The October List (4 page)

Detectives Naresh Surani and Brad Kepler were sitting in yet another operations room in the NYPD Big Building, main headquarters. The third one in three days. Government. Fuck.

Third – and the worst. The view here was of a pitted wall of City Hall and a smooth wall of a bank, pigeons, a sliver of sky, pigeon shit. And whatever had been rotting away behind the file cabinets of the last room didn’t come close to the chemical weapons here.

Kepler muttered to his partner, ‘Are they ready?’

Surani hung up the phone. ‘They’re ready-ish.’

Which sounded flippant and wrong, given the circumstances, Kepler thought. You know, people’s lives are at risk here.

Maybe Kepler’s face revealed that he was pissed off; Surani seemed to understand. He added in a graver tone, ‘They’re assembled and staging. That’s the last I heard. It’s like they’re too busy to talk to us.’

He was referring to the NYPD’s tactical team, the Emergency Service Unit boys – and probably a girl or two as well. All the fancy weapons, machine guns, helmets, Nomex, boots.

Ready to swoop in nail the perps.

‘Too busy to talk to us?’ Kepler repeated, his voice gravel. ‘The FCP Op didn’t originate with them.’

The name of the operation had, in the past few hours, morphed from the official ‘Charles Prescott Operation’ down to ‘the CP Op.’

Then, thanks to the complications that had surrounded the case, the inevitable modifier, commencing with the sixth letter of the alphabet, now preceded the name. Cops. Naturally.

FCP Op …

Kepler continued, ‘It’s
our
investigation.
We
should be all over it like … like …’ His voice faded.

‘Couldn’t think of a good metaphor?’ Surani offered.

Kepler rolled his eyes, grimacing. ‘They’re sure where Gabriela is?’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t worry. They’re tracking her.’

Wait, Kepler thought: Like beetles on shit, like frat boys on kegs, like frat boys on coeds …

But too late.

‘Call Surveillance again. Make sure there’s a signal.’

Surani sighed. But he did as requested. Had a brief conversation. He disconnected and turned to Kepler. ‘Yeah, they have a good signal on her. A humongous signal. A hard-on of a signal. Is it okay if I say that, or do
my
people not refer to erections?’

Kepler didn’t even bother. ‘Where
exactly
? Do they know
exactly
?’

‘Yes, they know ex-act-tily. Which is where, like I said before, ESU is staging. They’re ready to move in for the take-down as soon as we give the word.’

But, of course, it wasn’t
we
who would give the word; it was
he
. Captain Barkley.

Kepler grumbled, ‘I’d like to see pictures. I’d like to be on the ground. They have fucking cameras, ESU does. They should be beaming us pictures.’

‘It’s been hard enough to track her—’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘—track her in the first place. You’re not going to get high-def video, for Christ’s sake. Oh, is it okay if someone of my persuasion says—’

‘Enough with that.’ Kepler noted the grimy windows, the clutter, the bile-green paint, the smell: food once more. But, unlike earlier, this time he was anything but hungry.

Surani glanced down and brushed at his brown suit jacket, which, Kepler thought again, clashed badly with the man’s gray complexion. His own skin tone was a hard-earned tan, but his suit, unlike his partner’s, was wrinkled and – he now noticed – bore an embarrassing stain on the sleeve. In the shape of Mickey Mouse ears.

He sat forward in the truly uncomfortable orange fiberglass chair, and thought: So is this how it ends? I’m balls-deep in an operation where people may get dead and no one knows exactly what’s going on. And if it goes south, the brass’ll need a scapegoat. Hello, Detectives Surani and Kepler.

There are of course a thousand different ways an operation can go bad, but in the end you don’t need to worry about a thousand different ways because it only takes one to fuck everything up. And usually it’s the one you never see coming.

The two men didn’t jump to attention when Captain Paul Barkley strode into the room – NYPD detectives didn’t jump at much of anything. But Kepler lifted his feet off a neighboring chair and Surani put down the coffee he was loudly slurping. For detectives with the kinds of lives they had and the cases they ran, this was about all they could muster in terms of respect.

