In the movies, this would be where the judge pounded his gavel, calling for order in the court. This was not the movies, and Martin Gregg was not a cinematic judge.
“Is everyone all right?” Gregg asked.
Slowly, everyone in the courtroom shook it out, returned to their seats, offered nervous conversation with their neighbors. A minute or two later, it was as if nothing had happened. But it had.
“In light of this little unscheduled Broadway matinee performance,” Judge Gregg continued. “We will recess for one hour to consider our reviews.”
Good, Michael thought. A break was what he needed. Maybe he could get them back after all. Maybe he could find Falynn.
M
ICHAEL GOT BACK
into his office just before three o’clock. The court usually recessed for the day at around 4:30, and Michael still had hopes of completing his opening statement. Still, if Liam Ghegan had wanted to disrupt the trial, and especially the jury’s train of thought, he had certainly accomplished that mission. Bringing the jury back into the rhythm of the state’s case was not going to be easy.
Michael began to make new notes on his statement when a shadow crossed his doorway. It was Tommy.
“You hear what happened?” Michael asked.
“I heard,” Tommy said. “Maybe in two or three more generations the Ghegans will finally be able to walk on their hind legs.”
“Was there media outside?”
“Oh yeah. Cameras got them hauling Ghegan away, screaming his ass off.”
Michael thought about this. It was never good. Even worse in this case. If Falynn saw the footage, she might disappear forever. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
He told Tommy about the text message from Falynn, as well as the conversation with Deena Trent. “See if you can find out where she might have gone.”
With any luck, Michael would complete his opening statement today, Feretti would open in the morning – and, if they found Falynn, and Michael could talk to her into it – she would be on the stand by eleven o’clock.
“You got it,” Tommy said.
“Thanks, man.”
When Tommy left, Michael stood, closed the door, took off his suit coat. He found that the tension of the day had settled into his shoulders. He did some of his stretching exercises, soon felt a little better.
He poured himself some coffee, paced his small office, trying to reengage the mindset. He had only been interrupted during an opening statement once in his career, and that had been in law school, as an exercise. He had not done well that time, but that was a long time ago. Before he was a prince at the Palace.
A few minutes later his cellphone rang. He looked at the screen.
Private number. He had to take it. It might have been Judge Gregg’s clerk telling him there was a delay, which would be the first good news he’d had all day. He flipped open the phone.
“This is Michael.”
“Mr Roman.”
A statement, not a question. It was a man’s voice. Foreign.
“Who is this?” Michael asked.
“I will tell you this soon. But first I want you to promise me that you will remain calm, no matter what occurs in the next few moments.”
Michael stood up. Something turned in his stomach, the way it used to when he had a witness on the stand, and the person’s story began to crack. Except at this moment he knew this was wrong, but he wasn’t sure
how
he knew.
“Who is this? What are you talking about?”
“Before I begin, I want your assurance that you will listen to what I have to say in its entirety.”
Michael would make no promises. “I’m listening.”
“My name is Aleksander,” the man said. “May I call you Michael?”
Michael remained silent.
“I will take that as a yes,” the man continued. He spoke with an accent, the unmistakable Estonian inflection Michael knew very well.
“By now I believe you have heard about the tragic murder of a man named Harkov. A lawyer like yourself.”
Michael’s stomach fell. This man was calling about Harkov. Was this a detective? No. A cop wouldn’t be playing games. A cop would be standing in this office with his handcuffs ready. Maybe this was a fed. No. Feds had an even lower tolerance for bullshit. “I heard.”
“I believe that at one time you retained his services. Am I correct in this knowledge?”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to answer my question. It is in your best interest to do so.”
Michael felt the old anger begin to boil. “What the fuck do you know about my best interest? Tell me what this is all about or I hang up the phone.”
“Ah,” the man said. “The temper.”
“The
temper
? What the fuck is this? Have we met?”
The man hesitated for a moment. “No, we have never met, but in the past few hours or so, I have learned a great deal about you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You have faced death,” the man said. “You have looked into Satan’s face and lived to tell. As have I.”
The man continued, but the sounds seemed to drift away. Michael didn’t hear what the man was saying, until he said:
“I am in your home. Abigail and the girls are just fine, and they will remain so, as long as you follow my instructions.”
A deadening cold radiated through Michael’s limbs, as if he had suddenly been anesthetized. What had moments ago been a dark possibility – that this man somehow knew about the illegalities of the girls’ adoption – had now blossomed into a different, more terrifying reality.
The man continued. “Do not call the police, do not call the FBI, do not contact anyone,” he said. “If you do, it will be the mistake by which all other mistakes will be measured until your last breath. Do I have your attention and your belief?”
Michael began to pace again. “Yes.”
“Good. I want you to listen to me,” the man said. “My full name is Aleksander Savisaar. I want you to call me Aleks. I am telling you this because I know you are not going to contact the authorities.”
Up came the prosecutor in Michael. Up came the heat. Before he could stop himself he said, “How do you know what I will or won’t do?”
A moment. “I know.”
Michael stopped pacing, every muscle tightening. Every instinct within him told him to go to the police. This was his training, this was his belief, this was consistent with every case he had ever tried, everything he had come to believe. If this were happening to a friend or colleague, it would be the advice he would give them.
But now it was
his
life,
his
wife,
his
children.
Michael picked up his office phone. He dialed his home number. There were two house phones in the Eden Falls house, two extensions of the land line. One in the kitchen, one in the bedroom. For some reason he got a disconnect recording. The sound of the disembodied voice chilled him. He dialed Abby’s cellphone. After a second, he heard it ring in the background. It was Abby’s special ringtone. His heart froze. The man
was
in his house.
