Skeleton Justice (10 page)

Sam sat at his brother’s dining room table, reading the
New York Times
, a cup of steaming coffee before him. Things sure had improved around here since Jake started seeing Manny. Now there was always French-roast coffee and toast made with Portuguese sweet bread in the kitchen, not to mention toilet paper in the bathroom. Ah, the civilizing influence of women! He glared at his brother, also engrossed in the
Times
, across the table. One thing hadn’t changed. There was only one copy of the paper delivered, and he, as the uninvited guest, had to content himself with the sections Jake cast off. He’d already read the Arts and Dining Out sections, and he had no interest whatsoever in Business. That left Metro, since Jake was selfishly hogging both Sports and the main section. He picked it up unenthusiastically.

MAYOR VOWS TO RAISE CITY READING SCORES
. Yeah, yeah, they kept that story on file and had been rerunning it every year since he’d been in kindergarten;
CITY TO ALLOW PEOPLE TO CHOOSE SEX ON THEIR BIRTH CERTIFICATES
—only in New York. Sam turned the page.
LONG ISLAND POLITICO ACCUSED OF CORRUPTION
, like that was news. He glanced over at his brother, who appeared deeply engrossed in the op-ed page. Then why couldn’t he have Sports? Sam casually extended his long fingers and slowly drew the Yankees coverage closer.

Slap!

Sports was snatched back.

“C’mon, Jake, you can’t read two sections at once. Just let me check the standings.”

“No, I won’t get it back. I want to read the paper in peace before I leave for work. You have all day to read it. Wait.”

Sam sighed and returned to the Metro section. No new stories on the Vampire or the Preppy Terrorist. It really was a slow news day. He turned to the third page of the section and scanned the “Metro Briefs,” stories so minor that they didn’t merit a bylined article. A fire in Westchester, a hit-and-run in Connecticut… His gaze slid down the column in boredom, then stopped, riveted.

EXECUTION-STYLE SLAYING IN KEARNY

On May 24, police found the body of a twenty-three-year-old man in a litter-strewn lot in Kearny, New Jersey. He had been shot once in the temple, execution style. The victim was identified as Benjamin Hravek, who worked intermittently as a roofer. Police are seeking a ponytailed, tall, thin Caucasian male with silver hair, age approximately thirty-five, known to have had a violent encounter with Hravek at the Gateway Inn several days before his death.

The Metro section slipped onto the table and Sam stared out the window behind his brother’s left shoulder.

“Oh, here—take the damn Sports.” Jake tossed him the section.

But Sam was already out of the room by the time the newspaper landed.

Manny paced the space in front of her desk with the phone pressed to her ear. She covered the distance in a few strides of her long legs, pivoted at the first of the white Carrera leather chairs she had purchased to inspire the confidence of her clients, and marched back toward the other chair, where Mycroft sat licking his paw.

“I want to talk to your client and find out what the hell’s going on.” Sam’s voice came through the phone loud enough to make Mycroft’s ears perk. “This little odd job you recruited me for is going to end up getting me arrested for murder.”

“Look on the bright side, Sam. You’ll have the best defense counsel on the east coast.”

“Damn it, Manny! This isn’t funny. There’s some serious shit going down here.”

“I know there is, Sam. And I’m not sure it has anything to do with the Iqbar case and Islamic terrorism. You know, Brueninger has presided over scores of controversial cases. What if the feds were sidetracked by Travis’s reading material? What if they’re looking at this all wrong?”

“You’ve got a point. I can’t see a guy like Boo agreeing to work for a bunch of Muslim extremists. He’s more of an organized crime kind of guy.” Sam paused. “Was, I should say. Did Brueninger preside over any Mafia trials?”

“I’ve got a list of every case that came before him in the past five years,” Manny said. “There was a Mafia money-laundering case a while back where a few mid-level capos got sent to minimum-security prison. I don’t see the mob retaliating over that. They take those convictions as the cost of doing business.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “A little R and R and the boys are back to work. Besides, Boo’s not Italian. Hravek is what—Czech, Hungarian, Serbian?”

Manny scanned the list of Brueninger’s cases. “Hey, here’s something. The judge convicted a bunch of guys from former Soviet-bloc countries for human trafficking—smuggling poor Albanian girls into the country and forcing them into prostitution.”

“Sex-slave traders. They sound like the kind of guys who might carry a nice grudge against the man who sent them away.”

Manny had done a Google search on the case while she and Sam were talking. “Apparently, he sent them far away. They were deported to serve their sentences in Albania.”

