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  “Have you ever handled a sniper rifle?” he said as the other kids started laughing.

  “Well, yes, actually. I have. Now who knows what a policeman does?”

  Just as I said this, my phone started ringing. I had forgotten to put it on airplane mode, and the loud tones started playing, to the amusement of all the kids.

  Naturally, one of my kids at home had set it onto the stupidest ring available in the settings, a doofy electronic ditty called “By the Seaside.” As I unsuccessfully tried to hit the right button to shut it off, Henry leapt up with an impromptu belly dance for his buddies. Thanks, Henry.

  As the chaos erupted, I looked down at my phone screen and saw that the call was from Chief Fabretti, my boss. Which was actually a little concerning. He didn’t call me unless there was something happening.

  “Hey, Sr. Claire,” I said, waving my phone. “I’m sorry. I actually have to take this.”

  “Please, Detective. Take it, by all means,” she said, settling Henry back into his place on the floor.

  Leaving, I glanced back and saw Chrissy covering her face in abject embarrassment. Great.

  “Another fine speaking engagement, Tony Robbins,” Father Seamus said, giving me a mock thumbs-up as I left. “But don’t worry, I’ll cover for you.”

  I shook my head as my stage Irishman of a grandfather rushed to the front of the class and cleared his throat elaborately.

  “Boys and girls and girls and boys. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Father Seamus,” he said, taking a bow as the door closed behind me.

  Chapter 2

  Twenty minutes later, I was on 67th Street between Broadway and Columbus, standing in front of a beeping Caterpillar front loader as it was about to drop a bunch of rubble into a curbside dump truck. Inside the hollowed-out dirt worksite behind it, I could see yellow crime-scene tape cordoning off a section to the right.

  “Hey! Hold it right there! Back it up!” I yelled to the hard hat in the cab, showing him my shield.

  “What the hell is this?” said a big guy, who looked like the contractor in charge. He rushed over and got in my face. “What’s the problem? We’re working on the other side, away from the body. The first officer said it was okay.”

  “The first officer was wrong,” I said, stepping up till we were practically forehead to forehead. “I’m the responding detective. This entire site is a crime scene. Nothing gets moved out of it. In fact, you and everybody else get out on the sidewalk until I say different.”

  “Are you mad?” the contractor said, in his thick Brooklyn accent. “We’re on a schedule. Cement is on its way. We’re pouring in less than an hour.”

  “Not anymore,” I told him as I walked toward the crime-scene tape.

  “Hey, Detective. Sorry about that,” said a young black sergeant, stepping up beside me as I arrived at the crime scene. “I thought it would be all right since they wanted to work on the other side of the site. Besides, the guy looks like he fell or jumped.”

  “Looks can be deceiving, Sergeant,” I said. “Please go out on the sidewalk and keep those people off my back.”

  “Hey, Mike. Long time, no see,” said a sharp crime-scene tech I knew, Judy Yelas, who was photographing the body. “What brings the legendary Major Case to the lowly West Side? I thought the Twentieth Precinct was handling.”

  “Me, too, until my boss called,” I said with a shrug.

  “Ah, I see. Orders from on high. Poli-tricks as usual,” Judy said, rolling her eyes.

  Poli-tricks was actually kind of right.

  As it turned out, Index House, the hotel beside the crime scene, kept appearing in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Open for only six months, it had received negative publicity for a couple of viral videos. One was of people having sex on a balcony. Another was of a famous NFL player drunkenly knocking out a woman in an elevator.

  It also turned out that the owner of the hotel was a wealthy political contributor and close family friend of the new governor. Now, the powers that be wanted to “figure out” this latest Big Apple hospitality fiasco as quickly and discreetly as possible.

  I don’t know about any of that wishful sort of political thinking. Nor, frankly, do I care. A person was dead, and I was available, so here I was.

  I came around the pile driver and squatted down on my heels to look at the body. The deceased was a tall, lean, dark-haired man in his early thirties, maybe. He wore a nice dark suit and was positioned lying on his back in a pool of blood, his face smashed up horribly.

