The Family Lawyer Read online

  “I have homework,” Daniel says. “This public school crap is tougher than I thought it would be.”

  Debra looks at me and tilts her head, and though I enjoy Daniel’s company, I relish any opportunity to spend time alone with Debra outside of work. As we start for the front door, my cell phone rings. I show her the screen: The Downtown Jail.

  “Take it,” she says. “We need the work. Fee receipts are down this month.”

  I press the Answer button and say, “Grant and Hovanes.”

  Night Sniper

  James Patterson

  with Christopher Charles

  Chapter 1

  I’m almost starting to like it here. It isn’t as stuffy and stale as the phrase “in-patient residential facility” suggests. It’s not a gymnasium full of bunk beds made up with thin, scratchy blankets. I’ve just got the one roommate, and mostly she sleeps.

  There are activities, too. Pottery and beadwork and storytelling. Tuesday mornings we go for a guided walk along the beach. There’s even a garden with a fountain in the courtyard, where we’re allowed to sit or walk after lunch. And the food is good. Students at the local culinary school try their recipes out on us. Every meal is like a prix fixe at a fancy restaurant. But without the wine.

  I’m in a “program” for women looking to start over. They call it I.S.H.T.A.R. (Independence, Sobriety, Hope, Total Acceptance, and Recovery). Despite the pretentious name, it’s working. I almost never think about the incident anymore, and I’m starting to believe I could be something besides a cop. A teacher, maybe. Or a youth counselor. Someone who reaches people before the damage is done.

  I’m sitting on a bench by the fountain, sipping a cup of green tea (not a beverage you’d find in most squad rooms), when a baby-faced nurse who never stops smiling tells me I have a visitor. I’ve never had a visitor before. No one knows I’m here.

  “Someone wants to see me?” I ask.

  She gives a painfully slow shrug.

  “He has a badge,” she says. “I think he’s a detective. I can bring him out here, if you like.”

  “Can’t you tell him I’m not home?” I ask.

  She looks at me like I cursed in church.

  Randy Hall, my ex-partner, sits on the bench beside me. Randy was a fat kid from Ozone Park who grew into a lean cop with ironclad instincts and a knack for talking to whoever you put in front of him. He has a wife and an ex-wife and three kids between the marriages. Even the ex-wife loves him.

  “Hello, Detective Mabern,” he says. “You don’t look half bad. I was afraid you’d be wearing a hospital gown and drooling into a paper cup.”

  I flash my most biting grin.

  “Don’t be so nonchalant,” I say. “You must have jumped through hoops to find me. You ought to be proud.”

  “I’ve been worried about you.”

  Randy’s just kind enough for that to be true.

  “Worried?” I ask.

  “Turning in your badge and gun is one thing,” he says. “I didn’t expect you to disappear from the face of the earth.”

  He’s right: he deserved better. We worked Homicide together for seven years. Randy always had my back. Still, I sense a lurking motive.

  We’re quiet for a while. Randy watches a sparrow splash around in the fountain.

  “Why now?” I ask. “You’re a good cop. You could have found me months ago.”

  He leans forward, plants his elbows on his knees. In the interrogation room, that always meant he was closing in on the real question.

  “You get any news in here?” he asks.

  “If I do, I tune it out. News is bad for my recovery.”

  He shakes his head: cops don’t believe in recovery.

  Then he tells me.

  Chief Branford has dubbed this one the Night Sniper. A marksman who kills his victims from great distances with a single bullet through the heart. No connection between the vics. No geographical pattern. Always in the early morning hours.

  “The mayor’s putting the city on lockdown as of midnight,” Randy says.

  He waits for me to start talking. All I come up with is:

  “That’s horrific. But what’s it got to do with me?”

  His look says: Are you really going to make me ask? I gesture to the sign over the back entrance that reads: LIFELINE: A HAVEN FOR WOMEN.

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” I tell him, “but I’m not a detective anymore.”

  He stands, stares down at me.

  “Fine,” he says. “I’ll put out a citywide bulletin asking the killer to take a three-month vacation.”

