“What’s the name of the store?” I said.
“Ener-G Boutique. Sells all dat hip-hop nonsense clothes. It’s right on de corner.”
“You’re a good person, ma’am,” I said, putting the picture away. “Speaking up is a courageous thing.”
“You tell dat beautiful young girl’s mother I’m sorry for her loss,” the thin woman said as we headed back to the door. “I raised three sons on dis block by de skin of my teeth. If dey were taken from me like dat, I don’t know what I’d do.”
Chapter 30
THE ENER-G BOUTIQUE was right where our witness said it would be. I thought it was going to be a fly-by-night front sort of place, but it actually seemed legit. In the window were name-brand clothes from the Wu-Tang Clan, Phat Farm, Sean John, G-Unit, FUBU. They apparently sold footwear, too, to judge from the neon Timberland and Nike signs on the plate-glass door.
The clerk, plucking her eyebrows behind the counter, didn’t have a chance to say, “Can I help you?” by the time Emily and I, plus a couple of ESU SWAT cops, had crossed the store with our guns drawn. Big Ice was sitting on the shoe department’s try-on bench, slipping on a pair of Nike Dunks, when we approached him.
“Yeah?” he said testily, looking up at us.
There were two cell phones beside him and a plastic Ener-G bag under the bench. Inside the bag, a chrome-plated automatic was plainly visible.
“I wouldn’t move if I were you,” I said as I knelt and lifted the bag. The gun was a Browning Hi Power 9-millimeter. “You have a license for this?” I said, showing it to him.
“Oh, that ain’t
my
bag, Officer. Somebody else must have left it there. I just came in here to get me some new walkers.”
There was a shoebox in the bag as well. I upended it onto the floor. A plastic bag holding a dozen tightly bound bundles of twenties bounced off the beige carpet.
“Then I take it this money isn’t yours either. Or anything else I’m going to find when I tear this place apart.”
“Oh, I get it,” Big Ice said, looking from me to each of the cops surrounding him. “You gonna try and pin that girl on me. Some white girl dies, so let’s blame the big black man. How original. This is bullshit.”
Big Ice was right. What we were doing was not ordinary police procedure by any stretch. I didn’t care. I was past the point of doing this thing by the book. I didn’t have time to listen to a thousand “I didn’t see nothing”s. I was sick of looking at dead kids.
“Toss me my cellie so I can speed-dial my lawyer,” Big Ice said, yawning casually. “I got that white boy on retainer. He’s going to blow your inadmissible illegal-ass search the fuck up.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But Clarence-goddamn-Darrow isn’t going to be able to get you back this shoebox full of twenties.”
Big Ice suddenly looked at me as if I’d grown another head.
“Oh,” he said, smiling. “You wanna play
Deal or No Deal
. Why didn’t you just say so instead of bullin’ in here, getting my lady all up in a dander? You come to the right place. What can I do for you?”
“I know you or your people are out on that corner early,” I said. “That girl didn’t fall from the sky. She was dumped there. You help me with some information about it, I’m going to let you get back to your shoe shopping. Might even leave this bag where that poor soul left it.”
“With the piece in it?” Big Ice said hopefully.
“Nah, I’m going to have to turn this gun in to the lost and found,” I said.
He took a loud breath as he considered. He finally nodded.
“Okay. I could make some calls,” he said.
I tossed him one of his phones.
“What a guy,” I said.
Chapter 31
WE STOOD AROUND as Big Ice made phone calls and left messages.
“Don’t worry,” he said, snapping his phone shut. “They know what’ll happen to ’em if they don’t call me back in less than ten minutes.”
On the wall above a rack of Avirex leather jackets was a flat-screen TV tuned to the BET channel. Big Ice stood up laboriously, found the remote under the cash register, and changed it to CNBC. He stared at the screen intently as a bald white man in suspenders talked about IPOs.
