Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  I raced up and shrieked left onto Elizabeth straight after him, staring at his blue backpack as he ran along the sidewalk on the west side of the street.

  And almost slammed head-on into the back of a parallel-parking moving van!

  I added my horn to the shrieking siren to move the van, but to no avail.

  “Screw it,” I said, popping the door and leaving the cruiser stopped dead in the middle of the street as I took off on foot.

  My new wing tips were starting to cut the hell out of my feet when the guy reached the end of Elizabeth and went left onto Bleecker. When I got to the corner, I could see that the suspect was all the way west near the corner of Lafayette, where Con Ed had a manhole open.

  It was out of sheer exhaustion and frustration that I hollered to the work crew: “NYPD! Stop that guy! Stop that guy!”

  So I was a little surprised when that was exactly what they did. A burly black hard hat in blue Con Ed coveralls bobbed out from under the orange traffic tape like a boxer into a ring and clotheslined the runner as he was trying to get past.

  The guy went off his feet, knocking the corner trash can over like a bowling pin before landing flat on his back in the gutter on Lafayette. He was still moaning when I landed on him and flipped him over and slapped on the cuffs.

  As I knelt on his head, I zipped open his backpack, expecting gems. But it wasn’t gems. Not even close. I couldn’t believe it as about three pounds of rancid-smelling marijuana in little plastic bags spilled out onto the sidewalk.

  “Where are they?” I yelled.

  “Where’s who?” the red-faced suspect said.

  “Not who. The diamonds! Where’d you put the diamonds?”

  “What diamonds, man?” the suspect said, opening his eyes wide. “I just got weed. Just weed. When I saw the cop running, I got scared. I’m really sorry. It isn’t even my weed. I’ll tell you whose it is, OK? I’m just a college kid. I go to NYU, man. Please, I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “This ain’t him,” I said as a precinct car screeched to the curb. “Just a spooked dealer. Did you see anybody else?”

  “No,” the sarge said, punching the steering wheel. “It doesn’t make sense. The clerk inside said they’d been gone less than thirty seconds when we rolled up. When we came out of the store, we saw this fool on the corner of Greene just take off. I thought it had to be him.”

  Thirty seconds, I thought, staring out at the newly arriving cruisers and gathering crowd on the sidewalk.

  I kicked at the pile of weed bags that had spilled out of the backpack. I didn’t stop until I’d knocked every one down into the corner sewer. I was so frustrated I would have tried to kick the dealer himself down there, too, if I’d thought he would fit.

  How could we have missed them by thirty seconds?

  CHAPTER 69

  I WAS EXPECTING TO see shattered glass everywhere when I arrived at Wooster Fine Diamonds, so I was shocked to find all the jewelry cases still intact.

  I quickly figured out why. This latest hit had been a takeover robbery instead of a mad-dash smash-and-grab.

  Their plan had been quite elaborate. A woman and a man had come in acting like a rich couple a moment before two more males entered acting like federal agents there to arrest them. After they’d gotten the drop on the guards and buttoned down the staff, they took their time, almost ten minutes, as they unlocked cases and selected the best diamonds. They’d also been cool-headed enough to take the surveillance video this time.

  The three males matched the descriptions of the three from downtown. And now there was a woman, apparently. I couldn’t have been more pissed.

  I had to admit these crooks were good. They had flair and must have been well dressed to blend in with the ritzy area.

  Takeover robberies could go south in a breath and become a bloodbath, I knew. I really wanted to catch these people.

  If there was any silver lining, the fact that they had struck again so quickly impressed me as amateurish. They seemed too eager. I knew that some thieves get off on the adrenaline high, and like any junkie, they start to make mistakes to get it.

  I was still puzzling over how they’d gotten away so quickly when who should come in the door but my boss’s boss, Chief of Department Peter Vonroden.

  “Thanks for showing up, Bennett,” the short, fifty-something former competitive body builder said as he scowled at the crime scene. “Think you might stick around a bit this time? You being the new lead detective and all.”

