THERE WAS HEAVY TRAFFIC on the Major Deegan south and more on the approach to the Triborough that night, that crazy, crazy night.
I couldn't decide which was making my eye twitch more as we crawled across the span – the horns from the cars logjammed in both directions around us, or the ones honking from our driver's Spanish music station.
I was heading to Virginia for a job-sponsored seminar.
Paul was going to apply some face time to one of his firm's biggest clients in Boston.
The only trip we modern, professional, go-getting Stillwells were going to share this week was the ride to LaGuardia Airport.
At least I had one of the great views of Manhattan outside my window. The Big Apple seemed even more majestic than usual with its glass-and-steel towers glowing against the approaching black thunderheads of a storm.
Gazing out, I remembered the cute apartment Paul and I once had on the Upper West Side. Saturdays at the Guggenheim or MOMA; the cheap hole-in-the-wall French bistro in NoHo; cold chardonnay in the "backyard," our fourth-floor studio's fire escape. All the romantic things we did before we got married, when our lives had been unpredictable and fun.
"Paul," I said urgently, almost mournfully. "Paul?"
If Paul had been a "guy guy," I might have been tempted to chalk up what was happening between us to the inevitable. You grow a little bit older, maybe more cynical, and the honeymoon finally ends. But Paul and me? We'd been different.
We'd been one of those sickening, best-friend married couples. The let's-die-at-the-exact-same-moment Romeo-and-Juliet soul mates. Paul and I had been so much in love – and that's not just selective memory talking. That was us.
We'd met in freshman year at Fordham Law. We were in the same study and social group but hadn't really talked. I'd noticed Paul because he was very handsome. He was a few years older than most of us, a little more studious, more serious. I actually couldn't believe it when he agreed to head down to Cancún for spring break with the gang.
On the night before our flight home, I got into a fight with my boyfriend at the time and accidentally fell through one of the hotel's glass doors, cutting my arm. While my supposed boyfriend announced he "just couldn't deal with it," Paul arrived out of nowhere and took over.
He took me to the hospital and stayed at my bedside. This, while everyone else promptly hopped on the flight home to avoid missing any classes.
As Paul walked through the doorway of my Mexican hospital room with our breakfast of milkshakes and magazines, I was reminded of how cute he was, how deep blue his eyes were, and that he had fantastic dimples and a killer smile.
Dimples and milkshakes, and my heart.
What had happened since then? I wasn't entirely sure. I guess we'd fallen into the rut of a lot of modern marriages. Neck-deep into our two demanding, separate careers, we'd become so adept at meeting our individual needs and wants that we'd forgotten the point: that we were supposed to be putting each other first.
I still hadn't confronted Paul about the blonde woman I'd seen him with in Manhattan. Maybe that was because I wasn't ready to have it out with Paul once and for all. And, of course, I didn't know for sure if he was having an affair. Maybe I was afraid about the end of us. Paul had loved me; I know he had. And I had loved Paul with everything I had in me.
Maybe I still did. Maybe.
"Paul," I called again.
Across the seat of the taxi, he turned at the sound of my voice. I felt like he was noticing me for the first time in weeks. An apologetic, almost sad expression formed on his face. His mouth started to open.
Then his blasted cell phone trilled. I remembered setting his ring tone to "Tainted Love" as a prank. Ironically, a silly song we'd once danced to drunk and happy had turned out to aptly describe our marriage.
Glaring at the phone, I seriously considered snatching it from his hand and flinging it out the window through the bridge cables into the East River.
A familiar glaze came across Paul's eyes after he glanced down at the number.
"I have to take this," he said, thumbing open the phone.
I don't, Paul, I thought as Manhattan slid away from us through the coiled steel.
This was it, I thought. The final straw. He'd wrecked everything between us, hadn't he?
And sitting there in that cab, I figured out the exact point when you call it quits.
When you can't even share a sunset together.
OMINOUS THUNDER CRACKED in the distance as we pulled off the Grand Central Parkway into the airport. The late-summer sky was graying rapidly, bad weather was approaching with speed.
Paul was jabbering something about book values as we pulled up to my stop at the Continental terminal. I didn't expect him to do something as effort-filled as kiss me good-bye. When Paul had his low "business voice" going on the phone, a bomb couldn't make him stop.
I reached quickly for the door when the driver switched the radio from the Spanish station to the financial news. If I didn't escape, I feared the insectile buzz of investo-speak in stereo was going to make me scream.
Until my throat bled.
Until I lost consciousness.
Paul waved from the back window without looking at me as the cab pulled away.
I was tempted to wave back with one finger as I rolled my suitcase through the sliding doors. But I didn't wave to Paul.
A few minutes later, I sat in the bar, waiting for my flight to be called, thinking very heavy thoughts. I took out the ticket as I sipped my cosmopolitan.
From the overhead speakers, a Muzak version of the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" was playing. How do you like that? The folks at Muzak had discovered my childhood.
It was good that I was feeling so manic and upbeat, because normally that realization might make me feel old and depressed.
I tapped the ticket against my lip, then very dramatically tore it in half before I finished my drink in one shot.
Next, I used the bar napkin to dry the tears in my eyes.
I was going to move on to Plan B.
It was going to be trouble, for sure. Big troubles, no bubbles.
I didn't care. Paul had ignored me too many times.
I made the phone call that I'd been putting off.
Then I rolled my suitcase back outside, climbed into the rear of the next available taxi, and gave the driver my home address.
The first drops of rain hit the windows as we pulled out, and I suddenly envisioned something huge slipping under dark water and beginning to slide, something monumental, slowly, irretrievably sinking. Down, down, down.
Or maybe not – just maybe, I was heading up for the first time in a long while.
IT WAS FULL-OUT POURING by the time I stepped back into my dark, empty house. I felt a little better when I switched my wet business suit for my old Amherst gym shirt and a pair of favorite jeans.
And a lot better when I put Stevie Ray Vaughan on the stereo to keep me company.
I decided to leave the lights off and crack open a dusty case of calla lily-scented candles from the front-hall closet.
Pretty soon, the house was looking like a church, or maybe a loopy Madonna video, given the way the drapes were blowing around. It inspired me to scroll my iPod down to her pop highness's "Dress You Up" and to crank up the sound.
Twenty minutes later the front doorbell rang and the baby lamb chops I'd ordered on the cab ride home arrived.
I took the small, precious brown-paper package from the FreshDirect delivery guy, went into the kitchen, and poured myself a glass of Santa Margherita as I chopped the garlic and lemons. After I put the red potatoes on for the garlic mashed, I set the table.
For two.
I took my Santa Margherita upstairs.
That's when I noticed the insistent red blink on my answering machine.
"Yeah, hi, Lauren. Dr. Marcuse here. I was leaving the office and just wanted to let you know that your results haven't come back yet. I know you're waiting. I'll let you know first thing after we hear from the lab."
As the machine clicked off, I pulled back my hair and gazed into the mirror at the faint wrinkles on my forehead and at the corners of my eyes.
I was three weeks late with my period. Which normally wouldn't be a concern.
Except that I was infertile.
The results that my ever-helpful gynecologist, Dr. Marcuse, was referring to were from the blood work and ultrasound he'd urged me to get.
It was a race at that point. A neck-and-neck downhill heat.
Which would fail first? I thought, lifting my glass.
My marriage or my health?
"Thanks for checking in, Dr. Marcuse," I said to the machine. "Your timing is impeccable."
AT THIS POINT, my heart was starting to race. Dinner for two – and neither of them was Paul.
After I finished my glass of wine, I went downstairs and did the only sensible thing under the circumstances. I found the bottle and took it back upstairs with me.
After I had filled my third glass, I carried it and my wedding picture onto my bed.
I sat and drank, and stared at Paul.
At first, I'd been pretty resigned to Paul's change in behavior after his latest and most pressure-filled promotion at work. I definitely thought it was unhealthy for him to be so stressed out all the time, but I also knew that investment finance was what he did. It was what he was good at, he'd told me many times. How he defined himself.
So I let it slide. His distance from me. The way he'd suddenly begun to ignore me at meals, and in the bedroom. He needed every ounce of concentration and energy for the office. And it was temporary, I told myself. Once he got up to speed, he would ease back. Or, at the very least, he would fail. I'd lick his wounds, and we'd be back to normal. I'd get to see those dimples again, that smile. We'd be back to being best friends.
I opened the night table drawer and took out my charm bracelet.
On my first birthday after we were married, Paul had bought it for me from, of all places, the preteen store Limited Too. So far I had six charms, the first, and my favorite, being a rhinestone heart, "for my love," he'd said.
I don't know why, but every year, each chintzy, puppy-love charm meant a million times more to me than the meal in the fancy restaurant he always took me to.
This year, Paul had gotten us into Per Se, the new white-hot spot in the Time Warner Center. But even after the crème brûlée, there was no gift.
He'd forgotten to get me a charm for the bracelet. Forgotten, or decided not to.
That had been the first sign of real trouble.
The Times Square neon billboard for trouble came in the form of the twenty-something blonde outside his office on Pearl Street – the one he'd taken into the St. Regis.
The one Paul had lied to my face about.
I WAS DOWNSTAIRS IN THE KITCHEN, laying the pink chops down into sizzling butter, when there was a hard rap on the window of the back door. The butterflies swirling in my stomach surged, changed formation. I looked at the clock on the microwave.
Eleven on the dot.
Here it was, here he was, I thought, dabbing the sweat from my forehead with a kitchen towel as I crossed to the door. It was actually happening.
Right here.
Right now.
I took a deep, deep breath and slipped open the dead bolt.
"Hi, Lauren."
"Hi back at you. You look nice. Great."
"For somebody who's soaking wet, right?"
The rain that swung in with the door spattered a constellation of dark, wet stars on the kitchen's pale stone tile.
And then he stepped in. Quite the entrance, I might add.
His tapered, six-two frame seemed to fill the room. In the candlelight, I could see that his dark hair was freshly cut, the color of wet white sand where it was shaved close to his skull.
Wind roared in, and the scent of him, cologne and rain and leather from the motorcycle jacket he wore, hit me head-on.
Oprah has probably devoted a couple of hours to how you get to this point, I thought as I struggled for something to say. Harmless workplace flirting that leads to infatuation that leads to a furtive friendship that leads to… I still wasn't sure what to call this.
I knew some married female co-workers who took part in harmless flirting, but I'd always put up a wall when I was dealing with men professionally, especially the handsome, funny ones like Scott. It just didn't feel right, going there.
But Scott had gotten over my wall somehow, gotten inside my defenses. Maybe it was the fact that, for all his size and good looks, there was an innocence about him. Or maybe it was how he was almost formal with me. Old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. Or how his presence in my life seemed to have increased in perfect ratio to Paul's pulling away.
And as if that weren't enough, there was something nicely mysterious about him, something subtle under the surface that pulled at me.
"So, you're actually here," Scott said, breaking the silence between us. "Wait, I almost forgot."
For the first time, I noticed the wet, tattered brown bag he was holding. He blushed as he took a little stuffed animal out of it. It was a Beanie Baby, one I'd never seen before, a little tan puppy. I looked at the name tag, "Badges." Then I looked at the birthdate, December 1.
I put a hand to my open mouth.
My birthday.
I'd been looking for one with my birthday only forever. Scott knew, and he had found it.
I looked at the puppy. Then I remembered how Paul had forgotten the charm for my bracelet. That's when I felt something break like thin ice inside me, and I was crying.
"Lauren, no," Scott said, panicked. He raised his arms to embrace me, then stopped as if he'd run into some invisible wall.
"Listen," he said. "The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you. This is all too much. I can see that now. I… I'll just go, okay? I'll see you tomorrow as usual. I'll bring the Box O' Joe, you bring the cinnamon Munchkins, and this never happened. Okay?"
Then my back door opened again, and Scott was gone into the night.
I LISTENED TO THE MEAT SIZZLE rather melodramatically as I wiped my eyes with a dish towel. What was I doing? Was I crazy? Scott was right. What the hell had I been thinking? I stood there dumbly staring at the puddles he'd made on the floor seconds ago.
Then, the next thing I knew, I turned off the stove, grabbed my handbag, threw the door open, and ran outside in the dark.
He was getting on his motorcycle half a block away when I caught up to him, completely drenched now myself.
A light went on in a neighbor's house. Mrs. Waters was just about the biggest gossip on our block. What would she say if she saw me? Scott noticed me looking up at the window nervously.
"Here," he said, handing me his helmet. "Don't overthink this, Lauren. Just do it. Get on."
I put the helmet on and took another, even stronger hit of Scott's scent as he started up his red Ducati racing bike. It sounded like something detonating.
"Come on," he yelled, offering his hand. "Quick!"
"Isn't it dangerous to ride in the rain?" I asked.
"Outrageously," he said, grinning irresistibly as he gunned the throttle.
I put out my hand, and the next second, I was climbing on behind Scott and wrapping my arms around his sides.
I had just enough time to tuck my head between his shoulder blades before we screamed up the hill of my cul-de-sac like a bottle rocket.
IT'S POSSIBLE I LEFT CLAW MARKS on Scott's leather jacket while I hung on for dear life. My stomach bottomed out whenever we hit a dip and then seemed to bang off the roof of my skull when we topped rises. The rain-slicked world appeared to melt away as we hurtled past.
I cursed myself for not drawing up a living will when the bike's back tire fishtailed onto the entrance to the Saw Mill River Parkway. Then Scott let the bike run loose!
The next time I breathed and looked up, we were pulling off the Henry Hudson Parkway into Riverdale, an upscale neighborhood in the Bronx.
We came roaring down a hill and only slowed as we turned onto a street lined with dark, gated mansions. In a flash of lightning I saw the wide silver chasm of the Hudson close below us, the stark, shattered face of the New Jersey Palisades directly across the water.
"C'mon, Lauren," Scott said, suddenly stopping the bike and hopping off. He waved for me to follow him as he started walking up the cobblestone driveway of a colonial about the size of a Home Depot.
"You live here?" I called to him after I removed his helmet.
"Kinda," Scott called back, waving some more.
"Kinda?"
I followed him into a free-standing, three-car garage that was almost as big as my house. Inside, there was a Porsche, a Bentley, and a Ferrari the same color as Scott's bike.
"Those aren't yours!" I said in shock.
"I wish," Scott said, climbing a set of stairs. "They're more like my roommates. I'm just house-sitting for this friend of mine. C'mon, I'll get us towels."
I walked behind him into a small, loft-style apartment above the garage. He popped open a couple of Budweisers and put on a Motown CD before he went into the bathroom. In the massive bay window, the storm-racked Hudson was framed like a billboard.
After Scott tossed me a fluffy towel that smelled of lemon, he stood on the bathroom threshold, just staring at me. Like I was beautiful or something.
It was the same way I'd caught him looking at me down a corridor or in the parking lot or stairwell at work.
A kind of pleading in his almond-shaped brown eyes.
For the first time I allowed myself to stare back. I took a sip of cold beer.
Then my beer dropped from my hand as I suddenly realized why I was so attracted to him. It was crazy, really. When I was in high school, I met a boy on summer vacation at Spring Lake on the Jersey Shore. He was in charge of the bike-rental place by the boardwalk, and let me tell you, Lance Armstrong didn't put in as much roadwork that summer as I did.
Then one Friday night, the most momentous Friday in my life up to that point, he invited me to my first beach party.
I guess every life has at least one golden moment, right? A period of time when the glory of the world and your place in it briefly and magically align.
That beach party was mine.
There I was. My first honest-to-God beer buzz, the ocean crashing in the background, the evening sky the color of turquoise, as this perfect, older boy reached out across the sand and without a word took my hand in his. I was sixteen years old. My braces were off, my burn had finally started to turn to brown, and I had a sense of infinite possibilities and a stomach you could bounce a quarter off.
That's who Scott reminded me of, I realized, staring at the light in his eyes – Mike, the Jersey Shore bike boy, come to take me back to the endless beach party, where there were no high-stress jobs, no biopsies, and no cheating husbands with attractive blondes on their arm.
And I guess, right then, what I wanted more than anything, at the most confusing, shitty time of my entire life, was to go back there with him. And be that sixteen-year-old girl again.
