The Big Fear (10 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE CORNER

It woke her sometime after two, thick chemical smoke that stung Christine Davenport’s eyes. She sat up in bed. She could barely see through the room. There was no fire, just brutal, mean smoke, smoke that wasn’t from burning wood or paper. It reminded her of the smell made when she had melted the sippy cups by leaving them too close to the stove. Her husband was asleep beside her. He barely rolled over. Davenport sprung out of bed and ran to the boy’s room.

She turned the corner into the room that wasn’t really built as a bedroom. The boy was sleeping, as oblivious to the smoke as his father. She twisted him up to sitting and he blinked awake. It wasn’t as though they couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t see any actual fire. By this time her husband was standing at the door, waving his hand back and forth like that would do any good. She hefted the boy up, half onto her shoulder. As she turned from the miniature bedroom she saw that the smoke was chugging in from outside. They had left the window facing Perry Street open and something below was burning. Hoisting the boy, she turned to her husband.

“Can you go close that? And check why the alarms didn’t go off.”

The boy, groggy, swept his head from her neck to her shoulder. There was no danger now, maybe, but she still wanted to get out of the apartment. You never can tell.

“Mommy?”

“Shh. We’re going downstairs. We’re going to see what’s going on.”

“What’s that smell?”

“Shh.”

“Can I have some milk?”

They moved in slow motion, Adam struggling to shut the window and Davenport screwing a lid onto the cup of milk. She tied a pair of proper shoes on Henry and stepped into a pair of slippers herself. They were on the sixth floor. Never use the elevator in a fire. But there wasn’t a fire in the building as far as they knew. Still better to be safe. She slipped down the broad stairwell, carrying the boy, her husband trailing.

In the stairwell, safely away from the smoke, she gathered her thoughts and she held her son’s hand. The panic was over. Her thoughts drifted back to the worry she had suffered all afternoon. She hadn’t been able to read Eliot. Usually, when the tables turned, you knew right away. Once-eager executives suddenly coy, asking immediately if all of this is really necessary. But the man in the wool suit in summer had taken the news quietly. Maybe he had something to hide. Maybe he knew who did. It was something more than walking a midlevel trader over to the feds, but Davenport couldn’t tell how much more. That’s why she had taken the precautions that afternoon. A place to secure everything she had found so far. To preserve it. Just in case.

By the third floor Henry was up and walking on his own, one hand in his mother’s and the other gripping the milk. Their clothes smelled. The entire apartment would have to be cleaned. Another expense. The sleepy overnight doorman was more alert than Davenport had ever seen him as she tugged her son out toward the street. As soon as they turned from the desk toward the exit, they were silenced by the heat and the sound of it.

In front of their building, right below their corner window, a car raged with flame, spitting out the acrid smoke and those thick, slimy wisps that slither off of things that aren’t supposed to burn but are nevertheless burning. A twenty-year-old Volvo, car seat in the back. It was instantly recognizable to Christine Davenport. Some sort of liquid, leaking from deep within the skeleton of the machine, dribbled down the street, afire the whole time. Henry’s eyes widened at the scene. Adam’s eyes traced the smoke as it drifted up through the neighborhood trees into their window, and turned to Christine.

“Chris, that’s . . .”

She had the boy in her arms and was already out the front door.

“C’mon. Let’s go look at the fire.”

There were two uniform cops standing by the front of the wreckage, trying to shoo off sightseers and keep what little traffic was still on the streets to a minimum. It was late, dark, but Davenport hadn’t looked at a clock before leaving. She stared at the blistering upholstery, the plastic curling away from her son’s car seat through the window. She tried to remember if anything valuable had been left inside. Not that she would reach in to get it now. Even in the vestibule, beyond the door, she could feel the heat. There was no sign of a crash; just the smoking wreck of what once was her car. Carrying her boy, Davenport pressed through the window and walked up to the cop, who gestured to move along.

“That’s my car. The smoke woke us up. What happened?”

