Animal Instinct

by Rosenfelt, David

  According to Andy, when Pete heard that he could help me by finding out who the man was, Pete was eager to do it. It turned out that it didn’t take much effort; Pete was very familiar with him.

  According to Pete, the man’s name is Jake Gardener. Gardener is well-known in homicide circles as an extremely dangerous man who, while no doubt responsible for many deaths, has avoided even being charged, much less convicted. He does his job well, works alone, and does not come cheap.

  Once we located Gardener, Marcus became the key player. It has been up to him to decide the best time and place to deal with Gardener, which meant Marcus had to monitor the man’s movements and habits. Marcus has been doing that for three days, going on four.

  It feels like two months, going on a year. Though Dani won’t admit it, I’ve got to be driving her nuts. Even Simon doesn’t want to go for a walk with me.

  Finally, the call comes from Laurie. “Come on over; time to go over the final plans.”

  When I get there, Marcus and Andy are there as well as Laurie. She gets right to the crux of the matter. “Gardener likes baseball. And he appears to be a Mets fan.”

  “What’s his favorite color?” I ask obnoxiously.

  She ignores me, as she should. “The reason his devotion to the Mets is important is because he goes to the same restaurant every night, which is where he watches the game. There’s a TV over the bar. We don’t know what he does when the Mets aren’t playing, but that doesn’t matter because they’re playing tonight.

  “They’re in St. Louis playing the Cardinals so the game will start just after eight Eastern. A normal game would end at eleven thirty or so, and Gardener has been sticking it out to the end. Last night, for example, the Mets lost by eight runs, but he watched until the final pitch.”

  “DeGrom and Wainwright are pitching,” Andy says. He knows that I am aware that those pitchers mean it will likely be a low-scoring game, and therefore quicker than most.

  “When it ends, he leaves,” Laurie says. “By that time the place is just about empty; Marcus thinks they might even keep it open that late because Gardener wants them to. Maybe they’re afraid of him, or maybe he’s a big tipper; either way it doesn’t matter to us.”

  “So you grab him when he leaves the bar?” Andy asks.

  “Not quite. He parks in a lot about a block and a half from the bar, near the back where there aren’t many cars. He drives a souped-up Mustang, and it’s possible he doesn’t want to take a chance on it getting scuffed up. That works in our favor; it’s dark back there.”

  I nod. “As Clemenza put it, there shouldn’t be ‘any pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders’ around.”

  “Right. So we wait by his car,” Laurie says. “When he gets there, we surprise him.”

  “I wish there was something I could do,” I say.

  “There is. You can watch the Mets game and text me when it’s over.”

  “Hell, I can do that,” Andy says. “Let’s talk about how careful you guys are going to be. Pete said that Gardener is dangerous as hell.”

  “Marcus,” Laurie says, which usually effectively ends the discussion.

  “Let’s not be overconfident,” Andy says. It must be a weird feeling for him to be sending his wife off on this mission, even though she is a competent ex-cop who can handle herself extremely well.

  “I agree,” I say. “If you run into any difficulty, just abort.”

  “Marcus, can we do this?” Laurie asks.

  “Yunhh.”

  Once again, Marcus has the last grunt.

  LAURIE and Marcus took up their position behind Gardener’s car at ten fifty.

  Corey reported that the game was already in the eighth inning. He said something about Andy being right about deGrom and Wainwright, but that was more information than she needed.

  The game wound up going ten innings and didn’t end until just after eleven thirty. That was unfortunate in that it caused Laurie and Marcus to have to wait, but fortunate in that it made it even less likely that other people would be around.

  Finally, Corey texted and said the game had ended. It took ten minutes from that point for Gardener to approach his car. By that time Laurie was standing there waiting for him. He didn’t see her until he was almost at the car, because of the darkness.

  “Hi, I’ve been waiting for you,” Laurie said, making her voice friendly rather than threatening.

  “Yeah?” Gardener said, wary but intrigued, just before Marcus body-slammed him into the car, causing his head to put a dent in his Mustang and defeating the purpose of his parking back there. With a practiced maneuver, Marcus quickly frisked him and removed a handgun from his pocket.

  Marcus turned him around, and he took a couple of steps away from the car, perhaps contemplating fighting back. But he seemed dazed and ended up just standing there.

  Laurie stood to his left and Marcus to his right. They had done this maneuver before; they considered it disorienting to the person they were questioning. Laurie held a handgun on him; Marcus just stood there being Marcus.

  “You killed Gerald Kline and Lisa Yates,” she said.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “You killed Gerald Kline and Lisa Yates,” she repeated.

  “And you two are next. You signed your death certificate tonight.”

  “Wow, you’re scary. Either that or you’re a cowardly worm who shoots women from cars.”

  Marcus had not done anything or moved a muscle; he was just watching Gardener intently, waiting for any possible move.

  “I won’t be shooting you from a car. I’ll be doing it close up.”

  “Who paid you to kill those people?”

  Gardener just laughed. “I did it for the fun of it. And no one is going to have to pay me to kill you two.”

  Just then there was the sound of a car horn, loud and startling in the otherwise silent night. Laurie made the mistake of looking in that direction, dropping her guard momentarily.

