The Kills (4 page)

"Just
a cheap ploy to get you back here with me. There's your man." He clicked
up the volume as NY1, the local news channel, flashed a mug shot of Kevin
Bessemer.

"…convicted
felon escaped from police custody earlier today. Bessemer, who has a long
history of drug trafficking involvement, is thirty-two years old. He is
believed to be extremely dangerous," the earnest young newscaster said,
"and may possibly be armed."

"Yeah,
with a drumstick and four stale biscuits," Mike said, shutting off the
television. "C'mon, let's grab a meal. Gotta fortify myself for a midnight
tour. I'm doing night watch tonight."

Mike
would be working from twelve till 8
A.M.
, available to respond to every major crime that occurred in Manhattan.

"I
really don't-"

"C'mon,
Alex. You've done everything you can to get your ducks in order," Mercer
said. He had been working with me on the Tripping case during the two weeks
since my summer vacation ended after Labor Day weekend. "You're just
spinning wheels at this point. We'll feed you and drop you off at home. Call
Primola. We'll be waiting for you at the elevator."

I went
back to phone my favorite Italian restaurant for a reservation, straighten up
my desk, and pick up the file folder to take home to organize my questions for
the morning's hearing. The message dial was illuminated on my voice mail,
telling me that two calls had come in while I had stepped away.

I pressed
the playback button. "It's Jake, darling. I was hoping to scramble to make
the last shuttle home tonight. Whatever's rocking the stock market has the
staffers jumpy down here, so I think I'd better stay overnight. I'll try you
later. Pleasant dreams."

Jake
Tyler and I had been trying to sort out our relationship these past few months.
We had spent the end of August alone together at my home on Martha's Vineyard,
and the weeks of playful solitude had pushed from my mind the reality of what a
wedge our two intense professional schedules put between our attempts at a
serious romance.

The
second one was a short message, overridden by the static of a bad cell phone
connection. I couldn't tell whether the caller was male or female, and the only
word I could make out clearly was "tomorrow." I pressed the caller ID
function and got only the indication that the message had come from out of the
area.

I walked
to the elevator and met the guys, who were deep in conversation about how far
ahead of Boston the Yankees would end the season. The cop who had the lobby
security post bid us good night. "Full moon, Ms. Cooper. I'd get rid of
Chapman first shot you get."

I gave
him a thumbs-up and got into the passenger seat of Mercer's car, parked up the
street on Hogan Place, telling Mike we'd meet him at the restaurant on
Sixty-fourth Street.

"Mercer,
before you get in, remember to dig out the pictures, okay?"

He nodded
and opened the trunk, handing me four packages of snapshots of the baby who had
been born in the spring to him and his wife Vickee. As we pulled away from the
curb, I turned on the interior light and flipped through the photographs.

"It's
amazing how much they change in just one month. He's enormous."

Mercer
Wallace was forty-two, six years older than Mike and me. He was one of a
handful of African Americans who had been promoted to the coveted first-grade
rank in the detective division of the NYPD. After his mother died in
childbirth, he had been raised by his father, Spencer, in a middle-class
neighborhood of Queens, where the elder Wallace had worked as a mechanic at
Delta Airlines.

His
second marriage, to an equally talented detective named Vickee Eaton whom he
admired and adored, had ended a few years ago when she walked out on him. But
after Mercer was wounded in a shoot-out during a murder investigation, Vickee
had come back to help him heal, and the quietly charismatic man had rejoiced at
his great good fortune. The remarriage and recent birth of Logan Wallace marked
the first go at establishing a family among what Mike, Mercer, and I liked to
think of as our modern urban trio of musketeers.

I
listened to Mercer's description of his new lifestyle, my head against the car
window, mindlessly watching the overhead lights as we streaked past them up the
East River Drive. Sleepless nights were nothing new for any of us. But bottles,
feedings, formula, disposable diapers, and a wonderful little life for which
both Mercer and Vickee were completely responsible was a whole new dynamic.

"I
know I'm boring you to pieces, Alex."

"Not
at all. I love hearing about him. I intend to try very hard to spoil him beyond
imagining and be his favorite auntie," I said. "On the other hand,
the minute you start proselytizing like Mike, I'll treat you the same way I
treat telemarketers who call in the middle of my dinner hour."

I
listened to him tell me about the joys of fatherhood while my mind wandered for
the rest of the ride. Something had brought me close enough to formalizing my
relationship with Jake that I had tried living with him in the middle of the
previous winter. When I took a step backward from that move, it was without any
regret that I was putting off a decision about marriage and raising a child.

I had
often tried to figure out what it was that made me so content with my present
single situation, since I had experienced all the benefits of a warm and loving
family throughout my youth and adolescence. My mother, Maude, had met my father
while she was at college getting her nursing degree. She had every superb
nurturing quality of a great RN, but had diverted her skills and her own career
to the paramount feature of her life: her marriage. My two older brothers and I
were brought up in a household in which family came first-parents,
grandparents, and siblings. Now it seemed the independence that everyone had
worked so hard to instill in me had firmly taken root and made me entirely
comfortable in my own skin.