“Damn, you think I’m bad?” Big Ice said. “How ’bout you go after some of those private-equity joints. Those homies buy multinational companies with IOUs an’ shit. I should try that at Micky D’s. ‘Hey, how much is that Big Mac? Three bucks? Okay, I’ll take it, but instead of payin’ you right now, you can have the five Stacy be owin’ me whenever.’ They wouldn’t be lovin’ that shit, would they? But you times that scam by a couple of billion, you get a hospital named after you. Now how’s that work?”
Emily rolled her eyes at him.
“You in the market?” she said.
Big turned and stared at her.
“I look like someone who’s risk-averse to you, shorty? Course, I’m in. I be workin’ my S-an’-P portfolio all the time, re-up all those sweet dividends. You think them Knicks floor seats I got come cheap? You want, I could put you together with my broker,” he said with a wink.
“Would you?” Emily said sarcastically as one of Big’s phones rang.
“Listen good, Snap,” Big Ice said into it. “You out on the corner early this morning? Shut up and listen, fool. You didn’t see anybody over by the mosque real early, did you?”
Big listened, nodding.
“What’s up?” he said into his cell phone a few moments later. “What’s up is some white girl was found dead in the alley, chump, and I don’t want to get locked up.”
He closed his phone.
“Talk to us,” I said.
“Snap said around five-thirty he saw a white guy get out of a beat-ass yellow van. Reason why he noticed was business is slow that early, and he thought the guy must be a desperate customer. I like to stay out a little earlier and later than everyone else, customers be appreciatin’ that kind of extra service.”
“I’m sure they do,” I said impatiently. “Go on.”
“Well, Snap said this thin, mousy-looking dude with glasses and gray hair, wearing coveralls and wheeling a refrigerator, got out of the van. He figured it was a guy making an early delivery to the construction site or something. White guy came back with just the hand truck, got back in the van, made a U-turn, and took off.” I knew not to ask him if Mr. Snap had taken down a plate number.
It wasn’t much, but we had something finally.
“That help you?” Big Ice said, smiling as he rubbed his dinner plate–size palms together.
I dropped the plastic bag of drug money on the counter.
“Don’t invest it all in one index,” Emily called back as we left.
Chapter 32
THE STREET CROWD seemed somewhat calmer when we arrived back at the mosque. Imam Yassin had come out on the sidewalk and was speaking to his flock in a soothing voice.
I called back to the task force and passed on the information we’d gotten. I said the tip was anonymous to avoid further inconveniencing the NYPD’s newest friends, Big Ice and Snap.
“Okay, I’ll type up the DD-five for you and get it to the appropriate people,” said Detective Kramer, the Major Case detective who’d been put in charge of the Intelligence Squad.
I was getting paperwork done for me? I thought as I hung up. I was starting to like this task force stuff.
I caught up to John Cleary, the Crime Scene Unit supervisor, who was walking toward the alley with a biohazard box.
“Turns out the suspect didn’t dump the body into the fridge, John,” I said. “This guy actually dumped the fridge with the body already in it.”
“No shit?” Cleary said, removing his cell phone from where it was clipped to the collar of his Tyvek suit. “In that case, instead of dislodging the body here,” he said, “we’ll put the whole fridge onto a flatbed and do it at the lab.”
Back in my unmarked car, I called Detective Ramirez, still at the Skinners’ house, and broke the bad news. He let out a deep breath.
“That sucks,” Ramirez said. “This poor woman. She doesn’t deserve this. I’ll let her know, Mike. I’d rather shoot myself in the kneecap, but I’ll tell her.”
Not wanting to hear the grieving that would soon follow, I hung up quickly.
“So, what do you think?” Parker said, getting back into the car.
“I think we should eat,” I said. “I know the perfect place. It’ll almost make you forget the past couple of hours.”
Ten minutes later, we walked through the door of Sylvia’s restaurant on Lenox Avenue a few blocks away.
“You’re in luck,” I said to Emily, pointing to the menu after we sat down in the cozy, incredible-smelling place. “Not only do they have grits, they have collard greens, too.”
