Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  “Chrissy’s father?” I said as I placed both of my hands on the cool granite of the kitchen island to keep myself upright. I stared down at the pattern in the rock, which suddenly seemed like it was moving.

  “Yes, I’m her father,” Bieth said, his pale-blue eyes wet now. “You think you’re shocked? I just found out myself.”

  “That’s enough, Robert,” the lawyer, Pendleton, said quickly. “It’s true, Mr. Bennett. Mr. Bieth just found out that he is Chrissy’s birth father, and he has every right to see her. You can understand that, right? I believe we saw her when we came in. Could you bring her in here, please?”

  I finally looked up at the pushy lawyer and his client. Then I gathered myself together and held up a hand.

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait one second. You come in here with all these claims and suddenly you want to see my daughter? I don’t think so. I don’t know you folks from a hole in the wall. That’s not going to happen. And who the hell do you people think you are, showing up on my doorstep without even the courtesy of a phone call?

  “You know what? Never mind. I’m going to ask you to leave. The both of you. Now.”

  The lawyer sighed. Bieth stood there red-faced with his mouth open, looking stunned now and quite confused. Like being told off and thrown out was a brand-new life experience for him.

  “Let’s go, Robert,” the lawyer mumbled as he lifted the posh leather briefcase between his feet.

  “He’s right, Robert. Listen to your lawyer. He seems really smart,” I said, crossing the kitchen and throwing open the apartment’s back door.

  “My apologies for the intrusion,” the slick lawyer drawled as he ushered his client out the door.

  Bullshit, I thought, staring at the back of the probably thousand-dollar-an-hour mouthpiece’s curly gray head. I looked at his fancy briefcase, wondering what was in it. Why did I have the funny feeling that Pendleton had quite the knack for intrusion, for showing up and barging in on people with his honey drawl and his pricy briefcase and Savile Row suit to bowl them over and get them signing on the dotted line before they knew what was going on?

  Out on the back landing, Pendleton rang for the freight elevator, then turned and smiled amiably again. Bieth, behind him, already had a phone out, his angry red face aimed down at the screen. He seemed overly sensitive even for today’s often childish young adults. In fact, he looked like an upset overgrown baby with an electronic pacifier.

  Still, I glanced at the side of Bieth’s face again, at the shape of his eyes and chin, his complexion. And began panicking inside some more. Because he did look like Chrissy.

  Where is this crazy thing going? I wondered.

  The lawyer sighed again. Even the man’s sighs seemed pleasant and civilized. I wondered if he billed extra for them.

  “I just thought we’d come by on the outside chance that you might be able to talk reasonably about the situation,” Pendleton said as the freight elevator finally arrived. “But doing it the hard way, believe me, is fine, too, Mr. Bennett. You have yourself a good day, now.”

  My reply to the civilized gent’s measured statement unfortunately wasn’t as pleasant.

  I slammed the back door in his face hard enough to knock the kids’ pictures off the fridge.

  CHAPTER 37

  “DAD, DAD! WHAT’S UP? Who were those guys?” Eddie said, butting up against me in the hall as I headed out of the kitchen.

  I could see that the rest of the kids in the living room were all sitting up straight—eyes wide, still as statues—like patients in a doctor’s waiting room about to get a painful shot. I wondered how much they had heard.

  “Nobody,” I mumbled at Eddie as I gently lifted the short thirteen-year-old and moved him out of my path.

  “Nobody?!” Juliana said at my back as she stood up from the couch. “Don’t lie to us, Dad. We know something’s up. Those men weren’t nobody.”

  “Don’t you ‘Dad’ me,” I said, wheeling around and stabbing a finger at my eldest daughter’s surprised face.

  I knew the anger that I was expressing was really just the sense of free-falling fear that I’d felt in the kitchen, growing now with each second. And yet I couldn’t stop it. I was pretty much off my rocker at that point with dread and powerlessness and confusion.

