As she walked Jack's route, she was aware of the pungent smell of marijuana, as strong as that of frying garlic from the restaurant on the corner of Fifth Avenue. Jack was right that people were smoking dope and dealing in the square again. She didn't go all the way around, after all. Instead she crossed in the middle and came to the place close to Washington Square South where she'd called out to the suspect. Her stomach clutched, and once again she felt the shame of messing up. It didn't matter if it had been foggy, if she'd eaten too much and had had a glass of wine. It had been stupid to play Wonder Woman, to throw off her shoes and run barefoot after a killer. Stupid. Double stupid.
But she knew what her instinct had been. In martial arts they always fought shoeless. Her legs and feet were very strong. Of course she would shed the high heels to be more effective in bare feet. It wouldn't go down well with her superiors, though. She shivered as her cell phone rang. She located the thing in the bottom of her purse and saw private caller pop up.
"Sergeant Woo." Her tired voice broke on her name.
"Hey, it's Marcus. You sound bad."
"Marcus. What's up?" April was glad to hear from him.
"I've been checking on some of Bernardino's old cases. You know those two guys you and the lieutenant collared eight years ago in that sweatshop fire? They got out last week. I just thought you'd want to know."
"Didn't they get fifteen?" April remembered the case. A nasty one. Two owners of a run-down Chinatown building had been running a pocketbook sweatshop with a couple dozen illegal workers. They'd boarded the windows and locked all the exits so the employees couldn't wander in and out during the day. An angry ex-boyfriend of one of the workers had set the place on fire and killed five people on the top floor who'd been trapped inside. An unexpected consequence was the jury's decision to convict the two building owners for criminal negligence in the deaths.
"Yeah, white guys, they served eight," Marcus said.
"I remember them." April did remember them. Slimy guys, Ridley and Washburn had said they'd get even, but dozens of people who were put away said that. By the time the scum got out, they usually had other things on their minds. "Good going. Have you checked where the pair were on Wednesday night?"
"Well, it didn't have to be them. They could have hired someone," Marcus said. "But yeah, I'm all over it."
"Thanks for letting me know."
"How ya doin'? You sound like hell," Marcus said.
"I'm doing great. Keep in touch on it, will you?" April didn't feel like socializing.
"You bet." Marcus obediently rang off.
April turned back to where she'd left her car. Ridley and Washburn were jerks, but jerks who'd killed by accident because they were greedy. They were hardly karate experts, trained to kill in public places. As she faced west, the air behind her stirred in an uneasy shimmer from another dimension, predicting more trouble to come. Goose bumps rose on the back of her neck. She'd experienced the same sensation many times before, and much as she wished it were just a breeze picking up, she knew it wasn't a breeze. It was a chilly warning to watch her back. The ghosts and devils from Bernardino's past were coming alive.
Twenty-two
Friday night passed in an anxious haze of yin uncertainty. Together again by eleven p.m., Mike and April talked very little about the case and held each other tight all night, each hoping the other would get a few hours' rest from the case. By seven a.m. Saturday morning, however, April was up again, padding around in a T-shirt and bare feet. The twenty-second-floor, one-bedroom apartment they shared faced Manhattan in the west, and the first thing she did every morning ever since 9/11 was to reassure herself that the beloved skyline was still aligned the same as it had been the night before.
Today she opened the doors to the terrace, where the wisteria she had planted a year ago was now in abundant bloom. The flower sprays were her favorite color, huge and purple. They cascaded over the little trellis Mike had sunk into the pot for her. Neither she nor he had much interest in playing gardener, but the little time they'd spent on planting the cutting back then yielded a huge reward now. The magic of nature distracted her for a moment. She stepped outside into the chilly spring morning to smell her prize. Instantly the healing scabs tightened on her tender knees, and cold cement bit into her bare feet. She ignored the cold and leaned against the terrace railing to inhale the wisteria's sweet perfume. She was fully awake now, and despite her bruises and sore muscles, she felt clearheaded.
She gazed out at her wide view of the jewel Manhattan so tantalizingly etched against the sky. From across the East River in Queens, it always looked so tempting, like a magical city. But right now within the island's twenty-one miles Bernardino's killer might well be sleeping, eating, still walking around unchallenged. Then again, he might be somewhere else, far from their reach. Or the killer could be as close as a relative. It was too soon to know. Finally the cold got to her, and she went inside to put the kettle on.
As she waited for the water to boil, her brain began to gallop through the list. Bernardino was a retired cop, a Vietnam veteran, a father of two law-enforcement specialists, a recent widower, and the heir to a lottery fortune. Unconnected slivers of information bombarded her like parade confetti in a high wind. Where did the dots connect? She'd bet a year's salary the key to the murder was the fortune. But maybe it wasn't.
If she had to examine every aspect of Bernardino's life leading back the last few days, the last few weeks, the last few months, the last few years of his life to find where Bernardino had been headed and who had crossed his path before he got there, she would do it. Anything to release his soul for a happy afterlife. She moved to the sofa in the living room to start with the computer files that she'd copied into her laptop.
A decade ago, when April began working with Bernardino, he hadn't owned a computer, and neither had she. Then they'd done everything the old way. They'd taken notes by hand and banged out reports on manual typewriters. A couple of desks in the unit had been equipped with electric typewriters, but not the correcting kind. That had been back in the dark ages when they'd kept their files in boxes and stacked them up in corners because there weren't enough filing cabinets to contain them all.
When she'd copied Bernardino's files, April could see that he hadn't been one of those older guys who hung onto carbon paper and Wite-Out and hated technology. Quite the contrary, Bernardino even had his PalmPilot hooked up to his Micron, so both his address book and schedule came up on his computer screen. April wasn't this meticulous. Her precious address book was a small fat loose-leaf that contained the phone numbers and addresses of nearly every person she'd ever used as a source, people from all over the country. She'd never gotten around to copying all of it. Periodically she'd forget where she'd left it and tailspin into a panic.
Bernardino was on the other end of the spectrum. He'd taken all the precautions. He also had Quicken, the accounting software that showed his deposits and itemized all his expenses. This degree of organization was initially surprising to her, because he'd always seemed like a sloppy kind of guy, not that disciplined. He'd eaten anything he fancied, didn't mind what hours he worked or who was inconvenienced by his schedule, and when he was investigating a case he'd been like an octopus. The tentacles of his mind had reached out in all directions.