Most Wanted (12 page)

Melanie made as if to throw the football in Brad’s face; he laughed and pretended to cower behind his hands. She walked over and handed it to him.

“From what I hear,
you’re
winning the macho contest,” Brad said enviously. “Kicking butt and taking names. Her suspect’s got, like, twenty bodies on him!” he said to the others.

“Really?” Susan asked. “Jed Benson’s killer did twenty murders?”

“That’s what the informants say,” Melanie replied.

“And I thought I was hot shit doing the Vlad the Impaler trial,” Brad said. “He only killed four people. Although a machete through the stomach, that should count extra, right?”

“Forget Benson’s killer. It’s Witchie-Poo who scares me,” Joe said. “We saw her ambush you earlier, Melanie.”

“Careful,” Brad said, glancing around nervously.

“Don’t worry, I saw her leave for the day,” Susan said.

“So what was that all about? You okay?” Joe asked.

“She’s all over me about the Benson case,” Melanie said.

“Better you than me,” Joe said, his eyes kind behind thick glasses. He really was a decent guy. She was certain it rankled that she had gotten a plum assignment over him, but Joe would never hold it against her. The son of a prominent African-American city councilman, Joe came from a family that expected him to go into politics one day, but he lacked the cutthroat personality for it. He was intellectual, refined, laid back almost to the point of meekness. Joe’s most famous moment in the courtroom was when he fainted dead away during a blistering attack from the nasty Judge Warner for being late to court. He and Melanie had often helped each other out—he sharing his expertise on legal precedent, she tutoring him on the nuts and bolts of investigation and trial strategy.

Brad checked his watch. “Any of you fine people care to join me at Burger and Brew? Work out my trial strategy over a pitcher?”

“Sounds good,” Susan said. “I’m ready to pack it in for the night, and I’m starving.”

“Sorry,” Joe said. “I’m due at my folks’.”

“Melanie?” Susan asked.

“Nope. Wish I could, but too much work.”

“What happened to the Vargas we knew and loved? Never met a margarita she didn’t like?” Brad said.

Melanie laughed. “You’re confusing me with someone else. I was never that much fun.”

“Well, no time like the present to start, right?”

“Hey, doofus, leave her alone,” Susan said cheerily, punching Brad on the arm. “Maybe if you quit partying so much yourself, you’d get the big cases. Let’s go.”

“I’ll walk out with you,” Joe said.

The bulletproof door slammed shut behind them, leaving the office more silent and gloomy than before.

THE SKY OUTSIDE WAS BLACK, SHEETS OF WATER falling sideways in the wind. The rain pounding her window provided the only sound as Melanie hunted through a nearby box for something to read while she ate. She pulled out a random wiretap affidavit and brought it over to her desk, where the soggy plastic bag of diner food gave off a pungent pickle smell. Unwrapping the foil-covered sandwich, she bit into it and chewed the dry, tasteless turkey. Yuck. She hated bland food, but she was trying hard to be good. She thought longingly of the leftover arroz con pollo sitting home in her refrigerator. Lucky thing it wasn’t here, or she’d scarf it all in about ten seconds and feel fat for the rest of the night.

She flipped to the last page of the affidavit, searching for a date. Attested to nearly four years earlier by Special Agent Daniel K. O’Reilly of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it said. Such a pretty name, Daniel. What did the
K
stand for? Something Irish? Kevin? Kieran? Maybe she’d ask him. No, she wouldn’t. She had to be careful with Dan, and she knew it. She was at a desperate place in her life, and he was
too
attractive. And sweet. Man, was he sweet. No. Stop thinking about him. The last thing she needed was a new man in her life. She wanted to work things out with Steve, if only for Maya’s sake. Whatever else Steve was, he was a good daddy. Yes, think of Maya. Think of Maya, think of work. Stay focused. Besides, Dan was so hot he probably had a million women. He probably wouldn’t even like her back.

The affidavit began with a background section that detailed the gruesome murder case against Delvis Diaz, the C-Trout Blades founder. She read it and finally understood the chronology. Eight years ago, when Jed Benson was still a prosecutor, he’d locked Diaz up for three murders. Three consecutive life terms for torturing, mutilating, and killing three teenage gang members who were caught stealing drugs from him. Diaz had been in jail ever since. Flush with victory, Jed Benson had left the office, gone into private practice, gotten rich, and expected to live happily ever after. Expected never to hear from Delvis Diaz again. End of story, or so everybody thought until last night.

