Skeleton Justice (6 page)

Jake stepped through the door of his town house and slid on a pile of mail that had been shoved through the slot onto the parquet floor hours earlier. Scooping it up, he tossed it on a table so full of unopened bills and unanswered invitations that its fine Empire lines were utterly obscured.

When he had bought this dilapidated brownstone in the mid-eighties, the bus ride from his office at Thirtieth Street to his home north of Ninety-sixth Street had been an exercise in urban survival. He had needed to stay constantly alert to sidestep roving packs of teenagers who hopped on the bus looking for pockets to pick, staggering panhandlers shaking their paper cups of change under the noses of riders, and assorted drunks and crazies. Reading, or even daydreaming, was done at your peril. These days, the ride on the clean air-conditioned bus was so uneventful, you could go into a Zen-induced trance and still emerge unscathed at your stop. And his neighborhood, once populated by dealers and pimps, had sprouted a Starbucks and a Gap—not necessarily improvements, in his view.

All in all, coming home was less stressful but also less exciting than it used to be. And, since his divorce nearly two years ago, less organized. Still, the five-story house, packed with forensic specimens, haphazardly furnished, partially remodeled, was his personal sanctuary. The place where he could go to lick his wounds and gather strength for another round of battle. And today, after the disturbing evidence gathered at the Hogaarth autopsy, and the strain of explaining to Pederson why it still hadn’t brought them any closer to catching the Vampire, Jake deeply craved the restorative peace of his home.

“Your girlfriend called me today.”

The voice—deep, amused, irreverent—emerged from somewhere in the shadowy front parlor.

“Why are you sitting there in the dark? And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Companion, lover, significant other—what’s the politically correct term you prefer?”

What was Manny to him? At the moment, pain in the ass or thorn in the side seemed the most fitting description. Jake walked toward the sound of his brother Sam’s voice, only to crash into a randomly placed display case.

“Ow! Would you turn on the damn lights!”

Sam reached out a long arm and flicked on a lamp, revealing himself, prematurely gray ponytail and all, sprawled on a wing chair and ottoman, and the astonishing clutter of Jake’s living room.

“I find this room more habitable when it’s only illuminated by that neon sign across the street,” Sam said.

“No one asked you to inhabit it.” Jake found his brother’s tendency of popping in unannounced for extended stays both infuriating and entertaining, especially since he had his own rent-stabilized apartment in Greenwich Village. Today, infuriating had the upper hand.

“Come, come, big brother. No need to snap at me just because you’re in the doghouse with Manny.”

Heading for the chair across from Sam, Jake moved a box of disarticulated bear bones that some less experienced ME had sent him, thinking they were human, and sat down. “She called you to complain about me?” He could feel his heart rate rising. How juvenile!

“No, she called to offer me a job, and in the course of describing said job, she—quite inadvertently, I’m sure—revealed her frustration with you.”

Jake looked at his younger brother’s teasing grin and felt the same overwhelming need to jump on top of him and twist his arm that he had felt when they were twelve and five, respectively. “A job? What kind of job—bag carrier for one of her shoe-shopping swings through Bloomies?”

“You underestimate me, bro. I’m temporarily employed by her as a trial-prep resource—doing a little investigation work on a case. Tracking down four kids who were in the company of the Preppy Terrorists and who have since vanished.”

“Last time I checked, you weren’t licensed for that.”

Sam brushed off this concern as if it were one of the cobwebs hanging off the replica of the Maltese falcon in the corner. “Anyone can ask a few discreet questions. I’m just assisting Manny with her inquiries, so to speak.” Sam sat up straight, took his feet off the ottoman, and leaned forward to look his brother in the eye. “I hear you think she’s not up to handling this case.”

Jake kicked the box he’d just moved. “I never said that! I just cautioned her not to eagerly accept what may turn out to be an unwinnable case for
anyone
.”

