Step on a Crack Read online

  That was it. I snapped. I snatched up the plastic pony. Seamus ducked as I Frisbeed it across the kitchen and knocked the chore chart off the fridge.

  “Where do you want me to file your concern, Gramps?” I yelled. “To my wife on her deathbed, or maybe to the thirty-three celebrities in St. Paddy’s with guns to their heads?”

  Seamus came around the kitchen island and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “I just thought I was the one who was going to help you,” he said in one of the most tired voices I had ever heard him use.

  I understood now. Why he was being such a pain in the butt about Mary Catherine. He thought he was being replaced, pushed out of our family picture.

  “Seamus,” I said, “if I had a staff of twenty, I would still need your help. You know that. There’ll always be a place for you here. I need you to help us by helping Mary Catherine. You think you could do that?”

  Seamus’s mouth pursed as he thought about it.

  “I’ll try,” he said with a melodramatic, agonized exhalation.

  I stepped across the kitchen and picked up the chore chart. When I lifted the plastic pony, I noticed that it was missing its tail.

  “Plug that iron back in, Seamus, would you?” I said, bringing it quickly back over to the kitchen island. “If we don’t get this thing fixed, Bridget will kill both of us.”

  Chapter 48

  WHEN I ARRIVED back at the bedlam scene in front of St. Patrick’s, I saw that two FBI Hostage Rescue Team trailers had been parked next to the NYPD one. With all the mobile command buses, the staging area was starting to look like a huge tailgating party.

  A party in the parking lot of hell, maybe.

  I checked in with my boss, Commander Will Matthews, and then with the other negotiators. Still no new word had come back from the gunmen inside. Nothing new from Jack.

  So I poured myself what could have been my twentieth cup of coffee that day and sat.

  I hated this part, the waiting, the feeling of powerlessness. It was one of the reasons why I’d transferred out of the Hostage Negotiation Team. In Homicide, there was never a second when there weren’t a hundred things you could do, never a lack of angles to work a case, always countless outlets to pour your persistence and neuroses into.

  I sat up suddenly in my swivel chair. There actually was one thing I could do to get me away from the oppressive face of the clock, and it could possibly help us.

  I found Commander Will Matthews sitting in the rear of the bus with a glass of fizzing water in one hand. “Hey, boss,” I said. “Remember what I said about Caroline Hopkins? My hunch about her so-called accident? L’Arène, that restaurant where it happened, is three blocks away. I was thinking of swinging by to talk to the kitchen staff.”

  Will Matthews rubbed his eyes and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Take twenty minutes to see what you can dig up if it makes you happy. Then get your butt back here.”

  I patted my pocket. “I have my cell. And a backup.”

  The recent tragedy there, and the siege up the street, must have spoiled the appetites of New York ’s rich and famous because L’Arène looked empty when I jogged in off Madison Avenue. The marble stairs I climbed in the vestibule were draped with a red, white, and blue carpet that seemed more French than American. On either side of the stairs, sumptuous pyramids of lemons and apples sat on top of antique champagne boxes.

  Maybe on some other night, the elegance of the setting might not have been so off-putting. And if I hadn’t been grinding so hard in the last few hours, the arrogance that seemed to pulse from the tall, tuxedoed maître d’ posted beyond the inner door wouldn’t have filled me with such anger.

  The dark, curly-haired Frenchman looked like he’d just eaten a bad snail when he spotted me in front of his library dictionary-size reservation book.

  “The kitchen is closed,” he spat, and returned to writing notes in his book.

  I closed the tome for him and put my badge on top of it. I savored the shock on his face.

  “No,” I said. “Actually it’s not.”

  When I told him I was there to investigate the First Lady’s accident, the maître d’ instantly handed me a business card.

  “Gilbert, DeWitt and Raby represent us in all legal matters. You will refer your inquiries to them.”

  “Wow, that’s really helpful,” I said as I immediately dealt the card back past the sharp tip of the maître d’s long nose.

  “But I’m not from the insurance company, I’m from the Homicide squad. Now I can either talk to you and your kitchen staff here, informally, or call my boss and we can go the formal route.

