Delta Ghost (13 page)

The second possibility was that the police themselves had carried out the hit on Kruger, or at least ordered it. O’Dell had inadvertently let slip his connection with the man, and the cops had decided to avoid the messiness of due process and gone for broke. This was even more unlikely, in Franciscus’ opinion. Black-ops cells, hit squads, did exist. But he doubted they operated within the NYPD on such an advanced operational scale.

Which left possibility number three. That there was another agency at work, someone or more than one person who knew of the connection between O’Dell and Kruger, and had eliminated Kruger for reasons as yet unknown.

It was the vaguest of all the three scenarios, but it was the one Franciscus favored, and the one he decided to pursue.

The next step was to work out how he’d begin to investigate the matter, and Franciscus believed he had the answer.

He caught the subway to the office he rented off Wall Street. His was a single-attorney practice, one he’d been running for seven years. He’d gone independent straight after passing the bar exam, rather than joining an established law firm first. His reasons for this were both personal and strategic. Personal, because he wanted to prove to himself that he could establish himself as an accomplished attorney right off the bat. Strategic, because it suited his patron’s purposes for him to do so.

In his office, he checked his schedule. No meetings that morning, no court appearances. That was good.

Franciscus had a secretary, but for the kind of nosing around he was going to do that morning, he preferred to work on his own. So he told the woman he’d be out until early afternoon, possibly later, and asked her to hold his calls. He might require her services later, if he needed certain phone calls to be made.

With a 24-hour news channel running in one window on his computer monitor, he opened a word-processing document and began to draw up a task list.

Get access to the police investigation on the Kruger killing.
The precinct house was in Mott Haven in the Bronx. Franciscus had a couple of connections in the borough, though none in that particular district. It would be tricky. He’d have to claim that one of his clients was peripherally connected with Kruger and that he needed information about the killing to help the client’s defense. Which meant he’d have to use an informal, favor-seeking approach, so as not to arouse suspicions.

Cross-reference all available data on O’Dell and Kruger and look for overlap.
He could leave that to a computer program he used, one he’d obtained through a now-defunct contact he’d had with an employee of the FBI.

Speak with Detective Lieutenant Venn.
This was a potentially fruitful avenue to explore. Franciscus could easily justify seeking an audience with Venn, since he’d been O’Dell’s lawyer and would be legitimately looking for reasons to account for his client’s suicide.

Franciscus glanced at the window in the corner of his monitor where the news feed was running. The scene being shown was a jerky, chaotic one, amateur footage recorded on a cell phone of the multiple shooting in the market off Ninth Avenue yesterday. Franciscus had already seen it on the news the night before. The police were keeping their mouths shut about what had actually gone down, but they’d released a statement saying that three suspected gang members had been killed by officers and a fourth was in custody.

Something caught Franciscus’ eye just as he was about to look away. The person who’d taken the cell-phone footage had dropped to the ground at one point, so that the remainder of the film was taken from the level of the sidewalk. One of the gang members stood several yards away, his arm round a screaming woman’s neck, his gun jammed in her ear. It was the kind of dramatic clip the networks loved.

In the foreground, in the extreme right of the camera’s range, part of a man bobbed into view. The back of a shoulder was visible, then a shaved head. The figure disappeared, then appeared once more.

The gang member was looking directly at the obscured figure. Franciscus assumed the figure was one of the cops.

Then the black woman cop appeared out of nowhere from behind the gang guy and took him down. The picture went blurred after that, as scrambling bodies got in the way right in front of the camera.

Franciscus flipped channels until he found the same news story on another network. There was the footage again. He recorded it onto his hard drive this time.

Played it back.

Freeze-framed it, whenever the obscured man appeared.

He wasn’t certain, but he thought the man was Lieutenant Venn.

Franciscus sat back in his office chair and closed his eyes.
Venn.
A link between O’Dell, and Kruger, and now this street shooting, the nature of which was as yet unclear.

And the gang members, from what had emerged so far, were Hispanic. Possibly Mexican.

