Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  I let out a breath as I watched him blubber. I knew he was telling the truth. Noah had told me all about the different types of cannibalism from his research: sexual cannibalism, aggression cannibalism, spiritual and ritual cannibalism, epicurean cannibalism. It was obvious now that the group here tonight wasn’t a pack of budding Jeffrey Dahmers. Sick, amoral assholes who needed a beating and some lessons on how to be human, maybe, but not actual killers.

  It looked like we had come upon cannibals in the city, only they were the wrong type of cannibals. Super.

  I went in and spoke to some of the waiters. When I stepped back out onto the deck, they were behind me, pushing rolling carts with all the “food” on them. One by one, I started Frisbeeing the plates into the harbor. Brooklyn came out and started enthusiastically helping me.

  “What are you doing?” Frosty the Jackass wanted to know.

  “It’s called a burial at sea. This is the remains of a human being. That means something to me because, see, I’m a human being, too. It’s called human fellowship. You and the people in that dining room there might want to look into it.”

  “But you can’t do this,” he said.

  “No?” I said, flinging another plate into the drink. “Now go get the captain to turn this boat around for shore, would you? I’m sorry, but tonight’s culinary adventure has come to a close.”

  CHAPTER 81

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when I got home. I was tapped out, all right, officially out of patience and in absolutely no mood for any more nonsense from anyone after the night’s fiasco.

  The night wasn’t a complete waste, thanks to Brooklyn. Though I continued to fume as the boat made its way back to the dock, my partner wisely managed to keep her head. Ingratiating herself with a few of the diners, she managed to get more insight into the cannibal subculture and, better yet, score a few names of some even sketchier culinary adventurers that we might want to look into.

  Though we were still in the dark on Naomi’s murder, I was quite proud of Brooklyn and the rest of the gang. If nothing else, at least my Harlem crew was really coming along as investigators and as a team.

  A funny thing happened as I walked through my front door. I heard singing coming from the kitchen. Though the rest of the apartment was dark, in the lit kitchen doorway I could see Seamus at the sink, singing to himself as he washed dishes.

  It was the old Irish tune “The Fields of Athenry,” about a poor Irishman who gets sent to a penal colony for stealing food for his family. Seamus had a good singing voice, and it was nice to stand there in the darkened hallway for a few peaceful moments and listen to him sing the sad and yet somehow hopeful old ballad.

  I waited until he was finished before I walked in. He gave me a pat on the back and a gentle smile as I grabbed a towel and started drying beside him.

  How he could grin or sing after picking up the slack of babysitting and dinner and homework without Mary Catherine was beyond me. Seamus was certainly a wise guy and a prankster, but he was also one of the most selfless and truly faithful people I’d ever known. Plus he loved my kids as much as I did, if that was possible.

  In his calming presence, I felt embarrassed by my night’s out-of-control emotional outbursts, especially my rough treatment of the heart-attack-candidate suspect, Dale Roanoke. Wrath was a sin I’d been really wrestling with since coming home from California.

  “Anita’s not still here, is she, Seamus?” I said.

  Anita was Anita Ciardi, the longtime live-in housekeeper at Holy Name’s rectory, where Seamus worked. The saintly seventy-year-old and seventy-pound little fireplug had insisted on coming over to help out once she’d heard that Mary Catherine had to go back to Ireland. The Bennetts had more than one guardian angel floating around, apparently.

  “Just sent her home after she got the laundry done,” he said. “When I came into the kitchen, she was taking out the flour to bake the kids some of her famous Italian cookies, but I told her I’d excommunicate her on the spot if she didn’t leave. How about you, Detective? You’re looking pretty tired. Any collars tonight?”

  “Not a one,” I said, thinking of my many still-open cases.

  “Well, you made it home in one piece, right?” he said, staring at me with his serene blue eyes as he handed me the dripping spaghetti pot. “You can chalk that in the win column, at least.”

  “Hey, how about you? You had the doctor today,” I said. “The real doctor, not that Dowdy character.”