The cop looked to his partner. The partner smirked, and Davenport sensed he looked a little too happy given the circumstance. “It’s her car. You may as well.”

The cop scowled at the burning car. “Some animal tried to appropriate the vehicle. Apparently he left his hot-wiring skills back in Brownsville and couldn’t get it to start.” The cop shrugged. “So he figures that if he douses the whole thing with gasoline we won’t find his fingerprints. Genius that he is, he manages to trap himself inside after setting the fire. We have him in the ICU. You gotta tell the insurance we’re keeping the car as evidence.”

“Oh. Okay. Thank you.”

So that was that. The car thieves were on their way back. Some of them were just smart enough to try to conceal their tracks and just dumb enough to almost kill themselves in the process. No one could keep the rush of the real New York from seeping back in somewhere. Davenport nodded to the cops and turned back to her building. Henry’s bright brown eyes kept fast on the flames. Her husband had already started his way upstairs, and Davenport walked her son back inside, the last defense from the outside world, and felt safe taking the elevator back to her apartment.

As the smoke emptied from the apartment, Christine set the boy down back in his toddler bed, his smile drifting away as his body gave in to sleep. She sat with him for a moment. She could protect him if it came to that. Maybe she’d take him for an afternoon at the playground sometime. She stroked his hair, stood up, and walked back into the living room. Adam was still uselessly waving at what was left of the smoke when she spoke to him.

“We have to tell the insurance company that they’re impounding it.”

Her husband too seemed perhaps not concerned enough. “It’s okay. It was old. I hope they even give us enough to get another.” The car was no use to Davenport after all. It was her husband who drove, on the three days a week that he had to be in New Jersey, living the academic dream of the musty, thoughtful man in a frumpy old car. Maybe he was hoping for another clunker to replace it. He would probably be ashamed to drive something more modern.

She walked past him and set up a fan in the window. Set to exhaust, it wouldn’t do much, but it was better than swinging your arm at it. Her husband slipped around the corner from the window and into the real bedroom. Not that it was much bigger than the too-small bedroom. You could fit a bed in it anyway. The smoke was clearing, but the smell still lingered, stark, acrid. A hint of fear in it. Adam called faintly from the bed as Davenport watched the smoke clear. “Are you coming to bed?”

Davenport sat on the sill, looking downward. “Just a minute.” She stared out at the melting car, the plastic now burnt away and the metal husk glowing with heat. It was a magic, throbbing sight. A bright-pink skeleton surrounded by quicksilver fire on an otherwise ordinary street. She couldn’t turn away from it; the tires popped one by one and the chassis slumped to the asphalt.

Then she looked up and down the street and felt suddenly cold. Two cars down from her burning wreck was a sleek, black SUV. The car after that was an S-Class. The whole block was peppered with luxury automobiles and here she was supposed to believe that the neighborhood car thief had targeted a battered Volvo with an odometer in the high one-fifties.

She stared out at the two uniform cops keeping guard, watching the car melt away. They had been there before the fire department. According to them, a man had been pulled out of the car and taken to the hospital, but no ambulance siren had woken her up. From below, one of the cops saw her looking at him and stared back, offering a firm quiet stare and a thin smile.

The Little Fear hadn’t come back after all. This was the real thing. Or at least it was a warning. The real thing wouldn’t be only the smell. Whoever it was knew where she lived. Knew her car. Knew she had a son. She slipped into Henry’s room and started packing a bag. Her husband’s parents were in New Jersey, they could stay there. Cut down on his commute, now that he didn’t have a car anyway. Take the first bus in the morning. See if it was too late to enroll the boy in school out there. The boy would miss the last week of camp, another expense down the drain, but now very much worth it. There was no point in waking Adam or Henry, they were useless at packing themselves up anyway. She would stay up, have them ready, shuttle them off to the suburbs until the danger had passed. She would stay behind and finish what she needed to do. She turned to the bathroom and started to peel out her son’s necessities, neatly filing away the toothbrush, comb, and soap into tidy plastic bins, planning her own next move as she packed for her careless boys.