Scott was down on his knees, wiping up the beer spill. I took a breath, reached out, and brushed my hand over his head. "You're sweet," I whispered.
Scott stood up and held my face in his hands. "No, you're the one who's sweet. And you're the most beautiful woman I know, Lauren. Kiss me. Please."
PAUL AND I HAD ONCE HAD a sweet sex life. In the early days, we were inseparable. On the way down to our third honeymoon, in Barbados, we even became full-fledged members of the Mile High Club.
But being with Scott?
It was life-threatening.
For the better part of an hour, we just kissed and caressed and fondled, my breath and heart rate accelerating in dangerous increments with each button release, every tug of my clothes. When Scott eventually pulled up my shirt and pressed his face to my stomach, I almost bit through my lower lip.
Then he popped the top button of my jeans. From my throat came a sound that wasn't even close to human. I was in danger of passing out, and loving it.
We staggered from room to room, shedding each other's clothes. We clinched, straining against each other, desperate for breath. I had been needing this for so long, especially the touches, the caresses, maybe just the attention.
How we actually ended up in his bed, I couldn't quite remember. Somewhere near the end, I recall, lightning struck so close in the backyard that the window rattled in its frame in time to the headboard.
Maybe God was trying to tell me something.
But I don't think we could have stopped if the roof of the house had been ripped away.
Afterward I lay there on the comforter, shuddering like a trauma victim, sweat covering my cheeks and neck, my lungs stinging. The wind howled against the windowpane as Scott rolled his searing body off mine. "Jeez, Lauren. My God, you're great."
I was afraid he might stand up and offer to take me home then. I was happily relieved when he spooned in beside me, resting his chin on my shoulder. As we cuddled in the dark, all I could think about were those eyes of his, those gentle, almost auburn-colored eyes, as he finger-combed my hair.
"I think I need a shower," he said finally. His long, muscular legs seemed to wobble when he stood. "Check that out. I need an IV."
"You could get one at the emergency room when you drop me off," I said, smiling.
I had just enough energy to prop up my head on a pillow as Scott walked to the bathroom. I could see him in the mirror when he turned on the light. He was beautiful. Honest to God he was.
His bunched muscles dug into his sides and his tanned back. He looked like something off a Calvin Klein billboard.
It had been… perfect, I thought. Better than I had had any reason to expect. Undeniably hot, but also sweet. I hadn't thought Scott would be so affectionate, that we would connect emotionally as well as physically.
I'd needed to have this happen, I realized. To feel hot and then warm. To laugh. To be held close by someone who liked me and who thought I was special.
And I refuse to feel guilty, I thought, listening to another close explosion of thunder.
What's good for the goose is definitely good for the desperate housewife. Even if this never happened again – and maybe it wouldn't, shouldn't – it was worth it.
IN THE CRAMPED DARK of his Toyota Camry parked half a block north of the apartment over the garage, Paul Stillwell stared, mesmerized, as another flash of lightning illuminated Scott's shiny red motorcycle.
He'd actually seen the Ducati in the centerfold of the FYI section of Fortune magazine once, one of those impossibly expensive fantasy boy toys. Something a movie star or the devil-may-care heir to a European shipping conglomerate might ride.
And happy assholes like Scott, Paul thought, staring at its fighter-jet contours, red and slick as lip gloss in the shimmer of light.
His throat tightened as he tore his eyes away and went back to scrolling through the pictures file on his Verizon cell.
He stopped at the shot of Scott that he'd taken when he followed Scott home from work the week before. In the photograph, Scott was astride the Italian bike at a stoplight, his full-face helmet perched back on his forehead. Lean, powerful, and as cocky as the expensive machine between his legs.
Paul closed the cell and stared out through the rain at the light in the garage's upstairs window.
Then he leaned back and lifted the Ping 3 iron from the floor of the backseat. The golf club had good heft and balance.
It was a drastic solution, he knew, staring at the heavy, fist-size metal club's face. But what choice did you have when a man invaded your house and took what was yours?
Everything was in jeopardy now, he reminded himself. Everything he'd worked for was in danger of slipping through his fingers.
Maybe he should have done something sooner. Headed things off before it came to this. But maybes and should haves and if onlys were beside the point now, weren't they? One question remained: Would he allow this bullshit to continue or would he not?
No, Paul thought, cutting the ignition. There's only one way to end this.
The rain rattled on the roof of the Camry. He pocketed his cell phone and took a deep breath. With slow, almost ceremonial deliberation, he wrapped his black-gloved hand around the grip of the perfectly weighted club.
The extreme hard way, he thought, and he opened the car door and stepped out into the driving rain.
"SO, WHAT NOW?" Scott said, pulling his jacket on over his bare chest as he came out of the shower.
"Surprise me," I said. "I like surprises. I love surprises."
Scott bent over and took my left wrist. My vision went double as he softly kissed my pulse point.
"How was that?" he said, smiling.
"Nice start," I said when my lung function finally returned.
"You stay here while I spin by the all-night market. I'm out of fresh basil and olive oil," Scott said, standing. "You don't mind if I whip us up a late dinner, do you? I have some great veal cutlets I got on Arthur Avenue yesterday. I'll make you my mom's sauce. It's better than Rao's."
Mind! I thought, envisioning Scott in an apron. A man actually cooking for me?
"I could probably suffer through it," I said after I finished swallowing really hard.
Scott was opening the door, when he suddenly stopped and turned, staring back at me.
"What?" I said. "Changed your mind about cooking?"
"I…," he said, "I guess I'm just glad we did this tonight, Lauren. I wasn't sure if you would go through with it. I'm glad you did. I'm really glad we did."
Wow, I thought, smiling as he closed the door. I looked out at the storm-racked Hudson. Scott probably had the right idea, didn't he? Live for the moment. Forever young. Carefree. Maybe I could get used to this.
I glanced at my watch. Just after one. Where was I supposed to be now? In bed in some cramped Virginia Marriott.
Sorry, Paul, I thought. But remember, you started this.
I decided to call him and get it over with. It was as good a time as any to go through the motions. Paul liked charades, didn't he?
I could play at that game, too, I thought as I rolled off the bed, looking for my bag and my cell phone.
THERE'S MY BOY, Paul thought as Scott Thayer threw open the side door of the garage. Hey there, Scotty.
Dressed all in black and crouched in the shadows along the ivy-covered wall beside Scott's parked motorcycle, Paul knew he wouldn't be seen. Besides, it was raining like hell.
Paul hefted the golf club as Scott came across the driveway and entered the dark street. Time to show this son of a bitch the error of his ways.
Scott was ten feet away. Five.
Then suddenly, inexplicably, horribly, there was music blaring from somewhere. From him! From Paul's jacket pocket! His cell phone was going off!
No! Paul thought, reaching down to silence the stupid "Tainted Love" ring tone. Why the hell hadn't he left his cell in the car?
He was fumbling to turn it off with his free hand when Scott Thayer crashed into him at a run. Paul's breath left him as he was knocked backward onto the muddy ground.
He looked up, meeting Scott's wide eyes.
"You!" Scott said in shock. The golf club disappeared out of Paul's hand as Scott kick-smashed his motorcycle boot into Paul's fingers. Then Scott lifted Paul off his feet and threw him into the air. Paul cried out as his back struck something painfully hard. It was the Ducati. He and the bike went over in a pitiful heap.
"If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were planning on doing me some harm tonight, Mr. Stillwell," Scott said, not even breathing heavily. He lifted the fallen club as he slowly approached.
"Something like this could really hurt somebody," Scott said, waving the 3 iron at him like a chiding finger. "Here, let me show you."
I STOOD THERE, FROZEN, my nose millimeters from the rain-streaked glass as I looked out at the private street in front of the garage.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This isn't happening, I thought. It can't be happening.
Paul was here?
And he and Scott were fighting in the street! Really going at each other.
I'd gone to the window when I heard the crash of the motorcycle. Then I found myself immobile, unable to do anything but stand and stare at the unbelievable scene.
Of course Paul was here, I thought, reeling. What an idiot I'd been! Scott and I hadn't been discreet. We'd sent e-mails back and forth. I'd actually put Scott's number in my cell phone. Paul had simply started keeping tabs.
Guilt rattled through me. And fear.
What had I been thinking?
For weeks I'd tortured myself, imagining Paul with his blonde lover. Night after night, I'd envisioned them making love in their St. Regis suite. I was wallowing in the pain that only a spouse who realizes they're being cheated on feels. Pathetic.
But imagining was one thing.
Doing the same thing as revenge was another.
I'd just had a quickie for Christ's sake!
I watched, helpless, as Paul and Scott crashed into each other. Then the fight moved out of my line of sight, blocked by the vine-covered wall across the street. The two of them became just shadows. Violent ones that grappled and walloped and kicked at each other. What was happening now?
I couldn't think of what to do. Call out? Try to stop them?
And I was only looking at the preamble. It would be even worse when the fight was over and Paul came inside. When I had to face him.
I didn't know how I was going to do that.
Suddenly, there was a tremendous crack, like a well-hit baseball, and I didn't have to think about it anymore.
Both shadows stopped moving.
Then one dropped. He actually bounced off the ground before he lay completely still.
Who was hurt? Who was down? I wondered with a kind of dumbstruck curiosity. Then the scariest question of all occurred to me. One that took my breath away as it nicked through my heart like a cold razor.
Who did I want it to be?
FOR A HEART-PUNISHING MINUTE, everything was dead still. The shadow figures outside. My breathing. Even the rain appeared to have stopped. The silence was so absolute it seemed to ring.
Then from out of it came a far-off thump. Then another thump. Thump, thump, thump. I thought it might be the sound of my heart amplified by terror until a silvery glow cut through the darkness.
The unmistakable throbbing assault of cranked-up rap music reached my eardrums as a tricked-out Acura pulled onto the street and then into a driveway at the far end of the block.
For the briefest moment, powerful xenon headlights lit the opposite side of the street, revealing the unforgettable scene in its startling entirety.
It only took a millisecond, but that was more than enough time for the image to be burned forever into my memory.
The standing shadow was definitely Paul. He was breathing heavily, holding Scott's motorcycle helmet in his hand like a club.
Scott lay at his feet, a golf club near his hand, a black halo of blood beneath his head.
This is what happens when you cheat, a voice whispered in my ear.
This is what you get.
Then, at that moment, I did the most constructive thing I could think of. I dropped away from the window and hid my face in my hands.
Scott was down, not moving.
Because of me.
I was still in full-body lockdown, fumbling with these new, numbing realities, when another thought occurred to me.
Was Paul crazy enough to come after me, too?
Overcome with the need to see where Paul was now, I went back to the window.
What the hell?
Parked directly behind Scott's fallen motorcycle, in the dome of light, was Paul's car. I watched in horror as Paul tossed Scott onto the backseat. It seemed like Scott's head banged against the door frame, and I heard him groan.
What did Paul think he was doing?
Finally, I rushed down the stairs of the apartment. I couldn't let this continue. I went through CPR procedure in my head. Mouth-to-mouth. I was almost at the door when I suddenly realized I didn't have any clothes on. I hurried back upstairs.
I had my T-shirt on and was fumbling with my jeans when I heard the thunk of a car door closing, and then the sound of tires spinning.
I rushed to the window again.
I looked out just in time to see Paul's car speeding away.
My chest burning, my head spinning, I had one more question for Paul as I watched the car's red running lights disappear into the darkness.
Where the hell are you going with Scott, Paul?
IT TOOK ME A FULL TWO MINUTES to realize what must have happened. Two mind-and-body-numbing minutes of leaning my head against the cold, rain-streaked glass. I smiled when the sweet logic of it suddenly struck me. For the first time that night, my heart slowed slightly and approached a semi-human rate.
Paul must have taken Scott to the hospital.
Of course he had. Paul had come to his senses. Sure, he'd lost it for a few minutes. Who wouldn't, catching up with the man who was sleeping with his wife? But after Scott had gone down, Paul finally snapped out of it.
They had to be pulling up to the emergency room of the closest hospital right now.
I called a taxi and arrived back home in Yonkers an excruciating forty minutes later. I threw open the door and stood there, staring at the microwave clock in the silent house.
Where was Paul? Shouldn't he be back by now? What was happening?
I decided Paul had taken Scott to Lawrence Hospital, about ten minutes away from Scott's apartment. But now over an hour had passed. There was no word. Had something even more terrible happened? Maybe Paul had been arrested.
I checked the answering machine upstairs, but other than my gynecologist's dispatch on my failing health, it was empty. After another five minutes, spent staring at the empty street, I seriously considered giving Paul a call on his cell to see what was going on. The problem was, I didn't know exactly how to phrase things.
Hi, Paul? Yeah, it's me, Lauren. How's the guy I was screwing behind your back coming along? Is he going to be okay?
I needed to find out what was going on firsthand, I finally decided. But waiting around like this was making me insane.
It was time to face the music.
I needed to go to the hospital. I grabbed my gun, tossed it in my handbag, and ran out the door.
THANK GOD FOR ABS, I thought as I came centimeters from rear-ending with my Mini Cooper the shiny ambulance parked in front of the Lawrence Hospital ER.
"Where's the beating victim?" I called to the polished-looking red-haired nurse behind the Plexiglas at the triage desk.
"Oh my God! You were beaten?" she said, spilling the People magazine out of her lap as she stood.
I looked around the waiting room. It was empty. Stranger than that, it was clean. Calming classical music serenaded from the overhead speakers. Bronxville, Yonkers ' extremely wealthy neighbor to the east, was one of the most upscale suburbs in Westchester, I remembered. Lawrence did lacrosse injuries, the occasional Oxy overdose, a debutante who'd fallen off her horse.
I rolled my eyes as I headed back to the parking lot.
A bloody John Doe couldn't have been left at Lawrence Hospital 's doorstep, I realized, because the entire Bronxville police force wasn't here. So, where could Paul have taken Scott?
I racked my brain for the next-nearest hospital.
Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center, to the south on the Bronx River Parkway, I decided, as I peeled out into the wet street once again.
Back down in the real Bronx. The one without the ville.
After hammering it down the parkway for ten minutes, I noticed that the center-doored colonials that bookended the parkway had been replaced by less quaint, gritty tenements. Steve McQueen would have been proud of the fishtailing stop I made before I ran into the ER entrance of Our Lady of Mercy on East 233rd Street.
I heard vociferous complaints as I cut to the head of the long triage line in the packed, grimy waiting room.
"Have you had any anonymous beating victims in the last hour?" I yelled to the first nurse I could find.
She replaced the bloody dish towel over the barbecue fork stuck in the hand of the Hispanic woman beside her before she looked up.
"He's in three," she said, annoyed. "Who the hell are you?"
More shouts followed me as I rushed through the open door behind her. I found number 3 and ripped back the green plastic curtain around it.
"Ever hear a knockin', bitch?" a near-naked black kid asked me in a malevolent tone as he attempted to cover himself with the hand not cuffed to the bed rail. A big white bandage was wrapped around his head, and a big white uniformed cop was sitting by his feet.
I felt something shift ominously in my stomach.
If Scott wasn't here, I thought…
Then where the hell was he? And where was Paul?
"Yo, Earth to lady," the Bronx uniform said to me with a snap of his fingers. "What's up?"
I was fumbling for a lie when I heard two loud beeps cut from the static of his radio.
He ignored me for a moment as he turned it up. The words were too garbled for me to catch everything, but I heard something about a white male victim, along with an address.
St. James Park. Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue.
White male? I thought. No way. Impossible. Had to be a coincidence.
I closed my gaping mouth as the cop directed his suspicious stare back at me.
"So you're saying this isn't where I hand in my urine sample?" I said, backing away.
Minutes later I was flooring it, heading south down the Bronx River Parkway. I'd just swing by, I told myself as I rocketed off at the Fordham Road exit. No biggie. It was almost stupid, really. Because Scott couldn't be at some Bronx crime scene. Because he was right now at a hospital, being treated for some cuts and bruises. Minor cuts and bruises, I reminded myself.
I rolled west up Fordham Road. I passed under a sign above a broken streetlight that proclaimed, "The Bronx Is Back." Where had it been? I thought, staring at the steel-shuttered Spanish clothing stores interrupted by the occasional Popeye's Fried Chicken or Taco Bell.