“Eeew—that sounds unpleasant.
If
they’re still there. But who knows—bribe the right people in the old country and they could very well be back on the streets here in New Jersey.”

“And how would we ever know?” Manny asked. “We can’t do follow-up in Albania.”

“I’m relieved to hear you say so, because I’m not taking a field trip to Tirana.”

Manny kicked at the side of her desk in frustration, then hopped up and down in pain. Mycroft studied her mournfully. Since getting expelled from the Little Paws doggy day-care center for fighting with a Boston terrier, he’d been spending long days in the office with Manny. “Somehow we have to find out who hired Boo, and why. Why did the bomber want to involve Travis?”

“Travis and/or Paco,” Sam said. “The two guys Boo took with him to Club Epoch aren’t going to know anything. We have to find the other guy, Freak.”

“Or Deke or Zeke,” Manny said. “No one seems clear on his name, where he came from, or where he disappeared to.”

“The police maintain a database of nicknames bad guys use on the street,” Sam said. “Do you know if the feds tried to find this guy in there?”

Manny dropped into her desk chair and swiveled to look out the window. Twenty floors below, the hustle and flow of lower Manhattan moved silently by. “If you ask me, the feds seem to be doing all they can to pretend our mystery man never existed. And I find that in itself to be very suspicious.”

“Ah, Manny—you see conspiracies everywhere. Why not give plain old incompetence credit sometimes?”

“You’re right, Sam. It’s hard to overestimate that on the federal level. Luckily, I know a guy high up in the New Jersey Bureau of Criminal Justice. I’ll suggest he run those names for us—for their investigation.”

Manny waved Kenneth into the office. He was wearing a faux tiger-skin shirt topped by a short feather boa jacket. The jacket was a concession to the need for formal law office decorum. Despite his new natural-toned acrylic nails, he’d done an excellent job typing up the Eduardo wrongful death summary judgment brief that had to be filed with the court the next day.

“Thanks, Kenneth. I’ll sign that and you can send it off.”

“Hello? Are you still there?” Sam demanded.

“Sorry. Where was I?”

“Tracking down Freak.”

“Right. If I could find him, the feds would have to accept that Travis didn’t plan this. If I can’t, I have to find another way to convince them Travis was an unwitting dupe, not an intentional coconspirator.”

“Are you sure that’s true?”

Manny sighed. “Not entirely. And that’s exactly why I’m telling you to stay away from Travis Heaton. He’s under house arrest, and I’m sure there are federal marshals keeping an eye on his apartment. If they see you waltzing into his building, a fleet of cruisers will be waiting for you when you come out. I’ll talk to him.”

This suggestion was met with silence. Finally, Sam spoke again. “Okay, maybe you’re right.”

Manny smiled. There was a sentence you’d seldom hear any man utter.

“Listen, this is what I want you to find out. Whose idea was it that they go to Club Epoch? Why that place, that night? Did Travis know they were going to be meeting anyone?”

“I want to know those things, too, Sam. And believe me, I intend to find out.”

“And what about this Paco kid—are you going to talk to him?” Sam demanded.

Manny switched the phone to her other ear and reached out to stroke Mycroft. He yipped and scooted away from her hand. “Mikey, what’s—”

“Manny! What about Paco?”

She wasn’t eager to answer this question. The truth was, Paco Sandoval was proving quite elusive and it was really pissing her off. And worrying her. He was hiding behind his diplomatic immunity and letting his friend take the fall. If Paco was just an innocent dupe, as Travis claimed to be, then why wouldn’t he at least cooperate in his friend’s defense? She suspected that this mysterious caller who’d contacted Boo Hravek was somehow connected to Paco. But how could she prove it if she couldn’t even talk to the kid? His family’s apartment near the UN was a veritable fortress; the Monet Academy had treated her like a damn pedophile when she tried to reach Paco there. Still, she didn’t want Sam to panic. She could handle this.

“Look, Sam, Travis went to school today, and he’ll talk to Paco and let him know we need to meet with him. I’ll work it out.”

“You’d better. Call me as soon as you’re done with those kids.”

“Fine. Expect to hear from me by five.”

As soon as she’d put the phone down, Manny scooped up Mycroft to examine the paw he was licking. The dog held perfectly still as her fingers searched gently. Then he shuddered and yelped when Manny found the swollen wound hidden in his curls. He’d been bitten by that damn terrier! The nip he’d given Kimo had been in self-defense.

“Oh, Mikey, I’ve got to get you to the vet. You’re wounded. And unjustly accused, too.”

