,” I said, reluctantly slapping my twenty-dollar bill on Giuliano’s desk. “Twenty-two historical statues in Central Park and not one is a woman.”

  “You don’t count Alice in Wonderland?” Mike said.

  “I rest my case,” I said. “What if James Prescott is messed up in some kind of corrupt trafficking scandal? What if he shouldn’t be handling this investigation?”

  “None of that old paranoia, Coop. I’m going to let you have some tiger tonic tonight just to shore up your strength.”

  Trebek stood back and the Final Jeopardy! answer was displayed: “STONE CARVER LUIGI DEL BIANCO SCULPTED A PRESIDENTIAL EYE WITH WEDGE-SHAPED GRANITE STONES TO REFLECT THE LIGHT ON THIS FAMED MONUMENT, SO THAT IT CAN BE SEEN FROM MILES AWAY.”

  “Give me a break,” Mike said. “Trick question, actually. I got it.”

  “You go,” Mercer said.

  “What is the Washington Monument?”

  “I was short on laughs today,” I said. “But you just saved me. That’s an obelisk, as you well know, and there’s no carving of the president’s face on it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s got those holes on top with blinking lights,” he said. “Like devil’s eyes. Eyes you can see for miles.”

  “I’m going with Lincoln,” Mercer said. “What’s the Lincoln Memorial?”

  “Right president,” I said, sweeping up the money with my right hand. “Right president but wrong location. What is Mount Rushmore?”

  “Stop, thief!” Mike said. “You’re just going by Hitchcock. North by Northwest.”

  “That Rushmore was made on a movie set,” I said. “The real one has Del Bianco’s great touch. I’ve been there, babe. He highlighted Lincoln’s pupils and he fixed the huge crack in Jefferson’s lip by patching it. Now, feed me.”

  Trebek had confirmed the same answer, without my longer explanation.

  We went upstairs and Dominick led us to our usual table in the front corner, between the window and the door.

  “Your usual, signorina?” Dominick asked.

  “No, thanks. Just a glass of Pinot Grigio,” I said.

  Mike and Mercer ordered their drinks and we nibbled on lightly fried zucchini strips while we waited for our main courses.

  “I want to try to diagram this tomorrow,” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Like we did in middle school, Mike. Mercer can lay out maps and draw lines between places abroad and Manhattan and the Texas hunting preserves,” I said. “You and I can make a list of the characters and see who cross-connects with whom. Then I’d really like to meet with a couple of the guys who worked on Operation Crash for Battaglia. See what they know about smuggling and the angle of it that involves animal parts imported in the same shipments as drugs. They’re both in private practice now.”

  Dominick came back with our dinners. Mike changed the subject to football, to get our heads out of the case while we ate.

  “Are you able to sleep okay?” Mercer asked, watching me yawn at him across the table.

  “Not yet.”

  “You look worn-out, Alex,” he said. “Sleep will come in time.”

  “Let’s get going,” Mike said, pulling out my chair. He signaled to Dominick to put the dinner bill on my tab.

  Mercer hugged me and walked up Second Avenue toward his car. Mike and I turned the corner onto Sixty-Fourth Street, headed east, to get to his.

  He opened the door to the passenger side and waited until I belted myself in.

  Then he crossed in front of the car, stopped at the curb to kick his tire. He knelt down and I lost sight of him. He stood up and kicked the tire again.

  I opened my door and got out. “What’s up?”

  “A flat,” he said, planting his hands on his hips and staring at the wheel. “I’ve got a fucking flat tire.”

  “What’s the problem? Let’s change it.”

  “It’s a department car, Coop, from the Homicide Squad. There’s no spare in it.”

  He turned away from me and took out his phone.

  “You calling Mercer?” I asked. “He can’t be too far.”

  Mike nodded.

  “I’ll go back to Primola and wait.”

  “No, you won’t,” Mike said, holding out his arm to tell me to stop.

  “I won’t drink,” I said, walking to his side to reach up and kiss him on the tip of his nose. “I promise you.”

  “Get back in the car, Coop. You’ll stay with me.”

  “Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” I said.

  I knew he was thinking of my abduction. I knew he was thinking that I had mistakenly gotten into a black car that I thought was my Uber after walking out of Primola—just like we did minutes earlier.

  “Listen to me, kid,” Mike said. “Get back in the car.”

  I let him lead me into the street as he reached Mercer. “Yo, pal. You got a spare? My tire’s flat out of air.”

  A kid on a bike with a food delivery bag hanging from his handlebars whizzed past me, so close that he practically ran over my toes. He had no headlight and I hadn’t seen him in the dark.

  “Careful,” I said to Mike. “There’s another kid coming. Don’t open the door.”

  The second bicyclist had no light either. He was wearing a dark hoodie and bearing down on us like he had a train to catch.

  Mike stepped from behind me and slammed me against the side of his car. That’s when I saw the biker slow down just as he passed us. He pulled something out of his pocket, lit it, and tossed it on the hood of the old Crown Vic.

