Devil's Bridge

by Linda Fairstein

  “We’re good for the moment,” I said. Jimmy took Pete Fitzgerald back up to the wire fencing that ran around the island’s perimeter and handcuffed him through the open metalwork so he’d be out of earshot.

  “I told Jimmy,” the ranger said, “that I can run him back to Manhattan anytime he’d like to go. The Fitzgerald kid, too. What’d he do exactly?”

  “We’re grateful for your offer,” Mercer said as I parked myself on one of the crates. “We’re not able to tell you what happened till the police commissioner signs off on everything in the next few hours. Nothing violent. No felonies. But still kind of top secret, if that isn’t being too rude to you on your own property.”

  “I understand completely. I’m just here to give you what you need,” the ranger said. Then he pointed at the sturdy wooden box beneath me. “If you’re trying to keep things quiet over here, don’t kick on that package. It’s got some of the Roman candles for tomorrow’s celebration.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  As soon as he walked away, Jimmy started talking. “The guys at TARU will give you everything you want on the phones as soon as I get them over there.”

  “How about contacts?” I asked. “Did you run through all of the names on Lonigan’s phone?”

  “See for yourself. There aren’t many,” Jimmy said. “A lot of Lonigans, a girlfriend, some of the guys from the union, the main number in the office here.”

  “Renner. You see anything listed for a Renner? Maybe Emmet?”

  “No luck, Mike.”

  Mercer folded his arms and looked back at the Fitzgerald kid, locked in place to the fence.

  “Did he say anything to you once he and Lonigan were separated?”

  “He’s whining a lot about what he doesn’t know. Doesn’t seem too interested in giving up any dirt on Lonigan, if there’s any to be had.”

  “Let me see how I do,” I said.

  Mercer’s long arm reached out, his palm touching the center of my chest. “Stay away from the kid, Mike. You’ve been spinning out of control.”

  “I’ve got no reason to hurt him. I just want to talk to—”

  “And I think we ought to get going before it gets dark,” Mercer said. “I promised you fifteen minutes and your time is up.”

  I walked back to the river’s edge. The sun was behind me now, playing what was left of its light off the glass towers in the canyons of lower Manhattan.

  “And get that Lonigan kid out of the head, will you?”

  “When I’m good and ready, Mercer.”

  I had no intention of letting Cormac Lonigan go until the lab did a thorough examination of the backpack, the sheet, and the plastic handcuffs. He could spend the night in the homicide squad if that’s how long it took.

  “What is it about the river for you?” Mercer asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Is it Renner? Something to do with him or the Westies?”

  “Renner just picked up where Coonan and Featherstone left off,” I said. “Their whole thing was kidnapping.”

  “Kidnapping?” Mercer asked. “I thought the rackets was it.”

  “Yeah, but when their vics didn’t pay up, they got their revenge by kidnapping,” I said. “They took relatives, they took local businessmen and their families—it was known as the snatch—and held them for ransom.”

  Mercer was quiet for a minute. “But there’s no ransom here.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Coonan had a guy who worked for him. A butcher. The neighborhood butcher. His name was Eddie Cummiskey. Eddie the Butcher they called him.”

  “So?”

  “Coonan used Eddie to kill his victims if nobody paid up. Dismember them.”

  “You serious?”

  Mercer came up beside me on the end of the dock.

  “Stop asking me that. Of course I’m serious. I used to have nightmares, after my dad shot Charlie, that Eddie would take him apart one day, piece by piece.”

  “That must have been jive, man. Not for real.”

  “You think so? Check the Westies’ files, Mercer. Coonan used to keep some of the dismembered fingers from the victims’ bodies in a freezer in his office, so he could use them to plant fingerprints on guns his crew used in hits.”

  “No wonder you had nightmares,” Mercer said. “What did they do with the other body parts?”