I made a hard right onto Jerome Avenue.
And slammed on the Mini's brakes with both feet.
I'D NEVER SEEN SO MANY NYPD cop cars in one place. They were on the sidewalk, under the elevated track, parked like a wagon train in St. James, a block-square concrete park. Every one of their blue and red and yellow lights was flying full throttle. There was so much yellow crime-scene tape, it looked like Christo had decided to do a yellow-and-black installation in the Bronx.
Keep going, a voice whispered in the back of my mind. Some ER doctor is sewing Scott's stitches right at this very moment. Or, who knew? Maybe Paul had already dropped him back at his place.
Get out of this wretched place right now. You'll get into trouble, big trouble, if you stay here.
But I couldn't go. I needed to be sure. I needed to act responsibly. Starting right now.
I rolled directly toward the commotion.
The thin, silver-haired cop directing traffic around the light show gave me a look of eye-boggled shock as I stopped my car almost on top of him.
He was reaching for his cuffs when I opened the door and all but fell out of my car. When I went into my handbag, he changed his mind and went for his Glock instead.
But then I took it out.
Took out my badge.
The gold badge I'd been given when the NYPD promoted me to detective.
"Jesus," the relieved-looking uniform said as he lifted the yellow tape behind him and beckoned me under.
"Why didn't you just say you were on The Job?"
I'D BEEN A COP FOR SEVEN YEARS, the last year and a half as a Detective First Grade on the Bronx Homicide Task Force. Which made my co-worker Scott Thayer a cop, too. Detective Third Grade with Bronx Narcotics.
What can I say?
Office affairs happen in the NYPD, too.
I dodged under the yellow tape and walked toward the blinding white floodlights the Crime Scene Unit had set up at the center of the park. Maybe it was just my frazzled state, but I was all too familiar with crime scenes and I'd never seen one quite so frantic, or one filled with so many pissed-off cops. What the hell was going on?
I walked past rusted monkey bars and a graffiti-covered wall for handball.
I stopped in the darkness just beyond where the lights blazed down on a fountain so old and exhaust-stained that its granite looked black.
A blue plastic tarp around its ornate base was half floating in the water, covering something. What was under the blue tarp?
I had a feeling it wasn't some new artwork about to be unveiled up here in the Bronx.
I almost jumped as a hand, large and warm, palmed the standing hairs at the back of my neck.
"What are you doing here, Lauren?" Detective Mike Ortiz said with his ever-serene half-smile.
Mike, my partner for the past year, was in his midforties and about as laid-back as he was large. He was constantly being mistaken for The Rock, so I guess that made him confident enough to be laid-back, or any other way he wanted to be.
"Aren't you supposed to be down in Quantico, handing out, I mean, picking up, tips at the FBI Academy?" Mike asked.
My seminar in Virginia was with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, an NYPD-sponsored brushup on the latest investigative techniques.
"Missed my flight," I managed to get out. "I'll get an early one tomorrow."
Mike clucked his tongue as he nudged me forward into the spotlight beside the fountain. "I have a funny feeling you're going to wish you'd made that plane," he said.
My partner tossed me a pair of rubber boots and gloves as we got to the fountain's scrolled stone rim. I slowly pulled them on and then swung myself over the edge and down into the water.
The icy rainwater went to about mid-shin.
I kept my questionable balance and motion forward by concentrating on the glitter of the police lights inside the rain pocks. They looked like tiny fireworks, I thought as I waded closer to the tarp. Little red and blue blossoms of light. Kind of unreal, like everything else tonight.
This was stupid, I thought with conviction as I sloshed even closer.
Because there was a drug dealer under the tarp. Or just another junkie. People like me always ended up doing a meet-and-greet with them, just like tonight.
Then I was finally beside the blue tarp under the hot, unforgiving glare of the portable light carts. No more delaying. I couldn't have turned back now if I'd wanted to. Mike Ortiz was right behind me. "Do the honors, Lauren," he said.
I held my breath.
And tugged the sheet away.
JESUS GOD, HELP ME, I thought.
My next thought was even weirder.
When I was seven years old, I caught a men's softball game line drive right in my chest. It was at our Bronx Irish neighborhood's annual NYPD vs. FDNY barbecue, and it happened as I was on the Finest first-base line, cheering on my patrol sergeant dad, who was on the mound, pitching. I don't remember the ball hitting me, don't remember a thing about it. They said that my heart actually stopped. My father had to give me CPR until they defibrillated me. I don't remember any light at the end of a tunnel or any sweet-faced guardian angels beckoning me heavenward. Only pain and the silently moving mouths of the adults looking down at me, seen as if through an incredibly thick piece of glass.
I felt that exact same sense of disconnection as I looked down.
And saw warm brown eyes staring up at me through a foot of bloody rainwater.
I almost hugged Scott right there and then. Almost dropped right into the water beside him in all my clothes, wrapped my arms around him.
Except I was unable to move.
I remembered the first time we met, at the 48th Precinct under the Cross Bronx Expressway. I was working overtime in the Homicide squad room upstairs, and Scott was working OT out of Narcotics downstairs, when the soda machine in the muster room wouldn't take my dollar. He gave me one of his, and when I hit the button, two Diet Cokes dropped down.
"Don't worry," Scott said, smiling. You could almost hear the click as our eyes met. "I won't tell Internal Affairs."
I swallowed as the rain fell around me now. I eyed the tiny circles it was making over Scott's dead eyes.
"One of the uniforms ID'd him. Name's Scott Thayer," Mike said. "He's a detective from Bronx Narcotics. One of us, Lauren. This is as bad as it gets. Somebody killed a cop."
My hands went up to my leaking eyes. I contemplated ripping them out.
"He was beaten very badly," my partner continued, sounding to me like he was speaking from somewhere out past Pluto.
I nodded. Tell me something I don't know, I thought.
Then Mike did.
"Beaten to a pulp," he said, anger seeping into his voice. "And then somebody shot him."
SHOT HIM?
"See the entry wound under his left jaw?" my partner said, pointing as he continued to talk in a soft, mournful way.
I stared, nodded. I couldn't believe that I'd missed it. It looked like a misplaced belly button. I shuddered as I suddenly remembered the feel of Scott's stubble on my stomach.
"And the corneas."
I nodded. Death sometimes makes the corneas look blurry after a few hours. Scott's were clear, indicating that he'd died very recently.
"He's got an ankle holster, but the gun is missing," Mike said. "It's a small holster, so I'm not sure if it was his service weapon… or maybe a throw-down in case he got into a questionable shoot. Who knows what he was doing here? Anyway, better to be tried by twelve than carried out by six, right? But it looks like Scott missed his day in court. God help him."
This was one reason not to get involved in an office romance, I thought as I stepped out of the fountain and collapsed back against the cold, wet edge a minute or so later.
My brain made itself semi-useful by locking onto one word as I sat there. It banged against my skull, ricocheting off the inside like a trapped bird looking for an escape.
Why?
Why? Why? Why?
Scott had been alive. I'd heard him moan when Paul put him in the car. I was a Homicide detective, a trained expert in these kinds of things. Scott had been alive.
Had been, I thought, alternating glances between the tarp and the ground between my feet. After a while, I noticed that it wasn't actually a tarp. It was a Neat Sheet.
I shook my head in disbelief. I remembered clearly the trip to Stop amp; Shop when I bought the picnic blanket for Paul to keep in the trunk of his car.
Paul, you idiot, I thought as tears sprang hot from my eyes.
You stupid, goddamn idiot.
"I know, Lauren," Mike said as he sat down beside me.
"That might as well be you in there," he said. "Might as well be me. Imagine, everything he ever worked for. Everything he ever enjoyed. Ever planned."
Mike shook his head grimly.
"Dumped into a Bronx fountain like so much garbage."
For a moment I felt the immense weight of my guilt. The idea of owning up hovered over me like a waiting avalanche. All I needed to do was turn to my partner and spill my guts. Tell him everything. Commence the end of my life as I knew it.
But I just couldn't make the words come out. Not now, anyway. Was it some instinctual desire to protect Paul? To protect myself? I don't know, I sincerely don't.
But I didn't say anything to my partner and the moment passed.
I kept my thoughts to myself and shook as I cried.
I WAS STILL WIPING MY EYES when a pair of clunky black shoes appeared in front of my rubber boots.
I tilted my head up and saw my boss, Lieutenant Pete Keane. Irish, fair-skinned, baby-faced, and near-skeletal. The overseer of the Bronx Homicide Task Force could have passed for an aging altar boy if not for the flat nail heads of his hard gray eyes.
"Lauren," he said. "Came in when you heard the bad news, huh? I'm really glad you did. Saves me a call. I want you to be the primary investigator on this. You and Mike'll be the perfect team. You're my go-to guys, right?"
I stared at Pete Keane. Things were happening at warp speed. I was hardly reconciled to the fact that Scott was dead, and now my boss wanted me to be in charge of the case?
I wondered suddenly if Keane had learned about our affair. Jesus. Maybe he suspected I knew something about Scott's death and was testing me. Was that it?
No, I thought. That was impossible. Nobody knew at work. Scott and I had gone to painstaking lengths to make sure of that. Besides, nothing except flirting and a few meals had even happened between us. Until tonight, of course.
Actually, it felt like just about every conceivable thing had happened between me and Scott tonight.
It was only that Pete Keane liked me for big cases, I realized after a paranoia-dissipating breath. There were detectives on our squad who were senior to me, but I, his "lady lawyer cop," as he liked to call me, was a perfectionist. I put my law school training to work in the Homicide squad. I went methodically by the book, was completely thorough, completely organized, and I had a very high success rate. Bronx assistant DAs practically fought to take my cases because they could just about read my reports aloud for their prosecutions.
In a big-daddy political-shitstorm case like this, it would be all about reports, I realized. The ones that would have to be sent up the chain of command on practically an hourly basis.
I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there. I needed time to think, to sift through the pieces of my blown-apart life.
I felt the knot in my stomach twist like a corkscrew. In the end, it all came down to my inability to come up with a plausible excuse for not taking the assignment. For the moment, words failed me.
"Whatever you want, Pete," I found myself saying.
My boss nodded.
"Scott Thayer," he said, shaking his head wearily. "Goddamn twenty-nine years old. Unbelievable. You guys know him at all?"
Mike blew on his coffee, shook his head.
My boss turned to me.
"How about you, Lauren?" he said.
How could I deny Scott? I thought. Only hours before, he'd stared into my eyes as he stroked my hair in his bed. Now he was lying there cold on stone, the expression of pain on his face reserved only for those who die completely alone.
The number 4 train screeched past on the elevated track on Jerome Avenue behind us. The blue-white light of its sparks snapped against the dark faces of the surrounding tenements.
"The name sounds familiar, I think," I lied as I peeled off a rubber glove.
My first lie, I thought, looking out at the sea of NYPD blue and the flashing firefight of emergency lights.
I had a feeling it wasn't going to be my last.
"GIVE ME WHAT YOU GOT SO FAR," Keane said. "Commissioner just got off the Whitestone. I need smoke to blow up his ass – and keep it coming. What's your initial read on the crime scene? Impressions – anything at all?"
"Massive lacerations and contusions to the face," Mike said. "And one bullet wound under the left jaw. Maybe more, but we're still waiting on the ME so we can roll him."
"Caliber?"
"Medium. A thirty-eight, maybe," Mike guessed with a shrug of his shoulders.
"Service weapon or badge anywhere?"
Mike shook his head grimly.
"First impression is that somebody threw Thayer an incredible beating, shot him, and then dumped him here. Somebody pretty perturbed."
"You agree, Lauren?" my boss asked.
I nodded, cleared my throat.
"Looks like it," I said.
"Why do you say 'dumped him'?" Keane asked next. "You pretty sure Thayer wasn't killed here?"
"Not much blood in the fountain. Plus, his clothes are covered in mud and grass stains," Mike said. "This park hasn't seen grass since the Iroquois Nation."
"Do your canvass forthwith," Keane said. "Talk to the ME and crime-scene, then get your asses into Thayer's office and check out his caseload. See what was open, what he was doing. The other members of his Drug Enforcement Task Force are being called as we speak. Talk to them when they get in. Talk to everybody in the squad."
Keane turned as a speeding, four-car entourage arrived beneath the elevated track from the south. He gave me a fatherly pat on the back.
"They're probably going to try to give this to those prima donnas at Major Case, but I'm not going to let them do it. This happened in our house. Make me proud."
MAKE MY BOSS PROUD? I thought numbly as Pete Keane walked away.
That was going to take some doing.
Wait a second, I thought. Where was Paul? I'd been so busy being angry at him, I hadn't even thought to check if he was okay. For the first time, I realized something chilling.
For all I knew, he could have been shot, too! That actually made some sense to me.
I tried Paul's cell first. My stomach dropped as his voice mail picked up.
I had to see if Paul was okay.
"Damn," I said, slapping my forehead with my phone as I looked up at my partner. "You're not going to believe this, but I had terrible insomnia last night, so I was up baking, and I left something in the oven. I need to swing by my house, Mike. You think you could cover for me for about half an hour?"
"What?" Mike said, shaking his head. "Biggest case of our lives and… What was it, anyway?"
"Brownies."
"Okay, Betty Crocker," Mike said with a dumbfounded shake of his head. "I got you covered for now. We have to wait around for the ME, anyway. Anybody asks, I'll tell them you went to swing by Scott's office. But you better fly, Ms. Primary Investigator. I don't think the LT is going to be too happy if you're not here when he gets back, even if you bring him a midnight snack."
I did as I was instructed. My lead foot coupled with the portable cop light I kept in my Mini had me back at my house in about eight minutes flat.
But as I crested the top of our cul-de-sac and spotted Paul's car in the driveway and the light on in our bedroom, I eased off the gas. A wave of relief washed over me.
Paul was home, at least.
THE CAR GAVE ME AN IDEA. Finally, my brain was starting to function again. I killed my headlights along with my siren and dash light and cruised toward my house like I was about to commit a burglary. I needed to figure out as much as I could before I faced Paul. I parked three houses down the street and walked the rest of the way.
The Camry's doors were locked, but with the Slim Jim I retrieved from the trunk of my Mini, it was only a temporary setback. I paused at the driver-side door as the smell hit me. Pine cleaner and bleach. Somebody had cleaned up a mess. I shook off my emotions, took a breath, and clicked on my Mini Maglite.
A few drops of blood under the passenger-side rear floor mat were all that I could find.
It took me all of three minutes to find the bullet hole.
It was underneath the driver's headrest. It had gone in but it hadn't come out. I probed the hole with the blade of the Leatherman tool I always carried and heard it click against something hard. A few saws later, the mushroomed lead slug dropped out of the hole right into my hand.
I placed it in my handbag, closed my eyes, and pieced the situation together as best I could.
Paul must have been driving when Scott, lying on the backseat, came to. Disoriented and fearing for his life, Scott probably drew his ankle gun and fired once at Paul. The first round had hit the headrest.
Paul might have turned then and struggled for the gun. Then it must have gone off again.
In Scott's jaw. Jesus, God.
I took a scalding breath of bleach before I continued my reasoning, such as it was.
After that, Paul must have panicked. Even in self-defense, he knew that a dead cop just wasn't going to go away. So he'd come up with a quick plan, the best he could do. Scott was a cop. Who kills cops? Drug dealers kill cops. So Paul had driven into the Bronx and didn't stop until he found a busy drug area. Then he dumped Scott, came back home, and cleaned the car.
I shook my head as tears welled in my eyes again. For about five minutes, I knelt over where Paul had killed Scott and wept until my eyes ached.
This wasn't fair. It wasn't right. One mistake in judgment and now three lives were totally wrecked. I finally wiped my tears and got out of the car and headed for my house. And Paul.
But first I made a little side trip.
I AM A HOMICIDE DETECTIVE, and a pretty good one, and I easily found Scott's gun and badge in our garden toolshed.