  The windshield exploded as a fireball ignited the car’s interior, showering glass fragments all over us. A searing blast of hot air raced up my back, as though a torch had been held against it. We fell to the ground together, Mike scrambling to roll me away from the car, then dropping his body on top of mine as a taxi came to a screeching halt just inches from our heads.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “You knew something was going to happen, didn’t you?” I asked Mike.

  He was sitting on a gurney in a hallway outside the ER at New York–Presbyterian Hospital.

  “Not then. Not tonight,” he said. “You think I would have told you to stay there with me?”

  I had no injuries. Two of the nurses had used tweezers to pick tiny pieces of glass out of my hair. They had looked me over for cuts and bruises—head to toe—but I had nothing more than a scraped knee and shattered nerves, once again.

  “But you knew.”

  Mike had several small shards of glass that had stuck into his scalp and neck, and scraped-off skin on the palms of his hands. One of the nurses—the fiancée of a cop Mike knew—had extracted them and cleansed the open wounds. We were waiting for her to give him a tetanus shot before being discharged.

  “Here’s what I knew,” he said, brushing my hand away from his hair. “You were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Monday night, solving a murder case, when you had no business being there.”

  “Fact.”

  “Paul Battaglia spotted you on the evening news.”

  “Fact.”

  “Which means that a boatload of other people saw you there too.”

  “But they don’t know me,” I said. “The thousands of viewers in the tristate area had no idea who I was.”

  “Lucky for that,” Mike said. “Battaglia makes a beeline for the Met, late at night, and someone actually followed him there, thinking it was a fine place to make a statement and end his life.”

  “Fact.”

  “Which means that the killer or killers had been tailing him—who kn
ows for how long—in order to take their shots on such short notice.”

  “Good point.”

  “Battaglia ran up the steps—facing you,” Mike said. “He called out your name, said a few words. And you responded.”

  “Yes, but all I said was that I would not talk to him.”

  “But the killers—and whoever was running them—couldn’t hear the back-and-forth. They don’t know what either of you said.”

  “Oh. You’re right.”

  “You’re quick, Coop. I like that about you.”

  “I’m not operating on all cylinders. Get that?”

  “Loud and clear,” Mike said. “And Battaglia called you several times throughout the evening on Monday, because he was agitated about something.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t pick up. I didn’t have my phone.”

  “I didn’t even know that,” Mike said, “so for sure no one else did. The killers might have figured you summoned him to come meet you.”

  “Deadfall,” I said, climbing up to sit on the gurney opposite Mike’s in the wide hallway at the ER entrance. “I had no idea I was so irresistible till this happened.”

  “They kill the district attorney, and then they’re in the wind. Came out of nowhere and disappeared—so it seems—without a trace.”

  “Fact.”

  “You can bank on the point they had no idea who Battaglia was going to meet when he trotted up the museum steps.”

  “Probably so,” I said, wagging my head from side to side. “Fair enough.”

  “That’s what saved your life Monday night.”

  I looked over at Mike. “What do you mean?”

  “Battaglia was silenced for a reason, kid. We’re not sure what reason, yet—and I don’t know what kind of progress Prescott has made,” Mike said, rubbing his forehead, “but whoever killed the district attorney now wants you dead, too.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said, ignoring the chills that flashed up and down my spine.

  “Fact, as you would say.”

  “If someone wanted to kill me, that was the perfect moment.”

  “Not if they didn’t realize who you were,” Mike said. “The shooters were just the operatives acting for whoever wanted Battaglia dead. Then the smoke cleared and whoever ordered the hit realized the DA was on his way to see you—to talk to you.”

  “But I don’t know what he wanted to talk about,” I said. “I still haven’t been able to figure out who Diana is and why that was on Paul’s agenda.”

  “Not even the good guys believe that, Coop. Not even the task force.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. Nobody seemed particularly worried about me after I left the morgue, did they?” I asked. “They all left me to my own devices.”

  Mike was feeling the top of his head, as though he still had glass splinters.

  I slid off the gurney and started pacing. “Prescott didn’t make an issue of relocating me. He didn’t think I was in danger or he would have told me,” I said. “The commissioner would have insisted on a detail to bodyguard me.”

  Mike didn’t pick up his head.

  Suddenly, it dawned on me. “Something you want to tell me, Detective?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You haven’t taken days off at all,” I said. “You’ve been assigned to me 24/7, haven’t you? No wonder you’re still driving around in a department car.”

  “Somebody had to do it. You think I want anyone else keeping watch on your bedroom?” Mike said, pulling on the arm of my sweater, trying to loosen me up.

  “Why didn’t you let me know, at least?”

  “It didn’t make any difference, Coop. You had Mercer and me with you all the time.”

  “Really, Mike,” I said. “Now you’re getting paid to sleep with me?”

  “Sometimes that’s a thankless job, kid,” he said, flashing his best grin.

  “Is that why you didn’t make love to me?”

  “You must be fucking nuts,” Mike said, lifting both arms in the air. “A few days ago, I was three feet away from a man who had his brains blown out. I know how that impacted you, but may I remind you it was not high on my list of sexual stimulants either. I’ve been no more interested in thinking of making love than I expect you are.”