  “If we go by the book, everyone will have to be brought down to the station house, and of course, you’ll make sure each and every staff member has all his proper immigration papers available for identification purposes. You know, now that I think about it, there was a request from the Justice Department to play a part in this case. You know, the FBI, the IRS? You do have L’Arène’s tax receipts from the last five years? And, it goes without saying, your own personal ones?”

  The maître d’s expression underwent an almost instantaneous transformation. It was amazing how warm a smile he’d been able to hide behind his Gallic scowl.

  “I am Henri,” he said with a bow. “Pray, tell me. How can I assist you, Detective?”

  Chapter 49

  AFTER I TOLD HIM I needed to interview the kitchen staff, mon ami Henri promptly led me through a set of swinging Tiffany blue doors and translated my question for the chef.

  The chef looked like Henri’s shorter and pudgier older brother. He seemed affronted by the questions. He’d personally fixed the First Lady’s meal, and there was no way, he said angrily, that he had put any peanuts in her foie gras.

  The only explanation he could fathom was that a foolish prep cook had spilled peanut oil on the dish during the controlled chaos of a busy night, but even that seemed patently absurd to him. The chef then said something in heated French before sweeping a couple of pots off the stainless-steel counter and storming off. I caught the word American, and thought I heard the word Snickers.

  “What was that last part?” I said to Henri.

  Henri blushed.

  “The master chef suggested perhaps that the First Lady snacked on a… candy bar before her meal arrived.”

  So much for repairing French and American relations tonight, I thought.

  “Has there been any turnover in the staff since the night she was here?” I said.

  Henri tapped a long finger against his bloodless lips.

  “Yes,” the maître d’ said. “Now that I think of it. One of the prep cooks, Pablo, I believe was his name, stopped showing up for work a day or so after the terrible accident.”

  “Any last name on Pablo? An address? Off his employment application perhaps?”

  Henri squinted as a pained, sorrowful, almost penitent expression crossed his features.

  “It was like you were saying before about formal and informal. Pablo was more of an informal hire. We have no application per se,” he said. “His leaving was not even a real concern. Our turnover rate for prep staff, like in most restaurants, is quite high.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  “Wait,” Henri said. “I believe he left some things in his locker. Would you like to come down and take a look?”

  I did, and downstairs in Pablo’s old locker, I discovered two items.

  A pair of dirty sneakers and a crumpled Metro North Hudson line train schedule.

  The case of the dirty sneakers, I thought. Encyclopedia Brown would have been impressed.

  Yet another dead end, or so it seemed at that moment anyway.

  I stuffed the kitchen helper’s things into an empty Duane Reade bag I found under the locker. Maybe we could ID Pablo from prints. If he wasn’t already back in Central America.

  It was a pretty sad lead, I realized, but better a sad one than none at all.

  “Do you have a clue?” Henri aske
d excitedly, and I lifted the bag of “evidence.”

  I slammed the locker with a resounding bang.

  “Very rarely, Hank,” I said.

  Chapter 50

  IN HER DREAM, Laura Winston, the Vogue magazine-dubbed “Fashion Queen of the New Millennium,” was out on the lake at Ralph Lauren’s estate in northern Westchester. She was lying alone in a canoe dressed in a sheet of white muslin, and she was floating beneath a sky of bright, endless blue. The boat skimmed along the shore beneath the boughs of a stand of cherry blossom trees, and a blizzard of falling white petals, fine as angel eyelids, softly landed on her face, her throat, her breasts. When she tried to sit up in the canoe, she realized that the muslin was wrapped tightly around her arms. She was dead and in her funeral boat, she realized-and she began to scream.

  Laura Winston woke with a start and banged her head hard on the wooden arm of the church pew she’d propped it against.

  There was a heavy clop-clop of booted feet, and two ski-masked men with bandoliers of grenades strapped across the front of their brown robes passed slowly up the center aisle of the chapel.

