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"Sure, sure, sure," she said, giggling. "What a gentleman."
"Are you looking for some company tonight?" she said in his ear when her $20 dirty martini arrived.
"Oh," he said, feigning surprise. "Oh, wow. You're um…"
"Working. Yes," she said, nodding, smiling. "Does that bother you?"
"Bother me? I'm bothered, all right. Hot and bothered in the best way possible. How does it work?"
"You're not a cop, are you?"
Carl laughed and took a sip of his Whiskey Smash.
"Hardly," he said.
"I didn't think so. How does it work? Let's see. You give me a thousand dollars, and I give you a lovely night you won't forget."
"Heck, let's get to it, then," Carl said, taking her hand again.
She banged his bad knee as she was pulling out her bar stool.
"I'm so sorry," she said.
"No problem," he said, his eyes tearing with the pain. She was going to pay for that, Carl thought.
His limp became more pronounced as they left the bar and headed for the opulent lobby's elevator.
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"Old war injury," Carl said. "Don't worry. Everything else works fine."
"Glad to hear it. What should I call you?"
"My employees call me Mr. Rifkin," Apt said. "But you can call me Joel."
Chapter 87
Monday morning, I sat at my desk at One Police Plaza still as a Zen master, breathing slowly, eyes closed, mentally prepping myself for my upcoming reaming at the task force meeting.
After reading the morning papers, I needed the meditation. Berger's lawyer, some fool named Allen Duques, was crying false arrest and police negligence and was insisting on a thorough investigation into his client's death. Only the Post piece happened to remind everyone that his client was a child- and cop-killing wacko.
I was thinking about getting into the lotus position to counteract all the bad karma when there was a knock on my cubicle wall. I reluctantly opened my eyes. Then I smiled. It was Emily Parker.
"Mike, are you… okay?" she said.
"Fine," I said.
"Good, because my friend's cousin is downstairs waiting for us."
"Oh, right. The spook," I said, standing.
"Shh," Emily said. "The walls have ears."
Outside on the street half a block east, a massive silver Lincoln Navigator sat idling. A bony, attractive brown-haired woman sat behind the wheel. Even more unexpected was the six-month-old in the car seat behind her.
"Mike, Karen. Karen, Mike," Emily said as we climbed in.
Emily grabbed shotgun while I was relegated to the backseat next to the baby on board. I flicked some cheerios off the leather before I sat.
"Please tell Mike what you were telling me, Karen. You worked with Carl Apt in Intelligence, right?"
"I did," the thin woman said, checking her mirror.
"How about the baby?" I said, smiling at the cute little girl.
"She's a civilian," Karen assured me with a smile. "I worked for the Company until a year ago. Now I'm a Larchmont soccer-mom-in-training. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Love makes you do some damn strange things."
"I know what that's like," I said.
Emily shot me a look from the front seat.
"I thought it was Carl when I saw the security shot in the Post," Karen began, "but I didn't come forward because of national secrecy, yada, yada, yada. But after the recent death of that woman, I couldn't stay silent anymore. What I'm about to tell you is classified information. You didn't hear this from me. Agreed? In 2002 I worked in Yemen with the CIA SAD."
"Is that the stay-at-home-dad department?" I said.
"Special Activities Division," she said as we hooked a quick left down an alley-wide Chinatown street. "We were responsible for covert military raids on Al Qaeda targets. Carl was on one of our strike teams. He was the bomb tech. All the other Delta guys deferred to him for all things explosive. He actually won the Intelligence Star commendation in our operation when he used a predator drone to knock out a pickup truck loaded with bad guys who were coming in on our position."
"You're kidding me," I said.
"I made some phone calls," Karen said. "Carl, while great at war, wasn't too hot on the domestic front. He was working at Fort Bragg as a Delta Force trainer up until 2003, when he got into a beef with his new supervisor. He was about to be transferred out of the group, when the CO found some C-four wired to his car battery. When they came to ask Apt about it, he was gone. He'd bugged out."