Franciscus deleted the task list he’d been drawing up, then hit various search engines. Venn came up within a minute.

Lieutenant Joseph Venn. Division of Special Projects.

Franciscus hadn’t heard of the Division, and there was nothing in the publicly available NYPD online data about it. The title was vague enough that it could mean anything.

He picked up his phone.

V
enn said, “You go first.”

Walter held up a pudgy hand, began ticking off points on the fingers. “Let’s start with the biggest one of them all. The whopper. You’re no computer hacker, kid. You didn’t get Lieutenant Venn’s home address from the NYPD’s database, because it isn’t stored there.”

Clune gripped the arms of his office chair, opened his mouth to speak, but Venn held up a hand.

“So if you’re no hacker, most of the rest of your bullshit story collapses like a house of cards.” Walter ticked off another finger. “You weren’t hired by this Flowers to hide his money, if he even exists. You didn’t read any emails between him and this Salazar, who again may be imaginary.”

“I did!” Clune gibbered. “He –”

“These emails,” cut in Venn. “Between these two men, both possibly Mexican. They were in English?”

“Um... no,” said Clune. “Spanish.”

“You speak Spanish?”

“Yes.” The kid’s voice was shaky.

“Es usted un pendejo?”
Harmony asked.

“Uh...
si
,” said Clune.

Harmony smiled. “I just asked you if you were an asshole.”

Clune said nothing.

Venn looked at Walter. “My turn?”

“Sure.”

Venn leaned in close, staring at Clune’s lowered face. “You told me you followed Kruger from his home.”

“Yeah.”

“On foot?”

“Right.”

“Kruger’s home is in Jersey City. We checked. That’s quite some hike, Jersey to the Bronx. You must have been exhausted.”

Another silence.

Venn said: “I told you I had a lie detector.” He nodded at Walter.

Clune didn’t make eye contact. He looked utterly defeated, as though the sky had collapsed on his head.

Venn squatted down in front of him. He peered into his face.

“They’re closing in, kid. Just like you said. The Mexicans. Out there, sniffing around the streets, congregating like a pack of wolves. Whatever it is you’ve done, whyever it is they want you, they’ll get you. And soon. You’ll be beyond the protection of me, or any other cop.”

Clune began to shudder violently.

“One more chance, kid. Just one. And this time, the full truth. No lies. No clever plays on words. Walter will know if you’re playing us along.”

Clune lifted his head, his eyes closed.

He nodded.

S
alazar was up at six, after just four hours’ sleep. It was all he needed. He and ten of his men had holed up in a house on the Lower East Side which one of the men’s cousins had made available to them.

He made calls, checking in. No sign of the kid. No leads.

At one point, Salazar had become concerned that the kid was back in police custody, which would make access to him a lot harder. But by a stroke of luck, one of his people had been approached on the street by a pair of cops in Midtown. They’d asked him if he’d seen a missing person. The picture they’d shown him was that of the boy, Clune.

Which meant he was still at large.

Salazar had another nagging problem. Ramon Espinoza. He’d been in police custody nearly 24 hours now. Of course, Salazar hadn’t gone anywhere near him. Espinoza was on his own. His instructions were clear, as were those of all of Salazar’s people in the event that they were arrested on a serious charge. You kept your mouth shut. Didn’t argue, didn’t plead. You asked for legal representation, but you didn’t name an attorney. Let the city, wherever you were, supply a public defender. And you didn’t tell your counsel anything.

You never,
ever
, did a deal with the cops. If you did, your life was over. As were those of your immediate and extended family, all of them. Salazar had had to apply this punishment just once in his career. The tortured, burnt bodies of the transgressor’s wife and kids had been displayed on the TV evening news in Mexico. After that, there had been no more disobedience.

Still. Even if Espinoza did his duty, and kept his mouth shut, even if he took like a man what was coming to him – and hostage-taking would earn him a few decades in prison, at least – he was still a loose end. Salazar felt an abiding contempt for the man. When he’d seen his situation was hopeless, he should have either turned his gun on himself, or provoked suicide-by-cop. That would have been a noble act, and Salazar would have honored his memory. Now, he was just another inconvenience, at a time when Salazar needed to focus all his efforts on the hunt for the British boy.

