A Clean Kill

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.

In the forty minutes before the first building collapsed, she'd seen the faces of desperate people as they broke the windows to jump out eighty, ninety, a hundred floors above the street. Whipet knew the building well, and it drove him nuts thinking of the dozens of people trapped on the stairs leading to the roof—locked inside where he could not get to them. His unit had been warned off by the FD and by his PD bosses. They didn't want those choppers to burst into flame, trying to save people they felt couldn't be saved. But Steve had believed that he could have rescued some people. While he'd been in the air; he'd shot a bunch of photos. He had his opinions about what he could have done if they'd been allowed to land on the roof.

Afterward, he'd come down to earth to work the site and deferred his retirement for months. Even after he was out, he returned there from time to time. And he still believed that more could have been done. Both he and Eloise continued to have nightmares about it, and the relationship ended. Two years ago Steve bailed for good. He retired from the Department and went somewhere far away with the wife he always said he'd never much liked. He and Eloise didn't keep in touch anymore.

After a fruitless search in her drawer for the missing pens, Eloise finally gave up looking. Hagedorn was still offering the one from his pocket, so she took it. 'Thanks.'

'What does she want?' he asked about the Woo conversation.

'Oh, she wants us to investigate the Peret case, find out where he went, how he got in, who served him booze. And of course where he got the blow.'

'This doesn't sound like our kind of case. Are we going after the clubs?' Charlie said excitedly.

'Not clear.' Eloise didn't know what else to answer.

'It sounds pretty clear to me. Lieutenant Woo went downtown this morning. The chief has her on something.' He rubbed his hands together. 'This is great. We've been too easy on these creeps. The plastic trail should make a good start. We could shut them down.'

'Right,' she said quickly. She was new to the job. She had no idea what he was talking about. Did precinct units do club raids?

'Also his cell phone. His incoming and outgoing calls might place him inside one of the clubs, or more than one. We could get lucky there.' Hagedorn was already on it.

'Check,' she said. 'You work on the credit cards, and I'll see what we can do about that phone.'

Charlie returned to his computer, and Gelo tapped her fingers on the pen, wondering when Woo might get back to the shop and tell her what was going on.

Eleven

Come on, little girl. Make it easy on yourself.

These are your knives, aren't they?'

Remy shook her head. The detective with the crappy diet was now calling her 'little girl.' She hated this guy. She'd already told him they weren't her knives.

'They belong to the kitchen,' she said wearily.

'Cam-onnn.' His New York accent was an assault from which there was no retreat. 'Cam-onnn, answer the question. Are they all here, or are there more?'

'I ... don't . . . know,' she said very slowly. 'This is Wayne's kitchen. I don't keep track of everything he brings home.'

And that was another thing that was upsetting her. Why wasn't Wayne here? Why wasn't he answering these questions? A pile of plastic bags covered the long kitchen counter. Each one had a knife in it. There were seven cleavers of varying sizes, ten butcher knives. Six carving knives of different lengths, some of them very long. More than a dozen paring knives, with and without serrated edges. They were his knives, so why did she have to answer for them? Frankly Remy was shocked by how many there were. She'd known there were a lot of knives in the house. It was certainly clear that Wayne was a fanatic about them. He had his own sets, one at home and one in his car, that he wouldn't let anyone else use. In addition to those, manufacturers sent him new knives to test out in hopes of getting an endorsement. Sometimes he brought these home, too. Altogether it turned out to be a big number to account for.

She made a disgusted noise. Until today the knives had always been beautiful tools to her. Just that morning after she'd washed up the breakfast dishes, the stainless steel blades had been shiny and the handles as dry as she'd left them the night before. She liked things clean. Since then, all the knives had been removed from the various drawers and locations where they were kept. They'd been labeled and bagged, and she knew they were headed for a laboratory somewhere to determine who had touched them and if there were traces of Maddy's blood on any of them. They all had Remy's fingerprints on them—that was a given.

'I told you I was in here the whole time. No one would have been able to come in and put them back,' she said irritably.

Sergeant Minnow cleared his throat. 'What did you say your duties are, little girl?'

'I told you a dozen times. I'm the cook.' Remy wasn't changing that story.

'I thought you were the babysitter.'

'I look after the kids sometimes, but that doesn't make me a babysitter.'

'You took them to school this morning.'

'Yes.'

'Did you do that to be with Mr. Wilson?'

'Please.' She made an impatient gesture.

'I asked you a question.'

'I went with him because he asked me to,' she said sharply.

'Do you do everything Mr. Wilson asks?' Minnow said this with a straight face and a suggestive tone.

Remy didn't see it corning. She didn't see a lot of what he said coming. She closed her eyes.

'Would you do anything he asked you?' he repeated.

She scratched the side of her nose. 'No,' she replied.

'Oh, what wouldn't you do?'

'He wouldn't ask—' she started to speak, then shut her mouth. She didn't want to say any more about what Wayne wouldn't ask. He'd asked her to make up with Maddy and to keep quiet about their relationship. She didn't want to talk about him.

'Okay, little girl, play it your own way. But we're going to find out everything anyway. We're going to rip this thing wide open, so you might as well come clean.'

She didn't say anything.

He softened his voice. 'So you're the cook and you don't know how many knives are in your kitchen. Cam- onnn. You expect me to believe that?'

Finally Remy spoke. 'Look, this is a kitchen for a bigger staff. There are duplicates of everything. Wayne brings knives and other equipment home to test. We got a lot of stuff here.' She shrugged.

He wanted to talk about knives. She could talk about knives.