  If I had to guess, I would have said that Vonroden probably wasn’t very pleased that I had been hand-selected by the commissioner to come back to Major Crimes. Vonroden was known to be a tough political infighter, not to mention very good friends with my old nemesis, Chief Starkie.

  What really sucked, though, was that I was nowhere on this case. Which had been on the front page of the Post and the Daily News this morning.

  So instead of banging heads, I wisely ignored his taunts. Or at least tried to.

  “These guys are switching their script now, Chief,” I said. “Instead of a smash-and-grab, this was a takeover. Got the drop on the guards, locked the front door. They took their time.”

  “I hear they were Russians,” Vonroden said. “Or Serbians?”

  Vonroden was referring to a theory that was being batted about that the infamous Serbian Pink Panther gang that had targeted over a hundred fifty stores throughout the world, including dramatic heists in Tokyo, Dubai, Paris, and London, had come to town.

  “They had some kind of accent,” I said. “One of the clerks lives in Brighton Beach. Swears they sounded Russian, but who knows? We can’t really verify. This crew has a flair for the dramatic. It might be possible they were just putting on another show.”

  “Looks like some real Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth shit so far, from where I’m sitting,” Vonroden said. “But for some strange reason, I don’t feel that entertained. Not even by the clown sideshow you keep putting on.”

  Tell me what you really think, Chief, I thought, biting my tongue.

  He leaned in to whisper to me. I didn’t think it would be sweet nothings. I was right.

  “Got a call last night from a friend of mine, Bennett. He was asking my help about trying to get you off this case and out of Major Crimes Division, but you know what?”

  “What’s that?” I said, playing along since I had no other choice.

  “It looks like you’re doing a far better job of getting booted off this case than I ever could,” Vonroden said.

  As the chief left, I got a call from Detective Siobhan Barton, one of the responding Fifth Precinct detectives I’d sent to canvass the neighborhood. She was calling from the Kate Spade’s around the corner, one of the stores whose bag the female thief had been seen holding.

  “Hey, good news, Mike,” the rookie detective said. “We got a lead, I think. Clerk in here says a woman came in and bought some sandals about an hour before the robbery. She paid in cash, but they have a camera, and I got a pretty good shot of her.”

  “Was anybody else with her?” I said.

  “No, but it’s the woman. She fits the description exactly. Same platinum-blond hair, same black dress.”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “That’s not all,” Detective Barton said. “It’s just like the jewelry store staff said. She had a Russian accent.”

  CHAPTER 70

  ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, with the processing of the SoHo crime scene wrapping up, I made some phone calls and got into my cruiser and headed east and then north up the FDR for the not-so-trendy Boogie Down Bronx.

  Just over the Harlem River at Macombs Dam Bridge, I pulled over onto Jerome Avenue in front of Yankee Stadium’s Gate 2 and parked. I made another phone call. About ten minutes later, one of the stadium’s maintenance doors opened and out came a guy in a security guard uniform. He was a short, potbellied middle-aged man with a huge bald head and an even huger grin on his face.

 
“Mike, I am so glad you called me,” said my old buddy, Yaakov Chazam, as he happily climbed into the cruiser.

  Yaakov was quite an interesting character. An immigrant from Moscow, right after the Berlin Wall fell in ’89, he’d been a brilliant math professor at NYU before he ditched academia for the life of a professional poker player. We’d come into contact over the murder of a young Wall Street trader I had worked five years before.

  As it turned out, the murdered guy had been killed over gambling debts to Russian mobsters accrued in the underground Brooklyn gambling dens that the mobsters controlled and where Yaakov played. Yaakov, who had been a good friend of the young guy, had done the right thing by contacting me and anonymously named enough names to get the loan shark enforcer and his Mob boss put away.

  Since then, Yaakov had turned out to be a veritable font of information about the Russian Mob in Brooklyn. I would tap him for info from time to time, as would the FBI and the DEA.

  Though squealing about the Russian Mob was highly dangerous for him, Yaakov couldn’t help himself because he was an incurable mystery reader, police buff, and lover of all things cop. Which explained his choice of low-paying security guard jobs like the one here at the stadium. He didn’t even need a job, with all the money he made playing poker. He just wanted to wear a uniform.

