They crossed Riverdale Avenue and started walking up the steep hill of 236th, passing a crafts store, a fish store-which was quite pungent in this heat-a real estate office, and another hardware place before the block gave way entirely to apartment buildings.
"How was Maria's family?"
Angell shuddered. "When I started, Benton said that the worst part of the job was notifying families. Everything else-wading hip-deep in people's blood, talking to scumbags who commit murder for the stupidest reason, dealing with idiot lawyers and hidebound judges, too much OT, not enough OT money, no personal life-all that you can deal with, eventually. But nothing is worse than telling someone that their little girl won't ever come home again."
Stella found she could say nothing in response to that.
They walked the rest of the way to Morgenstern's house in companionable silence. And it was a house, not an apartment building. They turned onto Cambridge Avenue to find several small homes with postage-stamp yards in front. One of them apparently belonged to Jack Morgenstern.
As they were about to ring the doorbell, Angell finally broke the silence. "I got the mother-the father died last year. She was apparently worried sick when Maria didn't come home last night, but she didn't report it because Maria'd been out all night a few times before with her boyfriend without calling, so she figured it was that. The mother broke down and cried for fifteen minutes. She said she moved to Riverdale because it was supposed to be a safer neighborhood. Then she threw me out and told me to stop wasting time talking to her and to go and capture her daughter's killer."
"Three stages of grief in one shot," Stella said wryly.
"Yeah." Angell rang the doorbell.
The house had a white screen door in front of a white wood door. In front of them was a doormat with the words WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS stenciled on it. Gold metal numerals providing the house number were nailed to the inner door. That door swung open to reveal a white male in this thirties with long brown hair-which was somewhat unkempt-and a beard. He was wearing a silk bathrobe and looked bleary-eyed. Stella suspected they'd woken him up.
Stella held up her badge; Angell did likewise. "NYPD, Mr. Morgenstern. I'm Detective Angell, this is Detective Bonasera. We have a few-"
"Just a sec." He closed the door.
Exchanging a glance with Angell, Stella said, "O-o-o-okay."
The door reopened, and Morgenstern then opened the screen as well. He was holding out two business cards. Stella noticed that he was walking a bit stiffly, like he had bruised or even broken ribs. "That's the name and number of my lawyer, Courtney Bracey. You want to talk to me, set it up with her."
Stella stared down at the cards. If he was lawyering up already…
"Mr. Morgenstern," Angell said, "we just have a few questions about-"
"I don't care. I have the right to legal counsel, and I'm damn well exercising that right. Now please, take the cards, go back to your little precinct house, and make an appointment. We're done here."
"Look, Mr. Morgenstern," Stella said, trying to sound reasonable, "we just want to know-"
"Save it, Detective," Morgenstern snapped. "The last time a couple of detectives showed up at my doorstep saying they just had a few questions, I was arrested for rape."
Involuntarily, Stella tensed at the word rape. It had been over a year, but the memory of being attacked by her psychotic ex-boyfriend Frankie Mala was still so easily triggered. He hadn't actually raped her, though she had felt violated when she discovered that he'd put a recording of their lovemaking on the Internet. She'd broken up with him after that, and then he broke into her apartment, attacked her, tied her up, cut her, and threatened to do worse.
Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she still saw him leaping over the partition as she grabbed her Glock out of her handbag, knocking her to the floor.
In only a second, she got over it. She was on the job, not in the office of the department shrink Mac all but twisted her arm into seeing. It had been more than a year ago. She was over it.
She was.
Morgenstern was still talking, his voice rising with each sentence, and she forced herself to focus on his words. "Mind you, I didn't rape anybody. But you people put out a description of a white male in his thirties with long brown hair and a beard. I was in jail for two days before the real guy raped somebody else. This time, they caught the right guy, sprung me without even an apology, not even when the DNA test proved it wasn't me." He gave a bitter-looking half smile. "I suppose I should be grateful-the lawsuit that I won paid for this house." The smile fell, and now he looked furious. "But if you think for one second that I have any interest in saying anything to a police officer without my lawyer present, then you're out of your mind. I've been a victim of the NYPD's gestapo tactics once; it's not happening again! Good-bye!"
With that, he dropped the two business cards on the doormat and slammed the door shut.
"Looks like he gets the best exit line of all," Stella muttered.
Angell was crouched down, picking up the business cards. "What was that?"
"Nothing." Stella sighed. She took one of the cards from Angell, and they started walking back down Cambridge.
"What do you think?" Angell asked.
"He's the last one seen with the victim. He was a rape suspect. He has a temper. He was obviously in a fight recently. He was wearing a shirt that's the same color as the fiber found on the body. I'd say we just talked to prime suspect number one."
7
FOR A LONG TIME, Dr. Sheldon Hawkes never thought much about prison. He'd been a respected surgeon for a few years before one lost patient too many drove him to the medical examiner's office. He couldn't stand to bear even the slightest responsibility for a human being's death, so he put his medical skills to use in trying to catch those who did.
Intellectually, he knew that those who murdered the bodies he examined as an ME-and later, after he moved from the morgue to fieldwork, those responsible for the crime scenes he examined-usually went to prison. But still, that didn't have much meaning for Hawkes.
Then he was arrested, accused of murder, put in handcuffs, and taken to Rikers Island, and prison took on a whole new meaning.
He'd worked in law enforcement for years, but until that day, Sheldon Hawkes had never understood just how humiliating it was to be restrained by handcuffs, how helpless you felt with your wrists pulled behind your back, the metal biting into your flesh.
As a black man, Hawkes knew he had to live with the constant suspicion. The little old white ladies who would walk across the street to avoid him, simply because of the color of his skin. The state troopers who pulled him over, ignoring the white drivers who were going much faster down the highway. It didn't matter that he had a medical degree or that he had a badge of his own.
But even so, he'd never quite understood what it was like to be considered the scum of the earth until he was placed in pretrial detention at Rikers. He stopped being a person the moment those cuffs went on.
Hawkes couldn't call it the worst feeling he'd ever had in his life, as that spot was reserved for the way he felt the last time he'd lost a patient on his operating table. But it was pretty damn close.
He had been framed, of course. Shane Casey was a whack-job with a mad-on for the crime lab. Casey's brother had also been accused of murder, but he killed himself in prison. Casey was sure his brother was framed, and so he turned around and framed Hawkes, who had still been an ME at the time of Casey's brother's trial. Hawkes's testimony was part of what led to the guilty verdict.