Perfect, she thought. Mike was involved in something too serious to break away from, and she couldn’t leave the little ones here alone.
She assured Sister Sheilah that she’d have someone pick up the latest casualties as soon as humanly possible, and she called Mike’s grandfather, Seamus. This time, fate relented. He was available to go get them right away.
Mary Catherine had just finished talking to him when Ricky, Trent, Fiona, and Chrissy wandered into the kitchen with a chorus of complaints.
“The TV stopped!”
“So’d my computer!”
“Yeah, like – everything.”
“Must be a power blackout,” Mary Catherine said, shrugging. “Nothing to be done about it.” She rummaged in the utility drawer and took out a deck of cards. “Have you guys ever played blackjack?”
Ten minutes later, the kitchen island had become a card table with Trent as the dealer and the others squinting at their hands. The noise level was reduced to the little guys counting out loud and grappling with the rules. Mary Catherine smiled. She wasn’t one to encourage gambling, but she was pleased to see them having fun without batteries. She decided to make sure the entertainment devices were turned off, then screw the fuses back in so she could finish the laundry and make soup. They’d be too absorbed to notice.
But first, there was an important matter to take care of. Socky was still complaining piteously and trying to rub its vomit-stained coat against her ankles. She gingerly lifted the cat by the back of the neck.
“You’ll thank me in the long run,” she said, and carried it, clawing the air in furious protest, to the kitchen sink.
Chapter 19
“You must be a cop, because you certainly don’t look like a customer,” a young woman called to me as I was exiting the Polo store.
Well, if it isn’t Cathy Calvin, intrepid Times police reporter and all-around pain in the ass, I thought.
She wasn’t somebody I wanted to talk to right now. On top of all the problems I was facing, I was still very annoyed at how distinctly unhelpful she’d been at the St. Pat’s Cathedral siege.
But I put a smile on my face and walked over to the barricade where she was standing. The enemies we cannot kill, we must caress, and deception is the art of war, I remembered. Thank God for the classical education I’d received from the Jesuits at Regis High. You needed to brush up on your Machiavelli and Sun Tzu to survive an encounter with this lady.
“Why is it every time we meet, it’s over police sawhorses and crime scene tape?” she said with a big bright grin of her own.
“Good fences make good neighbors, I guess, Cathy,” I said. “I’d love to chat, but I’m really busy.”
“Aw, come on, Mike. How about a quick statement, at least?” she said as she turned on her digital recorder. She was giving me some pretty intense eye contact. For the first time, I noticed that hers were green – striking, and actually kind of playful. She smelled good, too. What was it she’d just said? Oh yeah, she wanted a statement.
I kept it as by-the-book vague and as short as possible. A store clerk had been shot, I told her, and we were withholding his name pending notification of his family.
“Wow, you’re a font of information just like always, Detective Bennett. What about the shooting at Twenty-one? Is it related?”
“We can’t speculate at this time.”
“What’s that mean, really? Chief McGinnis isn’t letting you in on that one?”
“Off the record?” I asked.
“Of course,” Cathy said, clicking off her recorder as I leaned in.
“No comment,” I whispered.
Her emerald eyes didn’t look so frolicsome anymore as she clicked the recorder back on.
“Let’s talk about last night, up in Harlem,” she said, totally switching tracks. “Witnesses say police snipers shot an unarmed man. You were right next to the victim. What did you see?”
I was used to aggressive reporting, but I was starting to wonder where I’d left my pepper spray.
“Cathy, I’d just love to relive that experience, especially with you,” I said. “But as you can see, I’m in the middle of an investigation, so if you’ll excuse me.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it over lunch? You have to eat, right? My treat. And no tape recorder.”
I snapped my fingers in fake disappointment. “Wouldn’t you know it? I already have a reservation at Twenty-one.”
“Very funny,” she said with a wry look. Then she shrugged. “Oh, well. A girl has to try. I probably shouldn’t tell you this – it’ll go to your head – but I could think of worse lunch dates. If you ever put an ad in the personals, I’ll give you a couple of tips on what to say. Tall, nice build, thick brown hair, definitely cute.”
I was startled that she thought that about me. Maybe she was just flattering me to get more information, but she seemed like she meant it.
“I don’t have any plans to,” I said. “But thanks.”
“And that crack I made about you not looking like a Polo customer was below the belt. You’re actually a very sharp dresser.”
My hand rose automatically to smooth my tie. Christ, was she really hitting on me? Or was I a total fool to even imagine it? Cathy was damned nice-looking herself, and in the kind of outfit she was wearing right now – short, tight black skirt, tighter blouse, and patent leather pumps – she was flat-out hot. As long as you could ignore her being a bitch on Rollerblades.
But was she even such a bitch? I started wondering. Or just a hard-driving professional trying to do her job, with a brassy style of flirting, and I was a hopelessly grumpy old bastard who’d been taking it all wrong?
I backed away, as confused as a schoolboy. She was watching me with her hands on her hips and her head cocked a little to one side, like she’d challenged me to a duel and was waiting for my response.
“Don’t let it go to your head, Cathy,” I said, “but I could think of worse lunch dates, too.”
Chapter 20
I spent the rest of that afternoon at the 21 Club, mostly interviewing witnesses who had been there when the maître d’, Joe Miller, was shot. When I finished, I sank into a red leather banquette in the back bar and yawned. There’d been a lot of them.
No one here had seen the actual killing, but there didn’t seem to be any doubt that the shooter was a bike messenger, who had come in and left again quickly at just that time. Miller had been found with the bloody message tucked between his shoes. There was also a general consensus that the messenger was a fairly tall, white male, probably around thirty years old.
From there, it was a good news/bad news scenario. Every single person I’d talked to, from the high-powered executive customers to the busboys, confirmed that he’d been wearing a light, uniform-style shirt – not an orange Mets jersey. But he’d also had on a helmet and sunglasses. Like at the Polo store, nobody had gotten a clear look at his face, or even his hair color. Which left us still without any details for matching the suspects in the various assaults.
Along with that little problem, there was another troubling mystery. The bullets that had killed the maître d’ were.22 caliber, very different from the.45s that were used on Kyle Devens. Then again, shell casings were also clean of fingerprints.
There were still a ton of possibilities. But in spite of the contradictions, my increasingly queasy gut pushed me more and more toward thinking that the two shootings, at least, were related. The suspects’ ages and general physical descriptions were similar. Both crimes had occurred at high-end establishments.
But most important was the text of the typed message found with the maître d’s body. I lifted up the evidence bag and read it again.
Your blood is my paint. Your flesh is my clay.
It had a creepy similarity to what the Polo clerk shooter had said to Patrick Cardone.