  Gardener moved with incredible speed, whirling around and coming toward her. Marcus saw it immediately; there was the glint of a blade, which had been hidden in Gardener’s wrist.

  He brought it toward the throat of the stunned Laurie and was less than six inches away when his head was crushed by Marcus’s forearm and elbow. Marcus followed up with a second blow as he was going down, but it was thoroughly unnecessary.

  Heads are not built to absorb that kind of force; planets are not built to absorb that kind of force. Gardener was dead well before he hit the ground.

  Laurie recovered quickly, felt for a pulse on Gardener’s neck, and realized that the next few minutes would be crucial, as they decided what to do. Her cop training told her to call 911, wait there, and tell the police what had happened. What Marcus did was a defensive act, pure and simple. He was saving her life.

  But that might not be how it would look to the arriving officers. It might look like they had lain in wait and ambushed Gardener, killing him when he resisted. Marcus could wind up being arrested.

  Marcus seemed to understand the situation and had already decided what they had to do. He mentally went through the areas they might have touched while waiting for Gardener, and he wiped away any chance of fingerprints.

  Laurie watched him do it and weighed the issues in her head. This was no small decision for her; all her training said to call the police. But her common sense said otherwise, and her allegiance to Marcus did as well, so she realized they had to leave.

  Which they did.

  Gardener stayed behind and waited to be discovered in the morning.

  “LEAVING was not our only option,” Laurie says. “I’m not sure we did the right thing.”

  She has been relating the night’s events ever since she and Marcus came back to the house. I was home while it was going on but came to Laurie and Andy’s when Laurie texted me the simple words “It’s over.”

  That had sounded ominous to me, and based on the story I just heard, ominous doesn’t even cover it
.

  “There was nothing else you could do,” Andy says.

  Laurie shakes her head. “The law says otherwise. Legally we were supposed to stay there, report it, and tell the story of what happened. We killed a man.”

  “And what would you have accomplished?” Andy asks. “The legal system, which as you know I would like to exit, abhors a vacuum. They wouldn’t have shown up and said, ‘Oh, you guys killed him? No problem. You can go home; give our best to Andy.’ They would have started an investigation, and it would go on forever. And there would be no way of predicting how it would wind up.”

  “He was a murderer. I’m an ex-cop; the presumption would have been with us.”

  “He was a murderer? Who says so? The justice system? Then why wasn’t he ever convicted? Why wasn’t he ever even charged? Everyone in this room knows he was a murderer, he basically admitted it to you and even tried to demonstrate it on your neck. But according to the justice system, he was pure as the driven snow.”

  Laurie is obviously getting frustrated by the conversation. “Look, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you; nor is Marcus. We’re the ones who walked away. But there’s a moral issue here also.”

  Time for me to speak up. “No, there isn’t. He tried to kill you. Marcus clearly acted in your self-defense. And he was a killer; the justice system may not know it, but facts are facts. He was a killer.

  “I’m troubled by the legal side of this as much as you, Laurie … maybe more. But at the end of the day, there was no good option. I think I would have done what you did, but I can’t say for sure. I wasn’t there; you and Marcus were. It was what it was, and you did what you did. Let’s move on.”

  Laurie frowns. “This is going to bother me for a while.”

  I am frustrated too, but for different reasons. “Laurie, we have some real-world evidence that you did the only thing you could do. You think calling the police would have worked out just fine? I’m with Andy on this, and you know why? Because I did the right thing: I called the police when I found Gerald Kline’s body. And I’m walking around with a damn GPS bracelet on my ankle because of it.

  “And you know what else? I had to spend my last million dollars on bail.”

  Everybody laughs at this, including Andy and Laurie, who put up the money. Actually, Marcus doesn’t laugh because he wasn’t born with the laugh gene. The laughter takes a lot of tension out of the room.

  The truth is that I don’t know what I would have done had it been me instead of Laurie. The Kline analogy doesn’t apply because I didn’t kill him; I only found his body. Marcus did kill Gardener, so his legal position would have been more perilous than mine, had I not been framed.

  I also don’t know if my spoken view that Laurie did the right thing is how I really feel. It certainly must be colored by the fact that I’m the one we’re all working to help; I have a huge self-interest in this.

  Laurie and Marcus were in that position because of me; I feel guilty and responsible for having put them in harm’s way in the first place. I owe them a debt that I can never repay. And speaking of pay, they are professional investigators who are not getting a dime for this.

  So I am grateful to them and I am going to support them. What I would have done is and will remain a hypothetical, and I’m not going to worry about it. One thing Andy was certainly right about is that my GPS bracelet and I should not have been there; if I was shown to be on the scene, it would have been a disaster.

  But that’s now behind us. Laurie was right when she texted me the message “It’s over.”

  “We need to talk about our next steps,” Andy says. “Gardener, to state the obvious, is now a dead end.”

  “Can we discuss it tomorrow?” Laurie asks.

  Andy looks at his watch. “It’s already tomorrow.”

  “I know,” Laurie says, “and I’m tired. Marcus and I have had a bit of a rough night.”

  “I agree,” I say. “Tune in tomorrow.”