"He went AWOL," Emily said.
"Not just that," Karen said. "A month to the day after he left, the supervisor didn't show up for work. They found him sitting at his kitchen table in his bathrobe with the top of his head blown into his bowl of Blueberry Morning. Coroner retrieved two.forty-five ACPs from his brain pan. He'd been double tapped, execution-style. No forced entry. Apt must have picked the lock. Delta Force SOP. Apt came back and finished the job."
That explained a lot, I thought. Apt's dedication, his bomb-making flair. It also explained the connection he had with Berger. Both warped bastards had been "wronged by the world."
"That's what I call Army strong," I said as the baby grabbed my thumb. "Do you know anything about Berger?"
"The rich fat guy?" Karen said. "Not a thing. I just thought I'd let you know who you're up against. Apt knows tactics, counterinsurgency. He's one dangerous son of a bitch. I said more than once that I was glad he was on our side. Only now he's not."
"Any family?" Emily said.
"Only family on his army record is a mother. Deceased."
I looked out at the street then turned and looked at the baby.
"You wouldn't know where Carl is right now, would you?" I asked the little girl.
Chapter 88
As spy mom dropped me and Emily off in front of One Police Plaza, I felt a tingle run up my side. Instead of my Spidey sense cluing me in to Apt's current location like I was hoping, it was just my cell phone that I'd left on vibrate.
"The good news is that you don't have to attend this morning's piss-and-moan session," my boss said. "One guess what's behind door number two."
I took the phone off my ear and just stared at it as I leaned back on one of the massive concrete bomb-blast planters out in front of the building.
"Another one?" Emily groaned.
"How? Where?" I finally said into the phone.
"The Carlyle Hotel," Mirlam said. "Madison and Seventy-something. Looks like a hooker, Mike. You need to get up there before the news vans. This guy just won't quit."
Emily and I got my car and went crosstown to Sixth Avenue and made a right. It was another sidewalk-scorcher of a day. The overtaxed A/C started spitting water by the time we made it to Midtown. As we approached 42nd, the traffic actually halted, and we did the stop-and-go thing in the white-hot glare. I thought there was an accident or maybe the president was in town, but it turned out to be just a traffic agent blocking off two right-hand lanes for no discernible reason.
"Are you freaking kidding me? Get the hell out of the way!" Emily screamed, practically climbing out of the passenger window to get a piece of the stringy white traffic lady as we roared past.
"And an abusive morning to you, too, Agent Parker," I teased as I gunned it, hoping the city worker didn't catch our plates. "You want to stop for an iced coffee? Or I could pull over and throw open a fire hydrant for you to cool down if you want."
"I don't know how you do it, Mike," Emily said, taking her pulse. "This city. This heat. No wonder everyone here is nuts."
"Present company most definitely included," I said, pointing at her.
We rolled east over to Madison and picked up the pace. Fancy boutiques with even fancier foreign names started sailing past. Emanuel Ungaro, Sonia Rykiel, Bang amp; Olufsen, Christian Louboutin. Were they luggage shops? Jewelry stores? Law firms? If you had to ask, you couldn't afford it, and I most definitely had to ask.
The Carlyle was between East 75th and 76th on the west side of Madison Avenue. It was also right around the corner from Berger's Fifth Avenue co-op building. Was Apt getting sloppier now? I wondered. Was he homesick? Or was he taunting us? If he was, it was working. I most definitely felt taunted.
We had to circle around the block in order to double park on 76th near Fifth behind a patrol car. As we approached the Carlyle, I saw that a section of the hotel was actually under renovation. There was a sidewalk shed and an exterior construction elevator connected to the pale limestone of its north face. Outside the construction entrance, about twenty hardhats, half of them shirtless, were enjoying coffee and cigarettes and the passing women. They immediately shifted their attention to my partner as we passed.
