The 17th Suspect Page 21

  I slowed for the stop sign and came to a full stop. I watched an old man clipping his doorstep hedges. A calico cat trotted across the street, and when it was safely home, I revved my engine.

  I was running away. This was not my usual style and I knew that I was being crazy. I had to go to see the doc. I drummed my fingers on the wheel.

  Not going. Going. Not going.

  A car honked behind me and I put my foot on the gas. My hands spun the wheel to the right and I turned onto Union, then I took another right onto Divisadero. I took two more right turns in this pretty neighborhood that looked as though it had been ripped from a storybook tale ending with “And they lived happily ever after.”

  Having circled Doc Arpino’s block, I parked again beside the pansy-painted mailbox.

  I sighed. I dragged myself out of my car and put one foot in front of the other until I’d reached the top of the doctor’s front steps.

  I rang the bell and opened the door.

  CHAPTER 100

  I PUT THE doctor’s office in my rearview and drove to the Hall on autopilot.

  I parked on Harriet Street under the rumbling roof of Interstate 80, and in a few minutes Brady crossed the alley and got into my passenger seat. He looked at me, did a double take, and said, “You’re scaring me, Boxer.”

  I nodded as if I knew what I was going to say or do.

  One option was to go for the weekly B12 shots and, at the same time, go to work as usual and hope for the best. That meant no all-night stakeouts, firefights, or hand-to-hand combat with insane gunmen. In other words, I could not safely do what I called my job.

  Or I could get the weekly shots and take a medical leave, as directed by my doctor. During that time Conklin would get a new partner, and I would lose my place in Homicide. I just hated that thought. It was roughly equivalent to closing my eyes and jumping into a sinkhole.

  I said, “Brady, my condition is … how can I say this? It’s serious. I have something called pernicious anemia.”

  “You’re saying you’re anemic?”

  “It’s a form of anemia. The causes are various and so are the symptoms, but it has to do with my blood being unable to absorb vitamin B12. If I don’t deal with this situation pronto, it could damage organs and nerves, or could become something worse. Years back I had aplastic anemia, and that really could have killed me.”

  Brady kept his eyes fixed on me. He was reading me.

  “This pernicious kind. You’re heading it off right now, right? And so you say it’s treatable? Reversible?”

  “I’ve got a good doctor. I need shots every week for a while. And Doc wants me to take time off.”

  “Please, Boxer. Do what you’re supposed to do. Take whatever time you need.”

  “He says a couple of months. He said I have to do a whole mind and body reset. Sleep, you know, whatever that is. Meditation would be good. See him on schedule. Get better.”

  Brady smiled. “You. Lying around the house.”

  I tried to smile back, then I shook my head. Brady put his hand on my arm.

  “Be a good girl, will you, Boxer?”

  “Yes. I will. I have no choice.”

  Brady said, “I might as well tell you something you’re going to hear soon anyway.”

  “Shoot,” I said.

  Brady checked his phone, sent someone a reply, then came back to me. He told me that Jacobi was being retired out, as a result of a case Conklin and I had worked about a year and a half ago involving a crew of dirty cops. After the fallout, the body count had been, all told, about nineteen guilty and innocent souls.

  I said to Brady, “IAD is hanging it on Jacobi?”

  “Accountability goes with the job,” he said.

  I felt tears welling up. Not only was I at a personal low, I was taking this blame-Jacobi news personally.

  “Who is replacing him?” I asked.

  Brady shrugged. “To be decided.”

  Then he said, “Go home, Lindsay. Fight this pernicious anemia. It’s something you have control over. Other than that, don’t worry about a thing. It’ll all work out somehow. You get better, and when you get a green light from your doctor, come back. Not a second before.”

  He leaned over, kissed my cheek, said, “Love you, Linds. Be good to yourself. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Then he got out of my car. I sat there and watched him cross Harriet Street and disappear behind a line of parked cars on his way up to the squad room.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” he’d said.

  What, me worry?

