House Reckoning (22 page)

He then told Hanley and Grimes that DeMarco had in his possession a video of an old mafia guy named Tony Benedetto and Quinn needed to get the video. Benedetto was a sick old man and DeMarco had forced him to tell a pack of lies that DeMarco could use to build a trumped-up case against him. And that’s all it took. Hanley and Grimes got three other guys, two of them retired cops and one of them a technical guy who could deal with alarm systems and computers, and they broke into DeMarco’s house and recovered the video. Hanley didn’t tell the people who accompanied him to D.C. anything other than that he was looking for a video of an old guy talking. When they found the video camera in DeMarco’s basement lockbox, the only one who looked at it was Hanley and he told Quinn he only looked at it long enough to confirm that Benedetto was on it—and Quinn believed Hanley. Fortunately, it didn’t appear as if DeMarco had copied the video; at least Quinn hoped so. They hadn’t found any evidence on DeMarco’s computer that a copy had been made or emailed, nor had they found Benedetto’s statement on any CDs or flash drives in DeMarco’s house.

The teacher had been easy. Quinn and his wife were big supporters of the New York public school system, donating money and helping out on a variety of projects with at-risk kids. Quinn called up the school superintendent and told her he needed to get Janet Costello out of town for her own safety but he didn’t want Janet to know she was in danger. The superintendent told Janet that a big donor—a man who wished to remain anonymous—wanted to reward Janet in a small way for her years of service. The donor claimed that she had made a lifelong impression on him, and because he was now a rich man in a position to pay her back, he was treating her to two weeks at a resort in the Adirondacks. The school system was giving her the time off without making her use her vacation time. Janet obviously didn’t have a clue who this person could be; she wasn’t aware she’d ever made an impression on any of the idiots she’d taught, but she gladly accepted her reward.

Quinn didn’t have to tell Hanley and Grimes much of anything regarding Dombroski. He just told them that Dombroski was cooperating with DeMarco and he wanted Hanley and Grimes to let Dombroski know that he’d better stop cooperating.

Quinn had a problem, however. Hanley and Grimes may have been willing to do anything for him, but it wasn’t going to be so simple to get the entire police department looking for DeMarco. Quinn knew that if he ordered a full-scale manhunt, his cops would find the damn guy in a couple of days, maybe in a couple of hours, but a manhunt meant getting people looking at both public and private surveillance camera feeds, checking to see if he was registered in hotels, and plastering his picture in the papers and on television. The problem with doing that was that at some point he’d have to tell the media
why
he was looking for DeMarco, and he didn’t want to go down that path. He finally decided to search for DeMarco in a more low-key way, knowing in advance that the chances of finding the bastard were smaller.

He called John Braddock. Braddock was the deputy commissioner in charge of NYPD’s antiterrorism division. He told Braddock that Hanley was emailing him a picture of a man and he wanted every beat cop and transit cop in the city to get a copy of the picture. He also told Braddock he wanted him to employ the so-called Ring of Steel.

The Ring of Steel, named after a similar surveillance system in London, uses more than three thousand surveillance cameras to watch for terrorists and common criminals. In New York most of the cameras are located in midtown and lower Manhattan, and the majority of those were focused on high-value terrorists targets: the New York Stock Exchange, the World Trade Center memorial, federal buildings, bridges, and tunnels. The system uses artificial intelligence software in addition to human eyeballs, and the software contains algorithms that direct the cameras to search for specific shapes and sizes—like suspicious packages that might contain bombs—and specific human faces. The cameras would now be hunting DeMarco.

Quinn told Braddock the same thing he’d told Hanley: that when DeMarco was found no one was to approach him; they were to call Quinn. When Braddock asked why Quinn was hunting for this unnamed man, Quinn said, “I can’t tell you, John. It’s just something the guys in D.C. asked me to do.”

