The Sniper's Wife (22 page)
Ogden waved that away and studied the map over his younger colleague’s shoulder. Since Ogden had been working on other matters while the three of them had been collecting most of this, he was less familiar than they were with its particulars, which was one of the reasons for this meeting now. “Huh,” he commented, “looks like we’re getting a cluster in Brooklyn. Silva lived there, Cashman, Lenny Manotti… who’s Michael Annunzio?”
“Right,” Berhle said. “Hold it. That’s another connection. I just remembered.” He repeated his search and extracted a document, scanned it quickly, and smiled. “Known associates,” he quoted, “Franco Silva. Small world.”
Ogden tapped him on the shoulder with two fingers. “Nice catch, James.” He straightened and peered down at them all. “What else? Did you run a picture of Bob Kunkle by Mary’s girlfriend, what’s her name?”
Sammie spoke up, although it wasn’t really her place. She’d been feeling out on a limb ever since this morning, acutely aware that the one thing they’d studiously avoided so far was much mention of Willy. “Loui Obregon. She didn’t know him.”
“Right,” Berhle added. “I went back and questioned her and several other Re-Coop workers on Mary’s habits. Now that we’ve got our suspicions about her, I was able to lead the discussion a little. I can’t say I got much, but there was definitely a private part to Mary’s life that she didn’t share with any of them.”
Ogden was back to pacing, his eyes running along the ceiling. “Okay. What about the Re-Coop? There were questions earlier about how it could operate the way it does.”
Gunther took this one. “I did some digging around in whatever incorporation records were publicly available. It’s a little hard to tell, and this not being my patch, I probably missed some resources you would’ve known to hit, but it looks like the primary backer of what’s called the Re-Coop Foundation is a nonprofit charitable outfit named the Seabee Group. There’re other supporters, of course, but Seabee was by far the heavy hitter. I ran out of time before I could chase that down, though.”
Ogden pointed at Berhle. “See what you can do about that, okay? Almost sounds like the name of a boat. What’s the timing on the DNA from the overalls we recovered from Mary’s building trash compactor and the blood from Nate Lee’s head?”
Jim Berhle shook his head. “We’re still weeks away from that, or the samples the ME collected from under her nails. She did confirm that the blood wasn’t Lee’s.”
Ogden picked up Mary’s phone record again and peered at it. “What about John Smith? That sounds bogus.”
Berhle shrugged. “For all I could find, it could’ve been a wrong number. It’s way out in Broad Channel, the call lasted less than a minute, only happened once, and the John Smith cross-indexed with that address is clean as a whistle. I even called it, but got no answer.”
“Well,” Ogden announced, “since the local Brooklyn precinct guys are working on the shooting scene, I think I’ll go out and knock on John Smith’s door. I gotta do something. This standing around is driving me nuts.” He looked at Sammie and Joe. “You two can either stay with Jim and keep beating on the computer or grab some shuteye. I’ll kidnap whoever’s sitting around the squad room to keep me company.”
“I’d like to ride along, if that’s all right,” Gunther said.
There was a momentary silence. They all knew Ogden’s generosity was wearing thin, and that this could only further erode it, but the veteran detective finally smiled, if faintly, and granted the concession. “Okay.”
Sammie quickly played the team card. “I’ll stay here and help Jim.”
Berhle looked happy with that, so Ogden said, “Whatever,” and headed out into the larger room to recruit someone from his own department to ride shotgun with him.
On the face of it, the trip to Broad Channel didn’t make much sense. There was no probable cause to request a search warrant of the John Smith residence, Jim Berhle had gotten no answer when he’d called the number, and there was no reason to suspect that the number’s appearance on Mary’s phone record was anything other than an anomaly. But anomalies were what interested Ward Ogden most in cases like this, where he was being faced with an otherwise solid wall of nothing.
As things turned out, it was a fortunate impulse. As soon as he, Joe Gunther, and the junior detective Ogden had tapped to come along emerged from their car at the Smith address and began approaching the front stoop, a large, bearded, tattooed man with a bandage on his head and an ugly expression on his face appeared on the nextdoor porch and shouted at them, “Who the hell’re you guys?”
Ogden displayed his badge. “Police.”
“We didn’t call for you. Take a hike.”
Ogden’s face broke into a smile. “Well, we’re here anyway. The head feeling better?”
The man touched the bandage by reflex, his eyebrows knitting. “How’d you know about that?”
“Lucky guess,” Ogden answered him. “How’d it happen?”
Whether confused by Ogden’s affable response to his own hostility or simply wishing he could get things clarified in his own mind, the big man came off his porch and crossed the five feet of lawn to join them, his tone softening as he drew near.
“Damned if I know. I went in there to shoot the shit with John a little, and the next thing I knew, the son-of-abitch coldcocked me.”
“You had a fight?”