It takes a lot of work and cleaning materials to erase a crime scene. I didn't see any obvious evidence in our garbage can outside the garage, so I went to the next logical hiding place. On the other side of the shed door was one of the Stop amp; Shop bags we used for garbage. It was brimming with blood-pink paper towels.
And underneath the bag were Scott's badge and the gun Paul had used to kill him.
It was a short-barreled Colt.38 revolver, a Detective Special. It was special, all right. I used one of the paper towels to lift it. I tipped out the chamber and looked at the dark holes where two rounds were missing.
I carefully placed it back under the bag and then locked the shed. I was walking up the driveway to my front door when my cell vibrated.
I looked at the caller ID, then at my lit bedroom window. I pressed myself into the shadows beside the garage door.
It was Paul.
What did he want? Should I pick up and talk to him? Had he seen me? I wimped out and let my voice mail take it. I played his message back a few seconds later.
"Hi, Lauren. It's me. I'm at home. I ran into difficulties with my flight. I'll explain what happened later. Was there a problem with your flight, too?" Paul said. "I noticed that your car's not here. Are you at work? Give me a call when you get a chance, okay? I'm worried about you."
Worried about me? I thought, staring up at my window. Why? I didn't kill anybody.
Could this get any more bizarre? At least he was all right, I finally thought, folding my phone closed.
Paul was all right physically, if not otherwise.
I was taking a deep breath by my porch stairs, preparing myself to finally go inside and face him, when my phone vibrated a second time.
But it wasn't Paul this time.
It was my partner. I headed back into the shadows by the garage before I picked up.
"Mike?"
"Time's up, Lauren," he said. "Keane's on the move. I won't be able to stall for you much longer. You have to get back here now."
"On my way," I said.
I looked up at my window again. What the hell was I waiting for? I thought. Why was I skulking around in the dark outside my own house? I needed to go in and talk to Paul. Get some crisis management in motion. Call a good lawyer. Be rational. Be an adult. Figure this thing out somehow.
It was just a matter of looking Paul in the eye and saying, "Yes, I cheated on you. Yes, I made love to another man tonight, and now we have to deal with the terrible consequences of what you've done."
I thought about that as the rain continued to fall around me.
I wasn't a procrastinator by nature, but in this case, I thought I'd make an exception.
I stuck to the shadows on the jog back to my car.
I LEFT THE CAR ON GRAND CONCOURSE and walked in a daze down 193rd, trying to think my way through this disaster. I met Mike on the south side of the park, at the entrance far from where the bosses were set up in the Command Center on Jerome.
I couldn't help noticing the half dozen news vans parked alongside it. Great. The public has a right to know. To which I have to ask, Why is that?
"Anybody notice I was gone?" I asked Mike in greeting.
He made a pained face. "Bad news, Lauren. The commissioner came over about ten minutes ago, all outraged about where you were."
My stomach dropped.
"But you know me," Mike said, "I just slapped him around and told him to get his sorry ass back in the donut bus, where he belongs."
I punched my ever-the-wiseass partner in the arm. The contact felt good, actually.
"I appreciate it," I said. Mike had no idea how much.
The steady rain continued to fall as we made our way toward the tenements on Creston Avenue on the east side of the park. If two concrete acres of handball courts, rusted basketball hoops, and pit bull-chewed baby swings could be considered a park.
I don't know what James was the patron saint of, but I have a funny feeling it wasn't the marijuana, coke, and heroin that were sold out of the ancient buildings along the park's perimeter. Judging by the looks of the young, bored-looking, hooded men under the red plastic awning of a corner bodega, our presence had slowed sales considerably, though.
"Give me some good news on your canvass, Sarge," Mike said to a stocky black cop filling out a report in the open door of his double-parked police van.
He looked up, his face disappointed.
Good, I thought. Disappointment was good.
"We got an Amelia Phelps, eighty-year-old African American lady lives in that rattletrap over there," the sergeant said, pointing to a vinyl-sided Victorian on the corner.
"She said she saw a car park near her driveway," the sergeant continued, "and a man carrying something out of the trunk."
"White, black, Hispanic?" Mike asked. A loud shout interrupted him.
"THAT'S WHAT YOU GET!"
It was one of the hoodies in front of the bodega. His arms and hands were outstretched.
"FIVE-0 FINALLY GOT WHAT'S COMIN' TO 'EM!" he yelled again. " 'BOUT TIME!"
Mike moved out into the street at the bodega so quickly I had to jog to keep up.
"What was that?" he said, putting a hand to his ear as he ducked under the crime-scene tape and closed in on the men in front of the store.
Most of the St. James sales personnel had wisely dispersed down the block, but the rabble-rouser, a thin, green-eyed, light-skinned Hispanic, inexplicably stood his ground. He looked to be in his early twenties.
"What? You don't like hearin' the truth?" he said as he cocked his little bantam rooster head at Mike. "Then, do somethin' about it, chump."
Mike picked up the metal garbage can off the corner and threw it at the guy, two-handed like a basketball pass. Its steel-rimmed side knocked the punk instantly on his back and into the gutter. Mike lifted the can and turned it upside down, burying the kid in garbage.
"How's that for somethin'?" he said.
"He's nothing," I whispered into my partner's ear after I caught up. "You want to get jammed up over this mope? Open your eyes, Mike. There's bosses everywhere."
Mike rubbed the vein throbbing at his temple as he finally let me walk him away.
"You're right. You're right, partner," he mumbled with his head down. "Sorry, I lost it."
That's when I remembered.
Mike was a second-generation cop whose father had been killed in the line of duty. His dad had been a transit cop, and he'd walked into a subway car where a rape was in progress and was shot in the face. It was one of the few cop murders in the history of the NYPD that had never been solved.
So there actually was one thing that could rile my even-tempered partner, I thought as I pulled him toward the witness's house.
A dead cop.
Things just kept getting better and better.
HERE WAS OUR WITNESS. And what exactly had she seen?
Amelia Phelps, tiny, elderly, and black, was a retired Bronx High School of Science English teacher.
"Would you like some tea?" she inquired with perfect diction as she brought us into her dusty, threadbare parlor. Books covered every surface and were piled chest-high like trash in a landfill.
"That's okay, Mrs. Phelps," Mike said, taking out his bifocals and putting them on.
"Ms. Phelps," she corrected him.
"Sorry," Mike said. "Ms. Phelps, as you know, a police officer was found dead in the park. We're the detectives conducting the investigation. Can you help us?"
"The car I saw was a Toyota," Ms. Phelps said. "A Camry, I believe, and a recent model. The man who exited it was white, five eleven maybe. He wore glasses and dark clothing.
"At first, I thought he was here for the same unfortunate reason most Caucasians visit our community; namely, the purchase of illegal drugs from our neighborhood boys. But then, oddly, I saw him open the back door of his car and emerge with a large something rolled up in a blue sheet. It could very well have been a body. He returned approximately five minutes later, empty-handed, and drove away."
When I glanced at Mike, he looked as happily astonished as I felt dismayed.
Because this Bronx witness, this former schoolteacher, was a rare species indeed. We'd done midday gas station shootings where not one of twenty people had seen anything. Drive-bys of weddings where both sides of the family hadn't seen or heard a thing. Now, here we had a middle-of-the-night dump job in a drug spot, ostensibly the most difficult of all homicides to solve, and we run into photographic-memory Grandma.
"Did you get the plate number?" Mike said expectantly.
No, I thought, wincing. Please, God, make her say no.
"No," Ms. Phelps said.
I had to force myself to release my breath silently.
"It was too dark?" Mike said, disappointed.
"No," Ms. Phelps said, looking at him like he was a student who'd forgotten to raise his hand. "There were no plates."
"Did you call the police and tell them what you saw?" I said.
Ms. Phelps patted me on the knee.
"In this neighborhood, Detective, staying out of other people's affairs is an acquired necessity."
"Then, why did you tell the police officer who knocked on your door that you saw something?" Mike said, curious.
"They asked," Ms. Phelps said with a prim nod. "I am not a liar."
That makes one of us, I thought.
"Would you be able to pick out the man you saw from a lineup?" I asked with a tight smile.
"Undoubtedly," Ms. Phelps said.
"Terrific," I said as I handed Ms. Phelps my card. "We'll be in touch."
"You can count on it," added Mike.
MIKE HAD HIS BIFOCALS on top of his head as we left Amelia Phelps's house and walked back into the park. He mumbled to himself excitedly as he went over his interview notes. He was pumped. He had to feel we were getting closer to the killer. It was a great feeling, I knew. Being a detective, being the good guy.
I missed it terribly.
I felt horrible about lying to Mike and the rest of the cops who were traipsing around in the rain out there. When one cop goes down, all cops feel it. There's the instant outrage, of course, but underneath is unsettling fear. Have I made a mistake in choosing this dangerous job? Is it worth dying for?
I knew my friends and co-workers were reeling, hurting. By telling the truth, I could erase their anxious tension. The thought that somebody else could possibly get hurt out there made me almost physically sick.
I closed my eyes, listening to the crackle of police radio chatter and the rain in the trees.
I didn't say anything to anyone about what I knew, what had actually happened to Scott.
I kept my head down and my mouth shut.
I looked up only when I saw some commotion alongside the fountain.
A couple of dozen uniforms were arraying themselves in parallel lines from the fountain to the medical examiner's black station wagon, waiting underneath the rusted el on Jerome.
"They're taking him out," I heard one of the uniforms say as he rushed past me to grab a place in the line.
An honor guard of six cops carefully stepped into the water of the fountain and received from the medical examiner's team the green-black body bag Scott had already been placed in. They handled him as if he were a sick person who was still alive. Oh, God, I wished that were true. I wished I could take this entire night back, every second of it.
Along that stock-still, midnight-blue rank, someone started singing "Danny Boy" in a high, clear, haunting tenor that would have made Ronan Tynan jealous.
You want a definition of forlorn? How about half a dozen cops slowly bearing one of their dead through a dark Bronx tenement valley while the rain falls and the pipes, the pipes are calling. Was Scott even Irish? I didn't know. All dead cops are Irish, I guess.
I watched the rain splatter like flung holy water against the body bag as the procession passed me. Everywhere men were weeping openly. I watched as even the commissioner, standing beside the ME office's hearse, cupped a hand over his eyes.
An overhead passing number 4 train sounded out a martial drum snare as Scott was slid into the back of the wagon like a file returned to a drawer.
Tears drained out of my eyes as if my tear ducts had been slit.
I CAUGHT A WHITE BLUR out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly I was enveloped in a wall of warm Tyvek.
"Oh, Lauren," an academy classmate of mine, Bonnie Clesnik, whispered in my ear as she hugged me to her side. "This is so horrible. That poor guy."
Bonnie had been premed at NYU before she dropped out to become a cop, and she was now a sergeant in the Crime Scene Unit. As the only female former professionals in a class filled mostly with twenty-two-year-old, smooth-faced boys from Long Island, we had formed a quick bond. I'd stayed over at "the Bonster" and her partner Tatum's loft on St. Mark's Place so many times, they named the futon after me.
Bonnie fished a Kleenex out of her suit and wiped the corners of her eyes, then handed me a tissue, too.
"Look at us," she said with a laugh. "Badass cops, huh? It's been – what? A year? You did something to your hair. I like it."
"Thanks," Mike said, stepping between us. "I just washed it. And you are?"
"Bonnie, this fool is my partner, Mike," I said, introducing them. "I thought you worked days."
"When I heard the news, I came running, just like everybody else," Bonnie said. "I haven't seen this many cops in one place since St. Paddy's. Or Ground Zero."
She took off the freezer bag that was strapped across her chest beside several cameras.
"I'm glad I did, though, Lauren. I'm really glad. I think I found something."
I accepted the freezer bag from her, held it up.
Every light in the park and beyond seemed to surge suddenly with a white-hot brightness. The rain felt like it was falling right through me.
I turned Paul's silver, wired-rimmed glasses slowly in my hand.
"They were in the sheet Scott was wrapped in," Bonnie said. "I already called one of the guys in his narcotics unit. Scott didn't wear glasses. If they're prescription, we can go through the files of every ophthalmologist in the tristate area and nail the four-eyed son of a bitch who did this."
I felt a tingling behind my left eye as Mike whooped and gave Bonnie a high five.
A stream of electrified chatter leaked from Mike's radio a moment later.
"It's the boss man, Lauren," he said. "The commissioner has entered the donut bus and wants a briefing."
"Are you okay, Lauren?" Bonnie said, putting a hand on my back. "You don't look so hot."
I looked at her, at the concern in her eyes. Christ, how I longed to break down right there and then. Bonnie was a friend, a woman, and a cop. Out of everybody, she'd be the most likely to understand. Tell me what to do. Help me.
But what could I say to her? I was screwing the deceased, who, by the way, was blown away by my husband? I looked away from Bonnie. Nobody could help me, I realized. I was completely and utterly on my own.
"I'm fine," I said.
"We're all a little overwrought," Mike explained to Bonnie as he led me away toward the Command Center bus. "Even some of those dealers by the bodega teared up when that red-haired uniform was singing 'Danny Boy.' "
Mike put his arm around me as we walked. He really was a good guy, one of the best.
"Our guy is messing up, Lauren," Mike said. "At first I thought we were screwed. You know as well as I do how hard dump jobs are to solve. But look. Mistake after mistake. We're looking at an amateur. I can almost see him out there thinking he's covering his tracks, but his mind is racing and he's fucking up, just leading us closer and closer. A twelve-pack of Sam Adams says we lay hands on his sorry ass by this time tomorrow. You down?"
I shook my head as I labored to stay on my feet, to keep moving toward the bus.
"That's okay, Mike," I said. "I don't take sucker bets."
A SHORT BLUR OF TIME LATER, I was making myself stand up straight in the antiseptic glare of the Command Center bus interior.
Everywhere there were cops in front of laptops. White-shirted bosses were barking into cell phones. A map of the area was projected up in a wide-screen PowerPoint display. It looked like the situation room at the Pentagon, or maybe on the TV show 24.
I could feel my heartbeat pulsing crazily in my eardrums, behind my eyes.
And Paul was the enemy.
"Commissioner," my boss was saying with a formality I was unaware he was capable of. "This is Detective Stillwell, the primary investigator on the case."
A large hand shook mine, and I looked up into the famous, fatherly black face of the police commissioner of New York, Ronald Durham.
"Pleasure to meet you, Detective Stillwell," Durham said in a warm, honey-laced tone. "Some of your reports have crossed my desk. You do very good work."
My God, I thought, feeling dizzy again. My first "attaboy" from the police commissioner. Put another shelf in the career trophy case.
Then I came down like a crackhead after a three-day binge when I remembered the utterly damning evidence of Paul's glasses.
The cottage cheese in my fridge was going to outlast my career.
"Thank you, sir," I fumbled.
"Tell me what you have so far," Durham said next. His eyes were huge and pinned on mine.
I went through it all. Scott's wounds, Amelia Phelps's perfect description of Paul and his car, the glasses we'd just found. The entire homemade recipe for my own disaster.
When I was finished with the speech, the commissioner tapped a forefinger to his lip. Unlike a lot of the top brass, Durham had actually been a detective on his way up.
"Have you looked over his open files?" the commissioner asked.
"I haven't had a chance yet, sir. That's next on our list."
Durham nodded.
"You're closing in quickly," he said. "The only thing that might soften the blow here for everyone is expedience."
Not everyone, I thought.
"Detective," the commissioner said, smiling. I knew he was going to ask me for something. What it was, I had no clue. I just knew that in the NYPD, after a boss feeds you a carrot, the stick isn't far behind.
"Sir?" I said, trying to keep the nervousness out of my voice, and failing miserably.
"I wanted to remind you to serve the death notification to Scott Thayer's family."
My jaw muscle locked and I was surprised my teeth didn't shatter. Jesus Christ, I'd forgotten! Telling the family was part of my job as the primary.
Scott had told me he had a mom and a younger sister somewhere out in Brooklyn. How excruciating was this going to be? Couldn't I just feed my hand into a wood chipper instead?
"Of course, sir," I said.
"I know it's the most unfortunate part of your job," Commissioner Durham said with a fatherly pat on my shoulder. "I just think it should be done before someone leaks Scott's name to the press. I think it would also be better to hear it from somebody out of the same office. Then I could arrive a little later. Help soothe the blow."
