Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution (19 page)

Ippolito held up both hands. “Okay, okay, okay, fine, the point.” He took a breath. “See, I heard some things ’bout a guy I know. He’s a guy who knows stuff about stuff, y’know?”

“What
kind
of stuff?” Abbie was now holding the coffee menacingly near her mouth.

“Security plans, okay? For museums, and stuff.”

Abbie put down the coffee. “Which museums?”

Petersen chose this moment to put himself back in the conversation. “Obviously, this
does
pertain to your current case, Lieutenant, so—”

While still looking at Ippolito, Abbie held up a
finger in the direction of the lawyer. “Mr. Petersen, I can just as easily pour coffee down
your
shirt.”

Sputtering, Petersen said, “How dare you—”

“Oh, cut that out, David,” Phil said, “I know what your hourly rate is, you can afford a new suit.”

Abbie maintained her most intense
don’t screw with me
stare on Ippolito. “Which museums?”

“The Museum’a the City’a New York, the Cortlandt Museum, an’ the Whitcombe-Sears Library.”

Again Abbie maintained her poker face, even though she was jumping cartwheels internally. “Yeah, and?”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘yeah, and’? This is good stuff!” Ippolito was now flailing about in his chair.

“Right now, it’s just you naming three museums and talking about some guy. None of this is helping me out much.”

“All right, all right, all right, all right.” Ippolito waved his hands back and forth at the wrist. “You want a name? I can give you a name.”

“Which name?”

Ippolito frowned. “Whaddaya mean which name?”

“I mean,” Abbie said, trying to keep her patience intact, “the name of the friend of yours or the name of the person who
hired
the friend of yours. And for the record? The second name would be a
lot
more useful to me.”

Before Ippolito could say anything, Petersen pounced. “How much more useful?”

Abbie threw a quick glance at Phil, who just shrugged. He’d already said he’d follow her lead.

“You give me the person who hired your friend, I think that ADA Czierniewski could be convinced to move for dismissal when Judge Olesen finally shows up.”

“Excellent.” Petersen turned to Ippolito. “Tell her.”

Ippolito, though, now looked like he’d swallowed something that made him nauseous. “That’s kinda gonna be a little teeny-tiny bit of a problem.”

Abbie just stared at him.

“Don’t look at me like that, I
hate
when you look at me like that.” Ippolito turned away, started staring at the ceiling. “Look, I ain’t got
that
name. I just got the name of the guy I know.
Him
I can give you, no problem. But I dunno who hired him.”

Turning to Phil, Abbie said, “That’s not really worth a dismissal, is it?”

Phil shook his head. “No, but I’d be willing to cut a deal for time served in exchange for that name—assuming it’s actually useful to Lieutenant Mills.” He added that last with a conciliatory gesture to Abbie.

The fact was, it would be useful to Abbie no matter what, as the person who checked security for these robberies was the first real lead they had on who did this, beyond “members of Serilda’s coven,” which wasn’t something she could enter into the database at headquarters.

But if she had someone to lean on? That was something she could work with—a thread she could pull.

“So to be clear,” Petersen said, one arm on Ippolito’s shoulder as if trying to hold him down in case he flew off, “if my client provides you with this intelligence, you promise to ask the judge for time served in exchange for a guilty plea?”

Phil nodded. “I can have it written up for you by the time Judge Olesen finally makes it in.”

Petersen leaned back. “Then sit tight, because we’re not giving up anything until I see that document.”

Phil unfolded himself into an upright position and pulled out his phone. “I’ll make the call now.”

For several seconds, Abbie stared at Ippolito, who fidgeted in his chair. “Can I ask you something?” she finally asked.

“Knock yourself out.”

“You’ve been sitting in lockup for eighteen months. Corbin and I offered you a plea deal way back when. You could’ve plead guilty to trespassing, and you’d have already served your time.”

