Raging Heat (25 page)

“This won’t shut the case down,” said Feller.

“Really,” said Ochoa. “Do they think we’re just going to drop it because you go to Staten Island?”

Heat said, “Of course you are capable of keeping it going. Especially this group. But we need to see this for what it is.”

“Round one,” said Rook.

“Exactly. This is the opening salvo in an orchestrated legal and power offensive. The idea is to dismantle progress one piece at a time and, eventually, to ‘make it go away.’”

She took a moment to register contact with each of them. “We can’t let that happen. This case has been a difficult one from the start. A lot of contradictions. A lot of conflict—even in here. Which is fine. It’s what you get with cops who have passion. I want that. But now we have entered a new phase.” She walked to the board to point at Captain Irons’s name up there as a murder victim.

“We need to drill down.” Nikki turned to look at his name again and milked the silence. Then she selected a new red marker from the cardboard sleeve. “This squad has twenty-four hours to be brilliant. Twenty-four hours to live up to its reputation as the top-clearing homicide squad in the NYPD.”

Heat opened the red marker and used it to draw a circle around her earlier translation of Fabian Beauvais’s tattoo: “Unity Makes Strength.” Then, in that same red ink, Nikki divided the board into four equal quadrants. She wrote a name in each, going clockwise: “Raley. Ochoa. Feller. Rhymer.” Capping the marker, she squared herself to her detectives. “Your assignment today is to examine every case detail inside your square. If you aren’t the detective who brought in the lead, become familiar and dig into it. If you did bring it in, go back over your own work and be critical. ‘What did I overlook?’ ‘What didn’t I ask?’ ‘Who didn’t I talk to?’ ‘What do I know now that I didn’t then that opens new lines?’ Talk to each other. If you have an expertise or hunch, poach that item from your colleague and run with it.”

Their attention was rapt and she took advantage of it. “Four victims: Fabian Beauvais, dropped from the sky; Jeanne Capois, tortured; Shelton David, home invasion victim; Captain Irons—line of duty. This is a bear of a case on the worst day to work it. But we all know that the solves don’t get handed to us. They come by donkeywork.” She tapped the whiteboard. “Something already up here could bring this home. Be diligent. Be thinking. Be cops.”

The squad flew into its work without hesitation, all of them going to their desks, except Rhymer, who lagged behind to faithfully copy the items listed in his box into his notebook. Raley, the media king, brought his iPhone to the mix and made a photo capture of his section. In short order, the bull pen filled with the buzz of investigators working phones to call back eyewits, confer with other divisions and precincts, and to debrief each other about leads and clues. Heat worked as liaison and free-floater, connecting thoughts and waving off the obvious time wasters. Rook self-directed, cherry-picking from the board and free-associating on Internet searches.

Shortly before two, Heat came to Rook’s desk. “Mayshon Franklin is out of surgery and in recovery. You mind getting a little wet?”

The first thing the prisoner saw when he opened his eyes was Heat’s badge. He couldn’t help but see it because Nikki held it so close that it was almost touching his nose. It had taken him longer to come out from under his anesthetic than she and Rook had expected, and they spent a quiet hour waiting in bedside chairs listening to the hiss of rain against the window. Far from lost time, it ensured she would be there on wake-up when the haze of pain meds might dull Mayshon Franklin’s instinct to clam up, lie, or ask for an attorney.

With Earl Sliney, the state police’s fugitive now off the board, BCI Senior Investigator Dellroy Arthur had broken camp, happy to leave his accomplice to NYPD. Heat obliged. “Mayshon Franklin, you are under arrest,” she said, removing her shield once she knew it registered.

His eyes were glazed, searching but not making optical sense of his world yet. He tugged lightly at the manacles connecting him to his jail-ward bed. Then he licked his dry mouth and said, “Earl?”

“Earl Sliney is dead, Mayshon.”

He closed his eyes, nodding an of course to himself, and then opened them again. “How?”

As Heat tried to decide how to put it, Rook stepped up behind her and said, “Human Pez dispenser.” That only confused Franklin, and Heat didn’t want him to lock up. Plus, she only had so much time before he would fatigue-out and go under again, so she got to it.

“Look up here, Mayshon.” Nikki held up the ATM security cam freeze of him and his crew and tapped Beauvais. “You recognize him, right? Mayshon, eyes here. Good. You know him?”

