by Andrew Case
“It’s going to take me a while to put together what’s going on here. Who gave you this?”
“A friend. Someone who would know. It’s what Davenport was working on.”
“Well, if this is what I think it is, your friend is in danger. Whoever has been doing this has been at it a while.”
Leonard tugged at his bandage. He couldn’t help but rib her. “Sure. A grand conspiracy. Next thing you are going to tell me is that someone bet against the Titanic. Or that this pop-up investment firm caused the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.”
“Leonard, on August 27, 2001, someone placed two large anonymous shorts—one against United Airlines and one against American Airlines. No short of airlines in general. No reason to think those two airlines were going to suffer any particular harm. Unless you were planning to cause that harm. We think that there are people out there destroying the world because they hate our way of life. Or they don’t like our morals. But almost every time, you can trace it back to someone who is making money.”
She dove deep into the screen now, scanning through police personnel files, schematic drawings of a restaurant basement, a license for crane inspections from the Department of Buildings records. The pages swarmed by one after the other. First there were pages of e-mails, all written in code. Then there were pages mapping out what looked like shipping routes, each with a logo and the words “SKS Containers” plastered in a sleek corporate font across the bottom. The next few pages were more coded communications. Then a photograph of a container ship, then a map of its route, pinpointing its final leg across Buttermilk Channel. Roshni sat up.
“They had been planning to sink the ship, Leonard. The one where the cop got shot.”
He held his bandage tight and clipped the fasteners into place.
“How?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to have to decode this. It could take all day.”
Leonard remembered what Veronica had told him. That they needed to find the next target. The container ship had been the last one. She had pulled records from the firm, she had learned what was going on before, but she didn’t know what Davenport had found since. Davenport’s investigation was somewhere. Either in the hands of the people who had killed her, or stashed safe.
“Roshni, I’m going to have to go out. This isn’t complete. Davenport kept searching after this.”
Roshni scrolled through to the final screens. Records of trades. Short sells of the crane manufacturer, the restaurant where the rats had turned up, and the private water taxi line. And of the shipping company. Just two days before Mulino had shot Rowson on the boat. She looked up at Leonard.
“They were planning something on the boat. Rowson was there to sink it; he had killed the deckhand. But Mulino shot Rowson and that was the end of it.”
Leonard nodded. He had been right. Mulino had been on the up-and-up all along. More than that, he had been breaking up something serious. He probably hadn’t even known what it was. Rowson had flashed his gun, had been trying to escape. And once Rowson was dead, why not pin it on the detective. If Leonard had enough to go on, he could bring it to Mulino. But he didn’t have enough to go on yet.
Leonard felt a swift pain in his shoulder. He touched his bandage and felt that it was wet. Probably sweat but he couldn’t rule out blood.
“I need to change. I need to go out.”
“There is a bathroom in the hallway. But be careful if you leave. If whoever is behind this knows what you’re up to, they won’t hesitate. I’m going to try to look at the code.”
Leonard nodded and stood. He walked through the quiet hallway and into the bathroom. Old-fashioned black and white hex tile on the floor fading to gray and gray. Once the developers get ahold of this building, the whole place will be rubble, then glass and steel, and then no one will remember. He took off his shirt and unwrapped the bandage. It wasn’t doing him any good anyway. He changed his clothes. Her story was hard even for Leonard to believe, but at least someone was on his side. At least someone believed him. He had found one ally in Veronica and he now had another surprising one in Roshni.
There was more to do. Veronica had told him that Davenport may have learned something. It was worth a shot. But he couldn’t even stand up without stumbling toward the wall now. His head, neck, and back shouted at him to get some rest. To wait a few hours at least. He would ask Roshni if he could sleep awhile on the floor. He would go back out after sunset.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE JOHN MARCHI
Ralph Mulino’s knuckles nearly burst as he squeezed the railing of the Staten Island Ferry, looking at the Statue of Liberty and behind it, the morass of the Jersey City shoreline. The impudent clock, ninety feet tall, perched on the edge of the shore proclaiming a single word: Colgate. As though this crowd could be duped into changing their toothpaste in exchange for being told the time. As though anyone on that ferry didn’t know the time down to the minute. Each of these commuters had boarded at six eighteen, as each one had every day of his career, and each would disembark at six fifty-two, no matter what the Colgate Clock did or didn’t say.
It was the first time Mulino had been on the water since the night of the shooting, and he hadn’t started to like it any better. Sure, it was a smooth ride over the harbor, but that did not put him at ease. He was on the John Marchi, a new ship brought on when they upgraded the fleet seven or eight years ago. It was named for a Staten Island legend, a man who had served the island as city councilman, state assemblyman, state senator. He’d even beaten John Lindsay in the ’69 Republican primary for mayor, only to have Lindsay double-cross him as an independent in the general. The name reeked of local pride, and reminded everyone on board that while one of the places it docked was lower Manhattan, the other place was home.