  I took a few steps back, looked up at the hotel and unintentionally let out a whistle. He must have come down face-first and hit the metal pile driver on the right, which flipped him like a rag doll. I felt terrible for the guy. Like pretty much every other jumper I had ever dealt with, he seemed to have suffered a gruesome death.

  “Wallet? Phone?” I said to Judy.

  “None that I can see. I didn’t pat him down, though. Thought you’d want to.”

  I knelt beside him, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, and went through the pockets of his pants and jacket. There was nothing. No wallet, no phone. Not even when Judy helped me turn him and look underneath the body.

  Didn’t make a lot of sense. Drunk? I thought. Suicide? But I let my conclusions slide for the time being, and snapped a few pictures with my phone of this poor citizen’s ruined face.

  “I’m done here, Judy,” I said, giving her my card. “When the medical examiner gets here, tell him this gentleman is good to go.”

  “That’s it, huh?” Judy said, smiling. “Love ’em and leave ’em? Mike Bennett, NYPD’s version of the Lone Ranger. Who was that masked man?”

  “Hey, feel free to take notes on what an efficient textbook investigation looks like,” I said with a wink. “Like you said, you’re dealing with the legendary Major Case.”

  Chapter 3

  The first thing I noticed as I entered the stylish modern hotel off the 67th Street sidewalk were the two people talking by the front desk.

  One was a twenty-something white guy wearing an Arab keffiyeh scarf with his blue blazer. The other was an elegant middle-aged black woman in a plum-colored dress and pearls. They seemed to be arguing quietly, and the guy in the scarf was holding up his phone between them, right in the lady’s face.

  “Hi. I’m Detective Bennett. Are you the hotel manager?” I said to the woman.

  “Yes. I’m Amanda Milton,” she said pleasantly. I stepped between them, almost knocking the phone out of the guy’s hand.

  “And who are you?” I said to the guy curtly. As if I didn’t know.

  “Luke Messerly. From the New York Times,” he said.

  “Could I talk to you for a sec, Luke?” I said. I steered him toward the front revolving door. “I just got here, buddy,” I said in a low tone. “I need to get a handle on this investigation. Give me your card, and as soon as I have something, I’ll get back to you. I promise.”

  “Yeah, right. Don’t give me the runaround, Detective. I know who you are. You’re Mike Bennett, the NYPD’s go-to Major Case problem solver. Or is it fixer? I also know that the owner of this hotel is very good friends with the governor. Coincidence? I think not.”

  I smiled as I put an arm over Luke’s shoulder.

  “Luke, you’re quick. I like that. But listen. Your boss told you to drop everything and rush the hell down here, am I right?” I asked.

  “Of course. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Luke, we’re in the same boat, buddy. My boss did the same exact thing to me.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means we’re in this together. But if you start stepping on my toes, then how can I be nice to you and help you keep your new job? See, I know you’re young and impatient, Luke. I was the same way myself once upon a time. But if you continue to push, I will ‘no comment’ you straight back to the real estate or Queens section you just came from. You don’t want that, do you? Of course not. You’re in the bi
gs now, Luke. The last thing you want is to get sent back down, right?”

  “I guess,” he said. I slapped my card into his hand and nudged him into the exit.

  “Let’s cooperate, buddy, and truly, we’ll all get through this just fine,” I said with a smile, as I helped the doorman push the reporter out the door.

  Chapter 4

  “From what time do you need the footage?” said the hotel’s stocky Asian security head, Albert Yoon, a couple of minutes later as I stood in his tiny basement office.

  “We’ll start at around four o’clock last evening,” I said, as I stood watching his computer screen. “You have two bars, right? Any trouble last night?”

  “Not really,” Yoon said in a Long Island accent. He had been a Suffolk County cop. “Someone upchucked in the men’s restroom in the lobby. No precedent set there.”

  “Wait. Stop it there,” I said. I saw a tall black-haired guy in a dark suit on the screen checking in. “That might be him. Can you match the check-in time to the name?”