  “What? You guys don’t have homework anymore?” I yelled at my wide-eyed children. “Get out of this living room and into your own rooms with your noses in your schoolbooks, now, every last one of you. And heaven help you if I hear a single sound!”

  The kids stared at me in dead silence, then instantly scattered. Had they ever seen me so crazed? Even I knew I was being a jerk, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from melting down.

  “Oh, Daddy, what’s wrong?” Chrissy said, suddenly next to me with tears in her eyes. “Why is everyone so upset? Why are you upset? Are you OK?”

  I stared at her, at her pale-blue eyes. I swallowed, my face hot, fighting back tears. Chrissy’s father? I thought. Out of nowhere. How can this be happening?

  “Daddy just has a headache, kiddo,” I lied as I knelt down and gave her a hug. “But he’s going to get some aspirin and get better, OK? Now go find your sisters.”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder as I stood. It was Mary Catherine. She looked crestfallen.

  “Mike, I’m so sorry about this. I was doing laundry when Joseph called from the lobby and told Bridget there were two men here to go over a case with you. She let them in, thinking they were police officers working with you. But when I came back up from the basement and they started talking about Chrissy and what adoption agency you had used, that’s when I called you.”

  She balled her hands into fists as she stared down at the floor.

  “I was an idiot. I should have thrown them out right then and there, but I wasn’t sure what to do.”

  “It’s not your fault, Mary Catherine,” I said, placing a hand at the back of her neck. “That slick lawyer was definitely playing games, coming here out of the blue.”

  “Do you think it’s true?” Mary Catherine whispered to me frantically. “Was that young man Chrissy’s father?”

  “I’m not sure what’s going on, Mary Catherine,” I said as I gave her neck a squeeze and turned.

  “But I’m going to get to the bottom of it right now.”

  CHAPTER 38

  I WENT INTO MY bedroom and closed the door. I walked over to the small closet that I’d converted into a home office. I paused and took a breath before I opened the bottom file drawer in the desk.

  And almost found myself crying again.

  I looked at the neat rows of folders and paper, the color-coded cellophane tabs, scanning my dead wife’s nunlike script. In addition to being the world’s greatest wife and mother, Maeve had managed all our home office stuff with an iron fist, somehow never missing a trick with the credit-card bills, the kids’ education stuff, all of our dental and medical records.

  I let my fingers do the walking until I got to Chrissy’s adoption folder and pulled it out.

  Everything came back to me as I slid on a pair of reading glasses and went through it. Chrissy’s birth mother’s name was Barbara Anjou, and she was a runaway from a physically and sexually abusive home in rural Pennsylvania. At the age of fourteen, she had come to New York to change her life but instead was almost immediately sucked into the world of drug addiction and prostitution.

  When she found out she was pregnant at the age of eighteen, she appealed to a Catholic charity in the rough Hunts Point section of the Bronx that protected battered women. Sister Christina, the nun who ran the shelter, was a friend of the family through Seamus, and when she heard that the only thing Chrissy’s mom wanted for her daughter was to be placed with the largest, most loving family possible, she gave my wife and me a call.

  I’ll never forget how happy the short, spunky, pregnant blond teenager seemed when she interviewed us for the first time at a Dunkin’ Donuts on East Tremont Avenue. She teared up as she beamed from ear to ear, know
ing that her daughter was going to have what she herself had been denied: a loving mother and father and more protective big brothers and sisters than she could count.

  When we asked Barbara if she wanted an open adoption, she was vehemently against it, saying it would be better if Chrissy never knew who she was. And when we asked about the father, she said she had no idea who the father was.

  Wait a second, I thought as I took off the glasses and thumbed at my eyes. That had bothered our family lawyer, Gun “Gunny” Chung, at the time, I remembered. That there was no father on the contract had really rubbed him the wrong way.

  I put down the file and took out my cell phone. This was one call I really didn’t want to make.

  After seven rings, Chung’s secretary finally picked up and told me he was in a meeting and would call me back.