It was a bright new boat with sleek modern seats and plenty of room to look over the deck, but Mulino was still on the water, and he still hated being there. If you’re on a boat, there are only so many places you can go. If things turn sour, there is no escaping back into an alley, there is no getting in your car and speeding away. Mulino had learned again just a few days ago how limited your options are on the water.
He scanned the rows of passengers. They planned their breakfast and their workday around the ferry schedule, and huddled alone during their thirty-minute trip. It wasn’t that long ago that most people on the ferry read the tabloids, rustling real leaves of paper in the twilight. But as Mulino looked up and down the ship, he saw that nearly half the commuters were staring at one kind of electronic device or another. The dedicated office drones were settling up their last batches of e-mails while the pure nine-to-fivers updated their fantasy baseball teams or twinkled bright candy or gems into place.
People hated to be disturbed during a ferry ride, a private little reverie taking place in front of a hundred others. But Mulino would do his job. He fished the photograph of Davenport out of one pocket and his detective’s badge out from under his shirt. He straightened his posture and set out for his first victim—a woman whose face was happily buried in an e-reader, glad the other passengers couldn’t figure out what kind of books she was into.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
The woman didn’t look up. A New Yorker’s reaction. If you don’t pay attention to someone, eventually they’ll leave you alone. It works with unwanted men trying to pick you up in bars and with panhandlers. Not so often with the police.
“Ma’am, I’m Detective Ralph Mulino, NYPD. You mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”
She snuck a peek to make sure he really had a badge, then looked fearful. Everyone has something they’d just as soon not tell a cop.
“What is it?”
He held out the picture.
“Were you on the six-eighteen on Tuesday? Any chance you remember seeing this woman?”
The lady looked over Davenport’s picture. Davenport stood rigid, the n
ational and state flags draped behind her, smiling too brightly, the way people do in their official work portraits. The lady shook her head.
“No. I was on the boat. I didn’t . . .”
And before she could trail off, Mulino was off to the next one. There were at least three hundred people on the ferry, and it would be docking in only twenty minutes. He didn’t have time to linger with people who had nothing to say.
The next one was a stiff-looking guy in a suit who didn’t want to talk to him and hadn’t seen Davenport. The one after that was wearing flip-flops and had a trim beard and was probably a tourist seeing the Statue of Liberty the cheap way. The one after that was another stiff guy in a suit, as was the next one and the following twenty or so.
Mulino had long ago grown used to the fact that police work, at its essence, was profoundly boring. Asking a hundred or so people the same few questions about the same photograph, only to be told by every one of them that they didn’t know anything, was not even close to the dullest thing he’d done as a cop. Mulino had interviewed witnesses who only remembered the first two letters of a license plate and the fact that the car was maybe gray, leaving him to make six or seven hundred house visits in Forest Hills, New Rochelle, and Throgs Neck. He had called upon two hundred hardware stores in Brooklyn to ask which of them might have sold a couple of rolls of a particular kind of cable exactly six weeks before. At least these people on the boat were as captive as he was. At least he knew he was going to be through with them, one way or another, when the ferry landed.
“Oh, yeah, I saw her.”
It was a woman in a red suit, dark hair short, and an expensive-looking bag at her side. Someone who ranked a little above the middle management functionaries that typically crowded the ferry. Maybe an ad executive or a boutique lawyer. Maybe the kind of person who works downtown, but not the kind that usually lives in the quiet of Staten Island. Mulino couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing on the boat.
“You did?”
“Yeah, it was interesting. She was sitting with a cop. She kept looking over her shoulder, like maybe someone would notice. I thought she was under arrest.”
“A cop?”
“Yeah. He was wearing his uniform. Young guy, dark hair. I don’t know, a cop.” Almost no civilian can tell one rookie cop from the next. Mulino had himself been indistinguishable from a couple of hundred others once, coming out of the academy. You don’t want the world to think of you as an individual; you want them all to see the uniform first, the badge second, and the gun third. You never really want them to see your face at all.
“And what happened then?”
“As the boat slowed down, you know, before we docked, the cop stood up and told her to come with him. She started to push off at first and then he grabbed her.”
“Push off?”
“You know. You see a ton of people in the city. Crazy or whatever. He grabbed her and pulled her in. I don’t remember if he cuffed her.”
She hadn’t been handcuffed. The marks would have been there the next morning when her body was found. Mulino knew just how much a pair of solid handcuffs can drill into the soft tissue. The cop who took her would have known that too.
“What else?”
“I saw one guy get arrested on the ferry once and he fought off the cops and two other guys that were just riding the boat jumped on him and started punching him. Undercovers, I guess. Everyone looked away. This woman didn’t want to be there, but it wasn’t as though she was kicking and screaming. I didn’t think much of it.”
“Thank you.”
He kept going, eventually finding a good half-dozen who had noticed Davenport get removed from the ferry by a cop. Like the first woman, no one had thought anything strange about it. Why would they? No one cared: these little dramas go on all day long in New York, and the audience usually keeps its distance.