“And now you have proof,” Aleks said.
“Look” Michael began, his rage a gathering gale. “If anything happens to my family there is nowhere on earth you will able to hide. Nowhere. Do you hear me?”
For a moment Michael thought, and feared, that the man had hung up.
“There is no need for anyone to be hurt,” Aleks said. His calmness was as infuriating as it was chilling. “But this is entirely up to you.”
Michael remained silent as the clock passed four o’clock. Any second now his office phone would ring. They would be looking for him.
“I am looking at your schedule,” Aleks said. “You should be in court. Are there problems?”
“No.”
“Good. And I see that later today you are due to meet some tradesman on Newark Street.”
The cold began to spread. Michael found that he had not moved a muscle in minutes. This man knew his whole life.
“You are to go about the rest of your day as if everything were normal,” Aleks continued. “You will keep all of your appointments. You will not contact anyone about this, or send anyone to this house. You will not call this house for any reason. You will not come home.”
“Let me talk to my wife.”
The man ignored him, continued. “You are being watched, Michael Roman. If you do anything out of the ordinary, if you are seen talking to anyone in law enforcement, you will regret it.”
My God, Michael thought. It was all connected. The brutal murder of Viktor Harkov, the stealing of confidential files. And now a madman had his family.
But why? What did he want?
“When you step out of the office, one of the people you encounter will hold the lives of your wife and these little girls in their hands. You will not know who it is. Be wise, Michael. I will contact you soon.”
“You don’t understand. When I go into the courtroom there will be all kinds of police officers, detectives, marshals. I can’t –”
“No one.”
The line went dead.
What Michael had feared, just a few short moments ago – the possibility he might lose his daughters in a long, protracted legal battle – was nothing.
Now he was fighting for their lives.
TWENTY-SEVEN
T
he Queens Homicide Squad was located on the second floor of the 112th Precinct headquarters in Forest Hills, a square, nondescript building with mint-green panels below the windows, and a black marble entrance.
Of the twelve full-time homicide detectives, only two were women, and that was just the way Desiree Powell liked it. Although she had many female friends on the job, most of them were drawn to other squads as a career – vice, narcotics, forensic investigation. Powell knew she had a knack for this work, always had, even as a child. There was logic to it all, but it was more than that. As a student she had been far better at algebra than geometry.
A
always led to
B
then to
C
. Always. If it didn’t, you had the wrong
A
to begin with. She did not consider that she had a gift – few investigators were gifted at detection. She believed it was something that came from instinct; you either had the nose, and the gut, or you didn’t.
She had recently investigated a case in North Corona where the victim, a forty-nine-year-old white male, a family man with a wife and three children, was found lying on his backyard, middle of a nice summer day, his head bashed in. There was no weapon found, no witnesses, no suspects. There was, however, a ladder leaning up against the back of his house. The man’s wife said when she left for work that day, her husband told her he was going to replace a few shingles. CSU found blood on the roof, in the gutter as well, which led them to conclude that the man had been bludgeoned on the roof, and not in the backyard as they had originally thought.
Desiree Powell mused: Who climbs a ladder, bludgeons a man, watches the victim roll off, then climbs back down? Why risk being seen by the entire neighborhood? Why not wait until the guy was on the ground, or in the house?
Three times during the neighborhood canvass Powell found she’d had to stop for a moment and wait for the jets overhead to pass. The neighborhood was directly in the flight path of LaGuardia airport.
When the case stalled, Powell reached out to an old friend in TSA, who in turn called a few of the airlines and discovered that, on the day the man died, a cargo plane had reported some engine trouble on takeoff from LaGuardia. Powell visited the hangar and discovered that a piece of metal had come off the engine housing, a piece never recovered by investigators. She also discovered that the plane had passed directly over the community of North Corona. She brought back CSU, and they did a search of the chimney. Inside, they found a chunk of metal near the flue, a ragged piece that fit the engine’s housing perfectly. It was caked with the dead man’s blood.
Airplane, Body, Chimney.
ABC.
Sometimes Powell scared herself.
M
ARCO
F
ONTOVA WALKED
into the duty room, dropped into his chair on the opposite side of the desk, one of nine or so desks in the small, paper-clogged office. He glanced once at the whiteboards on the wall, the board displaying who was in court that day, who was on the range. He checked his box for mail.
“Nice suit, by the way,” Powell said. She didn’t really mean it, but the kid was a peacock, and she liked to keep him happy. “New?”
Fontova smiled, opened up the jacket. The lining was mauve paisley. “Like it?”
It was a special brand of ugly. “Very becoming. What do we have?”
Fontova had a thick sheaf of paper in his hand, as well as a CD in a clear crystal case. “We have a printout of some of the files on Harkov’s computer, along with a copy of the original data files.”
“That was fast.”
“You want the big half or the small half?”
“I’ll take it all. You know I love this stuff.”
Fontova gave it to her.
Powell looked at the files. It was a database, a listing of Harkov’s clients. The dates went back ten years, and had to contain three hundred names. There were brief notations regarding the nature of the work Harkov had done for these people. Most were civil matters, but there were a number of criminal matters.
Was their killer in here somewhere?
The brutality of the murder suggested something other than a robbery. This was revenge. No one took the time to do what was done to Viktor Harkov just because they had a few hours to spare.
There were really only a few reasons to torture someone. Two, actually, that Powell could think of. One, the hatred for the victim ran so deep, the sense of vengeance was so strong, that nothing less than a slow, painful death would salve the loathing. The other reason was that you wanted information from that person, information the person was not ready to give up. That was pretty much it. Unless you just happened to have a taste for it, which, even for New York City, was fairly uncommon.