I got up to pour myself a drink.
"Don't I get one, too?" he asked as he came back into the living room.
"Sorry. I didn't know when you'd be off the phone." I returned to the bar and fixed him a scotch. The mood shift had been completed. Now I was cool and abrupt to Jake and he was fired up with the adrenaline rush created by an exclusive piece of breaking news.
He sensed my pout immediately. "You're not jealous, are you?"
"Of whom? I don't even know who called." He didn't offer to tell me her name.
"She's just an old friend. A paralegal at one of the big white-shoe firms."
"I wouldn't care if it was Gwyneth Paltrow or Emma Thompson. I am just stunned that there is something you can't talk about in my presence." I steered away from the sofa and sat in an armchair across the room. "You go through this whole big deal about me needing to let you more into my life and me needing to open up to you. You try to convince me that I should move in with you, and then the first time you get a serious telephone call you fly out of the room because there's a conversation that I'm not permitted to be privy to."
"There's your preposition, darling."
"I'm not amused, Jake. You can be damn sure"-I got up and walked in a circle around the chair as I talked-"damn sure that I'm not ever about to live with someone who takes private calls in a separate room. And especially when I hear the word 'murder.' Now, do you want to tell me what that was about?"
He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs, his glass in one hand. He was smiling as he looked over at me. "Am I talking to my lover, or am I talking to a prosecutor?"
"When you say 'murder' and 'kids' in the space of a few minutes, I regret to inform you-darling-that I am a prosecutor."
He sat back. "That's the problem. My sources are privileged. I got this information in confidence, so don't ask me anything I can't tell you." He was too anxious to repeat the story not to go on. "She was working-"
"She?"
"The source. My friend. She was called in to assist a partner who had a business appointment with a client. Emergency meeting on a Sunday evening because the client's a stock analyst, specializing in foreign securities. He was supposed to be off to Europe in the morning. Very well-known guy in the financial community."
"What's his name?"
Jake looked at me. "Can't do that."
He paused. "They sit through half an hour of the meeting, then the senior partner takes a break to go to the men's room. Client follows him in and, standing next to him at the urinal, tells him that he killed his wife on Saturday and-"
Mike Chapman would have had an appropriate comment about the guy's timing, but the moment and its humor were lost on me. "In Manhattan?"
"They live here, but this happened somewhere between New York City and their beach home on Long Island. Nassau or Suffolk County, Madam Prosecutor. Not your jurisdiction."
He couldn't possibly think that I would fail to be appalled about a homicide that had occurred outside the confines of the city limits of my legal responsibility. "And the kids? What's the part about children?"
Jake paused slightly before answering. "This guy actually put his wife's remains in the trunk of his car. Then he got the two kids and drove upstate to dump the body."
"Where?"
"Where what?"
"Where is that woman's body right at this very moment? And where the hell are the children?"
"They're fine. She assures me that they're perfectly okay."
"And you're not going to tell me who this victim is and whether she's lying out in the woods or dumped in a lake or-?"
"Look, my informant's in a tough position, Alex. This is their client and the information he's giving them is privileged. They're trying to do the right thing and deal with getting him surrendered before he leaves the country, but right now he's resisting that idea. When there's more that I can tell you-"
The phone rang again and Jake answered. "Hey, that's fine. No problem. You can call me any hour of the night with a story like this. In the meantime, why don't we plan on lunch tomorrow? You can give me all the details then."
His caller clearly liked the idea.
"Michael's. Fifty-fifth Street between Fifth and Sixth, at twelve-thirty. There's a great table in an alcove in the front. Very private. No overheards. I'll call in the morning and reserve it."
She had a suggestion for Jake.
"No, you're not disturbing anything. Sure, if you get something else, call right back." He hung up and turned back to me. "You can't solve all the world's problems, Alex."
"I'd like to think that even if I were not a prosecutor, this story would be so upsetting that it would make me get off my ass and do something about it. I can't understand how you can sit there and probably just think about whether you can scoop the other networks with some lurid personal detail about this woman's murder. I can't understand why calling the police isn't the first thing you do."
The phone rang again and this time, without asking my permission, Jake held up a finger as if to suggest that I wait a few minutes till he returned from the den to finish our conversation. He trotted off to the other room to take his call alone.
I walked to the window and looked out at the murky night sky. Three minutes of that did nothing to calm me. I picked up my cell phone, Jake's spare set of keys, the forty-seven dollars cash I had left until I hit the ATM in the morning, and I stuffed them in my shoulder bag. I had to get out of the apartment before my temper exploded. And I needed to find out who the dead woman might be.
Jake was still in the den when I put on my coat and walked out to the elevator.
I pushed the revolving door open before the doorman could get to his feet and reach out for it. A fine layer of sleet was falling as I turned the corner and tried to find a coffee shop where I could make some calls to local precincts to see whether any relatives or friends had reported a missing female in the past twenty-four hours.
After going three blocks, it was apparent that nothing in the area was open after eleven o'clock on a Sunday evening. Although I was less than five minutes from my own apartment, I knew it was foolish to go there. I did not want to risk an encounter with the unstable, stalking complainant, Shirley Denzig, and I had not received word that the window had been repaired.
I reached inside my coat and lifted my beeper when I felt it vibrating on my waistband. I held it up under the streetlight and saw it display Jake's number. I replaced it, tightened the collar of my coat, raised it against the sleet, and crossed the street.
If I walked another few blocks north, I would reach the Nineteenth Precinct station house on Sixty-seventh Street. If I went east instead, I could get to Mike's building just as quickly. He knew every homicide detective in a fifty-mile radius of the city. We could sit in his tiny studio apartment, which he had long ago nicknamed The Coffin, making calls all night if need be until we figured out who this killer was and locked him up before he fled the country.
I picked up my pace as I headed east to York Avenue. A coat of ice was forming on the sidewalks and streets and I took care not to slip as I walked briskly along. The only people outside were those who needed to be there. Dog walkers out for the last effort of the evening, hospital workers heading for the midnight shift at Cornell Medical Center, and the occasional homeless person huddled in a storefront or alleyway.
When I reached the entrance to the old tenement that stood dwarfed amid the surrounding high-rise condos and upscale restaurants, I opened the outer door, shook the drops off my sleeves, and looked for the buzzer to Mike's apartment. It was marked with the number of his gold detective's shield rather than his name. As the beeper on my waistband went off a second time, I continued to ignore it and pressed the doorbell.