“Nah. Nah, nah, nah.” Ippolito shook his head so fast Abbie feared it would start spinning around. “Can’t do that. I didn’t trespass, I broke an’ I entered. If my record—if the
official record
of the United States says that I’m guilty’a somethin’, then dammit, it’s gonna say that I’m guilty’a somethin’ I actually
did
. None’a this trespassin’ crap. I got scruples, y’know.”

Abbie rolled her eyes. “Ippolito, you can’t even spell
scruples
.”

“Sure I can! S-K-R-U—”

“I rest my case.”

Now Ippolito was frowning. “Wait—is it S-K-R-O-O—”

“So if you didn’t want to plead down, why didn’t you give me something like this sooner?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t have nothin’ till today from somebody who was talkin’ inside. Like I said, scruples. However the hell you spell it.”

WITHIN AN HOUR
, Phil had a plea agreement, which Ippolito signed, and then Abbie had a name, Carl Polchinski, and three addresses, none of which were actually his.

“Y’see,” Ippolito had said, “Polchinski is a couch surfer. Sometimes with his mom, sometimes with his girlfriend, sometimes with his sister. Basically, whichever one’s the least pissed-off at him, that’s who he’s stayin’ with.”

She called Crane’s cell first. “Good morning, Lieutenant. Is your testimony complete?”

“Not exactly. Ippolito gave me the name of someone who was hired to check the security for all three local places that had Independence Crosses taken.”

Crane said, “But Lieutenant—four locations were burglarized. Besides the museum in Tarrytown and the library here in Sleepy Hollow, there
were
two
museums within the city of New York that were burglarized.”

Abbie frowned. She had forgotten about the Metropolitan Museum, which had started this whole ball rolling, along with Crane’s vision. “Well, I’m gonna have this guy picked up and see what he says.”

“Excellent. I’d offer to join you, but I’m currently struggling with the
grimoire
that the late Mr. Whitcombe-Sears provided.”

Not liking the sound of that, Abbie asked, “Struggling why?”

“He informed me before he expired that there was a spell to thwart the resurrection of Serilda this night in this
grimoire
. However, he neglected to inform me
which
of the two hundred pages of faded Latin text contains the spell.”

“Lucky you. Well, you stick with that, then. I’ll keep you posted.”

Her next call was to headquarters. Detective Jones answered, and she gave him the name, the connection to the break-ins and murders at the Cortlandt Museum and the Whitcombe-Sears Library, and the three addresses Ippolito had provided.

“Uhm,” Jones said, “I can send uniforms to the two places here in town, but the mother’s place is in Tarrytown.”

Abbie winced. Technically, the Cortlandt Museum thing was Detective Costa’s case. “You take care of those two, I’ll call Costa in Tarrytown.”

Jones snorted. “Better you than me.”

After ending the call with Jones, Abbie dialed the main number for Tarrytown PD. Costa wasn’t at her desk, but she was home, and the sergeant gave her the detective’s cell phone number

She answered on the first ring. “What do you want, Mills?”

“Good to hear your voice, Costa. I got a break in a case we share.”

“Since when do we share a case?”

Abbie ground her teeth at Costa’s acerbic tone. “Since about five minutes ago. You know that fire at the Whitcombe-Sears Library?”

Costa’s tone, to Abbie’s relief, softened. “I heard about that. Sorry about Han and Drosopoulos.”

“Thanks.” Abbie blew out a breath. “I just got a tip from a CI who’s very much in the B-and-E community that a guy was hired to learn about the security of both the Cortlandt and Whitcombe-Sears—as well as the Museum of the City of New York.”

“Didn’t they get hit with a B-and-E/murder combo, too?”

Even though it was lost over the phone, Abbie nodded. “Yeah, and a couple cops got killed there, too.”

“So who’s your guy?”

“His name’s Carl Polchinski. He’s got three addresses, and one of ’em’s in Tarrytown.”

“Give me the address, I’ll pick this cop-killer’s ass up right away.”

