“What the hell happened out there?” he asked. Gotta love New Yorkers. Not one second wasted on preliminaries.
“I came in late, but from what I understand, the hand-to-hand was about to go down and the locals just…opened fire.” She held up her hands in dismay.
“Ah, crap.”
“The guy who shot first claims one of the Colombians was reaching for a weapon.”
“Was he?”
“Well, the Colombians definitely had assault rifles, so maybe. But now we have to deal with an IAB investigation in the middle of our case. It screws everything up.”
“Shit.”
“I’m just amazed nobody was killed. One of the Colombians is in the hospital with a bullet in his leg. I arranged with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office for a bedside arraignment later this morning. And we locked up Pavel Stepanov, Esposito’s bodyguard.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah, except our case on him sucks. Once the shooting started, the hand-to-hand never happened, and the second Colombian ran off with the drugs. So we have no product to put on the table. It’s just a circumstantial conspiracy case. I mean, we could charge an attempt, but…”
“Son of a gun. It just gets worse,” Albano muttered.
Melanie paused, looking for a diplomatic way to bring up the subject that was foremost on her mind. But there was none. “So listen, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah?”
“What went wrong with Trevor? I mean, how could you lose him like that?”
Albano looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time. “Yeah, sorry about that one, kid. What can I say? The good guys don’t win every inning.”
“That’s it? I mean, Trevor’s a solid human being. What are we doing to find him?”
“We were following up a tip that I thought came from you about the hand-to-hand tonight, thinking maybe the Leonard kid got by us somehow and that he’d show up here. But obviously things didn’t play out that way.”
“No, obviously they didn’t.”
“Well, I don’t know what you want from me,” Albano said irritably. “We got Dan and Bridget still out with the Puerto Ricans searching that area again, on the off chance anybody’s around. But it’s a long shot. Who knows, maybe this joker Pavel’ll start talking and tell us where the kid is.”
“He won’t. He invoked. So he can’t be questioned without a lawyer present.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“Yeah, and when counsel’s appointed in the morning, it’ll be for ex-tradition purposes only. That lawyer’ll just tell him not to talk until he gets transported to New York and gets his real lawyer, which could be weeks from now given how slow the Marshals’ airlifts are.”
“This is when I hate the fucking system. A kid’s life is at stake. You’d think we’d be allowed to go in there and beat the crap out of that Russian prick till he gives it up.”
“That’s what separates us from the barbarians, I guess,” Melanie said.
“Look around. Nothing separates us from the barbarians these days, so why stand on ceremony?” Albano popped one of his ever-present Rolaids. “Stay put for a few minutes, wouldja? I’m gonna see if I can raise the supervisor here and get an update.”
“Okay.” Melanie drew a shaggy breath.
Albano patted her arm. “Buck up, kid. The game ain’t perfect, but we gotta keep playing it.”
“You’re right.”
Exhausted, she put her head down on the desk.
Sometime later Ray-Ray Wong shook her shoulder. Melanie lifted her head blearily. A paper clip that had been stuck to her cheek fell to the desktop with a ping.
“Morning, ma’am. The lieutenant asked me to drive you back to the hotel.”
“What? Why? What’s happening?”
“Zero. Nada. Everybody in custody invoked, so they can’t be questioned. I’m tasked with returning you to the hotel for some shut-eye and then heading on to assist in the search at El Yunque.”
Melanie sighed and stood up. She had a headache so bad it felt like there was an ice pick stuck in her eye. Insect bites and thorn pricks on her arms and legs stung like hell. Trevor was missing. Carmen was still missing. Melanie was beginning to think they were probably both still in New York, dead or alive. And here she was in San Juan, at a big fat standstill.
56
MELANIE WASN’T one to stand still for long. After Ray-Ray dropped her off, she packed her suitcase, checked out, and took a cab to the airport. There was a seat available on a 7:00 A.M. Delta flight that got into JFK before lunch, so she handed over her credit card. Sitting in the airplane waiting to take off, she left a voice mail for Dan telling him where she was going, and why.
About five hours later, she stood in the harsh light of the baggage-claim area at JFK waiting to collect her suitcase. Supposedly a blizzard was on the way, and the woman next to her said the airport was closing in half an hour. So much for the prospect of reinforcements for whatever it was she hoped to accomplish here. The rest of the team would be stranded in San Juan. Lucky them. She shivered for fifteen minutes straight standing in the taxi line. On the ride in, New York City did its best impression of hell, with decaying highways, steam rising from enormous fissures in the roads, garbage and graffiti everywhere.
She checked her voice mail from the cab. A message from Detective Frank Leary prompted her to go straight to Noir, Jay Esposito’s club in the Flatiron District. The taxi let her out in front of an industrial-looking brick building on a cramped side street. She hauled her suitcase into the dark nightclub, breathing in cigarettes and stale beer, and found Detective Leary at the bar finishing an interview. When he was done, he escorted her back through the club, past the coat check and restrooms, toward Jay Esposito’s office.
“Apparent suicide. I’m all ready to slap cuffs on the asshole, and he goes and offs himself. Whaddaya gonna do?” Leary shrugged. He was a burly Irishman in his thirties, with a pleasant face and a receding hairline.
“I hate that. You’re just about to arrest somebody and they die. I always feel like I should do the case anyway,” Melanie said.
“Good news is, we think we found the murder weapon from the Deon Green case. Prick used his golf club, you believe that? We got the nine-iron with hair and blood still on it. Sent it to the lab for testing, but it matches up perfect with the bludgeoning MO in the Green case.”
“What makes you think Esposito killed himself?” Melanie asked as they entered the office, which was crowded with cops.
“I got maybe ten, fifteen witnesses saw Esposito come in here alone at eleven-thirty last night. Me and my partner show up around one, find him with a gun in his hand and his brains splattered all over that wall there. M.E. hauled off the body already, but you can see the debris.”
A nauseating amount of chunky tissue and clotted blood adhered to the concrete wall behind Esposito’s desk. Someone had drawn a large circle around it with red Magic Marker.
“I see,” Melanie said, swallowing hard, turning away.
“Found him slumped in the chair. Looks from the trajectory like he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”
“I have to tell you, Detective, based on what I know about Jay Esposito, he’d never kill himself.”
“Maybe he figured he was going down and he couldn’t stomach the thought of the inside. Some guys can’t,” Leary said.
“Esposito would just hire a big-name lawyer in a two-thousand-dollar suit and try to beat the charges. He wouldn’t go without a fight. I’m sure of it.”
“What are you saying? You think he was murdered and the shooter faked a suicide?”
“Maybe. Who knows?” She paused, thinking about all the evidence that Esposito was being framed by somebody, then said more firmly, “Yes, I do.”