Monkey in the Middle (7 page)

But then Coldstream went bust and the administrators vanished without a trace. And there was no money. And it was off to Africa.

Two years later, when Thorpe found him again, Carter was in Dar es Salaam, at the Sea Cliff Hotel, relaxing by the pool after dinner. They'd shared a pleasant drink, reliving old times, then taken a little stroll by the cliff. The setting was magnificent. The sun was dropping into the Pacific Ocean and the dhows' triangular sails were smoldering orange triangles, the color made all the more intense by the darkening seas.

Thorpe had chosen the moment of his approach carefully. Carter wasn't exactly penniless, but the blood diamonds he'd carried across the continent hadn't fetched the price he'd hoped for. Plus, he had to wonder exactly what he'd do when he got back to the States. Carter had stumbled through high school, barely earning a diploma, then joined the army a month later. And what had the army taught him, except to kill?

Thorpe invoked this unpleasant truth as they walked. Character is destiny, he insisted, and aptitude is aptitude. Delta Force hadn't perverted Lenny Carter. Far from it. The military and Carter were a perfect fit. And what Carter must now do, with a military career off the table, is market his talents and training on the free market. Not some imagined set of skills he doesn't have, but the ones he actually does.

That said, they strolled in silence for a time. Carter was being pitched, pitched by a master, and he knew it. He didn't object. Sooner or later, a bottom line would appear. Thorpe always had a bottom line. As he had a talent for pushing the right buttons at the tight time.

Vulnerabilities, niche markets and entrepreneurship were the subject of Thorpe's second lecture. Because they work outside the law, he began, criminal enterprises rapidly accumulate capital. Because they cannot turn to the police when faced with aggression, they must protect their capital with ferociously-applied force. But of what use is force against an aggressor who can't be found? The answer, Thorpe explained, is none: an anonymous assassin, motivated by financial gain and therefore presumably rational, has every advantage. Naturally, the mark will resist this conclusion, not least because the situation is entirely novel. But the heads of criminal enterprises are also rational actors. They will sue for peace once they internalize their helplessness.

Carter waited until he was sure Thorpe was finished, then asked, ‘How much?'

‘Per head?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Twenty grand.'

The door to Sweet's Bar and Grill opens suddenly and a man staggers out to light a cigarette. A second later, he's joined by a woman. Carter brings his eyes to the rifle's scope and sights down on the man. Not a mark.

Sweet's is nominally owned by an aging alcoholic named Harry Sweets, but Paulie Margarine has a controlling interest in the bar, as he does in several legit businesses. Sweets is also where Paulie holds court, his minions coming and going. According to Thorpe, Paulie has been powerfully influenced by John Gotti, who delivered sensitive instructions to his people vis-à-vis walk-and-talks outside his social club. Paulie, who doesn't trust phones any more than did the Dapper Don, has added a little fillip to the walk-and-talk. His strolls take place beneath the el as trains pass overhead.

According to Thorpe, any tactic, when analyzed, will yield a vulnerability, a sacrifice of one benefit to achieve another. True, Paulie's tactic will most likely frustrate the cops and their long-distance microphones. Not so an assassin.

Carter's wait drags on for another hour. He doesn't mind. Alone in the shadows, he feels at home, as if designed for the environment. Outside, the sidewalks are busy, as are the stairways leading up to the el. Christmas is coming and there's a tension in the air that Carter, from a distance, finds pleasant. The children are especially exuberant. They skip down the street, blowing little clouds of steam into the frigid air. As he watches, Carter's eyes drift along the sidewalk, restless as the wind-blown litter. Eventually, his gaze settles on a panhandler huddled against the wall of a Dunkin' Donuts. The panhandler is little more than a bundle of rags and he sits unmoving, despite the cold. Very occasionally, someone pauses long enough to give up some spare change and Carter imagines the little clink of coin on coin. The panhandler himself appears not to notice.

