Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  “How’s the guard?” I said.

  “They zapped him pretty good, roughed him up a little, plus he’s an older guy, but he’s an ex-cop. A pretty tough old bird. He’ll be OK. EMTs just took him to the Tribeca Medical Center for observation.”

  “CSU here yet?” I said.

  Williams shook his shaved head.

  “Of course not. You know CSU. They were five minutes away about ten minutes ago,” he said.

  “Did you grab the security footage on that camera yet?” I said.

  “Tried to, but the owner and his wife showed, and they’re irate and not what you’d call cooperative. They’re inside there now, yelling at their staff, if you want to say hello.”

  CHAPTER 57

  DETECTIVE WILLIAMS WAS RIGHT on the money. Bruno Santanella and his wife, Ellie, were both behind the counter, berating the staff in heated Italian, when I walked through the propped-open door.

  Santanella was a tall, middle-aged man with a deep tan and a lot of plastic surgery, wearing a gray chalk-stripe designer suit that was a tad tight around his potbelly. His petite brunette doe-eyed wife, Ellie, was a foot shorter and easily two decades younger. She wore a leather jacket over a cream designer dress and a sparkling diamond bracelet that was as thick as a sweat band on her right wrist.

  “Where are my diamonds?” Bruno Santanella said in a thick Italian accent as his orange-tan face went an unhealthy looking beet-red. “Tell me you’ve recovered them!”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I know how shook up you guys must be. I’m Detective Bennett. The first thing I’m going to need from you is the footage from that security camera. And a detailed list of everything that’s missing.”

  “Do you think I care what your name is?” Santanella said, suddenly clutching at the sides of his neatly coiffed gray head. “What do you need the footage for? I’ve already told five of you there were three men, two large men and a smaller man. They were wearing green coveralls and yellow hard hats. They distracted my guard and came in here and let off a gun into the ceiling. Then they smashed all my display cases.”

  He waved his hands around helplessly like he was swatting at flies.

  “Can’t you see here what they’ve done?” he said. “Look what they’ve done to my beautiful store!”

  I nodded as I looked over his shoulder at the wide-eyed male clerks behind the counter.

  “Is everyone OK back there?” I said. “They didn’t lay hands on anyone, did they?”

  “You don’t need to talk to them,” petite Ellie Santanella said, barking at me even more rabidly than her husband. “Why are you even in here? You need to get out and find the damn thieves. Can’t you understand how serious this is? You think this is…what? Shoplifting at Walmart? These animals made off with over three million dollars of our finest diamond jewelry!”

  “I can leave if you want, Mrs. Santanella. It’s completely up to you,” I said, laying my card on one of the few un-smashed glass cases. “If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call.”

  “Wait! Where are you going? That’s it?” Santanella cried as if he’d just been knifed. “Now you’re leaving? What about my diamonds?”

  I let out a breath. I’m usually pretty tolerant with citizens, especially still-emotionally-sore victims of crimes. But this wasn’t getting anywhere. The couple seemed much more interested in yelling at everyone and being ridiculously dramatic than anything else. But then I suddenly thought of a way I might be able to get them to be more constructive.

  “OK, let’s try this again, Mr. Santanella,” I said. “Tell me, did the thieves hit the safe in the back?”

  “Are you stupid?” the lovely razor-tongued Mrs. Santanella said, pointing at all the shattered glass. “Are you blind? They just took what was in the cases.”

  “Even so, I really think we should check the safe,” I said, nodding patiently. “You never know with thieves of this caliber. They could have tampered with the safe without you knowing. While I’m here, why don’t we all just go to the back, open the safe, and take a detailed inventory just to be sure?”

  I stood there and watched as the couple exchanged a worried look.

  Of course they were worried. I’d been on jewelry heist cases before and knew that diamonds were a pretty funny business. Dealers often kept on hand what were known as black diamonds, aka black-market diamonds that were bought and sold off the books to avoid taxes. No way did Santanella want me looking in his safe, let alone taking any inventory.

