Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution (6 page)

Abbie just hoped that she could keep up with him on that score. While Crane had centuries to catch up on, Abbie had plenty of her own adjustments to deal with.

After taking a bite of pizza, Crane said, “In my own experiences, coincidences have been harbingers of doom.” The words were solemn, though the effect was muted by the tomato sauce that got caught
in his beard. Abbie seriously considered not telling him about it just to see how long he’d go with sauce on his face, but then Crane himself wiped it away with one of the paper napkins they kept on the table. Abbie had to admit to being disappointed.

“Crane, no offense, but your
presence
is a harbinger of doom.” Irving reached into his pocket to pull out his smartphone. “As it happens, the insurance investigator who handles the Met is my former partner.”

Abbie blinked. “Really?”

Irving shrugged. “Most insurance investigators are former law enforcement. Bethany Nugent and I went to the academy together, and we both humped the same radio car for a year. She got her twenty, and now she’s in insurance. I’ll give her a call.”

While Irving searched through his phone’s address book for the number, Crane gave Abbie one of those looks that she met with a due sense of anticipation and dread. “I believe I have ascertained the meaning of ‘radio car,’ but I’m not sure of the meaning of the verb ‘to hump’ in this particular sentence. Also, she received her twenty what, exactly?”

Abbie hesitated. She had a hard enough time explaining regular slang to Crane—explaining cop slang meant going down a road she wasn’t entirely sure she’d find her way home from.
Got her twenty
referred to her being on the job for two decades, thus vesting her pension, but she didn’t relish the notion of explaining
humped a radio car
.

Irving saved her by putting his phone on speaker and placing it on the table next to the pizza box, the tinny sound of a ringing phone coming from the tiny speakers.

“Sonofabitch,” said a sandpapery female voice without fanfare. “I was just thinking that the only way my day could get worse was if I heard from my old partner.”

His grin a mile wide, Irving replied, “Well, I’m used to hearing your voice in my nightmares, so I may as well hear it on my phone, too.”

Crane was giving Abbie a concerned look, but she just held up a hand and mouthed the words
it’s okay
.

“You still working in the ’burbs?”

“Yeah, Sleepy Hollow.”

“You
do
remember that Westchester County is where they send the cops who can’t cut it in NYPD?”

“Yeah, and the ones who can’t cut it in Westchester become insurance investigators.”

Nugent’s laughter echoed from Irving’s phone. “Touché. All right, you may have nothing better to do in Sleeping Halo, but some of us
work
for a living, so let’s get to why you called me. Crap, I didn’t forget your birthday again, did I?”

“No, this is actually a business call. I’ve got you on speaker with one of my officers, Abbie Mills, and a consultant we’ve got in from England, Ichabod Crane.”

Now Nugent’s tone changed. The time for bantering with an ex-partner had passed and it was down to business. “What’s going on?”

“I was down at the Met with Macey yesterday.”

Another tone shift, this to friendly concern. “How’s she doing?”

“Just fine. She’s getting ready for her SATs.”

Abbie stared at her captain. The first sentence was an obvious lie, but the second was the declaration of a proud father. She didn’t get to see that side of Irving very often, and she had to admit to liking the look of pride on his face.

“Oh c’mon, she can’t possibly be old enough to take the SATs. Her ninth-birthday party at Serendipity was only last year.”

Irving snorted. “You wish. Yeah, I remember the day she was born like it was last week. Come to think of it, I remember it better than last week.”

“You had a really crappy Christmas, too, huh?”

Irving looked over at Abbie and Crane. “My whole life has been pretty crappy, honestly. Anyhow, the reason I called was that Macey and I were looking at an exhibit that was supposed to have two medals in the American Wing—the Congressional Crosses that were awarded to Marinus Willett and Abraham van Brunt. Thing is, we’ve got a lead from one of our CIs that somebody might be targeting those crosses.”

“How—oh, right, suburbs. ’Course you got CIs
who can give you intel on art heists. Probably know which wineries are being targeted, too, right?”

Abbie recognized the stalling tactic. “Ms. Nugent, this is Lieutenant Mills. Captain Irving told us that the crosses were out for cleaning, but I’m guessing by your use of the term ‘art heist’ that the cleaning thing is just for the general public?”

“Score one for the suburban cop. Look, Frank, I can’t have this getting out. We’ve kept the press, NYPD, and FBI out of it, but—”

That got Abbie’s eyes to go wide. “You didn’t report it?”

“Not
yet
—we think it was someone inside, and we want to try to take care of it internally first. If that doesn’t pan out, I’ll go down to the one-nine myself and fill out the report.”

Crane gave Abbie another of his patented confused looks, and he mouthed,
one nine?

Abbie held up a hand to indicate that she’d explain later that Nugent was referring to the 19th Precinct of the NYPD, which included the Metropolitan in its domain. She did that a lot.…

“Don’t worry, Beth, Lieutenant Mills and Mr. Crane are part of a classified task force. They aren’t gonna be talking to
anybody
about any of this.” Irving punctuated that with a look at each of them. Crane looked nonplussed, but Abbie just gave the captain her
are you serious?
look.

“All right,” Nugent said, “let me finish up our investigation
here. Give me two days, and if I haven’t nailed anything down, I’ll take a drive up the Saw Mill Parkway, and we’ll compare notes.”

“Sounds like a plan. Thanks, Beth.”

“Miss Nugent, this is Ichabod Crane.”

Abbie winced. It was always dangerous when Crane started talking to people who weren’t part of the craziness.

“Yeah, the consultant. Nice accent.”

“Er, thank you. I have a query regarding the crosses. By what means did they come into your museum’s possession?”

