Blood Ties

About the Book

Private detective Bill Smith is hurtled headlong into the most provocative - and personal - case of his career when he receives a chilling late night telephone call from the NYPD. They're holding his fifteen-year-old nephew Gary. But before he can find out what's going on, Gary escapes Bill's custody and disappears into the dark and unfamiliar streets…

With his partner, Lydia Chin, Bill tries to find the missing teen and uncover what it is that has led him so far from home. Their search takes them to Gary's family in a small town in New Jersey, where they discover that one of Gary's classmates was murdered. Bill and Lydia delve into the crime-only to find it eerily similar to a decades-old murder-suicide…

The situation is not helped by Bill's long term estrangement from his sister. But now, with his nephew's future at stake, Bill must unravel a long-buried crime and confront the darkness of his own past…

About the Author

S. J. ROZAN was born and raised in the Bronx and is a long-time Manhattan resident. An architect for many years, she is now a full-time writer. Her critically acclaimed, award-winning novels and stories have won most of crime fiction's greatest honours, including the Edgar, Anthony, Shamus, Macavity and the Nero Award.

Praise for
Blood Ties
and the Bill Smith/Lydia Chin series:

“With
Blood Ties
S. J. Rozan paints with the full palate of the human heart, using depth, detail, and nuance of character that I haven't seen since Raymond Chandler. Rozan delivers a wonderful mystery that is also a full-bodied novel about the pressures we place on ourselves and our loved ones, and how these pressures can crush us.” Robert Crais

“Featuring two of my favorite characters in crime fiction, Bill Smith and Lydia Chin,
Blood Ties
is a chilling and compelling look at the dark roots of violence among Americanteens. It is the most intense and topical work from one of the finest crime writers today. This is a writer—and a story—not to miss.” Linda Fairstein

“Smart, crisp writing . . . remarkable sense of place . . . a sumptuous feast for jaded palates”
New York Times Book Review

“The language bounces and bites and zips the tale along, offering rewards at every level in this tense thriller about children growing up amid adults who've never grown up themselves . . . Rozan does a terrific job of mixing family, past and present, old crimes and present police investigations. Her minor characters . . . are gems.”
Washington Post

“Disturbing, suspenseful . . . In showing how we set priorities that can create monsters, Rozan also points to deep flaws in our society”
Publishers Weekly

“A compelling mystery about the roots of teen violence”
Library Journal

Also by S. J. Rozan:

Trail of Blood

Bad Blood

This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Epub ISBN: 9781407080062

Version 1.0

  

Ebury Press

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Published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

A Random House Group Company

First published in 2002 in the US by St Martins Press as
Winter and Night

Copyright © 2002 by S.J. Rozan

S. J. Rozan has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780091936358

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www.rbooks.co.uk

Contents

Three cheers for:

Steve Axelrod, my agent

Keith Kahla, my editor

MVPs

Steve Blier, Hillary Brown, Monty Freeman, Max Rudin,

Jim Russell, and Amy Schatz

All-stars

Betsy Harding, Royal Huber, Barbara Martin,

Jamie Scott, and Keith Snyder

Coaches

Kim Dougherty, Corey Doviak, Pat Picciarelli,

and the team at Manhattan Sports Medicine

Trainers

NeverTooLate Basketball and the SKW Laser Beams

Teammates

David Dubal

for continuing education

Carl Stein

the car guy

Deborah Peters and Nancy Ennis

the home team

Helen Hester

traded to New Orleans

Peter Quijano

for the circus catch

and DL and GP

for raising the bar

Then come home my children

The Sun has gone down

The dews of evening arise.

Your spring and your day

Are wasted in play

Your winter and night in disguise.

—William Blake,
Songs of Experience

one

When the phone rang I was asleep, and I was dreaming.

Alone in the shadowed corridors of an unfamiliar place, I heard, ahead, boisterous shouts, cheering. In the light, in the distance, figures moved with a fluid, purposeful grace. Cold fear followed me, something from the dark. I tried to call to the crowd ahead: my voice was weak, almost silent, but they stopped at the sound of it. Then, because the language I was speaking wasn't theirs, they turned their backs, took up their game again. The floor began to slant uphill, and my legs were leaden. I struggled to reach the others, called again, this time with no sound at all. A door swung shut in front of me, and I was trapped, longing before, fear behind, in the dark, alone.

