The Night Falconer (20 page)

I looked out the window of Marbush’s office. There was a maple tree behind the building, its dark green leaves sun speckled and waving in a puff of wind.

“So is Los Miembros trading in live warm bodies or what? We talked to someone who said one of the dead men was heavily into this.”

“They’re behind at least a couple of significant prostitution rings, we know that. A lot of their girls barely even speak English. They don’t need to, for what they do.” Her gaze was steady.

“That have anything to do with the motive behind the shootings?”

“Possibly. Or a hundred other things. Like I told you, this shooter we’ve got in custody was from the competition.”

“So you think we’re totally out in left field going after Watisi with our hired falconer theory?” I said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“You got anything else from ballistics to tie this guy to the shootings?”

“Not yet. Bullets were 7.62x39mm assault rifle Hollow Point, probably Russian.”

“Nasty stuff.”

“We’ve already executed a warrant and are trying to match the fragments to a rifle we pulled from the guy’s apartment. It doesn’t look like a match, but the gun he used the other night could be at the bottom of the East River somewhere,” Marbush said.

“Without the gun or eyewitnesses though, you’re case is still pretty circumstantial.”

“Maybe. Look, forget about it, Frank,” Marbush said. “You stick to your wildlife stuff. You want to go tracking down your bird man, have at it. If you make some connections and anything comes of it, give us a shout. I’ll let you know if something more definite comes up from our end—and don’t forget about what I told you last night. I heard about that little spectacle in housing court earlier.” She stared at me.

“Darla’s convinced there is a link between the missing pets, what happened at the airport, and what’s going on in the park. She’s been living with this thing the longest,” Nicole said.

“Fair enough,” Marbush said. “But it looks like she also missed the Lonigan/Watisi connection from a few years back. I’m not saying either of you are bad detectives, Ms. Pavlicek. Just that you’re probably wrong.”

The lieutenant had a point. I didn’t think Darla had underestimated the urgency of the threats she’d received. Neither had I. But Darla was now hobbled and we were left with what was beginning to look like a crumbling case.

“All right,” I said.

“Look,” she said, “no matter what else happens, you’ve got me curious about the falconer guy. At roll call this morning and afternoon I’m instructing the officers on patrol in and around the park to keep an eye out for this idiot.”

“How about giving them my cell phone number too,” I suggested. “If it’s after dark, it might be hard for them to tell what it is they’re looking at.”

“Okay,” she said. “And it should go without saying as far as you and your daughter are concerned, whatever you come up with, I’d like to be kept informed.”

“Got it.”

But I didn’t get it. Not really. As we left the precinct, the snickers and grins were gone. Warren Fitzhugh nodded gravely at me from his sergeant’s desk. I was beginning to feel the eyes of the hunter, the strange and paradoxical realization that as pursuers we might soon find ourselves being pursued; that I did not understand enough of the motivations of those involved to be able to properly respond to what would happen next.

24

“Why didn’t you tell us you and Watisi had a history,” I asked our client.

Dr. Lonigan was at her easel, painting. She’d been working on a landscape she said, since coming home from work an hour earlier. She’d been so upset by the incident in housing court that morning, she said, that she’d left work early, right after seeing her patients.

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” she said.

“Not relevant? When you’re out there making claims against the man quoted in the newspaper?”

“He’s hiding something. He’s always been hiding something.”

“I may grant you that, but you’re not exactly helping us do our job here.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re sorry.”

“Yes.”

“What are you hiding, Dr. Lonigan?”

She pushed her brush in a wide stroke across the canvas. “Nothing. Just trying to help someone. Just trying to get to the bottom of all this. Same as you.”

“Help someone?” This was a revelation. “Who might that be?”

Her eyes remained on her canvas. “Can’t say.”

“Lovely.”

“I still would like you to keep working for me on this.”

“You bet I will keep working on it,” I said.

She turned to face me. “But not necessarily for me.”

I said nothing.

She went back to her canvas. “Feel free to stay in the apartment and continue to use my car, if you’d like,” she said.

* * * * *

Darla called me from her hospital bed.

“How come you guys haven’t been by to bring me flowers?”

