Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  “Poor lady,” Arturo said, shaking his head. “Least I could do. Imagine some fruitcake stalking you like that?”

  “This guy is more than just a nut,” I said. “A lot of stalking cases are just bluff by spurned jerks, but Holly’s account is definitely concerning.”

  “How can you tell the difference?”

  “The fact that this Roger guy seems to have some psychiatric issues, that he’s a physically abusive substance abuser, and that Holly had been intimate with him are some very serious red flags when it comes to the potential for violence.”

  I suddenly stopped the car as we were sweeping around Holly’s block for the second time. I took a pair of binoculars that I keep in the glove compartment and pointed them into Morningside Park.

  “What’s up?”

  I handed Arturo the glasses.

  “Female on the bench off to the right by the playground,” I said.

  “The white girl with the glasses?” Arturo said, focusing in.

  “She’s directly opposite Holly’s building, and she’s got a camera with a telephoto lens.”

  “Birdwatcher?” Arturo said.

  “She’s watching something,” I said, pulling over. “This Roger guy is quite the ladies’ man, right? Well, maybe he got himself a new friend to keep an eye on Holly. Let’s go see what she has to say.”

  Only having been in it a few times, I had almost forgotten how nice a park Morningside is. Built by Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous nineteenth-century landscape architect who designed Central Park and Prospect Park, it had meandering walkways and grand stone staircases and even an elaborate waterfall beside one of its pathside ponds.

  Too bad I wasn’t there to sightsee.

  “Hey there,” I said, showing the woman on the bench my shield as I approached. The pale woman stood up, quickly stuffing the camera into a bag and gathering her things. But before she could take off, Arturo was already coming up the opposite side, blocking her way along the curving tree-lined path.

  “What do you want?” the woman said. “I’m not doing anything.”

  It was hard to tell how old she was. Besides the granny glasses, she had studs in her pierced cheeks, a men’s vintage-shop gray raincoat and badly dyed black hair peeking out from under a ragged tweed cap. She’d been pretty once, probably not too long ago. Now she looked as hard as the old concrete she probably slept on every night.

  “Sit back down,” I told her.

  “What is this about?” she said as I sat down next to her and took out my binoculars and pointed them at Holly’s building. I knew it. She had a straight shot to the front door.

  “This is about him,” I said, showing her Roger’s picture on my phone. I stared at her face as I showed it and caught a brief flicker of recognition.

  “Hey, Mike, watch her,” Arturo called out as the young woman thrust her hands into her bag.

  I waved him off. She wasn’t going for a weapon, I knew. She was just busy thumbing the Delete button on her camera. It was a Sony, a three-or-four-hundred-dollar digital SLR. Which made little sense, considering she was homeless. Probably stolen by Roger, I thought. I let her thumb away at it.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Piss off,” she said.

  I looked at her glassy eyes. It looked like she was on something.

  She didn’t say anything as I went into her tattered backpack and took out a wallet. She had a Connecticut driver’s license. Rachel Wecht. I couldn’t believe she was only twenty-one. Thanks, drugs. Thanks, broken families. I was also right. She had been pretty once.

  “Listen, Rachel,” Arturo said. “This guy Roger, or whatever his name is, who’s got you doing this, he’s really not as exciting as you think he is. In fact, he’s trouble. Like you’ll-end-up-dead kind of trouble. We have a warrant out for his arrest.”

  “We could lock you up right now for aiding and abetting a known criminal,” I said. “But I’m going to go on the assumption that he lied to you, OK? I’m going to cut you some slack. If you tell me where he is.”

  She sneered at me as she took off her tattered cap and spun it on her finger.

  “As if I knew what the hell you’re even talking about,” she said.

  “This lady you’re watching. She was Roger’s old girlfriend,” Arturo said. “What do you think happens to you when he gets sick of you?”

  She rolled her eyes and shrugged before she stood up and shouldered her pack.

  “I’m leaving,” she said with a dreamy smile.