“Collard greens? Well, lordy me,” Emily drawled, wafting an imaginary fan at herself. “I’ll never be hungry again, though I definitely wouldn’t have pegged you as a soul food aficionado, Mike.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Parker. I can put away a six-pack and potato with the best of me Irish brethren. It was my wife who introduced me to it. She was the foodie. Every Saturday, she’d con Seamus into watching the gang, and she’d take me to new places. We used to come to the jazz brunch they throw here on Saturday afternoons.”
Over a couple of racks of Sylvia’s fall-off-the-bone ribs, we went over the case.
“I think things are looking up a little,” Emily said between bites. “The witness was horrible, but by allowing there to be one, at least it means our guy is human, capable of making mistakes. I wasn’t sure there for a little while. But bringing the body in a fridge and then dumping the fridge? That’s . . . bizarre, wouldn’t you say? He’s going to an awful lot of trouble.”
“Yeah,” I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin. “It’s not just a job for this freak. It’s an adventure.”
“I keep asking myself
why
he’s doing it,” Emily continued. “Why bother pretending it’s a kidnapping at all? He hasn’t asked for any ransom. I mean, why even contact the families if you’re just going to kill the vics?”
“Attention,” I said. “Has to be. He’s making this as dramatic as he can. Why do most of these psychopaths do this? They’re inadequate in some fundamental way, yet have this grandiose ego. Look at Oswald. The Columbine fools. They can’t be famous in a regular way, so they get attention by killing.”
“But,” Emily said, raising a barbecue-sauce-coated finger across the table, “you’ve spoken to this guy, Mike. He seems educated and very articulate. He doesn’t strike me as inadequate.”
I shrugged.
“Then he must be deformed or something, because no way is that staging and Q-and-A stuff a setup. Our cultured friend is getting his rocks off.”
“You have a point there,” Emily said.
I was shocked when the waitress came back around and Emily ordered a Jack Daniel’s.
“What happened to the full-sugar Coke? You hear that rumbling sound? That’s the sound of J. Edgar rolling over in his grave.”
“What can I say, Mike? You’ve completely corrupted me,” Emily said with a wink. “They warned me about you New York cops. Stupid me. I should have listened.”
When the check came, I tucked my credit card over the bill.
“Hold on. What are you doing?” Emily said, going into her purse. “We’re splitting this. You’re acting like this is a date.”
“Am I?” I said, staring into her eyes as I handed the bill to the waitress.
She stared back for a couple of long, very pleasant moments. She blushed. No, actually that was me.
What the hell I was doing, I didn’t know. My wife had been dead two years, and usually I felt unsettled when it came to new lady friends. Special Agent Emily Parker was different, I guess.
Or maybe I was just going crazy. That was probably it.
Chapter 33
IT WAS ALMOST nine p.m. when the end-of-day task force meeting ended, and an exhausted Emily Parker arrived back at her hotel. Six minutes after that, the top of her head hit the surface of the hotel’s indoor lap pool with a satisfying smack.
There was nothing like that first, magical moment for her. Like she did in every new pool she was in, she plunged down into the cold serenity of the water until her hand passed across the pool’s gritty bottom.
She sat Indian-style and closed her eyes. There were no worries down here. No aggravated bosses. No stresses. Certainly no dead children.
When she was growing up, her family had a pool in Virginia, and she’d spent practically every moment of every summer, from the time she was six until she turned ten, at the bottom of it pretending she was a mermaid. She’d close her eyes and put out her hand, waiting for it to be enveloped by her beloved mer-prince, who’d take her away to her lost kingdom.
When her lungs began to burn almost a minute later, Emily remembered that Chelsea Skinner had been a lifeguard.
She broke the surface and started her workout. Usually laps were enough to clear her head, but even after five, she couldn’t help thinking about the case. Swimming the English Channel probably wouldn’t have been enough to get her mind off this one.