Devil's Bridge (25 page)

Mercer’s phone rang. “Wallace,” he said, then walked ten feet away from me to take the call.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Catherine Dashfer,” he said to me. “You want it?”

We met halfway and I grabbed his phone.

“You got something good?”

“This call didn’t happen, Mike.”

“Shoot.”

“Battaglia’s playing games with the police commissioner,” Catherine said. “I’m not quite sure why.”

“I’ll give you that piece of it. Scully thinks the district attorney is beholden to the Reverend Hal Shipley. It’s been going on for a while, but it came to a boil this morning during our meeting,” I said. “You have something about Coop?”

“I wish I did.”

“What, then?”

“Keep this to yourself, Mike, okay? Just you and Mercer.”

“To the grave.”

“Battaglia took the DA’s squad off the search for Josie Aponte,” Catherine said. “He put his civilian investigators on it instead of detectives and they found her around noon today.”

“That’s great!” I shouted.

“Nobody knows. They’re still questioning her pretty hard.”

“Where is she?”

“With family. It’s pretty clear that she went from the courthouse to Penn Station and jumped on a train, down to South Philly where her sister lives. Josie’s real name is Rosita Quinones. They picked her up at her sister’s apartment.”

“What’s she got to say?”

“Not exactly all you’re hoping for, Mike,” Catherine said. “Rosita’s not talking yet. We’ve got all the senior people in the unit working on this, believe me. Once she realizes Estevez is unlikely to step forward to bail her out, we’re hoping she rolls over on him. But there’s no sign of any connection between Alex and the newlyweds—Rosita Quinones and Antonio Estevez—after the moment that she got out of the criminal court building.”

“But you’re still digging? You’re not giving up?”

“We’ll keep digging, of course. It’s just that a first dump of her cell phone and texts doesn’t suggest anything going on that remotely involves a kidnapping.”

I hadn’t thought for long that Estevez was behind Coop’s disappearance. I didn’t believe he could have orchestrated an abduction as sophisticated and clean as this one seemed to be. Rosita’s skill was in tech work, and she had done all that was expected of her by breaking into the DA’s office computer system.

“What was it Drew Poser said on Wednesday afternoon?” I asked. “That Estevez was trying to bring Coop down, right?”

“Yes.”

“Seems to me he was on the way to getting that done by causing her enough embarrassment that all of us thought she might actually take some time off to chill,” I said. “Nobody thought he was out to—to hurt her.”

“Battaglia’s clearly aiming to undermine the commissioner by taking over the Rosita Quinones matter. He’s hoping to see egg on Scully’s face because the NYPD didn’t make the arrest before she skipped town,” Catherine said. “That’s why you’ve got to protect me on this. I just wanted you to know that Quinones and Estevez are unlikely suspects in Alex’s disappearance.”

“I get it, and I appreciate it. One suggestion for you?”

“Okay.”

“Keep your team as far away from this one as possible,” I said. “There’s some kind of link between Reverend Hal and Estevez, and the DA’s a fool to try to take control of anything that involves Shipley. It will come back to bite him in the ass by the time all of this unravels.”

“Point well taken, Mike. I’m just a foot soldier here. I like to stay out of the line of fire,” Catherine said. “But I was with Alex on Wednesday afternoon just after she left Battaglia’s office. I got my first hint of how deep this trouble may go.”

I didn’t offer anything I knew. I didn’t want to compromise Catherine’s position on Battaglia’s staff. But it was beginning to dawn on a few of us that the DA’s behind-the-scenes manipulations to retain political power might become transparent in the weeks ahead.

“You mean with Shipley?” I asked.

“Yes,” Catherine said. “I hadn’t known what a tough spot Battaglia put Alex in during her investigation of the complaint against Shipley, but then he tried to cover his tail with a file memo. And there is also the letter Estevez made Rosita upload on the computer. It’s a real hornet’s nest.”

“I hear you.”

“More importantly, Mike, how are you holding up?”

I didn’t have an answer that made sense.

“Is there anything we can do to help you? We’re all itching to be more useful,” Catherine said. “Alex will be furious with us when she finds out we’ve left you hanging out in the cold.”

“Mercer’s with me. We’re . . . working through—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t hold a thought for more than a few seconds.

I passed the phone back to Mercer. I had never felt as lost as I did now.

“Keep the faith, Catherine,” he said, ending the call.

Then Mercer turned to me. “Now I have a better understanding of why you want to stay near this river, Mike, after what you said about the Westies. But we’re taking this boat back right now.”