  I let her walk. She’d called my bluff. There was nothing to hold her on. Not yet, at least. If anything, I was even more concerned about Holly now. Roger was recruiting people to help him stalk her.

  “This Roger really is a ladies’ man, huh?” Arturo said as we watched her leave. “Maybe that’s what I’m doing wrong. I need to drop my nice-guy routine and act more like I just escaped from the nuthatch.”

  PART TWO

  ONE OF OUR OWN

  CHAPTER 26

  THAT EVENING AFTER WORK, instead of heading straight home, I did something pretty out there. Something fairly nuts even for me. Which was saying something.

  I drove up into the Bronx near Yankee Stadium and made a purchase. Two purchases, actually. I hid them under my coat as I made my grand entrance that night around seven p.m. into the Bennett family abode.

  “Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages. I have an announcement. A neenie-neenie-nouncement!” I bellowed, quoting Chrissy, as I barged my way through the front hall into the living room.

  Mary Catherine came in from the kitchen, giving me a wink as she wiped her hands on a dish towel. I’d already made her privy to the surprise. I’m by no means the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even I was smart enough to know to run something like this by her first.

  Seamus appeared behind her with a folded New York Times crossword puzzle clutched in his hand.

  “And what’s going on here with all this ruckus?” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Seamus. You’ll just have to wait until the masses are amassed and everyone is present and accounted for. This is a four-alarm family surprise. Maybe a five-alarmer.”

  “Let me guess,” Seamus said excitedly. “You’ve finally checked yourself into Bellevue?”

  “Not yet, old-timer,” I said, hefting my surprise. “But you may have a point after you see what I have behind curtain numero uno.”

  The kids rushed in. Even the big ones. Earbuds were removed. I definitely had their attention.

  “Now, are you ready?” I said.

  “Yes!” they yelled.

  Well, the little ones, at least, with a beaming Chrissy and Shawna leading the chorus.

  “I can’t hear you!” I said. “Are you ready!?”

  “Dad, enough, please, would you?” Brian said. “I have a Latin test tomorrow.”

  “Well, then, without further ado, I present to you…”

  I pulled the coat away like a magician, revealing the hamster cage I was balancing on my forearm.

  And the puppy I was holding in my palm.

  “AWWWWWWWW!” said everyone.

  And I mean everyone. Even most of the boys.

  No wonder. In the palm of my hand was the cutest little border collie puppy in the history of the world. He was mostly white, with some almost tigerlike black stripes on his back and a black patch over his left eye.

  “A puppy!” the little girls yelled as they hyperventilated and hopped up and down.

  “And a hamster!” Chrissy shrieked. “Put them down! Put them down! I need to touch them now!!!!”

  “Why, yes. A puppy and a hamster,” I said, continuing to hold them aloft. “The two newest members of Clan Bennett are here. On one condition.”

  “Anything, Daddy!” the girls squealed.

  “That little hands pitch in to take care of our family’s newest members, especially walks. Dogs need walks with people attached to the other end of the leash.”

  “And pooper scoopers,�
�� said Seamus.

  “I’ll walk the hamster,” Eddie said.

  “You are a hamster,” replied Ricky.

  “We promise, Daddy,” Shawna said. “Can we touch them now? Can we, please? Please?”

  “I suppose,” I said as I finally placed the puppy and the hamster cage on the floor and wisely backed out of the way.

  CHAPTER 27

  I WAS COMMUTING UP to Harlem the next morning and had just turned south on Adam Clayton Powell when my phone rang.

  “Hi, Detective. This is Doyle. Jimmy Doyle.”

  “Hey, Jimmy. What’s up?” I said.

  “I just had a phone conversation with Officer Chast’s stepmother down in Florida.”

  “Officer Chast’s who?” I said.