  “Coonan made Eddie the Butcher take them down to the Hudson,” I said, staring out at the darkening ripples in the water. “Throw them in the water. Right there in Midtown, the West Forties and Fifties. One time Eddie forgot to puncture the lungs in a guy’s torso and it bobbed to the surface a week later. Floated right into a sailboat out for a ride off the Battery, or he’d never have been found. But usually the fish got the flesh and bones that sunk to the bottom.”

  “I can’t begin to imagine what those men were like,” Mercer said.

  “The Westies made me ashamed to be Irish,” I said, looking from the Verrazano Bridge to my right back up to the GW on my left. “They were murderous thugs, Mercer. And they used the Hudson River as their personal morgue.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Mercer’s phone rang. “Wallace,” he said, then walked ten feet away from me to take the call.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Catherine Dashfer,” he said to me. “You want it?”

  We met halfway and I grabbed his phone.

  “You got something good?”

  “This call didn’t happen, Mike.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Battaglia’s playing games with the police commissioner,” Catherine said. “I’m not quite sure why.”

  “I’ll give you that piece of it. Scully thinks the district attorney is beholden to the Reverend Hal Shipley. It’s been going on for a while, but it came to a boil this morning during our meeting,” I said. “You have something about Coop?”

  “I wish I did.”

  “What, then?”

  “Keep this to yourself, Mike, okay? Just you and Mercer.”

  “To the grave.”

  “Battaglia took the DA’s squad off the search for Josie Aponte,” Catherine said. “He put his civilian investigators on it instead of detectives and they found her around noon today.”

  “That’s great!” I shouted.

  “Nobody knows. They’re still questioning her pretty hard.”

  “Where is she?”

  “With family. It’s pretty clear that she went from the courthouse to Penn Station and jumped on a train, down to South Philly where her sister lives. Josie’s real name is Rosita Quinones. They picked her up at her sister’s apartment.”

  “What’s she got to say?”

  “Not exactly all you’re hoping for, Mike,” Catherine said. “Rosita’s not talking yet. We’ve got all the senior people in the unit working on this, believe me. Once she realizes Estevez is unlikely to step forward to bail her out, we’re hoping she rolls over on him. But there’s no sign of any connection between Alex and the newlyweds—Rosita Quinones and Antonio Estevez—after the moment that she got out of the criminal court building.”

  “But you’re still digging? You’re not giving up?”

  “We’ll keep digging, of course. It’s just that a first dump of her cell phone and texts doesn’t suggest anything going on that remotely involves a kidnapping.”

  I hadn’t thought for long that Estevez was behind Coop’s disappearance. I didn’t believe he could have orchestrated an abduction as sophisticated and clean as this one seemed to be. Rosita’s skill was in tech work, and she had done all that was expected of her by breaking into the DA’s office computer system.

  “What was it Drew Poser said on Wednesday afternoon?” I asked. “That Estevez was trying to bring Coop down, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seems to me he was on the way to getting that done by causing her enough embarrassment that all of us thought she might actually take some time off to chill,” I said. “Nobody thought he was ou
t to—to hurt her.”

  “Battaglia’s clearly aiming to undermine the commissioner by taking over the Rosita Quinones matter. He’s hoping to see egg on Scully’s face because the NYPD didn’t make the arrest before she skipped town,” Catherine said. “That’s why you’ve got to protect me on this. I just wanted you to know that Quinones and Estevez are unlikely suspects in Alex’s disappearance.”

  “I get it, and I appreciate it. One suggestion for you?”

  “Okay.”

  “Keep your team as far away from this one as possible,” I said. “There’s some kind of link between Reverend Hal and Estevez, and the DA’s a fool to try to take control of anything that involves Shipley. It will come back to bite him in the ass by the time all of this unravels.”

  “Point well taken, Mike. I’m just a foot soldier here. I like to stay out of the line of fire,” Catherine said. “But I was with Alex on Wednesday afternoon just after she left Battaglia’s office. I got my first hint of how deep this trouble may go.”

  I didn’t offer anything I knew. I didn’t want to compromise Catherine’s position on Battaglia’s staff. But it was beginning to dawn on a few of us that the DA’s behind-the-scenes manipulations to retain political power might become transparent in the weeks ahead.