He stalked off the dock with Jimmy North, toward Pete Fitzgerald. I stepped on the gunwale of the Intrepid and lowered myself down. I lifted the bench and took a look at Cormac Lonigan. His discomfort level was high—bent over the toilet in the cramped, foul-smelling space with his hands cuffed behind him—but he wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of looking at me or asking for mercy.

“I’m riding with you on the boat,” Mercer called out. “Why don’t you let Jimmy go back with the two kids on the ranger’s vessel? We can have Major Case meet them at the Chelsea Piers docks and take them for questioning, if that’s what you want. Jimmy can get work started on the cell phones and take the backpack and sheet to the lab. Figure out whether this is all a Chapman red herring or actual evidence of a crime.”

I didn’t want to let Lonigan out of my hands, but I didn’t have much reason to keep him.

I shut the lid on the head again. “That would mean too many cooks in the kitchen. Telling Major Case means Scully will find out before too long.”

“Look, Mike,” Mercer said. “Ray Peterson can’t run this whole thing himself.”

“He’s with me so far.”

“Get Lonigan off that boat and let’s head for the other dock.”

I was about to swing myself up on the gunwale again when the phone in my pocket rang.

“Mike,” the lieutenant said. “Are you sitting down?”

“Ready for whatever you’ve got.”

“The old man, Mugsy Renner, he’s still alive.”

“What?” I said. I could feel fire rising inside my gut. “He must be eighty-six.”

“Eighty-eight and dying of lung cancer,” Peterson said.

“What prison?” I asked. “We can race someone up there to talk to him.”

“That’s just it. Six life sentences with no chance of parole, but two weeks ago Renner was granted a release.”

“A
what
?” I screamed into the phone. “You run a mob of hoodlums, kill a few dozen people yourself, get nailed rock solid for six homicides, and some parole board decides twenty years later to override the trial judge who heard the grisly details and go lenient?”

“Calm down, Mike,” Peterson said. “They call it—”

“I don’t give a damn what they call it.”

“They call it a compassionate discharge. Truth is, the warden told me, the state can’t afford the medical treatment for the aging prison population.”

I was off the boat and headed toward Mercer. I couldn’t control my rage.

“Then let out the old men with terminal toe fungus who stole cars or robbed banks. Let out the thieves and the con men with psoriasis, not the murderers. Who cares if that bastard died in a jail cell?”

Mercer was jogging toward me.

“Where is he?” I asked Peterson. The wind had picked up as the sun lowered itself to the west. It carried my voice downriver with it.

“That’s the thing, Mike. He’s back in the city.”

“Woodside, Queens, no doubt. Where all the old Westies go to die.”

“You don’t have to know where he is, okay? I’ll handle that conversation myself, I promise you that.”

“I need to know, Loo. The last thing you can do is hold out on me.”

“You’ve got to keep your head together, Mike,” Peterson said. “I got through to the feds, too. About Emmet Renner.”

“What did you find out? They’ve got a new leniency program in Witness Protection, too?”

“He’s got a two-week pass from the program. They let him come home from Arizona to say good-bye to his old man.”

“One more Westie and I win the trifecta,” I said. “Where are they, Loo?”

“Be sensible, Mike. That’s not a job for you. You’re not even going to recognize Emmet Renner, thirty years after the fact and enough plastic surgery so nobody who ever knew him can make him,” Peterson said. “You see him on the street today? You’d walk right past him.”

“I’ll figure this out without you, understand? There was Emmet, the oldest son, and Charlie,” I said, thinking of the kid my father shot, “and then there were three girls in between. One of them must have taken the father in when Correction let him go. If you don’t tell me the names, I’m sure my mother will remember.”

“I’m done with your threats, Mike. I’m taking two men from the squad and going out to Queens myself.”

“I’m sorry for breaking balls, Loo. And yours, most of all. But Parole must have given you an address, right? They couldn’t let him out without accounting for his whereabouts.”

“I know his whereabouts better than I know yours,” Peterson said. “Enough playing games with me, Mike. You’re officially off this investigation as of right now. I should have done this hours ago. Give the phone to Wallace.”

“You have an address, right? You’re not driving blind, are you?”

“The man’s in a hospital, okay? He’s on life support. Yeah, he was released to his daughter’s home,” Peterson said. “But he’s in a hospital now. He’s in a hospital and his daughter’s got the health-care proxy. Shauna Renner decides when to pull the plug.”

