She came to the end of the alley; four buildings backed onto the narrow space, creating a kind of courtyard. Fire escapes ran down the walls, but there was only one other way out—another alley across the way. A large group of trash and recycling containers were shoved together at odd angles, creating some patches where the homeless had created little houses, lining the hard ground with cardboard boxes and newspapers.
As Kieran blinked against a sudden flare of the sun, she saw that the petite blonde woman was standing at the entrance to the other alleyway.
Right in front of her, there was another woman: taller, about five-eight, and perhaps twenty-five years old. Her hair was a true flaming red—a color Kieran had seldom seen in anyone who wasn’t Irish or of Irish descent. Or, of course, who had bought the color in a box.
She frowned, not thinking that she needed to be afraid in any way, and yet she knew that she had been led to this woman.
“Are you Kieran Finnegan?” the woman said.
Irish. By the inflection of her voice, she was definitely Irish.
“Yes,” Kieran said softly. “And you are?”
“Riley McDonnough, Miss Finnegan. How do you do?” She extended her arms, indicating the trash containers and the makeshift cardboard beds on the ground. “Welcome to my home.”
Kieran hesitated before speaking.
People sometimes came to Finnegan’s from the mother country when they were looking for jobs. Declan was always willing to help—legally. If this woman just needed work...
She swallowed, not wanting to be disappointed. It wasn’t that she—and her family—didn’t want to help newcomers. That was how Declan had met—and fallen in love with—Mary Kathleen.
But this wouldn’t bring her any closer to figuring out who the beautiful baby belonged to.
“You know who I am. You must know, then, that if you just came to Finnegan’s—”
“Oh, no, no. It’s not like that. I am Irish, of course—I suppose you’ve noticed?” Riley McDonnough said, her tone dry. It was impossible not to notice. She had a beautiful brogue.
“Yes, well... If you came to the pub—even as an illegal—we could set things in motion to help you.”
“I’m illegal, but, trust me, there are people out there looking for me, and I would not bring them to your pub.”
Kieran shook her head. “Okay, please explain. I admit to being at a complete loss.”
The tiny blonde woman watching the back alley said something—she spoke in Russian, Kieran thought, recognizing the sound of the language, but not the words.
Riley, however, apparently spoke Russian, as well. She replied in kind.
“Tanya is nervous and wants me to get to the point,” Riley said.
“Yes, which is...?”
“We knew her,” Riley said, and she sounded as if she was choking.
“Knew who?”
“Her name was Alexandra Callas. She was a dear friend. She cared. She tried so hard to help. We tried to get her to leave. She just wouldn’t... There were others, you see?”
“No—I don’t see. Exactly what are you telling me?”
“The woman who came to you, Miss Finnegan,” Riley announced, her brogue growing exceptionally strong. “The poor woman murdered with a knife in her back, right there on the streets of New York. We knew her—she was our friend. And she believed in you!”
* * *
David Beard had been the lead detective on the case when Michel Marcus had been arrested and later died by his own hand in jail.
Beard was about six foot even with close-cropped dark hair, a square man with big shoulders and rough hands—the kind of guy Mike referred to as an “in the trenches” kind of cop. Beard would never wait for backup, Craig thought—he’d plow right in.
The man agreed easily enough to meet with Mike and Craig; he was off duty and hanging out at a neighborhood pool hall that was frequented by cops.
Sitting with the two agents, he told them about a civilian being horrified when they’d seen the young woman bleeding to death in an alley—she’d been found by the early morning employee of a diner who had come out to dump trash. He told them that it had all seemed too easy—before dying, the victim had given them a name.
They’d gotten the guy, all right.
And then Marcus had died without saying a word against another soul.
“I can’t begin to tell you how many man-hours went into the hunt. There was a baby somewhere—we were all passionate. We owed it to the victim to find that baby. You should have heard about it on the news.” Beard shook his head and leaned forward on the table; he had arms like an old-time sailor, full muscles straining at his shirt.
“We probably did,” Mike said, a long breath escaping him. “But whatever we were into at the time was probably pretty heavy, too.”
“Probably,” David Beard said. He had a haggard face, worn from years on the job, but a good smile when he chose to use it. At the moment, he was reflective. “We had to give up. We had nothing but dead ends. Every officer in Brooklyn had been apprised of the case, and nothing. We got nothing.”
“We’re just wondering if you ever took the angle that this woman was illegal, or a refugee, if she’d been smuggled in. We have to keep pursuing that now, since it’s the only lead we’ve got.”
“It’s very possible,” said Beard. “When you have people willing to come here outside the law, they can end up on the wrong side of everything. It isn’t easy getting refugee status.”
One of the guys playing pool had apparently overheard them. Holding his stick while his opponent played, he joined in, saying, “The refugee thing is ongoing. You know, some of the things people are escaping...we can’t even picture. Dictators—including guys we almost never hear about. Or Islam Karimov from Uzbekistan. He’s taken all kinds of prisoners, given them no trial and executed them. There’s even sound evidence that he boiled two prisoners alive. The Gambia’s leader has been known to decapitate gay citizens. Eritrea’s leader—total dictator—known for torturing his prisoners. Hey, there’s a long list out there. People have to come to the States. They’re desperate.”