Loose ends needed tying, or they’d trip you up.

Once Espinoza was sentenced and behind bars, it would be a simple matter to get to him. Salazar’s reach was extensive within the US prison system, his capacity to offer bribes and inducements almost limitless. But by then it might be too late. It would be preferable to silence Espinoza now, while he might be wavering in his resolve to keep his mouth shut. The trouble was, Salazar didn’t know where he was being detained, and even if he did, access to a man in police custody was problematic.

Even so. Locating him was a first step.

Salazar called a couple of his men over and gave them their instructions. They were to begin calling every precinct house within a ten block radius of where Espinoza had been arrested, and claim anonymously that they had information about Ramon Jesus Salazar. The moment one of them received a positive response – a sense that the cop on the other end of the line was interested, which would suggest Espinoza had been taken into custody there – they were to hang up and inform Salazar.

He stepped out into the morning sunshine. All around, local New Yorkers were strolling or jogging or hurrying to work, sweating in the so-called heat. Again, Salazar felt contempt, this time for the masses teeming in this vile city like hive insects. He despised them and their narrow, cramped opinions, their self-absorption, their belief that this constituted hot weather. Salazar had toiled in the Mexican sun until his skin blistered, had faced the worst the desert could throw at him, and had triumphed. He flared his nostrils in disgust at the stench coming off the East River a few blocks away. There was no purity here. The minds, the bodies, the environment, were as polluted as a sewer.

And if they chose to pollute their veins with the product he supplied to them in abundance, so much the better. There were times when he imagined himself as God’s agent on earth, helping to cleanse His wretchedly fallen creation by eliminating those too morally weak to deserve to survive.

One of his men emerged from the house behind him, and Salazar turned.

“Sir,” said the man. “Danny Clune. We have a sighting.”

*

“I
’m telling you,” said the girl. “It was him.”

“He fell out of a tree,” added her boyfriend.

The pair of them stood close together, looking bewildered and not a little frightened. They were in a stinking alleyway, somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen. All around them were Salazar’s men, forming a circle, with Salazar directly in front of them.

His man had given him the message –
there’s been a positive ID on the British kid
– and Salazar had said to stay put and headed directly to the location to the northwest, three of his people in tow. They’d found three more of his men with the two white kids. They looked like college dropouts, and reeked of booze even at eight in the morning.

“We found them drinking here in the alley. Showed them the picture, and they said they’d seen him,” said one of his men.

Salazar didn’t try to pretend he was police, didn’t bargain or entice or cajole. Instead, he allowed the menacing demeanor of himself and his men to speak for itself.

The kids were talking in a jumble, random statements overlapping. Salazar held up a hand.

“Slow down,” he said sharply. The girl appeared the more sober of the two, and Salazar addressed her. “Start at the beginning.”

She took a deep breath, brushed tangled hair out of her eyes. “Kyle and I were partying last night with a couple other guys,” she said carefully, as though trying not to slur. “Meatpacking District. We decided to head north to find a party we’d heard of there. Didn’t have enough money for the subway, so we walked. Dumb mistake. We got lost somewhere west of the park. Started arguing about which way to go. Next thing is, we’re next to this house and this guy falls out of a tree in the garden, with this other guy – the homeowner, I guess – leaning out the window and threatenin’ to shoot him.”

“He
did
shoot him, I think,” said her boyfriend, looking annoyed at being excluded. “’S why he fell out the tree.”

“Shut up,” said Salazar. To the girl: “It was the young man in this picture?”

She squinted at it again, wrinkling her nose. “Yeah. That’s him. Scrawny little mother. He’s tryin’ to get up, but he’s hurt his ankle. Then this big dude comes out the door, big and scary-lookin’, waving a gun. Hauls the skinny guy up and drags him inside. Guy’s yellin’ at us to help him, that he’s being attacked. He was a burglar, I reckon. But a pretty shitty one.”