He smiled. “Five, four, three, two, one.”
There was a knock on the door and the guard came in. “Time’s up.”
“I will find them,” she said, her voice hitching just a bit.
He smiled wider as if he had a victory. Her stomach flipped. She’d screwed up. She’d reacted to his story, to his near-confession. He’d reeled her in like the damn fish he was talking about. He’d told her he’d seen her show, how she craved the truth. Then he dangled the truth out there and snatched it back, giving her nothing. And her reaction let him know he’d hit her button.
She picked up the recorder and notepad and walked out without looking back.
Damn, she was usually better than that.
Chapter Three
David Kane walked into the 115th Precinct in Queens. Though the cop shop was swept and cleaned by janitorial crews at night, a gray pallor hung over the old building, accented by the deep scent of unwashed criminals and burnt coffee. He approached the desk sergeant. Her badge read DUNN. The woman was fifty and plump around the middle, but had the sharp eyes of someone who’d seen it all and was never surprised.
He said, “I’d like to speak with Detective O’Hara.”
“ID, please.”
“I’m carrying, and have a license to carry,” he said before reaching into his coat pocket and removing his identification. His New York State driver’s license, his veteran’s card (because with cops, being a veteran often granted access or courtesy), and his concealed carry permit. Even with David’s background and high-level security clearances from his time in the army, a CCP was next to impossible to get in New York City. After threats against Max when David first started working for the show, and obtaining his private security license, it had finally come through. David suspected either Max or Ben had been involved, but he’d decided he didn’t need to know.
David also had Maximum Exposure press credentials, but he’d found that in a police station, those particular credentials would get him tossed on his ass.
Sergeant Dunn scrutinized his identification. “Which O’Hara? We have three cops named O’Hara.”
He didn’t know.
Dunn sighed. “What’s it about?”
“A cold case. Palazzolo.”
“Sally O’Hara. Have a seat.”
David stood, his back against the wall, and surveyed the room. A kid high on something was mouthing off to two uniformed officers as they wrestled the brat into booking. A young black couple, the woman with a tear-stained face, was reporting a break-in. “They took my mama’s wedding ring.”
A teenage girl smacking her lips with a thick wad of gum glanced over at David and winked. He didn’t react. But if his daughter ever wore a skirt that short or dyed her hair an impossible color, she’d be in a convent.
As if you have any say.
Brittney made his life miserable, but Emma had grown up surprisingly normal for a girl with a selfish, conceited, childish mother and a gay father who only saw her a few weeks of the year. She was twelve, and David supposed the worst years were to come, but he cherished the limited time he could spend with her. She’d be flying to New York City to spend six weeks with him this summer. Max had already bought tickets to two of the hottest musicals, and then planned on sending him and Emma to her house in the Hamptons for three weeks. Because, as Max said, New York in August was hell on earth.
David Kane had considered law enforcement when he was honorably discharged from the army, but he’d had enough run-ins with MPs during his ten years in the service that he decided it wasn’t the place for him. He liked rules, he liked structure, but he sometimes had issues with authority. Specifically, authority that abused its power.
He’d considered reupping, but the last year he’d been in had been hell. Everything that could go wrong, did. David wasn’t political, but the actions of politicians and people who had no business running military ops had put him and his team at great risk, repeatedly.
And then he’d lost his closest friend.
Sometimes he missed the life. The Ranger motto—“Rangers lead the way”—meant something to him. Especially as part of a special reconnaissance unit, where he was used to gathering information in dangerous situations.
Working for Maximum Exposure hardly qualified as dangerous, but he was good at it. And, surprisingly, he liked his job. Especially now that Max had adjusted to most of his security changes. Working for Max wasn’t always easy, but he respected her in ways he didn’t most people.
A plainclothes cop approached the desk sergeant, then glanced at him. When he caught her eye, she bypassed the sergeant and made a beeline toward him. She looked like the girl-next-door type with a mess of white-blond curls that touched her shoulders and big blue eyes. If it wasn’t for her gun and badge clipped to her faded jeans, David wouldn’t have pegged O’Hara for a cop. He would have thought she was barely old enough to drink, until she got closer and saw the faint crow’s-feet framing her eyes.
“Let’s walk.” Without waiting for an answer, O’Hara led the way outside.
David followed. He didn’t have to ask—O’Hara knew who he was and why he was here.
She glanced over her shoulder, but wasn’t looking at him. “Good,” she said and slowed her pace. “You can buy me coffee. But no way in hell I’m going there.” She jerked her finger to a coffee shop across the street from the precinct. “We’re walking three blocks so O’Malley doesn’t hear I was talking to you.”
“You must know Max.”
“I really didn’t believe she’d send anyone out here. I told her she was getting her panties in a wad, but she doesn’t take no for an answer.”
David suppressed a smile. He could just imagine how that conversation went over with Max. “She asked me to follow up on the Palazzolo investigation and gave me your name.”