Especially today, in the throes of the FCP Op.

‘You have her location?’

Surani said, ‘Yep. And she has no clue we’re on to her. ESU’s in position. They’re assessing risk exposure.’

The captain uttered a snort. ‘“Risk exposure”? Forget bad cop movie – that sounds like something a banker’d say. Now, you seen the latest?’ Barkley snapped, turning to a computer, logging in. ‘I saw it ten minutes ago. Jesus.’

What was the old man referring to? Kepler had enough miles to show impatience with his boss and he did so now, though silently and in the form of a frown, his tan brow V’ing severely.

Kepler thought an official document or report or surveillance CCTV video was going to appear. But what they were looking at on the screen was the
New York Post
online edition, updated recently. Kepler sighed as he read the story, a follow-up of an earlier one. The first headline had included the word ‘injured.’ This one featured the verb ‘died.’

Both articles included this sentence: ‘Crushed beneath a delivery truck.’

Surani said, ‘It’s out of hand, I know.’

‘And that’s not acceptable. I want to move in. I want perps being processed in Central Booking
now
. It could turn into a bloodbath if we don’t move fast.’

‘It already is a bloodbath,’ Surani muttered, looking at the photo of the body.

Gesturing angrily at the computer screen, Barkley muttered, ‘Look at the press. Fucking mobile phone cameras. That’s the problem nowadays. They’re everywhere. Assholes with a Samsung or iPhone are on the scene faster than first responders. Shit. Crime Scene’s on it?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, but they’re not getting much.’

They all stared at the screen. Blood’s pretty vivid in high definition.

‘And Gabriela’s with that guy?’

Surani said, ‘Yeah.’

‘That woman,’ the captain intoned, ‘has a lot to answer for.’ The comments, devoid of obscenity, seemed particularly ominous. Barkley debated, or at least he cocked his head as if he was, and stared out the window.

Bank, City Hall, pigeon shit.

‘Okay, I’m making the call. Send ESU in. Now.’

‘That could fuck everything up,’ Kepler said. ‘I think we should wait, find out who the players are, what the risks are. What—’

‘Send ESU in
now
,’ Barkley growled, as if he wasn’t used to repeating himself. Which, Kepler knew, he was not. ‘We’re not waiting any longer. Whatever else she’s done in the last couple of days, if she ends up like –’ A nod to the truck crush article. ‘– it’s gonna be bad for a lot of people.’

Meaning him, meaning us, meaning the city.

Especially bad for Gabriela, too, Kepler wanted to say but refrained.

Surani snatched up the phone. He leaned forward, tense, as he said, ‘It’s Surani. Your teams’re green-lighted. You can—’ His gray-brown face froze. ‘What? What?’

Kepler and Barkley stared at him. Barkley was hard to read, but undoubtedly what he felt was the same dismay Kepler was experiencing.

‘
What?
’

The repetition was infuriating. If he said the word again, Kepler was going to grab him by the collar, take the phone away.

But Surani’s next words were, ‘Oh, shit.’

Kepler’s eyes went wide and he lifted his palms. Meaning: Tell us the something fucking specific.

Surani was now nodding intensely. ‘Sure, I’ll put him on.’

‘What?’ Barkley asked, apparently not noticing he was echoing his detective.

Surani said, ‘The ESU tac op commander has somebody he thinks you should talk to.’

‘Who?’

‘A Department of Sanitation driver.’

Barkley gave his deepest frown so far today. ‘What the fuck does a garbage man have to do with the operation?’

‘Here.’ Surani handed him the phone as if it were a box of unstable ammunition.

The captain snatched the unit from his hand and spoke to the driver. He disconnected and sat back. Finally: ‘We’ve got a problem.’

CHAPTER
32

3:15 p.m., Sunday
15 minutes earlier

‘What happened back there, with that man,’ Gabriela whispered, wiping tears. ‘I … I don’t know what to say.’

