The Cross: An Eddie Flynn Novella (7 page)

“I don’t know. Why didn’t he shoot you?”

“He could have. Or, the big bastard in the leather jacket could have strangled the both of us in your Caddy, drove us out of the city, and dumped the car and our bodies. He didn’t. Marzone can’t make a move on us directly. You think if the lawyers suing him got killed on the eve of his trial the NYPD would do anything other than arrest him? Think, Jack. We’re too close to him. Frost was responsible for investigating every single cop in this city. Somebody takes him out, you’ve got damn near the entire force as suspects—thirty-five thousand of them.”

“But if Frost didn’t have anything on Marzone, then why’d he kill him?” said Jack.

“That’s what I can’t figure out. He told me he had the stats on choke hold complaints, but that doesn’t link directly to Marzone. He did say something else, though. Said that if he learned to trust me, he’d show me what really happened to Chilli Hernandez. That’s where
we should be looking. Chilli’s death exposes Marzone. There’s some kind of link that’s more than a chance encounter with Marzone that led to Chilli’s death. We’re just not seeing it. We can play this out a little longer, Jack. We’ve got to. Tell you the truth, I couldn’t walk away from Maria Hernandez and look myself in the mirror. I just couldn’t do it. Hang in there with me. I need you. We can do this together.”

Leaning forward, Jack shook his head. Then he threw the phone back at me.

“Call McAllister. Let’s see what she’s got. If we can’t force a decent settlement out of the city, then I say we walk away. There’s no other choice here. We got a deal?” said Jack.

“Deal,” I said.

I’d dried out the Post-it note with McAllister’s cell number and memorized it, even the variables on the final number. First call was invalid; I changed the last digit and dialed again.

She picked up on the second ring. I heard her breath, heavy and quick. She didn’t say hello.

“It’s Eddie Flynn,” I said.

“It’s all over the news,” said McAllister.

“I saw. What did you tell the cops?”

“Nothing,” said McAllister. “This wasn’t an official meet. Apart from Jones and me, no one knew Frost was meeting you. Going after Marzone was a strictly off-the-books op. With the quick turnover in IAB, we couldn’t have any accidental slips in security. As far as anyone else in Internal Affairs knows, I was taking a look at the scene of an old shooting in DUMBO. So no one has come to ask me any questions about Frost yet. But they will. If you want the information, I’ve got it. The only question is, how do I get it to you?”

Chapter Thirteen

Jack had given me a ride to Brooklyn to pick up my car.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

Old Fulton Street looked deserted. Ten after midnight. Not a single person on the street. The only sound was the East River gently washing against the pier and, overhead, the distant sound of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. Leaning forward, I checked the windows of nearby buildings. No lights. We waited.

I nodded at Jack and got out of the Caddy. Before I got into my own car, I went down on my knees and checked underneath it. Nothing looked unusual, certainly no alien devices hanging beneath. I unlocked the car, got in, and hesitated before I inserted the key. Checking around the center console, I couldn’t see any signs of tampering. I put the key into the ignition. What if somebody hooked the starter motor to a device tucked in beside the engine block? I popped the hood. Got out. Nothing out of place on the old Ford. I got back in, took two deep breaths, and turned the key. Just the regular splutter from the V6. Thumbs-up to Jack. He passed me in the Caddy, and I pulled out behind him.

Left onto Furman Street and then a right loop onto Atlantic Avenue and the access road for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A steady forty miles an hour behind Jack’s big taillights. Turning east, the three-lane highway became partially covered on the right by the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I followed Jack off the 278 at Bridge Park, and another loop brought us onto the Manhattan Bridge. As we’d agreed, I overtook Jack on the bridge. He
hung back and changed lanes. Far as I could tell, we didn’t have a tail, and Jack was double-checking, watching the vehicles to the rear, keeping a lookout for the blue SUV, or any other car that seemed to be hugging our tail.

Jack sped past me, flashed the lights. No tail that he could see. We exited at Forsyth, which brought us down to ground level, and then a left took us past the end of Chinatown and to the Lower East Side. Fine-dining restaurants, invitation-only art galleries, boutique furniture stores, and hipster coffee that ran at eight dollars a cup. Half a mile north, then a dogleg right at the end of Allen Street onto East Houston and then Avenue B. The coffee got cheaper, the beards a little shorter, and the area a little friendlier.

