In the kitchen, Mike offered to tell the mother.
"That's okay, Mike," I said, smiling insanely as I dialed the number from the open address book. "Why break precedent?"
I held the phone away from my ear after I told Scott's mother that her son was dead. I eyed my partner across the kitchen as we listened to the agonized sounds coming from the earpiece.
Mike lifted a crayon-scribbled picture from underneath a Blue's Clues magnet on the fridge and shook his head. One of the kids had drawn a two-headed dragon.
"You find the ones responsible," Brooke said to me as we made our way to the door a few minutes later. The two-year-old boy was up now, too. He was attached to the leg that the four-year-old had neglected. The baby in Brooke's arms started to cry again.
"YOU FIND THEM!" followed us out the door. "FIND SCOTTY'S KILLER!"
Chapter 33
OTHER THAN BROOKE'S WORDS still ringing in my ears, our ride back to the Bronx was dead silent.
Scott's multi-agency Drug Enforcement Task Force team was waiting for us in their squad room on the second floor of the 48th Precinct. My Homicide unit was on the fourth. I averted my eyes from the doorway of the muster room Scott and I had met in as I made my way up the stairs.
The guys in Scott's unit didn't look like typical cops, even to me. For a second, I thought I'd made a wrong turn and stepped in on a skateboarding club meeting.
The DETF boss, DEA agent Jeff Trahan, was tall and had the longish blonde hair of an aging surfer. Scott's main backup, or "leash," as they called him, Asian American NYPD detective Roy Khuong, was so baby-faced he probably had trouble buying cigarettes. New York State detective Dennis Marut had the appearance of an East Asian Doogie Howser. Mountainous, black, draped head to toe in leather and gold, the last team member, Thaddeus Price, looked more like a bodyguard for a gangsta rapper than a DEA agent. I guess that was to his credit.
I stood beneath the buzzing fluorescents, almost wilting under the hard stares of the men.
But after a moment, I realized the expressions were the same ones I'd been seeing all night, looks of loss mixed with anger and shock. Pretty much what I was feeling myself – at least a part of what I was feeling.
For a Narcotics team, losing an undercover was a nightmare realized. Like most survivors of homicide victims, they looked like a bomb had just gone off; they were flailing around, looking for some direction, some notion of what to do next.
"We're here to help in any way we can," Trahan said solemnly after all the introductions had been made. "Just tell me what we can do for Scott."
How much longer could I keep this charade up? I wondered as I glanced away from the group's pain to the water-stained ceiling. A passing Long Island-bound eighteen-wheeler rattled a window that appeared to be painted shut in the corner. I took out my notebook.
"What was Scott currently working on?" I said.
Chapter 34
TRAHAN TOOK A DEEP BREATH and then began. "Scott was our primary undercover on a case we're making on a couple of Ecstasy dealers from Hunts Point, the Ordonez brothers," he said. "The older brother is an Air Force pilot who does supply runs back and forth to Germany. Turns out, he's flying back with just a little more than empty skids on his C-one-thirty. Scott made a couple of midlevel buys with them. We were planning a big one, a quarter-of-a-million-dollar deal, for next week, when we were going to bust them."
"Had Scott been in contact with them recently?" I said.
"He logged a call with them three days ago," Roy Khuong jumped in. "But he could have gotten a call tonight – off duty."
"Would Scott have gone to meet anyone without telling you?" I said.
"Not if he could have helped it," Roy said. "But undercover is seat-of-your-pants, dangerous work. You know that, Detective. Sometimes you don't get a chance to call for backup."
"You're saying Scott could have been approached by someone unexpectedly, asked to accompany them, and he would have had to do it in order to not make them suspicious," Mike said.
"Exactly," said Thaddeus Price. "It happens."
Trahan added another twist. "Or Scott could even have been approached by somebody from a previous case. Somebody he'd busted who'd gotten out of jail maybe. That's your worst fear when you're out there on the street. That you're going to be in Burger King with your kid and meet somebody you've already gone over on."
I heard my partner groan at what Trahan was saying. There were potentially hundreds of suspects in Scott's murder.
"First thing we need to do is bring in these Ordonez brothers for questioning," Mike said. "This deal was for big money. They could have picked up Scott early to rob him. Scott was beaten badly. So maybe he was tortured to tell them where the quarter million was. We need to pick them up. Do we know where these mutts are?"
"The pilot brother, Mark, works out of the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in South Jersey. We'll have the staties talk to his CO and check his apartment in Toms River," Trahan said. "But Victor, the younger one, has three or four stash apartments in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Girlfriends and relatives. It'll take a couple of hours to pinpoint where they're at. We'll get up on our wires and see what we can find out."
"In the meantime," Thaddeus said, "I'll get together the files from Scott's previous busts so we can start cross-referencing them with likelies who might have just gotten out of prison."
"That's a lot of files," Trahan said, shaking his head grimly. "Scott had hundreds of collars. He was one of the best undercovers I ever worked with."
He sure fooled me, I thought, remembering his wife and family.
I turned away from the pain in Trahan's bloodshot eyes. He looked as if he'd lost a best friend more than a co-worker.
"Wait a second," Detective Marut said. "Has Scott's family been told? My God, how will Brooke handle it? All those kids. I think four."
"Three children. We just got back from the notification," I said. "And she's handling it about as well as you would expect."
It sounded like a gunshot went off when Scott's partner, Roy Khuong, suddenly kicked the side of his desk. Paper went flying as he swept the entire contents of the desktop onto the floor before storming out of the room.
Mike shook his head, took out his cell phone, and started dialing a number.
"Who are you calling?" I said.
"Wake up the ADA on call," he said. "I'm going to get him to start on the subpoena to bring up the LUDs on Scott's house and cell phones."
My breath caught. LUDs were local usage details, a printout of the phone company records that would show every phone call to and from Scott's phones.
Including all the times Scott had called me!
Five minutes later, Mike stopped in the stairwell on our way upstairs to our squad room.
"Lauren, your eyes are gray," he said.
"What are you talking about? They're blue," I said.
"I meant the whites of them," Mike said. "You've been banging a mile a minute since this thing started. We're in a holding pattern now. It'll be morning before we get a real handle on anything. You live ten minutes away. Why don't you scoot home for a couple of hours of shut-eye. I was scheduled to work this shift. I'll mind the store."