"I understand," I said.
Then the commissioner sighed.
"Though I know whatever way we do it, it's going to be nothing short of devastating for Scott's wife," Durham said gravely. "Not to mention his three young kids."
SCOTT WAS MARRIED?
I managed to stay upright on my suddenly numb legs by a sheer act of will.
A married father of three?
He sure hadn't mentioned that.
Not the wife. Or the kids. Scott had told me he was NYPD's most eligible bachelor.
"I know," the commissioner said. "It just keeps getting worse and worse. We have ourselves a real tragedy here tonight. Scott's wife, Brooke, is only twenty-six, and his kids are four, two, and an infant."
Another fatherly pat on my shoulder signaled that our meeting had come to an end. I had the feeling there must be a section on fatherly pats on NYPD promotion tests.
"Your lieutenant has the address," the commissioner said. "Proceed, Detective. Good luck."
Twenty minutes or so after we left the commissioner in the Command Center bus, we stopped in front of a cute Dutch colonial in the middle of a long block lined with them.
All the windows of the Thayer house were dark. Bright flowers lined a curving slate path through the manicured lawn.
There was a Fisher-Price basketball backboard at the end of the short driveway. I had to tear my eyes away from it. I checked my watch. It was coming up on 4 a.m.
Wait a second, I thought insanely. Did I really have to go into that house? I could just walk away, couldn't I? Forget everything. That I was a cop. That I was a wife. I mean, why be so conventional? I was in the market for a life change. Maybe I could run off to an abbey and make cheese.
"Ready, Lauren?" Mike asked at my side.
"No," I said, opening the storm door anyway. Then I hit the brass knocker on the inside door a couple of times.
Beautiful, was my first thought when I looked into the groggy face of the petite brunette who answered the door.
Why would Scott cheat on this perfectly lovely young woman? The mother of his kids.
"Yes?" Brooke Thayer said, her eyes widening as she looked from me to Mike and back to me.
"Hi, Brooke," I said, showing her my badge. "My name's Lauren. I'm a detective from Scott's precinct."
"Oh my God," Brooke said, instantly awake and talking very fast. "It's Scotty, isn't it? No! What happened? Is he hurt? He's hurt?"
Death notices are served in different ways, none of them pleasant. Some detectives think blunt honesty is the way to go. Others soften the blow by first saying the victim was seriously injured and lead into the fact of their death.
For the first time this night, I went with honesty.
"He was shot, Brooke. I'm so sorry. He's gone."
I watched her eyes go. That's something you never get used to. Watching someone standing right in front of you disappear. Recede into themselves.
Then she stumbled back away from the door, her legs dancing side to side like a center fielder trying to get under a fly ball. Finally she dropped to her knees.
"No!" Brooke Thayer screamed.
I found myself on my knees with her in the dark foyer, my hand – my evil, betraying, foul hand – rubbing her thin back as she screamed louder and louder.
"NOOO! NOOO! NOOO!"
"I know," I whispered in her ear. "I know."
"YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT!" she screamed in my face, clawing me away from her. I reared back, covering myself. One of her long nails had raked a red line diagonally across my forehead. Then she collapsed sideways to the floor.
"You don't knoooow!" she cried into the hardwood floor. "You don't know! You don't!"
MIKE LIFTED BROOKE THAYER UP and put her on the couch in the family room. After I closed the front door, I spotted a blonde girl in pink Disney Three Princesses pajamas. She was staring down at me from the top of the stairs.
"Hey, sweetheart," I said. "Your mommy is going to be all right. My name's Lauren."
The adorable little girl said nothing. She just continued to stare at me with her big blue eyes.
"Maybe you should go back to sleep, honey," I said, taking a step up the stairs toward her.
She screamed then. In a pitch so high and violent, I had to avert my face and cup my ears.
Brooke shot past me up the stairs, the siren quitting immediately as the girl was scooped up into her mother's arms.
I stood there as the mother and daughter rocked back and forth. On a side table in the living room, I spotted a picture of Scott in his uniform. He had his arm around a pregnant Brooke. It looked like it was taken in a park somewhere. The sun was shining brilliantly.
When Brooke and her daughter started keening at the same pitch, I suddenly thought about the gun in my bag. I visualized it. The way its steel shone like chrome under the light. Its almost feminine curves. I imagined the cold of its barrel placed against my temple, the feel of its hair trigger on the second joint inside my right index finger.
I stood in Scott's house and thought of my gun, and of what I had done, and I wondered how much more of this I could take.
You're not a bad person, I tried to tell myself. At least you weren't before tonight.
POOR BROOKE WAS STILL ROCKING her four-year-old daughter when a baby started crying from somewhere behind them in the upstairs hall.
Slowly, I climbed to the top.
"Do you want me to check on the baby?" I asked Brooke.
Brooke's eyes seemed to stare right through me. She said nothing, not a word.
"Try to find an address book in one of the kitchen drawers and call a family member to come," I called down to Mike.
I walked past Brooke, following the cries to the nursery at the back of the house.
A mobile of mitts and bats dangled above the crib, and there was a Mets night-light.
The baby boy couldn't have been even six months. I lifted up the tiny, wailing child.
His whole body trembled with each cry, a sound that seemed too big for his size. I cupped him against my chest, and he stopped crying almost immediately. I sat down in the rocking chair and held him close, thankful to escape the noise below for a short while.
Even under the wretched circumstances, I noticed how wonderful he smelled. How pure. I swallowed hard when he finally opened his big eyes. His big, warm brown eyes.
He looked exactly like Scott.
I was the one who started crying then. This baby in my arms no longer had a father, I thought.
Way to go, Lauren. Way to go.
"Give him to me," Brooke barked, suddenly charging into the room with a bottle. The baby boy seemed to smile at me as I handed him over to his mother. Brooke was still crying, but she seemed to be over the initial shock.
"Can I call someone for you?" I offered.
"I already spoke to my mom," Brooke said. "She's on her way."
She looked straight into my face for the first time. Her brown eyes were surprisingly kind.
"Look," she said. "I scratched you. I'm so sorry. I…"
"Please," I said quickly. "Don't you dare be sorry. You're the one who needs help now. You and your children."
"I want to hear you say it," Brooke said after a minute.
I stared at her, wide-eyed. Her features looked stark in the night-light, her eyes a void of shadow.
"What?" I said.
"I want to hear you say what happened to my husband. I appreciated your honesty before. The men will only try to protect my feelings. I need to know exactly what happened so I can try to deal with it. These kids need me to be able to deal with it."
"We don't really know yet, Brooke," I said. "We found him shot in a park, St. James Park in the Bronx. It's a known drug area."
Her face contorted, her lips quivering. Her left eye began to twitch.
"Ooooooh! I knew it," she finally said, nodding vigorously. " 'Undercover's a promotion, Brooke. They always watch my back.' Not always, huh, you goddamned idiot."
I racked my brain about what to say next in the silence that followed. The walls seemed to move in on me. I needed to get out of there. Something ripe was starting to churn in my stomach. I had to have some air.
What would I normally say in an investigation I didn't already know all too much about? I took out my notebook again.
"When was the last time you saw Scott?" I asked her, trying to act like a detective.
"He left around eight tonight. Said he had to go in for a few hours. He kept insane hours. Scotty was almost never home lately."
"He didn't say specifically where he was going, did he? Was there a phone call that preceded his departure?"
"Not that I can think of this second. No. I don't remember any call."
Brooke started bawling again all of a sudden.
"Oh, God. His poor mom and sister… they were so close. They're going to be… I don't think I could tell them. No, I… Could you? Detective…?"
"Lauren."
"Could you call her, Lauren? Scotty's mom, I mean. Will you make the call?"
"Of course," I said.
"Are you from his unit?"
"No," I said. "I'm from Bronx Homicide."
"Did you know Scotty?" she asked then.
In the silence, I listened to the splutter of Scott's son greedily finishing his bottle.
"No," I said. "We were out of the same precinct, but we never had the chance to work together."
"I'm sorry about what happened with Taylor. My four-year-old," Brooke said. "She doesn't respond well to strangers. She's autistic."
I stood there, breathless.
That was it.
It. The thing that finally took me over the top.
"I hope I didn't frighten her," I heard myself say as I nearly ran out of the room. "Could I use your bathroom?"
"Down the hall on your right."
The vomit came up a foot or more before I made it to the toilet. I threw both taps on to cover the sound of more retching. And left them on to cover the tea kettle-high primal shrieks that escaped my throat.
I used the entire roll of toilet paper, cleaning up. I actually took out my gun as I sat on the pink-carpeted toilet lid. I wondered if the coroner would put Death by Guilt on my certificate. I finally put the gun away and went downstairs. Not because I didn't want to kill myself anymore. I just thought that Brooke Thayer was having a bad enough night as it was.
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!"
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.
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."
Part of me didn't want to leave my partner's side, or to possibly miss something on the case. Who the hell knew what would happen next? But out the grimy stairwell window behind Mike, I couldn't help noticing how the streetlights were starting to swim. I was exhausted.
Whoever said moving and divorce were the two most stressful events in your life never had their husband shoot their lover.
Collapsing wouldn't help things, I decided.
"Okay, Mike," I said. "But call me the second you hear anything. Anything at all."
"Go home, Lauren."
"Okay. I'm gone. I'm out of here."
I CUT MY MINI'S ENGINE in my garage and was getting out, when I heard something weird in the far-right corner. I guess I was a little jumpy, because immediately my Glock was drawn, sights center-massed on the seated figure there.
Until I realized it was Paul.
I clicked on the lights before I finally holstered my weapon.
Paul was snoring in a lawn chair beside his toolbench. On the concrete floor beside him was a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch. With maybe one shot left in it.
Oh yeah, and Paul wasn't wearing any clothes. He was bareass naked.
He was also wasted. Blotto. Three sheets to the wind, as they say. Maybe four.
How bad I was feeling tonight wasn't a fraction of what was going on with Paul, I realized, staring at his troubled, unconscious face.
I knocked off the last shot in his bottle before I tried to shake him awake. No response.
One of his eyes flipped open when I tugged his earlobe. I pulled at his right hand until he stood.
He mumbled something, but I couldn't make it out as I brought him into the house. I'd never seen him so drunk.
I almost threw my back out, trying to steer him into our bedroom. I finally laid him on top of the bed, and I brought over the wastebasket in case he was sick.
I was just able to make it into the bathroom myself before all the pent-up stress exploded out of me in violent sobs.
Where the hell was all this going? What did I think I was doing, playing dumb in the investigation? This wasn't a game. Scott Thayer was dead. Few things on this earth bring down more scrutiny than an NYPD cop getting murdered. Did I think I could bluff my way through this? Was I crazy?
I thought about Brooke Thayer again. Her autistic daughter. The two other kids. I felt poisoned. Evil. I wanted to turn myself in. At this point, I would do just about anything to take this black burden off myself.
But I wasn't the one who would get punished for it.
It was Paul.
So, what was I supposed to do now?
I STILL HADN'T FIGURED THAT OUT when I totally collapsed three minutes later in the shower.
One moment I was standing there, shampooing my hair, and the next I was sitting down hard on the cold porcelain, water pinging off my torso and legs.
I pressed my forehead to the wet tile as the sum of the night's events dripped through me. What made me the sickest was hard to decide. My flat-out betrayal of Paul? Or staring into Scott's dead face? Or maybe staring into his wife's face?
Closing my eyes, I longed crazily for the water to melt me, to let me stream down the floor of the tub and disappear with a gurgle into the drain.
After a minute of that not happening, I lifted my head off the tile and opened my eyes.
This wasn't just going to go away, was it? I needed to do something. But what?
I considered my choices.
First, what would happen if I turned Paul in?
I was an expert on the Bronx criminal justice system. Like any retailer faced with massive volume most of the time, the Bronx DA's office was willing to make a deal with offenders, offer justice at a reduced rate. But the high-profile nature of Scott's case, I realized, would be considered a career maker for the prosecution. It would be Paul against the system, and the system would make sure that this was one case they would win, and win with a vengeance.
I thought of the mountains of legal bills. The cost of bail for Paul. If he could get bail.
Even with the obvious plea of self-defense, the best-case scenario we were looking at was manslaughter, five years of state prison. I shook my head. Five years. Whenever I dropped off a prisoner at Rikers, after five minutes I longed to do a hundred laps in a pool of antibacterial soap. I winced as I remembered the cattle line in the search room. The sound of crying babies and the beneath-the-table sex in Visitors.
I imagined Paul looking at me over a scuzzy table, disgust in his blackened eyes.
"What's the matter, Lauren?" he would say. "I thought you liked quickies."
And if that wasn't horror enough to consider, there was the New York press. What could be more salivating to the tabloids than a love triangle gone wrong, where two cops were involved, one of them now dead! We were looking at long-lasting infamy here.
Loser Hall of Fame material.
Mass-media humiliation.
And let's not forget what would happen to Scott's family. Right now, Brooke was being regarded as a hero's wife. But once the truth got out, that Scott was killed by the husband of the woman he was cheating with, it would be bye-bye crying on the commissioner's shoulder, bye-bye Brooke, bye-bye kids.
My eyes almost bugged out of my head as I considered these particular details.
It would also be so long line-of-duty death benefits for the Thayer family!
I pictured Brooke rocking with her poor daughter. Instead of getting Scott's pension, she would be left with jack squat.
I stood up in the shower. Tried to catch my breath.
My little decision-making meeting was adjourned.
If this were just about me, I would turn myself in. I would go into my room right now, get dressed, and march into my boss's office. I would confess.
But it wasn't just about me. It was about Paul. It was about Brooke.
And most of all her three fatherless kids.
Who was I kidding? There wasn't any choice, at least not right now.
I had to make everything right again.
The water roared in my ears like thunder as I thrust my face under the spray.
But how could I make everything right?
PAUL WAS STILL SNORING when I left for work. I would have liked to speak with him. To say we had a lot to deal with was quite the understatement. But since I didn't think they offered marriage counseling in prison, I decided that instead of waking him up, priority numero uno was getting back to work to see if I had a shot at keeping my husband out of jail.
Mike was writing Scott's name on the bullpen Homicide chart when I stepped into the squad room.
I was more or less happily surprised when I realized nobody was looking at me suspiciously. I guess adrenaline-flooded and terror-struck have a passing resemblance to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Through the smeared glass wall of the rear office, I could see my boss, Lieutenant Keane, talking on his desk phone while dialing his cell.
"What do we got?" I said, handing Mike a bodega coffee from the brown bag I was carrying. Starbucks had yet to make inroads into Soundview.
"Shit," Mike said, flicking the plastic coffee lid sliver across his desk as he sat. "No sign of either Ordonez. Turns out the pilot's off work until next Wednesday, and he wasn't at his apartment. Of the younger and even scummier brother, Victor, we have no sign at all."
Mike handed me a file folder.
"Check out the family album."
The Ordonez brothers were the only children of Dominican immigrants. On the slightly older brother, Mark, the Air Force pilot, there was surprisingly little. A single assault bust when he was twenty-one. But the younger one, Victor, had a crime-ography that was a long and interesting read.
From the age of sixteen, Victor had been in and out of jail, putting up MVP crime stats. Burglary, narcotics sales, attempted rape, assaults of prisoners while incarcerated, possession of a deadly weapon.
But for me, one charge stood out as if it had been marked with a neon highlighter.
Attempted murder of a police officer.
The abstract described how at the age of seventeen, Victor, while resisting arrest for yet another possession charge, drew a concealed.380 semiautomatic, pointed it at the officer's face, and pulled the trigger several times. After he was wrestled to the ground, it was discovered that the gun hadn't discharged due solely to the fortuitous fact that young Victor, new to the wonderful world of semiautomatics, had forgotten to rack the slide and jack the first round into the chamber. To show you what kind of straits the New York criminal justice system was in during the crack epidemic of the early nineties, Victor did just one year.
I blinked down at the sheet in disbelief.
Victor Ordonez was looking so good for Scott's murder, I was almost convinced he did it.
I pointed my chin at the file stacks covering both of our adjoining desks and the floor as I sat down.
