Hell Gate (44 page)

“Oh God. What will become of the child?”

“Don’t buckle now, Alex,” Mercer said, resting his hands on my shoulders.

“Says she was born to Anita Paz in Brownsville, Texas. Gives the name of the hospital and date of birth.”

“Paternity?” I asked. “Did she—?”

“Yeah. According to this, Ana’s father is Kendall Reid.”

Mercer’s low whistle blew into my ear. “No wonder Rowdy was so bound and determined to get up here. Fine piece of blackmail that is. Any question between them of who gets whatever cash is still hidden away, Rowdy Kitts would have been holding the golden key to unlock the moneybags.”

“Reid’s baby. Ethan Leighton’s beloved protégé duped him into thinking the kid was his own.”

“You’re assuming Reid knows the truth,” I said.

“There’s a gift to put right in the lap of Tim Spindlis. That’ll let him tighten the screws on Reid.”

“So now this baby has no mother, and her real father’s about to be a convicted felon, once my office finishes with him.”

“You can’t do all the world’s worrying, Coop. Maybe Anita’s aunt really is a decent, hardworking woman. ACS will look into that. I’ll make you a promise here and now. We’ll sit on that one, with you, to be certain Ana’s taken in—eventually adopted—by the kind of family she deserves. Hell, anything’s better than the way she’s been treated till now.”

I looked at Mike quizzically. He didn’t make pledges lightly.

“You have my word.”

“Chapman?” a deep voice called from below.

“Yeah?”

“All clear here. You can start on down.”

“Thanks. We’re on the way.”

“Where’s my Bloody Mary? I think I need it.”

“I’ll spring for a six-pack when we get you home.”

“How am I going to do this?”

“You’re going to trust us, Alex, like you always do,” Mercer said. “I’ll go first, just one step ahead of you. Mike will be right behind. You need to hold on to me? You do that.”

“But if I trip, you’re the one who’ll get hurt. What if I knock you over?”

“You’re more surefooted than that. I’m not the least bit worried.”

Mercer put his foot down one step and I forced myself to the edge of the landing. I picked my chin up and looked out the window for the first time from the top of the stately tower.

The sky was a crisp, clear blue. The clouds that shrouded the skyline in a wintry mist the last few days had passed through the city. I thought of all the victims of the shipwreck, and how the turn of events of the last few hours could speed their clearance through the system and let them get on with their lives.

My gaze caught on the promontory where the mayor’s elegant mansion jutted out into the East River. I had met the deadly fury that is Hell Gate head-on.

Mike put his hand on my shoulder gently, to reassure me that he was right there with me. “Enough with your sightseeing, Ms. Cooper. It’s not every day I offer to buy the first round of cocktails.”

“Good morning, Alex. I’m Elizabeth Arrington. How do you feel?”

Two days had passed since my terrifying confrontation with Rowdy Kitts. Mike, Mercer, and I were in a conference room at the federal courthouse on Pearl Street where Arrington, an assistant United States attorney, was about to appear before a magistrate judge for the arraignment of Kendall Reid on trafficking charges.

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“Don’t worry, Liz,” Mike said. “She cleans up a hell of a lot better than this. Give her a month or two.”

I was sitting at the end of a long wooden table. Mercer had planted himself as close to me as physically possible, his chair catty-corner to mine, staring like a family member watching a critically ill patient in an intensive care unit. Mike was leaning against the windowsill, impatiently waiting for the magistrate.

“You understand that I’ll be handling Reid’s case?” Arrington asked. “I’m sure you know that Donny Baynes has recused himself.”

The feds had taken jurisdiction of the trafficking investigation that stretched halfway around the world at this point, and it would doubtless grow as more victims were uncovered by cooperating witnesses. For once, Battaglia didn’t battle to keep the case, in large measure because my involvement would have made his efforts futile.

“I’m very glad it’s in your hands,” I said, hoping my smile looked as sincere as it was meant to be. Liz Arrington, a short feisty brunette, had done a brilliant job as second seat to the lead prosecutor in the trial of one of the most notorious terrorists—a blind sheikh who had masterminded the planning of bombings at several land-marked buildings but was caught before the acts were completed. “You’ve got a great reputation.”