“‘Cause we’re too busy out here trying to solve your case,” I said. Actually, we’d been by twice but she’d been zonked both times and the docs didn’t think she was ready to talk.

She chuckled under her breath. “You go, Franco.” Her voice was still slightly slurred from whatever pain meds they’d given her.

I brought her up to speed on the information we’d gleaned in her absence and the NYPD’s suspect when it came to the murders and her shooting. When I got to the part about the sign-swinging protestors at the courthouse, I could almost hear her shaking her head through the phone.

“You guys don’t have to keep on with this, you know,” she said.

“Are you kidding?,” I said. “Someone’s either got it all wrong or I’m missing a huge piece of the puzzle. And you lying in the hospital. I’m not about to walk from that.”

“Didn’t figure you would,” she said.

I said nothing.

“I’m going to get some sleep now. You be careful out there, Frank. Take care of that daughter of yours. She’s a diamond,” she said. “You tell her I said so.”

“She is that,” I said. “And I will.”

* * * * *

Darkness was still an hour away as Nicole drove us around the outside of Dominic Watisi’s Westchester estate. We’d turned our backs on Lonigan’s Porsche in favor of a nondescript Ford rental. Rush hour traffic on the Major Deegan had delayed our arrival by at least an hour. I could only hope it would do the same for Watisi, who no doubt would be working late at his office in Harlem.

Before we ventured into Central Park again after our mystery falconer, I wanted to get a closer look at Watisi’s castle. I had no idea what we were looking for, other than the fact that Watisi seemed so intent on protecting it. Maybe I was paranoid. Then again, maybe I wasn’t paranoid enough.

The cameras dotting the spiked top of the estate’s brick wall seemed to form an impregnable barrier. They were spread every thirty yards or so. We were probably on someone’s video screen or tape right this moment. At the same time, I noticed something odd about several of the cameras.

“Stop the car right here,” I said.

“What?” Nicole let her foot off the gas to slow down.

“Right here. Stop the car.”

“But they’ll have us on tape. Or the could be watching us right now.”

“Maybe not.”

She did as I said and braked us to a stop at the side of the road.

“Did you bring the stepladder I asked you to get?”

“In the trunk.”

“Great,” I said. “Here goes nothing.”

I climbed out, she popped the trunk, and I pulled out the ladder.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Dad,” she said.

“Me too.”

I stepped across the grass to the wall and leaned the ladder up against it. I climbed up and found myself nearly face to face with one of the cameras. It looked intimidating. I reached across, grabbed it by the lens, and begin to pull on it.

“Are you nuts?” Nicole said. “If whoever’s in there wasn’t watching us, they’re definitely going to be now.”

The camera swiveled on its base. It felt light as a feather. I twisted the lens—hard. It broke off in my hand.

I peered inside the casing. Nothing there.

“They’re fakes,” I said.

Nicole climbed out of the car and came over to the ladder.

“The cameras aren’t real?”

“Nope. Not all of them anyway. Strictly used as deterrence. Sometimes, in order to save money, building owners will mix some fake cameras in with the real ones. I’ve been checking out these along the top of the wall. Some are real, but most aren’t. My guess is whatever contractor Watisi used to put these cameras in messed up because we’re smack dab in the middle of a row of fake ones.”

“So there’s a blind spot. We can walk right in.”

“Hopefully.”

“What about the ones back at Grayland Tower?”

“Oh, most of those were real enough, I think. But we’re not exactly sitting in the middle of a high crime area up here.”

“What about further on inside?”

“Oh, I’m sure Watisi will have more real surveillance further on inside, including the human type.”

“At least we can get in.”

“It’s a start,” I said.

The road we were on looked empty enough. It curved downhill in front of us, but we hadn’t passed a single other vehicle as we’d driven along it. Beautiful shade trees, maple and oak, blocked most of the sun here, making it less likely we’d be spotted once we scaled the wall. Only one way to find out for sure.

Nicole opened the trunk of the car and brought out her backpack filled with camera equipment, in case we needed to document what was saw. The fact that we were going in armed meant that we were committing more than one felony. God help us if we were caught.