  “What’s wrong with the other hundred Homicide detectives on the city’s payroll?” I ask.

  “You caught Bryzinski when no one else could.”

  “That was dumb luck.”

  He doesn’t bother to contradict me. He starts to walk away. He gets as far as the door before I call him back.

  “The curfew is a mistake,” I say. “You’d be inviting the killer to escalate.”

  Chapter 2

  The victim is a lunatic strung out on PCP, hemorrhaging from a stab wound to his abdomen. He’s thrashing, screaming in tongues. A team of orderlies strap him to the table and hold his head still. He bites wildly at the oxygen mask. Dr. Amy Winston, anesthesiologist extraordinaire, doesn’t hesitate: she slaps the man’s face with all of her force, then clamps the mask in place before he can recover.

  Dr. Miles Caffee watches his patient’s skeletal frame go slack.

  “You’re a marvel, Amy,” he says.

  “You’re the one who keeps them alive,” she says. “I just keep them quiet.”

  Miles catches a hint of her country-girl smile beneath the paper face mask.

  At three in the morning, paramedics carry in an elderly bag lady who broke her hip running from a gang of juvenile thugs. She’s whimpering, crying out for the Lord to take her. Amy brings the mask down like a caress.

  Night after night, Miles watches her calm the weary and drug addled, give the gift of sleep to victims of the most violent crimes and horrific accidents. She brings people peace in their worst hour.

  And then Miles patches them up, sends them back out into the world.

  At 3:30, Dr. Miles Caffee operates on a sixteen-year-old boy who shot himself in the leg with his father’s hunting rifle. The hole appears surprisingly small until he cuts away the pants leg, finds the major artery obliterated. Judging by the boy’s lettered jersey, this marks the end of a varsity career.

  “The cops asked me to sedate the mother,” Amy says.

  “Hysterical?” Miles asks.

  “More like hell-bent on killing the father.”

  Miles removes dead skin and tissue from the wound. Extracting the bullet is the easy part; if he can’t restore blood flow, he will have to amputate to prevent gangrene.

  Amy hovers in the back, watching Miles and a small team of nurses transplant a blood vessel from the boy’s good leg.

  “Stellar work,” Miles tells the head nurse.

  He uses cadaver skin to fashion a temporary graft, then turns the boy over to the orthopedic surgeon on call.

  Later, back in the break room, Amy says:

  “That was amazing. I thought for sure he’d lose the leg. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Miles enjoys the adoration but finds it misplaced. In the ER, he is a mere technician. He can do nothing more than react to whatever trauma materializes on his table.

  At 4:00 a.m. their shift is over. As always, Amy’s betrothed is waiting just outside the hospital doors. Ron’s an ambitious young prosecutor, six months into an already promising career with the DA’s office. According to Amy, he sleeps just three hours a night, rolls out of bed and does two hundred push-ups, then takes a brisk shower and meets her at the hospital. After he walks his wife-to-be home, he heads straight to the courthouse.

  Ron kisses Amy for what seems to Miles a moment too long, then nods to the guitar case dangling from Miles’s right hand.
<
br />   “Early morning rehearsal, Dr. Caffee?”

  “I rent a little studio space in Chelsea. Playing helps me wind down.”

  “After ten hours under those fluorescent lights, I can barely make it home before I pass out,” Amy says.

  “Better get going, then,” Miles says.

  He stands at the curb, sticks his hand in the air as though hunting for a cab. Once Amy and Ron have turned a corner and are safely out of view, he heads for the subway.

  He exits at the first stop in Brooklyn. The conditions are ideal: no fog or mist, the bridge in sharp relief against a bright moon.

  Just like the photo.

  He hops a fence and enters a small park on the water. The park is officially closed, but there’s no one to stop him. The benches are empty after a chilly late autumn night; the homeless have sought out shelters, or maybe police came through and chased them away.