Jake peered at slides through a microscope set up on a small side table in his office. While he’d been obsessed with the Vampire, a multitude of work on other cases had piled up. Stacks of case folders and unproofed autopsy reports teetered on his desk. The medical degrees and awards hanging on his walls seemed to mock him as he worked.

As much as he tried to focus on wrapping up the details of these other cases, thoughts of the Vampire continued to derail his concentration.

A light tap at the door made him look up. Vito Pasquarelli stood on the threshold of his office, looking as gaunt and nervous as Jake had ever seen him.

“What’s the matter?”

Vito stepped into the office, shut the door, and leaned on it. “I had my meeting with the FBI this morning.” His eyes were half-closed as he spoke. “They want to take over the case.”

“That’s good news, isn’t it?” Jake came out from behind his desk and waved Pasquarelli into a chair beside him. “This Vampire thing has put you in the hot seat. Let them have it.”

Pasquarelli shook his head. “The mayor’s fighting it. Ever since the FBI fouled up that near-miss subway bombing in Brooklyn and let the conspirators slip away, the mayor never misses a chance to hang the feds out to dry. He says no one does a better job of protecting New Yorkers than the NYPD.”

Jake grinned. “His confidence in you is touching.”

“Yeah, yeah, tell me about it. He’s just grandstanding for reelection, and jabbing our congressmen for not getting New York more federal antiterrorism money. That all looks great on the news, but I’m the one who’s gotta figure out how to solve this Vampire thing, and I don’t see how I’m going to do it if the FBI gets its knickers in a twist and refuses to help me.”

“Why do they want the case? What do they know that you don’t?”

“They know whose fingerprint was on that coffee mug, but they don’t know how it got there. And neither do I.”

“It didn’t get there when the person was drinking from the mug?”

Vito leaned back and stared at the warped and grimy ceiling of Jake’s office. “Well, maybe. But he sure as hell wasn’t having a drink with Ms. Hogaarth.”

“Why not? Whose print is it?”

The detective gave up on trying to divine the future by reading the stains in the acoustic tile and met Jake’s eye. He spoke the words as distinctly as if he were calling the person forward to accept an award.

“The former president of the United States—Richard Milhous Nixon.”

Manny stood on the front stoop of the five-story walk-up on West Ninety-seventh Street and pressed the button next to the faded nameplate reading
HEATON
. When nothing happened in response, she pressed again.

She’d managed to squeeze in a visit to Mycroft’s new vet on the way to Travis’s apartment, but the detour made her fifteen minutes late for her client. Dr. Costello had been so accommodating, examining Mycroft right away, bandaging him up, and even placing a call to Little Paws to argue, successfully, for Mycroft’s readmission. Efficient, kind, and handsome, too. But Dr. Frederic Costello was married, to his receptionist, and she had Jake, so enough of that little daydream.

Manny leaned on the button again and tried shouting into the scratched and dirty speaker. “Mrs. Heaton? It’s me, Manny Manfreda.”

A window on the second floor opened and a woman in a green-and-orange housecoat leaned out. “Bell don’t work. You gotta call.” The window slammed down.

Manny sighed and dug out her cell phone. But as she dialed, the buzzer opening the outer door sounded and she was admitted to the building. In the small tiled vestibule, Manny was assaulted by the mingled scents of industrial-strength roach spray, cooked cabbage, and ammonia. The stairs ahead were steep and narrow. Manny looked down ruefully at her Chanel wedges and began the long climb to the fourth floor.

On the second floor, the sounds of Spanish-language holy-roller radio blared.
“¡Dios, Dios! ¡Yo te amo Dios!
” over and over, barely muffled by the scratched brown metal door to apartment 2A. This was not the kind of two-bedroom Manhattan apartment most Monet Academy students were familiar with. She wondered if Travis ever brought his friends home. She wondered what he felt when he visited them in their luxury co-ops and town houses.

Manny shifted her purse to her other shoulder and kept climbing, pausing to catch her breath at the next landing, but she was motivated to press on by the intense cooking smells on the third floor. With a stitch in her side, she reached apartment 4A, positioning herself directly in front of the peephole before she knocked, so Mrs. Heaton could see her clearly.

She had barely grazed the door with her knuckles when it flew open. “Thanks for coming. I’m sorry I’m still in my work clothes. I just got in a few minutes ago.” Maureen Heaton stepped back to let Manny in. The door opened directly into the kitchen, a room with cracked greenish linoleum and a window that looked out onto a brick wall. Manny hadn’t seen such an ancient gas stove since she’d last visited her great-aunt Cecilia.

“Can I get you a drink?” Mrs. Heaton offered. “Lemonade? Tea?”

“Just a glass of water will be fine, thanks.” Manny tried not to pant as she spoke.