  “Passed all the tests with flying colors,” Seamus said. “Like I told that doctor, I’m fit and fine as Rory McIlroy. And to prove my point…”

  Still wearing his rubber dish gloves, Seamus dropped down and did twenty push-ups, which nearly gave me a stroke of my own.

  “See,” he said, standing. “My own da lived till he was ninety-five. Three heart attacks and cancer didn’t slow him down. Not a step. Well, until he took his last one, I suppose.”

  “That’s enough, Father. Good night now,” I said. “It’s late, so call me when you get back to the rectory.”

  “Call you?” Seamus said as he snapped off his gloves and went for the door. “How about I just text you instead, you dinosaur?”

  When my comical priest grandfather had left, I grabbed a beer and took it into the bedroom. I kicked off my shoes and hopped up on the bed and checked my e-mail on my phone. There was a message from my lawyer, Gunny Chung.

  Mike,

  Just a quick note. First, I just wanted you to know I have my best people working on this. We are scouring the records for Mr. Bieth, including a thorough background check and examination of all social media sites to get to the bottom of exactly who he is, where he came from, what he wants, and what his motivations are. With that said, I have some bad news. We have a court date with Mr. Bieth and a judge scheduled on the 14th that you and, unfortunately, Chrissy, must attend. I will e-mail you the particulars as we get closer to the date.

  All the best,

  Gunny

  I looked out at the lights of Manhattan and thought of my dear departed wife, Maeve.

  “I’m blowing it, right? You agree with me?” I asked her.

  In my mind, I pictured her in a golden field somewhere, happy and waiting for me. The fields of Athenry, I thought.

  I finally wiped my tired eyes and finished my beer and laid the bottle carefully on the night table.

  Those Irish ballads, I thought with a sigh in the dark as the heavy lids of my eyes finally and joyfully closed.

  They’ll get you every time.

  CHAPTER 82

  I WOKE INSPIRED AT six-thirty the next morning, and by seven-thirty, the dining room table was set for ten and everything was lined up.

  There was a platter of bacon and sausage, both Irish and American, no cultural bias here this fine morning. A steaming yellow hill of scrambled eggs. Next came a bowl of peppery golden home fries crisped to my exacting standards. Set beside it was a loaf of white bread, toasted and liberally buttered and fanned niftily around the rim of a plate like a deck of cards. The only thing not made from scratch was the towering stack of pancakes beside the syrup.

  No one’s perfect.

  Well, except for Mary Catherine, of course, but she wasn’t here.

  “What the…?” said Ricky as he came in, followed by a groggy Eddie and Brian. Ricky looked at the food and then down at his plaid tie.

  “Oh, no, is it Sunday?” he said.

  “No, son. It’s still Tuesday. Thought I’d give you guys a surprise hearty breakfast to kick-start your brains into learning mode. Pull up a chair and a plate and have at it.”

  I didn’t have to tell the boys twice. Or the girls. Pretty soon, ten backpacks were ready and waiting by the front door as my ten little Indians dug in around the table like lumberjacks.

  When I’d gotten out of bed, I’d wisely decided to do as MC would occasionally do and drop a surprise Sunday breakfast on everyone in the middle of the week to shake things up. It seemed to be working. There was no fi
ghting and even an occasional giggle as I stood sipping a cup of coffee, watching the gang eat.

  Seamus arrived five minutes later, startled and seemingly impressed to see the kids gathered around the dining room table in relative quiet.

  “I see you’ve woken up on the right side of the bed this morning,” he said as he poured himself some joe. “I thought I’d have to pry you out of bed with a crowbar with that long face you had on last night, but here you are, running the Bennett Diner.”

  I winked as we clinked mugs.

  “Carpe diem, Padre,” I said.

  Then something great happened. Something really great and even more unexpected. It was a text on my phone. A suggestion, along with some instructions.

  “What is it? What’s up?” Seamus said.

  “Stay right there,” I said, running into my bedroom.