  “That’s OK—Detective Bennett, is it?” Santanella said, suddenly less dramatic and much more reasonable. “I’m sorry for being so rude. I let my emotions get the better of me sometimes.”

  “Happens to the best of us,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about the safe,” he continued. “I already checked it. It’s, eh, fine. Very secure. Nothing missing. Is there anything else besides the security footage and jewelry list that you will need for your investigation?”

  “That’s all for now, Mr. Santanella,” I said as I turned for the door. “Thanks for being so cooperative.”

  CHAPTER 58

  BACK OUTSIDE ON THE street, a burly Asian patrol sergeant hurried up and told me Detective Williams was looking for me. He quickly led me north up Trinity and then turned left onto an extremely narrow street called Emeric J. Harvey Place.

  In the middle of the alleylike street, we stopped before a brick warehouse that looked old enough to have rented a storage locker to Alexander Hamilton.

  “He’s waiting for you up top,” the First Precinct sergeant said, thumbing at the building’s old-fashioned tilting fire escape, which had been lowered to the sidewalk.

  I pulled on a pair of rubber gloves before I climbed up the rickety ladder and the zigzagging cast-iron stairs to the seven-story warehouse’s roof. Off the roof’s terracotta rim, there was a clear view of the new World Trade Center’s busy construction site. Too bad I wasn’t there to sightsee. Across the tar paper and around the base of a rocketlike wooden water tank, I found Williams standing in the open doorway of the interior stairs.

  There was a pile of clothing, green coveralls and traffic vests and yellow hard hats, piled at his feet.

  “Security guard just called it in,” Williams said. “They must have come up here, lost the outfits, and then went down through the interior of the building and out the front door looking like anyone at all.”

  “Tell me there’s a building security camera?” I said, toeing one of the helmets.

  Williams shook his head.

  “Disabled since yesterday. Looks like they had a good escape route already worked out. I hate to admit it, but these guys are good.”

  Back down on the street, there was now another cluster of newsies on the north end of Trinity Place setting up cameras on tripods behind the crime scene tape. A quick-thinking female talking head from NBC turned and knifed a microphone at my face as Williams and I passed.

  “Detective, does this robbery look like it’s related to the string of heists in Brooklyn and Connecticut?” she said.

  “Too early to tell,” I said.

  “Do you have any leads so far?”

  “No comment,” I said as I passed by, and almost kicked myself when I realized that with my luck, they would probably edit out the word comment.

  The only good news was the sight of the newly arrived CSU van in front of the store. Inside, Manhattan South Evidence Collection Unit detective Stacy Bergen was on her hands and knees on the carpet examining the cases and shattered glass fragments with a burning white high-intensity light.

  “Anything, Stacy?” I said.

  “No blood so far,” Bergen said. “Which is surprising, because some of the holes in these cases are very jagged. I’m not holding my breath for getting any prints. They had to have been wearing thick work gloves.”

  I was just about to tell her about the find on the roof when my phone rang. It was my buddy Arturo Lopez from the Harlem squad.

  “Mike?” Lop
ez said, out of breath. “Did you hear about Holly Jacobs? EMTs are rushing her over to the Harlem Hospital Center as we speak.”

  “What!” I cried.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ellie Santanella emerge from the rear of the store and make a beeline for me.

  “Here’s what we lost,” the haughty young woman said, thrusting a paper-filled folder at me. “Here’s what those bastards stole from us.”

  “One moment, please, Mrs. Santanella,” I said, and watched her face go crimson as I ignored the folder and showed her my palm.

  “Arturo, I’m here. What happened to Holly?” I said frantically.

  “They found her at her apartment. She was shot, Mike. Multiple times. That son of a bitch finally did it. He got her.”

  “Wait! Where do you think you’re going?” was the last thing I heard as I ran out of the store and into the street for my car.

  CHAPTER 59

  BY THE GRACE OF GOD, I just barely dodged bowling over a smiling family clutching Mylar and a bundled blue blanket on the corner of 136th and Lenox by the Harlem Hospital Center. I didn’t even have time for an apology as I sprinted past on the sidewalk for the red emergency room awning.