The ringing tore through the dream; it went on awhile and I grabbed up the phone before I was fully awake. “Smith,” I said, and my heart pounded because my voice was weak and I thought they couldn't hear me.

But there was an answer. “Bill Smith? Private investigator, Forty-seven Laight Street?”

I rubbed my eyes, looked at the clock. Nearly two-thirty. I coughed, said, “Yeah. Who the hell are you?” I groped by the bed for my cigarettes.

“Sorry about the hour. Detective Bert Hagstrom, Midtown South. You awake?”

I got a match to a cigarette, took in smoke, coughed again. My head cleared. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. What's up?”

“I got a kid here. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Says he knows you.”

“Who is he?”

“Won't say. No ID. Rolled a drunk on Thirty-third Street just up the block from two uniformed officers in a patrol car.”

“Sounds pretty stupid.”

“Green, I'd say. Young and big. I told him what happens to kids like him if we send them to Rikers.”

“If he's fourteen, he's too young for Rikers.”

“He doesn't know that. He's been stonewalling since they brought him in. Two hours I been shoveling it on about Rikers, finally he gives up your name. How about coming down here and giving us some help?”

Smoke twisted from the red tip of my cigarette, lost itself in the empty darkness. A November chill had invaded the room while I slept.

“Yeah,” I said, throwing off the blanket. “Sure. Just put it in my file, I got out of bed at two in the morning as a favor to the NYPD.”

“I've seen your file,” Hagstrom said. “It won't help.”

Fragments of stories I would never know appeared out of the night, receded again as the cab took me north. Two streetwalkers, one white, one black, both tall and thin, laughing uproariously together; a dented truck, no markings at all, rolling silently downtown; a basement door that opened and closed with no one going in or out. I sipped burnt coffee from a paper cup, watched fallen leaves and discarded scraps jump in the gutters as we drove by. The cab driver was African and his radio kept up a soft, unbroken stream of talk, words I couldn't understand. A few times he chuckled, so whatever was going on must have been funny. He let me out at the chipped stone steps of Midtown South. I overtipped him; I was thinking what it must be like to grow up in a sun-scorched African village and find yourself driving a cab through the night streets of New York.

Inside, the desk sergeant directed me through the glaring fluorescent lights and across the scuffed vinyl tile to the second floor, the detective squad room. Two men sat at steel desks, one on the phone, the other typing. A third man, at the room's far end, punched buttons on an unresponsive microwave.

“Ah, fuck this thing,” the button-puncher said without rancor, trying another combination. “It's fucked.”

“You break it again?” The typist, a bald-headed black man, spoke without looking up.

“Hagstrom?” I asked from the doorway.

The guy at the microwave turned, said, “Me. You're Smith?”

I nodded. He was a big, sloppy man in a pretty bad suit. He didn't have a lot of hair but what he had needed a trim. “You know how to work these things?” he asked me.

“Try fast forward.”

The typist snorted.

“Screw it,” Hagstrom said, abandoning the microwave, crossing the room with a long, loose-jointed stride. “Doctor says I should lay off the burritos anyway. Come with me.”

I followed him into the corridor, around a corner, into a small, stale-smelling room. It was empty and dim. The only light came from the one-way mirror between this room and the next, where a big kid rested his head on his arms at a scarred and battered table. Two Coke cans, an empty Fritos bag, and a Ring Ding wrapper littered the tabletop.

Hagstrom flicked a switch, activated the speaker. “Sit up,” he said.

The kid's head jerked up and he looked around, blinking. His dark hair was short; he wore jeans, sneakers, a maroon-and-white varsity jacket with lettering I couldn't make out on the back. They were all filthy. He rubbed a grubby hand down his face, squinted at the glass. That glass is carefully made: It will show you your own reflection, tell you what's behind you; it hides everything else.