The Carlyle had one of those lobbies that immediately makes you check the shine on your shoes and look to see if there are any spots on your tie. A piano played from somewhere as chandeliers the size of minivans glittered between palace walls of pristine white marble. The black stone floor was so highly buffed, I looked for a "Slippery When Wet" sign.
An almost-as-buffed short black man in a tailored blue suit immediately button-holed us by the check-in desk. The man looked incapable of perspiring, like he'd long ago had the offensive glands removed.
"I'm Adrian Tottinger," the manager said. "The um… unfortunate person is actually downstairs, where they're working."
It was hot again once we entered the hotel's drab concrete back stairwell. At the bottom of it, a uniform snapped his cell phone shut and led us along a stifling corridor past the hotel's kitchen and a rumbling laundry room.
Beyond some hanging plastic and another door, the section of the hotel under construction smelled faintly of an open sewer. The sound of nail guns and shouts rang from above as we walked over gravel to a corner where three more uniforms were standing.
The "unfortunate person" was lying in a large tublike pan used for mixing concrete. The woman had actually been cemented into the tub with just her head and arms and lower legs exposed. As if perhaps she'd mistaken the pan of ready-mix for a Jacuzzi and had fallen asleep.
She was pale and had white-blond hair and a Marilyn Monroe or Madonna look. Even with most of her face beaten black and blue and her neck swollen and purple, she'd obviously been quite attractive. Now she was naked and dead and tossed like so much trash among the construction site's drywall screws and spackle-flecked-compound buckets.
"Let me guess. This fits with the Joel Rifkin profile somehow," I said.
Emily was already on one knee, reaching into her bag, flipping through her stacks of photocopied research.
She tore out a sheet.
"Rifkin's second victim was beaten and strangled."
"Check," I said.
"The dismembered body parts hidden in buckets of concrete."
"This isn't technically a bucket, but a pretty reasonable facsimile."
"Reasonable?" Emily said as the sound of hammers rained down from above.
Chapter 89
The hotel's security cameras turned out to be a gold mine.
Standing in a cramped, broiling basement security room, Emily and I watched a computer screen, where Apt, in living color, casually walked with the dead girl through the Carlyle's lobby.
"You grinning son of a bitch!" I said, clinking the screen with my finger.
Apt was wearing an expensive-looking polo shirt and jeans, dressed elegant casual, summer suave. He had on a chunky gold wristwatch. We'd already spoken to the clerk, who said Apt had paid for his $2,000-a-night suite in cash. Watching him head for the check-in desk, I thought Apt's overall demeanor seemed calm, self-confident, not out of place in the slightest in the insanely expensive hotel. The fucker.
The best video footage of all came from the camera in the corridor outside his room. At three a.m., a difficult-to-make-out man carrying something large wrapped in a sheet walked toward the rear service elevator.
"So he did her in the room, then," Emily said, nodding.
I nodded back.
"It still boggles my mind that he would take the time to prepare a batch of concrete in the basement and lay her in it. Imagine, you're down in that pit in the middle of the night. He even took the time to trowel it smooth and seamless with a craftsman's pride. I can see why this guy was a commando. He must have antifreeze for blood."
After we obtained copies of the tapes, we went up to the eleventh-floor room Apt had rented out. There was lavish furniture everywhere, an antique rolltop desk, a cream-colored sectional, gilt-frame mirrors. The window of the sitting room had an incredible view to the south, the Met Life Building on Park and the Chrysler Building.
We found the hooker's bag behind the chic sectional. Among a plethora of interesting trade equipment was a wallet with a New Jersey State driver's license. Wendy Shackleton.
"Do you think Jersey Girl Wendy here crossed Berger somehow, too?" I said. "Or is Apt maybe starting his own Dead People Club now? Branching out?"
"My money's on Berger," Emily said.
The CSU team was already in the bedroom. They'd found a bloody chair leg and blood spatter on the sheets and headboard of the bed. One of the techs told us they'd also found textbook-quality fingerprints on the chair leg.
"He's getting sloppy?" I said.