“Both of them were gifted to the museum about a hundred years ago by descendants of the original owners. It was van Brunt’s grand-nephew and Willett’s great-grandson or some such. I could look it up if you want.”

“No need. My thanks.”

Irving reached for the phone. “Thanks again, Beth. We’ll talk soon.”

“You bet. And give that kid of yours a kiss on the head from her old aunt Beth, ’kay?”

Irving smiled. “Will do. Take care.” He ended the call.

Crane turned his confused look on Irving. “In the early stages of your conversation, I feared that this Miss Nugent was a great enemy of yours.”

Abbie was startled by Irving laughing in response to that. Irving hardly even smiled, much less
laughed, to the point where she wouldn’t be able to swear on a Bible that Irving had teeth.

“Yeah,” the captain said, “I can see why you’d think that.”

“I imagine that your verbal japes derive from the time you spent humping with your radio car?”

Now it was Abbie’s turn to laugh. “Great, now we’ve got him mangling cop slang. We’re doomed.”

JANUARY 2014

CAROLYN TOLLEY HAD
no idea how her life had been reduced to working as a security guard in the Cortlandt Museum in Tarrytown.

It seemed like it was just yesterday that she was working a high-paying job at a money management firm on Hudson Street, with a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side, the best husband in the world, and a wonderful son.

With Jamal doing well in high school and about to go off to college, she and Greg had been looking into houses in Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Hastings-on-Hudson, and other locations in the Lower Hudson Valley. They’d even put a down payment on a place in Hastings.

But then Greg got laid off. And then his unemployment ran out without any job prospects. A lot
of close calls, but nothing solid. The bank withdrew the approval of their mortgage because of Greg’s unemployment.

And then everything happened at once. Greg came back from what he said was a job interview completely drunk and assaulted her badly enough to send her to the hospital. After she filed a police report, she learned that he’d blown through their savings on alcohol and had been out drinking all the times he was supposedly on interviews or at job fairs.

He used the last of the savings on bail, and then proceeded to drive their car into a truck that was in the middle of the intersection of Columbus Avenue and West 100th Street. The very next day, Jamal was arrested for drug possession. He did a deal with the district attorney to give up his supplier in exchange for probation, but then the dealer in question got someone to shoot Jamal in the back of the head.

The day after that, she was informed that her boss had fled to the Bahamas with all the firm’s money, just barely ahead of an SEC investigation that would likely have shut the place down anyhow.

All of that happened while Carolyn was in a bed in St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital recovering from the broken arm, broken leg, and facial contusions her late husband had given her.

She had an even harder time finding work than Greg had, as her association with the disgraced firm
was a scarlet letter on her résumé. Nobody would even give her an interview at her level, and every time she applied for a lesser job, she was rejected for being overqualified. “You’ll be bored and leave in a month.”

Carolyn kept telling them that she was willing to be bored if she could make rent.

Eventually, she had to give up the place on Ninety-Seventh Street and take a crappy apartment in Sleepy Hollow. She got a job working night security at the museum, one of three guards who kept an eye on the valuables while the place was closed.

She’d found it ironic that she got a job as a security guard, when she’d been too unobservant to notice that her husband was a drunk, her son was a drug addict, and her boss was a thief.

Right now, she sat glancing over the security camera footage of all the galleries. Next to her was her partner at the front desk, Kyle Means. In front of her was the paperback novel that she’d finished halfway through the shift, and she had neglected to bring a second one.

Kyle was reading off a tablet, which gave Carolyn a pang of jealousy. She’d had a Kindle, but the screen died, and she couldn’t afford to replace it. Not that she could afford to buy books anymore, either—the one she’d finished came from the Warner Library on North Broadway—but she still missed having the damn thing. Not to mention a television, an iPod, a smartphone … All of them
had died, and the only one she replaced was the phone, but she now had a flip phone that couldn’t even send text messages.

Her radio squawked. “Hey, Carolina, where you at? Shoulda come by me on your walk-through by now?”

Carolyn had long since given up correcting Pedro Gomez’s mispronunciation of her name. She’d met him at the dojo in Hastings that she went to for the first month after moving here, before she could no longer afford the tuition. It was affiliated with the one on the Upper West Side that she used to attend when she lived there. He’d been the one to tell her about this job. She figured that was worth his misremembering her first name.

She grabbed the radio to reply to the third guard, whose job it was to guard the loading dock. Like the front door she and Kyle sat near, it was gated and locked. “My knee’s acting up, Pedro, I’d just as soon not bother with the walk-through. It’s not like we
need
to do it since the cameras cover everything. Hell, they don’t need three of us here, either. We can just tell Myra I did it, okay?”

“That’s dishonest, Carolina. I got too much to confess on Sunday, I no wanna add lying to that.”

Looking over at Kyle, she asked, “Meanie?”

He didn’t even look up from his tablet. “I did the last walk-through, and I
have
to finish this chapter for class tomorrow.” Then he did look up. “Besides, I asked you to stop calling me that.”

Carolyn chuckled. She couldn’t help it. Kyle was the nicest person she’d ever met, and so she couldn’t resist the nickname. “Cut me some slack, Meanie, I don’t get much by way of amusement these days.” With a sigh, she pulled herself to her feet, wincing as her knee made several unfortunate noises that were very much like what Rice Krispies sounded like after you poured in the milk.

Kyle winced. “Oooh, that sounds bad.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you lose your health coverage before you get referred to do physical therapy.” She grabbed the radio. “All right, Pedro, I’ll do it, but when I get to the loading dock, you gotta promise to tell me some of the things you
are
confessing Sunday.”

“I’ll tell you
one
thing, Carolina.”