  But he was right. I counseled myself to get a grip on the one thing I might be able to use to save myself. I had to stay home. Spend more time with Julie and Joe and Martha. It would be quite interesting to find out who I was when not working a homicide case.

  I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to go home and give Joe the news.

  CHAPTER 101

  I HADN’T SEEN Jacobi since the hammer came down, but I’d called him the day after he walked out of the Hall for the last time to ask how he was doing.

  “You know how it is, Boxer. Sometimes you’re the dog. Sometimes you’re the tree.”

  I commiserated. For different reasons, we were both feeling like trees.

  We had a breakfast date this morning. Not in the break room with passed-over donuts, but at an actual eatery in Jacobi’s section of town.

  He lives in Hayes Valley. Gentrified not long ago, it has shaken off the rough edges and is now littered with cute little restaurants and bars and boutiques; a nice place to visit. Jacobi’s house holds down the end of a block on Ivy Street and is one of many single-family and multifamily wood-frame houses, built closely together, facing sidewalks lined with young red-flowering gum trees.

  I parked my Explorer behind my old friend’s Hyundai SUV and called him on my phone.

  “Lindsay?”

  “Who else?”

  “You’re not the only woman I know,” he said, laughing.

  “I’ll be right down.”

  A couple of minutes later he came down the zigzag of wooden steps from his living quarters over his wide-body garage. He looked the same as always: gray haired, with hooded eyes, walking with a limp, and wearing a leather flight jacket handed down to him from an uncle who’d fought in the Korean War.

  But he looked different to me now. He hadn’t aged. It was nothing as obvious as that. He didn’t even look depressed.

  He looked lighter. Like a man who had been retired before he was ready to go, but was glad that the load was off his back. He was grinning when he crossed the street and I crossed the street toward him.

  We opened our arms and hugged in the middle of Ivy, and man, it felt good.

  Jacobi had stood in for my awful father before, and he was doing it now, even as I had come to comfort him.

  He might have heard my strangled sob.

  “Do not go wobbly on me, Boxer. I may be fat, I may be pushing sixty, but here I am.”

  “Let’s get out of the road,” I said, “so that those aren’t your last words.”

  Playa del Oro was a little Mexican joint sandwiched between a shoe repair shop and an art gallery. We ordered huevos rancheros and tea and talked about how we’d come to this unexpected place in our lives.

  He said, “Boxer, I’m not an innocent party. I didn’t know Ted Swanson had assembled a robbery crew, but I should have known. I have to be accountable. If I were the mayor, jeez, Louise—someone had to pay. Obviously the buck stopped at my door. And hey, it came with full retirement pay.”

  “That part is awesome,” I said.

  “And pretty soon, Medicare.” Jacobi grinned broadly, looking lighter and younger by the minute. He said, “But enough about me. Tell me how you’re doing. Don’t leave anything out.”

  I told him, “I feel pretty good but like I’m playing hooky. I’m supposed to be on the job. I mean, shit happens and then you die, right? But this is a case of shit happens and you get to stay home, watch movies
, and collect a pay-check.”

  “Go figure,” said Jacobi. “We’ve got the same deal. But there’s upside for both of us. Your job is to rest up and heal. Mine is to get back to my fighting weight. My doctor told me to lose the bowling ball or else, and when he described ‘or else,’ I definitely didn’t want it.”

  I pointed to the dish of chocolate chili cake with a side of churros our waitress had put down in front of us, and he laughed. “I know, I know, but this is a special occasion, old friend. I’m going to cut down on the carbs and start walking. I might get a dog.”

  “How about this, Chief? Why don’t we get together to walk my dog every week or so. Or our dogs. We could go to a museum once in a while, take in a ball game. Fight back against enforced home confinement.”

  “I like the sound of that, Boxer.”

  We grinned at each other, reached across the small round table laden with sweets, and shook on it.

  I said, “We’re both fighters.”