"Scott's previous Narcotics cases?" I said.
Mike nodded grimly. He chucked his reading glasses onto his desk and rubbed his eyes.
"I'm not cracking spine one of that saga until we have a talk with our Dominican friends," he said. "I guess the only good news is I got an ADA to get a subpoena to the telephone company. They're getting Scott's phones together right now. They're going to fax it over within the next ten minutes."
I SAT THERE, ROCK STILL, trying to absorb what I had just heard. The fluorescent lights above hummed in my ears like an angry beehive.
How many times had Scott called me in the last month? Twenty? Thirty maybe? How was I going to bluff my way out of this one? I pictured the confusion on my partner's face as he spotted my number over and over again.
Mike moved his mouse to remove his "Who pissed in your gene pool?" screen saver. It sounded like someone stepping on Bubble Wrap when he rolled his neck.
"Mike, what are you doing?" I finally said.
"Gonna get a jump on those D-D-fives. Keane's about to have triplets. Look at him in there."
DD5's were the incident reports we had to write for Scott's case file. I raised my eyebrows.
"Um, hello? Earth to Mike," I said. "People are going to actually read these reports, Shakespeare. You're the beauty, remember? I'm the brains. In fact, why don't you go grab a couple in the crash room upstairs. We need your head clear just in case we have to knock down a door with it. I'll bang out the reports in a way that doesn't get us reassigned, and when the phone records come in, I'll start collating them. How's that sound?"
Mike stared at me, exaggerated hurt in his red-rimmed eyes. Then he yawned.
"Yes, dear," he said, standing.
I held my breath as he walked to the exit. The bullpen gate had just swung back into place, when a low, off-pitch ringing sounded.
I turned around. It was the fax machine. Jeez, Louise.
It rang again, and the sound was followed by an electronic bleep. One of the white sheets started to slowly slide down out of it.
Keep going, partner, I thought, not looking at him. Please. For me.
But out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mike turn around.
My face felt hot. He would see it in a second. My number repeated over and over again! What the hell could I say? Nothing came to mind. How could I get out of this one?
I turned all the way around as Mike lifted the first sheet out. I watched him squint, watched his hand go to his forehead.
That's when I noticed his reading glasses sitting there on the desk beside me, right where he'd left them.
I didn't think. I just acted.
I opened my bottom-left desk drawer, and with one of Scott's files swept Mike's glasses off his desk and into the drawer. Then I quietly kicked the drawer shut.
I pretended to ignore Mike until I heard him rummaging around on his desktop.
"Didn't I tell you to take a nap?" I said, annoyed. "You're not having another senior moment, are you?"
Mike exhaled a tired breath as he gave up the search for his glasses. He dropped Scott's phone records in my lap.
"All yours, sister," he said weakly. "Courtesy of Ma Bell. See you in sixty winks."
FOR TWO SOLID MINUTES, I spun my pencil through my fingers like a baton twirler, my old, creaky wooden office chair cawing as I rocked back and forth just staring at Scott's phone records.
I turned and squinted through the office glass at my mercifully still-busy boss, then looked back down at the eight number-filled sheets of paper in front of me.
The fact that I'd managed to get my hands on Scott's rec-ords was phenomenal, but after riffling through them, I realized I now had a new problem.
I stuck the pencil between my back teeth and began turning it into a chew toy.
How the hell was I going to remove my number from them?
The thirty-three times it occurred!
"Lauren," a voice said.
I almost swallowed the pencil's eraser as I looked up. My boss had exited his office and crossed the squad room without my noticing. He placed his hands flat on my desk as he leaned over me, his fingernails practically scratching the edge of the fax paper. Could he read upside down?
"How we looking on those D-D-fives?" Keane said. "Borough and Detective Division commanders want them ASAP. Any problem with that?"
"Give me an hour, chief," I said, bringing the form up on my computer screen.
"You've got half," he shot back over his shoulder as he left.
I leaned over my keyboard, trying to look busy and at the same time hide what I was doing.
My eyes went from the screen to the phone records. From the phone records to the screen. Waiting for something obvious to jump out at me.
Then, miraculously, it did.
The font of the phone records was a common one. Times New Roman.
A second later, an idea occurred to me all but fully formed.
Which was good, I thought as I clicked on the Microsoft Word icon on my screen, since I didn't have a second to spare.
First thing I did was find the number Scott called the most. It was a 718 area code with an exchange I wasn't familiar with.
I checked my notes and verified that it was Scott's home number.
I typed the number, hit "print," and compared it to the records. It was a little too big. I blocked the number out and dropped the font size from twelve to ten, printed that out, and compared it again.
Perfect, I thought. It would work.
I copied the number thirty-three times and hit "print" for the third time. Who knows? I thought, pocketing scissors and tape from my desk drawer. I lifted the records off my desk along with the sheets from the printer as I stood.
This just might work.
It took me five minutes of nonvirtual cutting and pasting in the last stall of the ladies' room to tape over every incident of my cell number on the LUDs with Scott's home number.
Everything important I learned in kindergarten, I thought as I flushed the scraps away.
One trip to the copying machine later – with a brief side trip to the shredder – and I had everything the way I wanted it.
Scott's new and improved phone records.
I was coming out of Keane's office after dropping off my completed crime-scene reports twenty minutes later, when Mike walked back into the squad room. He gaped at the undetectably doctored phone company records I had left on his desk. His reading glasses sat on top of them like a paper-weight.
"Don't worry," I said, giving him a pat on his wide back. "Dropping a little off your fastball is pretty much expected at your age."
I lifted my coat from the back of my chair.
"Where are you going?" he said.
"To see my friend Bonnie," I said. "Try to speed the crime-scene processing along."
"Why don't I go with you?" Mike said.
"Because you need to get back to the phone company and put faces to those numbers, see who Scott was calling."
"C'mon," Mike said as I was leaving. "I'll behave. I'm not just a big ugly man doll, you know. I have a sensitive side. I'm in Oprah's Book Club."
"Sorry," I said, knocking through the bullpen gate. "No boys allowed."
C'MON, C'MON, C'MON! Let's go, let's go!
I checked my watch as a cash register's electronic beep exploded through my skull for perhaps the thirty-seven-billionth time.
I had thought my one-purchase stop at the 57th and Broadway Duane Reade would be quick. But that was before I discovered the aisle-long line behind the lone checkout cashier.
Ten minutes later, I was one customer away from the promised land of the counter, when another cashier arrived and called, "Next."
Taking the one step needed to the newly opened register, I was nearly mowed down by a middle-aged Asian man in a doorman's suit.
"Hey!" I said.
In response, the line cutter showed me his back, boxing me out as he pushed a bag of Combos at the cashier.
The last thing I wanted was to make a scene, but I didn't have the time to be demure. I leaned in, snatched the Combos out of the cashier's hand, and sent them sailing down one of the crammed aisles behind me. Problem solving NYC-style.
"Next means next," I explained to the wide-eyed man as my purchase was scanned and bagged.
I waited until I was in my squad car, double-parked outside on Broadway, to open the bag. I pulled on a pair of rubber crime-scene gloves and took the men's reading glasses out of their package.
The lenses were round, silver rimmed. Just like the ones Paul had dropped at the crime scene. Just like the ones Bonnie hopefully hadn't processed yet.
I wiped them down with alcohol before snapping open an evidence bag and dropping them in. I lit the receipt with a match and scattered its ashes out the window onto Broadway. Then I turned the engine over and screeched away.
Next stop, police headquarters in Manhattan.
BONNIE HAD HER HEAD in one of her desk drawers when I stepped into her fifth-floor office at One Police Plaza.
"Hey, Bonnie," I said. "That is you, isn't it?"
"Lauren, what a happy surprise," Bonnie said, shaking a bag of Starbucks coffee as she stood. "And what perfect timing. How about some French roast?"
"So," she said, placing a steaming black mug in front of me a minute later. "How are things coming along?"
"I was about to ask you the same thing," I said.
"Even though this case is our priority, it's going to take some time. All we got so far is that the tarp Scott was wrapped in was a Neat Sheet, a mass-market picnic blanket. They sell them in supermarkets everywhere."
I sipped my coffee, nodding. I'd bought it at Stop amp; Shop.
"What about the glasses?" I said.
"Not too much, sorry to say," Bonnie said. "There were no visible fingerprints on the lenses themselves. I red-balled them down to the lab to see if they might pick up a partial on the rims, but I wouldn't hold my breath. We're going to have to cross our fingers and see if we can get a hit on a prescription. I just got off the phone with this guy Sakarov, head of ophthalmology at NYU. He's going to analyze them and guide us through the records."
I burned my tongue with another sip of coffee, then placed the mug back down on the corner of her desk.
"Do you think I could see them?" I said.
Bonnie gave me a funny look.
"Why?" she said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
"I don't know," I said. "To get some sort of feel for this guy. Maybe? You never know."
Bonnie grinned as she stood.
"Okay, Psychic Detective. The lab's just down the hall. I'll go get them for you. You sit there and prime your mysterious powers until I get back."
I FINGERED THE GLASSES in my jacket pocket as I watched her walk off. My plan was to improvise, but what would I do? Say, "Look, Bonnie, a bird!" and then do the old switcheroo?
I drank my coffee and tried to think.
About a minute later, a scruffy-looking young man appeared in Bonnie's outer office. I watched him looking around, clearly lost. Maybe it was David Blaine, come to give me some sleight-of-hand tips.
I opened the door.
"Can I help you?" I called out.
"I'm looking for Sergeant Clesnik. I'm supposed to pick up a package for Dr. Sakarov?"
No! He was here for the glasses. I was out of time.
Or was I? The kid stared at me as I debated. Finally, I took the Duane Reade glasses in the evidence bag from my pocket. I found an empty envelope on Bonnie's desk. I dropped the glasses in, sealed it with a lick, and handed it over.
The kid put the envelope in his shoulder bag and stood there, staring at me. What now? Bonnie was going to be back any second.
"Anything else?" I said.
He rubbed the scruff on his chin.
"How about your number?" Shaggy said with a sly smile. "That'd be cool."
As if. Like I hadn't had enough of younger men. Now, what could I say that would make the kid disappear instantly?
"What's your take on kids?" I said, looking into his eyes lovingly. "Because my four could really use a father figure."
"Take it easy," he said with a wave as he finally left.
Bonnie arrived back maybe three minutes later with Paul's glasses in an evidence bag.
"You're lucky you came early," she said. "A messenger is about to pick them up."
"Oh, no," I said. "Some guy just came in, and I sent him away. Let me run and catch up to him."
I grabbed the glasses out of Bonnie's hand as I jogged for the exit.
"Thanks for the joe, Bonnie. Call me with the first thing you hear," I yelled over my shoulder.
THE FIRST IMPORTANT THING I noticed as I stepped back into the Homicide bullpen was that my boss wasn't alone in his office. I had just enough time to put my coat on my chair before his door opened.
"Lauren," Keane called out. "Come in here, will you. I need to see you right now."
I silenced a groan as I walked across the boss's threshold.
Jeff Buslik looked up at me, his dark eyes clear and bright and vigilant.
"Afternoon, Detective," he said.
For the past five years, the extremely handsome African American Jeff Buslik had been the Bronx DA's office's Homicide Bureau chief. Everybody said he was an actual genius. I'd worked with him three times before he'd become head of the bureau, and three times he'd gotten jury convictions. Bronx jury convictions, slam-dunked with maximum sentences, state prison, twenty-five years to life.
I rubbed my eyes as I sat down.
"What do you have so far?" the prosecutor said. "Let me hear it all, Lauren."
"Give me a break, Jeff," I said. "You have my report right there in front of you. Speed-read it again. It'll be quicker."
Jeff smiled. No wonder juries liked him. He looked like a freaking movie star. Jeff had the gift of glib, too.
"Humor me," he said.
So I told him.
When I was done, he leaned back on his chair's back legs. He laid his hands on the lapels of his spotless gray suit as he stared up at the water-stained drop ceiling. His half-lidded eyes moved back and forth as if he were reading something. How many homicides had crossed his desk? I wondered. A thousand? Two thousand?
Already he was analyzing and sorting, building up the strengths and weaknesses of the case.
Or maybe he was just reading my mind, I thought, stilling the tap-tap routine my shoe had started against the floor. Christ, he made me nervous.
"This elderly witness, Amelia Phelps, does she seem believable?" he said after a minute.
I nodded. "Very believable, Jeff."
"Pathology report?"
"They're rushing it," my boss said. "But it'll still take at least a week."
"What's your gut on these two dealers?" Jeff said. "The Ordonez brothers?"
"They're looking damn good," Keane said. "Only, we're having trouble locating them."
"You think maybe they could be heading back to the Dominican Republic? I think maybe."
Wouldn't that be lovely, I thought.
"Who knows?" I said.
"Do you think these gentlemen are dumb enough to have the murder weapon on them?" Jeff said, creaking the chair back and forth with a flexing wingtip. "My juries love murder weapons. Murder weapons and DNA. Have to give them a crossover episode of CSI and Law and Order these days. You know that. We find the gun, hopefully with a little blood on it, it'll be over before it starts."
A vivid picture of the gun and bloody bag in my toolshed flashed through my brain.
"I've worked in this borough for a while, Jeff," I said nonchalantly. "Dumb is something I never underestimate."
Jeff gave me some more red-carpet wattage as he smiled broadly again.
"You seem to have your end covered as usual, Detective," he said. "I'll head back to the office and get started on boiler-plating some search warrants. Soon as you get an address, we'll be ready to go. Maybe shoot for the death sentence on this one."
I NEARLY IMPLODED in my desk chair after Jeff Buslik had left the building.
I thought I could handle this. Because I was in charge of the case, I thought I could get out in front of everything. Now I wasn't sure. In fact, I doubted it.
I'd been lucky so far, but how much longer could that last? Not long with clear-eyed Jeff Buslik staring over my shoulder. He could sense guilt the way a shark can smell blood.
Twenty minutes later, Mike came in with a dozen Dunkin' Donuts and a Box O' Joe.
Wow, a keg of caffeine. I wasn't high-strung enough yet?
"What's the word?" I said.
Mike shook his head.
"Jelly?" he said, opening the box. "Nobody knows squat. It's hurry-up-and-wait time. Boston cream?"
The rest of the day and into the night was spent "no commenting" the reporters, who called by the half hour, and flipping through Scott's case files.
Scott had really been a terrific undercover, I soon discovered. He'd been loaned out on stings to the FBI and the ATF and had actually gotten to be the right-hand man of a high-level guy in the Cali cartel.
I found a picture of Scott, smiling along with the rest of his interagency task force, as they posed in front of a white sandbag wall of seized cocaine. Oh, Scott.
I shook my head as I slapped the file closed and opened another.
A born bullshit artist, I thought, and I actually had to go ahead and believe him.
The next time I looked up, the squad room windows were dark. What time was it?
Mike hung up his phone and growled like a bear awakened from hibernation two months early.
"Get this. These DEA geniuses have the Brothers Ordonez's location, and I quote, 'pinned down to this after-hours club they partially own in Mott Haven or to an apartment in the ass end of Brooklyn.' "
"That's some or," I said.
"My sentiments exactly. Bottom line, we're looking at a long night," Mike said. "It's your turn to crash. Go home and see what that husband of yours is looking like these days. Keep your cell phone on. The second I get the word, you'll get it. Go home."
I HEARD THE TV in the den when I came in. A lone voice followed by studio audience laughter. Letterman, probably. Great. He'd be doing a Top Ten about me and Paul soon enough.
I put my keys on the pub mirror and looked at the blue TV light spilling through the crack onto the runner of carpet in the hall. Of all the difficult things I'd done all day, this one felt like the hardest.
Nothing could quite top off a long day of covering up a murder like having to admit to your husband that you cheated on him.
I took a long lungful of oxygen, slowly let it out, and pushed the door open.
Paul was lying on the couch with a Yankees throw pulled up to his chin. He clicked off the set when he saw me standing there.
"Hey," he said with a smile. He still had a nice smile, even at the most inappropriate times.
I stared at him. I don't know what I was expecting, but a cheerful "hey" wasn't it. "Hey, slut" maybe.