  “You mean with Shipley?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Catherine said. “I hadn’t known what a tough spot Battaglia put Alex in during her investigation of the complaint against Shipley, but then he tried to cover his tail with a file memo. And there is also the letter Estevez made Rosita upload on the computer. It’s a real hornet’s nest.”

  “I hear you.”

  “More importantly, Mike, how are you holding up?”

  I didn’t have an answer that made sense.

  “Is there anything we can do to help you? We’re all itching to be more useful,” Catherine said. “Alex will be furious with us when she finds out we’ve left you hanging out in the cold.”

  “Mercer’s with me. We’re … working through—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t hold a thought for more than a few seconds.

  I passed the phone back to Mercer. I had never felt as lost as I did now.

  “Keep the faith, Catherine,” he said, ending the call.

  Then Mercer turned to me. “Now I have a better understanding of why you want to stay near this river, Mike, after what you said about the Westies. But we’re taking this boat back right now.”

  He stalked off the dock with Jimmy North, toward Pete Fitzgerald. I stepped on the gunwale of the Intrepid and lowered myself down. I lifted the bench and took a look at Cormac Lonigan. His discomfort level was high—bent over the toilet in the cramped, foul-smelling space with his hands cuffed behind him—but he wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of looking at me or asking for mercy.

  “I’m riding with you on the boat,” Mercer called out. “Why don’t you let Jimmy go back with the two kids on the ranger’s vessel? We can have Major Case meet them at the Chelsea Piers docks and take them for questioning, if that’s what you want. Jimmy can get work started on the cell phones and take the backpack and sheet to the lab. Figure out whether this is all a Chapman red herring or actual evidence of a crime.”

  I didn’t want to let Lonigan out of my hands, but I didn’t have much reason to keep him.

  I shut the lid on the head again. “That would mean too many cooks in the kitchen. Telling Major Case means Scully will find out before too long.”

  “Look, Mike,” Mercer said. “Ray Peterson can’t run this whole thing himself.”

  “He’s with me so far.”

  “Get Lonigan off that boat and let’s head for the other dock.”

  I was about to swing myself up on the gunwale again when the phone in my pocket rang.

  “Mike,” the lieutenant said. “Are you sitting down?”

  “Ready for whatever you’ve got.”

  “The old man, Mugsy Renner, he’s still alive.”

  “What?” I said. I could feel fire rising inside my gut. “He must be eighty-six.”

  “Eighty-eight and dying of lung cancer,” Peterson said.

  “What prison?” I asked. “We can race someone up there to talk to him.”

  “That’s just it. Six life sentences with no chance of parole, but two weeks ago Renner was granted a release.”

  “A what?” I screamed into the phone. “You run a mob of hoodlums, kill a few dozen people yourself, get nailed rock solid for six homicides, and some parole board decides twenty years later to override the trial judge who heard the grisly details and go lenient?”

  “Calm down, Mike,” Peterson said. “They call it—”

  “I don’t give a damn what they call it.”

  “They call it a compassionate discharge. Truth is, the warden told me, the state can’t afford the medical treatment for the aging prison population.”

  I was off the boat and headed toward Mercer. I couldn’t control my rage.

  “Then let out the old men with terminal toe fungus who stole cars or robbed banks. Let out the thieves and the con men with psoriasis, not the murderers. Who cares if that bastard died in a jail cell?”

  Mercer was jogging toward me.

  “Where is he?” I asked Peterson. The wind had picked up as the sun lowered itself to the west. It carried my voice downriver with it.

  “That’s the thing, Mike. He’s back in the city.”

  “Woodside, Queens, no doubt. Where all the old Westies go to die.”

  “You don’t have to know where he is, okay? I’ll handle that conversation myself, I promise you that.”

  “I need to know, Loo. The last thing you can do is hold out on me.”

  “You’ve got to keep your head together, Mike,” Peterson said. “I got through to the feds, too. About Emmet Renner.”

