Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  Rylan’s legal representation showed up twenty minutes later. He was an intense-looking fortyish blond guy in a beautifully cut dark-gray suit. He looked expensive. Very expensive. As I watched him confer with the brass across the squad room, I wondered if Rylan had bought him with the diamond money.

  After watching the mouthpiece’s chat with my boss, Arturo and I escorted him down the corridor to Rylan. When I opened the interview room door, I apparently surprised Rylan, who leaped to his feet so suddenly that he knocked over his chair. He was sweating, red-faced. He looked extremely distraught.

  “Whoa! Calm down, Rylan. Your lawyer is here.”

  Panic flashed in Rylan’s face when he looked at the lawyer behind me.

  “No,” he said. “Forget it. I changed my mind. I don’t want to talk to my lawyer. I, uh, can I talk to you? I want to talk to you, Detective.”

  “That’s not advisable, Mr. Rylan,” the lawyer said quietly. “I’m here to help you. You should speak with me first.”

  “Screw you!” Rylan said to his lawyer with a sudden explosive anger. “Get the wax out of your ears. I’m not talking to you, so go look for an ambulance to chase!”

  CHAPTER 101

  I TOLD ARTURO TO take the lawyer back to the squad room and went in and sat down across from Rylan.

  “What the hell is going on, Rylan?” I said. “First you claim you don’t know why you’re here. Then you want a lawyer. Now you don’t? I mean, I’ll give your strategy points for originality, but this is getting a little tiresome, don’t you think?”

  Rylan squinted down at the scuffed linoleum floor. “You’ve been a cop for what? Fifteen years?”

  “Over twenty,” I said. “Why?”

  He began absently thumbing at the doodles and phone numbers scribbled on the chipped Sheetrock beside the handcuff rail.

  “I need to know if you’re, like, an old-school decent person, not a corrupt piece of crap out for a buck. Being a cop is a vocation for you?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said honestly.

  Rylan looked at me intensely for a moment with his intelligent brown eyes.

  “I’ll talk,” he said. “To hell with it. I’ll talk to you, but you have to help me. Because I don’t know which direction it’ll be coming from. You don’t understand how powerful he is. I’m going to need protection.”

  “Protection from who?” I said.

  He looked at me. His face pale. His hands trembling. “The billionaire, Gabe Chayefsky. He’s the guy who hired me to empty that bank box.”

  I sat up. Straight.

  Chayefsky was the rich hedge fund guy who bankrolled Luminous Properties, one such building being the slum where Doyle had almost gotten creamed.

  “It was all about what was in the box from the beginning,” Rylan started. “Frickin’ Houdini couldn’t crack that bank’s high-security vault during a burglary, so we had no other choice than to go in during the day. When we tripped the alarms, we only had a few precious minutes, so we had to have you thinking diamonds. That’s why we did those other jobs. We had to establish a pattern.”

  “That was a pretty smart head fake,” I said. It worked, after all.

  “Yeah, I’m so smart, look where I’m sitting,” Rylan said, rolling his eyes.

  “How does a budding young Gordon Gecko know about knocking over jewelry stores?” I said.

  “I’ll be straight with you, Detective. Growing up, the closest thing I had to a father was an uncle out in Staten Island who was a nine-to-five real-deal professional thief. I worked for him a few summers, driving up and down the East Coast hitting places. We had this cherry-picker tree-trimming truck that we would use to get onto roofs and cut into joints. Supermarkets, mostly. Pharmacies. I was his apprentice until he died from cancer, and then my mom made me concentrate on school and getting a scholarship.”

  “They didn’t mention that in the New York Mag article,” I said.

  “Listen, Detective—”

  “Call me Mike,” I said, hoping Rylan would feel he could tell me anything.

  “Well, Mike, my illustrious Bernie Madoff bio is tabloid bullshit. It wasn’t like that. I was legit. Well, maybe not legit, but I wasn’t doing anything that everyone else wasn’t doing.

