The End Game (22 page)

36

Queens, New York

I drove out to Queens in Gigi’s BMW 4 Series convertible, which she’d offered to me without even blinking.

I checked my face in the mirror—exhausted but presentable—before climbing out of the BMW and walking across the street.

The fire marshal who signed-off on the coroner’s report on Kyle Rossetti lived in a 20s Astoria semi, from where it would take no more than thirty minutes to drive across the East River to the Twelfth Battalion building on Third Avenue.

A couple of traditional wooden sleds lay on the postage-stamp front yard. The noise of joyfully shrieking children mixed with the slap of snowballs finding their target drifted from the rear of the house. They sounded happy. I hoped I wouldn’t have to apply too much pressure to get the information I needed.

The doorbell chimed as I pushed the button. I looked around the inside of the porch where several sets of ice skates were neatly arranged. From the number, colors and sizes I guessed they had three kids: two girls under ten and a teenage boy.

I was still gazing at the skates—wondering whether my entire family would ever go skating together again—when the door opened and a slim woman with freckles and warm brown eyes looked at me inquiringly. I figured she was in her mid-thirties. She was dressed in lazy-day sweats and wore her straightened mousy-blond hair in a loose ponytail.

She scrutinized me for a couple of seconds before asking, “Can I help you?”

“I hope you can. I need to find your husband. It’s important.”

“He’s at the basketball court.” She gestured. “Three blocks east.”

I must have looked skeptical.

She shook her head. “I know. In this weather. It’s nuts. But he shoots hoops every day, no exception. Says it keeps him sharp, so I’m not going to argue with him. Because in his line of work, if you’re not sharp, you’re dead.”

I nodded in recognition, which she immediately read. “You a cop?”

“FBI.”

“I hope he can help you.” She turned to go back inside but turned back again. “Wait a second . . .”

She reappeared a minute later with a large thermos flask and a couple of mugs. “I made him some soup. You can share it with him.”

I took them from her, thanked her, and left.

The basketball court was an unfussy concrete square boxed in by a twelve-foot wall of chicken wire. It backed up against a thicket of bare trees. Although some of the court was still under three inches of snow, the area inside the three-point line had been cleared. Dressed in baggy sweats, a tall African-American guy was playing one-on-one with an imaginary opponent, his breath misting in the freezing air.

He danced clear of the phantom defense, bounced the ball and released a shot. The ball dropped through the hoop without touching the rim.

I flashed my badge, hoping that my assured technique would preclude closer analysis of my ID. “Nat Lendowski, FBI. Just need five minutes of your time.”

“On a Sunday? Would you have pulled me out of church?”

“I don’t know.”

He gestured to the court. “Well, this is my church. Come by Third Avenue tomorrow, I’ll be happy to help.”

I held up the thermos flask. “Your wife said I should bring this.”

Taking a step toward me, he studied me for a moment, then shook his head and smiled. “OK, tell you what. If Janette wants you here, that’s good enough for me.”

He gestured to a wooden bench on a patch of snow-covered grass beside the court. The snow had been cleared from the bench; a thick winter coat slung over the back.

I passed the flask to its owner. “You investigated a fire. A condo at 113th and Adam Clayton.”

He handed me a mug of steaming soup then poured one for himself. “Sure. Journalist by the name of Kyle Rossetti. Poor guy burnt to death. What’s your interest?”

“We think he was working on a piece about Maxiplenty.”

“The crime Internet thing?”

“That’s the one. We have the founder in custody, but he’s lawyered up and locked down.” I took another sip of the soup. “It’s good.”

“Yeah, who needs more, right? A wife you still want to live with, kids you can be proud of, a job to come home from and food in your stomach.”

I nodded, agreeing with everything he said, but still knowing I’d never be able to enjoy any of that till I dealt with my white whales.

Both of them.

The next part was a gamble. I knew it would sound plausible—and I suspected Walsh had better things to do than check it out for himself.

“We know Rossetti wrote about Maxiplenty. We’re thinking maybe he uncovered more than he published. And maybe that made him a target.”

Walsh screwed the top back on the flask. “Everything burned. Files, laptop, everything. Unless he had cloud backups or documents stashed away in a safety deposit box, you’re not going to find anything.”

“You’re sure it was an accident?”

“Absolutely. No evidence of foul play.” He read my expression, cause he then said, “You seem disappointed.”

Which I was. I didn’t see the point in hiding it. “Kind of. It sends me back to square one.”

He thought about it for a second. “Look, everything about the case is consistent with an accidental death: Melted insulation and carbon build up from arcing inside the light switch—that’s a spark crossing the air from one piece of metal to another. It was only a matter of time before it got hot enough to start a fire. Stacks of books and papers close by. Flat battery in the smoke alarm. We think he was probably asleep on the sofa when it started. Maybe he got up and tried to deal with it, but his clothes caught fire. Guys from Engine Fifty-eight found him on the floor, maybe he tried to roll himself out.”

