My gaze caught on the promontory where the mayor’s elegant mansion jutted out into the East River. I had met the deadly fury that is Hell Gate head-on.
Mike put his hand on my shoulder gently, to reassure me that he was right there with me. “Enough with your sightseeing, Ms. Cooper. It’s not every day I offer to buy the first round of cocktails.”
FIFTY-TWO
“Good morning, Alex. I’m Elizabeth Arrington. How do you feel?”
Two days had passed since my terrifying confrontation with Rowdy Kitts. Mike, Mercer, and I were in a conference room at the federal courthouse on Pearl Street where Arrington, an assistant United States attorney, was about to appear before a magistrate judge for the arraignment of Kendall Reid on trafficking charges.
“I’m okay, thanks.”
“Don’t worry, Liz,” Mike said. “She cleans up a hell of a lot better than this. Give her a month or two.”
I was sitting at the end of a long wooden table. Mercer had planted himself as close to me as physically possible, his chair catty-corner to mine, staring like a family member watching a critically ill patient in an intensive care unit. Mike was leaning against the windowsill, impatiently waiting for the magistrate.
“You understand that I’ll be handling Reid’s case?” Arrington asked. “I’m sure you know that Donny Baynes has recused himself.”
The feds had taken jurisdiction of the trafficking investigation that stretched halfway around the world at this point, and it would doubtless grow as more victims were uncovered by cooperating witnesses. For once, Battaglia didn’t battle to keep the case, in large measure because my involvement would have made his efforts futile.
“I’m very glad it’s in your hands,” I said, hoping my smile looked as sincere as it was meant to be. Liz Arrington, a short feisty brunette, had done a brilliant job as second seat to the lead prosecutor in the trial of one of the most notorious terrorists-a blind sheikh who had masterminded the planning of bombings at several land-marked buildings but was caught before the acts were completed. “You’ve got a great reputation.”
“You’ll get your cred back, Coop,” Mike said. “People find out you can drop-kick a killer like Rowdy Kitts, they’ll forget you needed a team of Saint Bernards to get you down from the tower.”
“Mike,” Mercer said, pointing a finger at his good friend. “Save it for another day.”
“Why? She didn’t lose her sense of humor, too, along with her cell phone and her sanity?”
“What do you need from me, Liz?” I ignored Mike, even though I knew that teasing was his way of trying to nudge me from the morose state that I’d found myself in since my Sunday-morning encounter with death.
“I’ve tried to get myself up to speed with the facts. Donny sat me down and gave me a crash course, but I’ve still got questions.”
“Is he-?” I wondered whether his close relationship with Ethan Leighton and his membership in the Tontine Association had derailed Baynes professionally.
“He’s good, Alex. Donny will help with anything he can. He’s asked for a transfer to the appeals bureau till we see how this all shakes down.”
“We’ve spent a lot of time trying to puzzle this out, Liz,” Mercer said, taking the lead in his calm, mannered style. “Let me help. You trying to keep Reid in jail?”
Kendall Reid had surrendered to the feds on Monday evening, just a little over twelve hours before. His lawyer would use that voluntary move as a basis for requesting release on his own recognizance, so that he wouldn’t have to come up with money for bail. The cash he’d been stealing from the council’s phantom funds was no longer at his disposal for personal use.
“Absolutely,” Liz answered without a moment’s pause. “The magistrate will want to know exactly which crimes he played a role in. I’m hoping you can guide me the rest of the way. Donny admits he had blinders on to much of what the Leightons were doing, and to Kendall Reid too.”
I had been in Liz Arrington’s shoes. I knew she had to immerse herself in a complicated series of facts-criminal conduct that stretched back over years, from one continent to another, with laundered money from illegal human slave trading stashed in shoe boxes and other places not yet imagined. I needed to shake off my own dark thoughts and concentrate on helping her get the job done.
“The dead girl,” Liz said, looking down at a sheaf of notes she had put together. “I’m looking for her name. Sorry-give me a minute.”
“Salma Zunega?” Mercer asked.
“No, no. Eugenia, the girl who washed up on the beach. It was Rowdy Kitts who killed her?”
I lifted my head to look at Liz. “That’s what he told me.”
“He actually admitted that?” She seemed somewhat skeptical, or else I was too sensitive to the way everyone was looking at me. “I mean, Kitts talked to you about Eugenia?”
“Rowdy wasn’t going to let me live, Liz. He was making that climb up the tower to get his insurance, his blackmail material-the baby’s birth certificate. And once done, I had no doubt he was going to get rid of me too,” I said. The coffee was cold and tasteless, but I took another sip. “He delighted in seeing the terror in my eyes when he told me that Eugenia was worthless to him. That she’d been trafficked in long before the Golden Voyage grounded here, lived with him for a while, and was ready to blow the whistle so the new girls wouldn’t be subjected to his personal form of torture.”
“Did he talk to you about Salma?” Liz asked. She was looking for another murder confession and I couldn’t give it to her.
I shook my head.
“Coop gave him the boot before he got that far,” Mike said, turning his back to lean on the sill and stare out the window. “The lab handed us the rest. Twist Kendall Reid’s testicles and he’ll paint the whole picture for you.”
Liz looked to Mercer for help. “Touch DNA? Someone can explain it to me this week, I’m sure. I’ve never handled a case with that kind of evidence.”
“Alex will make it crystal-clear for you. She’s done the forensics before juries more times than you can count, and the team at the lab is the best in the business. They’ve got Kitts on the murder weapon in Salma’s apartment, and from the satin trim on the blanket she was wrapped in.”
“Yeah, and that nubby white wool is even stuck in the threads of a sweater we recovered from his apartment yesterday,” Mike said.
“Can you help me with why Kitts killed her?” Liz wanted answers from all of us. “I mean, why the spoofed phone calls before the murder?”
“Think big picture, Liz,” Mercer said. “Let me get you there. This trafficking scheme has tentacles that are going to take you deep and wide, so back up to that. Rowdy Kitts and Kendall Reid are just two of the snakeheads at the top of the pit. An operation as big as this, as well-funded? It takes a village.”