  “Sure, I was down in the books and shuffling investors’ money out the door, but it was to buy time. You don’t think the big firms do it? Grow up. It’s standard operating procedure. Had the feds come in three days later—three days later—the position I had planned would have made everyone whole again plus ten percent.

  “But the market was crashing and the feds needed a quick sacrifice to hide the thumb they perpetually have firmly wedged up their ass, and I didn’t have the political juice to make it not be me.”

  I nodded.

  “What does that have to do with this bank and Chayefsky?”

  “Well, when I got out of prison, I wanted to get my life back, clear my reputation, and get back into the financial industry. I loved being a trader, not just for the Lambos and bimbos, but for the juice. The risk. The daily tightrope walk. The best way I could think to do it was to rejoin the Greenwich Road Rats club I’d started back in oh-six.”

  “The Road what?”

  “So many financial guys are macho ex-NCAA student athletes who’ve never grown up. Like me. I started out with triathlons. I actually came in fourteenth in the 2003 Ironman and then got heavily into cycling. So I created a club for financial types. Which they reluctantly let me back into when I got out of jail. That’s how I met Chayefsky.”

  CHAPTER 102

  RYLAN WAS ON A roll now, I sensed. All I had to do was listen.

  “Chayefsky was richest guy in the bike club by far,” he continued. “He’s a genius. MIT advanced math degree, got his fingers in the aerospace industry, Silicon Valley, biotech. He made his money off his hedge fund, where he developed this high-frequency trading algorithm that insiders call the crystal ball.

  “Some say he cleaned up in the 2010 flash crash and others say he caused it on purpose. His software is a literal printing press. I mean, the man laid his own private transatlantic fiber cable to his offices in London! He also played soccer for MIT and is an incredible athlete. The dude’s a winged demigod.”

  “How did you hook up with him, then?”

  “I would be lying if I said I didn’t work to get in his good graces. He’d heard I’d doped during the Ironman and wanted to know about it, so I helped him with that. Then I helped him buy some drugs through some of my old Staten Island connections, helped him buy some women.

  “Then, after a night of debauchery where he watched me beat the shit out of a Twenty-Third Street club bouncer who’d mouthed off to him, he approached me to help him with a problem he had. One that if I helped him fix, he would set me up with a desk on his fund. We’re talking two and a half billion in assets. He was offering me an opportunity to make my life whole again, a seat back at the table.”

  “What was the catch?”

  “Someone was blackmailing him,” Rylan said. “He told me someone had a video of him having sex with a girl who wasn’t his wife. That it was the daughter of a colleague, and she was apparently seventeen at the time, so he was looking at a lot of trouble at his office, plus a rape case, and an extremely messy divorce all wrapped up into one. He couldn’t have it coming out, and he was willing to pay to make sure it did not. The guy who was using it was hammering the shit out of him for millions.”

  Rylan closed his eyes and balled his fists.

  “But I saw the video, Mike. It was on a phone that I took from the vault. It’s not what he said…My God…”

  His whole body started trembling. He grasped his skull in his hands.

  “Why did I watch it? He told me to hand it over. Shit, why did I do any of this?”

  “It’s OK,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “You’re doing the right thing here. Just get it off you.”

  “It wasn’t of him having sex, OK?” Rylan said, his eyes bugging wi
th stress. “It was…sick…evil. It starts with this girl standing in a fancy kitchen. She looks like a high school kid, like a babysitter or something, has her little purse, puts it on the counter. Then Chayefsky comes through the swinging door, six-three, ripped, and buck naked.

  “He has a crowbar in his hand, and he just hits her, smashes her right in the face with it…He…ties her up and brutally tortures this girl to death. Her screams. I had to turn off the sound. Then after she’s finally dead, he ties on a chef’s apron, puts on some classical music, and starts to…cut her up like a chicken. I fast-forwarded it, but the last scene I saw was him frying something, Mike. Standing there bare-assed in the blood splatter, swirling butter around something in a copper pan.”

  It was my turn to stare at the floor tile as he broke down, sobbing and sniffling. It all clicked together. Luminous Properties. Cannibalism. Naomi Chast’s murder.