Franklin nodded weakly. “We have video of your friend Earl shooting at him a few weeks ago. You were there.” He nodded again, which was encouraging because she wanted him unguarded. “Did he hit him?”

“No, shot at him.”

“Right. We know he shot at him. Did any of Earl’s bullets hit him?” Mayshon shrugged and winced at the effort. “Can you answer yes or no?”

“I don’t know. Mighta hit him, mighta not. I dunno.” He took a breath that stuttered on the intake and his eyes drooped.

“Stay with me, Mayshon, you’re doing great. Almost done.” His lids fluttered to half-mast and Nikki pressed, aware of the short time she had before he zoned. “You and Earl were chasing him, and he had a package. What was it?”

“He stole.”

“What did he steal?”

“From the boss.” He smiled dreamily. “Y’all don’t steal from the boss.”

“What’s the boss’s name, can you tell me that?” He made a face, mimicking a child in trouble and wagged his head on the pillow. She’d come back to that. “What was in the package?”

“Bad stuff, I dunno. Stuff meant for the shred net.”

Since he claimed he didn’t know what was in it, she didn’t want to waste time flogging that. “Tell me about the shred net.” One eye closed. His other lifted like a stoner’s in a music video. “Mayshon. Where’s the shred net?”

“You don’t know? You’re the police.”

“Tell me, help me understand you better, Mayshon.”

“Flatbush. C’mahn, you know.” His speech became increasingly slurry.

“Where in Flatbush?”

“Flatbush, there ya go.” He closed his eyes and muttered in a singsong, “Mar-co.” And then he chuckled, answering in the same cadence, “Po-lo.…”

“Mayshon, don’t play games with me, just tell me where.”

Again he sang, “Po-lo,” then didn’t say anything, and she thought she’d lost him. Then he chuckled again and said, “Whirl ride.”

And then he slept.

Working his iPad in the hall after the floor nurse ordered them to step out, Rook made a spin move on the polished linoleum. “Ha-ha, knew it. Thug-One wasn’t jerking your chain. Look.” He held the tablet out for Nikki to read his search hit. “Marco Polo Worldwide—as opposed to ‘whirl ride’—Spice Distributor and Wholesaler in Flatbush, New Yowk.” He watched hope cross her face and her wheels starting to turn. “I wouldn’t call ahead.”

“No,” she said on her way to the elevator. “Let’s surprise them.”

When they pulled out of the garage of Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical Center, the rain surprised both Heat and Rook by still seeming relatively light. Shouldn’t it be more torrential? The wind, however, remained prolific, seemingly limitless. On the drive down Marcus Garvey Boulevard toward Flatbush, plastic bags, tree branches, chunks of billboard, even price numbers ripped from service station signs flew across their path, prompting Rook to say something Nikki only half heard about falling gas prices.

She was busy trying to sway the acting precinct commander of the Sixty-seventh to provide backup at Marco Polo Worldwide. He was understandably reluctant to release assets during a citywide emergency, yet was no match for Heat, who invoked the name of Zach Hamner as her next call, if that’s what it took. The acting PC offered two patrol teams to meet her at the west end of Preston Court in fifteen minutes.

Heat’s Taurus had been blocked in back at the Twentieth, so she and Rook arrived in the drug impound undercover car she had commandeered in her haste. A pair of blue and whites was waiting for them outside the U-Haul parking lot on the corner of Preston at Kings Highway. “Don’t want to jinx it,” she said to Rook, “but we’re only about three blocks from Fabian Beauvais’s SRO. If this turns out to be that shred net, and he ripped them off, it’s an easy walk.”

“Or run,” he said.

More than simply functioning as backup, the patrol officers had good local knowledge. Preston Court was a down and dirty industrial zone, a partially unpaved, two-lane alley lined on either side by low-rise weathered brick and concrete warehouses, mounded quarry materials, and metal-scrap lots bordered by chain link and razor wire. The spice distributor sat a hundred yards east between a tire recycler and a boiler-system repair company. The ranking uni, a sergeant, said all the business on that stretch of Preston loaded their materials in and out the front doors, so there was only a narrow service track running behind the buildings, an easy route to plug with a patrol car on each end. Heat told the sergeant she liked his plan and dispatched him and the other team to the back, keeping one of the uniforms to go in the front door with her and Rook.