  Inside, Brooklyn Kale was at the other end of the crowded waiting room, standing by the nurses’ station. She looked down and shook her head somberly as I rushed up.

  “She still had some vitals when they brought her in, Mike, but by the time they got her on the table, it was too late. Robertson and Lopez just called down. They were up there trying to see if she would give them a deathbed identification, but she never got even one word out.”

  Off the hospital elevator on four, we spotted Lopez and Robertson by a room at the end of the corridor. Inside the room, under the huge lighting apparatus and between gray metal cabinets and computer and IV carts, was a gurney covered in a white sheet.

  I immediately starting sweating heavily as I entered the bright room and stood over the stretcher. It wasn’t just from running, I knew, but because trauma operating rooms are kept at eighty-five degrees to stabilize the plummeting body and blood temperatures of gunshot victims.

  Swiping sweat, I finally pulled the sheet and stared down at Holly Jacobs.

  There was blood everywhere. Red streams of it from her mouth and nostrils, red pools of it in the folds of the warming blanket she lay on. In addition to the multiple wounds in her head and neck and chest, there were through-and-through wounds in both arms. I let out an angry breath as I looked at the carnage of her left hand, where her ring finger had been blown off completely.

  Someone had unloaded a nine-millimeter into her, maybe a whole fifteen-shot magazine at very close range. Looking at the blood in her stylish hair and the sadness and terror in her purple-eye-shadowed brown eyes, I suddenly pictured Holly down on her knees thrusting up her hands to protect herself.

  Because there had been no one else there to protect her, I thought, still angry as I wiped at the sweat now dripping off my nose. She’d come to us to save her, had begged for help, and we’d completely let her down.

  “What the hell happened? I thought she was supposed to go away,” I said when I got back out into the hallway.

  “We think it was her cat,” Lopez said, shaking his head. “She was so nervous when she left, she must have forgotten about it. We think she probably came back to grab the cat, and he was waiting for her. Ambushed her right outside her building’s front door.”

  A moment later, I heard the sound of muffled weeping. When I turned around, I saw that it was coming from Noah Robertson, who now had his arms wrapped around a shocked-looking Brooklyn Kale.

  Brooklyn quickly unclenched the still-crying Noah and turned to me for help.

  I felt bad for Noah. The poor young guy was really upset. This must have been the first murder victim he’d ever seen. At least, the first one he’d ever seen this brutally up close and personal.

  “Hey, Noah,” I said, steering him down the hallway a little as he continued to break down. “You’re obviously a very compassionate person, which is good. Caring about people is what we do for a living.

  “But if you want to do this job, if you really want to be a detective, you need to put some armor on. It won’t help victims or their families to see us emotionally compromised, understand? We’re the ones they rely on. The ones who need to be tough.”

  I glanced through the operating room doorway back at poor Holly, dead on the gurney, as Noah tried to gather himself.

  Or am I maybe too tough? I wondered.

  CHAPTER 60

  LEAVING ALL OUR TROUBLES behind—well, at least for the current nanosecond—that Friday night, Mary Catherine and I found ourselves outside a flower-and-vine-bedecked little town house a stone’s throw east down Fifty-Second Street off Fifth Avenue.

  Surrounded on all sides by towering office buildings, the whimsical little structure looked like a fairy-tale house conjured into the middle of Midtown Manhattan by some wizard’s magic spell.

  Some French wizard’s magic spell.

  “Welcome to La Grenouille,” I whispered to Mary Catherine in a terrible French accent as we stepped under the famous restaurant’s white awning from the taxi.

  We stood there for a moment, peeking in through the plate glass at the heady swirl of waiters and well-dressed people inside.

  “You ready for this?” I said to Mary Catherine, who had her blond hair up and her makeup on and was looking stunningly, amazingly, redundantly hot.

  “No,” she said with her delicious-looking scarlet lips as she fussed with her pearl choker.

