The Jake Helman Files Personal Demons (7 page)

“You know the drill, Helman. We need your gun.”

With a trembling hand, Jake eased his Glock from its holster. The gun felt heavier empty than it had loaded. Ejecting its spent magazine, he showed Hammerman the gun’s vacant chamber, then deposited both pieces into the bag, which Hammerman sealed.

“Are you ready to give us your statement?”

“Sure,” Jake said without conviction.

Handing the evidence bag to Klein, Hammerman reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

“Jake!”

All heads turned as Edgar hurried away from the Recorder with a concerned expression on his face. His gait slowed as he gazed at the bloody corpses on the floor, but he did not stop to gawk. Stepping before Jake, he gave his partner’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

“You okay?”

Jake nodded. “Yeah, but you look as white as a ghost.”

“At least with me it’s only a temporary condition.” Edgar fired a sideways glance at the Inspectors. “They confiscate your gun?”

“It’s procedure,” Hammerman said, handing his card to Jake. “Meet us at IAB at 1430 hours.”

Two-thirty, Jake thought, focusing on the card. He had less than two hours to pull himself together.

As Hammerman and Klein circled the corpses in opposite directions, Edgar surveyed the damage behind the bar. “You don’t play. It looks like the O.K. Corral in here.”

Jake took his notepad out of his pocket and tore out a page, which he handed to Edgar.

“What’s this?”

“The rundown on Shannon Reynolds’s hangouts. The roommate even wrote down some of the bartenders’ names.”

Edgar skimmed the list, then glanced at his watch. “The bars have been open for half an hour. I need to move on this.”

“Sorry I won’t be able to help.”

Edgar pocketed the list. “You’ll do anything to get out of a little legwork, won’t you?”

Jake grunted. “Does L.T. know I’m jammed up?”

Edgar nodded. “I was in his office when the call came in.”

Jake looked at Dread and Baldy. Their skin had turned purplish gray. He needed a cigarette.

After Edgar had departed, Jake ducked beneath the crime scene tape stretched across the entrance. The crisp air revived his senses, and in the afternoon sunlight he winced at the crowd of spectators gathered on the sidewalk: hard-bodied men and women, many of them wearing police uniforms.

The lunch crowd
, he thought, taking a deep breath. Only a few of the intense faces looked familiar. Their silent attention caused his stomach to knot up. Were they pissed that they had to drink somewhere else on their breaks? A patrolwoman with a ponytail brought her hands together, and the others joined her. The applause grew louder and Jake felt himself turning red. Offering them a weak smile, he wondered if their support would have been as strong if they’d known he had snorted cocaine only thirty minutes earlier.

Across the street, a Crime Scene Unit vehicle and a news van competed for a parking space. Jake had no desire to be in the spotlight. Lighting a cigarette, he turned his back on the cops and strode uptown, the clapping fading behind him. Nicotine soothed his nerves but did nothing to decelerate his heartbeat. Pedestrians moved toward him in jerky starts and stops, like figures in a silent film. Traffic noise intensified, and he flinched at a honking car horn. After two blocks, he flicked his cigarette at a storm drain and hailed a taxi. Inside the car, he rolled down the window and took several deep breaths. Closing his eyes and willing his stomach to settle, he tapped one foot on the floor. Five minutes later, as the taxi crossed Central Park, he still saw Dread and Baldy lying dead on the floor, covered in blood.

I killed two men
, he thought.
I had no choice
.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art came into view as the park opened onto the Upper East Side. Jake had never been much of a museum-goer, but Sheryl had made it one of her missions in life to civilize him, and he had grown to appreciate the treasures within the sturdy structure. The cab turned left on Museum Mile and he gazed at the people sitting on the Met’s front steps and alongside the decorative water fountains outside the museum, stagnant in the wake of water restrictions. Turning right, the cab cruised the congested shopping district on Eighty-sixth Street, in the One-Nine Precinct. Another right turn and Jake got out at the corner of First Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street, his muscles uncoiling in the still air of the quiet neighborhood. He entered his building, a five-story walk-up, and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, pulling himself along the railing. By the time he reached the door to his apartment, his heart had started hammering again and he felt winded.

Wiping his forehead on his coat sleeve, he dropped his keys. He scooped them up from the welcome mat and let himself inside. Sunlight flooded the silent living room, silhouetting the plants hanging before the windows. He closed the door and locked it. As much as he wanted to hold Sheryl in his arms, he needed privacy more. Opening the front closet door, he reached up to the shelf and took down an aluminum attaché case. Kneeling on the floor, he thumbed the dials on the combination locks and the tabs sprang open.

His personal Glock lay within its foam rubber compartment in the case, along with two magazines of ammunition and a silencer. He had bought the weapon for home protection only, and the silencer had been a gag gift from his colleagues in Special Homicide after he had put down his first case as Primary Detective. Sliding his fingers between the edge of the foam padding and the metal rim, he removed the false bottom containing the gun and its accessories. A rubber-banded bundle of twenty-dollar bills lay at the bottom of the case, nearly ten thousand dollars the last time he had counted it. He removed the cash and cocaine from his coat pocket and added them to the cache. Then he set the false bottom in place and locked the case, which he returned to its spot on the closet shelf. He hung up his coat, went into the eat-in kitchen, and guzzled a glass of water. Only ninety minutes before his IAB interview, and he needed to shower and brush his teeth.

His mouth tasted like death.