"Hey, yourself?" I said tentatively.
I didn't know what the next dance step was supposed to be. Not even a wild guess. I'd never had Paul murder my lover before.
"How was work?" Paul asked me.
"Work was fine, Paul," I said. "Um, don't you think that maybe we should talk a little bit about last night?"
Paul lowered his eyes to the floor. Now maybe we were getting somewhere.
"I was pretty loaded, huh?" he said.
That's what generally happens when you practically polish off a bottle of scotch by yourself, I wanted to say. But I guess I needed to be supportive. I definitely needed Paul to open up, unburden himself. Tell me exactly what happened. Hear his side of things.
It would make things so much easier. He could get it off his chest, and I could tell him that he didn't have to worry, that I was already taking care of everything.
"What's going on, Paul?" I whispered. "You can tell me."
Paul glanced at me, his lower lip caught between his teeth.
"My God, Lauren," he said. "My flight. It was a nightmare. There was this loud boom, and we started plum-meting. I was convinced it was another terrorist attack. That I was dead. Then it just stopped. The plane leveled out, but the pilot landed it in Groton. I never made it to Boston.
"It was like I'd been spared, you know? After we touched down, I rented a car and drove home. I guess I was still in shock when I got back in. I opened the bottle to have a drink to calm myself, and pretty soon, the bottle was my drink. Don't ask me what happened to my clothes. Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."
My face burned in the dark. Why was Paul lying to me now? Acting as if he wasn't aware I knew what was going on? On the other hand, it wasn't uncommon for murderers to enter a state of denial. Sometimes it was so impenetrable, it was like they themselves truly believed they didn't commit the crime. Was that it? Was Paul in shock and so racked with guilt that he'd become delusional?
"Paul!" I finally said. "Please!"
Paul looked up at me, confused.
"Please what?" he said.
My God, I thought. As if this wasn't hard enough. Was Paul playing some type of game with me? It was as if he didn't know I'd been there, too. That he thought Scott had been alone and…
Holy shit! That was it! A hand went to my gaping mouth. I couldn't believe it.
Paul didn't know that I'd been there!
Paul hadn't come to confront us, I realized. He must have seen an e-mail or two, suspected what was going on, and gone over to Scott's to deliver an ass kicking in order to scare him away from me. That's why he'd left without confronting me! And that was why he was acting oblivious now. He wasn't acting. Paul was oblivious!
Paul didn't know I'd cheated on him.
NOW, THAT CHANGED THINGS, didn't it? I stared across the room as Paul lifted up the throw.
"Get in here with me, Lauren," he said. "You've been working too hard. Hell, we both have. C'mere."
Seeing Paul lying there like that reminded me of the time when I'd thrown out my back, chasing a suspect down a Throgs Neck fire escape the year before. I was laid up for two weeks, and Paul had used his vacation to take care of me. Really take care of me. He'd cooked us three meals a day, and we'd eaten here together watching daytime TV, reading, Paul reading to me. The water heater gave up the ghost in the middle of the second week, and I'll never forget how Paul had washed my hair in the kitchen sink with water heated from the stove.
Bottom line was, he'd been there for me.
Now he needed me to be there for him.
I took a breath and stepped over and lay down beside him. Paul switched off the light. I reached out in the dark until I found Paul's hand, then I held it tight.
"Well, I'm glad you made it home to me," I finally said. "Even if your clothes didn't."
THE NEXT MORNING, I got dressed quickly after Paul left for work. I'd been waiting for him to leave, actually. More accurate: I couldn't wait for Paul to go.
As I was about to dump my handbag into my Mini, I suddenly very distinctly remembered what ADA Jeff Buslik had said about the gun used to kill Scott. How it was absolutely critical to proving the case.
I moved away from the car and hurried toward the work shed, a single question racing through my brain.
Which river was I going to dump the gun in – the Hudson, the East, or the Harlem?
But I swallowed hard as soon as I unlocked the shed's door. I hadn't been expecting this. Not in my wildest dreams.
There was an empty space where the bag of evidence had been! There was just air.
I looked behind the rakes, the bags of fertilizer, the watering can. No gun. No bloody paper towels. No nothing.
What now?
I stared at the spot, wondering what Paul might have done with the murder gun. Had he dumped it when he went to return the car? If so, where?
That worried me. A lot. The murder weapon still around someplace, probably with Paul's prints on it.
I was standing there, stomach churning, when I noticed the shovel. The tip of its blade was dark. I touched it. It was wet with mud. I took it out of the shed with me and jogged toward the backyard.
Where would I bury a murder weapon if I were Paul? I thought.
I'd want to hide it someplace close, I decided. Someplace where I could glance out my window and see if the area had been disturbed.
I scanned my backyard. It got only afternoon sun, so it was still shaded. I paced its entire length, staring at the cool, shadowed ground for twenty minutes, but there were no obvious disturbances. Not in the plant beds, not beneath the hedges or azaleas.
About ten minutes later, next to the grill, beside a stack of garden bricks we'd bought at Home Depot a year before, I noticed something a little curious. To the right of the pile, I could see faint indentations of bricks in the dirt.
The bricks had been moved slightly over to the left, I realized.
I began removing the top row of bricks and placing them back in their original formation. Under the last row, the earth was loose.
I dug with the shovel until it squished into something. My breath caught and my heart pumped with relief. It was a plastic Stop amp; Shop bag. I opened it and saw the.38 sitting on top of the bloody towels.
I put the gun in my purse and tied the shopping bag and put it in the trunk of my Impala, the cop car I usually drove to work in. Then I went back, filled the hole, and painstakingly put the bricks back the way I'd found them.
I was sweating, placing the last brick back down, when I heard something at the corner of the house.
I turned.
And my heart stopped.
It was my partner, Mike.
Mike? Here at my house? Now?
Behind him were Scott's DETF group members Jeff Trahan and Roy Khuong. All three were wearing full ballistic armor.
I could feel my sweat glands open like a drain. This was it – endgame!
They'd been surveilling me, I thought. They knew exactly what had happened. Probably from the get-go.
Now it was over.
My mouth opened wordlessly as I stared at them from where I was, on my knees.
"What's up, Lauren? Don't you answer your phone?" Mike said, pulling me up. "We just got word from a confidential informant that the Ordonez boys are at their club right now. We decided to just come by and pick you up. Marut and Price are waiting in the van."
He slapped the dirt from my hands as if I were a naughty child he'd caught playing in the mud.
"You can plant your perennials later, Martha Stewart," my fired-up partner said with a grin. "It's time for us to bag some cop killers."
RIDING IN THE BACK of a speeding van disguised as a plumbing company's, which the Bronx Narcotics Drug Enforcement Task Force used for surveillance, I studied the black-and-white photographs of the Ordonez brothers that Mike had brought with him. The pilot, Mark, was a year older than his brother, Victor, but the hard-eyed, pock-marked tough guys could have been twins.
I handed the pictures back to Mike, who was crouched next to me. He was sheathed in Kevlar, a tactical shotgun held port arms across his chest. I was wearing a full vest, too, and it felt incredibly heavy across my back and shoulders.
Or maybe it was just my head-about-to-explode guilt and anxiety dragging on me.
"Couple of real lookers," I managed to get out.
"Did you notice how light-skinned Victor is? Six foot. He matches Amelia Phelps's description almost to a T. He did it, Lauren. He's our guy. He just about killed a cop fifteen years ago, and he finally got his chance with Scott. The son of a bitch was Scott's shooter. I can feel it."
I stared at my partner. There was a far-off look in his eyes, a malevolent gaze. "These two are going to wish their mother strangled them at birth," he whispered.
I raked my hair back with my fingers. I remembered again that Mike's dad had been killed on The Job. Now we were going after cop killers. I wondered suddenly if this was such a good idea. Actually, I knew it wasn't.
"We're here," Trahan called from the wheel as the van slowed. "Lock and load, ladies."
There was a heady metallic smell in the van's enclosed space. Adrenaline probably. Or maybe testosterone. Things were happening way too fast. The click of weapons echoed off the stark, steel walls.
We were parked on East 141st Street somewhere off Willis Avenue. I guessed the Manhattan real-estate bubble had yet to blow in this direction, looking out at the weed-filled lots and crumbling buildings.
Anything to keep my mind off what was happening now.
Across the desolate street, a wind-blown page of El Diario caught against the skeletal bumper of a stripped-to-the-bones Escalade. The only structures that looked semi-sound around here were the housing projects across the gun-metal strip of the Harlem River behind us.
Trahan pointed at an ancient, listing, four-story walk-up midway down the block.
"There she blows," he said. "That's the club."
Club? I thought, confused. What club? What Trahan was pointing at were just two graffiti-covered steel shutters bookending the shadowed doorway of an anonymous-looking storefront. The crumbling tenement windows above it were empty. Not just of people. Of glass and aluminum frames, too.
Trahan caught my dumbfounded look.
"You have to see this place inside," he said with a rueful shake of his head. "It's another world."
Trahan took out his cell phone and made a call. He tssked after a few seconds, snapped it shut.
"Damn confidential informants," he said. "She's not picking up."
"It's a woman?" I said.
"Of course," Detective Marut said. "She was sleeping with Mark Ordonez until he left her for another lady. There's no better informant than a woman scorned."
"When did you last hear from her?" I asked.
"Right before we picked you up," Trahan said. He bit the antenna of his radio in frustration.
"I wanted to hit it fast, flash-bang through the front door, get everybody down. Now I'm not so sure. My CI there said that the place was packed. We can't risk somebody getting hurt, especially us, unless the Ordonez brothers are definitely in there. Then, fuck everything!"
"Hey, wait a second," I said. "Where's the Emergency Service Unit? They live for this kind of stuff. Why don't we let them handle it?"
"Scott was our brother," Khuong said gravely, his eyes hard and dark as coal. "This stays in the family."
Good lord. I didn't like the sound of that. I was getting a scary vibe off everyone, actually. These guys were too keyed up. Letting their emotions get the best of them. This thing felt more like a war party than an arrest procedure. Whatever happened to removing the emotionally involved from the case? Like I of all people should talk.
"Did somebody say that the place was packed?" I said, staring dubiously at the desolate establishment. "It's coming on nine a.m."
Thaddeus's gold tooth winked. At least I think that's what I saw. He racked his 10mm Smith amp; Wesson.
"Some people never want the party to end, girl," he said.
"Wait a second. How are we going to do a recon?" Detective Marut chimed in. "If these guys killed Scott, then they're going to be superparanoid about anybody who looks suspicious. We've all been on surveillance. Who knows if they made us."
"I have an idea," I said.
I stared at the club. It looked evil, like an inner-city entrance to Hell. But I was the one whose charade had put us here, and I could barely live with myself at that moment. If somebody else got hurt, I didn't know what I would do.
"Wire me up," I said.
Trahan shook his head. "No way."
"What are you, nuts?" Mike said. "No way are you going into that pit alone. I'll do it."
I stared into my partner's eyes. He meant what he'd just said. Like I said, he's the best.
"You listen to me," I said. "I'm going in. They don't know me from Eve. They won't expect a woman. Oh, and if that's not good enough for you, I'm the primary investigator. And to answer your first question, Yes, obviously I'm nuts."
IT TOOK ABOUT A MINUTE AND A HALF for DEA agent Thaddeus Price to attach a tiny wireless Typhoon mike under the button of my suit jacket. I kind of wanted to tell him I wasn't in that big a hurry, but I kept that particular news flash to myself.
"Okay, here's the set," he said. "This place is a shit hole, but believe it or not, on Friday mornings they get a slumming, hard-partying Manhattan crowd. Go up, knock on the door, and tell the bouncer you're looking for your boyfriend, DJ Lewis. Don't worry, he's not there. But the bouncer will probably let you in."
"Why's that?" I said.
Thaddeus's tooth glittered again as he smiled at me.
"Look in the mirror, Detective. Pretty white girls like you don't need to be on the list."
"You see either of our buddies, Mark or Victor," Trahan advised, "I want you to call out, 'Code red,' and find the nearest corner. Same goes if there's trouble, if you feel you're in any danger at all. We'll be there before you can draw another breath, okay?"
"Code red," I said. "Got it." Hell, I'd been in code red for the past twenty-four hours.
"All right, what else?" Trahan said. "Oh, yeah. Cough up your weapon and badge. The bouncer might want to search you."
The walls of the cramped van suddenly seemed to shrink in on me, until I felt like I was lying in a coffin. My own coffin.
Dear Holy Christ!
I could hand over my Glock and badge without any problem whatsoever.
But Scott's gun, the one that Paul had used to murder him, was in my handbag. That might raise a few eyebrows in the van. What the hell was I going to do now?
I reached into my purse and handed Trahan my Glock. Then I gave him my gold badge.
But I left Scott's murder weapon right where it was, under my wallet and a box of Altoids. "Wish me luck," I said.
"Code red," Trahan repeated. "Don't be a hero in there, Lauren."
"Trust me, I'm no hero."
The door of the van suddenly slid open, and I stepped out, blinking, onto the cracked and stained sidewalk. I looked around. I didn't know which was bleaker, the inner-city horizon or my dwindling chances of pulling this crazy charade off alive.
"Don't worry, partner," Mike said. "We'll be watching you every step of the way."
Yeah, I thought, hefting my bag as the door slammed shut.
That was precisely the problem.
I stared at the establishment in question, the so-called club. The steel shutters. The lightless doorway between them like a vertical open grave.
What in the name of everything holy could happen to me next?
Code red was the least of my problems.
IN THE SMALL ALCOVE just inside the crummy front door was a crimson velvet rope and behind it, an ink-black stairwell leading down.
The bouncer standing next to it was wearing champagne-colored sunglasses and a three-piece suit that could have been made of red Mylar. I silently debated what made me more uneasy as I approached him, the fact that he was six and a half feet tall or the fact that he was morbidly obese.
A steady thumping rose from the raw concrete stairwell at his side, as if blasting were going on in the depths of the earth.
"Lewis spinning tonight?" I asked.
The bouncer shook his huge head almost imperceptibly.
Did he understand English? Did he automatically know I was a cop? I felt suddenly very glad Mike and the other guys were just a yell away.
"Is it a private party, or can I get in?" I said.
Private party, I prayed, glancing down into the black of the stairwell. I had no problem with going back to the van a failure. We could figure something else out. I was leaning toward a nap at that point. Or maybe a three-week vacation out of the country.
"Depends," the bouncer finally spoke.
"On what?" I said.
The bouncer lowered his shades and adjusted himself in a way that made me glad I hadn't eaten any breakfast.
"On how bad you want in," he said.
"That's really romantic," I said as I turned on my heel. "But there's nothing on this earth I want that bad."
"Come back, come back," the unsavory bouncer said, booming nasty laughter as he unclipped the velvet rope. "Don't get so testy, white girl. Just a little joke. Bouncer humor. Welcome to Wonderground."
I WAS ALMOST READY to draw Scott's gun for protection by the time I made it to the bottom of the treacherously dark stairwell. Instead, I took a deep breath. Then I stepped toward the amplified throbbing, passing through a doorway curtained with crystal beads.
On the other side, I stared, amazed, at the flat-screen TVs, the expensive lighting, the packed center bar that looked like it was made of black glass.
The female bartenders behind it wore black rubber cat suits and fake breasts. Heck, they might have been transvestites. The Bronx really was back.
I had to admit, I was kind of impressed. This could have been Manhattan. The Ordonez brothers had done their degradation research.
Among the predominantly Hispanic crowd was a well-represented contingent of upscale white people. They were sweating on the dance floor, faces rapt with foolish smiles as they spun neon-colored glow sticks in both hands.
Above gyrating dancers, in a steel cage suspended from the ceiling, a naked dwarf wearing angel wings was banging on the bars with a white nightstick. Who thinks this shit up? I wondered.
"I can feel your energy," a bloated, middle-aged bond-trader type said as he spilled off the dance floor and tried to embrace me.
I tried to stiff-arm him away, and when that didn't work, I lightly kneed him between the legs.
"Now you can – maybe," I said as he backed off in a hurry. I fled toward the bar.
"Twelve dollars," the bartender said after I ordered a Heineken.
