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  For the first time this night, I went with honesty.

  “He was shot, Brooke. I’m so sorry. He’s gone.”

  I watched her eyes go. That’s something you never get used to. Watching someone standing right in front of you disappear. Recede into themselves.

  Then she stumbled back away from the door, her legs dancing side to side like a center fielder trying to get under a fly ball. Finally she dropped to her knees.

  “No!” Brooke Thayer screamed.

  I found myself on my knees with her in the dark foyer, my hand — my evil, betraying, foul hand — rubbing her thin back as she screamed louder and louder.

  “NOOO! NOOO! NOOO!”

  “I know,” I whispered in her ear. “I know.”

  “YOU DON’T KNOW SHIT!” she screamed in my face, clawing me away from her. I reared back, covering myself. One of her long nails had raked a red line diagonally across my forehead. Then she collapsed sideways to the floor.

  “You don’t knoooow!” she cried into the hardwood floor. “You don’t know! You don’t!”

  Chapter 31

  MIKE LIFTED BROOKE THAYER UP and put her on the couch in the family room. After I closed the front door, I spotted a blonde girl in pink Disney Three Princesses pajamas. She was staring down at me from the top of the stairs.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” I said. “Your mommy is going to be all right. My name’s Lauren.”

  The adorable little girl said nothing. She just continued to stare at me with her big blue eyes.

  “Maybe you should go back to sleep, honey,” I said, taking a step up the stairs toward her.

  She screamed then. In a pitch so high and violent, I had to avert my face and cup my ears.

  Brooke shot past me up the stairs, the siren quitting immediately as the girl was scooped up into her mother’s arms.

  I stood there as the mother and daughter rocked back and forth. On a side table in the living room, I spotted a picture of Scott in his uniform. He had his arm around a pregnant Brooke. It looked like it was taken in a park somewhere. The sun was shining brilliantly.

  When Brooke and her daughter started keening at the same pitch, I suddenly thought about the gun in my bag. I visualized it. The way its steel shone like chrome under the light. Its almost feminine curves. I imagined the cold of its barrel placed against my temple, the feel of its hair trigger on the second joint inside my right index finger.

  I stood in Scott’s house and thought of my gun, and of what I had done, and I wondered how much more of this I could take.

  You’re not a bad person, I tried to tell myself. At least you weren’t before tonight.

  Chapter 32

  POOR BROOKE WAS STILL ROCKING her four-year-old daughter when a baby started crying from somewhere behind them in the upstairs hall.

  Slowly, I climbed to the top.

  “Do you want me to check on the baby?” I asked Brooke.

  Brooke’s eyes seemed to stare right through me. She said nothing, not a word.

  “Try to find an address book in one of the kitchen drawers and call a family member to come,” I called down to Mike.

  I walked past Brooke, following the cries to the nursery at the back of the house.

  A mobile of mitts and bats dangled above the crib, and there was a Mets night-light.

  The baby boy couldn’t have been even six months. I lifted up the tiny, wailing child.

  His whole body trembled with each cry, a sound that seemed too big for his size. I cupped him against my chest, and he stopped crying almost immediately. I sat down in the rocking chair and held him close, thankful to escape the noise below for a short while.

  Even under the wretched circumstances, I noticed how wonderful he smelled. How pure. I swallowed hard when he finally opened his big eyes. His big, warm brown eyes.

  He looked exactly like Scott.

  I was the one who started crying then. This baby in my arms no longer had a father, I thought.

  Way to go, Lauren. Way to go.

  “Give him to me,” Brooke barked, suddenly charging into the room with a bottle. The baby boy seemed to smile at me as I handed him over to his mother. Brooke was still crying, but she seemed to be over the initial shock.

  “Can I call someone for you?” I offered.

  “I already spoke to my mom,” Brooke said. “She’s on her way.”

  She looked straight into my face for the first time. Her brown eyes were surprisingly kind.

  “Look,” she said. “I scratched you. I’m so sorry. I . . .”