  “Exactly,” Doyle said. “That’s what I said. Anyway, I got in ten minutes ago, and there were a bunch of messages left here from her, and she’s really worried about Naomi. Apparently she and Naomi are close, they talk three, four nights a week. Been doing it for the last ten years, since Naomi moved up here and became a cop. Anyway, she was waiting for Naomi’s phone call all day yesterday because it was the stepmom’s birthday. But she didn’t call.”

  “Have you tried calling Naomi?” I said.

  “It just kicks into voice mail. Chast is pretty good about getting back to you day or night, so it’s pretty weird.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Central Park West in the hundreds.”

  “OK. I’m about two blocks from the office. I’ll pick you up on One Twenty-Fifth and we’ll head over and see what’s going on.”

  Chast’s building was at 109th and Central Park West, a block south of the northwest corner of Central Park. It was about twelve stories, red brick trimmed in pale limestone, one of those anonymously beautiful prewar structures that you never get tired of seeing in and around New York.

  But when we parked in front of it, I could see that despite its good bones, the building had gone to seed a little. There was some choice graffiti here and there along its base, some broken glass next to a broken pay phone kiosk on the corner. When we reached the door, instead of the doorman that the old building probably once had, there was a buzzer system. First we pressed for Chast in apartment 4H. There was no response after a minute, so we pressed for the super. No dice on that front, either.

  I then did what every New Yorker does when confronted with a buzzer system and a locked lobby door of a building to which they need access. With both hands fluttering like Liberace playing a solo, I rang every button in the box.

  “Who is it?” said a woman’s rough voice after thirty seconds.

  Doyle rolled his eyes. The woman sounded almost exactly like the “Do your paperwork” lady, Roz, from Monsters, Inc.

  “NYPD,” Doyle said. “Open the door, please.”

  “Yeah, and I’m Hillary Clinton, you jerk,” replied “Roz,” then added, “You kids get outta here before I call the cops. And stop pissin’ in the elevator! What are ya? Dogs? Go piss in the park, you filthy animals.”

  “I want to shoot this thing. Can I, please? Just once?” Doyle said, pounding on some more buttons.

  Fortunately, before he could take out his service weapon, the door’s buzzer went off, and we went up the stairs to Chast’s apartment door. After knocking on it pretty hard for a few minutes, I started getting worried. If Chast was sick or hungover, she would have woken up. If she was in there, she was in trouble. I truly hoped she wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 28

  I SENT DOYLE DOWN to the basement to see if he could find the building’s super. He came back up five minutes later with the super’s wife, an attractive fiftyish redheaded woman in flannel pajamas, named Meg Hambrecht.

  “I knew it,” she said, fumbling with a huge set of keys at Chast’s door. “Every time my husband goes on jury duty something like this happens.”

  “You hear anything out of the ordinary in the building last night, Ms. Hambrecht?” I said.

  “Not a thing,” she said, finally spilling the keys into my hands. “Here. I’m useless. You try.”

  The second key I tried worked. Doyle and I looked at each other nervously as I swung the door open into the dead-silent apartment.

  Dear God, I prayed silently. Please let Chast not be here.

  “Could you wait out here, Ms. Hambrecht?” I said.

  “With pleasure,” she said.

  “Hey, Naomi? Hello? Naomi, it’s Detective Mike Bennett and Jimmy Doyle. You in here? You OK?” I said as we entered the apartment.

  We passed by a galley kitchen and a sunken living room. Doyle and I exchanged a concerned glance when we spotted the closed back bedroom door.

  I turned the door’s paint-flecked glass knob and pushed it open.

  Naomi was sitting slumped over at a cluttered home office armoire. Immediately, we could see her open eyes, the blood splatter among the pencils and notebooks, her chunky black service Glock on the carpet between her feet.

  Officer Naomi Chast was gone.

  “No,” Doyle said, groaning as he started to walk over to her. “C’mon! This isn’t right. How is this possible?”

  I grabbed his shoulder and pointed him toward the door.

  “Go call it in, Doyle,” I said. “Call it in.”

  CHAPTER 29

  AS WE WAITED FOR the local precinct detective to arrive, I went over to Naomi and knelt beside her.