On the drive up the block, they passed a flatbed stacked with hollow automobile bodies in front of a crusher yard. Next door, outside a vacant hulk with a red and white sign advertising thirty thousand square feet for lease, a handful of young Latinos crouched with cupped hands around their smokes as if the hurricane were a minor inconvenience. When they made the undercover cop car, they ran in all directions. Pulling up to Marco Polo Worldwide Spice Distributors, Rook scoffed at the sign. “If this isn’t a front for something, I’ll eat a tablespoon of cayenne.” Indeed, the sad building looked anything but international, a double-height box of exposed concrete blocks topped by rusty corrugated steel panels.

The front door was unlocked, either through sloppiness or thanks to the smokers, and the three entered. They found the reception area unattended. Clearly it got no walk-in customers. Dingy framed photos of herbs drying on foreign hillsides graced Masonite paneling straight out of a Khrushchev-era basement bomb shelter. Inside the dust-caked display cases, bowls of dead and decayed spices were laced with cobwebs. From their pallid color and texture, they might have been delivered by Marco Polo himself.

The door to the side of the counter opened, and an imposing guy ripped with muscles stepped in, hastening to pull it closed behind him. “Help you?” he said in a voice an octave higher than anyone expected from his roided body.

“Interested in some spices,” said Rook. “I’m just mad about saffron.”

Both the officer and the muscleman gave him strange looks. Heat’s focus stayed on the hard body, whom she saw stuff something in his back pocket and cover it with his untucked shirt tail. “I’d like to speak to the manager. Is that you?”

“We’re closed.”

“The door was open.” She parted her coat to show some tin and Sig Sauer. “Are you the manager?”

“No.”

“Who is?”

“You have a warrant?” As soon as he asked it, the inner door behind him opened wide. A slender Asian man holding an unlit cigarette and a disposable lighter stood in it. Behind him they could see a portion of a large, open warehouse with about a dozen foreign men, women, and children off-loading garbage bags from a box truck. Muscle Man gave the guy with the cig a shove back inside and pulled the door shut.

“Won’t be needing a warrant. I just happened to observe illegal activity. That girl I just saw is working in violation of child labor laws,” said Heat, approaching him. “And you are under arrest for carrying an illegal weapon.” She reached in his back pocket and pulled out a telescoping billy club. While the uniform frisked and cuffed him, she said, “I think I’d like my tour now.”

An hour later, still handcuffed, but seated in a stained executive chair in the middle of the warehouse, the muscleman, Mitch Dougherty watched glumly as his workforce of forty-six illegals called him names in foreign tongues as they filed past to be processed by Social Services. SSD personnel had braved the weather and arrived with two buses to transport the dozens of abused and malnourished aliens to emergency shelters and to get a health assessment.

To use the term Heat had heard from FiFi Figueroa, Mitch was only one of the bulls, an enforcer. But he was inside, and that meant he must know who ran the business. And what a business it turned out to be.

Ana, a young woman from Honduras who spoke excellent English, approached Nikki on behalf of the other workers, desperate to share the story of their plight. “I am like most of these women. We have been abducted from our hometowns and brought here against our will.”

In the case of Ana, she was taken one night in La Ceiba by gangs who first raped her, then smuggled her to America to be a prostitute. “Sadly,” she said, “it is true for some of the boys as well, although many of the men and women were not kidnapped, but were tricked to come here. Who does not want to come to America for education,
s
i
? That is what they told some, and then they arrive, and there are no identity papers or no colleges, and they are then forced to work for pennies in this living hell and live in the squalor of the rooms they keep us in.”

Heat scanned the lineup of vacant-eyed souls. Of course she knew about human trafficking—the underground industry of human servitude that kept the moral outrage of slavery alive and well in modern times. But here she saw it in the flesh, en masse. Men, women, and—as she learned from Social Services—children, as young as nine, caught in the historic form of abduction, abuse, and enslavement for the enrichment of their captors; and all who supported the system. Here before her were forty-six lives. What made her shudder was the certainty that they were the proverbial grain of sand on the beach.

Exhilarated by her rescue from bondage, Ana led Heat and Rook around the warehouse, describing the setup and the jobs done by each team. “That’s how they divided us, by specialty. And by literacy. You’ll see what I mean.”