He looked contemptuous. “No, we didn’t have a fight. I would’ve killed him if we had. I told you: He snakebit me. Hit me from behind.”
“Damn,” Ogden commiserated. “That’s pretty weird. The two of you been having problems? What’s your name, by the way?”
“Budd Wilcox. And we’re really good friends. I saw him drive up around dawn—he’s got crazy hours—and I went in to talk, like we do sometimes before I go to work. I shouted for him a couple of times and he finally answered me from his office, so I went back there and that’s when he hit me, first with the door, and then by smashing my head against the wall. Bastard turned my lights out, and I never did a damn thing to him. I had to call in sick because of this. Really pisses me off.”
“I bet,” Ogden said, eyeing the house with renewed interest. “So you never got a look at him. Did you actually see him walk from the car to the house?”
Wilcox stared at him dumbly. “What d’you…? It was his car. I looked out once, it wasn’t there, then it was. He’d just gotten home.”
“You didn’t actually see him.”
“You saying it wasn’t him?” he asked incredulously.
Ogden looked surprised. “Me? How would I know?”
Budd scowled and whipped around to face his own house. “Judy,” he yelled, “get out here.”
His wife appeared moments later, her face flushed and her expression ready for battle. She stopped dead when she saw her husband had company.
“You saw John this morning, right? When he drove away? This is the cops.”
She nodded. “I called out to him. Asked him if he knew where Budd was, ’cause I thought they were together.”
“You saw his face?” Ogden asked.
She gave him the same blank look Budd had earlier. “Yeah… well, sort of. He was in his car, pulling out.”
“But you saw his face clearly?”
“No, but it was him,” she answered belligerently. “Who the hell else would it be?”
Ogden murmured to himself, “Who indeed?”
Judy Wilcox studied them for a moment, shook her head, and muttering, “Goddamn cops—frigging useless,” turned and retreated into her house.
Budd faced them again, now totally perplexed. “Why’re you here anyway?”
Ogden gave him a slow smile, as if a ray of sunlight had just slipped into a dark recess of his brain. He reached into his pocket and removed a photograph of Ron Cashman, which he showed to the burly Wilcox.
“You ever seen this man?”
Wilcox stared at it, stared at Ogden, and began to look angry again. “You jerking me around?”
“Not on purpose.”
Ogden looked so ingenuous, Wilcox had no choice but to set him straight. “That’s John Smith.”
Ogden handed the picture to his sidekick, along with his cell phone. “Get us a search warrant for this place.”
S
ammie Martens unclipped the quietly vibrating pager from her belt and looked at the call-back number. She wasn’t surprised she didn’t recognize it. A stranger here, all she knew was that it wasn’t a Vermont exchange. Probably Joe on one of a billion phones outside the building. She glanced around the small room she was sharing with Jim Berhle. “There a phone in here?” she asked.
He looked up from the computer screen before him. “No. Use one of the ones outside. Just dial nine to get out.”
She stepped outside and crossed to an empty desk and punched in the number, reading it carefully from the pager.
Willy Kunkle answered after the first ring. “Meet me at the Greenwood Cemetery. Boss Tweed’s tombstone.”
The phone went dead.
Greenwood Cemetery was commissioned in 1838 and occupied almost five hundred acres in Brooklyn, just a few blocks inland from the Red Hook warehouse where Ron Cashman had breathed his last. The primary inspiration for the much more famous Central Park in Manhattan twenty years later, Greenwood had many of that spot’s sylvan touches, but being both a cemetery and reflective of a gaudier era, it was enhanced with some truly over-the-top flourishes. Pavilions, gatehouses, ornate shelters, fountains, reflecting pools, streams, lakes, and dozens of other oversized wedding cake accoutrements were scattered among the half million graves, monuments, mansion-sized mausoleums, and hundreds of statues to display a Gothic/ Victorian vision of what heaven was thought—or hoped—to be like.
Sammie drove through a gatehouse that looked as if it had been stolen off the front of a thousand-year-old French cathedral, and after asking directions from a bored guard, meandered along a narrow half mile of curving, forested, paved hill-and-dale roadway, aware of the fact that the higher she got, the more spectacular became the view facing west, overlooking New York Bay and the rigid, serried ranks of stalwart Manhattan skyscrapers. The contrast between the two impressions—the cemetery’s contrived Valhalla and the city’s concrete commercialism—made Sammie feel she was part of neither, like a fly crawling across two overlapping photographs.
She slowed among a copse of trees near the top of an incline and pulled over on the outside of a gentle curve, having finally discovered William Tweed’s headstone, downright demure given the setting and his own flamboyant reputation.
Sammie killed the engine and got out of the car, enjoying the sense, however artificial, of being in the countryside once more. She hadn’t fully admitted it yet, but New York’s unremitting geometric solidity—its hard angles, lack of earth, and the peculiar way everything seemed to either run up and down or left and right, but rarely in nature’s random way—was getting to her.