  “Please,” I said quickly. “Don’t you dare be sorry. You’re the one who needs help now. You and your children.”

  “I want to hear you say it,” Brooke said after a minute.

  I stared at her, wide-eyed. Her features looked stark in the night-light, her eyes a void of shadow.

  “What?” I said.

  “I want to hear you say what happened to my husband. I appreciated your honesty before. The men will only try to protect my feelings. I need to know exactly what happened so I can try to deal with it. These kids need me to be able to deal with it.”

  “We don’t really know yet, Brooke,” I said. “We found him shot in a park, St. James Park in the Bronx. It’s a known drug area.”

  Her face contorted, her lips quivering. Her left eye began to twitch.

  “Ooooooh! I knew it,” she finally said, nodding vigorously. “ ‘Undercover’s a promotion, Brooke. They always watch my back.’ Not always, huh, you goddamned idiot.”

  I racked my brain about what to say next in the silence that followed. The walls seemed to move in on me. I needed to get out of there. Something ripe was starting to churn in my stomach. I had to have some air.

  What would I normally say in an investigation I didn’t already know all too much about? I took out my notebook again.

  “When was the last time you saw Scott?” I asked her, trying to act like a detective.

  “He left around eight tonight. Said he had to go in for a few hours. He kept insane hours. Scotty was almost never home lately.”

  “He didn’t say specifically where he was going, did he? Was there a phone call that preceded his departure?”

  “Not that I can think of this second. No. I don’t remember any call.”

  Brooke started bawling again all of a sudden.

  “Oh, God. His poor mom and sister . . . they were so close. They’re going to be . . . I don’t think I could tell them. No, I . . . Could you? Detective . . . ?”

  “Lauren.”

  “Could you call her, Lauren? Scotty’s mom, I mean. Will you make the call?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Are you from his unit?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m from Bronx Homicide.”

  “Did you know Scotty?” she asked then.

  In the silence, I listened to the splutter of Scott’s son greedily finishing his bottle.

  “No,” I said. “We were out of the same precinct, but we never had the chance to work together.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened with Taylor. My four-year-old,” Brooke said. “She doesn’t respond well to strangers. She’s autistic.”

  I stood there, breathless.

  That was it.

  It. The thing that finally took me over the top.

  “I hope I didn’t frighten her,” I heard myself say as I nearly ran out of the room. “Could I use your bathroom?”

  “Down the hall on your right.”

  The vomit came up a foot or more before I made it to the toilet. I threw both taps on to cover the sound of more retching. And left them on to cover the tea kettle–high primal shrieks that escaped my throat.

  I used the entire roll of toilet paper, cleaning up. I actually took out my gun as I sat on the pink-carpeted toilet lid. I wondered if the coroner would put Death by Guilt on my certificate. I finally put the gun away and went downstairs. Not because I didn’t want to kill myself anymore. I just thought that Brooke Thayer was having
a bad enough night as it was.

  In the kitchen, Mike offered to tell the mother.

  “That’s okay, Mike,” I said, smiling insanely as I dialed the number from the open address book. “Why break precedent?”

  I held the phone away from my ear after I told Scott’s mother that her son was dead. I eyed my partner across the kitchen as we listened to the agonized sounds coming from the earpiece.

  Mike lifted a crayon-scribbled picture from underneath a Blue’s Clues magnet on the fridge and shook his head. One of the kids had drawn a two-headed dragon.

  “You find the ones responsible,” Brooke said to me as we made our way to the door a few minutes later. The two-year-old boy was up now, too. He was attached to the leg that the four-year-old had neglected. The baby in Brooke’s arms started to cry again.

  “YOU FIND THEM!” followed us out the door. “FIND SCOTTY’S KILLER!”

  Chapter 33

  OTHER THAN BROOKE’S WORDS still ringing in my ears, our ride back to the Bronx was dead silent.