Look at that, I thought, coughing up the money, they even had Manhattan prices.
Maybe thirty seconds later, a short, pudgy Hispanic man with a goatee smiled and wedged himself in beside me.
"I'm the candy man," he said.
I stared at him. The candy man? Was that a new pickup line? I'd been out of it for a while. Actually, to tell the truth, nice Catholic girl that I was, I'd never actually been in it.
He placed an ivory-colored pill in my hand. I didn't think it was a Sweet Tart.
"Twenty," he said.
I gave it back to him and watched him shrug his shoulders and leave. The Ecstasy dealer had to be working for the Ordonezes, right? But I lost him when he stepped into the laser-light kaleidoscope of the dance floor.
I looked around for either Ordonez. I scanned the A-list booths at the rear of the dance floor behind the DJ. The strobes and violent waves of bass weren't exactly helping my concentration. Like it or not, I had to get closer.
I was skirting the far edge of the dance floor to avoid any more unwanted advances, when one of the doors in the concrete wall beside me opened.
Victor Ordonez stepped out, staring right into my eyes. Before I could move, an iron hand was wrapped around the back of my neck.
I turned and saw my buddy from upstairs, the bouncer in dire need of Jenny Craig. "It's only me, lady," he said and grinned.
"Why don't you come into the VIP room?" Victor yelled over the music as I was pushed inside. "Private party. But you can be my guest."
THE BACK VIP ROOM was actually a tenement basement. Raw concrete walls and floors, cinder-block window frames, the rusted hull of an old boiler. Nice décor. A naked bulb hung above an old grease-caked kitchen table that held a stainless steel electronic scale.
Beyond the table, through a dark doorway, was a corridor with something lying on the floor.
I swallowed hard.
It was a crud-stained mattress.
"Get your filthy hands off me right now," I said, struggling to break the bouncer's grip.
"Calm down, please," Victor said pleasantly as he stepped in front of me. He was wearing a three-piece white suit, white shirt, and a black tie. I wondered if Mickey Rourke knew one of his suits was missing.
"This is a routine security matter," Victor explained. "My employee, Ignacio, forgot to search you upstairs. An oversight on his part."
An alarm bell went off in my head. I wondered what else was routine for the violent drug dealer standing in front of me.
"Hey," I said. "Go ahead and kick me out for breaking your rules. I was thinking about hitting a diner for some breakfast, anyway."
Victor sighed. Then he nodded at the bouncer.
My handbag was ripped away. I heard its contents being dumped onto the table as I scanned the room for another exit.
I couldn't stop staring at the mattress. Or remembering the attempted rape arrest on Victor's rap sheet.
Should I just grab for Scott's gun? I wondered. How many rounds were left? Four? Double-tap Victor, go for a head shot on the behemoth, then get out the same door I came in.
"What's this?" Victor said, picking up Scott's.38 before I could.
I almost panicked. I had an open mike, and I couldn't let the team hear about the gun. I thought quickly. "That looks like a code red," I said casually.
"What do you mean, 'code red'?" he asked.
"That. The gun you pulled and have pointed at me. That looks like a code red!" I said in a loud voice, hoping my mike had picked me up.
My knees stung as Victor suddenly threw me to the floor.
"Shut up, you bitch! Who are you to come into my place, shouting your head off at me?" he yelled.
"Coño! Don't you see?" the bouncer behind me said. "That's a cop gun. She's a fucking lady cop. And Pedro already sold to her!"
"Shut up, you useless hump, and let me think!" Victor screamed.
My face went numb as the younger Ordonez suddenly pointed the gun at me. I stared into the black barrel. Instead of seeing my entire life, everything that had happened since I'd decided to be with Scott flashed before my eyes. In high-definition clarity, I saw every misstep that had led me from two nights before to here and now.
Wait a second, I thought. Where are the troops? I looked at the thick walls. These damn basements! I must have been in a radio blind spot.
"Code red!" I screamed as I scrambled for the door.
The bouncer was surprisingly quick for a mountain. I made it only halfway before he grabbed my ankle and almost tore off my entire left foot.
Then there was a scream – and the door exploded!
Pounding dance music instantly flooded the room. My eyes – tearing in the dust and splinters – were greeted with hands-down the most satisfying sight of my life to that point.
My partner, Mike, shotgun to his shoulder, was riding the knocked-down door into the room like it was a surfboard.
MIKE CRUSHED THE BOUNCER'S ugly face with a shotgun butt to the nose before the monster could even form his first curse word.
"Where's Victor?" Mike then said, tossing me my Glock and cuffs. "We lost your transmission outside. Trahan's informant told us Victor brought you in here."
"I don't know where he went, Mike," I said, searching behind me. "He was right here a second ago."
"Cuff that one to something and give me some backup," Mike said. He leveled his shotgun toward the dark passageway where the mattress lay and then rushed toward it.
I cuffed the unconscious bouncer to one of the boiler's pipes. His glasses were shattered and his leaking face was now the color of his suit. Just a little cop humor, I felt like telling him as I ran into the corridor after my partner.
I heard the sound of a door slamming ahead of me.
Where the hell had Mike and Ordonez gone? I banged my shin on some unseen stairs and jogged up them, my Glock leading the way.
The door I finally found, pretty much with my face, exited onto a field with high weeds and garbage and broken glass. Now where was I?
I blinked in the sudden, blinding daylight. I saw Mike already halfway across the abandoned lot. A half block in front of him, a figure in a white suit was sprinting along 140th Street. It was either Victor Ordonez or an ice-cream man training for the marathon.
I began closing the distance as Mike chased Victor east for two blocks. At the end of the third intersection, they went under an el and in through the gate of a junkyard. Would Ordonez get away? I guess I hoped so. If it were up to me, he could keep running until he got back to Santo Domingo.
Unfortunately, Mike kept up his pursuit, rushing hell-bent for glory around an obstacle course of crushed boxes and piled metal. All Ordonez had to do was wait and fire, and Mike would be toast. But it didn't happen that way.
Approaching a rusted tin wall at the rear of the junkyard, I heard a loud metal screech. Then a metal-on-metal boom. What the hell was that?
Half a block away in the farthest corner of the yard, I spotted Ordonez scrambling off the forklift he'd just crashed into the fence.
He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled out of sight through a crack that he'd made in the fence.
A second or two later, Mike appeared from a wall of pipes and dove through the same hole in the fence, still chasing Ordonez.
When I finally got there, huffing and puffing, I could see trains. Lots of trains. Ordonez had fled from a junkyard into a subway rail yard.
And I forgot to fill my MetroCard, I thought as I crawled through the fence, keeping my eyes peeled for the deadly third rail.
I WAS RUNNING through a narrow space between two parked number 4 trains, searching frantically for Mike and Ordonez, when I heard a sharp crack. Shit! The window above my head shattered. "Hey, white girl! Catch!"
I turned in time to watch Victor Ordonez, who was leaning out the conductor's window two cars away, fire again. I felt something zip past my ear and then heard a sound like thin ice breaking.
I started emptying my Glock in Victor's direction.
I ejected the empty clip before I realized something warm was running down my neck. My legs dematerialized suddenly, and I found myself lying on gravel. There was something wrong with the side of my face.
God, I'd been hit! I felt dizzy. Like I was sliding out of myself, watching myself from a distance.
Don't go into shock, Lauren. Move! Do something! Right now! I scrambled upright and began retreating as fast as my shaky legs would carry me. I pressed the sleeve of my jacket to my head where it was bleeding.
I fell to my knees one more time and had to pick myself up again before I reached the end of the train.
I spotted an open door at the end of the last car. I climbed up, pulled myself inside on my stomach, and rolled under some seats.
That's when the shooting really got started! Two or three cars away, a shotgun blasted three times in quick succession. Then it went off again almost on top of me, and the window glass of the car I was in shattered.
I was lying there, curled up on the filthy floor, bleeding and shivering, when I suddenly heard Ordonez scream in the next car. I couldn't see him from where I lay, but I could hear him as clearly as if he were in the same room.
"Okay! Okay! I give up!" Victor Ordonez yelled at somebody.
There was the sound of something heavy dropping against the floor. Scott's gun?
"I want my lawyer," Ordonez said.
For a second, everything was quiet. Too quiet. What was happening now?
Then a shotgun was jacked.
Click-clack.
"Only thing you're going to need, you cop-killing piece of shit," I heard Mike say, "is an undertaker."
No! I remember thinking. Dear God, Mike. What are you doing? No!
I spun onto my stomach, struggled to stand, my mouth gaping to shout at Mike.
"Cop killer?" I heard Ordonez say with confusion in his voice.
Then the shotgun exploded one last time.
I MUST HAVE PASSED OUT for a little while, because the next thing I heard were the cries of somebody asking, "Where the fuck are you?" The words were coming out of Mike's radio, which lay beside my head. Mike was on the subway car floor, cradling me in his lap.
"You're going to be all right, Lauren," Mike said. He had a smile on his face, and there were tears in his eyes. "Your head got nicked. Flesh wound. Honest to God. You're going to be fine."
"I'm not dying?" I asked Mike.
"Nope. Not on my watch."
Through the open door between cars, I could see a hand sticking out of a sea of shattered glass. Blood was flecked on a white sleeve.
"What about Victor?" I said. "You…"
Mike put a finger to my lips.
"Fired on him after he shot at me. You remember what happened, partner?"
I winced. I couldn't believe it. Somehow I'd gotten from my normal life to here.
"That's the way it happened. He shot and then I shot," Mike repeated. "That way and no other way."
I nodded, looked away from Mike. "I hear you. I got it, Mike."
"They're here," a frantic voice called from somewhere outside the subway car. "They're in here."
"My dad was killed on a train just like this one," Mike said in a tired voice. "Just like this one."
Outside came the chop-chop of an approaching helicopter, then the sound of barking dogs.
"He used to take me and my brother fishing out on City Island," Mike went on. "My little brother was so hyper he flipped the boat on us one time. I thought my dad was going to drown him, but instead he just laughed. That's how he was. How I'll always remember him. With us hugging his big neck as he laughed like hell, swimming us ashore."
An awful sound ripped from the back of Mike's throat. Thirty, forty years' worth of grief.
"I always knew something like this would happen," he said. "Sooner or later."
I patted my partner on the elbow.
Then EMTs and cops and DEA agents all came flooding into the shot-up train car.
I DEFINITELY WASN'T DYING TODAY. It turned out I didn't need stitches, so the EMTs cleaned my wound, applied pressure to stop the bleeding from my cheek and left ear, and fixed me up with a small bandage. I sat on the edge of the ambulance, watching the fuss and thinking that I easily could have been killed in this train yard.
Trahan had finally called the Emergency Service Unit, the NYPD's SWAT guys, and a wagon circle of their diesel trucks surrounded the train yard's wheelhouse. There were K-9 units, aviation hovering, a platoon of detectives and uniforms. After Mike saw me go down, he'd called in a 10-13, "cop in dire need," and it seemed everyone on the force, except maybe the harbor patrol, had responded.
Lieutenant Keane hopped down from the train car where Victor Ordonez was still lying and came over.
"You did real good," he said. "The serial number on the gun beside our dearly departed friend in there matches. It was Scott's. Just like we thought. The Ordonezes took him out."
I shook my head and genuinely couldn't believe what had happened. In a weird way, it had actually worked out better than I could have hoped, or dreamed. Everything was going to be okay now. Despite the stalling, the omissions, the lies.
"Any sign of Mark, the pilot brother?" I asked.
"None so far," my boss said. "But don't worry, he'll turn up."
"Where's Mike?" I asked.
My boss rolled his eyes.
"IAB. Rat squad practically got here before the ESU. You'd think you getting hit might make a difference to them. Those shit-shoveling assholes think you shot yourself and dumped the gun maybe."
I kept my breathing normal, but only through intense concentration.
Meanwhile, my boss rubbed my back like a boxer's cornerman before standing him back up to fight.
"Why don't you tell this kid to get you over to Jacobi before the commissioner shows up. After the hospital, go home and unplug the phone. I'll keep the sewer rats away until you catch your breath. Give me a call sometime tomorrow. You need anything right now?"
I shook my head. I couldn't even begin to think of an answer to that question.
"You did real good, kid," my boss said before he left. "Made us all proud."
I sat there, watching him walk away.
The department had their shooter.
Paul was probably off the hook.
Brooke and her kids would be taken care of, as they ought to be.
I watched the blue NYPD helicopter skim over the razor wire at the rail yard's fence, then sail into the bright blue sky. Out of the corner of one eye I saw the CSU camera lights pop in the glassless window of the train car.
Everything had worked out okay, hadn't it? This was the end of the mess.
So why was I crying?
IT WAS SUNNY and cool the following Monday morning.
Standing at attention out on the steps of St. Michael's on 41st Street in Woodside, I was glad for the warmth of my dress blues, and for the body heat coming from the officers around me.
Though there were maybe three or four thousand cops on the cordoned-off street, waiting for the arrival of Scott's hearse, the only sound was the snapping of the honor guard's flag; the only movement, the billow of its bright stars and stripes.
The rattle of snare drums began at the first tolling of St. Michael's bells. From around the corner of the stone church came a forty-member contingent of the NYPD Emerald Society, the bagpipes silenced, the drummers sounding a funeral march on black-draped drums.
Behind them came a seemingly endless two-by-two line of motorcycle police, their engines crackling as they rode at parade speed.
When the sleek black body of the hearse finally slid into view, you could almost hear the lumps forming in thousands of throats. Presidents don't get put in the ground with more heart-wrenching class than an NYPD cop killed in the line of duty.
My muscles in my jaw stood out as I prevented myself from shaking, moving, breaking down completely.
From the limo that pulled to a stop behind the hearse, Brooke Thayer finally appeared. She was holding her baby and her four-year-old daughter.
A member of the honor guard suddenly broke rank and leaned into the limousine with an extended hand. Then Scott's two-year-old son finally emerged, wearing a black suit.
A black suit and his father's eight-point policeman's cap.
The Mass was excruciating. Scott's mother broke down during the second reading and his sister during the eulogy.
It was even worse when Roy Khuong, Scott's oldest friend and partner, told a story about how Scott had saved his life during a gun battle. He finished it by turning from the pulpit toward the crucifix and saying with a simple yet startling conviction, "I love you, Scott."
How I got through the rest of it, I'm not sure. People can survive amazing things. Look at that hiker who cut off his own arm with a pocketknife when it got stuck under a boulder. We are capable of anything, aren't we?
Well, I am. I know I am now.
They buried Scott in Calvary Cemetery on a high hill overlooking an unobstructed Manhattan skyline.
The mayor of New York gestured toward the city as he finished his graveside words.
"We ask that Scott do what he did so well in life. Watch over us, Scott. We will never forget your sacrifice."
Brooke embraced me like a vise after I had dropped my rose among the hundreds that buried the casket's varnished lid. She touched the bandage on the side of my face.
"I know what you did for me," she whispered. "What you did for my family. I can sleep now. Thank you for that, Detective."
I pulled the black lip of my cap even more tightly over my eyes to shield them, nodded stupidly, and then moved along.
I SAT ALONE IN MY CAR before leaving Calvary. I could see the flower-covered casket in my rearview.
When the skirl of the bagpipes started up, for a moment I again caught a heady gust of cologne and rain and grass. Felt again the holy, fevered heat of Scott's body in his bedroom. The strength of his jaw against my bare skin. I banished the forbidden thoughts like the demons they were as "Amazing Grace" sailed up above the gravestones.
Mistake, I reminded myself.
It had all been a terrible mistake. Quick as lightning, just as deadly.
I looked out at the red-eyed police heading back to their cars. That I was fooling them burned like battery acid in my stomach, but I tried my best to believe it was the best thing for everyone under the circumstances.
What result could have been better? I thought. The dehumanizing, demoralizing tabloid circus that was the truth?
I stared out at the casket as Scott's son raised a hand in salute to the wobbling brim of his father's hat. Then I looked up at the stunning skyline of Manhattan, at the gravestones in the foreground like a kind of city itself.
My eyes were dry as I turned the engine over.
There was one good thing – undeniable – Paul and I had been given a second chance.