The night was just beginning.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WARRANTS

It had all finally come in. Bankers’ boxes, binders, spools of illegible dot-matrix splatter. Every scrap of paper that the New York Police Department had ever collected on Ralph Mulino, Brian Rowson, or any officer on the scene that night had been dumped somewhere in Leonard’s office. At least he had taken over the commissioner’s suite, so there was a conference table to smear it over. No one would be having a conference there for a while. From the table, the files metastasized across the chairs, the floor, the shelves. The whole room seemed to be pasted with a thin flutter of paper. You couldn’t even see how dirty the rug was.

Leonard had started his way through the mess, but he already knew the most important part. He knew what he wasn’t going to find. There was no photograph, no daily activity report, no memo book, no inventory log, no evidence of any kind that Brian Rowson was holding a gun when Mulino shot him. Leonard would have to do interviews for that. He had already scheduled the sergeant to come in the next day. There were some techs coming in, but they would stick to the script. Exactly what was in their written report but no more.

He had already found one thing, though. Mulino had been in the trial room before. Over a decade ago. Leonard reminded himself to put in a call to the trial room to always make sure they give him everything on the subject officer before the interview. He shouldn’t have had to wait for this. Leonard had chuckled when he read it. The whole thing had happened in the Ebbets Field Apartments. His own building now. A few floors below him, recent enough that people would remember. But even ten years ago it was a different world, a different building, a different kind of fear in the hallways.

Mulino had been a witness to a higher-ranking officer who had botched an arrest and killed a guy in the process of pepper spraying him. Give the old-school guys new toys and someone is likely to wind up dead. There are pretty clear instructions on the back of the canister of the spray about how you’re supposed to treat someone when you douse them. But old-school guys don’t read the instructions on the canister. Fortunate, Leonard thought, that Mulino kept his revolver. No telling how many people he would have killed with the nine.

But a funny thing about that old case. Mulino got a decent rip, a couple of weeks’ suspension, and he basically kept his mouth shut. He had offered no evidence whatsoever that could help the DA, even though he had to have seen exactly what was going on as Ramsay sprayed and tackled and cuffed the big guy, and then probably kicked him and twisted his neck to boot. The PD usually rewards that kind of silence. They close the wagons and make life a little easier for you. But no one had made anything easier for Mulino. No promotion to a task force, no comfortable desk at 1PP. Just wake up every day and hit the streets.

The scoop on Mulino and the color of the day had been on page three of the
Daily News
. Leonard was glad that Ells had done him that favor. Keep a little pressure on the case. Prep the city for a finding. The detective was sloppy, he hadn’t been paying attention, he saw something he thought was a gun. In this environment, no one would raise a stink. The police unions wouldn’t hold a march across a bridge in solidarity. They were becoming cowed by the new administration themselves. Leonard turned to the files on the other officers, picking apart their histories. He wanted to be sure on Mulino; he wouldn’t draft his conclusions until after another half-dozen interviews and after every piece of paper in this office had been scoured. And he maybe felt bad for the guy. Maybe it wasn’t Mulino’s fault that he had stayed on the force a little bit long and lost a step along the way. But if Leonard was going to prove himself to Ells and the guys above him, he was going to have to bring in a trophy sooner or later, so he couldn’t avoid the one that was tied up on his desk with a bow.

After Rowson’s brush with IAB, he had been swept clean and parked at Harbor. And as soon as Leonard opened the files piled around his office he had found more. The command was full of them. Guys who avoided the trial room after reaching into someone’s throat for a piece of gum they mistook for a glassine envelope. Guys who had shown their badge one too many times at a bar that didn’t think it had to give every cop in town free drinks. One guy who fronted the money on a drug buy and swore up and down the kid had pulled out a box cutter on him, the box cutter never found. All of these guys had been cleaned up and shipped to Harbor to work for Sergeant Sparks. Not a peep from any of them since.

