But I wasn’t the one who would get punished for it.
It was Paul.
So, what was I supposed to do now?
Chapter 36
I STILL HADN’T FIGURED THAT OUT when I totally collapsed three minutes later in the shower.
One moment I was standing there, shampooing my hair, and the next I was sitting down hard on the cold porcelain, water pinging off my torso and legs.
I pressed my forehead to the wet tile as the sum of the night’s events dripped through me. What made me the sickest was hard to decide. My flat-out betrayal of Paul? Or staring into Scott’s dead face? Or maybe staring into his wife’s face?
Closing my eyes, I longed crazily for the water to melt me, to let me stream down the floor of the tub and disappear with a gurgle into the drain.
After a minute of that not happening, I lifted my head off the tile and opened my eyes.
This wasn’t just going to go away, was it? I needed to do something. But what?
I considered my choices.
First, what would happen if I turned Paul in?
I was an expert on the Bronx criminal justice system. Like any retailer faced with massive volume most of the time, the Bronx DA’s office was willing to make a deal with offenders, offer justice at a reduced rate. But the high-profile nature of Scott’s case, I realized, would be considered a career maker for the prosecution. It would be Paul against the system, and the system would make sure that this was one case they would win, and win with a vengeance.
I thought of the mountains of legal bills. The cost of bail for Paul. If he could get bail.
Even with the obvious plea of self-defense, the best-case scenario we were looking at was manslaughter, five years of state prison. I shook my head. Five years. Whenever I dropped off a prisoner at Rikers, after five minutes I longed to do a hundred laps in a pool of antibacterial soap. I winced as I remembered the cattle line in the search room. The sound of crying babies and the beneath-the-table sex in Visitors.
I imagined Paul looking at me over a scuzzy table, disgust in his blackened eyes.
“What’s the matter, Lauren?” he would say. “I thought you liked quickies.”
And if that wasn’t horror enough to consider, there was the New York press. What could be more salivating to the tabloids than a love triangle gone wrong, where two cops were involved, one of them now dead! We were looking at long-lasting infamy here.
Loser Hall of Fame material.
Mass-media humiliation.
And let’s not forget what would happen to Scott’s family. Right now, Brooke was being regarded as a hero’s wife. But once the truth got out, that Scott was killed by the husband of the woman he was cheating with, it would be bye-bye crying on the commissioner’s shoulder, bye-bye Brooke, bye-bye kids.
My eyes almost bugged out of my head as I considered these particular details.
It would also be so long line-of-duty death benefits for the Thayer family!
I pictured Brooke rocking with her poor daughter. Instead of getting Scott’s pension, she would be left with jack squat.
I stood up in the shower. Tried to catch my breath.
My little decision-making meeting was adjourned.
If this were just about me, I would turn myself in. I would go into my room right now, get dressed, and march into my boss’s office. I would confess.
But it wasn’t just about me. It was about Paul. It was about Brooke.
And most of all her three fatherless kids.
Who was I kidding? There wasn’t any choice, at least not right now.
I had to make everything right again.
The water roared in my ears like thunder as I thrust my face under the spray.
But how could I make everything right?
Chapter 37
PAUL WAS STILL SNORING when I left for work. I would have liked to speak with him. To say we had a lot to deal with was quite the understatement. But since I didn’t think they offered marriage counseling in prison, I decided that instead of waking him up, priority numero uno was getting back to work to see if I had a shot at keeping my husband out of jail.
Mike was writing Scott’s name on the bullpen Homicide chart when I stepped into the squad room.
I was more or less happily surprised when I realized nobody was looking at me suspiciously. I guess adrenaline-flooded and terror-struck have a passing resemblance to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Through the smeared glass wall of the rear office, I could see my boss, Lieutenant Keane, talking on his desk phone while dialing his cell.
“What do we got?” I said, handing Mike a bodega coffee from the brown bag I was carrying. Starbucks had yet to make inroads into Soundview.
“Shit,” Mike said, flicking the plastic coffee lid sliver across his desk as he sat. “No sign of either Ordonez. Turns out the pilot’s off work until next Wednesday, and he wasn’t at his apartment. Of the younger and even scummier brother, Victor, we have no sign at all.”
Mike handed me a file folder.
“Check out the family album.”
The Ordonez brothers were the only children of Dominican immigrants. On the slightly older brother, Mark, the Air Force pilot, there was surprisingly little. A single assault bust when he was twenty-one. But the younger one, Victor, had a crime-ography that was a long and interesting read.
From the age of sixteen, Victor had been in and out of jail, putting up MVP crime stats. Burglary, narcotics sales, attempted rape, assaults of prisoners while incarcerated, possession of a deadly weapon.
But for me, one charge stood out as if it had been marked with a neon highlighter.
Attempted murder of a police officer.
The abstract described how at the age of seventeen, Victor, while resisting arrest for yet another possession charge, drew a concealed .380 semiautomatic, pointed it at the officer’s face, and pulled the trigger several times. After he was wrestled to the ground, it was discovered that the gun hadn’t discharged due solely to the fortuitous fact that young Victor, new to the wonderful world of semiautomatics, had forgotten to rack the slide and jack the first round into the chamber. To show you what kind of straits the New York criminal justice system was in during the crack epidemic of the early nineties, Victor did just one year.