Just as the boat was nearing the dock at Staten Island, one final witness, a cheap-looking man in a cheap-looking suit, told him one thing more. He had been at the front of the boat, and had seen her get walked off just as it was about to dock, just like everyone said. He had been up smoking a cigarette himself, hanging just off the front starboard where they might not bother to stop you.
“But then it was really the craziest thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The cop led her away, he gestured to the guys who tie the boat on and he took her down the ramp before it was really steady. He had to duck her into the gate. Just like that. Before anyone else got off. Before the boat was even at the dock all the way.”
The ferry slowed as it pulled into the landing. It nudged gently up against the pier, heaving back a quick little rock of relief. At most, the space under the gate was only about three feet high. The cop would have had to tug her down and duck under with her to get her through. Mulino looked up and saw the camera pointed at the bow of the boat. It doesn’t start recording, though, until the boat locks into place. A little energy-saving measure. In a minute, the gate would spring open and the whole crowd on this Ferry would heave off. Mulino only had a few moments left for questions.
“How did she look as she left?”
The man thought for a second. “She turned around and she just had the widest eyes. She just looked at me. I thought she said something, but I couldn’t make it out. And the cop kind of tugged her around and walked her down the pier.”
“Any idea what she might have said?”
“Like I said, I couldn’t really hear it. And you don’t think, you know, when you see someone get arrested. But at the time the way her mouth moved, what I really thought is that she was calling out, ‘Help me, help me.’ But you know, so many people are just nuts. What are you going to do?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
DUTY
Joey Del Rio looked up from his terminal to find Sergeant Sparks staring down at him. Joey hadn’t noticed him show up, wrapped up as he was in entering the week’s daily activity reports into his computer. Harbor Patrol had it good, with computers and everything. Back in the Four-Six, Joey had to tally the DARs by hand, and copy them into a logbook every week for his sergeant. The Harbor Patrol had its downsides, most of which involved the fact that Joey very easily got seasick, but the computers were nice. The sergeant didn’t say anything.
“What is it, boss?”
“What do I have to do to get your attention?” The guys with a little military, Joey thought, were the worst supervisors. Sparks was okay, but he was in the reserves, and every couple of months he went out to the Catskills or wherever with his army buddies and they built rafts and ate MREs and whenever he came back he always had a hard-on for protocol. For mopping the floor of the precinct twice a day even though no one ever came in, for making sure the laces of your uniform shoes were tucked into the shoes themselves after you changed out of them to go home. For all the administrative bullshit side of the NYPD. He was a badass, Sparks, but Joey would just as soon have taken it a little easier most days.
“You have my attention, Sergeant.”
“I just got a call from our friend.”
“No, Sergeant. Find someone else. I’m off tour in thirty minutes.”
Sergeant Sparks never got angry. Instead, he started to speak more slowly and he lowered his chin. Like he was displaying his unhappiness with a small child who was mildly retarded. He was speaking very slowly to Joey now, with his chin nearly touching his chest.
“You are going to go off tour when I tell you to go off tour. You accepted the special assignments. And I don’t have to remind you what you were given in return.”
Joey gritted his teeth. When Sergeant Sparks had first come to him, almost a year ago, he had been desperate. He had been taking in extra money working security for an underground card room. Frisking the guys that came in. Advising them what to do in case of a bust. The undercover that came and played had never even sent a te
am to bust the room—he had just notified IAB that Joey had been working there.
Sparks had straightened it all out, but the price got higher and higher. At first there was extra money for the work, and the jobs were easy. Then they kept asking him to do things a little bit worse. Damage property. Hurt people. And by the time he realized that Sergeant Sparks owned him, it was too late. The NYPD remained a paramilitary organization. If he tried to rat out Sparks to his lieutenant, he would take the fall with him. Maybe even instead. Ever since what had happened to Brian on Monday, Joey had sworn he wasn’t going out on any more of the special operations. But Sergeant Sparks did not see eye to eye with him on that one.
“Please, Sergeant. No one ever said it would be dangerous.”
“It got dangerous.”
“Well, isn’t that your fault? Wasn’t the detective supposed to come out after it was all done?”
Sparks looked at the floor. It was the first time Joey had ever seen him look vulnerable. “I did everything I could to slow him down. I told you both to be quick. I told you we were coming. He was getting suspicious, the way I drove the boat. He jumped on board as soon as we got there. I couldn’t hold him off any more than I did.”
“You didn’t hold him off long enough, did you? You didn’t hold him off long enough to keep Brian from getting killed.”
“We’re almost through. The whole operation is coming to a head. But tonight we need you. We’re relying on you.”
There was no one else in the precinct. Joey thought, just for a moment, about what would happen if he drew his gun on the sergeant. He might have surprise on his side. He might get his shot off before the sergeant did. But even if he did, what then? How would he explain to the Firearms Discharge Control Board why he’d shot his direct supervisor in the middle of a station house with no civilians for a mile around? And if he just refused the sergeant—he wasn’t sure exactly how Sparks would pull it off, but he knew that the NYPD wouldn’t stop to mourn the loss of Joey Del Rio very long.