As if to communicate that fact to a kindred spirit, she crossed over to a nearby tree—large, old, and supporting a broad, comforting canopy—and laid her palm against its rough surface.
“Hey, Sam.”
She turned to see Willy cautiously emerge from behind a statue-topped monument. He looked tired and worn.
She went to him, put her arms around him, and kissed his cheek, feeling his one arm loop around her waist and a shudder run through his body.
“I forgot how good this feels,” he said, barely above a whisper.
“You should practice more,” she suggested, rubbing his back.
“Along with a lot of other things.”
She pulled away enough to look him in the face, struck by the total absence of his usual edginess. “You going to survive all this?”
He gazed at her with a sudden wave of tenderness. In its utter simplicity, it was a wonderful question: caring, supportive, and pertinent, all while being discreet. She wasn’t asking for what he couldn’t tell her. She’d neatly sidestepped the fact that they were both police officers and avoided asking him anything that might force him to either lie or admit to a malfeasance.
All she’d posed was the single core question. And all it had done was to render him speechless.
He buried his face in her neck and shut his eyes, feeling for the first time something other than the slow buildup of an indefinable, all-consuming heat that had been kindling inside him for longer than he could remember, and threatening to explode for the last several days.
“Come over here,” she finally said, leading him to the low stone wall surrounding one of the lots. “Sit down.”
They sat side by side for a long time, watching the gentle breeze barely ruffle the nearby branches, enjoying the smell of grass and the sound of water running, even superimposed as it was over the low, steady thrumming around them.
“Why do you stay with me?” he finally asked.
She’d asked herself the same question so many times, she didn’t hesitate to answer, “Because your trying so hard has made it worthwhile. So far.”
He smiled bitterly. “A man on the road to redemption?”
But she shook her head, well used to his deflecting cynicism. “I don’t know where you’re headed, especially now, but you’ve never taken the easy way.”
His voice betrayed his skepticism. “And that’s good, the way you see it?”
She took her eyes off the scenery to look at him. “Think about it, Willy. The people we deal with every day, most of them didn’t start any worse than you, or suffer more than you have. They just quit.”
He looked over the past few days, not just at what had happened recently, but at what he’d been forced to confront from years before, all the way back to his childhood.
“I don’t know about that. Feels like I quit a bunch of times.”
“Stopped, maybe. For a while. Like you’re doing now, I hope.”
She’d gone back to gazing at the trees before saying this, and he studied her profile with a sudden sense of revelation. What was it that made some people see things the way they did? He was so self-absorbed most of the time, he never paid much attention to such philosophical musings, finding it easier to simply ignore them. He was a pretty good student of human nature, funnily enough, smelling out people’s inner motivations and often getting them to reveal what they didn’t want others to see. But that was when they were opposed to him, like another hockey player in a face-off. He wasn’t as good when it came to his own teammates. The effort expended on his behalf by people like Sammie or Joe confused him, since it wasn’t something he ever practiced himself.
Looking at this woman whom he’d never bothered understanding, he was struck by her thoughtfulness, and embarrassed by his own lack of depth. When they’d become lovers, he’d been in turn stunned by his good fortune and dismissive of her common sense, but in both guises, he hadn’t chosen to consider her view of that decision. It had merely been something he figured she’d soon see as a giant mistake.
Now, as stupid as it seemed, he realized she hadn’t come to him on the rebound or out of pity or simply because she wanted someone to hold. She’d made a conscious choice.
And there was something else, something that harked back to an earlier situation that had baffled and angered him. During a case the previous winter, Sammie had gone undercover as a ski instructor, dying her hair blond and sporting the tight jeans and high-waisted parka she thought suitable for the job. He’d been furious with her for that, for looking so good, for making the role seem natural. He’d seen how everyone had appreciated her in purely physical terms, and had realized how easily he could lose her. Then, of course, that fear had only made him lash out as usual.
Not that this sudden revelation would necessarily help now. For his newfound respect for Sammie came saddled with an equally powerful conviction that he’d never be able to express it. Even as he watched her, filled with this sudden knowledge, he was at a loss for what to do.
As if realizing this, she stood up and looked down at him. “Do you know why you wanted to meet?” she asked, looking faintly surprised at how the words had come out. She corrected herself. “I mean, why did you want to meet?”
He considered both questions, and knew neither one could be given an honest answer, the first because of his own emotional inability, and the second for legal reasons.
He therefore chose the latter’s more familiar terrain— he’d certainly skirted the law’s finer points before.
“I was wondering how the case was going,” he stated neutrally, hoping she’d work with him in tiptoeing through a metaphorically mine-laden conversation.