  Always cautious, Miles hides himself in a small stand of bare trees and lays out his guitar case. He snaps the locks open, lifts the lid. Inside, hidden beneath the false surface of an archtop guitar and glistening from a recent polish, a Remington 700 bolt-action sniper rifle. The gun his father smuggled back from Vietnam, fitted with a contemporary, state-of-the-art adjustable scope.

  Flat on his belly, balancing the rifle on a bipod, Miles is unable to angle the barrel high enough to take aim at the bridge. He will have to fire this shot standing. He does not mind: any challenge brings him closer to his reward.

  At 4:30 a.m., there are next to no pedestrians. At 4:40, his opportunity arrives. A woman, alone, stops near the center of the bridge, leans her elbows against the railing, and stares out at a fixed spot in the distance. Like the woman in the photo, she is neither young nor old. There is a heaviness about her expression—a sagging under the eyes, a mottled complexion that suggests tears. Miles finds no longing in her gaze. She is past longing. A widow, maybe. Or a mother who outlived her child.

  Miles watches her a moment longer, imagines she is reviewing her life, weighing the bad against the good, summoning the courage to jump. He will spare her this last bit of torture. He presses the butt of the rifle hard against his shoulder, rotates the scope, zeroes in.

  Just one more breath, he thinks.

  She grabs at her chest, then falls forward. Not quite the dramatic plunge Miles had been hoping for, with the road below, but graceful and painless nonetheless.

  Chapter 3

  The morning after Randy’s visit I’m standing on a Brooklyn pier, watching boat cops and NYPD divers hoist a bloated female corpse ashore. Blond, middle-aged, turquoise rings and earrings. There’s the kind of green tint to her skin that comes from soaking in New York waters.

  “Single shot through the heart,” Randy says.

  “How’d you know where to look?” I ask.

  “We’ve got dispatch flagging all suspicious death calls between midnight and sunrise. The early-bird jogger who phoned this in said the vic clutched at her chest and fell forward. He thought she’d had a heart attack.”

  I blow into my hands. It’s late autumn with a touch of winter. The sun’s been up a couple of hours, and the wind is harsh off the river. I look across at the skyline, scan the traffic on the bridge. The city didn’t miss a beat while I was away.

  Well, I think, I didn’t miss you, either.

  “You okay?” Randy asks.

  “First day out of the asylum,” I say. “It’s like none of this is real.”

  Randy nods toward the vic.

  “Doesn’t get any more real for her,” he says.

  The boat cops lay the body out on a tarp, and we gather around. In addition to Randy, who still works the Lower East Side, the task force is made up of the best and brightest Homicide cops from each borough—dyed-in-the-wool murder police with clearance rates hovering in the mid- to high nineties. Kelly Byrd from the South Bronx—late thirties, pale going on pasty, wearing a pea coat that fits her like a burlap sack; Dennis Pfeifer from Staten Island—five foot nothing with pockmarked skin and a protruding gut; Pete Cohn from Queens—tall, dark, and handsome enough to play himself in the movie; and Patsy Bowles from here in Brooklyn—early fifties, short and plump, easy to mistake for a first-grade teacher. Patsy once went a decade without an open case. Collectively they look like they’ve slept about four hours in the last five years.

  “You think she was shot from this side of the river?” Patsy asks.

  Randy shrugs.

  “Maybe the ME can tell us,” he says.

  “The killer could have been riding a tugboat, for all we know,” Pete says.

  “Someone check her for ID,” Randy says.

  Kelly slips on a pair of latex gloves, kneels beside the dead woman, searches her pockets.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “Probably had a purse,” I say.

  “If she did, it’s sloshing around Long Island Sound by now,” Dennis says.

  The uniforms lift up the yellow tape at the end of the pier, and we watch a Crown Vic come veering toward us, then pull up short. It’s Chief Branford, the kind of bureaucrat who was born wearing brass. He marches straight to the body. The best and the brightest all stare at their feet.

  “This is him?” he says, to no one in particular.

  “Looks like it,” Randy says.

  “That makes four,” Branford says. “What’s her connection to the other victims?”

  “She was shot through the heart in the early morning hours,” Dennis says.