I blinked down at the sheet in disbelief.
Victor Ordonez was looking so good for Scott’s murder, I was almost convinced he did it.
I pointed my chin at the file stacks covering both of our adjoining desks and the floor as I sat down.
“Scott’s previous Narcotics cases?” I said.
Mike nodded grimly. He chucked his reading glasses onto his desk and rubbed his eyes.
“I’m not cracking spine one of that saga until we have a talk with our Dominican friends,” he said. “I guess the only good news is I got an ADA to get a subpoena to the telephone company. They’re getting Scott’s phones together right now. They’re going to fax it over within the next ten minutes.”
Chapter 38
I SAT THERE, ROCK STILL, trying to absorb what I had just heard. The fluorescent lights above hummed in my ears like an angry beehive.
How many times had Scott called me in the last month? Twenty? Thirty maybe? How was I going to bluff my way out of this one? I pictured the confusion on my partner’s face as he spotted my number over and over again.
Mike moved his mouse to remove his “Who pissed in your gene pool?” screen saver. It sounded like someone stepping on Bubble Wrap when he rolled his neck.
“Mike, what are you doing?” I finally said.
“Gonna get a jump on those D-D-fives. Keane’s about to have triplets. Look at him in there.”
DD5’s were the incident reports we had to write for Scott’s case file. I raised my eyebrows.
“Um, hello? Earth to Mike,” I said. “People are going to actually read these reports, Shakespeare. You’re the beauty, remember? I’m the brains. In fact, why don’t you go grab a couple in the crash room upstairs. We need your head clear
just in case we have to knock down a door with it. I’ll bang out the reports in a way that doesn’t get us reassigned, and when the phone records come in, I’ll start collating them. How’s that sound?”
Mike stared at me, exaggerated hurt in his red-rimmed eyes. Then he yawned.
“Yes, dear,” he said, standing.
I held my breath as he walked to the exit. The bullpen gate had just swung back into place, when a low, off-pitch ringing sounded.
I turned around. It was the fax machine. Jeez, Louise.
It rang again, and the sound was followed by an electronic bleep. One of the white sheets started to slowly slide down out of it.
Keep going, partner, I thought, not looking at him. Please. For me.
But out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mike turn around.
My face felt hot. He would see it in a second. My number repeated over and over again! What the hell could I say? Nothing came to mind. How could I get out of this one?
I turned all the way around as Mike lifted the first sheet out. I watched him squint, watched his hand go to his forehead.
That’s when I noticed his reading glasses sitting there on the desk beside me, right where he’d left them.
I didn’t think. I just acted.
I opened my bottom-left desk drawer, and with one of Scott’s files swept Mike’s glasses off his desk and into the drawer. Then I quietly kicked the drawer shut.
I pretended to ignore Mike until I heard him rummaging around on his desktop.
“Didn’t I tell you to take a nap?” I said, annoyed. “You’re not having another senior moment, are you?”
Mike exhaled a tired breath as he gave up the search for his glasses. He dropped Scott’s phone records in my lap.
“All yours, sister,” he said weakly. “Courtesy of Ma Bell. See you in sixty winks.”
Chapter 39
FOR TWO SOLID MINUTES, I spun my pencil through my fingers like a baton twirler, my old, creaky wooden office chair cawing as I rocked back and forth just staring at Scott’s phone records.
I turned and squinted through the office glass at my mercifully still-busy boss, then looked back down at the eight number-filled sheets of paper in front of me.
The fact that I’d managed to get my hands on Scott’s rec-ords was phenomenal, but after riffling through them, I realized I now had a new problem.
I stuck the pencil between my back teeth and began turning it into a chew toy.
How the hell was I going to remove my number from them?
The thirty-three times it occurred!
“Lauren,” a voice said.
I almost swallowed the pencil’s eraser as I looked up. My boss had exited his office and crossed the squad room without my noticing. He placed his hands flat on my desk as he leaned over me, his fingernails practically scratching the edge of the fax paper. Could he read upside down?
“How we looking on those D-D-fives?” Keane said. “Borough and Detective Division commanders want them ASAP. Any problem with that?”
“Give me an hour, chief,” I said, bringing the form up on my computer screen.
“You’ve got half,” he shot back over his shoulder as he left.
I leaned over my keyboard, trying to look busy and at the same time hide what I was doing.
My eyes went from the screen to the phone records. From the phone records to the screen. Waiting for something obvious to jump out at me.
Then, miraculously, it did.
The font of the phone records was a common one. Times New Roman.
A second later, an idea occurred to me all but fully formed.
Which was good, I thought as I clicked on the Microsoft Word icon on my screen, since I didn’t have a second to spare.
First thing I did was find the number Scott called the most. It was a 718 area code with an exchange I wasn’t familiar with.
I checked my notes and verified that it was Scott’s home number.
