The Night Falconer (3 page)

“There you go then.” I shrugged, took another sip of wine.

“You do lead an interesting life sometimes.”

The jazz playing in the other room ended. It was followed by a smooth R&B tune from an artist I didn’t recognize.

Marcia took my hand. “Dance with me?”

“You bet.”

I’m not much of a dancer. Maybe it’s my big feet or maybe I’m just too self-conscious. But here in Marcia’s living room seemed safe enough. The mood was slow. The lights were off. We held each other close and swayed. I led. She followed. Simple, really.

Her head was on my shoulder and I could feel the rise and fall of her hips in time with mine.

“Frank,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Is there hope for us?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”

“Been thinking about you too.”

“Why does it all have to be so complicated?”

“I don’t know.”

“We love each other.”

“Yes.”

“What do we have to do about it?”

“You could marry me, you know.”

“I know. But it’s summertime, beach weather. I’m off from school.”

“So?”

“I don’t know if it’s the best time to be making commitments.”

“I’m here. You’re here. I’m leaving in the morning. What more is there to commit to?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I know what you mean.”

She slid her fingers around the back of my neck and kissed me. Lightly. Then she shuddered.

“Frank,” she said.

“I’m here.”

“I think we should go to bed now.”

“Really?”

“I think we should go to bed and I think I should marry you in the morning.”

“But I told you, I’m leaving first thing in the morning.”

“As soon as you get back then.”

“I thought you wanted a big church wedding.”

“I know a pastor who will marry us. We don’t need a crowd.”

“You’re serious,” I said.

“Absolutely.”

“What have we been waiting for?”

“Time. Each other. I’ve been doing a lot of praying. I know it’s right now.” She kissed me softly once again.

“Can you do something for me then?” I asked.

“What?”

I reached into my pocket, felt the smooth touch of white gold. “I bought this six months ago. Basically been too chicken to do anything with it until now. I don’t know why, but something made me slip it into my pocket on the way out the door tonight.”

I pulled out the ring. Tears began streaming down her face.

“It’s a holiday weekend,” she said. “Do you really have to leave?”

“I’m sorry, yes.”

She slipped the ring over her finger. The music went on as we kissed.

“What time did you say your plane leaves in the morning?” she asked.

3

“Bad memories?”

Nicole caught me staring out the window as our commuter flight began to bank on approach into LaGuardia. The sun had risen over Long Island and was angling its rays into the gray spires of midtown, which looked almost peaceful at this hour on a Saturday. Haze draped the Verazzano, the East River, and the rest of the city like steam settling over a cauldron. Marcia D’Angelo’s house back in Charlottesville was suddenly a distant memory.

“A few. Some good ones too. How many times does this make it you’ve been to New York?”

“Must be the fifth or sixth. After you and Mom broke up, back when she was married to the schmuck and had tons of money, she brought me up here a few times to see Broadway plays and go shopping.”

“You miss it?”

“Miss what?”

“The money.”

“Sometimes,” she admitted.

“Yet here we are.”

“Yup. Here we are.”

Marcia and I had decided not to inform anyone else of our engagement. We’d tell Nicole, of course. And we’d tell Jake, who was still my best friend despite being my former partner and probable best man, and maybe a few other close friends a couple of days before the ceremony. Nicole, however, sensed something was up.

“So how’d it go last night?”

“How’d what go last night?”

“You know what I mean … with Marcia.”

“I thought things went rather well.”

“Rather well? You don’t talk like that, Dad. What happened?”

“We talked. We danced. It was a nice evening.”

She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

“Tell you what?”

“Anything,” she said. “About what really happened.”

“I thought I just told you.”

“I need details, dad. Details … .”

“Look, I don’t quiz you, even though I’m your father, about your romantic escapades, do I?”

“Uggh!” She sucker punched me in the deltoid.

“Hey, watch it. That’s my old pitching arm.”

As if there’d ever been any doubt, my daughter had grown into a beautiful young woman. Petite, composed, possessed of an innate ability to read others’ emotions, like her mother once upon a time. She’d let her dark hair grow out some, but still kept it stylishly trimmed in a French twist. She was neatly decked out for the city in black jeans and a plain white tee.

