Chapter 25
I WAS COMING out of Chelsea’s room when the phone rang. But it wasn’t the Skinners’ phone. It was mine.
“Mike, hello. How’d you sleep? Well, I hope?”
Son of a bitch! I stopped in midstride, adrenaline jolting through me like live wire. It was him! The sly bastard was calling me instead of the house.
“Fine,” I said, ungluing myself from the carpet and racing downstairs into the study, where we were set up. I found the department tech and pointed excitedly at my phone. He retrieved a handheld voice recorder from a laptop bag and handed it to me. I held it by my phone’s earpiece.
“I’m glad you called back,” I said. “Where are you? Maybe we could talk in person?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But then again, maybe not, Mike. How do you like the Skinners’ place? Exquisite, wouldn’t you say?”
What? He knew I was here? Or was he just guessing? Was he watching the place?
“And that view,” he continued. “The grandeur of the mighty river beneath those austere crags. Truly to die for, if you’ll excuse the term. Thomas Cole himself could hardly have done it justice, wouldn’t you agree? But what am I doing, dropping such names to a policeman? Thomas Cole was a painter, you see. He started the Hudson River School.”
“Was Frederic Edwin Church a Hudson River School guy?” I said, to keep him talking.
“Why, yes, he was, Mike. You know your art history. Where did you go to school?”
The police academy, scumbag, I felt like saying to him.
“Manhattan College,” I said instead.
“Never heard of it,” the kidnapper said.
“Well, it’s pretty small,” I said. “Could we speak to Chelsea? We’re ready to give you what you want if you’d only tell us.”
Then he said the words I was dreading.
“If that’s the case, then listen closely,” he said. “I want you to come and get it. I want you to come and get little Chels and bring her back to Mumsy. You know the drill. Get in a car. Ten minutes. You can bring your pretty little FBI friend, too, if you like.”
Chapter 26
THE CIRCLE LINE tour boat was coming through the Amtrak swing bridge down on the Harlem River as we raced across the Henry Hudson Bridge.
And if you look up, ladies and gents, I thought, emergency lights blazing through the lower level’s E-Z Pass lane, you’ll see an authentic, stressed-out New York City cop about to break the sound barrier.
I clicked the siren to full auto as we blasted through the Manhattan-side tolls at a stomach-churning seventy.
We’d just been told Chelsea was in Harlem. I couldn’t lose another kid. If there was any possible way to get to her before it was too late, I was going to do it.
“Where are you now?” the kidnapper said into the ear of my hands-free headset. Again, he’d insisted on guiding me street by street. My own personal insane OnStar operator.
“On the Manhattan side of the Henry Hudson Bridge,” I said.
“Did you know that it was built by Robert Moses back in the thirties using New Deal labor?” he said. “In twenty years, Moses managed to build most of New York City’s major bridges, parkways, and public beaches. The Twin Towers were knocked down almost ten years ago, and it’s still just a pit. Our civilization is winding down, Mike. It’s obvious. So’s our planet. Take a fork out of the drawer and turn off the oven timer. This place is done.”
“Hello? Hello? I think the signal’s breaking up,” I said as I whipped off the headset to clear the sweat and bull crap out of my ears. Beside me, Emily was working two radios and her cell phone as we gunned it south. I cupped my cell’s microphone.
“How are we looking?” I whispered.
Besides Aviation and the Emergency Service Unit backing us up, the phone company was on board now, actively working on a trace.
“Verizon’s still trying to triangulate,” Emily said. “Nothing so far.”
As I drove, I racked my brain to come up with a way to try to throw the kidnapper off balance, turn the tables on him. He was in charge, and what was worse from the smug tone of his voice, it sounded like he knew it.
“Are you there?” he was saying angrily when I patched back in.
“Hello? Hello?” I said. “The signal seems to be back now.”
“The signal, huh? I believe you, Mike. Almost. Now take the George Washington Bridge exit.”
Shit, I thought. That exit was already blowing past on my left. I spun the wheel, mercilessly mowing down a family of construction traffic cones on the exit’s shoulder. We missed a head-on with a construction light cart by a few millimeters as I just made it back into the lane.
“Can you hear me now?” the kidnapper said. “Head over to Broadway, if it’s not too much trouble.”
Chapter 27
I FOLLOWED THE kidnapper’s instructions through Washington Heights and on deeper into Harlem. As we turned off Broadway at St. Nicholas Avenue, we passed a series of enormous housing projects that were as stark and depressing as warehouses in an industrial plant.
Bulletproof windows began to appear on the corner delis and Chinese takeouts. It looked a lot like the section of the Bronx where we’d found Jacob Dunning.
I was on another magical misery tour of the inner city, complete with constant narration.