The tattoo parlor below Jack’s apartment looked empty, but the lights were still on. Probably getting ready to close up. The Caddy’s nose stopped in front of a roller door. Jack got out, used a key to raise the shutter, stepped inside, and hit the lights. He drove in. I followed. A neighbor of Jack’s, a Miss. Corstana, was staying with her mother for a week. Mrs. Corstana Senior had just been released from hospital following a minor stroke. While she was away, Jack was feeding her cat, or was supposed to be. Miss. Corstana’s parking space was free, and I pulled up beside the Caddy.

I killed the engine and waited while Jack closed the shutter doors. The clang of the metal tongue hitting the concrete killed the motor noise from the rollers. I got out and stood at the trunk of my car, beside Jack.

I popped the trunk. Detective McAllister unfolded herself and got out. She stretched her back, letting her arms hyperextend, rolled her neck, and turned back toward the trunk. She came up with a large, bulky brown paper envelope.

“It’s all here,” she said.

Chapter Fourteen

“What kind of man doesn’t have any food in his refrigerator?” said McAllister.

“Jack’s not convinced that eating is good for you,” I said.

“Then why the hell is his fridge so big?” said McAllister.

She had a point. The one appliance that dominated Jack’s studio apartment was the extra-large classic red refrigerator. Home to the loneliest aerosol can of cheese in Manhattan. She settled for a beer but didn’t pop the can. Instead, she held it against her neck, then her forehead.

I guessed that McAllister was in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, thin but physically strong. I could tell that she looked after herself. Frost had trusted her with the information he’d offered to me, so by definition she was a serious operator. There was no wedding band on her tanned fingers.

Jack and I sat at his dining table. The large envelope McAllister had brought with her rested unopened on the table in front of us. There were only two dining chairs, so McAllister reached behind her, pulled a Glock that sat low on her back, set the weapon on the counter, and hopped up beside it. She popped the tab on the Bud and took a long drink.

With her head back, eyes on the ceiling, the Bud to her lips, I noticed that her other hand strayed to the Glock on the counter. This was not a woman who felt safe. I got the
impression she’d lived that way for a long time. And no amount of weapons on hand, or hours spent with the iron in the gym, would make her feel any safer.

The envelope remained untouched.

“Frost and Jones died to get you that envelope,” she said.

“No, they didn’t,” I said.

“How do you figure?”

Jack got up and poured two mugs of coffee.

“Before he died, Frost told me he had nothing on Marzone or the Morgue Squad. He knew they were keeping a tail on me because of the Hernandez case, and that’s why he set up the meeting. I guessed that Frost wanted Marzone to see us together. His theory was that Hernandez’s murder exposed Marzone in some way, and he wanted to make him itchy. Itchy enough to try to take me out. It was Frost’s plan. He wanted to catch Marzone making an attempt on my life. It backfired.”

“Bullshit,” said McAllister.

“I’m telling you the truth.”

She put down the beer and studied me.

“You’re trying to tell me that the head of IAB deliberately put a civilian at risk to catch a dirty cop? I don’t buy it.”

“I’m not selling it. Frost said he had the real statistics on choke hold complaints in the NYPD and the evidence to show that those complaints, even when they’re upheld by the Review Board, don’t result in disciplinary action against the officer. That doesn’t tie Marzone to a crime, but it’s useful for the Hernandez case. What did Frost tell you?”

“Not much. I’ve only been in Internal Affairs three months; transferred in from Robbery Homicide. I’m trying for lieutenant, so I need the IAB detail to work up my application. I’ve got a decent amount of time on my badge, and I was new. Frost wanted a senior officer he could trust. He told me you could connect the dots from the Hernandez killing to the Morgue Squad. Exactly what that connection might be, I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. It sure as hell wasn’t to put a target on your back. Jones told me you might not even know what you have, so we wanted to set up an exchange of information. You show us what you got, we show you ours.”

“What is the Morgue Squad?”

Her eyebrows went north, as if somebody pulled the skin taut on the back of her head.

“You don’t know?” she said, and turned to direct the question at Jack and me.

“No,” we said together.

She leapt off the counter, lifted her weapon, and slipped it into her waistband.

“Then I’m wasting my time. And Frost wasted his life,” she said. She leaned over to grab the envelope.

“Wait. We might have something that helps you nail Marzone. Maybe it’s like Frost said. We might not know we have it. You can appreciate we’re a little nervous,” I said.

I told her about Roark choking me in Jack’s car. The ultimatum to take the settlement or a bullet.