She did. Avoiding the shootout and the wounding of— and silence of—Riley Cox, she answered, “We found out Ron Cashman had two apartments, one clean and listed under his name, the other somewhere over near Kennedy Airport. They’re going over that one right now. Joe called in with an update about a half hour ago.”
“Find anything yet?”
She paused and rubbed her lower lip with her thumbnail. She was in a real quandary here. There was strong circumstantial evidence linking Willy to the shootout, although no actual witnesses who would talk, and certainly it made sense that he was the one who assaulted John Smith’s neighbor in Broad Channel, possibly stealing something in the process. Not only did that make him someone whom the local authorities would love to put in an interview room, if not worse, it also certainly meant she shouldn’t be discussing details of the case with him. Just being with him now put her in professional jeopardy.
Not that any of this was all that relevant, of course. Willy was going to motor on regardless of what she did or didn’t tell him, and maybe her judicious release of some information might help him go where he needed to without getting killed or jailed. She wouldn’t violate the black letter of the law, but she would tell him what she could because in her heart she knew it might be his only route to salvation.
“I don’t know what they’ve found at the covert address. I only heard that Cashman was using the name John Smith, and that Mary called him there once from her home phone.”
“She did?” he asked, surprised.
“Not only him, but other people connected to him. From her receipts and Metro cards and whatnot, we found out she was going regularly to Brooklyn and maybe meeting with several of these guys. Ogden has people knocking on those doors right now, too. I don’t know what or how, but something’s definitely starting to break with this case. For example, we think now that even though she wasn’t rolling in dough, she had access to some secret assets. It would explain why she never went the traditional welfare and assistance route.”
He absorbed that for a moment, remembering Cashman’s last words about Mary becoming greedy. “What else?” he asked.
“Not much. We took your suggestion to look into the Re-Coop a little closer. Turns out some nonprofit named the Seabee Group is their major backer, but that’s all we’ve got right now. I think Joe was going to study that more, but he and I are almost on the outs now. We’ve outlived our welcome.”
She didn’t explain why. She didn’t need to.
There was an awkward pause. Now that they’d moved from their personal feelings to discussing the case, each of them was anxious about the other’s welfare. The first topic made them yearn to stay here longer, the second almost guaranteed that any more time together endangered them both.
Willy ended the unspoken debate by getting to his feet. “Thanks, Sam. I better go.”
She stood next to him and laid her hand on his forearm. “I can’t ask what I want to. Maybe that’s the way it’ll always be—”
He interrupted her. “If you want to know have I stepped over the line, the answer is no. Enough to get me fired, maybe. But not the way you’re worried about.”
He looked ready to say more, to tell her things that seemed to be brimming up inside him, but he pressed his lips together tightly, as if physically biting the urge back.
She made the choice easier for him, kissing him and stepping away. “Will you at least try to come back in one piece?”
He smiled at her, again struck by how much she seemed to know of his inner struggles. “I will now.”
He watched while she retreated across the narrow roadway, got back into her car, and drove away with a small wave of her hand. Then he stepped in among the surrounding headstones and extracted from his pocket the top sheet of the calendar he’d stolen off Ron Cashman’s desk. Circled several times in blue ink on a date just following Mary’s death were the initials “CB,” followed by a phone number. The face of Carlos Barzún—La Culebra—rose up in his mind like a specter.
Ward Ogden sat back in Ron Cashman’s rickety office chair and stretched his arms high above his head. The setting sun was angling in through the dirty window overlooking the boat slip, filling the dingy room with a greasy yellow light. He and a search team including Jim Berhle and the young detective he’d brought with him hours earlier had been combing through the contents of Cashman’s two filing cabinets, deciphering what they could of the dead man’s arcane and half-encrypted notes. What they had made for interesting if frustrating reading, detailing a range of activities far beyond what Ogden would have guessed from these modest surroundings. It was true that Cashman had also maintained that other apartment, as clean and respectable as the proverbial hound’s tooth, but if his records were any reflection of his income, he could have afforded twice that and much more. Whether it was a credit to his discretion or simply because he had no love of material possessions was anyone’s guess.
Ogden lowered his arms and studied the scene out the window. Joe Gunther was sitting on the edge of one of the docks overhanging the narrow, slightly mired boat slip, staring out over the view as if he were taking in the Grand Canyon. He liked Gunther, respected his low-key, hardworking style. The man gave credit where it was due, shared what he found, didn’t put on airs, and nurtured his younger colleagues. In short, a cop without swagger or self-righteousness. Ogden could only rue that such a creature was so rare.
Which made his own predicament all the more unfortunate, since he was gong to have to tell Gunther that regardless of what Willy Kunkle might or might not have done—and the lack of any hard evidence so far was galling—the Vermont contingent was no longer welcome. The case was simply becoming too big and too complex, and it involved too many unanswered questions about both Kunkles, Mary and Willy.