“Take a good look around, Mike,” the kidnapper said. “Remember the War on Poverty? Poverty won. African Americans and Latino immigrants were lured into the cities because of jobs, and then the jobs moved away with all the white people. The racial and economic inequality that still exists in this country makes me physically sick sometimes.
“It’s not just here, either. Look at places like Newark, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. It’s the twenty-first century, and still there’s a lack of decent employment and no shortage of discrimination toward people of color.”
“Where to now?” I said.
“You’re getting warm. Make a left onto One Hundred and Forty-first, a left onto Bradhurst, and a right onto One Hundred and Forty-second,” the kidnapper said.
At 142nd, a single, leaning brownstone stood on the corner of a mostly rubble-filled lot. I slowed, scanning its surrounding weeds. I spotted a diaper, a mattress, and a rusty shopping cart but, thankfully, no Chelsea.
“Go to two-eight-six. That’s where she is, Mike. Time for me to go. Tell Mom I said hi,” he said and hung up.
I rapidly scanned the buildings and screeched to a stop in front of the address. I jumped out of the car and stared up at the onion-shaped dome above the three-story building in front of me.
“It’s a mosque,” I radioed our backup. “I repeat. We’re at two-eight-six One Hundred and Forty-second Street. It’s on the north side of the street. We can’t wait. We’re going in the front.”
We opened a pair of elaborate doors and rushed into a large, shabby, definitely unchic lobby. It looked like the mosque had been converted from an old movie theater.
“Hello?” I called as we entered an open area where the seats had once been. There were windows in its walls now, and the floor was covered in Oriental rugs. It must be the prayer room, I figured. The light-filled space was divided in half by a large lace screen, and one of the walls was covered in elaborate tile.
A stocky black man wearing a bright green, red, and yellow kufi on his head appeared in a doorway at the other end of the room. He hurried over, shock and anger in his face.
“Who are you? What are you doing here? You’re not allowed in here. Your shoes! You can’t wear shoes here in the mussalah. Are you crazy? Can’t you see this is a holy place?”
I showed him my shield.
“I’m with the police department. We’re looking for a girl who was—”
That’s when the Muslim man grabbed me violently by the lapels of my suit jacket.
“I don’t care who you are,” he cried, dragging me toward the door. “This is a sacrilege! Get out of here now! You have no right to do this!”
As we were bus
y struggling, I remembered the Harlem mosque incident in the seventies in which an NYPD cop had been killed. A police community conflict was all we needed now in the middle of a kidnapping.
A moment later, the muscular man suddenly fell to his side. Emily had tripped him somehow and now had her knee in his back as she ratcheted her cuffs onto his wrists. I helped her pull the hysterical man to his feet.
“Sir,” Emily said. “Please calm yourself. We’re sorry about the shoe mistake. We were unaware and apologize. We are law enforcement officers looking for a kidnapped girl. We were told she was here. Please help us. A young girl’s life is at stake.”
“I see,” he said. “I’m Yassin Ali, the imam here. I lost my temper. Of course, I’ll do anything to help.”
Emily undid his cuffs, and he guided us back out into the foyer.
“You say a girl is being held here?” he said, staring at us in disbelief. “But that’s impossible. There hasn’t been anyone here since morning prayer. What’s this girl’s name? Is she a member of the congregation?”
I showed him Chelsea’s picture.
“A white girl?” he said, perplexed. “No. There’s no way. There must be a mistake.”
“Has anything out of the ordinary occurred today? Anything that might direct us to where this girl could be?” I said. “Any deliveries or—?”
“No.” Then something flashed in his eyes.
“Actually, yes. When I came in, I heard a loud noise from the side of the building, where my office is. There’s an alley between us and the construction site next door. I thought maybe one of the workers had dumped some debris again, but when I looked out, there was nothing.”
“Please show us,” Emily said. “We don’t have a moment to waste.”
Chapter 28
THE SIDE ALLEY Yassin showed us was appalling. Water—from a busted sewage line, judging by its stench—cascaded down the brick wall of the building under construction next door. A faded blue tarp flapped from a hole on its third floor.
You knew you were in a bad section of Manhattan when even the real-estate flippers had abandoned ship.
The piles of debris in the dim alley looked like something out of a photography book about the Great Depression. I rushed ahead, wishing we’d brought a pair of wading boots as I slogged over garbage bags, old bricks, the rusted door of a car.
I was coming back from the rear of the alley when I almost tripped over a fridge discarded on its back with the door still attached. By law, supers were supposed to remove the doors because of the notorious suffocation death-trap threat to curious kids.
My breath caught as a thought suddenly occurred to me.
I flipped up the fridge’s freezer door with the heel of my shoe.