Mrs. Heaton gave her the water and led her down a long, narrow hall that ran past two closed doors and ended in a small, bright room overlooking Ninety-seventh Street. “Have a seat,” Mrs. Heaton directed. “Travis should be home any minute now.”

Grateful for the rest, Manny dropped onto the lumpy sofa, which was not completely sheathed by a ready-made slipcover. The room was filled with books. Books, and photos of Travis. Travis as an infant, Travis at his first birthday party, Travis on the shoulders of a tall, thin man who was obviously Mr. Heaton. More recently, Travis playing violin, Travis receiving a science fair award, and Travis in a Monet Academy fencing competition.

“So, Maureen, before Travis gets here, tell me a little about Paco Sandoval. How long have the boys been friends?”

Maureen sighed, the sigh of every mother who’s ever disapproved of her kid’s friends but can’t figure out what to do about it. “Paco. Well, Paco is everything that Travis isn’t. Wealthy, worldly, popular, hot with the girls.”

Manny arched her eyebrows. “Yet he befriended Travis?” In her experience, that wasn’t how high school worked.

“They were placed together in a peer tutoring program,” Maureen explained. “Paco was failing math and chemistry. With Travis’s help, he got his grades up to
B
’s.”

“So, Travis is a chemistry whiz?”

“Oh, yes! He won a special competi—” Maureen stopped mid-gush and turned on Manny. “Don’t tell me
you
think Travis built that bomb?”

“No.”
Maybe not at this very moment, but try me again tomorrow
. “But, Maureen,” Manny continued, “it’s important that I know absolutely every detail of Travis’s life that the prosecution could possibly use against him.”

Maureen rose and paced around the room. “I always knew Paco would manage to get Travis into trouble, but I figured it would be for something like cheating on homework or drinking at a party. Not this—federal terrorism! What could I do? I tried to reason with Travis, but he wouldn’t hear one bad word about his friend. Travis was always a little socially backward. He had his own interests, which kept him occupied. Paco ushered him into the circle of cool kids. Travis would do anything for that boy.”

“Our goal is to get Paco to do something for Travis. Why is he being so elusive? Can we appeal to his parents? Do you know them?”

Maureen shoved her hands into the pockets of her aqua nurse’s smock. “I don’t have the free time during the day to volunteer at the Monet Academy the way some of the mothers do. I don’t know any of those women well.”

Manny felt a flash of sympathy. Poor Maureen was excluded from the Monet in-crowd as surely as her son had been.

“You’ve never met the Sandovals at school concerts or sporting events?”

“They’re often traveling. I see more of them in the society pages of the Sunday
Times
than at school. But I did see them once at the senior class play. Paco had a small part, but Mrs. Sandoval was carrying on like he was Matthew Broderick. Ambassador Sandoval looked bored and irritated. He’s very severe—nothing like Paco, even though there’s a physical resemblance.”

“So you like Paco?”

Maureen shrugged. “It’s hard not to. He’s funny and charming and has beautiful manners. Every inch the diplomat’s son. At first, I was thrilled that he befriended Travis. Paco helped my son fit in at Monet. Travis’s first two years there were rough. He was constantly pressuring me to let him transfer to public school. Then Paco came along, and Travis started to enjoy school.”

“And then something happened?” Manny prompted.

Maureen shrugged again. “Nothing dramatic. Just these past few months, Travis hasn’t talked to me as much; he’s secretive, and I don’t always know where he is.” She fiddled with the stethoscope that still hung around her neck. “But everyone told me that was normal. ‘He’s growing up,’ they’d say. ‘You have to let him go.’ And now look what’s happened. I—”

Manny jumped up from the couch, hoping to avert another full-scale emotional breakdown. She glanced at her watch. “It’s nearly four—shouldn’t Travis be home by now?” A twinge of worry rose up in her throat, but she pushed it resolutely down. She was the lawyer, not the overprotective mother of an only child.

Maureen looked at her own watch in alarm. “He’s always home by now. He certainly wouldn’t have stayed after school without calling. Not with all that’s going on.” She rose and looked out the window. “Unless there was some delay on the subway …” Maureen’s upper lip trembled. “What could have happened? Should I call the school?”

“Wait a minute.” Manny looked over at the two closed bedroom doors. “Is it possible Travis has been home all this time? You said you just walked in before I arrived. Maybe he’s in his room, plugged into his iPod.” The worry subsided. That must be it. She suspected Travis was none too eager to talk to her again. He was probably lurking in his room, trying to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible.