  “We sure can,” Yoon said, clicking open a new screen. “Let’s see. Your guy is one Pete Mitchell. He’s still checked in. He’s in 717.”

  “Any charges on his credit card?” I said as I wrote it down.

  “No. It says there’s no credit card. He pre-paid for the room in cash.”

  “Did he show ID?”

  “Yeah. The desk clerk should have a photocopy of it upstairs. Anyone who pays in cash has to show valid ID in case a room gets trashed or what have you.”

  Yoon was standing but suddenly sat back down.

  “Wait a second,” he said. He clicked the security video again and hit Fast-forward. “I think this guy, Mitchell, might be the guy who yakked in the men’s room. Look at this.”

  Yoon brought up the shot of the lobby hall, and I watched as Mitchell headed into what I assumed to be the men’s room. A moment later, two other men appeared in the hall, one of them entering while the other waited. Some time passed, and the other guy in the hall went into the restroom and then Mitchell reappeared.

  “See the kind of nervous look on his face and how he hurries away?”

  I nodded. “Where does he go? Can you see?” I asked.

  Yoon clicked on another screen, and we watched as Mitchell pulled open another door at the end of the hall.

  “That leads to the B stairwell. There are no cameras in there. Maybe he went back to his room? I’ll look at the camera on seven.”

  Yoon changed screens and clicked the mouse several times.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “The camera on seven is broken or something. It’s not showing anything.”

  I looked at Yoon.

  “Does the stairwell go all the way up to the roof?” I said.

  Yoon looked back at me.

  “It does go all the way,” he said.

  “That’s when he did it,” I said. “He went all the way up the stairs and jumped off.”

  Chapter 5

  I finally arrived back at my apartment that night around five.

  A message on the fridge said Mary Catherine was out to get the twins from cheerleading practice and Ricky from soccer, and instructed me to put the lasagnas in the fridge into the oven at 5:30. Bennett situation normal, I thought as I cracked open a can of Corona Light and took a gulp. Busier than the control tower at LaGuardia.

  Mary Catherine is my kids’ nanny, and also my girlfriend. I’m a widower, so it isn’t as sleazy as it sounds. Or maybe it is; I’m not an expert on these things. At least that’s what I tell myself whenever my Catholic guilt taps me on the shoulder.

  “Dad! Look, look! It came! It came!” My daughter Shawna rushed at me with a large tan envelope as I walked into the living room. It was from the Schenectady Chamber of Commerce. There were half a dozen pamphlets inside, as well as the Daily Gazette newspaper.

  “Mary Catherine said after dinner I can cut out some of the pictures for the poster board.”

  “Hey, that’s awesome, Shawna.”

  “No, it’s not, Dad,” said Trent, coming in behind her with his arms crossed. “It’s not fair that Miss Goody Two-shoes got all this great stuff for the project and I didn’t get anything. Mine’s filled with just stupid printouts off the internet.”

  Oh, no. Here we go again, I thought, sharing a smile with Eddie, who was on the couch simultaneously reading a paperback and watching ESPN with the sound off.

  With ten adopted kids, drama on the home front is to be expected. The latest brouhaha concerned two of my youngest, Shawna and Trent, who were in the same fourth grade class and were both doing projects about New York State.

  Competitively, of course. Shawna was assigned the city of Schenectady, a metropolis whose factoids we had been regaled with for the last two weeks.

  Trent had nearby Rome, New York, which—in addition to being the place where the country’s first cheese factory was founded—was the nation’s current 140th largest city.

  Who knew? We did. That was who. Whether we wanted to or not. No one was in a more rabid New York state of mind than the Bennetts.

  “Hey, look, guys. Quick. On TV. Look there,” Eddie said, pointing quickly at some news footage of a car on fire. “This is just in. Schenectady and Rome, New York, just both suddenly exploded. They’re both gone, and now your projects are gonna really totally stink. Darn. I’m so sorry.”

  “D-A-A-D!!!” Shawna and Trent yelled in unison.

  Chapter 6

  After putting all fighters back into their respective corners, D-A-A-D had to make a call from his bedroom.