Abbie hesitated. “If you give me a bit, I can—”

“I told you before, Mills, this is
my
case. I’ll pick Polchinski up—give me the address.”

Reluctantly, Abbie gave it over. “Hell, that’s a block from my house. I’ll be there in five. Text you when it’s done.”

Abbie sighed as she ended the call. Maybe she’d be lucky and Polchinski would be in one of the two Sleepy Hollow addresses.

By the time she drove back home from White Plains, the text messages she got from Jones revealed that she wasn’t particularly lucky, as Polchinski was nowhere to be found at either his sister’s or his girlfriend’s.

She then texted Costa to see if she’d had better luck.

Moments after the text, she got a call from Irving’s cell phone. “Lieutenant, we’ve got a problem. I’m at the home of Maryann Polchinski in Tarrytown—there’s been an officer-involved shooting. Detective Lisa-Anne Costa just shot a man named Carl Polchinski.”

Abbie just stared ahead for several seconds before finally managing to gather up the wherewithal to say, “You have
got
to be kidding me!”

JANUARY 2014

AS SOON AS
Jenny saw the look on her older sister’s face, she knew that something really horrible had happened. Abbie was spitting nails and looking like she was about to rip someone’s face off.

“What happened?” Jenny was sitting in a corner, working on her laptop while Crane was off in another corner reading through Whitcombe-Sears’s
grimoire
. Jenny’s own Latin wasn’t anywhere near good enough to be of use to Crane’s search, so she was poring over the Internet, trying to find something useful about the type of magic that Mercier used on the crosses.

“We finally get a damn lead on this whole thing, someone connected to three of the break-ins. But before we can question him, Costa goes and
shoots
him.”

Aghast, Jenny asked, “Why’d she do
that
?”

“I didn’t get to ask her, but Irving was on the scene to deal with it. He said it looked like a clean shoot. Costa said Polchinski took a shot at her, and Polchinski did have a recently fired .45 in his hands.” Abbie shook her head. “That’s also
all
he had on him. No cell phone, nothing else. According to Irving, his mother saw him for the first time in three weeks this morning, and all he had with him when he showed up at her doorstep at five in the morning was the .45. And according to Jones, the girlfriend and the sister also hadn’t seen him in three weeks. So we’re back to square one thanks to Costa’s itchy trigger finger.”

Jenny frowned. “This is the same Detective Costa who stepped all over the Cortlandt Museum thing, right?”

Abbie nodded.

“That’s a little too convenient.”

“What do you mean?”

Jenny stood up from the seat and stretched her back, the vertebrae cracking. She’d been spending
way
too much time sitting. “I mean, we already know the robbery attempt up in Ticonderoga was an inside job. They had a member of the coven working for the museum. So what about down here? Nobody more inside than a cop. And then she conveniently shoots the only lead we have on where this coven is.”

The look Abbie was giving Jenny now was like a
knife right in her belly. It was the same expression that Abbie had on her face as a teenager, right after the incident in the woods. Jenny had insisted to the grown-ups—against Abbie’s express wishes—that they had seen some kind of monster. The whole time Jenny was pouring her heart out, Abbie gave her the same look she was giving Jenny now. Then, when Abbie was asked if she would corroborate what her sister said, she had said no. Abbie had denied everything.

That started both of them down a couple of very bad roads, roads that remained separate until very recently. Ironically, both of them were rescued by August Corbin, albeit separately. And it took Corbin’s death to bring them together.

Abbie then turned away. “I don’t like it. She’s a
cop
.”

“Yeah, well, so was Andy Brooks.”

That got Abbie to turn back. Brooks had been a fellow lieutenant under Corbin, who turned out to be a servant of Moloch, the demon they’d spent the last several months battling. Even after his death at Moloch’s hands, he’d continued to be an undead servant of Moloch—among other things, he was the one who facilitated Serilda’s last attempt at resurrecting herself.

Jenny continued. “Why didn’t she wait for you to go into the mother’s place?”