  “So, Yaakov, staying out of those poker dens?” I said as I made a U-turn and drove up 161st Street past the iconic Bronx County Courthouse.

  “Oh, yeah. Only a little here and there when I’m tight,” he said, rolling his eyes sarcastically. “Actually, my new wife, she hates when I go, yet she never objects to going on these monster shopping sprees when I win. Weird, huh? What can I do for you, Mike? You got something juicy for me?”

  “I’m trying to identify a woman. Might be from your neck of the woods,” I said, turning onto the Grand Concourse and pulling over and taking out my iPhone.

  “Oh, pictures!” he said excitedly as I brought up the video I’d gotten from the Kate Spade store. “I love pictures. Is it of a crime scene? Is she dead? Naked, maybe?”

  “Sorry, Yaakov,” I said as the security footage loaded. “Unfortunately, she’s alive and dressed.”

  “This isn’t so bad,” he said as he watched the mystery blonde put on shoes. “She has nice legs. What am I supposed to be looking for? If I know her? Seen her around?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  He peered at the screen.

  “No, I don’t know her. I don’t think so. Though it’s pretty impossible to tell with those big sunglasses, and that looks like a wig, right? Though she is Russian Mafia.”

  “She is?” I said. “How do you know?”

  He rewound and hit Pause and pointed.

  “See here? The green mark on her left ankle. That’s a nakolki, a Russian jailhouse tattoo. These Mafia idiot types are gaga about their stupid tattoos. A cat wearing a hat like that one is Mafia from way back. What is she? A hooker?”

  “We think she was involved with a robbery. A diamond heist today in SoHo around noon.”

  “There was another diamond heist today? Like the other one downtown that was in the paper? That’s the case you’re working? That’s so cool!”

  “Let me ask you, Yaakov. Do Serbians and Russians get along?”

  “Actually, they do a little. They trace a common ancestry. At least, a lot of Serbians say so. Why?”

  “There’s a group of Serbian crooks in Europe called the Pink Panther gang. They travel around the world knocking over jewelry stores. Japan, Paris, London. Do you think if Serbians came here they’d work with a woman from the Russian Mob?”

  Yaakov shook his head.

  “No, I don’t think so. Why go to all the trouble to come to the States and then use some woman you might not trust so much? Last time I checked, Serbian thugs had their own bitches to do shit for them. Why not bring one along with you?”

  “Good point,” I said as I finally thumbed off my phone.

  I tried to piece things together. I was having some trouble. So it wasn’t Serbians?

  “Stolen diamonds, mysterious blondes,” Yaakov said, staring at my phone. “This is like Hitchcock, only for real, man. What a freaking awesome country this is!”

  CHAPTER 71

  INSTEAD OF ANOTHER ROUND of La Grenouille’s prix fixe, that night’s dinner consisted of stale vending-machine Oreos washed down with even staler vintage instant coffee. My repast was served cubicle-side in Major Crimes’ deserted squad room as I stayed late running down leads on my case’s potential new Russian connection.

  With a blown-up printout of my mystery woman taped to the shade of the desk lamp beside my computer, I scoured the entire female Russian Mob suspect section of the electronic mug book from the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau. But even after two hours of clicking through the Russian female version of the mad, the bad, and the crooked, there was nothing even resembling a match.

  My informant, Yaakov, had been right, I thought as I unsuccessfully tried to blow the cookie crumbs out of my keyboard. With the woman’s wig and big glasses, she could have been anyone at all.

  My only luck came around eight-thirty when I took a stab in the dark and managed to get Sergeant Eileen Alexander, a sympathetic OCCB detective, on the phone to help me. The Organized Crime Control Bureau detectives were good to have on your side, since they worked with the FBI and had federal security clearances. After much cajoling and some downright begging, I managed to get Eileen to agree to run the photo through the feds’ more extensive Russian Mob databases.

  “Not exactly a family portrait, huh?” the cop said skeptically after I e-mailed her the security camera still. “This is the best you got?”