  “Then that makes two of us. Geronimo!” I said as I tightly hooked her elbow and pulled open the door.

  The maître d’ at the stand inside was pretty much exactly what you’d expect from the fanciest and most famous classic French restaurant in New York City. He was tall and handsome and dressed to the nines like a French Cary Grant.

  “Good evening,” he said in a deep, smooth Gallic-accented voice. “May I have your name?”

  “Bennett,” I said, lowering my own voice a little for the intimidating occasion. “Detective Michael Bennett.”

  He unstiffened an iota and smiled brightly as he came out from behind the podium and firmly shook my hand.

  “Oh, yes. Welcome, Detective. Claude mentioned you would be arriving. I am Michel, at your service. Bonsoir, Madame, and welcome to La Grenouille.”

  “Thank you,” said a blown-away Mary Catherine as the très debonair son of a bitch actually kissed her hand with a little bow.

  “We are delighted to have you,” he said a tad too smoothly for my liking as he batted his dark eyelashes at her. “Would you allow me to take your coat, Madame?”

  As I was about to tell Mr. Handsome Frenchy to get his googly eyes and dirty mitts off my dame, he unwrapped Mary Catherine and my jaw dropped.

  She’d been buttoned up in a raincoat when we met in the lobby of our building, so I hadn’t had a chance to see what she’d chosen to wear underneath. Now I could see that it was more like what she’d chosen not to wear.

  Instead of the little black dress I was expecting, she was in a little red dress. A very little red strapless one that showed off a lot of back and even more leg.

  Even the unflappable maître d’ looked a little flapped.

  “Yes,” he said, finally recovering. “Welcome to La Grenouille. This way, s’il vous plaît.”

  CHAPTER 61

  LIKE I SAID, I’M not exactly what you’d call a gourmet, but even I thought entering La Grenouille’s famous and fancy dining room was dazzling, like stepping into a vivid French Impressionist painting.

  There were gold damask wallpaper, bloodred banquettes, waiters in white berets performing tableside service from shining copper carts, waiters in white dinner jackets bearing bright-silver buckets of champagne.

  And the flowers!

  They were everywhere. Yellow firework bursts of chrysanthemums in huge vases, soaring whimsical constellations of late-summer
flowers and grasses arching toward the high ceiling.

  The patrons at the tables were pretty impressive as well. They seemed to fall into two categories, filthy-rich-looking older men with eye-candy models or skeletal grande-dame socialites holding court under thick layers of diamonds and pearls and Chanel.

  A lot of the eyes in the room, both male and female, shifted discreetly toward us as Michel sat us side by side at a rear banquette. And by toward us, I of course mean toward Mary Catherine.

  She snuggled in next to me on the soft red banquette as Michel assured us that our table captain was on his way.

  “Our table captain?” I whispered to Mary Catherine as I adjusted my tie. “I hope he doesn’t throw us overboard.”

  That was when I turned and took in Mary Catherine’s thoroughly bedazzled face.

  “So what do you think so far?” I said, smiling. “I mean, if you want, we could still head home. I thought I saw a can of tuna fish behind the Cheerios in the back of the pantry.”

  Mary Catherine gripped my hand like a vise.

  “This is…” she said, her eyes wet as she stared at the magical room around us, “…wonderful, Michael. Just wonderful.”

  I did a little double take. I didn’t think she’d ever called me Michael before. And definitely not like that.

  “You deserve wonderful, Mary Catherine,” I whispered in her ear. “And remember, this is just the first part of my little town-painting. I made us another reservation at the—”

  Her hand flew to my mouth before I could get the word Plaza out. Her fingertips were warm on my lips, her shiny red nails scratchy on my cheek.

  “I know, Michael,” she whispered.

  The bold look she gave me next made my mouth dry as it pinned me deep into the velvet at my back. She moved a red fingernail to her own lips and held my gaze as a white-jacketed waiter approached under the canopy of flowers.

  “Some things, Michael, are better left unsaid.”