Sergeant Sparks. His history was baffling enough, as well. Until about eighteen months ago, Sparks had leapt wildly through the ranks, had received all the badges and pins that his superiors could throw at him. He had the highest score on the sergeant’s exam of his class, not to mention higher arrest totals and a near-perfect physical exam. And then out of nowhere he had been sent off to Harbor. Unlike the rest of them, there wasn’t any trip to the trial room or DIMAC or IAB or any of the dozens of agencies assigned to tweak NYPD officers first. Just a sudden detour to a forgotten command, and then radio silence for close to two years.

Maybe someone thought Sparks was good for the troubled kids. The Harbor Patrol was being used as a kind of rubber room to see if Sparks could whip the bad eggs back into shape, or at the very least keep them where they couldn’t hurt anyone. But that didn’t explain Sparks himself. You don’t give up your chance to march through promotions in the Patrol Services Bureau to supervise a bunch of screwups in Harbor without getting something back for it. Maybe he had wanted to go. Maybe Sparks had done something wrong, but had impressed his bosses so much since that they’d just slipped it right out of his file. They were just pieces of paper in a cabinet after all. Whatever had happened, there was a big gaping
why
gnawing beneath.

The office was big, but it was hot and the air conditioning was worse than usual. Leonard unlatched the big semicircular window overlooking West Street and tugged at it. Nothing. Probably had been painted shut decades ago. He gave it another push, his palm on the glass. It wasn’t moving. He could sense that he wasn’t alone. He was in charge now, for the time being, and had to put up with the civil service lifers floating around him. He let go of the window and turned around.

“What can I do for you, Detective?”

The guy at the door wasn’t wearing a badge or a uniform, but with some guys you can just tell. The jacket that doesn’t quite go with the pants. The pants that were bought two belt sizes ago. The twenty-dollar haircut that he spent half an hour trying to make look nice for the occasion. Behind him, an obvious lackey. They come in pairs.

“Yeah, Leonard Mitchell? DIMAC commissioner?”

“Acting commissioner. I’m kind of busy.” Across the floor, the desk, the table, all confidential NYPD documents. If the guy tried to come in the room, Leonard would really have to ask for ID. The man gestured to himself and the one over his shoulder at once.

“Detective Harrison. And this is Officer Ricci. He’s with Warrants?”

Police are used to showing up and telling you what to do. When they start off by asking questions, or worse yet, introducing themselves with a question, it’s never good. Usually it means they’ve been sent to you under duress, to run some menial assignment they think is beneath them. Or they are delivering bad news. Or both.

There was another person behind Harrison. A lanky uniform guy barely twenty years old, his face still red from teenage acne. Over six feet tall but would fall on his face if the big one slapped him on the back. Five years of eating like a cop would cure that. The NYPD does not settle for donuts, what with the junk food of the world on every corner. It feasts instead on Jamaican beef patties, General Tso’s chicken, Cubano sandwiches, and Dominican pork knuckles. The kid would beef up soon enough. Shy too, standing tentative at the office doorway, afraid maybe he’d get a shock if he stepped in front of the detective.

“Warrants, huh.” Leonard looked over the skinny kid. Maybe he was assigned there, but he wasn’t with them. Warrants officers started their day at four, ferreting out guys who had skipped their arraignments. One guy would stand at the front door of an apartment and pound the hell out of it while the partner stood behind the building looking at the fire escape, waiting for a panicked criminal to jump out in his skivvies so they could cart him back before the judge. When you put in for warrants, the first thing they test you for is if you can scale an eight-foot fence in a second and a half. The kid may have passed that one, but Leonard didn’t have much hope for his prospects.

“I hate to intrude on you and I know the situation is . . . sensitive.” The detective had that slow, fumbling way of trying to sound like he cared. It came off like he was sleepwalking through his job until the matinee started at Shea. “But I’m here to show you this.”