I typed the number, hit “print,” and compared it to the records. It was a little too big. I blocked the number out and dropped the font size from twelve to ten, printed that out, and compared it again.
Perfect, I thought. It would work.
I copied the number thirty-three times and hit “print” for the third time. Who knows? I thought, pocketing scissors and tape from my desk drawer. I lifted the records off my desk along with the sheets from the printer as I stood.
This just might work.
It took me five minutes of nonvirtual cutting and pasting in the last stall of the ladies’ room to tape over every incident of my cell number on the LUDs with Scott’s home number.
Everything important I learned in kindergarten, I thought as I flushed the scraps away.
One trip to the copying machine later — with a brief side trip to the shredder — and I had everything the way I wanted it.
Scott’s new and improved phone records.
I was coming out of Keane’s office after dropping off my completed crime-scene reports twenty minutes later, when Mike walked back into the squad room. He gaped at the undetectably doctored phone company records I had left on his desk. His reading glasses sat on top of them like a paper-weight.
“Don’t worry,” I said, giving him a pat on his wide back. “Dropping a little off your fastball is pretty much expected at your age.”
I lifted my coat from the back of my chair.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“To see my friend Bonnie,” I said. “Try to speed the crime-scene processing along.”
“Why don’t I go with you?” Mike said.
“Because you need to get back to the phone company and put faces to those numbers, see who Scott was calling.”
“C’mon,” Mike said as I was leaving. “I’ll behave. I’m not just a big ugly man doll, you know. I have a sensitive side. I’m in Oprah’s Book Club.”
“Sorry,” I said, knocking through the bullpen gate. “No boys allowed.”
Chapter 40
C’MON, C’MON, C’MON! Let’s go, let’s go!
I checked my watch as a cash register’s electronic beep exploded through my skull for perhaps the thirty-seven-billionth time.
I had thought my one-purchase stop at the 57th and Broadway Duane Reade would be quick. But that was before I discovered the aisle-long line behind the lone checkout cashier.
Ten minutes later, I was one customer away from the promised land of the counter, when another cashier arrived and called, “Next.”
Taking the one step needed to the newly opened register, I was nearly mowed down by a middle-aged Asian man in a doorman’s suit.
“Hey!” I said.
In response, the line cutter showed me his back, boxing me out as he pushed a bag of Combos at the cashier.
The last thing I wanted was to make a scene, but I didn’t have the time to be demure. I leaned in, snatched the Combos out of the cashier’s hand, and sent them sailing down one of the crammed aisles behind me. Problem solving NYC-style.
“Next means next,” I explained to the wide-eyed man as my purchase was scanned and bagged.
I waited until I was in my squad car, double-parked outside on Broadway, to open the bag. I pulled on a pair of rubber crime-scene gloves and took the men’s reading glasses out of their package.
The lenses were round, silver rimmed. Just like the ones Paul had dropped at the crime scene. Just like the ones Bonnie hopefully hadn’t processed yet.
I wiped them down with alcohol before snapping open an evidence bag and dropping them in. I lit the receipt with a match and scattered its ashes out the window onto Broadway. Then I turned the engine over and screeched away.
Next stop, police headquarters in Manhattan.
Chapter 41
BONNIE HAD HER HEAD in one of her desk drawers when I stepped into her fifth-floor office at One Police Plaza.
“Hey, Bonnie,” I said. “That is you, isn’t it?”
“Lauren, what a happy surprise,” Bonni
e said, shaking a bag of Starbucks coffee as she stood. “And what perfect timing. How about some French roast?”
“So,” she said, placing a steaming black mug in front of me a minute later. “How are things coming along?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said.
“Even though this case is our priority, it’s going to take some time. All we got so far is that the tarp Scott was wrapped in was a Neat Sheet, a mass-market picnic blanket. They sell them in supermarkets everywhere.”
I sipped my coffee, nodding. I’d bought it at Stop & Shop.
“What about the glasses?” I said.
“Not too much, sorry to say,” Bonnie said. “There were no visible fingerprints on the lenses themselves. I red-balled them down to the lab to see if they might pick up a partial on the rims, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. We’re going to have to cross our fingers and see if we can get a hit on a prescription. I just got off the phone with this guy Sakarov, head of ophthalmology at NYU. He’s going to analyze them and guide us through the records.”
I burned my tongue with another sip of coffee, then placed the mug back down on the corner of her desk.
“Do you think I could see them?” I said.
Bonnie gave me a funny look.
“Why?” she said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I don’t know,” I said. “To get some sort of feel for this guy. Maybe? You never know.”
Bonnie grinned as she stood.
“Okay, Psychic Detective. The lab’s just down the hall. I’ll go get them for you. You sit there and prime your mysterious powers until I get back.”
Chapter 42
I FINGERED THE GLASSES in my jacket pocket as I watched her walk off. My plan was to improvise, but what would I do? Say, “Look, Bonnie, a bird!” and then do the old switcheroo?
I drank my coffee and tried to think.
About a minute later, a scruffy-looking young man appeared in Bonnie’s outer office. I watched him looking around, clearly lost. Maybe it was David Blaine, come to give me some sleight-of-hand tips.