A young girl, her head rising barely to her father's hip, stops before the beggar. She stares at the man for a moment, then yanks on her father's hand. Carter is too far away to make out her features, but he imagines her lips moving rapidly as she looks up at her dad, who wants only to be home, to be done with the day's obligations. His free hand clutches a pair of shopping bags and his shoulders sag with fatigue. He stops nevertheless, dropping his packages to the sidewalk as he digs beneath his coat for a suitable offering. Finally, he comes up with a bill, which he hands to his daughter. Suddenly shy, she edges toward the panhandler, looking back at her father for reassurance before dropping the bill into his cup. The panhandler remains motionless throughout.

Carter is wondering what it's like to be homeless four days before Christmas. Does the man recall happier times, perhaps his own childhood? Carter remembers being astounded on that first Christmas with Janie. The tree, the brilliant Christmas wrappings, the presents. At first, his senses were overwhelmed and he smelled a trap of some kind. But then he dug in, happier at that moment than he'd ever been in his life.

The door to Sweet's opens and Paulie Margarine steps out, shortly followed by Angelo ‘Bruno' Brunale, one of his closest advisors. Carter doesn't see them exit, his eyes only coming to them as they stand together on the sidewalk. More slippage? Carter drops his eyes to the scope and focuses on Brunale, ignoring the traffic. He recognizes the man from a file in his computer that includes shots of Paulie Margarine's family among its two dozen photographs. Brunale is a suitable target for this phase of the operation.

Carter settles back on his heels as a train approaches. He draws a long breath through his nose, then exhales slowly through his mouth, draining the tension. He half expects Paulie and his lieutenant to go back inside, but they remain on the sidewalk after the train passes. As Carter waits for an opening in the traffic, he finds himself thinking about Angelo Brunale's upcoming Christmas. He envisions a Christmas tree, children and grandchildren, a faithful dog curled before a smoldering fire, Christmas dinner roasting in the oven. Then Carter remembers another of Thorpe's many maxims. No predator can afford to feel sorry for its prey.

Ten

E
pstein sits at his desk at the Organized Crime Control Bureau, lost in his work. It's eight o'clock in the morning, twelve hours before Bruno Brunale's execution. An hour hence, Epstein will report to his boss, Inspector Champliss, and to the inspector's boss, Deputy Chief Radisson. As Radisson has a hair-trigger temper and a penchant for humiliating his inferiors (including Champliss), Epstein ordinarily dreads these meetings. But not this time. This time the fates have delivered a trio of Christmas miracles.

Almost as an afterthought, Epstein had instructed Billy Boyle to check surveillance cameras at subways stations up and down Seventh Avenue. The task was one of those hoops you had to jump through lest the bosses ask you why you didn't, and no positive outcome was anticipated. But the man hours have paid off. Against all odds, Epstein's detectives have uncovered a tape of Tony Maguire's killer, his floppy hat in place, exiting the subway station at Columbus Circle. This is a lead by any definition of the word and the bosses will almost certainly be grateful, despite the grainy images being (miracle number two) useless for purposes of identification.

Epstein's third miracle is of lesser significance – an interesting fact, if true, but one likely to lead nowhere, what with the absence of evidence not being evidence. While inside Macy's, the perpetrator appeared to rest his fingers on a glass display case. Certainly, his fingertips had come within millimeters of it. Yet despite their best efforts, which included superglue fuming, the lab rats were unable to raise his prints. Sergeant Tina Metzenbaum, a long-time CSU supervisor with whom Epstein has been flirting for years, had called him only ten minutes before.

‘What I think,' she told Epstein, ‘is that our boy's a non-secretor.'

As both knew, non-secretor, when applied to fingerprint identification, refers to individuals who don't sweat. Not sweating, they fail to excrete the oils necessary to produce a latent print. But the percentage of non-secretors in the general population is tiny. When Epstein later reviewed the video, it seemed just as likely that the perp never touched the glass.

‘I thought CSU was able to recover prints from non-secretors?'

‘Well, that's just it, Solly. When I examined the glass under a microscope, I saw a very faint smudge. At least I think I did.'

That's good enough for Epstein and he will present this opinion to his bosses as if it was a precious jewel.

The command performance takes place in OCCB's gigantic media room. Tape recorders, digital and film cameras of every description, bugging and tracking devices, computers programmed to enhance images and remove ambient noise from audio tapes. Called The Black Hole, into which stray bits of evidence are sucked, never to be seen again, the room is a maze of equipment benches, electric lines and cables. The arrangement has an organic feel to it, new devices having been randomly grafted to the mix as the various technologies developed. The big difference is the odor, in this case of dust and ozone, not trees and grass.