  “It just would have been nice if you’d tried,” I said, forcing a smile. “I always like it when you try.”

  “Is that your way of apologizing to me?”

  “I think it helps me to know when my life is in danger,” I said. “I dodged two bullets Monday night. I thought the worst was over.”

  I heard Keith Scully’s footsteps before he turned the corner and came into sight—the sharp-paced, firm march of a marine who never relaxed his bearing. Three men were in formation close behind him.

  “Are you okay, Alex?” the commissioner said, placing a strong hand on my elbow. “You’ve had a helluva week.”

  “I’m fine, thanks. It was shocking and frightening, but a more pleasant result than Monday’s experience,” I said. “It’s Mike who took the hit.”

  “How’s your thick head, Chapman?” Scully asked as they shook hands.

  “Aerated, Commissioner,” Mike said. “That can only help the gray matter to breathe some fresh air.”

  “Crime Scene’s going over your car,” he said. “It appears to have been a Molotov cocktail. Really primitive. The lab will analyze it but it’s probably just some gas in a soda bottle.”

  “It did the job,” Mike said. “It was a scorcher.”

  “Mercer told me what you saw,” the commissioner said to me. “Would you mind repeating it?”

  One of the detectives stepped forward to take notes.

  “The first kid practically nailed me when I went to get back in the car,” I said.

  “First kid?” Scully asked. “Mercer didn’t tell me that there was more than one.”

  “Two,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t get a chance to tell Mercer. Anyway, I think the first one was delivering food. At least I saw a bag dangling from the handlebars.”

  “Chinese? Italian? American?”

  “The food?” I asked. “I couldn’t see the writing on the bag.”

  “Not the food,” he said. “The kid.”

  “I didn’t get a good look. He was coming at me too fast,” I said. “It was all I could do to flatten myself against the side of the car.”

  “You didn’t flatten yourself,” Mike said. “I’m the one who pushed you when I saw the second biker coming our way.”

  Keith Scully looked at me as though I’d just committed perjury. “Which is it, Alex?”

  “Why bother asking me?” I said.

  “Did you hit your head on the pavement or something?”

  “Not hard enough to put me out of my misery, apparently,” I said. “Did you think that I was likely to be the target of a killer this time, Keith?”

  “You thought Battaglia’s assassin was done?” the commissioner said.

  I clapped both hands to my ears. “We’re all answering one another’s questions with questions.”

  “Can you describe the first biker?”

  “He had no headlights on the bike and no reflectors on his clothes. He was all in black with a hoodie pulled down on his forehead. Dark-skinned, I know, because I saw his forearms. He had gloves on his hands, but his sweatshirt sleeves were pushed up.”

  “Age?” the commissioner asked.

  “A kid. I thought he was a kid. A teenager, maybe.”

  “And the second one?”

  “Same,” I said. “Young, dark skin. I couldn’t make out any facial characteristics, and he was also wearing a hoodie.”

  Scully seemed to think I was useless, so he turned to Mike. “What’s your guess? Were they together? One to throw you off, make you unsteady, while the ot
her tossed the cocktail?”

  “Probably so,” Mike said. “They were only seconds apart from each other when they rode by. Seconds, not even a minute.”

  “Amateurs, hired by a pro,” the commissioner said.

  “You have ideas?” Mike asked.

  “Yes, Chapman. Three other incendiary cocktails went off like this around town within the last hour. There’s already a bunch of Facebook posts claiming that radicals were randomly blowing up cars to protest the jailing of one of the sheiks who was convicted in federal court by Prescott last week.”

  “Then these radicals should have lit a fire under Skeeter’s ass,” I said. “Not mine.”

  “All the episodes had two bike riders?” Mike asked.

  “Yes,” Scully said. “Tailing each other by seconds.”

  “Injuries?”

  “None, except for you. All the other cars were unoccupied, and no one was around them.”

  “Like you say, Commissioner, amateurs hired by a pro,” Mike said. “Poor man’s grenades, to make the whole thing look like a bunch of disenfranchised street kids in action, rather than a targeted attack.”

  “No sign of any of the pairs of bicyclists in the aftermath of each explosion,” Scully said. “I’m sure my guys will find abandoned bikes before morning. Gloved hands, so no prints. The bastards will slip out of the hoodies and split up, and be on their way back to Throgs Neck or Gravesend.”

  “So if someone’s out to kill me, why didn’t he—or they—just send sharpshooters, like they did for Battaglia?” I asked.

  “Not that tonight’s attacks are subtle, Alex,” the commissioner said, putting his arm around my shoulders, “but they create the illusion that this coincidence—”

  “Coincidence?” I said.

  “That’s how it will appear to the public, as happenstance. When they read the news of tonight’s four blasts—since we have no intention of releasing the information that you and Mike were close enough to the car to have been blown to bits—it will appear to be in no way connected to Battaglia’s death.”

  “But it’s a police car,” I said. “You won’t fool anyone.”

  “The car was unmarked,” Scully said, “and there isn’t enough of it left for people to know what it used to be.”