  “YOU know I hang on your every word of wisdom, right?”

  Pete Stanton was calling Andy at eight thirty in the morning as Andy had just returned from walking Tara and Sebastian. Knowing what the call had to be about, Andy took it on the speakerphone so Laurie could hear what was said.

  “I know you do, Pete. That’s why I share it with you. On your own you’re not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier.”

  “And you impart so much of that wisdom because you never seem to manage to shut up. Looking back, I particularly remember the time you told me that when it comes to criminal investigations, there is no such thing as a coincidence. I have found that to be so true.”

  “You going to get to the point anytime soon?” Andy smiled at Laurie since they both knew exactly where Pete was going. Laurie was somewhat less amused; she was still shaken up and doubting her decision to leave the scene.

  “Sure. You sent me a picture of Jake Gardener and asked who he was. I told you. I didn’t ask why you wanted to know because I basically didn’t give a shit. So last night the same Jake Gardener winds up dead, hit in the head by either Aaron Judge swinging a baseball bat as hard as he can, or Marcus.”

  “Wow, a young guy like that, cut down in the prime of life … it really puts things into perspective. Here’s another piece of wisdom, Pete. Live every day to the fullest because you never know.”

  “Yeah. But, you see, now I do give a shit about your interest in Gardener because he was killed right here in Paterson, the same city in which I am captain in charge of the Homicide Division. You understand?”

  “I do, and I admire your dedication. I have full confidence you will solve the crime, despite your track record. Now, are we done here?”

  “We will be done when you tell me what happened to Jake Gardener.”

  “Pete, have I ever lied to you?”

  “Constantly.”

  “And I regret that, deeply. But this time I’m going to tell you the truth. I don’t have the slightest idea what happened to Jake Gardener.” Laurie cringed at the obvious lie, but didn’t say anything. “And I’m sure that Marcus, if you could understand a word he said, would tell you the same thing.”

  “Maybe you’d like to tell it to me under questioning down here at the precinct.”

  “It would be my pleasure. I should have said this the last time I was down there, but I love what you’ve done with the place.”

  “This is not a game, Andy. A human being … I will admit, a piece-of-garbage human being … was killed last night. I am going to get to the bottom of it. So if you have any information, and I have no doubt that you do, you need to share it with me.”

  “Okay; point taken. I will tell you what I know, and it is all that I know. However, I will not tell you how I know it; that is privileged.”

  “Are you going to tell me before I’m too old to deal with it?”

  “Here goes. Jake Gardener killed Lisa Yates and Gerald Kline. He was paid a large sum of money to do it, but I do not know the source of that money. When I do know, you will be the first person I share it with. Well, maybe not the first, but in the first or second tier.”

  “So you’re telling me that Gardener is the real killer in a murder case for which your client has been accused. There’s another one of those coincidences.”

  “Maybe I was wrong that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. I’m wise, but I’m not infallible.”

  “ANDY Carpenter and associate to see Jason Musgrove.”

  “Does your associate have a name?” the receptionist asks.

  “That’s his name: Harry Associate. Don’t feel bad, everybody makes that mistake. Harry’s used to it.”

  The receptionist just frowns and picks up the phone, telling someone that Andy Carpenter and associate are here to see Jason Musgrove. As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve always considered Andy a pain in the ass; but when he’s doing it on my behalf, he doesn’t seem quite as irritating.

  Moments later a young woman who could be the receptionist’s twin
sister comes out to lead us back into the executive offices of Ardmore Medical Systems. They have the top eight floors of a modern Paramus office building off Route 17, and based on the expensive furnishings and appointments, medicals systems are good systems to be involved in.

  Jason Musgrove, since he’s the Ardmore CEO, is in the legendary corner office, with glass walls overlooking the highway. I guess this is as good a view as one could have if you’re on a highway, since the other side sort of has to be your parking lot.

  I checked out Musgrove before we got here. He’s only thirty-eight, but looks older in person because he’s clearly losing the battle of the bald. He’s got an MBA from Stanford, so it is likely he is not a dummy, or at least he’s smarter than me. Until recently I thought Stanford was a city in Connecticut.

  Musgrove is peering down at his glass desk, pretending to work as we come in. Only three sheets of paper and a phone are on his desk, but he’s devouring them. It’s a technique I’ve seen before; feigning being weighted down with work gives him an excuse to rush the meeting to a quick conclusion.

  “Mr. Musgrove…,” the young woman says, causing him to look up as if he’s surprised to be interrupted.

  He says, “Mr. Carpenter?”—then notices there are two of us. That look of surprise is quickly replaced by a look of greater surprise when he recognizes me. He composes himself. “You brought your client.”

  “I did,” Andy says.

  “I agreed to meet with you alone.”

  “Actually, it never came up. But you are welcome to have someone else join us if you feel outnumbered.”

  “I could also call this off right now.”

  “And as I mentioned, the alternative is to undergo a pretrial deposition, for which you should bring all business and personal records. And Mr. Douglas would be in the room for that as well. So if you’ll just bear with us for a few minutes, it shouldn’t be too painful. I promise to protect you if Mr. Douglas seems inclined to get violent.”