  “I’d heard rumors that Chayefsky was into sick, twisted stuff, but I’ve peeked into the window of hell, Mike. I keep seeing the expression on this girl’s face as she’s sitting there. So screw it. Put me back inside. I don’t want it anymore. Keep the money, Wall Street, everything. I don’t want anything anymore. I’m done swimming in this river of shit.”

  I stood to leave.

  Rylan suddenly wiped his nose and stared at me.

  “But that’s not why I’m telling you. I sent him a girl. He said he needed a hooker, so I sent him this girl I know for some special party he’s having tonight. He kept asking all these questions about her that I realized were attempts to see if she’d be missed. Don’t you see, Mike? You have to find them. This maniac is going to kill her.”

  CHAPTER 103

  A LITTLE BEFORE SIX that evening, Lopez and Doyle and I looked at each other nervously as I sped us off Exit 3 from Interstate 95 near Long Island Sound in the part of Greenwich, Connecticut, known as Old Greenwich.

  We had reason to be tense and alert. We’d recovered the smartphone from where Rylan had stashed it in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and had seen the video on it. It was exactly what Rylan had said. The billionaire mogul was indeed some kind of serial killer, and we had to find him and Rylan’s associate, Iliana, before Chayefsky killed her.

  After ten minutes of weaving our way through a neighborhood of winding private roads, we stopped at a gate call box. I told the tinny voice we were police and were there to speak to Mr. Chayefsky. I had to show my shield to the video camera above the box before we were buzzed through the heavy iron gate onto the driveway of Chayefsky’s estate.

  We drove up a curving, wooded rise. At its crest, a little past a rock formation, an inlet suddenly came into view, a ruffling wilderness of salt-marsh cattails against a sweeping, stunning expanse of placid glittering blue.

  “How can this be Chayefsky’s property or anybody’s property?” Lopez said, amazed. “It looks like a state park. Who’d he buy it from? The government?”

  “Nope. Jay Gatsby,” Doyle said.

  The house, when we finally saw it another eighth of a mile later, was even more ridiculous than the grounds. It looked like an English mansion out of a Jane Austen novel, or maybe something a school would take a day trip to. It had two towers and at least four chimneys and a huge antique weather vane with a verdigris copper dolphin leaping from between the waves of dormers in the blue-gray sea of the slate roof.

  We parked in the circular driveway and climbed up wide stairs onto a white-on-white covered porch you could have thrown a wedding on. Off the porch to the right was a massive gentle slope of manicured lawn, on which I spotted a fenced-in grass tennis court and a hedge maze and beyond it, a faded dock, where a pristine thirty-foot white sailing sloop bobbed softly.

  “So this is what they mean by happily ever after,” Doyle mumbled as the Fort Knox–like door swung open.

  We stood looking at the woman standing there. It was hard not to.

  In the doorway, near the base of a set of Gone with the Wind–style stairs, stood a beautiful woman in skintight white yoga clothes. She was about six-one, with a perfect toned body, perfect olive skin, and bright-green almond-shaped eyes in a face that demanded to be looked at. Her lush russet-colored hair was worn up, but it looked like it could easily do that Pantene knot-untying thing with a flick of her pointed chin.

  I would have said she was a model, but models weren’t as relaxed and elegant and kept up. She looked like she could be anywhere from twenty-two to forty-two. A retired model, I thought. An expression popped into my head from nowhere. Private Viewings Only.

  “Mrs. Chayefsky, I’m Detective Bennett. We’d like to talk to your husband,” I said.

  “My husband? He’s not here. I’m not even sure if he’s in New York. In any case, he doesn’t come home until quite late. But you can talk to me. Have you found Consuela’s car? She’s already gone. We had a car service take her home.”

  “Consuela?” Arturo said.

  “Yes. One of our housekeepers. Her car was stolen from the train station,” the gorgeous woman said. “Isn’t that what this is about?”

  No, it’s about your husband’s proclivity for killing and eating people, I felt like saying.