  What an idiot, she thought. Right now, if she had wisely begged off the funeral, she’d be thirty thousand feet above the South Caribbean in a Gulf Four, banking toward her twenty-one-million-dollar French Renaissance palace in St. Bart’s to put the finishing touches on her New Year’s Eve celebration. Giorgio, Donatella, Ralph, and Miuccia had already RSVP’d.

  Instead, she had ignored that little voice, her prudent inner survivor that had piped up just the night before: Hel-lo! High-profile NYC event, neon bull’s-eye terrorist target. Stay away!

  And then, of course, there was that other little secret voice that was just starting to warm up its dry, agonizing pipes.

  She was out of her pills.

  The OxyContin had originally been prescribed for a lower-back tennis injury. A month later, after learning that her doctor was more than willing to keep prescribing, she was taking them with her multivitamins. The ultimate energy boost, the ultimate stress eraser.

  Laura didn’t want to admit it, but for about the last hour or so, she’d been jonesing. It had happened once before on a shoot that had gone a day over in Morocco. The withdrawal had started out like a tiny itch in her blood. Soon the itch got much worse, and she had started throwing up. After dry heaving for an hour or so, she couldn’t stop shaking. After ten hours, she would have gladly pulled out her own hair to make it stop. She’d managed to survive that episode with half a bottle of Valium mercifully given to her by the photographer.

  But now, here, she had nothing.

  Maybe some of the others had something, she thought quickly. These Hollywood types were known for their Dr. Feelgood prescriptions. She could politely inquire, couldn’t she? They were all in the same boat. Share and share alike.

  No! she thought, shuddering. Her “Itness” was all she had. To lose it was simply unacceptable. No one could know about her “hillbilly heroin” addiction. She had to think. Think!

  Bottom line. What did the hijackers want? Either money or some political aim, she reasoned. Either way, her being alive was important to them, wasn’t it?

  What if she staged some kind of illness. A heart attack? No, all they’d have to do is take her pulse to see that she was faking. What other kinds of medical emergencies did people suddenly suffer from? Diabetic fits, panic attacks?

  That was it! A panic attack! Wouldn’t have to fake too hard there, either. She was already sweating; her heartbeat was elevated.

  Withdrawal hidden in a panic attack. A brilliant plan that would salvage her potentially billion-dollar reputation. Worst case, she’d be separated from the rest of the celebs to vomit in peace.

  Laura Winston relaxed her resistance against her shaking, and went with it.

  Chapter 51

  EUGENA HUMPHREY WAS so deeply zoned into her soothing Pranayama yoga breathing that at first she didn’t even notice when Laura Winston stood up. Eugena’s breath escaped from the high part of her lungs in a definitively non-Tantric gush when the elegant fashion guru suddenly started moaning like a rabid squirrel.

  A second ago, the fashion diva had been sleeping blissfully. Now, with her pasty face and her exquisitely colored hair in a rat’s nest, she looked like she might have been sleepwalking. Except that her eyes were open.

  “Sit down, Laura,” Eugena said. “You saw what happened to Mercedes. These men aren’t playin’.”

  Eugena tugged the hem of the fashionista’s butter-soft black suede Chanel skirt.

  “Get your hands OFF ME!” Laura Winston screamed.

  Hysterical, Eugena thought. She had to calm the woman down before she got herself killed.

  “Laura, what’s wrong?” Eugena said as calmly as she could. “Just talk to me. It’s okay. I can help you.”

  “I can’t TAKE IT!” Laura yelled, jogging out into the aisle. “HELP ME, PLEASE! Pleeeeeaaaaase! SOMEBODY!”

  The short, stocky lead hijacker appeared by the rail as Laura dropped, wailing, to her knees.

  “We can’t have her bugging out like this,” he called to Little John across the chapel. “Take care of her.”

  The extra-large hijacker stepped over and lifted Laura up from the marble floor by her lapels.

  “Ma’am? You’ll have to get back in your seat,” he said.

  “PLEASE HELP ME!” she yelled after a loud, rattling sob. “You can help me, can’t you, please? I can’t breathe. My chest. I need air. So hot in here. I need to go to a hospital.”