  “Mike, what are you doing, man? Aren’t we supposed to let the precinct DTs handle this? I can’t stand seeing her like that. I feel like it’s somehow my fault.”

  “Doyle, get over here,” I said as I peered into Naomi’s face.

  “No, man. I don’t want to,” Doyle said.

  “Now,” I said.

  “What?” he said as he finally arrived behind me.

  “Look, her front tooth there. It’s chipped.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And here, look at her left hand. Her nails are neat and polished, but on her right hand, there are three broken fingernails.”

  “What are you saying?”

  I suddenly snapped my fingers as I glanced in the closet and under the bed.

  “Doyle, listen. This is important. Where did Naomi wear her service weapon? On her right or left hip?” I said as I looked over the contents of her desk.

  Doyle closed his eyes.

  “Left,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “She was left-handed, but her bullet wound here is more on the right.”

  “You’re right,” Doyle said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “And also look at this computer cubby. It’s got everything, right? Except the computer. Where’s her computer? It’s not in the living room or the closet or under the bed. It’s not anywhere.”

  “You’re right,” Doyle said. “What’s going on? You think she didn’t do this?”

  “Hey, what are you doing in here?” said a voice from behind us.

  “Glad you’re here,” I said, extending my hand to a bald, skinny, pale, thirtyish detective in a brown golf shirt. “I’m Mike Bennett. This is Jimmy Doyle.”

  “Fred Evanson,” the cop said, shaking hands.

  “Nice to meet you, Fred,” I said. “We worked with Naomi. Her stepmother said she wasn’t answering her phone since yesterday, so we decided to check in on her.”

  Evanson frowned over at her.

  “I’m sorry about your colleague. Damn, I hate to see that. So young. Real tragedy. This job can really chew you up,” Evanson said.

  “That’s just the thing, Detective. I don’t know if it was the job. There’re signs of a struggle. Chipped fingernails, a chipped tooth. Also, her computer is missing and—”

  “Whoa. What the—? What the hell are you doing here, Bennett?” said an older Hispanic cop, stepping in.

  I restrained myself from rolling my eyes. I knew the cop, unfortunately. His name was Freddy Abreu, and he was known in the department as a creep and c
omplete hack who for some unknown reason kept getting promoted. Actually, the reason was known. It was because he was a good friend and even better minion of Chief of Detectives Starkie.

  “Get the hell out of here now, Bennett, before I have you written up for messing with my crime scene. Wait out in the hall. Now,” Abreu said.

  CHAPTER 30

  WE DID AS WE were told. We sat out on the steps in the building hallway as more uniforms and more detectives and the crime scene unit arrived. I got the call I was expecting right after I sent Doyle to get us some breakfast.

  “Bennett,” I said.

  “One question, Bennett,” Starkie said. “Just one. Are you effing kidding me? Five seconds ago, I put you in charge of that unit, and now one of your guys is a stiff? What kind of manager are you? This officer meets her new boss, then goes home and blows her brains out?”

  “That’s just the thing, Starkie. There are signs of a scuffle. I don’t think she committed suicide.”

  “Already heard about your little conspiracy theory, Bennett. You’re thinking maybe she was shot from a black helicopter, huh? Or the president put her on the drone kill list? Or maybe it had a teensie weensie bit to do with the fact that several of her prior assignment evaluations rated her as excessively emotional?

  “She was unstable, Bennett, and you pushed her right over the edge. So if I were you, I’d get my think box humming to deal with that, because don’t be surprised if that’s the media narrative coming your way. Because if you think I’m taking the heat on this from the mayor or the press or anyone else, you’re crazier than I thought!”

  There was a tiny crackling plastic sound as I gripped my phone savagely in rage. I literally could not believe the bullshit I was hearing. A cop had just been killed, and already Starkie’s primary concern was how inconvenient it was for his ambitious career?

  “That’s funny. I have a message for you, too, Starkie. Go—” I managed to get in before I heard his click.