“You’ll get your cred back, Coop,” Mike said. “People find out you can drop-kick a killer like Rowdy Kitts, they’ll forget you needed a team of Saint Bernards to get you down from the tower.”

“Mike,” Mercer said, pointing a finger at his good friend. “Save it for another day.”

“Why? She didn’t lose her sense of humor, too, along with her cell phone and her sanity?”

“What do you need from me, Liz?” I ignored Mike, even though I knew that teasing was his way of trying to nudge me from the morose state that I’d found myself in since my Sunday-morning encounter with death.

“I’ve tried to get myself up to speed with the facts. Donny sat me down and gave me a crash course, but I’ve still got questions.”

“Is he—?” I wondered whether his close relationship with Ethan Leighton and his membership in the Tontine Association had derailed Baynes professionally.

“He’s good, Alex. Donny will help with anything he can. He’s asked for a transfer to the appeals bureau till we see how this all shakes down.”

“We’ve spent a lot of time trying to puzzle this out, Liz,” Mercer said, taking the lead in his calm, mannered style. “Let me help. You trying to keep Reid in jail?”

Kendall Reid had surrendered to the feds on Monday evening, just a little over twelve hours before. His lawyer would use that voluntary move as a basis for requesting release on his own recognizance, so that he wouldn’t have to come up with money for bail. The cash he’d been stealing from the council’s phantom funds was no longer at his disposal for personal use.

“Absolutely,” Liz answered without a moment’s pause. “The magistrate will want to know exactly which crimes he played a role in. I’m hoping you can guide me the rest of the way. Donny admits he had blinders on to much of what the Leightons were doing, and to Kendall Reid too.”

I had been in Liz Arrington’s shoes. I knew she had to immerse herself in a complicated series of facts—criminal conduct that stretched back over years, from one continent to another, with laundered money from illegal human slave trading stashed in shoe boxes and other places not yet imagined. I needed to shake off my own dark thoughts and concentrate on helping her get the job done.

“The dead girl,” Liz said, looking down at a sheaf of notes she had put together. “I’m looking for her name. Sorry—give me a minute.”

“Salma Zunega?” Mercer asked.

“No, no. Eugenia, the girl who washed up on the beach. It was Rowdy Kitts who killed her?”

I lifted my head to look at Liz. “That’s what he told me.”

“He actually admitted that?” She seemed somewhat skeptical, or else I was too sensitive to the way everyone was looking at me. “I mean, Kitts talked to you about Eugenia?”

“Rowdy wasn’t going to let me live, Liz. He was making that climb up the tower to get his insurance, his blackmail material—the baby’s birth certificate. And once done, I had no doubt he was going to get rid of me too,” I said. The coffee was cold and tasteless, but I took another sip. “He delighted in seeing the terror in my eyes when he told me that Eugenia was worthless to him. That she’d been trafficked in long before the
Golden Voyage
grounded here, lived with him for a while, and was ready to blow the whistle so the new girls wouldn’t be subjected to his personal form of torture.”

“Did he talk to you about Salma?” Liz asked. She was looking for another murder confession and I couldn’t give it to her.

I shook my head.

“Coop gave him the boot before he got that far,” Mike said, turning his back to lean on the sill and stare out the window. “The lab handed us the rest. Twist Kendall Reid’s testicles and he’ll paint the whole picture for you.”

Liz looked to Mercer for help. “Touch DNA? Someone can explain it to me this week, I’m sure. I’ve never handled a case with that kind of evidence.”

“Alex will make it crystal-clear for you. She’s done the forensics before juries more times than you can count, and the team at the lab is the best in the business. They’ve got Kitts on the murder weapon in Salma’s apartment, and from the satin trim on the blanket she was wrapped in.”

“Yeah, and that nubby white wool is even stuck in the threads of a sweater we recovered from his apartment yesterday,” Mike said.

“Can you help me with
why
Kitts killed her?” Liz wanted answers from all of us. “I mean, why the spoofed phone calls before the murder?”

“Think big picture, Liz,” Mercer said. “Let me get you there. This trafficking scheme has tentacles that are going to take you deep and wide, so back up to that. Rowdy Kitts and Kendall Reid are just two of the snakeheads at the top of the pit. An operation as big as this, as well-funded? It takes a village.”