“Yeah, she found out it was passed over to me and thought she could use our friendship to push her crazy-ass theory. Last time I helped her I got my hand slapped. If O’Malley finds out I’m giving her anything after he banned her from the precinct, I’ll be demoted to manning the drunk tank.”
David had known Max for nearly two years, but hadn’t heard of O’Hara. That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise; Max knew a lot of people.
“Then maybe it’s better that she sent me.”
“You’re not exactly Mr. Incognito. I totally knew who you were.”
“Really?”
She shot him a narrow glance. “Who else is going to be here asking about the Palazzolos? And I recognized your name when Dunn called me.”
“Give me the story and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“There is no story. We’re just following through on some things.”
“Like?”
She didn’t say anything for an entire block. Then she turned in to a Starbucks. It was a short line for nine thirty in the morning. David paid and they took their drinks to a small table outside. The table and chairs were chained together. Didn’t make them impossible to steal, only more of a challenge.
“How much has Max told you?” O’Hara asked.
“I know about her theory that Bachman killed the Palazzolos.”
O’Hara glanced around. “Shh! Dammit, there could be cops here. Or reporters.”
“All the reporters are at the courthouse.”
“Right. Every damn one of them in all of New York City,” she snapped sarcastically. “Look, I want to find these people as much as Max. More. It’s my damn job. I work missing persons. All of Queens, not just in the one-one-five. There are two of us in each borough, and six in Manhattan. We’re pretty tight so I knew about the Palazzolos from the get-go. But who does Max call? Me. Just because she helped me once, I feel like I’ve sold my soul to the devil and I’ll never get out of debt.”
Max had that way with people.
“So,” O’Hara continued, “she’s been nagging me on and off, but truthfully, there was nothing there. We all thought they’d left like they were supposed to
and got jumped at a rest stop on their way back to Ohio. But there were a few things that bugged me. None of their cards were used after they filled up with gas near the I-95 interchange. We checked the surveillance cameras in the area and saw their car leave the station, but we can’t see who was driving the car and there’s no surveillance of the car crossing any bridge or entering the tunnel within twenty-four hours of that last charge.”
“So something happened to them in Manhattan.”
“We walked, talked, harassed everyone in the area and nada. No one remembers them, no one claimed to see anything. It was a dead end.”
“If they disappeared in Manhattan, why do you have the case?”
“That’s what Max asked me, and I avoided the answer like the plague, but she bribes cops with baseball tickets and Scotch. There has got to be something illegal in that,” she said under her breath. She sipped her coffee, silently fuming, but David had her pegged. She wanted Max’s help—because Max’s help meant Max’s resources—but Sally didn’t want to make it seem like she was easy.
“Somehow,” Sally continued, “Max figured out the case had been sent over to me. We had a witness, about a week after the Palazzolos disappeared, who claimed to have seen the Palazzolos’ car in the area surrounding the old Long Island rails. There’s an abandoned strip in southern Queens. So because the case might have had a Queens connection, Manhattan slid it over to me a few weeks ago so their clearance record would look better. Assholes.”
“That’s a largely abandoned area,” David said. “Similar to where Bachman dumped the bodies of his other victims.”
“There was nothing there a year ago. But when I got the case, I decided to retrace everyone’s footsteps, even though we have no hard evidence that the couple were anywhere near that area. Their car may have been seen, but we only have a partial number and mention of the colorful Ohio plate. The witness is eighty if he’s a day, and the call came in a year ago. Now he doesn’t remember any of it. Frankly, it’s like they just vanished. Poof! Into thin air.” She sipped her quad-shot latte. “I can see why Max is so obsessed with the case.”
Sally O’Hara didn’t know the half of it. The disappearance of Jim and Sandy Palazzolo hit all of Max’s buttons: they were an older couple, they vanished without a trace, and they had a family who wanted answers.
“Detective, Max wouldn’t have asked me to come out here if she thought she was going to have her own theory regurgitated back at her.”
“I don’t know how she knew,” O’Hara mumbled.
David didn’t say anything. He just stared at Sally until the cop talked.
“We found something, okay? Shit, one of my cops must have flapped his chops.” She shook her head. “No proof of anything, and it probably isn’t connected to the Palazzolos at all, but it’s weird. You know Max was almost arrested two weeks ago for trespassing.”
Of course David knew. Ben had to do some fast talking to keep Max from getting more than a slap on the wrist.
“Fortunately, my team had already gone through the rail station and removed potential evidence, so she came down to the precinct and raised hell like she does, and O’Malley kicked her out and swore none of us would tell her.”
“He’s suppressing evidence?”
“No, it’s all in the files, he just doesn’t want Max to have them. She vilified him three years ago when those girls went missing from the airport. Just skewered him. And while he made a mistake, he didn’t deserve to have his reputation tarnished like that.”
David didn’t know what case she was referring to, but nodded just the same. He’d have to ask Max about it later.
He steered Sally back toward the case at hand. “What did you find?”
“I swear, if she ever tells anyone I told you this, I’ll never speak to her again.”
“Understood.”