  When I came back to the dining room, I was holding my laptop. I cleared away some dishes and laid it on the corner of the table and turned it on.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” Chrissy said, trying to peek.

  “It’s a surprise,” I said. “You can’t look. Just wait one sec.”

  I clicked some more buttons, changing screens.

  “Ta-da!” I said as I held up the laptop to show Mary Catherine smiling ear-to-ear on Skype.

  “Mary Catherine!” everyone cried at once.

  Chairs scraped loudly as the kids rushed over beside me. Chrissy and Shawna jumped into my lap as Seamus practically jumped on my back. A dozen heads bonked together as everyone tried to get a look at our long-lost nanny.

  “Now would you look at all the happy faces,” Mary Catherine said. “On a Tuesday morning before school, no less. I guess I’m not that missed after all, seeing you so happy.”

  “Noooo!” Shawna cried. “We miss you! We really, really miss you!”

  “I miss you, too, Shawna. Like you wouldn’t believe,” Mary Catherine said. “I feel like I’ve been gone a year. How long has it been?”

  “Ten years,” I said.

  “Guess what we named the puppy, Mary Catherine?” Fiona said, holding him up to the screen.

  “Tell me,” Mary Catherine said, smiling widely.

  “Jasper!” the kids cried out together.

  “And don’t forget that the hamster’s name is now Puddles. That suggestion was me own, actually, on account of his reaction each time I pick up the nervous little fella,” Seamus said as the little ones giggled.

  “I love you all. That includes Jasper and Puddles. I’ll be home to you as soon as I can. Bye now,” Mary Catherine said as she clicked off the connection.

  “Not soon enough, Mary Catherine,” I mumbled to the blank gray screen.

  CHAPTER 83

  AFTER DROPPING THE KIDS off at school, I drove up on a loud commotion by the Harlem squad’s office building on 125th Street.

  As I parked behind a donut cart near the corner of Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, I could see a one-legged homeless guy on the plaza in front of the building. He was putting on some kind of a show. Jumping around energetically like a middle-aged black pogo stick, he was shaking a coin-filled coffee cup while singing the Marvin Gaye classic “Let’s Get It On” at the top of his lungs.

  Was he harmless? Dangerous? Bath-salted? I wondered as I stepped toward him. Entertaining? Definitely.

  “Well, hello there, sir. Tucker Johnson’s the name,” the man said, jingling the change in his coffee cup like a tambourine as he hopped toward me with a surprising athletic alacrity. “You have a request? What can ol’ Tucker sing for you? You like the Platters? I do a real nice ‘Twilight Time.’”

  I shook my head. I could smell the cheap wine off him from ten feet. Handicapped people are able to accomplish a lot of amazing things that deserve applause. But drinking oneself into oblivion by eight-thirty in the morning isn’t one of them.

  “I don’t mind you hanging out, Tucker. You just can’t hang out here making so much noise, bothering the good people of the world trying to go to work. No singing until noon. At least. Also, getting sober first might be nice.”

  “Ah, man. I ain’t hurtin’ no one,” he said. “I’m just tryin’ to spread a little sonic joy out here this morning. Plus this is my work, man. You gonna put an artist outta work?”

  “Fine,” I said. “How does ten bucks sound to go away?” I reached into my wallet.

  “Twenty sounds better,” Tucker said, getting surly.

  “Twenty what?” I said, staring at him sternly. “Days in jail for disturbing the peace?”

  “On second thought, ten’ll do just fine,” Tucker said, brightening.

  The crowd waiting at the donut cart on the corner of 125th gave me a cheer as I escorted Tucker Johnson on his way. I took a modest bow before heading back toward the building. And why not? Not even in the office yet and I’d already solved my first civil disturbance of the day.

  But before I got even halfway to the building’s front door, my phone rang. It was Arturo.

  “Mike, I just picked up the office phone. A cop stationed over at Harlem Hospital said Rachel Wecht just came in, in terrible shape.”

  I stopped in my tracks. Rachel Wecht was Roger’s new punk rock girlfriend, I remembered.