The detective pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded, folded again, and then crumpled into his suit coat. Leonard smoothed it up against the office wall. It was a search warrant. From what Leonard could tell, it had been hustled together at six that morning; the NYPD must have wrangled a judge out of bed to sign it. The place to be searched: the offices of the Commissioner to Investigate Misconduct and Corruption. The items to be seized: relevant evidence. Leonard laughed at the last part.

“Relevant evidence? That’s rich.” He would call the Law Department if he had to. Officers were not going to ransack his offices based on a shaky warrant.

“You can see it’s from missing persons.” Leonard looked at the bottom of the warrant. So it was. Detective Harrison gained speed. “I didn’t want to tell you like this. Your ex-boss has gone missing. Yesterday morning about five o’clock, she told her husband and her kid all in a panic they had to leave the city. We’ve spoken to them. They said she was extremely agitated. She put them on a bus and then she disappeared. No word from her cell. No one at home. We got video of her getting on the Staten Island ferry at six eighteen last night. We got nothing of her getting off at the other end.”

Leonard felt suddenly sick. A twist in his stomach, as though he had eaten something that had come back to life and was struggling to find its way out. This wasn’t a teenage runaway case, the cops waiting forty-eight hours to make sure the kid wasn’t coming home before they started looking. Leonard had his own problems with Davenport, leaving him stranded at DIMAC and in the crosshairs of the administration. And he hadn’t spoken to her since she’d left. He pulled himself up and looked at the detective.

“Why are you on this? Why send warrants? Why not send in missing persons?”

“Like I told you, Officer Ricci is warrants. I’m homicide.”

With that, Harrison was already in the office, slipping on a pair of plastic gloves. And suddenly the place was full of them. Rookie cops carrying plastic bags, pretending that the ephemera they were itemizing could be dusted for fingerprints. Guys who had joined the police force after taking sixteen credits of forensic science at John Jay, who barely knew that the technology they saw on television was mainly fake. That a fingerprint isn’t going to come up unless the person had been pressing their hand against polished glass or lacquered wood while sweating, that hair doesn’t carry DNA, and that luminol picks up about fifty substances besides blood.

The way most murders get solved is that an aggressive detective corners the dead guy’s most suspicious friend and badgers him until he confesses. The physical evidence is mainly just for show. Leonard shirked against the wall watching the carnival, the mountains of plastic baggies being stuffed with worthless junk, the papers he had been so looking forward to reading being trampled, the desk being rifled through. He watched the cops load up dozens of file folders and notepads into official-looking cartons. One cop stood dusting the windowsill. The one that Leonard had just tried to yank open for a bit of fresh air, on which he’d probably put his palm right up against the glass. The cop kept at it. If he noticed Leonard watching him, he didn’t let on.

Leonard could tell that the whole search was only theater. If Davenport had been murdered in the office, the police would know it by now, and if she hadn’t, there wouldn’t be anything worth finding. Most people don’t hide evidence of the crimes that they are about to commit in their desks. Most people who get kidnapped or murdered don’t know in advance. They don’t leave clues on their bookshelves. Search warrants are good for getting the guns from a stash house or the kiddie porn off a home computer, but combing someone’s workplace is a pretty worthless way to look for what anyone wanted hidden. But searches can have other purposes, and theater has its uses. It can let everyone know that the police are serious. Or it can make the officers feel that they are important. Or it can surprise someone; the search itself can make a suspect nervous enough to blurt out something he shouldn’t.

Standing by the wall, watching Detective Harrison chew on a mug of coffee, Leonard realized that the police have more than one way to intimidate you. They may close ranks when you have one of theirs under investigation. Or they may think that you didn’t much like the way your boss treated you on her way out the door. Surely you spoke to a couple of friends about what a pain in the ass she was. Surely one of those friends lit up a joint once, or smoked a cigarette on a subway platform, or did some other inconsequential little misdeed that he’d like to have wiped off his record.