“Shauna what?”

“Shauna Renner,” he said. “The oldest sister.”

“Do what you gotta do, Loo. I’m off duty,” I said, ending the call.

I jumped on the gunwale of the Intrepid and kicked the side of the bench where I had stowed my prisoner away.

“She’s Shauna Lonigan now,” I yelled to no one in particular. “And the snatch of Alex Cooper is about Renner’s revenge.”

“Coop’s life is on the line because of me,” I said.

“And you expect me to believe you’re going off duty?”

“Peterson swears he’s taking Renner down himself. What choice does it leave me?”

“Let’s give it a rest and we can come back fresh tomorrow.”

“Totally,” I said.

It was hard to look Mercer in the eye and lie to him, but going rogue was not in his playbook.

“Let’s just talk to these two jerks again, before we go back,” I said.

“What did Peterson give you?” Mercer asked.

“Cormac Lonigan’s uncle is Emmet Renner, and he’s somewhere in the middle of a two-week pass to pray at his father’s bedside,” I said. “Praying hard to find out where Mugsy buried all the money he stole before he got sent away.”

Mercer held up his hand to Jimmy to signal an ask for five minutes more. He stepped onto the boat with me and lifted the lid of the bench.

Cormac Lonigan picked up his head.

“Time to catch up on family ties, Cormac,” I said. “Sorry to hear about your grandfather.”

“Fuck you, Chapman. He’d say the same thing if he was here.”

“I know where he is, kid,” I said, pulling him to his feet. “Only I don’t think he’s going to be there much longer, so we have to step up planning for the reunion.”

“My witness,” Mercer said to me, pushing me out of the way. I climbed back onto the deck of the boat.

The kid’s eyes widened and he came close to freaking out just looking at the size of Mercer’s hands. He had no way to know how much gentler the man was than I.

“Where’s Alex Cooper?”

“Who?”

He was thin and wiry, but I was certain that belied the toughness of his Renner roots.

“The woman,” Mercer said. “The woman your uncle Emmet is holding.”

Lonigan’s lips were as thin as his long fingers. They were locked together in silence.

“You’ve got a chance to help yourself here,” Mercer said. “Where’s Emmet Renner?”

“Why don’t you ask your partner where Charlie Renner is?” Lonigan said. “He’d be alive if it wasn’t for a cop named Chapman.”

I held my tongue.

“Talk to me,” Mercer said. “Talk to me if you want to go home tonight.”

“You ain’t got shit.”

“Maybe you don’t watch enough cop shows, Cormac,” Mercer said. “Trace evidence, it’s called. That sheet you went back into the fort to get? There’ll be DNA in the sweat that’s on it, and skin cells that come off just from rubbing against it. The plastic handcuff, too.”

“Come back when you can prove it.”

Mercer asked him four more questions, but he refused to answer any of them.

“Let’s talk to Fitzgerald again,” Mercer said, stepping onto the dock. “I don’t think he’s going to take a fall for his buddy.”

I waited until Mercer’s back was to me, then I bent down and removed one of my socks. I pushed Cormac Lonigan down onto the toilet seat, shoved the sock in his mouth, and secured it by tying my handkerchief around his face. Then I slammed the cover of the bench.

Mercer was already face-to-face with Pete Fitzgerald and asking questions by the time I came up behind him.

“Three years, maybe four,” Fitzgerald said. “I haven’t known him more than that.”

“Been to his house?” Mercer asked. “Know his parents or any of his family?”

“Never been there, no. We’ve been on jobs together like this from time to time. And we have some beers after work. That’s all.”

I was hanging back but ready to jump in and make answers happen.

“What does the name Renner mean to you?” Mercer asked with a steadiness in his voice that I envied.

“Relatives of Cormac’s on his mother’s side. I don’t know them.”

Fitzgerald was obviously used to talking with his hands, but one was firmly tethered to the metal fence and the other seemed tongue-tied without its mate.

“Ever heard of them?” Mercer asked.

“Seems everybody has. My family’s out of Hell’s Kitchen, too.”

“Any relatives of yours ever call themselves Westies?”

“Went out of their way not to do, Detective. Good people, my folks. Hardworking people.”

“You ever been locked up?”

“No way.”

The onset of the dusk of evening helped the interrogation. Manhattan Island looked a million miles away.

“Accessory to murder,” Mercer said, “is a very rough way to start.”

