Most Wanted (15 page)

Closed files were stored in a secured room in the basement of her building. The basement stayed lit twenty-four/seven, and Melanie was grateful for this as she walked down a deserted mustard yellow corridor and came to a metal door marked DEAD FILE STORAGE. Even brightly lit, the basement was creepy enough to justify a door with the word “Dead” on it. She swiped her card key through the magnetic lock. The door swung open onto a vast, windowless file room, dimly lit by emergency lights. She would have to hunt for the main switch.

As she stood on the threshold, the room seemed oppressively silent. She imagined getting locked in. Nobody knew she was here. She could be entombed for days until somebody else came looking for a file. The thought thoroughly spooked her. Holding the metal door ajar with her hip, she rifled through her bag anxiously and pulled out her cell phone. No reception. If she did get locked in, she couldn’t even call for help.

She propped her shoulder bag in the doorway to keep the door from slamming shut. There, problem solved. She stepped into the room, located the main switch and flipped on the lights, illuminating the enormous space. The ceiling was low, the room lined from end to end with rows of metal shelves tightly jammed with boxes, creating an enclosed, cryptlike effect. She walked to the central aisle, her heels ringing on the hard concrete floor and echoing back at her like the sharp reports of a pistol. The room stayed cool because it was in the basement, but the ventilation was terrible. The stagnant air, redolent of ancient cardboard and mold, tickled her throat. Melanie walked deeper into the maze of shelves, scanning the dates labeled on each row until she found the Delvis Diaz files—far from the metal door where she’d left her handbag, almost at the opposite wall of the building.

The Diaz files consisted of at least thirty boxes, packed tightly on a lower shelf, running the full expanse of a row. She hauled down the first few and began opening them to see which looked important. A box of evidence about the three teenage gang members who were murdered seemed worthy of more careful study, so she opened it and started going through folders. One file held photocopies of news clippings about the trial. The stories referred to the victims as the “Flatlands Boys” because their dismembered bodies were discovered inside an old refrigerator that had been dumped in the Flatlands, a Brooklyn landfill.

Melanie studied the grainy photographs of the boys, wholesome and smiling in their school pictures. They were so young—two were fourteen and the third fifteen—but still, according to the news reports, they were old enough to guard a heroin stash for the Blades. Several kilos of heroin had gone missing from that stash, and Delvis Diaz was convicted of murdering the boys in retaliation. The boys had been shot execution style at the stash house, dismembered with a hacksaw in the basement, and then transported to the Flatlands in heavy-duty plastic trash bags.

Next Melanie plucked a folder containing autopsy reports from the box. She held it in her lap, opened it, and gasped aloud. Body parts stared her in the face, in a photo stapled to the top of the pile. The victim’s name was Melvin Atuna. He was fourteen when he died, and she was looking at an eight-by-ten glossy of his dismembered limbs. Two arms, two legs, displayed like wares on the green plastic trash bag they’d been discovered in. The limbs looked so real, so normal, except they weren’t attached to anything, and they had several odd-looking wounds. The arms thick and chunky, the legs bulbous. She looked back to the article with the school photos. Yes, Melvin had been a tubby kid. The arms were laid out on the plastic bag to showcase their numerous crude tattoos, belying the broad, childlike face grinning in the other picture. The right biceps bore a clumsily drawn black gun, the words THUG LIFE written beneath it. The left displayed another, more significant home-drawn tattoo—a greenish blue dagger being struck by a red lightning bolt as two green droplets flew from the blade. So young, but not so innocent. According to the news articles, the tattoo meant Melvin was a member of the C-Trout Blades, the two droplets signifying that he’d already, at his tender age, killed two people on their behalf.

She could feel several more photographs stapled beneath the top one, but she couldn’t bear to look at them. Not here in this creepy basement room, her heart still fluttering with the shock of seeing the first. So she flipped ahead and began reading Melvin’s autopsy report. Halfway through she found something that made her gasp again. The report revealed that his dismembered body had been covered with dog bites, just like Jed Benson’s body. She forced herself to go back to the photograph. Jesus, yes. Those wounds on his limbs. They were exactly like the ones she’d seen on Benson’s corpse. How did she miss that? The tooth marks were unmistakable.