Epstein was a year mastering the terrain. No big deal, because efficiency is purely optional at OCCB. The Bureau is all about the slow pace of its multi-year investigations, about the tedious accumulation of evidence. This is an assignment that calls for a stubborn attitude, along with the stamina of a canoeist paddling upstream. The basic aim is to generate enormous headlines by indicting whole organizations, from top to bottom. In another room on another floor, uncounted hours of audio and video, captured on DVDs, CDs or tape, rest on metal shelves.

Their current investigation, propelled as it is by the fear of a gang war, is the anomaly. Epstein doesn't know why the case was given to OCCB and he probably never will. They'd been following the string of assassinations from a distance, as they were following the activities of two dozen other criminal enterprises. Then, out of nowhere, careers were on the line. Was that good for him and Billy Boyle? On the one hand, Epstein has some measure of control. On the other, his failure to produce a suspect might negatively impact his outsized ambitions.

As his old man might've said, if he'd hung around long enough, Oy, vey, I'm lucky I got my ears.

Epstein begins the show with a simple playback, the various snippets of video tracking Carter's sixteen minutes inside Macy's having been spliced together overnight. This is the first time either of his superiors has seen the tape in any form and they're clearly fascinated. All to the good.

Six minutes later, Epstein stops the tape with the subject kneeling before a glass display case. ‘CSU thinks he actually touched the glass. The reason he didn't leave prints is because he's a non-secretor.'

This isn't entirely true. Sergeant Tina Metzenbaum does not speak for the Crime Scene Unit. But Epstein is pleased when a lively discussion between Champliss and Radisson follows, a discussion in which Radisson confuses non-secretor, as it applies to the analysis of bodily fluids, with the term as it applies to fingerprint analysis. Epstein thinks that Champliss would like to correct his superior but doesn't have the balls. Large enough to dominate a room, Radisson commonly reverts to a ferocious glare if challenged, especially when he's wrong.

‘How do you identify a non-secretor if you come across one?' Radisson finally asks.

Epstein replies first. ‘Put him in the box with Billy Boyle and see if he sweats.'

After an exchange of manly chuckles, Epstein restarts the tape and they watch in silence until Carter finally disappears into the subway. Then Epstein leads them to another machine and punches the play button. He speaks over the running tape.

‘This footage was captured by a token booth camera at the Columbus Circle station. Though his face remains hidden, we definitely see the perp walking toward an exit leading to Broadway. Right now, I have two men working the street, checking out surveillance cameras in stores and in the hotels on Central Park South. I can spare a couple more if you want to go that way.'

‘What I want,' Radisson declares, ‘is for this not to escalate.'

Epstein wants to tell Radisson not to hold his breath. Backed into a corner, Paulie Margarine will have to react. But Champliss isn't the only one intimidated by Radisson's temper.

‘I hope to have something on that by tomorrow morning,' he says.

Radisson nods once and Champliss positively beams. They will not have to face the press empty-handed. Champliss looks up at his boss.

‘The non-secretor business, should we call the evidence seriological or biological?' he asks.

Sofia is seated on the couch when Epstein walks through the door of his modest home in Bay Ridge a bit before noon. She has a pillow clutched to her belly, watching a History Channel documentary about the potential for catastrophic tsunamis on the east coast of the United States. The baby is wide awake and restless; his kicks and thrusts make little eruptions on Sofia's abdomen, leading them to exchange the usual joke about Jonathon being a space alien about to claw his way out of the womb. Then Epstein sits alongside his wife and takes her into his arms.

They remain that way for some time, listening to each other breathe, watching giant waves rip through Manhattan's skyline. In fact, as Epstein knows, to reach Manhattan, the tsunami would have to pass over Brooklyn. But Epstein isn't bothered by predictions of doom. He's a relentlessly optimistic man, undaunted by the cop experience, a man not given to questioning his choices, especially his choice of the woman sitting next to him. He's only sure that he has to have her.