Jake had been sitting in the waiting area of Internal Affairs Bureau, located on the sixth floor of 315 Hudson Street, for forty-five minutes. The carpeted room resembled the reception area of a doctor’s office more than an entry to a branch of the NYPD. The buttoned-down investigators passing through projected the professional demeanor of lawyers rather than the urban grittiness of cops. Jake’s heart rate had decelerated, but sweat continued to dampen his forehead. He felt like an errant schoolboy summoned to the principal’s office whenever the civilian receptionist glanced in his direction. Her medium-length dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses reminded him of Sheryl, but she lacked his wife’s natural beauty.

Fidgeting in his seat, he dug into a pile of wrinkled magazines. A
Sports Illustrated
cover featured the Yankees dousing themselves with champagne following their latest World Series victory. Jake always rooted for the underdog, which made him a Mets fan. Tossing the magazine aside, he unearthed a Time magazine from the bottom of the pile. Seeing the cover, dated two years earlier, he grunted. The paranoid eyes of a pale face, framed by a mane of unruly white hair, stared back at him. Lampooned on late-night talk shows and humor magazines, the painting had become iconic. The headline that spawned a thousand jokes read, Time’s
Person of the Year: Exploiting the Genetic Frontier
—”Where’s Old Nick?” Jake leafed through the issue, glancing at photos pertaining to the article: third-world citizens reaping the benefits of genetically enhanced food crops; a paraplegic taking his first steps following therapeutic cloning; and a low angle shot of the Manhattan headquarters of Tower International.

The front door opened and Hammerman and Klein entered, their coats folded over their arms. Hammerman wore a black suit with razor-sharp creases, but Klein’s taste ran strictly off the rack, his sports jacket at least one size too small for his girth. They wore identical smiles, as if they had just shared a joke.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Jake,” Hammerman said. “We had to follow up some loose threads.”

“No problem,” Jake said, setting the magazine down and sitting up.
What loose threads?

“We’ll just be another few minutes. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Jake tried to hide his indignation. He had plied countless suspects with caffeine to get their mouths running. Did Hammerman suspect him of something other than killing Dread and Baldy in self-defense?

Hammerman and Klein entered a side corridor lined with office doors. Sighing, Jake leaned back and waited. The Inspectors returned five minutes later, having traded their coats for file folders.

Hammerman turned to the receptionist. “Carol, which room’s available?”

The woman checked a log on her desk. “Number Four.”

“Thanks. This way, Jake.”

Jake rose and followed the Inspectors into a wide, wood-paneled room with tan carpeting and a low drop ceiling. Hammerman gestured to the digital audio recorder at one end of the conference table, next to an old rotary telephone with a thick rubber connection cable. “Take off your coat and stay a while.”

Jake peeled off his leather coat, draped it over the back of a padded chair, and sat. Hammerman positioned himself at the head of the table, with Jake on his left and Klein on his right. The informal arrangement put Jake’s mind at ease; with open space to his right, he did not feel surrounded. The overhead florescent lights hummed as the Inspectors spread their folders and notes before them on the table.

“This is the nicest interrogation room I’ve ever seen,” Jake said, looking around.

Hammerman smiled. “We prefer to call it an interview room. We keep it comfortable because we deal with cops here, not criminals.”

Sure you do
, Jake thought. “I notice there aren’t any windows, though.”

Hammerman looked up from his notes. “Well, you never know, do you?”

“I guess not.” Jake recalled his elevator ride to the sixth floor.

Klein opened a piece of nicotine chewing gum and stuck it into his mouth. “Feel free to smoke.”

“I’m good.”

“Ready to do this?” Hammerman said.

“Fire away.”

Hammerman switched on the digital recorder and announced the date. “Internal Affairs Bureau Inspectors Hammerman, Gary, and Klein, Richard, interviewing Helman, Jake, Detective First Grade, Special Homicide Task Force, Case Number Four-Seven-Seven-Five. Detective Helman, are you aware of your rights in this matter?”

“Yes,” Jake said, drawing out the word.

Hammerman opened a folder and scanned its contents. “I see that you’re a Ten.”

My file
, Jake thought. “That’s right. I’m halfway there.” He had put ten years into the Job, with ten more to go before he could collect his pension.

“And you’re second generation.”

“Yeah, my father was a sergeant at the One-Seven-Five.” He steeled his nerves, expecting Hammerman to ask about his father’s suicide.

“How long have you been chasing the Cipher?”

“Five months. We consulted on the second murder, then took over the investigation after Number Three.”

Hammerman set down his pen. “Okay, describe this morning’s events in as much detail as you’re able to recall.”

Because he had used the same tactic in numerous interviews, the sudden shift in conversation did not disarm Jake. Sitting forward, he cleared his throat and recounted his morning from his arrival at the Special Homicide Task Force squad room to the gunfight at Kearny’s—leaving out a few key details. Careful to adhere to his earlier description, he spoke as he had been coached to address courtroom juries: in clear, concise sentences, just the facts, ma’am.

Six minutes later, Hammerman consulted his notes. “You say you stopped at Kearny’s to use the bathroom?”

“That’s right. CSU would have thrown a fit if I’d contaminated the one in the vic’s apartment.”

“Did you have anything to drink while you were there?”

Jake shook his head. “Nope.”

Hammerman made a check mark next to one of his notes. “Did you go anywhere between leaving the Reynolds homicide site and going to the bar?”