Although a man of Braddock’s rank was normally in the loop, he wasn’t totally surprised that Quinn didn’t tell him more about the person they were hunting for. This sort of thing had happened before, and almost always for something related to terrorism. The CIA or FBI or NSA—or one of the dozen other alphabet agencies in D.C. involved in counterterrorism—would get a whisper about some Muslim fanatic being in the United States. They might not have a name, only a grainy picture taken by a satellite or a predator drone, and they’d ask police departments around the country to be on the lookout for the person of interest. Because the information was classified or came from classified sources, the feds didn’t share a lot of details with the local cops. And that’s basically what Quinn was telling John Braddock, and because Braddock owed his job to Quinn and was hoping that Quinn might endorse him to be the next police commissioner, he would do as Quinn asked.

After Quinn finished talking to Braddock he rejoined Pamela in bed.

“Is everything okay?” she asked. She was sitting up, the sheets down around her waist.

“Yeah. I just needed to talk to a couple of people to get something moving.”

“I’ll be so glad when you’re out of that job. The stress you’re under is unimaginable.” They both thought that being in charge of the Bureau was going to be less stressful than being the New York City police commissioner.

Pamela Weinman looked good sitting there, the sheets down around her waist. She had long dark hair, but the only time she let it down was when they were in bed together. When she was working, she always wore it tied in some kind of bun or piled on top of her head in a fancy braid. She thought she looked more professional if she wore her hair that way. He loved to watch her pull the pins from her hair and let it fall to her shoulders as they undressed for bed.

She had a narrow face and luminous dark eyes, eyes he thought of as Gypsy eyes, although as far as he knew her family didn’t have any Romani blood in them. She was slim like him because she jogged almost every day like he did. Her breasts were works of art. As far as he was concerned—although he’d never said it out loud—she could have posed for the
Venus de Milo
.

But it wasn’t just her looks and it wasn’t all about sex. He loved being with her. He loved the way her mind worked. He loved her quiet, sophisticated sense of humor. He loved that she understood the politics of the city and what it took to get things done in New York, New York. She was a realist, not an idealist.

He’d met her on a case she was trying two years ago and they both swore that the moment they saw each other was one of those events that happens only once in your life: an instant connection that was lust but more than lust. His marriage had been over years ago, not so much sexually but intellectually. He’d found Barbara interesting at first, mostly because she came from a higher social class than him. She knew the people who made things happen in New York—people in politics and business and the media. Just listening to her talk about those people had impressed him then. Barbara had also traveled all over the world, and at that time he met her, he’d never left the United States, not even a trip to Canada.

Later, after they’d been married not all that long, he realized that his wife may have been sophisticated and cultured, but she wasn’t really all that bright. In fact, she was extraordinarily shallow. Her primary interest in life was looking good and making her homes look good. Their apartment was perpetually being remodeled.

But he had needed her in the beginning. He had needed her family’s influence. And when her mother died and left Barbara all her money, he had to admit that he liked that, too. Now he didn’t need her connections and he didn’t really need her money, either. These days she simply bored him to tears. After he started seeing Pam he couldn’t stand to be around Barbara.

He would miss the money after they divorced, although his highest priority had never been money. It had always been his career. He also now had money of his own from books he’d written and investments he’d made, and when he finished his term as director of the FBI, he could write his own ticket with a dozen different companies. But he wasn’t thinking that far ahead yet. He’d spend the next two years running the Bureau, make his mark on the job, and when the president left office, he’d decide what he wanted to do. Most likely, it would be something in politics, as opposed to a lucrative private sector job. Governor of New York, senator from New York, and then, maybe, who knows, a run at the Oval Office. And Pam understood all this. She, too, believed that public service and the challenges that came with it were more important than money. They were the ideal couple.

He was going to divorce Barbara within the year. Thank God, they’d never had children. He and Pam had talked the plan over and she agreed it would be best to wait until after he was confirmed and had been in the job for a couple of months. That way, they decided, the divorce wouldn’t generate much of a political ripple. He didn’t think Barbara would fight the divorce unless he went after her money and he didn’t have any intention of doing that. Then he and Pam would get married and . . . Once again, he didn’t see the point in looking farther ahead, but he knew she would be the last wife he would ever have.