  Branford unleashes a long glare.

  “I need more than that,” he says.

  “We haven’t ID’d her yet,” Randy says, “but these killings look random. Different boroughs, different ages, different races.”

  Branford presses one thumb against each temple, squeezes his eyes shut.

  “We can’t wait any longer,” he says. “I’m calling in the media, putting the city on lockdown.”

  I step forward.

  “That won’t stop him,” I say.

  Branford looks me up and down, then takes Randy by the arm and pulls him aside. He’s being dramatic, not discreet—he keeps talking loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says.

  “You told me to staff the task force how I saw fit.”

  “I thought she was AWOL?”

  “On leave. Voluntary,” Randy says.

  “She’s a liability.”

  “She broke the Bryzinski case.”

  “Bryzinski was a slasher who targeted ex-cons. I don’t see the connection.”

  “The connection is we had nothing to go on then, either. She got inside his head. She knew what he was going to think before he thought it.”

  “Yeah, and the boy she shot is still on life support,” Branford says. “On the city’s dime.”

  “That kid fired on us,” Randy says. “He caught me in the leg.”

  “Yeah, with a gun he found lying in a tenement hallway. An autistic kid who probably thought he was in a TV show.”

  I catch Dennis and Kelly eyeballing me, but I can’t read their expressions.

  “It was still self-defense all the way,” Randy says.

  “She’s got to be invisible. It can’t look like we promoted a white cop for gunning down a half-baked child in the ’hood.”

  It’s like they’re reliving my career for me—the high of slapping cuffs on Bryzinski, then the crushing low that came with shooting Jesse Smits two weeks shy of his thirteenth birthday.

  Randy and the chief walk back over. Branford locks eyes with me.

  “Any ideas, hotshot?” he says.

  Chapter 4

  He’s slept only a few hours, has time to spare before his shift. He pays for his ticket in cash, heads down the museum’s long, vaulted corridor to the room reserved for special exhibits. A placard outside the entrance reads: ALFRED JARRY’S DISTRESSED SOULS: A RETROSPECTIVE. Odd to call the exhibit a retrospective when Jarry is not yet dead, Miles thinks.

  On a
weekday afternoon, he is alone in the expansive gallery—just him and the security guard, a middle-aged man with a handlebar mustache who seems more interested in his phone than in Miles.

  He sits on a bench at the center of the exhibit, surrounded by Jarry’s photos of New York at night. Each nocturnal cityscape frames a solitary figure. In one, a homeless woman watches television through a department store window on Fifth Avenue, a passing taxi reflected in the glass pane, lights dim on the upper floors. In another, a sax player stands under the arch at Washington Square Park, backlit by street lamps, an empty hat on the ground in front of him, no audience in sight. Miles leans forward, hears notes echoing off the stone.

  He rises, begins his tour. He is compulsive, goes out of his way to view the photos in chronological order. It bothers him that the museum did not arrange the exhibit in this manner. In fact, he cannot find any order whatsoever to the arrangement. There are black-and-whites mixed with color shots, wallet-sized photos next to floor-to-ceiling images. Part of his work, Miles realizes, is to restore order.

  Executioner and curator, he tells himself.

  He imagines Amy is with him. Sometimes she holds his hand; sometimes she drifts away to look more closely at a particular photograph. He addresses his thoughts to her, introduces her one by one to the photos that inspired his early kills.

  The first features an elderly and frail Chinese man using his full weight to draw down the metal security grid in front of his restaurant/discotheque. Miles traveled out to Flushing for that one, spent three nights canvassing before he found a close approximation.

  Then came the doorman smoking a cigarette in front of a luxury building on Central Park West. He was easy to find.

  Next, the gypsy cab driver stopped at a light in Bed-Stuy.

  Finally, the woman on the bridge.

  Amy would like Jarry’s photos—Miles has no doubt. Jarry documented, bore witness. The people trapped in these photos, like the wounded who pass through the ER, are begging for release. Amy provides temporary release. Miles has found a way to bring her work to its natural conclusion.