I don’t know who was rocked more by the sound of the word
murder
—the kid or me. It took me a few seconds to realize it was Mercer’s bluff to move Pete Fitzgerald in the right direction.

“I don’t know anything about a murder, Detective,” Fitzgerald said, tugging at the fencing as he tried to plead with Mercer.

“He claims you do,” I said, interrupting Mercer when he least needed me to do it. “Cormac Lonigan says you do.”

“I don’t believe he’s talking,” Fitzgerald said, shaking his head from side to side. “He wouldn’t talk to me; he sure ain’t talking to you.”

“I know his uncle,” I said, lowering my voice. “I know his uncle Emmet.”

Fitzgerald was breathing heavily, obviously confused about whom to trust.

“And I know his uncle Emmet is back in town.”

His eyes were jumping back and forth between Mercer and me like Mexican beans.

“You met Emmet yet?”

“No,” he said, his head still shaking.

“So what do you have now?” I asked. “Ten toes? Ten fingers? Count ’em good, kid, ’cause we let you go back on the ferry but we hold on to Cormac, and then I put the word out in the hood that we’ve been talking to you, you might be a few digits short come Sunday.”

“I never met Emmet. I swear to you.”

I backed off and turned to Jimmy. “We’ll hold on to Lonigan,” I said. “You get a head start out to Woodside right now. Pick a bar. Find Donahue’s.”

There was a Donahue’s in every Irish neighborhood. There must be one in Woodside.

“Have a few drinks on me. Throw Emmet Renner’s name around,” I said. “Then ask for Pete Fitzgerald. Tell them last time you saw him he was at the ferry pier downtown, talking to a bunch of cops. Then about eleven
P.M.
, I’ll come in with him, and by then—”

“Why would you do this to me? I don’t know about any murder.”

I moved in on Fitzgerald again. He smelled of fear.

“You might as well talk to me.”

“I’ll be a dead man anyway,” he said. “Why should I talk?”

“Because if you tell us how to find Renner—and his victim—we can pick him up before you get home. If he’s not hiding out on this island, then there’s no reason for anyone to connect his problems to you.”

Fitzgerald rubbed his handcuffed wrist and stared at the ground.

“Has he killed that woman?” he asked.

“Which one, now?” I said. “The one you don’t know anything about?”

“Cormac’s not one for talking much.”

“He told me he was drinking with you last night,” I said to Fitzgerald. “Was that a lie?”

“It’s true.”

“What bar?”

“Molly McGuire’s,” he said, probably thinking he was confirming some kind of alibi for Lonigan.

I pointed at Jimmy. “That’s where you’re hanging out, Detective. Molly McGuire’s. You let everyone in the joint know that Pete Fitzgerald’s squealing like a stuck pig.”

Fitzgerald swung around to try to grab the back of Jimmy’s windbreaker to stop him from leaving, but all he did was wrench his arm. “Wait! Don’t be saying that, please.”

“What, then?” I asked. “You know Cormac helped his uncle get onto the island late Wednesday night, into Thursday?”

“Let me loose from here,” Fitzgerald said. “Everything aches, okay? My wrist, my legs, my back. You’ve gotta let me loose.”

“In time, man. Speak up.”

He turned his head toward the boat to see if there was any sign of Cormac Lonigan.

“No way his uncle came here,” he said. “I don’t know anything about his uncle, except Cormac’s deathly afraid of him. Never met him till a week or so ago, but scared of him, just like his own mother is.”

“Well, that’s in the category of ‘nice to know,’ but it’s not helpful to what I need to do.”

“Cormac left the island when I did on Wednesday,” Fitzgerald said, calmly and without emotion. “Normal time, on the late afternoon ferry.”

“When did you come back?”

“Seven thirty Thursday morning. First ferry. And Cormac was on it with me.”

Fitzgerald was beginning to respond to my questions but directed his answers toward Mercer. I stepped back to let my old friend take the lead.

Mercer took the kid through Wednesday on the island in detail, and then Thursday, too.

“What about Thursday night?” Mercer asked.

“Cormac seemed jumpy, is all. I can’t describe it, really, but he wasn’t quite himself,” Fitzgerald said. “I asked him if he wanted to have a drink or two. He didn’t seem to want to go home, so he said ‘yeah,’ and off we were to McGuire’s.”

“What were you drinking?” Mercer asked.

“Usually beer, like I did that night. But Cormac surprised me. He ordered vodka. Tito’s,” Fitzgerald said. “A double Tito’s.”

