A Clean Kill (8 page)

He made a face at the gender putdown. "She had opportunity, and it took organization to clean up. That's a girl thing."

"Well, sure. But I'm thinking it was a man," April insisted. "The knife only proves it was spur-of-the-moment. The killer grabbed whatever came to hand—"

"How could a knife come to hand in the gym?" Mike interrupted.

"I don't know. Maybe it was scissors. Did you see the flower? Maybe Maddy brought the knife or the scissors in herself to cut flowers."

"Could be." Mike looked doubtful, though. "The killer was definitely in the shower with her. Maybe
she
turned on the water to wash herself off, not the victim."

"I don't see the killer as a woman," April insisted, knowing what that meant for Remy.

"It had to be someone with access to the knives, to the gym, someone who was angry enough to keep stabbing after she was dead—"

"Like a lover, or a husband," April said softly.

"Or a jealous babysitter. Someone who knew how to clean. She's the maid."

"Oh, I see. You've been talking to Fish. Okay, my turn. Remy told me Wayne promised her a job at Soleil, and she was only supposed to work here until it opened. She still seems to think he'll give it to her eventually. We know she didn't get the job, but 1 wouldn't call that a motive." April spoke passionately. She didn't want a lynching.

"Maddy had a trainer, name of Derek Meke, who was with her after Remy and Wayne took the kids to play school. After they dropped the kids off, Remy went to Wayne's restaurant to look at an oven, then walked home from there. We'll have to get confirmation on that. She said that after she got back, Derek did not come into the house, that he never came into the house."

"You know where to find him?"

"I can find him. One more thing." April had kept the best for last. "Wayne told me he fooled around."

"Ay caramba."
Mike sighed. "That's too bad. 1 liked him. Do you have a name?"

April shook her head. "Apparently it was more than one woman. He didn't want to name names."

"Well, if it was the babysitter, there's your motive." Mike stood up. "I have to get going."

"Me, too. What do you want me to do,
chico
April said, rising from the bench. " I have a bunch of people waiting for me in my shop. Avise has another job for me. If you think Remy did it, tell Fish to go for it. It's your call."

"Uh-uh. I'm not convinced."

"That's good, because all we have right now is a body."

He ignored the sarcasm. "What I want you to do is put Gelo in charge of your shop and take this case on. You can mop it up in twenty-four hours."

April shook her head at the difficulty of the politics. She got the feeling that he didn't want to step out on a limb on this one. She also felt manipulated. She didn't like either of the feelings one bit.

Since becoming a captain, Mike was a different guy. He had to appear at COMSTAT meetings with all the top brass once a month at headquarters to run the numbers in his precinct. Crimes and arrests, where they occurred, what was being done about it. Every single event had to be accounted for. Responsibility had given him a sharper edge, and his expectations for others in his command had risen proportionally. Fine for them. But April was not in his command. And even if she were, twenty-four hours would not be enough time to mop up any homicide. They wouldn't have a death report, or any crime scene analysis, for days. Even the clear-cut cases took weeks to process. She thought longingly of her honeymoon, less than a week away.

Mike pulled off the protective suit. "I'm done

here. I've got to go. I spoke with Avise. He says it's okay. He'll give you thirty-six."

Thirty-six hours? Were they crazy? April kept her back to the house, where people could be watching. She was fuming and didn't want anyone to see them fighting. "Mike, we agreed that we weren't going to do this anymore," she said.

"Come on,
querida,
think of her kids. It's probably a simple thing, boyfriend/girlfriend thing. You could do this case in your sleep."

She shook her head. "If it's such a simple thing, get someone else to do it." Then she thought of the cute little boys, who now had no mother. What was wrong with her? Not long ago she would have schemed to get on a homicide like this. She'd always been driven to be the one who nailed the killer. Now she was identifying with the babysitter who kept butcher knives in her knapsack. She was worrying about Sergeant Gelo's dress code, and she was thinking of her honeymoon. Not good. Skinny Dragon Mother used to say she had too much yang for a girl. She'd never find a man to marry her. Now she was married and had softened up, and sometimes she wondered if she had enough yang left to be a good cop.

"Mi amor,"
Mike murmured, "do the right thing."

Shit.
Usually he was urging her to do the right thing and stay out of it. Now he wouldn't
let
her out of it. It was tough. She hated to think that the. babysitter who wanted to be a chef could have killed her boss over a cooking job. It was hard to imagine anyone having a strong enough motive to stab a young mother to death a dozen times in her own shower. But early this morning someone had done just that.

She sighed. If she identified the killer fast, she could go back to the strip clubs and Fish could make the arrest. It was ironic how yin she'd gotten. She was more interested in sitting on a beach far away with her honey than in getting the credit. It almost made her laugh.

Ten

E
loise, it's me. What's going on?" Woo was on the phone.

"Boss." Sergeant Eloise Gelo was parked at her desk, but not alone. Sitting across from her, Detective Charlie Hagedorn had been filling her in with some background information on the senator's kid who'd overdosed at some club, and ended up ten hours later in psych lockup at St. Luke's. She'd been listening to Charlie, studying a spot high over his head, and occasionally taking a mental note.

The lieutenant wanted to know what was going on in the squad room. Gelo ran through the list in her head. A drunk who'd exposed himself one time too many on Broadway had been brought in by two uniforms and was now in the holding cell, sobering up. Three detectives were out on cases. The unit secretary was yelling at someone on the phone in Spanish. And Hagedorn, making a pitiful attempt at some form of human interaction, was staring at her breasts. Everything was copacetic.

"It's quiet, boss. Where are you?" she replied.

"We've got a homicide on Fifty-second Street," the lieutenant replied.