I went over the wall first, dropping into a nice thick stand of rhododendron, perfect for concealment. I waited for a minute or two. Nothing happened. So far so good. I whispered up to Nicole, who pulled up the ladder from the other side and leaned it down beside me on the inside of the wall, then climbed down next to me.

We waited some more. From where we stood, we could just make out the rooftops of what looked like the main residence or compound above the trees about a quarter mile downhill and to our right. My curiosity was immediately piqued, however, by a different set of structures, much closer to our location. Low slung, barracks-type structures made of wood and corrugated metal, like large mobile homes or temporary housing.

“What do you make of those?” I said, pointing to them in the distance.

“Building project?” Nicole said.

“Doesn’t look it. I don’t see any construction equipment or the framework of any larger structure.”

Nicole pulled her favorite camera from the bag, zoomed in with one of her telephoto lenses, and began snapping pictures. I grabbed a set of field glasses and scanned the area.

What looked like the shadow of a child’s head moved inside the windows of one of the structures. A screen door open and a brown skinned woman pushed out through it, bearing a basket full of laundry. There was a clothes line to one side with sheets and pants and shirts hanging from it.

“People are living there,” Nicole said.

“I see it.”

“Hired help to run the estate?”

“Maybe, but you could house a pretty big workforce in all those buildings.”

As I swept around the scene, more and more people became visible. A group of children playing on a swing set. Old men of indeterminate ethnic origin seated in the shadows, some of them smoking cigarettes or pipes.

“Looks like some kind of refugee camp, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it. Let’s see if we can get a closer look.”

We started to move along the base of the wall, using the rhododendron as cover. We hadn’t made it very far, however, when trouble hit. The roar of an all-terrain vehicle seemed to rise up out of nowhere and a second or two later the four-wheeler itself popped over a rise between us and the main residence. There was a solo rider atop it, brandishing an automatic weapon. He hadn’t spotted us yet—probably just patrolling—but he was about to. There was no avoiding that.

Worse, I recognized him as he drew closer. It was none other than my old buddy, the nameless stiff who’d been working as a bodyguard and driver down at Watisi’s office in the city.

We had the jump on him. Only one thing to do.

“Let’s try not to put ourselves in this type of jam in the future,” I said to Nicole as I drew out my Glock and stood, pointing it directly at the approaching vehicle. Nicole followed suit.

No sooner had the driver caught sight of us emerging from the bushes than he slammed on his brakes about twenty feet in front of us and tried to reach for a walkie-talkie also strapped around his neck. But a quick gesture with my handgun made him think twice. He slowly raised his hands as the cloud of dust that had been trailing him drifted in front of him.

“You people are making a huge mistake,” he said.

“Remains to be seen,” I said.

He looked us over with the same appraising eyes he’d shown back at the office, but his cockiness seemed to evaporate in the face of a pair of gun barrels.

“Why don’t you dismount that little pony of yours, take off that howitzer you’re wearing, and set it down gently in the grass there beside you.”

We waited while he did as I said. Then he started to reach for the key to turn off the engine.

“Ah, ah.” I motioned with the gun again. “Leave it running.”

He shrugged and stood to one side of the ATV with his hands still in the air.

“What are you people running here?” I raised my head in the direction of the distant barracks housing. “Some kind of illegal labor camp?”

“None of my business what the boss does with his money. He helps out a lot of people.”

“I’m sure he does.”

I thought about the situation. Nicole had taken enough pictures to provide plenty of documentary evidence of something suspicious, and who knew how many other yahoos like this Watisi had running around the place.

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, my good fellow,” I said. “Not that you’re going to be too happy about it.”

* * * * *

Ten minutes later, we were safely back out on the highway, headed south toward the city, all our gear and camera equipment stowed in the trunk. I didn’t know how long our young friend would remain gagged and tied securely to the bumper of his running vehicle, his ammunition gone and the batteries missing from his walkie-talkie. At least until someone missed him, that was for sure. Not to mention that we’d also relieved him of his fashionable dark trousers and purple jockey briefs, which Nicole had whistled at, and both of which we’d tossed in a dumpster a half a mile down the road from where we’d left him. I wasn’t too worried about Watisi calling in the Westchester County or town cops to report a break-in at the estate either. Not unless he wanted a lot more snooping investigators around besides us.