  “We need to speak to your husband. It’s urgent,” Doyle said.

  “Urgent?” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “He could be in grave danger,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. He was in grave danger. Of being put into a mental asylum for the rest of his life.

  “I demand to know what’s going on now,” she said.

  “Ma’am, there’s no time,” I said. “This is urgent police business. We need to contact him right now. Could we please have his cell phone number?”

  She shook her pretty head vehemently.

  “No, I can’t hand that out. I’m sorry. He told me never to do it. Never.”

  “Not even to the police?” Arturo said.

  “Especially not to you,” she said.

  Arturo looked wounded. Like it was personal.

  “He has so many businesses and tax things and partnerships, we get subpoenas all the time. I probably shouldn’t even be talking to you. You need to leave. I’m sorry. I thought this was about my housekeeper’s car. Now that I know it’s not, you have to leave. Contact him through his office. Good-bye.”

  Lopez and Doyle stood there seemingly frozen after she closed the huge door.

  “You know who she is or was, right?” Doyle said. “She’s that supermodel from the nineties.”

  “Dude, he’s right,” Lopez said, elbowing me. “She used to be, like, in music videos and Victoria’s Secret.”

  “Well, it looks like Victoria is keeping her hubby’s secrets,” I said as we hurried off the porch. “So pick up your chins and come on. We need to get the hell on the road and find this son of a bitch before that girl becomes his next victim.”

  CHAPTER 104

  ILIANA KUZNETSOV HAD been in limos before. Cheesy white superstretches with disco ball interiors. Hummer ones. Even a MINI Cooper one once with a hot tub in the trunk.

  But the car that had picked her up from her hotel room at nine on the dot wasn’t like that at all. It was a luxury Mercedes Maybach with a spacious and shining inlaid-wood cabin in the back. It was almost like a living room. There was a state-of-the-art entertainment console with a large-screen HD TV, dual headphones, clocks and thermometer dials and switches everywhere like the instruments on an airplane.

  The white-leather power chaise seat she lay back in was hands down the softest thing she’d ever parked her butt on, like being sunk into a hammock of piled spa towels.

  She smiled as she powered the überplush seat back a little with the control, resisting the urge to kick off her stiletto heels.

  For a moment, she imagined that this mogul or whatever he was beside her was her boyfriend, like she was suddenly Julia Roberts in the 1990 film Pretty Woman. She hit the seat back another smidge. There. Perfect. She could get used to this.

  The forty-something black-haired man smiling next to h
er as he spoke almost imperceptibly into a Bluetooth headset was obviously as upscale as the ride. He was sexy, handsome, tall and quite lean, and perfectly groomed in a dark European-tailored pinstriped suit. His playful smile softened his hard, sharp face and cool blue eyes. Iliana had been with men like him before. Rich, handsome, horny, hard-charging businessmen who could probably get all the action they wanted for free except they didn’t have the time. She smiled. He sure beat some sweaty fat bastard. The nine thousand she would make tonight would be the easiest money ever made.

  He finally pulled out the Bluetooth and flicked it into the drink holder beside him.

  “Ugh. I hate that thing. How rude of me. How do you do, Iliana? Rylan has told me so much about you. I am Gabe,” he said, very deliberately shaking her hand, making a little game of it. “Thank you so much for coming out with me tonight. I love your dress, by the way. It’s perfect for the party we’re going to. Classy without being boring. I hate boring.”

  “Me too,” Iliana said. “I like your car, Gabe. It is yours, right? I noticed that it had private plates.”

  “How perceptive of you, Iliana. So you’re not just a pretty face, I see,” Gabe said, zipping his own chair back until he was almost prone. “Yes, it is my car. You know what I like most about it? The windows. The tint is new. It’s literally impossible to see into here. We can see everything yet remain invisible. I mean, we could be doing anything in here right now and no one would know.”

  He toed a compartment under the TV and a refrigerator drawer buzzed out. Iliana felt her breath catch when she looked inside. Half a dozen frosty dark-green bottles of Dom Pérignon.