  “Apparently, Roger really did a job on her last night,” Arturo continued. “They were smoking crack, and he went nuts and threw her out a second-story window face-first. She broke both her arms and cheekbones and knocked out her front teeth. The good news is she spilled the beans on Roger’s location. He stays at the Charles H. Gay shelter for men out on Wards Island.”

  “Come down on the double, Arturo,” I cried as I headed back for the car. “I’ll meet you in the lot. We can’t let this guy get away again.”

  CHAPTER 84

  A SEEMINGLY ENDLESS CSX freight train was slowly making its way from Queens to the Bronx across the Hell Gate Bridge as we came through the Triborough Bridge toll for the island made up of Randall’s and Wards islands.

  In the middle of the East River between the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens, Randall’s and Wards was a weird area. It housed the FDNY Fire Academy and a New York State Police facility, but its most infamous institution was the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, a dizzying network of massive tan brick buildings with barred windows that had once been the largest mental asylum in the entire world.

  Beside the municipal buildings were open fields that had been converted into recreational facilities, baseball and soccer fields, tennis courts, picnic areas. There was even a driving range.

  Our destination, the Charles H. Gay Men’s Shelter, was at the bottom of the off-ramp, a large, wide four-story redbrick building behind a black iron fence. It almost looked like a private school until we got closer and saw the broken beer bottles and piles of vomit peppering the curb by its gate. We parked just beyond the M35 bus stop out front, where a white-bearded old Hispanic man lay splayed flat on his back on a bench, sleeping.

  We told the security guard inside the door what we wanted, and he buzzed us in to see the facility’s day director, Nolan Washington, in his office just off the lobby.

  “There must be some mistake,” said Washington, a well-dressed XXL black man and former air force medic. “You’re looking for a criminal? Here?”

  He rolled his eyes as he sat us down on his office sofa with some coffee.

  “That’s a joke, in case you were wondering,” he said, accepting the photo of Roger that Arturo handed him. “We got plenty of people with serious criminal histories here, especially sexual assaults. They commit offenses, go upstate to jail, and then when the jails dump them back out, they come back home to nothing and we get to deal with the mess.”

  “This place looks pretty empty,” I said. “How does the shelter work?”

  “We open at eight p.m. and close the doors at the ten p.m. curfew. Everybody has to be out by eight the next morning. They’re supposed to look for work, make some attempt to try to become self-sufficient. But they don’t. They mostly drink and drug and l
ie around all day like oversize alley cats until we open the doors back up at eight p.m. It’s pretty frustrating.”

  “So have you seen Roger?” I said, redirecting his attention to the photo.

  “Let me grab my glasses,” he said, lifting a pair off his desk.

  He slipped on bifocals and stared at the sheet thoughtfully.

  “Wait a second,” he said, his eyes suddenly brightening. “I think we just hired this guy in the kitchen. But his name isn’t Roger, it’s Simon. Simon Ritt? No, Britt. That’s it. Simon Britt.”

  He blinked up at us.

  “He should be here right now.”

  CHAPTER 85

  WASHINGTON TOOK OFF HIS bifocals as he lifted a phone.

  “Hey, Sam, is that new guy, Simon, in?” he said.

  He listened.

  “Uh-huh. OK. Thanks.”

  “He’s on his morning break,” Washington said as he hung up. “They said he just took one of the maintenance carts to go to the snack bar by the driving range.”

  We rushed back outside with a trailing Washington, who hopped into the backseat. We were coming along the concrete columns of the Triborough about a quarter mile north on one of the island’s access roads when Washington pointed forward through the windshield.

  “There he is! That’s him in the green cart.”

  Instead of the golf cart I thought he’d be driving, Roger, wearing kitchen whites, was on a green John Deere quad-like off-road vehicle. He turned his head as we were coming alongside him. I smiled as our eyes met.

  Then Roger disappeared.

  I almost ran him over as he suddenly cut savagely to the left in front of the Chevy, up over a curb under the Triborough Bridge overpass.