Daniel fell back into his waiting state: observing, not speaking. His eyes swept the overcast, afternoon streets of Midtown, east. ‘Looks clear. Come on.’

They walked another block.

‘There. That’s the place, Mac. Let’s get inside.’ Daniel was pointing out a narrow dun-colored apartment building down a cul-de-sac on East 51st. It crested at four stories high and many windows were hooded as suspicious eyes.

‘We’ll be safe there.’

She gave a brutal laugh. Safe. Yeah, right.

Daniel squeezed her hand in response.

As they approached the structure, Gabriela looked around, scrutinizing shadows and windows and doorways. She saw no police. Or other threats. Daniel let them into the lobby, which was painted in several shades of blue and lit by brushed silver sconces. The decor was tasteful, though hardly elegant. A painting – by a Picasso wannabe, it seemed – of a ballerina, possibly, hung from the wall near the mailboxes. They took the stairs to the second floor, where there were doors to two apartments.

Daniel directed her to the left, which faced the front courtyard.

The key clicked, the hinge creaked. It made a funny sound, musical. The first two notes of ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’

O-oh, say can you see …

After they’d entered the dark rooms, Daniel closed and double-locked the door, flicked on the overhead lights.

Gabriela dropped the new backpack, which contained her gym bag, on a battered coffee table in the living room. Daniel set his belongings beside it and sat heavily in a solid chair at the dining room table. He went online via his iPad and she walked to the window, looked out over the courtyard and cul-de-sac.

Gabriela found the smell of the rooms troubling. The aroma reminded her of a funeral parlor. Old, stale chemicals, though here they would just be cleansers, not preservatives for dead flesh. She recalled just such a smell from six years and two months ago. Her stomach twisted, hurt grew, anger grew. An image of the Professor arose.

Then she thought of her mantra.

Sarah.

Your goal. Focus on your goal.

Sarah.

It’s just a random smell, she told herself, that’s triggering hard memories. Still, she couldn’t quite flick it away. She stepped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, which was mostly bare – a container of coffee, butter, a shriveled lemon, hard as horn. And in the crisper an onion. It too was past prime but not rotten. Green shoots were growing from the end, eerie. She thought of Joseph’s unruly hair, slick, greasy. She found a knife, dull but sharp enough to slice the vegetable if she sawed with pressure. When she’d produced a small pile of rings, she found oil in the cupboard, which she poured into a dusty frying pan, without bothering to wipe it clean. She turned up the heat and cooked the rings and shoots, stirring them absently in a figure-eight motion with a wooden spoon.

The sweet scents rose and soon they’d mitigated the smells that had bothered her. The thoughts of past death faded.

Daniel Reardon walked to the doorway of the kitchen. She sensed him watching her closely. She glanced at his handsome face, felt that ping of attraction. Thought of Friday night, two days ago. A year, forever.

‘Hungry?’

‘Probably. But I don’t want anything to eat. I’m just air freshening.’

‘With onions?’ A laugh. He had a wonderful laugh – just like the actor he so closely resembled.

Her voice shivered as she said, ‘Every night when she’s with me, Sarah and I cook. Well, not every night. But most. She likes to stir things. She’s a great stirrer. We sometimes joke, we …’ And she abruptly fell silent, inhaled deeply, looking away from him.

She touched her chest, wincing, and Daniel stepped close, taking a tissue and slowly wiping the blood from the corner of her mouth. Then he embraced her. His hand trailed down her spine, bumping over the strap of her bra beneath the thick sweatshirt and settling into her lower back. He pulled her close. She tensed and groaned slightly. He tilted her head back and, despite the residue of blood, kissed her hard on the lips. She groaned, frowning, and he released her.

‘Sorry,’ he whispered.

‘Don’t be.’

He pressed his face against hers once more, pulling her body into him. And then stepped back, as if forcing himself to. She shut off the stovetop gas and they returned to the living room.