Meanwhile, the C-Trout Blades, that many-tentacled monster, regrouped and came back stronger than ever under new leadership. They ran a massive heroin ring headquartered at the corner of Central and Troutman in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, complete with guns, drive-by shootings, push-in robberies—all the fireworks of a modern-day drug conglomerate. Dan and Randall had gone after this new generation of C-Trout Blades and made lots of arrests, filling up enough boxes to crowd her tiny office. That case culminated four years ago, with wiretaps, search warrants, and raids that swept up nearly forty gang members. Even if Slice and Bigga weren’t gang members eight years ago when Delvis Diaz was locked up, they might well have been a mere four years ago when Dan and Randall had made their arrests. If they were, somehow they managed to escape detection. But her hope was they’d left some trace buried in one of the boxes sitting on her floor tonight.

Melanie gathered up the empty coffee cups and the sandwich wrapper, stuffed them in the plastic bag, and pulled herself to her feet. She walked out into the hallway and threw the bag into the trash by the Xerox machine to get that awful pickle smell out of her office. The hallway was completely silent, the only square of light the one shining from her own door. She returned to her office and dropped down onto the floor, facing the boxes, her back to the open door.

If she learned more about the gang’s structure, maybe she could find a shortcut to the right files. She leafed through boxes of background documents until she found a good overview of the gang. The C-Trout Blades’ drug operation was huge. Suppliers, mostly Colombians and Dominicans, delivered hundreds of kilos of raw heroin to mills set up by the largely Puerto Rican Blades in empty apartments all over Bushwick. The Blades operated eight or ten mills at a time, changing locations constantly to elude the police. In these apartments, teams of women worked in shifts around the clock under the watchful eye of a manager, cutting the raw heroin with filler and scooping individual dosages into tiny glassine bags sealed with custom-designed stickers.

The Blades sold two well-known brands of heroin. “Poison” was decorated with a scary black-and-white skull sticker, the brand name written in bloodred letters across its forehead. “Uzi” sported a realistic-looking decal of an Uzi, the brand name written in black letters along the silver gun barrel. Junkies had brand preferences like anybody else, and dealers came from as far away as Virginia and Ohio to buy these famous brands for their customers back home.

When a batch was ready, the mill manager summoned trusted junkies to test it. Too weak and it wouldn’t sell, too strong and the customers died like flies from ODs. If the batch passed muster, it was sent out to the Blades’ spots to be sold. The Blades ran retail spots all over New York City, most famously on Central and Troutman in Bushwick, where street pitchers sold dime bags to hordes of individual junkies. They also ran wholesale spots where out-of-town dealers could buy bundles of a hundred glassines at a time to sell at a markup back home. The Blades’ gross revenues from this enormous operation ran upwards of two hundred thousand dollars a day, 365 days a year. Where had all that money gone? Melanie wondered.

Dan and Randall had busted this huge operation wide open. They’d started with a single snitch, somebody they’d arrested one night with drugs and a gun. On the way to Central Booking, they’d told the guy he was looking at mandatory ten to life on the drugs alone, with a consecutive five years for the gun. His options were limited: either flip or rot in jail for the rest of his natural days. He flipped. They got him released on bail and back on the street in no time. The only difference was, now he was working for the feds.

With the snitch providing them key information, they’d applied for and gotten wiretaps on several telephones. The most important telephone was the one located at the most important heroin mill—an apartment on Evergreen Avenue in Bushwick rented in the name of Jasmine Cruz. Jasmine Cruz herself was a low-level figure, probably somebody’s girlfriend. Other than lending her name to the apartment and the telephone, she didn’t show up much in the documents. But Jasmine Cruz’s telephone served as the party line for the whole Blades hierarchy. Upper-level managers used it all day and all night to give orders to the Blades’ entire street organization. If Slice and Bigga were members of the C-Trout Blades four years ago, Melanie reckoned, they should have been intercepted talking on that phone.