“Ah, caution. You’re good at that, aren’t you, Jake? As I recall, you cautioned me against traveling cross-country on my motorcycle, climbing Mount McKinley, and touring the world with the Pacifists for Peace Rugby Club.”

“I didn’t want you to get hurt. And I hoped you would focus.”

“OMmmmmmmmm.” Sam started to chant, drowning out Jake’s paternal explanations before launching into his response. “I didn’t get hurt. I succeeded, and I had a hell of a good time along the way. And I learned. So will Manny. Trust me. Trust
her
.”

Jake opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again. Sam had never been married, had never even had a serious relationship, at least not with anyone he’d ever bothered to introduce to his family, but he felt free to dispense love advice like a regular Dr. Phil. And yet his brother, as feckless and carefree as he seemed to be, had a core of common sense, a rock-solid emotional stability that Jake envied. It seemed he’d always been that way, maybe because Sam had been too young to remember when their father abandoned them, while seven-year-old Jake had reacted so uncontrollably that their mother had finally sought help from a Jewish charity. Jake had been sent to a reform school for troubled kids, until he learned that the surest way out was to repress his emotions and pour all the energy required for anger into the study of science.

Jake extracted a Thai take-out menu from the clutter on an end table and tossed it to Sam. “Order us some dinner. I’ll go call Manny.”

Half an hour later, the pork with basil sauce and the lemongrass chicken had arrived, and Jake, Sam, Manny, and Mycroft sat around (and under) the dining room table, dissecting the case between fiery bites. Jake had been unable to bring himself to actually apologize for warning Manny off the Preppy Terrorist case, so he had simply issued the invitation to dinner as if nothing had happened. Manny had accepted readily enough, but it wasn’t lost on Jake that she had breezed right past him when he opened the front door, heading straight for Sam and the food.

“Apparently, Travis Heaton is a brainiac kid with no street smarts whatsoever and an inconvenient interest in Islamic culture.” Manny waved her fork for emphasis, sending a piece of chicken sailing off the tines. Mycroft leaped and caught it in midair. “Did you see that? Good dog, Mikey!”

“Have you ever heard of teaching your dog manners?”

“Have you ever heard of Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Clifford the Big Red Dog? That was a trick Mycroft learned after hours of study.”

“Is he earning a graduate degree at that doggy day-care place you send him to every day?” Jake asked.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Jake wished he could have reeled them back in. A few days ago, he’d been teasing Manny about enrolling Mycroft in some goofy place called Little Paws, but that was before the blowup in the restaurant. He saw her smile replaced by a scowl and knew he’d just dug himself deeper into a hole.

“Actually, Mycroft is no longer attending Little Paws. He was”—she paused for a breath—“expelled.”

Even Jake knew better than to laugh, and he kicked Sam sharply to head off any hilarity from that side of the table. “Expelled?”

Manny dismissed his inquiry with a wave. “It’s too complicated to get into now. I want to tell you about Travis. Where was I?”

“Smart but no street smarts, studying Islam,” Sam prompted.

“Right. He’s at Monet on a scholarship,” Manny continued. “His mom is a widow who works as a nurse at New York-Presbyterian. She knocked herself out getting him into private school because she thought the public schools were too dangerous for him. Now she’s finding out kids can fall into bad company no matter how much tuition you pay.”

Sam nodded. “Yeah, at Boys High School, where Jake and I went, all we had to worry about was pot and the occasional knife fight. Prep school exposes you to designer drugs and international terrorism. A much better class of criminal.”

Jake refilled all the wineglasses. “So, do you think your client’s telling you the complete truth about what happened that night?”

“No. Criminal clients always lie to you about something. Travis already lied about the apple by not telling me the whole story. And he said the book in his backpack was for a class, conveniently forgetting about the shelfful of books on Islam he had at home. Maybe he thinks leaving things out is not really lying, but I think it shows a certain amount of cunning.”