Relief flooded the mother’s face and she strode down the hall. “You’re probably right. I’m always calling him and he never hears me.” She rapped sharply on the first door. “Travis, honey, are you in there? Ms. Manfreda is here to talk to us.”

She opened the door without waiting for an answer, Manny right on her heels.

For a moment, all Manny could discern by the dim light of the shaded window were papers and clothes. Piles of each covered the floor, the bed, and every other level surface. The next thing she noticed was the electronic hum emitted by not one but three computers—two desktop, one laptop—and assorted other speakers, hard drives, routers, and mice. Was that lump in the bed Travis, or just a tangle of sheets and blankets? Maureen flicked on the wall switch and light flooded the room.

Manny watched as Maureen’s eyes darted back and forth, desperately searching for Travis, willing him to be there. She stepped forward to examine the interconnected maze of computers that occupied the desk and a folding table in the corner of the room.

“Quite a bit of equipment he’s got here.” Manny sized it up—the very latest models. Ironically, the deluxe Apple laptop was one that she had wanted for herself but had passed up in favor of a spree at the Henri Bendel trunk show new designer event.

“Computers are Travis’s passion. He earned the money to buy most of this. Never needed any help getting a job from the school placement office.”

Manny estimated the equipment before her added up to about two decades’ worth of babysitting. The more she learned about Travis, the more he worried her.

Next to the desk was a bookcase. Three shelves were jammed with books; the top shelf was empty. Maureen saw Manny looking at it. “That’s where the police took away Travis’s books.”

“Maureen, why didn’t they take his computers?”

“Well, truth be known, Travis had moved them to a friend’s house the day before he was arrested. An old one was here on the desk, and the FBI did take that,” Maureen explained.

The more Manny heard the more she worried Travis was guilty.

“It also seems like they took a lot more books than what he had for his comparative religion class.”

“Travis got interested in the subject and did more than the required reading.” Maureen got huffy “I’ve always encouraged his intellectual curiosity.”

“Mmm. How long would you say he’s had this interest in Islam?”

Maureen turned away and began folding the scattered clothes on the bed. “I don’t know. It’s not like he talked to me about it. I’m just dumb old mom.” Suddenly, her shoulders began to shake. “If his father had lived, none of this would’ve happened. Travis always talked to his dad.”

Maureen was bigger than Manny, which made hugging her awkward. Manny improvised with a few awkward pats on the back. As she administered this aid, something in the tangle of Travis’s clothes caught her eye: black-and-white checks, fringe. She pulled at it. An Arab man’s head scarf emerged from the pile. A kaffiyeh, the same pattern Yasser Arafat always wore.

Manny held it up. “Does he wear this much?”

Maureen snatched it away. “I’ve never seen that before. He must’ve … Someone must have given it to him.”

Yes, someone. Who?

Manny turned back to the computers and noticed a piece of paper taped to one of the monitors. She squinted to read the teenage scrawl:

Mom—

Don’t touch any of this. Don’t move the phone. I’ll be back soon
.

T

Maureen had been reading along, too, and as her eyes scanned the words, her fingers tightened their grip on Manny’s arm. “What? What does he mean, ‘back soon’? He can only be here or in school; that’s what the FBI said.”

Manny took in everything before her—the computers, the phone, the note—but her ability to process the information stalled. The last time she had experienced this sense of slow-motion impending doom, her sports car had been sliding off an icy road, heading for a massive oak. Now in Travis’s room, the crash came as pieces of the puzzle clicked together.

“He’s rigged some way to override the monitoring system.” Manny’s voice, flat and dead, hung in the air like another of the apartment building’s bad smells.

“What do you mean? That can’t be.” Maureen’s spiral of panic kept rising. “If you take off the ankle bracelet, the FBI knows right away. They explained all that to us.”

“He hasn’t taken it off,” Manny explained. “The bracelet transmits a signal back to the FBI through the phone line. Travis has figured a way to send that signal using this laptop. He’s a kid, understands electronics better than the feds—a Kevin Mitnick devotee. Travis must have figured that as long as he keeps the signal transmitting somehow through wireless relay stations going back only to this phone, it looks like the bracelet signal is coming from this apartment on West Ninety-seventh Street.”

Maureen’s head swiveled back and forth, searching for an answer, looking for an escape from the truth. “You mean, you mean he’s out in the city and we don’t know where? But how did he do it?”

“I’m not sure exactly, but it must be working, or there would be a dozen federal agents busting down the door right now.” Manny rubbed her temples. “The question is, How long can he keep it up?” Manny glanced at her watch. “I’ll give him until seven p.m. to get back in here. Then I’m going to have to report this to the FBI.”