Driven by that thought, she stood up and began searching through boxes for more on Jasmine Cruz’s telephone. She found a box labeled JASMINE CRUZ PHONE—SEARCH PHOTOS AND EVIDENCE and yanked the cover off. The first few folders held photographs taken by the search team after they raided the apartment. She leafed through the piles of eight-by-ten glossies. They all showed different views of a large living room, empty except for folding tables placed end to end to form a crude assembly line. The apartment itself looked dingy and run-down, with peeling paint and naked lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. In the photos, folding chairs sat askew or lay on the floor, telling the story. Their occupants had leaped up and tried to run when the feds kicked the door in. Close-ups showed piles of packing materials for heroin: tiny glassine bags, rolls of stickers, dispensers holding coveted “spoons”—the same long-handled white plastic McDonald’s coffee spoons Melanie recognized from her childhood. McDonald’s had discontinued their use years ago, but the black market for them remained strong; the spoons measured a perfect single dose and deposited it easily in a glassine. A table in the corner of the room held several digital scales and at least twenty kilo-size “bricks” of raw heroin, still wrapped in tape and waiting to be processed.

She pulled another folder, labeled SEIZED PHOTOS FROM JASMINE CRUZ APARTMENT, from the box. Different from the large, uniform glossies taken by the cops, these were snapshots of all different sizes and qualities, taken by the gang members themselves. Left lying around the apartment, they were seized as evidence during the raid. Melanie’s hopes rose at this typical sloppiness. Drug dealers and killers loved to record their exploits. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d shown a jury the defendant’s own pictures—posed holding his favorite gun or sitting in front of a big pile of cash. Her heart beat faster as she riffled through the contents of the folder, shuffling snapshots like playing cards. This might be something.

Most were pictures of young men she didn’t recognize, in baggy clothes, flashing gang hand signals and covered with home-drawn gang tattoos, some brandishing their guns. None of them was Slice, but she hadn’t expected to find him. From what she’d heard, he would never be careless enough to let himself be photographed. She leafed through these pictures hurriedly, impatient for something better.

Then, about halfway through, she came across several Polaroids of tortured animals. A cat and a chicken at first, their bodies mangled, torn to shreds. Something about the violence in the pictures seemed significant, although she couldn’t have said why.

The rabbit Polaroids were buried at the bottom of the folder, the very last pictures she found. In the first one, she couldn’t identify the animal. The copious blood threw her off, bits and pieces of fur awash in crimson muck, unrecognizable. But there was no mistaking the next one. The severed head of a rabbit, one ear ripped away, lying in a bloody pool on the floor of Jasmine Cruz’s apartment. The next Polaroid was even clearer—the rabbit’s decimated corpse, limbs missing. And in the bottom-right corner of that one, she finally saw it, what she’d stayed late to find. The blood-specked muzzle and large paws of a black dog, toying with the rabbit’s severed head. The same dog. It had to be. The same black dog that Rosario Sangrador had seen, that had mauled Jed Benson and ripped his throat open. That dog was in Jasmine Cruz’s apartment. Somebody there had taught it how to kill, and had snapped these pictures as souvenirs of the lessons. She turned the stiff Polaroid over. On the back the phrase NO JOKE was scrawled shakily in black marker, the capital letters lopsided, childishly formed. She took it as a message of evil intent, and it sent a chill of fear straight through her.

Or was the chill real? Leaning forward, hair spilling over her shoulders, Melanie felt a small draft kiss the exposed back of her neck. She heard no sound, saw no change in the light. But the stirring of the air told her that somebody stood silently in her open doorway, watching her. She knew this exact feeling. Knew it indelibly. Frozen, paralyzed, something dangerous behind her. Her father did what he could to warn her. “¡Corre, Melanie! ¡Él tiene pístola!”
She tried to run, but the man was too fast. Legs kicked out from under her before she knew it, carpet rushing up to meet her face. The flash, the thunder of the report
. “¡Papi, noooo!”

Here and now, she knew somebody was behind her. Whoever it was, he might have been standing there for a long time, so absorbed had she been in examining the photographs. She knew that the best option was to face him of her own accord. Why proclaim her fear by pretending to ignore him? Slowly and deliberately, she gathered her courage and turned around to see who stood behind her.