“So you
do
think he tried to kill the judge?” Sam asked.

Manny shook her head. “My gut feeling is that he’s telling me the truth about his lack of involvement in blowing up the mailbox. When I went back to ask him about the apple, he claimed that he and this Zeke character both swiped apples on the way out of the deli, and that it was Zeke the deli man saw take a bite and toss the rest. But Travis can’t remember what happened to his apple.”

“What about the books?” Sam asked.

“His mother claims it’s just a phase he’s going through. Apparently, he’s always had a compulsive streak. When he was four, it was trains; seven, dinosaurs; ten, medieval weaponry. He’s just that kind of—”

“Dweeb,” Sam said, completing the sentence as he handed his brother a beer. “Jake was like that when he was a kid. Remember your obsession with asteroids and meteors?”

Jake laughed. “I had our great-aunt Flo so worried about rocks falling out of the sky, she carried an umbrella everywhere she went.”

“Yeah, and he wouldn’t shut up on the subject,” Sam said. “As I recall, we got excluded from the Passover seder that year because no one in the family wanted to listen to you.”

Manny picked up Mycroft and held him on her lap. “That’s a small price to pay for pursuing your passions. I’m afraid Travis is truly being persecuted for having this interest. We have to prove he wasn’t involved in a conspiracy with those other guys.”

She turned to Sam. “That’s why it’s vital that we find them. They definitely have something to do with this, but I can’t tell if Travis knew them before or not.”

“What about Paco, the diplomat’s kid?” Jake asked.

“I’m trying to get hold of him, but the school and his family and the embassy have closed ranks around him. I can’t wait for Paco; I’m requesting a reconsideration of bail, so I can tear apart the forensic evidence on this apple.”

Jake paused with a forkful of food halfway to his mouth. “But I thought you just said you weren’t sure whether or not your client was telling you the truth about the apple?”

Manny shook her head pityingly. “You’re such a scientist, always worrying about what’s ‘true,’ so sure that true and false can always be quantified. I worry about what’s just. And an eighteen-year-old kid with no criminal record being held without bail for a crime in which the state can’t prove a link between the suspect and the victim is not just. An eighteen-year-old kid who, at the very worst, pulled a stupid stunt on a dare being held as a terrorist so the Department of Homeland Security can hold a press conference announcing how effectively they’re protecting us is not just. And the fact that the government is using a freakin’ apple to make its case is even more unjust.” Manny raked her slender fingers through her hair as she talked, ruining all the effort she put into keeping her wild red mane under control. “So, yes, Jake, I’m going to go into court and argue against that apple even if my client
did
bite into it. You got a problem with that?”

Jake’s eyes hadn’t left Manny since she started talking. When he saw her like this—eyes shining, hands waving, hair flying—his heart started pounding, and he sincerely wished his brother wasn’t sitting at the same table. He got up, put his hands on her shoulders, and buried his face in the hair next to her ear, breathing in the scent of very expensive shampoo. “No, I don’t have a problem with that.”

Manny twisted around to look him in the eye. “Oh, fine. You’re forgiven. You’d think a man with such an exalted vocabulary would be familiar with the words
I’m sorry
, but apparently not.”

“He didn’t know them when he was a kid, either, Manny,” Sam chimed in. “I don’t know how he managed to get such a high score on his SATs.”

“I hope you two are enjoying yourselves.” Jake massaged Manny’s shoulders.

“I am.” She leaned back and smiled. “Now, tell us what’s happening with your case. Is this woman who was murdered in midtown really a victim of the Vampire?”

Jake’s elation at being back in Manny’s good graces evaporated as soon as she mentioned the Vampire. He dropped his hands from her shoulders and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. The MO is totally different. No sign that he pushed into the apartment—she appears to have let him in. And then the torture—why has he suddenly turned so violent? I don’t think it’s a copycat. The only link is the puncture on her arm, where blood was obviously drawn, and the use of ether.”