I mulled over his words, then asked, “Say you wanted to burn someone to death, make it look like an accident. How would you go about it?”

He nodded, his eyes lingering on the distance. In his line of work, this was the case far more than it should be. “Off the record?”

“Sure.”

He shrugged. “First, you’d need an apartment building which didn’t have an AFCI—an arc fault circuit interrupter—in place of the standard circuit breaker.”

“And Rossetti’s building didn’t have that?”

“No. We advocate everyone uses them, but there’s no law to enforce their use. It’s also easier with people who think they’re too busy to stay on top of their smoke alarm.”

I shook my head. Strike two.

“Then all you’d need to do is swap a switch somewhere in the house for one you’ve already messed with. Would take no more than a couple of minutes. Then, to be one hundred percent sure the fire takes hold, you’d use an ignition agent. Someone who knows what they’re doing would know which one—maybe ethanol—where to place it and how much to use. Too little and the fire may not catch. Too much and you leave an ILR—ignitable liquid residue—then we’d know it was arson.”

At the level at which Corrigan operated, I figured all of this was perfectly possible to accomplish—and all without leaving a trace. Another thought hit me.

“Did you see the tox report?” I asked. “Anything in his body that could have slowed him down? Something to make him unaware of the fire till it was too late?”

“No. Nothing. Not even alcohol. If there was something, that didn’t leave a trace either.”

I had nothing more to ask. “Thanks for your time.”

Walsh stood. “Good luck and sorry I couldn’t be more help. I’m gonna head home. Promised the kids we’d make a snowman.”

He took my empty mug and added it to his own on top of the flask, stooped to pick up his basketball and left me sitting on the bench, feeling more and more certain that Rossetti was murdered—wondering how many more people Corrigan had killed in “accidents.”

As I stood, my burner rang. It was Gigi.

“Rossetti’s editor died two days after him.” Before I could ask, she added, “Heart attack.”

The two words just speared right through me and nailed me to the ground, right in that spot, as Nick’s face—not breathing, but lifeless, still belted into his seat, as I pictured he was when the car was finally at rest—came storming back into my consciousness.

37

Chelsea, New York City

Gigi rolled her eyes. “Come on. Not every premature death is part of a conspiracy.”

We were back in her loft, seated around the kitchen block—Gigi, he-who-must-not-be-named, and me. Gigi’s fingers were dancing flittingly across her keyboard as she talked, while Kurt’s were scrolling through pages on an Android tablet.

“Right now, I’d be more surprised if he did die naturally,” I said.

“I called up the newspaper while you were on your way back. Said I’d met him at a TED talk I saw online that he’d been to and that he’d asked me to give him a ring when I was next in town. Anyway, long story short, the guy was a heart attack waiting to happen. Not exactly slim, never did any exercise beyond walking to the office and back from his apartment in Murray Hill and taking the elevator down not once but twice an hour to have a smoke—yep, like a chimney, since he was in high school. Also, beaucoup coffee. Throw deadlines and dwindling circulation and ad numbers all newspapers are facing these days . . .” She let her words trail off and gave me a knowing look.

“What about my partner?” I asked. “He lived on junk food, didn’t exactly have the most stress-free of jobs?”

“Possibly indulged in erectile assistive pills,” she interjected, half-asking. To my questioning look, she hastily added, defensively, “You said his libido was running amok since his divorce, and given his age—”

“I don’t know, maybe,” I said, cutting off the rest of her analysis. “I do know he was living healthily since his divorce. Eating better, hitting the gym most nights, cutting down on the alcohol.”

“Even worse.” Gigi stood up, crossed to the wall-mounted machine and started to make coffee. “You hear these stories all the time, people changing their lifestyle so fast their body can’t keep up.”

“So he’s a likely candidate if he’s living like a slob or if he’s cleaning up his act? You can’t have it both ways. Plus he had a buddy who was a trainer and who was overseeing his workouts. I remember Nick complaining about wanting to look better—there was some girl he liked and he wanted the weight to come off overnight—but the guy wouldn’t let him.”

Gigi and Kurt exchanged a quick glance—the subject was maybe too close to the bone, given the new and improved Kurt. Then Gigi turned to me and said, “Reilly. Read my lips.
No es posible
.”

“How do you know that?” I countered, getting frustrated. “You’re not a doctor.”

“I’m not, but—look, if you could kill someone by triggering a heart attack at will, don’t you think we’d have read about it by now? I mean, at some point, someone somewhere would have used it and got caught doing it and it would have made a lot of noise.” She waved her hands. “We’d know about it.”

Kurt lifted his eyes from the tablet. “You’re talking about doing it by, like, slipping someone some kind of drug? That would show up in an autopsy, surely?”

“What if it doesn’t? What if these bastards have developed something that doesn’t show up? Remember, this isn’t some two-bit outfit we’re talking about. This is spook central.”

That quieted them down for a moment. “You’d have one hell of a cool murder weapon,” Kurt said.