"No," Emily said, staring at the blood on the graphic canvas over the California King sleigh bed. "I'd say it's more that he just doesn't care if he leaves evidence. His main concern and number-one priority was staging the body, turning it into a copy of Rifkin's second victim. The girl was just his project material, modeling clay, oak tag."
We stared out the window as the techs clicked their cases shut, getting ready to leave. As we watched, the sun came out from behind a passing cloud and turned the Chrysler Building's iconic spire to molten silver.
"Not bad digs for a boy from coal mine country," Emily said.
"Berger transformed the lad," I said. "It's your classic rags-to-riches-to-mass-murderer story."
"What now?" Emily said as we kept standing there.
"How about we both resign, and I call room service for a bottle of champagne?"
"Don't tempt me," Emily said as she headed for the door.
Chapter 90
After a hot, frustrating ride back downtown, we headed directly up to my boss's office on the eleventh floor of HQ to show her the hotel's security tapes.
"The stones on this guy," I said as we watched. "This place makes the Plaza look like a Days Inn, Miriam. And look at him. He's walking around like he owns it. He even paid for his room with a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills."
"What's the progress on getting Berger's assets frozen?" Emily said.
"The wheels of justice move slowly. Actually, in the summer in this city, they come to a grinding halt," Miriam said, frowning. "Last I heard we'll have the warrants by the end of the day, but that's what they said yesterday. Berger's lawyer, Duques, is the executor of the estate. Why don't you swing by and appeal to his civic responsibility. It's a long shot, but maybe it'll get him to shut his damn mouth to the press for five minutes."
We took another leisurely roll in the baking midday gridlock back up to midtown. Allen Duques's office was in a glass pagoda-shaped building on Lexington Avenue across from Grand Central Terminal. I parked my unmarked in the middle of a bus stop across the insanely congested street and threw down the NYPD placard on the visor so it would still be there when we returned.
Duques's firm was on thirty-three. The outfit had the entire floor. Right out of the elevator, the name of his firm, Hunt, Block amp; Bally, stood in yard-high stainless-steel letters on the Brazilian Cherry wall.
"Mr. Duques?" said the brunette waif of a receptionist behind the glass door after we asked to see him. Her fine-boned model's face looked amazed, as if we'd just asked her to tell us the meaning of life.
"I'm sorry, but Mr. Duques is booked all day," she informed us.
"Yeah, well, this is important," I said showing her my shield.
Even with all our magic badge power, we had to wait another ten minutes before another attractive flunky, who looked like she ate maybe every other day, showed up.
I trailed a finger along one of the exotic-wood-paneled hallways she led us down.
"So this is what the corridors of power look like," I said, nodding thoughtfully.
Around a corner, Duques stood in his office doorway, smiling pleasantly. The preppy bespectacled gent shook our hands before getting us seated in his plush office. He reminded me of the fancy hotel manager, polished and perfect, not a damn wrinkle in his white shirt even when he sat down. I, on the other hand, was sweating like a pig in a hot tub, despite the A/C. How did these rich guys do it?
"Now, what can I do for the NYPD and the FBI?" he said after we declined his coffee offer. The trim, middle-aged lawyer seemed affable and down-to-earth, which most likely wasn't easy for him, considering his socks had probably cost more than my shoes.
"We were wondering if you could help us," I said.
"I can try," he said, eyeing us carefully. "What's the problem?"
"We have reason to believe that Carl Apt still has access to Lawrence Berger's money," Emily said. "To be frank, we're working on a warrant to have Berger's assets frozen, but it won't happen until tomorrow at the earliest. We know you're the executor of Mr. Berger's estate, and we're here to ask you to freeze action on all accounts before anyone else is killed."
"Hmm. That's a tall order," the lawyer said, leaning slowly back in his chair. "You're assuming a lot. I'm not even sure I should admit that my client had a relationship with Mr. Apt."
"Crazy assumption, I know," I said, "considering your client admitted to it and to his guilt in his signed confession before he killed himself."
Duques took off his glasses and chewed on an endpiece.