Something went loose in my chest as I stared down.
I didn’t want to be seeing what I was seeing, yet I had to drag my eyes away. Then I reeled back to the alley’s fence behind me. With a shaking hand held over my mouth, I stood staring at the broken glass glittering in the rubble-strewn field beyond the alley. A train creaked and clattered in the distance. The wind played with a plastic bag.
I went back only when Emily got to the spot. We stood beside the open fridge, solemn and silent like mourners beside a strange white casket.
From inside, Chelsea Skinner stared back at us.
Her neck must have been broken when she’d been crammed in, because her body was twisted, facing the ground. It looked like her legs had been broken as well in order to fit her inside.
There was a bullet hole in the top of her head, and she had a cross made of ashes on her forehead.
Emily placed her gloved hand on the dead girl’s cheek.
“I’m going to catch the man who did this to you,” she promised the girl as she took out her phone.
Chapter 29
THE SUBWOOFER THUMPING of the low-flying PD chopper seemed to echo through my raging blood as I left Emily and threaded the narrow alley back to the sidewalk.
I stared at the line of decrepit three- and four-story brick town houses across the street. The ground floors of many of the buildings bore the closed steel shutters of abandoned stores, but I could see curtains and blinds in many of the upstairs windows that faced the alley. Somebody must have seen something.
A crowd had gathered around the just-arrived Emergency Service Unit truck, which was parked in front of the mosque. I could see Lieutenant Montana through the windshield, working the radio, calling for backup. Around the truck were many mosquegoers, men in kufis and some women wearing hijab head scarves. But others—local non-Muslim street folk looking for some stimulation—also seemed to be arriving by the minute.
I took out a picture of Chelsea as I walked over to the throng of people. “This girl was found dead in the alley back there,” I announced, holding it up. “Did anyone see anything this morning?”
“Oh, a white girl. That’s what all the fuss is about. Figures,” said a pudgy young woman, laughing between bites of her takeout.
“Word,” said a large man in cornrows beside her. “Why you cops messing around this mosque for? These are God-fearin’ people. This is harassment. Religious and racial discrimination. We don’t know anything about any white girl!”
From the way the large man stood, half turned, unconsciously shielding his right side, I would have bet my paycheck that he was carrying under his XXL Giants jersey. I wanted to bust him right there and then. Make the wiseass the recipient of the anger that was still reeling through me. l almost didn’t care that it would probably incite the rest of the gathering crowd.
I exhaled a long breath and let it go as a couple of Twenty-fifth Precinct radio cars turned the corner a moment later.
I was heading back toward the crime scene when I heard a window slam across the street. Behind the pane of dusty glass in one of the town houses’ second-story windows, a thin, middle-aged black woman stared down at me. She made extended, knowing eye contact with me and nodded before fading back further into her apartment.
She wanted to talk, but not in front of the neighborhood. Please, let this be a lead, I prayed as I went to get Emily.
I left a couple of uniforms to cordon off the alley and took Emily with me across the street. The town house’s inner door’s lock buzzed as we entered the foyer. As we reached the top of the narrow stairwell, a door cracked open down the hallway. The woman whom I’d seen in the window put her finger to her lips and motioned us silently inside.
The apartment was immaculate. The furniture was arranged tastefully on polished hardwood floors, and there was a granite island in the stainless-steel kitchen. Through an open bathroom doorway, I spotted a nurse’s flowered uniform blouse hanging on the shower curtain rod.
The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Price, and I showed her Chelsea’s picture as we stepped into the living room.
“This girl’s body was found dumped across the street,” I said, keeping my voice down.
The woman tsked loudly as she stared at the photo.
“Another dead child,” she said in a lilting Caribbean accent. “I’d say dis world has gone damn crazy, but I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t.”
“Is there some information you could share with us, Mrs. Price?” Emily prompted. “This probably happened right after the call-to-prayer speakers went off at five.”
“Oh, I know dose damn speakers,” she said. “Dey shouldn’t be allowed to do dat. Religion or not, dat’s noise pollution. I called three-one-one a hundred times, but do you tink anytin happen? Tink again.”
“Did you see anything?” Emily said.
“No,” she said. “But you talk to dat Big Ice. He’s de local drug dealer.”
“The loud guy with the cornrows?” I said.
She pursed her lips as she nodded.
“Big Devil, I say he is. Making dis block a livin hell for all de decent folks with jobs, tryin to raise families. Big Ice’s people are out all morning early on dat corner and stay out to all hours de next mornin. If an
ytin happened on dis block, dey seen it, sure. He tinks he so slick, runnin tings from dat clothes store round de corner while his runners and such do his biddin.”
“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.”