The handmade Texas vodka had become popular in the city, but it was pricey for a construction worker in Queens.

“Two of those,” he went on, “and he was toasted pretty quick. Asked me if he could borrow some money to buy a burger and another drink. No problem with that, but I told him he’d better slow it down. No point getting hammered having to work the next day.”

“Did he want to talk?” Mercer said.

“Not really. Just jumpy, like I told you. I thought it was to do with his grandfather dying and his uncle coming back.”

“He told you about that?”

“Not a word. But news about the Renners was all over the neighborhood, people wanting to stay out of their way and all.”

That was a fact I understood.

“Cormac had half a load on before he told me he had done something stupid. Something at work,” Fitzgerald said.

Mercer’s style was as smooth as silk. You’d think he attached no importance to the questions he was asking.

“Like what?”

Fitzgerald rolled his head around and rubbed his neck with his free hand.

“C’mon, kid. You’re almost there,” Mercer said.

“This will come back to me and then there’ll be nowhere to hide,” Fitzgerald said, tears forming in his eyes.

“We know what Cormac did already, Pete,” Mercer said. “We’ve got the evidence in his backpack. We don’t need you to prove it.”

Fitzgerald looked at Mercer straight on. “Then what am I doing? Then what is this about?”

“You need to save your own ass,” Mercer said. “You want to separate yourself out so you’re not charged as an accessory to kidnapping and murder? Then you’d best tell us exactly what you knew and when you knew it.”

Answers came faster now.

“So we’re at the bar, and Cormac’s drinking like a fish,” Fitzgerald said. “Told me that a friend of his needed to spend a night on the island. Maybe two. Liberty Island. That he saw the big story in the newspaper last year about the caretaker being retired and the island without any security at night.”

“Yeah?”

“The friend seemed to know about Fort Wood already, about the way it was boarded up inside the old building.”

“You think Cormac told him?” Mercer asked.

“Could be. He likes to go down there on his break. Just hang out solo in a quiet place,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s pretty familiar with it.”

“And you?”

“I was curious about it, yeah. I went downstairs with him a few weeks back, in early September, I guess it was. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.”

“Lunch break?”

“Exactly.”

“Popped a cold beer or two?” Mercer asked.

“It was a hot day. Yeah, we’ve done that.”

“So what about his friend who wanted to spend the night? How was he planning to get here?”

“Same way anyone else would, I guess. It’s a two-minute boat ride from the Jersey side to the dock on the back of the island. You got a boat, you could come here from anywhere.”

“No security at all during the night?” Mercer said.

“No people anymore. Not since they closed the caretaker’s house up,” Fitzgerald said. “A few surveillance cameras, but if you know where they are, you can come in underneath them.”

“To do what?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “All Cormac had to do was remove some of the wooden boarding, loosen it up so his friend could pull it aside and sneak in. Then be able to nail it shut again. That’s all.”

“Weren’t you interested in what this imaginary friend of Cormac’s wanted to do here?”

Pete Fitzgerald looked up at Mercer. “I figured I knew.”

“And what was that?” Mercer asked.

“I figured Cormac was trying to do the right thing. Trying to help a guy who needed to get out of his uncle’s way.”

I stared at him, trying to get a read on his credibility.

Mercer went on. “Why’s that?”

“Emmet Renner’s a name nobody wants to hear again, out where I live. Word got around that he had come back, and everybody was scrambling to keep out of Renner’s way. He’s got a rep for evening scores,” Fitzgerald said. “Cormac’s a good guy. Wouldn’t say anything bad about his own family, but he knew he’d become a sort of pariah if Emmet caught up with any of his old crowd.”

“So helping someone hide out over here is what you thought?”

“A union guy, probably. Someone like me, that’s what I thought. Someone who just needed to make himself scarce till the grandfather died. By then, Emmet will have to be gone again.”

“How about the woman?” Mercer said.

“I’m telling you what I know. Cormac never said anything about a woman.”

“Not even today?” I broke in. “Not even when you went back to get the sheet?”

Fitzgerald lowered his head. “Look, we saw you guys come on the island—word got around pretty quick that cops were here.”

“Why was that a problem?” I asked.

“It wasn’t a problem for anybody but Cormac. He got jumpy again, all at once. Said he had to go back and check that his friend wasn’t still in the fort.”

“And you just volunteered to go along?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I just did.”

“Stupid.”

“That’s your opinion.”

“Really stupid,” I said. “You walked yourself right into a felony, kid.”