"What
do you hear from your folks? They okay?"

"They're
fine. They're out West, visiting my brother and his kids," I said to
Mercer.

My
father, Benjamin, had retired from his cardiology practice years ago. The
simple plastic tubing that he and his partner had developed three decades
earlier had been used in all open-heart surgery in virtually every operating
room in the country. It was the Cooper-Hoffman valve that had cushioned my
lifestyle, providing a superb education-my degree in English literature from
Wellesley and the subsequent Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia-as
well as the means to maintain my apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side and
my beloved farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard.

But it
was my father's devotion to public service in his medical career that led me to
try something comparable in the law by applying to the Office of the District
Attorney following my graduation more than twelve years earlier. I had
anticipated spending five or six years there before moving on to private
practice. As I rotated through the routine assignments of the young
prosecutorial staff, I'd been fascinated and engaged by the work of the Sex
Crimes Prosecution Unit. The endless challenges-legal, investigative,
scientific, and emotional-kept me riveted, and committed to making a
professional home for myself in this new specialty within the law, created just
a generation earlier.

We pulled
off the drive and circled the block before Mercer spotted a parking place on
Second Avenue.

Mike was
standing on the sidewalk with Giuliano, the owner of the restaurant. Both
seemed to be enjoying the warm September evening.

"
Ciao, Signorina Cooper. Com'e stai?
How
was your holiday?" He held the door open and ushered us to the corner
table at the window, where Adolfo seated us and started to describe the
specials.

"Fine,
thanks. And Italy?"

"
Bellissima,
like always. Fenton," he
called to the bartender. "Dewar's on the rocks for Ms. Cooper.
Doppio.
And your best vodka for the
gentlemen. On me."

"You
oughta stay away more often, Coop. Giuliano's so happy to see you he's giving
away his booze. That's a first."

I ordered
the veal special, a paillard pounded thin and lightly breaded, with arugula and
chopped tomatoes on top. Mercer asked for sausage and pepper with a side dish
of fettuccine, and Mike settled on the lobster
fra diavolo.

"How's
Valerie?" I asked.

"Pretty
good. She never seems to pick her head up from the drafting table long enough
to tell me." Mike had been dating a woman for the past year, an architect
who was involved in planning the redesign of the Museum of Modern Art. They'd
met when Valerie was in the early stages of recovering from a mastectomy, in
treatment at Sloan-Kettering Hospital, where Mike had gone to donate blood.

"How
did the trip to California go?" Valerie had taken him home to Palo Alto to
meet her family over the Labor Day weekend.

"I'm
not sure Professor Jacobsen's first choice for his daughter's beau is a New
York City detective, but the old lady handled it pretty well."

Michael
Patrick Chapman was the son of a legendary street cop, a second-generation
immigrant who had met his wife on a visit to the family home in County Cork.
Brian was on the job for twenty-six years, dying of a massive coronary barely
two days after turning in his gun and shield. That had been during Mike's
junior year at Fordham, and although he'd completed school the following year,
he'd applied for admission to the police academy before he handed back his cap
and gown. He had idolized his father, longed to follow in his footsteps, and
distinguished himself in his rookie year with a major arrest following the
drug-related massacre of a Colombian family in Washington Heights.

I raised
my glass and clinked it against the others'. For the better part of the last
decade, these two men had become my closest friends. They'd taught me the
creative investigative skills they themselves had mastered, they covered my
back whenever I was exposed to danger or double-dealing, and they could make me
laugh at the darkest moments of my life.

Dinner
was casual and easy. We caught up on each other's personal lives and reminded
Mike of the details of the Tripping case. I wanted an early night, so Mercer
dropped me in front of my building before ten, and Mike went on to his office
to do paperwork, ready for the long tour ahead.

The
doorman let me in and handed me the mail and dry cleaning that had been left in
the valet's room. I rode up the twenty stories in the elevator, key in hand,
opening my apartment door and flipping on the lights.

I spent
an hour at my desk organizing my questions for the morning. Jake called at
eleven-fifteen, when he got off the air after delivering his piece.

"Hope
you don't mind that I stayed in D.C."

"Good
timing, actually. I get to concentrate on the trial. The sooner I have it
behind me, the happier I'll be."

"Remind
me what we've got on for the weekend."

"Saturday
night we've got theater tickets with Joan and Jim. Friday night I thought we'd
have a quiet evening at home."

"That
means I cook."

"Or
Shun Lee delivers. Or we starve, and just nibble on each other." I was
useless in the kitchen. Whipping up a tuna salad and removing ice cubes from
their tray was a slim repertoire.

"
That
flight I won't consider
missing."

I hung
up, undressed, and drew a steaming-hot bath, filling the tub with something
bubbly that smelled like vanilla. My friend Joan Stafford had written another
thriller, and I took the manuscript with me into the tub, trying to discern the
players who were so deliciously portrayed in the roman à clef.

Sleep
came easily and I awakened at six, with time to make coffee and read the
newspaper before making my way to the garage in the basement of my building.

"Good
morning, J.P.," I said to the attendant, who pointed to my Jeep, which he
had positioned at the top of the ramp.