  Gunny, a summa cum laude graduate of Fordham Law, was a sharp-as-a-tack former federal prosecutor who did a lot of pro bono work for the New York Catholic Charities, which was where he had met and befriended Seamus. Gunny was a middle-aged, professorial Korean American gentleman who favored tweed jackets and bow ties and was just incredible with kids. My guys absolutely adored him.

  Good old Gunny would figure this out for me, I thought after I hung up. Right? I certainly hoped so.

  I leaned back in my creaky old office chair and stared up at the bedroom ceiling, worrying about everything. I was still in the same position when the secretary called back.

  “Mr. Chung is in the middle of a civil case, Mr. Bennett. He said he’ll get back to you maybe late tomorrow or the next day. Sorry.”

  “Yep,” I said, sitting up. “Me too.”

  CHAPTER 39

  I WOKE THAT NIGHT well before dawn, at around five a.m.

  At first I took a crack at falling back asleep, tried to do some deep, peaceful breathing, even got up and splashed a little cold water on the back of my neck. But after five minutes of watching the occasional headlight sweep across the ceiling of my darkened bedroom, I sat up, knowing more sleep just wasn’t going to happen. Not for me. Not now. Not a chance.

  I cringed as I glanced at Chrissy’s adoption file still open on my desk. I was even more wrecked with worry than the moment I’d finally put my mind-blown head down on the pillow the night before. I thought about Chrissy still sleeping peacefully on the other side of the apartment, how she was always smiling and bright-eyed and spunky and open.

  Then I thought of her being taken away from her sisters and brothers, of having to say good-bye to her in some courtroom, and I closed my eyes and shook my head.

  As I sat there continuing to rip myself up inside with stress and worry, my little dark night of the soul was interrupted by a sound. It was a kind of whining coming from outside my door. I stood and followed it until I came to the hall bathroom. I wasn’t the only one up and worrying this early, I saw as I knelt down.

  It was the adorable border collie puppy I’d brought home. The cute little dummy was curled up and crying on a bunch of balled-up newspaper by the baby gate we’d put up to fence him in at night. We still hadn’t decided on a name. His whines subsided as I began petting him, his fuzzy little spotted tail slapping happily against the newspaper.

  “See, it’s OK,” I said to him. “Everything is going to be OK. I think.”

  When I came back into my room, holding the puppy in the crook of my arm like a baby, there was a soft flicker of light on my nightstand, followed by a chiming sound. I lifted my phone and opened the text Jimmy Doyle had just sent me.

  hey boss. just spoke to du maurier the third. some new info. we may have a lead.

  “What lead?” I said a moment later, after Doyle picked up his phone.

  “Sorry to bother you so early,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d be awake.”

  “Neither did I,” I said as the puppy started licking and then nipping at the inside of my elbow. “What’s up?”

  “Du Maurier called me all frantic about an hour ago. Said he’s been speaking to some people on the street about the whole cannibalism thing,” he said.

  “And?”

  “Apparently, there’s a homeless guy who lives in one of the Amtrak tunnels on the West Side who said he saw the same thing as Du Maurier. A bunch of well-dressed men having a dinner party alongside the Hudson River with a tied-up girl.”

  “When was this?”

  “About two months ago.”

  I thought about that. The unbidden image of Naomi slumped at her desk flashed in my mind.

  “Mike, you there?” Doyle said.

  “Do you have the witness’s name?”

  “Yeah, and a map he drew me.”

  “Let’s do it, Doyle,” I said. “We need to find this homeless guy.”

  “When?” Doyle said.

  “Ain’t no time like the present,” I said, glancing at Chrissy’s file again.

  CHAPTER 40

  TWO HOURS AND SEVERAL phone calls later, Doyle and I were shivering as we waited out at Broadway and 125th Street near the railroad tracks for a liaison from the Amtrak police to help us look around for our witness.

  We were finishing up a couple of Green Mountain French vanillas from the BP gas station we were parked beside when a big green pickup pulled up behind our cruiser. A lanky, goateed Amtrak police officer in an olive-drab tactical uniform hopped out of the Dodge and introduced himself as Sergeant Mark Avila. Then he dropped the covered truck’s tailgate and introduced his partner, a Belgian shepherd K-9 named Radar.