  Jacobi said, “And fighters win.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Our thanks to those who shared their time and expertise with us in the creation of this book: Judge Kevin Rathburn of Saumico, Wisconsin, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College; Attorney Steven Rabinowitz, Pryor Cashman, New York City, for his wise counsel: and Captain Richard Conklin, BCI commander, Stamford, Connecticut, Police Department. And gratitude to the home team, Mary Jordan, John A. Duffy, and our amazing researcher, Ingrid Taylar, West Coast, USA.

  THE ONE WHO KNOWS THE SECRETS IS THE ONE WHO HOLDS THE POWER. CAN NYPD RED FIND THE TRUTH BEFORE A CITY EXPLODES?

  PLEASE TURN THE PAGE FOR A PREVIEW.

  THERE WERE ONLY four words beneath the tattoo of the Grim Reaper on Aubrey Davenport’s inner left thigh. But they spoke volumes.

  Death is my aphrodisiac

  And nowhere in the entire city was her libido more on point than at the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, a crumbling three-story, U-shaped monster on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island.

  Once a marvel of neo-Gothic architecture, Renwick was now a rotting stone carcass, the final way station for thirteen thousand men, women, and children who had died a painful death.

  For the city fathers, Renwick was a historical landmark. For the urban explorers, it was New York’s most haunted house. But for Aubrey Davenport, it was a sexual Mecca, and on a warm evening in early May, she and a willing partner scaled the eight-foot fence, made their way into the bowels of the moldering labyrinth, and spread a thick quilted blanket on the rocky floor.

  She kicked off her shoes, removed her shirt and bra, shucked her jeans, and stood there, naked except for a pair of aquamarine bikini panties.

  Her nipples responded to the caress of a cool breeze that drifted over her breasts, and she inhaled the earthy scent of the decay around her, mixed with the dank overtones of river water.

  She dropped to her knees on the blanket, closed her eyes, and waited for her partner.

  She shuddered as he silently slipped the noose around her neck. His fingers were long and slender. Piano player fingers, her mother used to call them. Like your father has.

  As a child, Aubrey wondered why a man blessed with the hands of a concert pianist never played an instrument, never even cared to. But somewhere along the way she came to understand that Cyril Davenport’s long, slender fingers made music of another kind: the crescendo of sound that came from her parents’ bedroom on a nightly basis.

  Aubrey felt the rope pull tighter. Rope was a misnomer. It was a long strand of silk—the belt from a robe, perhaps—and it felt soft and smooth as he cinched it against her carotid arteries.

  He took her shoulders and guided her body to the ground until her belly was flat against the cotton blanket below her.

  “Comfy?” he asked.

  She laughed. Comfy was such a dumb word.

  “You’re laughing,” he said. “Life is good, yes?”

  “Mmmmmm,” she responded.

  “It’s about to get better,” he said, tugging at the waistband of her panties and sliding them down to her ankles. His fingers teased as they walked slowly up her leg and came to rest on the patch of ink etched into her thigh. His thumb stroked the shrouded figure and arced along the scythe that was clutched in its bony claw.

  “Hello, death,” he said, removing his hand.

  Crack! The cat-o’-nine-tails lashed across her bare bottom, burning, stinging, each individual knotted-leather strap leaving its mark. She bit down hard and buried a scream into the blanket.

  Pain was the appetizer. Pleasure was the main course. Her body tensed as she waited for his next move.

  In a single, practiced motion he bent her legs at the knees, tipped them back toward her head, grabbed the tether that was around her neck, and tied the other end to her ankles.

  “Hand,” he ordered.

  Aubrey, her right arm beneath her stomach, reached all the way down until her hand was between her legs.

  “Life is good,” he repeated. “Make it better.”

  Her fingers groped, parting the pleats, entering the canal, tantalizing the nerve endings. The effect was dizzying: the man with the whip, the foul-smelling ruins, and the inescapable presence of thirteen thousand dead souls.