  C’mon, Eileen, I thought but didn’t say, since every Eileen I knew cringed whenever someone brought up that aggravating ’80s pop song.

  “It’s all I got, Eileen,” I said.

  “And I thought I was having a bad day,” the detective finally said. “I’ll be in touch if I get anything, but waiting by the phone might not be the smartest move for you.”

  I decided to take her sage advice.

  Twenty minutes later, I came over the threshold of my apartment to find Joseph, our faithful new Polish doorman, standing watch.

  “Hey, Joseph, you’re here late. You change shifts or something?” I said.

  “No, Mr. Bennett. Ralph call in sick,” he said forlornly. “Last minute, too. I had concert ticket. Bullet For My Valentine at Roseland. Girlfriend is pissed. Hundred fifty bucks gone. Wish day was just over, you know?”

  “Joseph, I know all about it,” I murmured as I got into the elevator.

  By the time I’d unlocked my apartment door, I’d whittled down my wants to two, a cold beer and a hot shower. I’d just decided on both at the same time when I spotted Mary Catherine on her cell phone in the kitchen. Mary Catherine on the phone, red-eyed. Crying?

  I immediately panicked. Mary Catherine did a lot of things. She baked brownies, doled out Band-Aids, guided people through the perils of fifth-grade geometry, usually all at the same time. What she didn’t do was weep. And yet here she was, doing precisely that.

  My first thought, of course, ran to Seamus and his recent stroke.

  “Mary Catherine, what is it? Is it Seamus?” I said.

  Mary Catherine stared at me perplexed as she continued to listen. Then she nodded and hastily said good-bye and hung up.

  “Oh, no, no, no, Mike. Seamus is fine. It was my sister, Claire, on the phone. It’s about my mother. She just had a brain aneurysm about three hours ago. She’s in the ICU at South Tipperary General Hospital in Clonmel. She’s in a coma, Mike. On a ventilator. I can’t believe it. I was just talking to her three days ago.”

  “Oh, no, Mary Catherine. I’m so sorry,” I said, embracing her.

  “I have to go back to Ireland, Mike. Perhaps for a week or two. But how can I? We’ve barely unpacked and gotten the kids settled here. How can I leave you guys in the lurch?”

  �
�It’s not a concern, Mary Catherine. Your mother needs you. You’ll go. End of story,” I said, wiping a tear from her cheek with my thumb.

  CHAPTER 72

  “OK, MIKE. SO JULIANA and Fiona have dental appointments at eleven on Tuesday,” Mary Catherine explained as we sped along the Cross Bronx Expressway early the next morning.

  “What else?” she said. “Right. Wednesday is the after-school parent-teacher meeting over that scuffle Trent had with that bratty bully, Julio, in his class. And don’t forget, the super is going to install the new dishwasher that’s coming on Friday, but you have to remind him. He’s got a brain like a sieve. I should probably write all this down.”

  “Mary Catherine,” I said when she came up for air. “You did. You printed it out. I got it. I got it under control,” I said, patting her knee.

  That was a complete lie, of course. I didn’t know what on God’s green earth I was going to do once she left. But the least I could do for Mary Catherine, after all she’d done for us, was to try to keep her as calm as possible as she went back home to the unenviable task of attending to her terminally ill mother.

  “Don’t worry, Mary Catherine,” Juliana said as she leaned forward and gave Mary Catherine a huge hug from the seat behind her. We know what to do. We won’t forget what you taught us. All of us, even the boys, will make you so proud. You’ll see.”

  I looked away, kept my face on the horrible potholed roadway. I, like everyone, had been on the verge of complete emotional devastation after hearing the news that Mary Catherine had to leave. There was definitely something weird about the whole situation that I couldn’t put my finger on.

  Instead of her leaving for just a week or two, it really felt, for some strange reason, like we’d never see Mary Catherine again. Or was it just the possibility? It was almost scary how much we loved and needed her. Mary Catherine wasn’t the only one who was going to have to say good-bye to their mother.