Why she chose to work with her Neanderthal of a dad was a mystery to me, but not one I chose to try to solve at the moment. The headphones pinched around her neck were plugged into a portable CD player. Anyone looking at her might have concluded she was listening to music, but in fact she was boning up on her Spanish. Four years and a B.S. in computer science had apparently only whetted her intellectual curiosity.

“So you’re old buds with this PI who’s meeting us?” she asked.

I’d told her most of the story already. “Yeah. I owe her.”

“She a good detective?”

“Far as I know. Streetwise. A pro.”

“So like I’m learning from you, I can learn a lot by watching her then.”

“I suppose. Where are you going with this?”

“I just thought, well, since this seems like a pretty straightforward, low-risk kind of case, you maybe wouldn’t mind me doing some of the work on my own.”

The engines flared as we touched down.

“We’ll see,” I said. “New York’s not Virginia.”

“A chance to relive your glory days,” she said with a mischievous smile.

The flight was crowded with people traveling to New York for the fireworks and the holiday, so we had to wait our turn to deplane. Dragging our carry-ons, we entered the gate through a glass doorway. We climbed a set of stairs to the concourse and headed for the main terminal.

At the security checkpoint, which wasn’t busy at the moment, a heavyset black woman in a dark green pantsuit leaned against a table, talking and laughing with the two baggage screeners. She turned to examine the line of people exiting the ramp. Her gaze settled quickly on Nicole and me.

“There they finally are,” she said as we approached.

“Hey Darla,” I said.

“Get on over here and give this woman a hug, you big fool.” She held out a hand, bigger than most of the men I knew, shook mine with it and pulled me into an embrace. There was an easy frankness about her manner, and a world-weary look to her, a combination that commanded a certain respect.

“And this must be Nicky. Last time I saw you, girl, you were barely up to your daddy’s knee.”

She and Nicole exchanged handshakes and hugs as well. Nicole was smiling.

“You two have any checked bags?”

“Nope,” I said. “This is it.”

Nicole carried her laptop case and roll-on suitcase. I was wearing my sport coat, so all I toted was a shoulder bag. In Virginia, of course, we might’ve also toted our legally concealed handguns, but not here in the litigation and gun control happy Big Apple. I didn’t figure we’d need them. And if it turned out we did, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find whatever was required.

“Good,” Darla said. “My car’s right out back of the terminal here. Not too far at all. One of the bennies of being ex-Port Authority.”

She nodded and gave a wave to the screeners, then turned to the side to pull open a large metal door emblazoned with the words Authorized Personnel Only. We followed her through the opening and began to descend a flight of stairs.

“Where are we headed?” Nicole asked.

“Thought we’d stop someplace and grab a cup of coffee before I take you across the river to meet Dr. Lonigan.”

“Sure,” I said.

She cupped her hand to her mouth and stifled a yawn. “I need something to get my motor started this morning.”

“Late night?”

She nodded. “Decided to try some surveillance in the park.”

“Central Park?”

“Where else?”

“Trying to catch this guy with the owl.”

“You got it. Which—me being clueless about the bird thing—makes me glad you two are here.”

We were at the bottom of the steps at a junction with more doors and an entrance to a tunnel that seemed to run between the terminals. We started down the tunnel. Long fluorescent fixtures ran the length of it. The floor was smooth cement and the walls were made of concrete block. A couple of guys wearing airline maintenance uniforms approached and passed us, headed in the opposite direction. They didn’t even give us a second glance.

“Looks like you’re pretty well known around here,” I said.

“You might say that.”

“How long have you been looking for these missing pets?”

“Couple of days is all. And with other business, I haven’t had much time to spend on this.”

I nodded.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. Like I told Dr. Lonigan, I’m for sure gonna catch this idiot with the bird, whoever he is. But when I told her about you, Franco, she thought maybe you could help speed up the process.”

“I take it money’s not an issue with this client.”