McAllister picked up the envelope and emptied a half dozen manila files onto the table. She flicked through them, found a file, and flipped it so that I could see the cover. A photograph was pinned to the top left-hand corner of the file.

“That’s the guy,” I said.

“According to Frost, this guy is Marzone’s right hand. The Morgue Squad don’t take on work unless Marzone and Roark both agree to accept it.”

“What kind of work?”

“You really don’t know, do you?”

“No, we don’t,” I said.

“Let me put it this way—the Morgue Squad run a cleaning service on contracts.”

Jack and I exchanged glances. Neither of us got it.

“What kind of contracts?” said Jack.

“The kind that get people killed,” said McAllister.

Chapter Fifteen

Like all of the most lucrative criminal operations, at its core it was simplicity itself. McAllister had not deviated from the story. Occasionally she would take a sip of beer, or sweep her dark hair behind her ear, but she spoke straight and clear, sparing no details.

“The Morgue Squad came into being because the NYPD started getting real good at their job. Clearance rates for serious crimes hit all-time highs, with more murders solved than in any other years in recent memory. Plus the murder rate hit rock bottom. In the early nineties there were almost two thousand murders a year. That number dropped and has continued to fall. Last year there were just over three hundred, the lowest murder rate on record. Most murders in New York are domestics gone too far, but a good amount are drug or gang related. And we guess that around twenty to thirty murders in recent years are contract hits. In the nineties that number was well into the hundreds.”

I’d heard this before, on the street. If you ran a con operation in New York, you had to know who was off-limits. I knew the guys who could put out contracts, and I knew, by reputation, some of the guys who accepted them. There was no doubting the economy—if you were a contract killer in New York, then all the good money was made in the nineties.

“I’d heard on the homicide beat, from some of the twenty-year veterans, that there was a very real market for contracts. We’re talking high-profile hits. People with money and protection—informants in police custody, gangsters, other hit men, politicians, cops, lawyers,
even top drug traffickers and cartel enforcers were targets. According to the cops I worked with, Kuklinski got most of the work in New York because he was thorough, reliable, and safe; he hid the bodies in his freezer for a few years to mask the time of death, or he made it look like suicide or slipped the corpse into the Hudson so it would never be found. The Iceman got the work because he ensured nobody ever came looking for him, much less the man or woman who put out the contract.”

“Kuklinski got caught, didn’t he?” said Jack.

“Sure did, in the 1980s. I worked with a cop who was on the Iceman taskforce. When Kuklinski went down, there was a gap in the market. A lot of people tried to fill that gap. Half a dozen emerged vying for the number-one spot in Manhattan. Only one of them is alive today. He’s still working, and he’s still number one.”

“Because he disguises the kills?” I said.

“He does a little more than that. We don’t know the exact setup. What we do know comes from convicted felons, lifers. A cop in IAB investigated a complaint raised by the Innocence Project. They were working a case for a guy named Jason Fenton. In 1994 Jason Fenton was convicted of the murder of his neighbor Doreen Bird. They lived a few floors apart in luxury condos on the Upper West Side. A janitor saw Doreen and Jason leave the building together one night, and Doreen never made it home. She was found a few days later in a motel room in Jersey with her skull beaten almost flat. The desk clerk remembered her but couldn’t remember what the guy she was with looked like. Luckily, a drunk from a local bar caught a good look at the man who accompanied her to the motel, as did the janitor. They picked Jason out of a lineup, and the DA ran with the case.

“Jason protested his innocence, said he wasn’t with Doreen that night. Instead he’d gone to a movie and then went home. Jason had no priors and he was a pillar of the
community. The DA ran with the eye-witness evidence and hair fibers from Jason that were found on Doreen’s clothes. He got twenty-five to life. The Innocence Project lawyers reinterviewed the witnesses about three years ago. While Jason had always maintained his innocence, the Innocence Project lawyers had refused to file an appeal. That changed when Jason sent them a letter he’d received from one of the prosecution witnesses—the building janitor, Louis. By this time Louis was into his seventies, he was retired, and had survived his first heart attack. In the letter, Louis maintained that when he was near death in the back of the paramedics’ van, his only regret was giving false testimony against Jason. He wanted to change that. The Innocence Project sent an investigator to interview Louis, who in turn confirmed that he’d been threatened. Not by police, but by someone who’d told him to ID Jason or he would be killed. After a little more digging, the drunk confirmed that he’d been leaned on to pick out Jason and that it was a cop who’d told him to do it in exchange for a thousand dollars cash.”