  “To Bellevue maybe,” the big hijacker said with a chuckle. “Ma’am, you’re hysterical. The only way I know how to deal with hysterical people is to slap them. You don’t want to get slapped, do you?”

  The hijacker grabbed the middle-aged woman by her wrist when she tried to bolt past him. He turned her bony arm around behind her, then took her by the back of her haute couture top and led her out beyond the rail.

  “If that’s the way you want to play it,” Little John said, shaking his head.

  Next to an enormous statue of Jesus in Mary’s lap, he opened up a confessional door. He pushed the now screaming Laura Winston inside. When she tried to rush out, he put a combat boot to her chest, sent her flying, and slammed the door shut.

  “Jeez,” Little John said, shaking his head at the other hostages. “Some people, huh?”

  Chapter 52

  SECONDS LATER, as Little John strutted down the center aisle like a conquering hero, comedian John Rooney lost it. Being forced to idly watch the gunmen abuse Laura Winston had set some deep chord within Rooney humming. He forgot about his safety, about the resistance plan, about the police outside. He just sprang up from his seat and jumped the hijacker.

  Little John stumbled and dropped when Rooney slammed into the back of his knees. Rooney then managed to wrap an arm around his neck and squeeze with every ounce of his pent-up fear and rage.

  Rooney was still on top of Little John when the other gunmen started kicking him. Steel-toed boots struck his shoulder, his neck, his forehead. Instead of letting go, he closed his eyes and concentrated on one thing: the pressure of his arm on the hijacker’s windpipe.

  The kicking stopped suddenly. Then Rooney heard a metallic snapping and felt something cold and hard press against his temple.

  He opened one of his eyes and saw Jack, the lead hijacker, smiling at him from the opposite end of an M16.

  “I’m only going to ask you once,” Jack said. “Let him go.”

  “Shoot me!” Rooney found himself saying. Adrenaline burned like acid in his blood. “I’m not going to sit and watch you animals beat up on old people and women!”

  Jack squinted at him between the holes in his mask. Finally, he slowly lowered the M16.

  “Okay, Mr. Rooney,” the hijacker said. “Point taken. I’ll take measures to tone down the aggressive crowd control. Now, if you would please release my colleague. If he dies, I’m afraid it’ll start quite a bad precedent.”

&nbs
p; Rooney released the big man and stood up, breathing loudly. His cheek was bleeding from where a boot lace had scratched it, and his right arm felt like it had been in an industrial accident, but his blood sang. He’d actually done something about this outrage.

  Jack checked Little John in the chest with the rifle when he leapt up like a Doberman off the floor. “Go get something to eat and some rest,” he told him.

  “Mr. Rooney, please retake your seat. I’d like to address everyone.”

  Rooney sat as Jack went to the podium and cleared his throat. Then he smiled, and with his suddenly cheerful demeanor, he could have been an airline spokesman updating terminal passengers about a delay.

  “Hi, everybody,” he said. “We’ve started the negotiation process, and things seem to be working quite smoothly. If things continue to go this well, there’s a shot of getting you back home to your families by Christmas morning.”

  There was no applause, but Rooney definitely thought he detected a collective sigh.

  “Now, unfortunately, the bad news,” Jack went on. “If things deteriorate, we’ll more likely than not be forced to kill a number of you.”

  A low moan rose from the back of the chapel.

  “Since we are here in a house of worship,” Jack continued, “I’d advise any of you who have religious aspirations to get your prayers in now.”

  Linda London, the reality TV socialite, doubled over and began sobbing.

  “People,” Jack chided amiably. “People, please. You act like we’re going to torture you. You have my word. All executions will consist of a quick, humane shot to the back of the head.”

  Jack stepped back down from the pulpit and stopped beside where Rooney sat.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he said, stabbing Rooney in the throat with a stun gun. Rooney’s eyes shut of their own accord as every muscle in his body clenched at once. But instead of black, all he saw was sizzling television fuzz. A dry heave of a scream was lost in his throat as he bounced numbly off the floor and rolled under the seat.