Right now the only thorn in his side was this fool, DeMarco. Quinn had made only one big mistake when he was young—accidentally shooting Connors—but after he’d killed Jerry Kennedy and Gino DeMarco, he’d been able to put that mistake behind him. He felt bad about what Carmine had forced him to do but it was water under the bridge, and since that time he’d done a lot of good, more than enough good to compensate for the deaths of a couple of mafia hoodlums. There was no one who would disagree that he had been a champion of law and order and he’d done as much as anyone to keep terrorists from attacking his great city again. He also believed, sincerely, all false modesty aside, that the country would be safer if he was in charge of the FBI.

Yes, the good he had done and would do in the future far outweighed a youthful mistake and his inability to get out from under that bastard Taliaferro. Carmine Taliaferro had been the devil, and even from the grave he exerted an unwelcome influence on Quinn’s life, but it was now an influence that was tolerable.

He was not going to let Gino DeMarco’s son ruin his life.

Hanley emailed DeMarco’s photo to John Braddock, assigned a couple of men to park outside the building where Quinn and his wife lived, and then checked in by phone with the cops he had watching DeMarco’s relatives. Nobody had seen the damn guy.

Hanley didn’t know exactly what was going on with DeMarco. He believed Quinn’s story, that Quinn had made some sort of rookie mistake and that DeMarco was trying to use it to ruin Quinn. Quinn’s story rang true. He suspected, however, that Quinn hadn’t told him and Grimes everything—that there was a whole lot more going on with DeMarco—but it didn’t really matter, not to him or Grimes.

Hanley didn’t know what Quinn had done for Grimes. He and Grimes had been partners for four years and spent ten or twelve hours a day together, but they weren’t friends. In fact, Hanley wasn’t sure Grimes had any friends. He was one of those people who stayed totally inside himself. At any rate, he knew Quinn had done something for Grimes, something huge, because Grimes was just as loyal to the man as he was—and Hanley would do anything for Brian Quinn.

When Hanley got back from Iraq, he was kind of fucked-up. No, that wasn’t right. He was
totally
fucked-up. He’d been a New York cop for five years before he went overseas with the Army Reserve, and he’d seen all the violence and mayhem the Big Apple had to offer. He’d been in gunfights, he’d seen a score of dead bodies, he’d ended up in the emergency room twice as a result of tussling with assholes so high on drugs they thought they were supermen. But Iraq was different. For one thing, you could never relax; it wasn’t like being a cop where you could go home after the end of your shift. You just never knew when the crazies were going to blow you up or when some guy you thought was an ally might decide to shoot you.

The other thing was he’d never seen people blown up before. He’d seen rotting corpses, dead babies in plastic bags lying in Dumpsters, guys’ heads turned to red mush by shotguns—but he’d never seen detached arms and legs and scorched body parts splattered all over the inside of a personnel carrier. The worst thing he saw was one of his buddies, a guy he’d been close to, walking ahead of him one day when an IED went off. His buddy was literally blown in half. The top half of him looked normal—his face oddly enough actually looked peaceful, wearing the expression he’d been wearing right before the blast—but below his waist there was nothing left but a slimy trail of blood and entrails. That had really messed up Hanley; it messed him up for months.

He didn’t know how he got assigned as Quinn’s driver and bodyguard, but he was really glad that he was given the job. He just hadn’t been ready to go back out on patrol when he got back from that insane, pointless war. He was afraid he just might lose it and start shooting people. Fortunately, when he was interviewed by the department’s psychiatrists after he returned from Iraq, he didn’t say anything about the PTSD and he tested normal. He knew a bad psych eval could have messed up his career and he might have been put behind a desk, which was the last thing he wanted. Luckily, somebody in personnel made the decision to assign him to the commissioner’s security detail, and they probably chose him because he looked good on paper: an Iraq War vet with a bunch of medals, an experienced cop with commendations, a guy who could shoot and who was strong and would most likely throw his own body in front of Quinn if it ever came to that.