  “Hey, Chief. It’s Mike,” I said to Fabretti.

  “Mike, please tell me some good news on this jumper,” he said. “My boss keeps calling me every five minutes.”

  “Okay, here we go,” I said, putting my beer on my nightstand as I fished out my notepad. “Seven o’clock yesterday, a thirty-something male in a dark silk suit checks into the Index House Hotel under the name of Pete Mitchell, pays in cash, and shows them ID.”

  “What do you mean, under the name of?”

  “Turns out, this ID, a Delaware driver’s license, is a fake. There actually are a number of Pete Mitchells who live in Delaware, but based on age alone, it’s pretty clear that none of them are our dead guy. His license is a good fake, though.”

  “Oh, here we go. No ID. An actual suicide whodunit?” Fabretti said.

  “That’s not all. This guy gets a room, drops off his stuff, comes back down and has a drink at the bar. About ten minutes after that, he goes to the restroom and blows chunks. Then he goes up to the roof through the stairwell, and they find him the next morning in the worksite beside the hotel.”

  “What?”

  “Exactly. Weird, but it gets weirder. In a drawer in his room, there’s one of those fanny packs. The fake ID is in the pack along with a ton of cash in twenties and fifties, almost ten grand altogether. Beside the pack is a box of condoms in a CVS bag and that’s it. No luggage, no deodorant, no tighty-whities. Nothing.”

  “So you’re saying our guy is some kind of John Doe?”

  “Yep. Even the Pete Mitchell name seems like a fake. I looked it up online. It’s the name of Tom Cruise’s character in Top Gun.”

  “How does this make sense? He’s a drug dealer or something? Grabs some prophylactics and hits the Big Apple for a night in funky town but instead jumps off the roof? Is that the way you’re leaning? He jumped, right?”

  “I’m about seventy-five percent there. But with this guy’s fishy ID and the dough in his room and the fact there’s no video on the roof, we can’t be positive yet.”

  “Medical examiner run his prints?”

  “In process. Still waiting to hear. You know latent prints at the ME’s office. It’s a bottleneck unless they get some heat. Especially if it looks like a suicide.”

  “All right, I’ll make some calls there. Hit me the second you hear about the prints. By the way, how does the press look on this one? Any more rabid than usual?”

/>   I frowned as I held my phone. This is the kind of stuff I’m always leery of in Major Case. I am a cop, I felt like reminding him. My job is to solve homicides, not to do PR errand-boy work for politicians and the rich, connected people who financed their campaigns.

  “Not that I really noticed, Chief,” I fibbed, and hung up.

  Chapter 7

  At ten fifteen the next morning, I walked through the front doors of the office of the Chief Medical Examiner on East 26th and First Avenue.

  With its low ceiling and rows of stark blue metal tables, the autopsy room at the back of the first floor always reminded me of a pool hall—the least-fun game hall of all time.

  The tables were thankfully empty this morning. Doing my best not to peek into the lab’s scales and buckets and glass-doored fridges, I crossed the white-tiled room to the office of Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Clarissa Linder.

  Dr. Linder was a genial, nice-looking woman with short dark-blond hair. I’d worked cases with her before. Before becoming an ME, she had a lucrative pediatrician practice on the Upper East Side. But when she’d turned forty, inspired to do something more challenging, she had traded in Band-Aids and lollipops for psycho killers and floaters.

  Her door was open and she was standing behind her desk, thumbing at the Fitbit on her wrist.

  “You have one of these stupid fitness things, Mike?” she said. “They’re addictive. If you have nine hundred steps, you find yourself walking in circles around the room just to get to a thousand.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, and sat in the chair in front of her desk. “But I’m certainly no stranger to walking around in circles. Speaking of which, what’s going on with Mr. Mitchell? Or I suppose Mr. Doe is probably more appropriate. Unless we’ve heard from latent prints?”

  She raised an eyebrow as she handed me her file.

  “No such luck on the prints, Mike. As usual, the wheels of death processing grind slowly.”