Rommie had predicted she would find similarities between the MO of Jed Benson’s murder and the murder of the three boys. He was right. But what did the similarities mean? When Slice and his crew killed Jed Benson, had Delvis Diaz ordered them to copy the methods of his own murder of the Flatlands boys years earlier? Why would he do that? What purpose could it serve other than pointing the finger right at him? Did the black dog that Slice used to attack Benson actually belong to Delvis Diaz? Could it be the same dog that had attacked Melvin Atuna nearly eight years before Jed Benson’s murder? She didn’t think so. The paws in the Polaroid from Jasmine Cruz’s apartment, presumably taken about four years after Atuna was killed, looked like those of a puppy, a successor, an imitator of the earlier killer mascot. But she’d study that carefully when she finished here. She was glad she’d thought to put the animal-torture Polaroids in her bag. She should just take these autopsy reports and head home right now, finish reading them in the comfort of her own living room. A deserted basement late at night was no place to study the handiwork of a psychotic killer.

As she began gathering up the autopsy reports, Melanie froze. What was that? She was certain the sound of shuffling paper had masked an unnatural noise back near the metal door. She held her breath for a moment, listening for the noise again.

The overhead lights went off, leaving the room lit only by the dim emergency lights. Chest heaving with fright, Melanie prayed it was a fluke.
Por favor
, let it be so. The powerful overhead lights must be on a timer to save energy. She got to her feet, her knees trembling, to go switch them back on. But even as she stood up, the emergency lights went out, too, plunging the windowless room into complete blackness. She stood utterly still, straining her ears to hear, close to panic. She was certain you could only turn off the emergency lights by flipping a circuit breaker and shutting down power to this room. It could mean just one thing: Somebody was in here. To get her.

A loud slam echoed through the room in the pitch dark—the metal door crashing shut. Was somebody locking her in here …or coming in after her? Either possibility struck her senseless with fear. She began to feel her way carefully along the row, her breath coming in shallow gasps. He would surely hear her breathing in the darkness and zero in on her location. Her glance flew around haphazardly and came to rest on an exit sign glowing red at the end of the aisle. She headed for it, stumbling over one of the boxes sitting on the floor, crying out in surprise. Now she was certain she heard footsteps heading toward her. Panting, she ran for the exit sign, praying she wouldn’t crash into anything.

It was an emergency exit. She didn’t hesitate. She hurled her full weight against the handle, setting off an alarm as she stumbled out into a brightly lit stairwell, one flight down from street level. She took the slippery steps two at a time, breathing raggedly, terrified of tripping in her high heels and getting cornered by whoever stalked her. The stairs were confusing. As the staircase curled around on itself, she wasn’t sure whether the metal door she came upon would take her outside or lead her nowhere, trap her. She heard something behind her. No time to decide. She crashed against the door, tumbling out into pouring rain. She was in the deserted loading dock behind her building, convinced the footsteps were gaining on her.

GASPING FOR BREATH AND RAPIDLY GETTING soaked, Melanie dashed around the side of the building to the cavernous, echoing plaza beside the towering courthouse. The plaza was deserted of people except for a lone homeless man wearing a plastic bag, but cars whizzed by on the slick avenue. She rushed toward the street, bent on hailing a taxi and getting the hell out of here. But the sight of passing traffic calmed her enough that her curiosity kicked in. She managed to slow down and look over her shoulder. She wasn’t being followed. She heaved an enormous sigh. But then she remembered her bag, left propping open the metal door. She couldn’t pay for a taxi home.

She stood in the rain and agonized about whether to go back for it. She couldn’t just leave it there. Not only did it contain evidence she’d spent all night searching for, but it had her wallet and keys. If the person who’d chased her took those, he could gain access to her apartment, where Maya was sleeping. But she couldn’t go back either. Whoever had chased her might still be down there. No way was she risking running into him again. Who the hell was he? How could he possibly have gotten in? The building was so well secured these days. Federal marshals during the day and private security guards, all retired cops, at night. A guard was stationed at the main entrance. Several others executed regular patrols throughout the building. Yet somehow he’d managed to get in.