“So was everyone in the Tontine Association involved with the trafficking business?”

“None of us believe that,” I said. “I think the perps counted on the reputations of guys like Donny Baynes to give them cover. They built the social club around that. And then the bottom feeders got to work.”

“The judge is going to ask me about Ethan Leighton, Alex. I don’t want to go on the record and make him a target if we don’t believe he’s mixed up in anything worse than last week’s accident.”

“Of course not.”

“Tell Liz about the house call you had,” Mike said, crossing his arms after he passed me a bottle of water. “That coffee’ll rot your gut.”

“The district attorney dropped by my apartment on his way home last night. To check on me, make sure I was okay.”

“Nice.” Liz smiled at me.

“Bullshit. Battaglia did the drop-in to make sure she wasn’t holding back anything,” Mike said. “And toadying along beside him was Tim Spindlis.”

There was a knock on the door and Liz Arrington’s assistant started to come in. She held up her hand and told him to step back. “Tell the judge I need some more time.”

“Will do. Sorry. And some of Ms. Cooper’s friends are here.”

My prosecutorial posse, no doubt. I almost let myself relax.

“They’ll have to wait,” Liz said. “What about Spindlis?”

“Battaglia wanted me to hear right from him—”

“She means right from the mouth of the jellyfish,” Mike said.

“Battaglia wanted Spindlis to tell me himself that he had never played any part in Leighton’s introduction to prostitutes. The two had been close enough for Tim to come to realize—long before Claire caught on—that Ethan Leighton had an addiction that no one seemed able to help him control.”

“So Ethan was a client of Rowdy Kitts all along?” Liz asked, taking notes while she listened to me talk.

“You’ll have to meet with Tim Spindlis for more details. He told me Salma wasn’t the first.”

Mercer leaned forward and picked up the story. “We can point you in the right direction, Liz. Rowdy and his partners—Kendall Reid, some other politico riffraff, and a slew of ex-cons—they put together this Sub Rosa operation. They grew and grew it, in part from the money Reid was stealing from the City Council, and fueled by the appetites of rich men like Ethan Leighton, who were willing to pay through the nose for these women.”

“Look at the hold it gave these guys on Leighton,” Mike said. “Not just now, but for what they saw as his powerful political future.”

“So you don’t think the paternity scam was dreamed up by the girls—by Salma and Anita?”

Mike answered before I could open my mouth. “Rowdy Kitts all the way, Liz. Remember Kitts had a role model for bad behavior. He cloned himself from Bernie Kerik, the corrupt former commissioner. Hell, Kerik almost became the head of homeland security—a presidential appointment—before he got nailed for his crimes.”

“So why kill Salma?” Liz asked again.

“Reid’ll turn on a dime,” Mike said. “He’ll tell you why, if you sweeten his deal.”

I raised my head. “Sweeten nothing. We’ll help you build a case.”

“Yo, blondie,” Mike said, clapping his hands as he did a double take. “The phoenix is rising, Ms. Arrington. You’ll get her back in the game.”

“I don’t want to see any deal for Kendall Reid, Liz. Once you meet some of these victims and see the lives he’s destroyed, I think you’ll understand.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“Claire Leighton thinks Salma signed her own death warrant,” I said. “She confided in Battaglia yesterday. Salma fell in love with Ethan, or at least thought she could make a run for the whole package. Without the baggage of the baby.”

“So their argument the night of the car accident?” Liz asked.

“It was about Ana’s fever, to start,” Mercer said, filling in from what I had told him. “But Salma wanted Ethan to leave Claire, and she was tired of the charade about Ana being their child. Truth is, she didn’t want anything more to do with the baby.”

“That means Rowdy Kitts was about to lose the goose that laid the golden egg,” Liz said. “His blackmail ammunition to follow Leighton for life, up the political ranks.”

“Kendall Reid knew,” I said. “How cold-blooded can he be? That’s his very own baby. It’s unthinkable.”

“He certainly knew part of his seed money was stored in Salma’s closet,” Mercer said. “And since Rowdy was holding on to her papers, she had no choice but to sit there with it. She had nowhere to run.”