  Scott’s multi-agency Drug Enforcement Task Force team was waiting for us in their squad room on the second floor of the 48th Precinct. My Homicide unit was on the fourth. I averted my eyes from the doorway of the muster room Scott and I had met in as I made my way up the stairs.

  The guys in Scott’s unit didn’t look like typical cops, even to me. For a second, I thought I’d made a wrong turn and stepped in on a skateboarding club meeting.

  The DETF boss, DEA agent Jeff Trahan, was tall and had the longish blonde hair of an aging surfer. Scott’s main backup, or “leash,” as they called him, Asian American NYPD detective Roy Khuong, was so baby-faced he probably had trouble buying cigarettes. New York State detective Dennis Marut had the appearance of an East Asian Doogie Howser. Mountainous, black, draped head to toe in leather and gold, the last team member, Thaddeus Price, looked more like a bodyguard for a gangsta rapper than a DEA agent. I guess that was to his credit.

  I stood beneath the buzzing fluorescents, almost wilting under the hard stares of the men.

  But after a moment, I realized the expressions were the same ones I’d been seeing all night, looks of loss mixed with anger and shock. Pretty much what I was feeling myself — at least a part of what I was feeling.

  For a Narcotics team, losing an undercover was a nightmare realized. Like most survivors of homicide victims, they looked like a bomb had just gone off; they were flailing around, looking for some direction, some notion of what to do next.

  “We’re here to help in any way we can,” Trahan said solemnly after all the introductions had been made. “Just tell me what we can do for Scott.”

  How much longer could I keep this charade up? I wondered as I glanced away from the group’s pain to the water-stained ceiling. A passing Long Island–bound eighteen-wheeler rattled a window that appeared to be painted shut in the corner. I took out my notebook.

  “What was Scott currently working on?” I said.

  Chapter 34

  TRAHAN TOOK A DEEP BREATH and then began. “Scott was our primary undercover on a case we’re making on a couple of Ecstasy dealers from Hunts Point, the Ordonez brothers,” he said. “The older brother is an Air Force pilot who does supply runs back and forth to Germany. Turns out, he’s flying back with just a little more than empty skids on his C-one-thirty. Scott made a couple of midlevel buys with them. We were planning a big one, a quarter-of-a-million-dollar deal, for next week, when we were going to bust them.”

  “Had Scott been in contact with them recently?” I said.

  “He logged a call with them three days ago,” Roy Khuong jumped in. “But he could have gotten a call tonight — off duty.”

  “Would Scott have gone to meet anyone without telling you?” I said.

  “Not if he could have helped it,” Roy said. “But undercover is seat-of-your-pants, dangerous work. You know that, Detective. Sometimes you don’t get a chance to call for backup.”

  “You’re saying Scott could have been approached by someone unexpectedly, asked to accompany them, and he would have had to do it in order to not make them suspicious,” Mike said.

  “Exactly,” said Thaddeus Price. “It happens.”

  Trahan added another twist. “Or Scott could even have been approached by somebody from a previous case. Somebody he’d busted who’d gotten out of jail maybe. That’s your worst fear when you’re out there on the street. That you’re going to be in Burger King with your kid and meet somebody you’ve already gone over on.”

  I heard my partner groan at what Trahan was saying. There were potentially hundreds of suspects in Scott’s murder.

  “First thing we need to do is bring in these Ordonez brothers for questioning,” Mike said. “This deal was for big money. They could have picked up Scott early to rob him. Scott was beaten badly. So maybe he was tortured to tell them where the quarter million was. We need to pick them up. Do we know where these mutts are?”

  “The pilot brother, Mark, works out of the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in South Jersey. We’ll have the staties talk to his CO and check his apartment in Toms River,” Trahan said. “But Victor, the younger one, has three or four stash apartments in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Girlfriends and relatives. It’ll take a couple of hours to pinpoint where they’re at. We’ll get up on our wires and see what we can find out.”

  “In the meantime,” Thaddeus said, “I’ll get together the files from Scott’s previous busts so we can start cross-referencing them with likelies who might have just gotten out of prison.”