"We do?" Eloise was shocked. No one had called it in.

"Yeah, East Side."

"Oh." Maybe somebody's homicide, but not theirs. "Who is it?" she asked.

"A young mother. Madeleine Wilson, that restaurant guy's wife."

"Oh fuck. That's too bad."

"Eloise, the language," Woo retorted.

"Sorry, sir," Eloise replied cheerfully. April Woo was a
sir
to her.

"Look, I'm going to be stuck here awhile," Woo went on.

"Are you working the case?" Eloise took the chance of asking something her boss might not want to tell. She'd never heard of a detective unit CO working a homicide in another precinct.

"No, no," the lieutenant said easily. "I'm just on a look-see."

"Uh-huh." It still didn't sound right to her, but she knew things were not exactly regular in this particular unit.

Eloise tapped her fingernails on the table, and Hagedorn chose that moment to lift his eyes from her breasts to her face and stretch his goofy mouth into a lopsided grin. She rolled her eyes. "You there, boss?"

"Yeah, I want you to work on the Peret case. Find out where the kid went, who served him booze, where he got the drugs, the whole thing. Check his credit card records for that. He may have charged it. Then talk to the girls."

"Sounds good to me," Eloise said.

"I'll fill you in later. Call me if anything comes up."

"Sure thing, boss."

The phone went dead, and Eloise hung up elated. This was the kind of thing she'd returned to the bureau for. If she couldn't be in a counterterror unit, at least she could do something useful until she got what she wanted. "The boss is working a homicide in the Seventeenth," she told Charlie.

Hagedorn mugged surprise. "No kidding."

"That a usual thing?" From the moment that Gelo been assigned this unit, she'd been anxious about working for Woo/Sanchez. Her boss was famous, but not exactly known for being a team player. Going in, she knew that she had a lot to live up to. Charlie took a minute more to stare at her before giving her a serious answer.

"Her husband Mike is the precinct CO; he probably asked for her."

"Of course, I knew that." She knew they were married, anyway, and that they'd worked together in the past. What it all meant for her career, however, was still the big question.

Eloise Gelo had moved up and was in her first few weeks of having an office with a door to call her own. She was still basking in the glory of the promotion, and simultaneously disappointed not to be playing a role in defending the city against the biggest bad guys. The door was nice, but the top half of it was glass, so anyone could look in and see what she was doing at any time. Sometimes the males in the unit stood around, pretending to be having a conversation, but actually gawking at her.

What was the big deal? She was a female, but Woo was a woman, too, and they didn't gawk at
her.
Eloise looked for a pen to jot down her orders. "Damn." Her pen was missing. She was sure she'd been using it only a few minutes ago.

"Did you take my pen?"

Hagedorn snorted.

"Give it back."

He laughed, but not in an unfriendly way. "I didn't take it. Here, use mine." He held his out, but she ignored the offer.

"Somebody did." She rooted around in her drawer for another one. She'd bought a box of pens only last week, but people seemed to enjoy taking her stuff as a kind of joke. She kept some red nail polish in there to annoy the alternate second whip, an asshole by the name of Tony Bobb, who couldn't seem to get over her being his equal. Tony Bobb was an anal kind of guy half her size and twice her weight, who didn't want to be perceived as a nelly. She always left a lot girlie stuff around in her space to bug him. The red nail polish was still there. It distracted her as she searched for a pen and worried about not being able to fill her new boss's shoes.

Gelo had worked for a lot of male officers, but had never worked for a woman. April Woo Sanchez was unreadable, quite the opposite of herself. Eloise was out there, a straight-up kind of person. She talked out of the side of her mouth like a tough guy, had a conspicuous mane of blond curls, which she piled up on the top of her head, wore bright red lipstick and clingy clothes. She had the figure for it and a name to make a girl cry. Wherever she went, in the department and out of it, she got attention. A lot of it—particularly the kind from asshole officers of every rank—was unwelcome. Eloise Gelo had her own philosophy about her style:
I ain't changing for no one. I am who I am. Get used to it.
Both the attitude and the name caused her a fair amount of grief from people she didn't give a shit about.

From time to time, however, she got the attention of someone worthy of her respect. Back in'97, when she'd been a detective third grade, her path crossed with that of Lieutenant Steve Whipet, a former marine who was CO of the chopper unit. She was smitten by him right away. Maybe it was the marine thing, a cowboy kind of allure—the short blond hair, the ramrod posture. The take-charge, I-can-get-it-done attitude. Whatever.

Their paths crossed when she was on a team that needed a bird in the sky to reach a suspect up in the Bronx. Whipet also had a name to contend with. She liked that about him. He was introduced to her as the guy who'd rescued a bunch of people from the roof of the World Trade Center. Back then, there had been only one World Trade Center bombing. And taking a pregnant woman off the tower had been a big deal.

Whipet recruited her from the Detective Bureau and challenged her to take flying lessons. She became the first female copter pilot in NYPD. A lot of people weren't too happy about it, but she never let negativity get in her way. She was good at whatever job she had, and she and Steve had some fun for a while. But he changed after the Fire Department made a rule to shut down access to all tall rooftops in the city. He became a worried man.

After the first tower bombing, the powers that be had decided it was too hard and too dangerous to evacuate people from above. So, in a massive sweep, they'd locked all the roof doors of the office towers in the whole city. Whipet feared that an event on a lower floor anywhere could create a death trap for those working on the higher floors. And that was what happened in the second World Trade Center attack. Everybody above the sixty-fifth floor had no exit. Eloise had been in one of the birds, hovering just out of reach of the hundreds of people frying inside. She hadn't been at the controls, but she'd been there.