  “What did you find out? They’ve got a new leniency program in Witness Protection, too?”

  “He’s got a two-week pass from the program. They let him come home from Arizona to say good-bye to his old man.”

  “One more Westie and I win the trifecta,” I said. “Where are they, Loo?”

  “Be sensible, Mike. That’s not a job for you. You’re not even going to recognize Emmet Renner, thirty years after the fact and enough plastic surgery so nobody who ever knew him can make him,” Peterson said. “You see him on the street today? You’d walk right past him.”

  “I’ll figure this out without you, understand? There was Emmet, the oldest son, and Charlie,” I said, thinking of the kid my father shot, “and then there were three girls in between. One of them must have taken the father in when Correction let him go. If you don’t tell me the names, I’m sure my mother will remember.”

  “I’m done with your threats, Mike. I’m taking two men from the squad and going out to Queens myself.”

  “I’m sorry for breaking balls, Loo. And yours, most of all. But Parole must have given you an address, right? They couldn’t let him out without accounting for his whereabouts.”

  “I know his whereabouts better than I know yours,” Peterson said. “Enough playing games with me, Mike. You’re officially off this investigation as of right now. I should have done this hours ago. Give the phone to Wallace.”

  “You have an address, right? You’re not driving blind, are you?”

  “The man’s in a hospital, okay? He’s on life support. Yeah, he was released to his daughter’s home,” Peterson said. “But he’s in a hospital now. He’s in a hospital and his daughter’s got the health-care proxy. Shauna Renner decides when to pull the plug.”

  “Shauna what?”

  “Shauna Renner,” he said. “The oldest sister.”

  “Do what you gotta do, Loo. I’m off duty,” I said, ending the call.

  I jumped on the gunwale of the Intrepid and kicked the side of the bench where I had stowed my prisoner away.

  “She’s Shauna Lonigan now,” I yelled to no one in particular. “And the snatch of Alex Cooper is about Renner’s rev
enge.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  “Coop’s life is on the line because of me,” I said.

  “And you expect me to believe you’re going off duty?”

  “Peterson swears he’s taking Renner down himself. What choice does it leave me?”

  “Let’s give it a rest and we can come back fresh tomorrow.”

  “Totally,” I said.

  It was hard to look Mercer in the eye and lie to him, but going rogue was not in his playbook.

  “Let’s just talk to these two jerks again, before we go back,” I said.

  “What did Peterson give you?” Mercer asked.

  “Cormac Lonigan’s uncle is Emmet Renner, and he’s somewhere in the middle of a two-week pass to pray at his father’s bedside,” I said. “Praying hard to find out where Mugsy buried all the money he stole before he got sent away.”

  Mercer held up his hand to Jimmy to signal an ask for five minutes more. He stepped onto the boat with me and lifted the lid of the bench.

  Cormac Lonigan picked up his head.

  “Time to catch up on family ties, Cormac,” I said. “Sorry to hear about your grandfather.”

  “Fuck you, Chapman. He’d say the same thing if he was here.”

  “I know where he is, kid,” I said, pulling him to his feet. “Only I don’t think he’s going to be there much longer, so we have to step up planning for the reunion.”

  “My witness,” Mercer said to me, pushing me out of the way. I climbed back onto the deck of the boat.

  The kid’s eyes widened and he came close to freaking out just looking at the size of Mercer’s hands. He had no way to know how much gentler the man was than I.

  “Where’s Alex Cooper?”

  “Who?”

  He was thin and wiry, but I was certain that belied the toughness of his Renner roots.

  “The woman,” Mercer said. “The woman your uncle Emmet is holding.”

  Lonigan’s lips were as thin as his long fingers. They were locked together in silence.

  “You’ve got a chance to help yourself here,” Mercer said. “Where’s Emmet Renner?”

  “Why don’t you ask your partner where Charlie Renner is?” Lonigan said. “He’d be alive if it wasn’t for a cop named Chapman.”