  “My boss said this involves a murder investigation?” Avila said as he knelt and attached a leash to Radar’s harness.

  I nodded grimly.

  “We got a lead on a potential witness who’s supposed to live in something called the Freedom Tunnel. Do you know where that is?”

  Avila nodded back even more grimly.

  “All too well, unfortunately. We get calls there all the time,” he said.

  “Where is it?” Doyle wanted to know. “I’ve been working in Harlem awhile, and I’ve never even heard of it.”

  Avila pointed west toward the Hudson.

  “The Freedom Tunnel is what they call the Amtrak train tunnel that runs under Riverside Park from Seventy-Second to a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth,” he said. It was built in the thirties but was abandoned. That’s when the homeless started moving in. People talk about the mole people under Grand Central a lot, but up until the 1990s, the Freedom Tunnel was teeming with people. It was like an underground shantytown.”

  “What happened in the nineties?” Doyle asked.

  “They reactivated the track for the Amtrak Empire Corridor line up to Albany and kicked everybody out. Well, almost everybody. We still get reports from the drivers that they’re seeing people. There must be a dozen or so of the diehard mole people still left.

  “Every once in a while, we find one of them alongside the tracks hit by the train or OD’d or murdered. We can’t even ID them, let alone figure out who killed them. It’s like another world. Just nuts. What’s this witness’s name?”

  Doyle trash-canned his coffee cup and took out his notes.

  “They call him, um, Hamster,” he said.

  Avila rubbed his chin with a thumb. The shepherd, Radar, looked up at him earnestly as he snapped his fingers.

  “Yeah, I know him,” Avila said. “He’s one of the good ones. Nutty but clean. He sells books or something on the street during the day, then comes back home into his little hobbit hole, an abandoned toolshed that he squats in near the north entrance. Guy’s a trip. Has framed pictures on the walls, a La-Z-Boy, bookshelves, even a cat.”

  “A cat?” I said.

  “Yep,” Avila said. “All the comforts of home sweet home, only in a train tunnel. Like I said, nuts.”

  CHAPTER 41

  WE GOT BACK INTO the Crown Vic and followed Avila’s truck west underneath the West Side Highway until we were butt-up against a rusty chain-link fence. Two things were on its opposite side: train tracks and the massive clay-colored Hudso
n River.

  We got out of our vehicle and followed the train cop and dog through litter-strewn weeds about a hundred feet along the fence until we found a hole. Hopping down through the gap, Doyle and I exchanged a skeptical glance after we viewed the opening of the train tunnel.

  It was pitch black, about thirty feet wide, and completely covered in graffiti. And oh, yeah, it had train tracks sticking out of it. In a word, spooky. In another one, dangerous.

  “Yo, Mark,” Doyle called ahead to the Amtrak cop. “You sure this is the way? Because I think I saw this movie, dude, and it didn’t end well.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the dark,” the Amtrak cop said back with a wink before he disappeared into the dark tunnel’s mouth.

  The tunnel was no less creepy inside, a dark and seemingly endless cave lined at intervals with piles of garbage and random objects, a tattered camp chair, a broken shovel, a toy shopping cart. Dust motes swirled in the shafts of dim light that fell down from grates high above in the twenty-foot concrete-and-steel-beam ceiling. We hugged the wall as a rumbling Amtrak diesel suddenly rolled in from the north toward Penn Station in a clatter of steel and short, amazingly loud horn blasts.

  “Why do they call this hole the Freedom Tunnel?” Doyle asked Avila as the train’s red devil–eye taillights disappeared around the long, dark curve ahead of us.

  The train cop paused to kick a discarded sneaker out of his way.

  “They named it after some graffiti artist named Freedom, I think,” he said. “See the way the light from the grates hits the wall, kind of like an art gallery? He would do all these elaborate pieces there. One was a portrait of the Unabomber, if memory serves me right.”