I couldn’t get that idea out of my mind.

But it was more than that. Camacho, the Portuguese reporter, dies in a climbing accident back in 1981. Rossetti, the investigative reporter, dies when his apartment goes up in flames. His editor then dies from a heart attack, as does my partner.

How many others have died to keep secret whatever it is these people don’t want uncovered? And what is it they don’t want us to know about? Was that the reason the CIA was protecting Corrigan and shielding him from me? What was he part of? And what’s the connection to Camacho that goes back more than thirty years?

The same year my dad died.

“OK,” I said. “We need to try and figure out what Rossetti and his editor might have known. What can you do?”

Kurt glanced at Gigi. “We can look at both their digital footprints,” he said. “Have a look at their emails, see what they might have searched for online. Phone records, too. Might get a movement trail from their phones too, see where they’ve been hanging out.”

I went silent for a second. What someone with the right skills could do nowadays, the amount of information they could dig up about our lives—it still boggled my mind. I don’t know that the guys at our Cyber Division could do any better.

“Great, let’s do it. I also need to talk to a heart guy. Someone at the top of his game. I need to know if this is possible.”

As he tapped his screen, Kurt said, “I kind of figured you would. There’s a whole bunch of major cardiologists in this city, but here’s a guy I thought looked interesting.” He flipped his tablet around to show me. “Waleed Alami. He’s at NewYork-Presbyterian—its Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute, to be exact.”

I perused his bio. Great credentials, to be sure. Looked gregarious, younger than I’d imagined, maybe in his late-forties, with a full head of swept-back hair and thin-framed spectacles. “Why him?” I asked.

“Well, he’s a top cardiothoracic surgeon but he’s also a big cheese in cardiac arrest research.”

There had to be more. “And . . . ?”

Kurt gave it up with a slight grin. “He’s got this cool Frankenstein machine to revive people who get heart attacks. I figured being cutting edge, you know, having an open mind . . .”

I nodded. “OK. Sounds good.” I checked the big clock on the wall. It was four in the afternoon. I didn’t think Alami would be at the Hospital today. But I knew how I could get him to meet with me on a late Sunday afternoon. It was a small gamble, but I didn’t think he’d call the office to check if “Nat Lendowski” really was with the FBI—or still alive, for that matter.

Before I called him, I needed to make another call. I didn’t want to waste one of my throwaways, which I knew I’d need to discard if I used it now.

I turned to Kurt. “I need to make a call. Untraceable. Can you set me up?”

“
Hai, mochiron
,” he said with a little bow.

I gave him Deutsch’s number and he did his usual party trick of putting it through a VPN’d fake Skype account that was billed to the credit card of some random woman in Japan. Moments later, Deutsch picked up.

“Are you still outside the house?” I asked without an introduction.

“Reilly!” she exclaimed. “Where are you?”

“Is Tess all right?”

“Yeah, she’s—well, she’s OK right now. She’s in the house—I think. I mean, I can’t be sure any more, can I?”

I didn’t rise to the bait. “I need you to look into something. Are they doing an autopsy on Nick?”

She went quiet for a breath, then said, her tone soft, “ I don’t know, but . . . I’d expect so, given how he died, no? Why?”

“Tell the ME to look for anything that shouldn’t be there that might have caused it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “Just get them to run a full tox on him. Make sure they look for anything unusual—anything that could bring on a heart attack.”

She paused again—clearly, she wasn’t expecting any of this. “You think he was murdered?”

“It’s a possibility.”

Her tone went low, muffled, like she was cupping the phone for privacy. “Shit. Who—and why?”

“I’m looking into it. In the meantime, do me a favor. Keep it to yourself. Just ask the ME yourself and get him to call you directly if he finds anything unusual. And Annie?”

“Yes?”

“Stay alert. Keep Tess and the kids safe. And keep yourself safe too. These guys don’t mess around.”

I could hear the tension reach her throat. “Reilly, we should tell Gallo. If you’re right, we need to—”

“No. If you say something, they’ll know we communicated and they’ll take you off the detail and I want you there. I want you looking after Tess. Plus I don’t want to put you at risk by having them think you might know something you don’t. OK?”

She thought for a beat, then, without sounding overly convinced, said, “OK.”

“Annie, you’re going to need to be super-vigilant. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t trust anything—not a phone call, not a badge—without checking it through.”

“I hear you,” she said.

“We’re going to get those bastards,” I told her. “Every last one of them.”

I hung up, wondering if I believed my own words.

A thousand miles south, Sandman exited the United Airlines Airbus that had brought him down to Miami.

He picked up the waiting rental car and drove off, feeling a familiar tingle, the one that preceded the adrenaline spike of a well-executed kill. He sensed a clean, strong bite there, one that could well lead to his quarry. He’d be getting that spike before, of course, here in Miami. He wouldn’t be there for long. Then he’d fly back to New York and, with a bit of luck, he’d finally put the Reilly saga to bed.