She offered me fish eyes. “You really never heard of this building where she’s living?”

“No.”

“Don’t get out much anymore, do you?”

“Not to Manhattan anyway.” Maybe that would change once Marcia and I were married. I pictured taking her on a romantic weekend to the city. Broadway show. Carriage ride. Lunch at Tavern on the Green. Expensive, but it would be worth it.

Darla grunted an affirmation.

“I read about the Grayland Towner renovation in an architecture course I audited my last semester,” Nicole said. “Art deco preservation with a modern twist.”

“Now here’s a woman who’s up to speed.” Darla smiled.

“Modern twist, huh?” I said.

Nicole shrugged.

“You agree with Lonigan then?” I asked Darla. “You like the developer for whatever’s going on with her cat and these other pets?”

“I don’t know.” She paused for a moment. “I managed to get in to see the man, but didn’t get very far with him.”

“He hiding something?”

“Could be. He’s no rosy, cooperative type, I’ll tell you that.”

“What about the other pet owners? You think they’re playing straight?”

“Far as I can tell. I haven’t had a chance to talk to most of them yet.”

“It still seems like a lot of trouble to go through, putting all of us to work on this, don’t you think?” Nicole said.

“Probably,” Darla said. “But hey, if it was one of your precious falcons or whatever missing like that, you’d be going all out too, wouldn’t you?”

Nicole looked at me and nodded. Hard to disagree with that.

“So Lonigan strikes you as a straight shooter,” I said.

“Absolutely. And besides,” Darla said. “There’s been some creepy stuff going on with this whole deal.”

“What do you mean, creepy stuff?”

“I’ll tell you all about it when I get my hands on that coffee,” she said.

We’d come to another junction with multiple doors and a new flight of stairs. After climbing the steps, she led us through another door, this time back outdoors.

The morning air shook with the roar of an airliner taking off on a nearby runway. It didn’t feel much cooler than Virginia. The slight breeze off the bay was already full of humidity and the smell of jet fuel. A late model Dodge minivan with New York plates stood parked on the blacktop between the terminal wall and a row of maintenance vehicles.

“Your van?” Nicole asked.

“I’ve got three kids. Two still in school,” Darla explained as we approached the vehicle.

Her gaze locked on something in front of us for a moment.

“Hold up,” she said, pulling up short and reaching out her big paw to block us from passing. We stopped in our tracks. I followed Darla’s line of sight through the glass into the back seat of the van. “Weird … Don’t touch anything.”

“What is it?” Nicole asked.

“Wait one second,” I whispered. “Don’t move.”

Darla reached inside the jacket of her pantsuit, came out with a mini-Glock, and flipped off the safety. She pointed the gun at the van with both hands, knees flexed in a shooter’s position as she made a slow shuffling circle around the vehicle, taking her time. Finally, she ended up back next to us, her lip quivering a little but her fingers gripped around the Glock as firm as stone.

“Okay. Clear,” she said.

“What’s gong on?” Nicole wanted to know.

Darla didn’t answer. She re-holstered and secured her gun, then out whipped out her cell phone, and punched in a number.

“That’s what’s going on,” I said, pointing toward the back of the Dodge.

A child’s booster seat was strapped into one of the captains chairs in back. Which wasn’t an unusual sight for such a van. What was unusual was the shape of the K-bar knife someone had plunged into the base of the child’s seat, the exposed portion of its serrated blade winking out at us like a set of jagged teeth.

Something moved in the corner of my eye. A door in the terminal wall behind one of the other vehicles was closing softly.

“Hey!”

I dropped my bag and sprinted toward the gap. Managed to get there just before the door shut and flung it open with a bang against the outside wall. Footsteps pounding down metal stairs, flash of green, a dark shape moving below. Nicole behind me yelling.

I leapt down the first short flight of steps and landed with a hollow crash against a metal screen wall. Kept going.

Vapor rose from somewhere. Gargantuan air conditioning units pounding. The stairs terminated in the middle of a dim tunnel. Had the runner gone left or right? I waited, listening. Nothing—impossible to tell.