“And because they’re desperate,” David Beard continued, “they are far too often victims. There are those out there—some who even came from that kind of misery themselves—ready to take advantage of them.”
The waiting pool player added, “We knew that Michel Marcus was just the sprout of the plant on the surface—that there was a system somewhere going really deep. Any of us will gladly help at any time, let me say that. Oh, I’m Holmes, by the way. Detective Holmes. Believe that? It’s my real name. Randy Holmes.”
“Guys, meet my new partner,” David Beard explained. “My previous partner—who I worked with before, on the Marcus case—is retired now. Moved to Arizona. Or somewhere hot. Wherever. Cases like this—still gnawing at my insides—make me want to follow in his footsteps fast.”
Craig glanced over at Mike. It wouldn’t be easy to get in touch with Beard’s old partner and get a second opinion or memory on anything that had happened.
“We all knew there was much more to it. And we were close,” Randy Holmes said, nodding grimly. “I wasn’t a detective yet, but I was with the officers on the ground. We came to a building—a warehouse—right smack on the main street of the Vinegar Hill district, right near where they found the victim. They got a search warrant through some blood found on the door. When we opened it up, though, the place was as clean as a sterile chamber.”
“Who did it belong to?” Craig asked.
“Absentee owner, hadn’t been in the States in two years. He inherited the property from his family, apparently. Wealthy guy.”
“Absentee owner...a foreigner? Does he have a name?” Craig asked.
Beard sniffed loudly. “Foreign? Hell, no. The guy’s name is Smith. James... Jim Smith,” David Beard sai
d. “American as apple pie, so it sounded—or as American as any of us can be. Just rich as Midas. Anyway, there was nothing found—nothing whatsoever. We looked like idiots. His attorney said that his rights had been violated. I’m telling you, though, there was something going on with that place.”
“What is it now? Still an empty warehouse?” Mike asked.
“Hey, Holmes!” another pool player shouted. “Your shot!”
“Excuse me,” Holmes said.
They watched him walk over to the table. He was emotional, worked up from the memory he was sharing, but it seemed to add to his expertise. He made his shot. Balls—the right balls, they noted—flew across the table and into the pockets.
“You play?” Mike asked Craig. “I’ve never seen you play.”
“I’m no shark,” Craig said. He glanced at Mike and shrugged. “Then again, I don’t entirely suck, either.”
“Don’t worry—he’ll clean up the table and come back,” Beard said. “This whole thing is really getting to him. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a really good cop. But, as they say sometimes with the guys who don’t have a people way about them, Homicide is really a good place for him. The victims can’t give him their opinions on the world.”
“He has hot opinions, huh?” Mike asked.
“Don’t we all?” Beard asked quietly. There was silence for a minute, and then he said, “Poor kid forgets sometimes that I was lead on it and that it hurt like a son of a gun when we kept coming up against stone walls. It was my case, yeah, but it belonged to every cop in Brooklyn, too, really. We hated it—really hated it—that we couldn’t solve that poor woman’s murder. And that someone did it almost as easily as swatting at a fly and walked away free.”
Observing the pool game, Beard continued.
“We kept an eye on the warehouse—all of us—for a long time. It was used once as a staging house for a parade. And once there were a pack of sailboats stored for a while for a regatta. Apparently, Mr. Smith rents it out for occasions that intrigue him. Kind of disgusting, really,” Detective Beard said. “The kind of money you’d need to own a hunk of property like that in Brooklyn and leave it empty half the time. But the powers that be have kept at it. We tried the old catch-him-on-taxes thing, too. Jim Smith keeps his nose clean—and he stays out of the country and hires exceptional attorneys.”
They spoke for a while longer; Beard promised to have the complete files and anything that he could add sent to their office in Manhattan.
Holmes had cleaned up the pool table.
He headed back over, grabbing Mike and Craig before they could leave.
“You call us and let us know if you need us, day or night,” Detective Holmes said passionately. He handed Craig a card. “I mean it.” He shrugged suddenly, and his tone changed. “I’m one of those lucky guys who knows his family history. Mine came over right around 1900, and my great-granny was a hooker. Most of them died by the time they were forty. Anyway, people using other people and squeezing the life out of them? Pisses me off. And using desperate women for God knows what, and taking their babies? Maybe so that their infants can be sold? Even worse.”
“Some of those kids wind up in rich households, though,” Beard said. “Maybe better off than they would have been.”
Craig thought Holmes was going to explode.
“Adoption is great. When it’s legal. And when the birth mother really intends for the kid to be adopted—not when a baby has practically been ripped from her womb.”
“Thank you both,” Craig said. He looked at Mike, and Mike widened his eyes before nodding.
Yes, let’s get out of here before those two wind up in a full-blown fight!
Out on the street, Mike asked, “You want to go check out the restaurant? See if they missed something? Not that those guys aren’t fully competent, but I know you.”
“Sure. I want to see the restaurant,” Craig said. “Maybe we can join McBride and Kendall for meat loaf. But, first...”