As she stood there dumbly, uncertain of what to do next, somebody behind her called her name. She turned. Dan O’Reilly was striding toward her, coming from the direction of her building.

“THANK GOD YOU’RE HERE!” MELANIE CRIED out when she saw Dan.

“Why? What’s the matter?” he said, rushing up to her. “Are you okay?” She told him about being in the basement, the lights going out, the intruder chasing her.

“Hey, hey, relax. It’s okay. Probably just a custodian or something, thought the lights were left on by mistake and he shut ’em off. But come on, let’s go back and get your bag before somebody walks off with it.”

“No, Dan, I’m telling you, it wasn’t a custodian. Somebody came after me. I’m scared!”

“Don’t be scared. Here, look at this.” He lifted up his polo shirt to show her the butt of a silver gun protruding from his jeans’ waistband. Even in her distress, her eyes took in the smooth muscles of his stomach. She tried not to notice, but it was just there to see.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll be right there with you, and I’m armed. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He pulled his shirt down, taking her arm protectively, gently, leading her back toward her building. She relaxed, being with him. She felt safe, although she suspected he was merely humoring her.

“What the heck were you doing down there by yourself anyway?” he asked.

“I was working,” she said, making an effort to sound casual. “With you lounging around ordering room service with Rosario, somebody has to solve the case. Oh, hey, speaking of Rosario, who’s—”

“A guy from the PD showed up a couple hours ago, so I went to take care of some other stuff. Then I figured I’d swing by here to make sure those wiretap files showed up okay. Did they?”

“Yeah, they did, and, man, were they great. You’re not gonna believe what I found.”

Before she could describe the evidence to Dan, though, they reached her building. The security guard, a sour excop, refused to let her in without her ID.

“I left it in the basement—”

“I don’t care if you left it on the moon,” he snapped. “Rules are rules. You show ID or you can’t come in.”

“Let me explain. I was in the dead-file room, and somebody turned out the lights. Whoever it was started to come after me. I had to go out the emergency exit.”

“That was you who opened the emergency door? You know you set off an alarm?”

“I was running from somebody! There’s been a security breach. You should investigate!”

“Hey, hon, I been on duty since six o’clock, and I checked everybody going in or out. The only security breach tonight was
you
setting off the alarm. We got two guys down there right now trying to figure out what happened.” Shaking his head, he removed a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt and depressed a button.

“Yo, Pete, it’s Artie. You read me?” he barked into the handset.

The walkie-talkie crackled loudly. “Yeah, Artie? What’s up, over?”

“I got a prosecutor standing right in front of me cops to the whole thing. She heard a noise, thought someone was chasing her,” Artie said sarcastically. The guy on the other end howled with laughter, then said he was on his way back up. Melanie started to protest, but Dan cut her off with a sharp tap on her arm.

“I was thinking maybe she heard a custodian,” Dan said to the guard. “Anybody down there cleaning tonight?”

The guard shrugged. “Cleaning crew does the offices after hours, but they got no reason to go down to dead files. Maybe it was a pipe banging spooked her or something.”

Dan said, “She forgot her pocketbook, so I’m gonna take her back down there to get it, okay? I’ll escort her, and I’ll let you know if we find the…uh, intruder.” Dan practically winked at the guard.

“Right, okay, as long as you’ll take responsibility for her. Sign in,” he told Melanie. “I’ll verify your ID on the way out. And please, honey, do me a favor. Stay away from the emergency exits.” Smiling smugly to himself, he went back to his newspaper.

They got onto the elevator, and Melanie jabbed the “B” button furiously.

“What a jerk!” she said once the doors closed, quivering with rage. “How could you take his side? You don’t believe me?”

“I wasn’t taking his side, I was bullshitting him. I hate guys like that. Do their twenty years cooping under a bridge somewhere, ignoring their radios, and once they retire, it’s downhill from there. He couldn’t find his own ass in the dark with two hands and a flashlight. So I made sure we both got in, to do our own investigation.”