“I go through cold cases at home, reading through trying to look at things from a different perspective. I started thinking about that witness who called, and realized no one had been back to the area since. Not for a comprehensive search. So a couple of weeks ago I got a pair of uniforms who owed me a favor to help. It took us three days, but we covered every abandoned building in a four-block radius.
“In one of the abandoned train stations, a block from where the witness had possibly seen the Palazzolos’ car, we found an empty container marked sodium hydroxide. Lye.”
“I’m familiar with the chemical.”
“It was just sitting there, in the middle of the tracks, sort of hidden from sight because of the angle of the structure and debris that had piled up around it. It had been there a long time. It seemed so odd that I ran the serial numbers and it came back as having been sold to a business in Brooklyn—along with two other twenty-five pound containers. We followed up, but there was no such business and the address belonged to an old lady who didn’t speak English and had no idea what we were talking about.”
“Someone used her as a mail drop.”
Sally nodded. “We brought in a translator and pushed, talked to neighbors, but we didn’t even know what to ask. And there’s not like a doorman on the building who could tell us about a shipment that arrived nearly a year ago.”
“Nearly a year?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “The sodium hydroxide was ordered the day after the Palazzolos disappeared. It was delivered the day before the call came in about their car in Queens.”
“And you haven’t found the other two containers.”
She shook her head. “There is absolutely nothing to connect the empty container to the Palazzolos. Nothing. I can come up with a dozen plausible scenarios. And even if someone had killed them and destroyed their bodies with sodium hydroxide, why leave only one empty container? Where did they do it? Why? They weren’t poor or rich. They had some credit cards and maybe five hundred in cash on them. Their cards haven’t been used since they disappeared. I only ran the numbers on the container because Max got into my head and I could practically hear her telling me to do it.” She stared at her cup. David recognized the expression.
“You think it’s suspicious.”
“Damn straight I do. I had forensics analyze the container to see if there was anything else odd, and they came back with bleach residue. No prints. Someone wiped it down with bleach? Why on earth would they do that except that they didn’t want their prints on it. So, it may have something to do with the Palazzolos’ disappearance.”
She looked him in the eye, her expression determined. “I’m a good cop, Kane. I know when something is wrong, and this is wrong. And if I thought for one second that Bachman was involved, I would be all over his case. But it doesn’t fit, and nothing Max Revere says or does can force a square peg into a round hole. Even if the lye was involved in their disappearance or murder, that doesn’t mean Bachman was involved. He didn’t use lye on any of his other victims, and I went through each case—no containers or even a hint of the chemical was found at any of the crime scenes.”
“I have a favor to ask.”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “Of course you do.”
“Take me to where you found the container.”
“I have work to do, Mr. Kane.”
“Then tell me where you found it and I’ll go on my own.” He smiled at her. He liked O’Hara, and he could see why Max liked her, too.
“Shit.” She glared at him. “Fine, I’ll do it.”
“May I look at the file?”
“Don’t push it.” She got up and walked out. He followed.
He’d get a look at the file before they were done.
Chapter Four
Max had a terrific seat in the courtroom with a great view of the jury box and prosecution in particular. She was on the defendant’s side of the room, but from her angle next to the center aisle, she also had a good look at Bachman’s profile, especially when his attention was on the jury or a witness.
Charlene’s cocounsel was a doofus named Roger Hayes. He was older than Charlen
e and thought he should always be first chair, but in one of Richard’s more relaxed moods when he and Max had gone to a charity event together (as friends, but Page Six made more of it than it was), he’d told her how Roger was a screwup. Out of respect for the D.A., Max had never printed anything he’d said, but she itched to see Roger Hayes screw up firsthand so she could shine a light on his incompetence.
The opening statements were standard fare—the prosecution outlined what they were going to prove, using lots of adjectives like “evil” and “cunning” and “premeditated” and “brutal.” Max ignored most of those because they didn’t tell her anything about their actual case. It was when Charlene explained to the jury how the victims died that Max’s ears perked up. Most of the specific details had been kept from the press during the investigation, and she’d only heard bits and pieces.
“The state will prove that Mr. Bachman not only suffocated his victims with a clear plastic bag, but we’ll prove that first he tortured them for more than twenty-four hours.”
Now that was news. No one had leaked anything about torture.
Charlene continued. “The coroner will testify that each victim was suffocated to the point of losing consciousness, then brought back from the brink of death only to be suffocated again. The evidence will prove that the victims fought against their restraints to the point of cutting their wrists and ankles raw from the rope Mr. Bachman used to restrain them. And we will prove that Mr. Bachman, after torturing and killing each victim, callously and without remorse dumped their bodies amid garbage and filth in abandoned buildings all over the city.”
Bachman’s words came back to her.
“You put them down and they flop around, their gills trying to get air, but they can’t. Flop, flop, flop. Slower and slower. Until they are lying there, unmoving, except for those little flaps on the side of their head. If you throw them back into the water, they’re disorientated for a minute, then they swim away. Only to be hooked again.”
The bastard. It was a confession.
Compulsion (Max Revere Novels Book 2) Page 4