  “That’s a lot of files,” Trahan said, shaking his head grimly. “Scott had hundreds of collars. He was one of the best undercovers I ever worked with.”

  He sure fooled me, I thought, remembering his wife and family.

  I turned away from the pain in Trahan’s bloodshot eyes. He looked as if he’d lost a best friend more than a co-worker.

  “Wait a second,” Detective Marut said. “Has Scott’s family been told? My God, how will Brooke handle it? All those kids. I think four.”

  “Three children. We just got back from the notification,” I said. “And she’s handling it about as well as you would expect.”

  It sounded like a gunshot went off when Scott’s partner, Roy Khuong, suddenly kicked the side of his desk. Paper went flying as he swept the entire contents of the desktop onto the floor before storming out of the room.

  Mike shook his head, took out his cell phone, and started dialing a number.

  “Who are you calling?” I said.

  “Wake up the ADA on call,” he said. “I’m going to get him to start on the subpoena to bring up the LUDs on Scott’s house and cell phones.”

  My breath caught. LUDs were local usage details, a printout of the phone company records that would show every phone call to and from Scott’s phones.

  Including all the times Scott had called me!

  Five minutes later, Mike stopped in the stairwell on our way upstairs to our squad room.

  “Lauren, your eyes are gray,” he said.

  “What are you talking about? They’re blue,” I said.

  “I meant the whites of them,” Mike said. “You’ve been banging a mile a minute since this thing started. We’re in a holding pattern now. It’ll be morning before we get a real handle on anything. You live ten minutes away. Why don’t you scoot home for a couple of hours of shut-eye. I was scheduled to work this shift. I’ll mind the store.”

  Part of me didn’t want to leave my partner’s side, or to possibly miss something on the case. Who the hell knew what would happen next? But out the grimy stairwell window behind Mike, I couldn’t help noticing how the streetlights were starting to swim. I was exhausted.

  Whoever said moving and divorce were the two most stressful events in your life never had their husband shoot their lover.

  Collapsing wouldn’t help things, I decided.

  “Okay, Mike,” I said. “But call me the second you hear anything. Anything at all.”

/>   “Go home, Lauren.”

  “Okay. I’m gone. I’m out of here.”

  Chapter 35

  I CUT MY MINI’S ENGINE in my garage and was getting out, when I heard something weird in the far-right corner. I guess I was a little jumpy, because immediately my Glock was drawn, sights center-massed on the seated figure there.

  Until I realized it was Paul.

  I clicked on the lights before I finally holstered my weapon.

  Paul was snoring in a lawn chair beside his toolbench. On the concrete floor beside him was a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch. With maybe one shot left in it.

  Oh yeah, and Paul wasn’t wearing any clothes. He was bareass naked.

  He was also wasted. Blotto. Three sheets to the wind, as they say. Maybe four.

  How bad I was feeling tonight wasn’t a fraction of what was going on with Paul, I realized, staring at his troubled, unconscious face.

  I knocked off the last shot in his bottle before I tried to shake him awake. No response.

  One of his eyes flipped open when I tugged his earlobe. I pulled at his right hand until he stood.

  He mumbled something, but I couldn’t make it out as I brought him into the house. I’d never seen him so drunk.

  I almost threw my back out, trying to steer him into our bedroom. I finally laid him on top of the bed, and I brought over the wastebasket in case he was sick.

  I was just able to make it into the bathroom myself before all the pent-up stress exploded out of me in violent sobs.

  Where the hell was all this going? What did I think I was doing, playing dumb in the investigation? This wasn’t a game. Scott Thayer was dead. Few things on this earth bring down more scrutiny than an NYPD cop getting murdered. Did I think I could bluff my way through this? Was I crazy?

  I thought about Brooke Thayer again. Her autistic daughter. The two other kids. I felt poisoned. Evil. I wanted to turn myself in. At this point, I would do just about anything to take this black burden off myself.