Mike groaned.
“Yep, it’s a trip to Vinegar Hill—to stare at a warehouse.”
“Hopefully we can do more than stare at it.”
“Craig, we can’t get anything thrown out in court on this.”
“Me? You know me. I’d never dream of doing anything except by the book,” Craig said.
Mike groaned again.
“What?” Craig demanded.
“You’re by the book as long as you think you could possibly be caught!”
“The law is a marvelous tool—one just has to be careful how one uses it,” Craig said. “Let’s go. I don’t care how squeaky clean this Jim Smith appears to be. There’s something up with him, and with that warehouse. We just have to figure out what.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I’m so confused. The woman—Alexandra Callas—who came to me, was a friend of yours. Her English barely had an accent. I couldn’t even begin to tell where she came from. She had to have been in the United States for some time. Was she...was she with some kind of an agency? They tried to identify her with her fingerprints, but—”
“Illegal,” Riley told her.
“But...”
Riley lifted a hand and looked over at the pretty young Russian woman, Tanya, who was still guarding the narrow alleyway.
The woman made an okay sign with her fingers and thumb, showing Riley that they were still safe.
“Your friend here—is she Russian? How did you all come to be together? How the hell did you learn Russian so quickly?”
“Yes, Tanya is Russian. She is Tanya Petrofskya,” Riley said. “We met once we came to the States. But that’s all part of the same story.”
“About the murdered woman,” Kieran said.
“Alexandra Callas,” Riley said softly. “That was her name. She came to the United States as a child—her parents spent a great deal of money to escape the oppression of her country at the time. Her mother, she told me, dreamed of being a ballerina. Her father had been arrested—they heard he died in prison. How, they never knew. Her mother trusted a man who took all their money when they reached America, and so they went into hiding. Alexandra was able to go to school—her mother just kept moving and moving and moving. And when her mother died, Alexandra took over her mother’s jobs, cleaning toilets. She met a man who promised he was going to help her gain her legal status here. He had a job for her—a great job for her. Caring for infants.”
“Oh!” Kieran suddenly felt the need to sit.
There were no chairs. She forced herself to stand still.
“The man—the man who killed her? A man who is forcing illegal immigrants to give up their infants—and then selling them illegally?”
Riley nodded. “I figured you’d be quick,” she said drily.
“Riley, I can help you. I can help you and Tanya. And anyone else. I don’t know how Alexandra Callas knew to come to me—maybe she saw something in the paper.”
“Yes, possibly.”
“Because that’s how you know me?”
“No—I wasn’t in the country when you saved that girl in the subway, when your name was everywhere. I know because others explained to me why Alexandra might have been downtown when she was murdered.”
“Were you with her when...when she took the baby?” Kieran asked.
Riley shook her head. She whispered. Her brogue was heavy, and it took even Kieran a minute to understand. “We’ve been on the run, don’t ye ken? And then...we heard. We saw the news.”
“You’re hiding. You ran away. From where?” Kieran asked.
Riley shook her head. She had seemed so brave, but there was suddenly a look of terror in her eyes. “I don’t know, I... We ran...we ran and we ran...there was a truck...we hopped in. We slept in a different alley. We heard about...about the kitchen, and we were hungry and desperate. And someone there pointed out who you were.
”
Too many people knew who she was!
“Okay, you ran. But why didn’t you go to the police?”
“We can’t just go to the police.”
“The police will protect you.”
“Really? No, years ago, a friend was on her way to the police. She never made it. They have eyes everywhere. He is everywhere. That’s how he...how he killed Alexandra.”
“Who is he?” Kieran asked.
“He calls himself ‘the King.’ Sometimes, when he is feeling cruel, we have to call him ‘Your Majesty.’ He...” She hesitated. “You come here, and he owns you, and that’s the way that it is. He has other enforcers, of course. And drugs. They like to get girls addicted. They’re obedient and malleable that way. And there are others like Alexandra who stay, who help.”
“What about the baby? Does that precious child belong to either of you?”
Riley shook her head. “No—he has her. The mother. Yulia Decebel. She is Romanian. The man who calls himself the King has her, and we’re so afraid. She wants the baby, of course—it is her baby. But no one will help her, or go near the baby now. Because the entire operation could explode if they’re caught going after that baby, do you see? I know that Yulia must be pretending to our handlers that she has just let it go. Because he will be watching her, and he will kill her if she tries to escape. Another woman died, you see, escaping. The King—he sees everything, he finds everyone. Because others work for him, and then sometimes, they die, too. He sees everything.”
“We’re in an alley in Lower Manhattan,” Kieran said flatly. “He’s not here. You didn’t go to the police, and I understand your fear. But these people really can’t be everywhere. The police will protect you. And if not the police, then the FBI. I’m dating an FBI agent,” she explained. “Please, honest to God, I understand your fear of being killed, but—”
“Not just of dying, lass. It wouldn’t be so bad for me, but for Tanya...she’s terrified of being deported. She can’t go back. She’d be arrested. She fought with an officer—it’s a long story. She’d go to prison. And worse.”