  He said something, but she couldn’t hear over the sound of her own labored breathing. And then—the point of no return. She felt the swell of gratification surging through her body, and with near surgical precision she gently lowered her feet toward the ground.

  The silk rope around her neck tightened, compressing her carotid arteries. The sudden loss of oxygen along with the buildup of carbon dioxide made her light-headed, giddy, almost hallucinogenic. The orgasm came in waves. It left her gasping for air, but the euphoria was so powerful, so addictive, that she intensified the pressure around her neck, knowing she could go just a few more seconds.

  If erotic asphyxiation were an Olympic event, Aubrey Davenport would have been a world-class contender. Her brain was just on the threshold of losing consciousness when she released the death grip, and brought her feet back toward her buttocks.

  But the noose refused to relax. If anything, it felt tighter. Panic seized her. She thrashed, pulled her hands up to her throat, and clawed at the silk, fighting for air and finding none.

  She never made mistakes. Something must have snagged. She reached behind her neck, desperately trying to find some slack, when her fingers found his hand. He jerked hard on the silk cord, and her arms flailed.

  She slumped, too weak to struggle, all hope gone. Everything went black, and as the reaper stepped out of the darkness to claim her, tears streamed down her cheeks, because in the last seconds of her life, Aubrey Davenport finally realized that she didn’t want to die.

  THE COTILLION ROOM at The Pierre hotel bubbled over with New York’s wealthiest—including a few who were wealthier than some countries.

  They were the richest of the rich, the ones who get invited to fifty-thousand-dollars-a-plate dinners when one of their own wants to tap them for a worthy cause. In this case, the charity with its hand out was the Silver Bullet Foundation.

  The thirty-foot-long banner at the front of the hall pro-claimed its noble mission: fighting for the less fortunate.

  The man in the black tie and white jacket busing tables in the rear had boiled when he first saw the sign. They haven’t done shit for me, and I’m the least fortunate person in the room.

  They’re like swans, he thought as he watched them glide serenely from table to table: so elegant, so regal, but fiercely territorial and vicious when they feel threatened. And like swans, he observed, they are oh so white.

  He counted half a dozen black swans among them, but for the most part, the people of color were there to serve. He fit right in.

  With his shoulders slumped, his jaw slack, and a cheap pair of clearlens nerd glasses to dial down the intensity of his piercing black eyes, he was practically invisible, and definitely forgettable.

  The only human contact he’d had in t
he three hours since donning the uniform was with a besotted old patrician who’d slurred, “Hey fella, where’s the men’s room?”

  Shortly after nine, the lights dimmed, the chatter died down, and the commanding voice of James Earl Jones piped through the sound system.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the cofounder and chairman of the Silver Bullet Foundation, Mr. Princeton Wells.”

  The staff had been instructed to stop work during the presentation, and the busboy dutifully stepped into the shadows near a fire exit as Princeton Wells bounded onto the stage.

  Wells was his typically charming, still-boyish-at-forty, old-moneyed self. And lest any man in the room suspect that someone that rich and that good-looking wasn’t getting laid, Wells kicked off the festivities by introducing his current girlfriend, Kenda Whithouse, to a captive audience.

  Ms. Whithouse stood up, waved to the room, and threw her billionaire boyfriend a kiss. She was only twenty-three, an actress who was not quite yet tabloid fodder, but who clearly had the talent to fill out an evening gown. Those who knew Princeton Wells had no doubt that the gown would be lying crumpled on his bedroom floor by morning.

  Having trotted out his latest eye candy, Wells got down to the serious business of reminding all the do-gooders in the room how much good they were doing for the city’s less fortunate.

  “And no one,” he decreed, “has been more supportive of Silver Bullet than Her Honor, the mayor of New York, Muriel Sykes.”

  The city’s first female mayor, her approval rating still sky-high after only four months in office, was greeted by enthusiastic applause as she stepped up to the podium.

  The busboy did not applaud. He slid his smartphone from his jacket pocket and tapped six digits onto the keypad.