Michael Roman, the man who would become her husband, the love of her life, supine on the gurney, his face powdered with black ash, his eyes closed. She checked his vitals. Steady pulse, strong BP reading. She studied his face, his strong jaw, his fair complexion and sandy hair, now coated with black ash.
Moments later he opened his eyes, and her life changed forever.
In the end he had a slight concussion, a small laceration on the back of his right hand. Days later, when Abby saw the photographs of the car bombing, and what it had done to the nearby building, she, like everyone else, was amazed that he wasn’t killed on the spot.
The siren faded into the distance. Abby glanced at her watch, then over at the children.
The girls were gone.
Abby sprang to her feet. She walked over to the children’s section, looking behind all the low stacks, the festive displays for books on Easter and Passover. She stepped into the ladies restroom. No Charlotte, no Emily. She went down to the lower level, the section that had the DVDs and CDs. Sometimes she and the girls picked out movies here in the Family section. There she found four children, none of them her own. Quickening her pace, she returned to the ground floor, and was just about to speak to one of the library assistants when she looked down one of the long stacks in the adult section and saw them.
Her heart found its way back into her chest. The girls were sitting side by side, at the end of the stack of books. They had a large, coffee-table sized volume across their laps. Abby walked down the aisle.
“Hey, ladies.”
They looked up at her.
“You guys shouldn’t run off like that. Mommy got a little worried.”
“We’re sorry,” Charlotte said.
“What are you reading?” Abby got down on the floor with the girls. She sat between them, took the book from Emily. She glanced at the cover.
Russian Folk Tales and Legends.
“Where did you find this?” Abby asked.
Emily pointed to the bottom shelf of a nearby stack.
Abby returned to the page at which the girls had been looking. On the left was a large color plate, an intricate woodcut of a fairy tale figure, a tall, skeletal man with a pointed chin, rabid eyes, and gnarled fingers. He wore a black velvet robe and tarnished crown. To the right was an index to stories about Koschei the Deathless. Abby skimmed the next few pages, a little unnerved.
There were a number of variations on the legend, it seemed. One version included a prince and a gray wolf; another was about a firebird. One thing they agreed upon, though, was that Koschei was an evil man who terrorized the countryside, primarily young women, and could not be killed by conventional means. This was because his soul was separate from his body. As long as his soul was safe, he could not die. Except for one way, according to one of the variations. If he was stabbed in the head with a needle, it would be curtains for the big ugly guy. But only if the needle was broken.
Nice kid’s story, Abby thought. Right up there with Charlotte’s Web.
The good news was that her daughters couldn’t yet read.
Back in the car, heading home, Abby realized she couldn’t get the melody the girls had been humming at the grocery store out of her head. She knew it – recalled the piece of music the way you sometimes remember a face, like a person who was present during something important in your life: wedding, funeral, graduation. It was so melancholy, Abby doubted it was a wedding. The song was too gloomy.
She realized the only way to get a song out of her head was to replace it with something else. She flipped on the radio, dialed to a Nineties oldie station. Good enough.
Twenty minutes later they pulled into the drive. The sun was out, and the girls were giggling over something secret, as they often did. As Abby unloaded the groceries she’d found that the mysterious tune had left her, but for some reason the sense of unease had not.
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PART TWO
The borough of Queens is the largest of the five boroughs of New York City, and the city’s second most populous. It sits on the westernmost section of Long Island, and is home to both LaGuardia and JFK airports, as well as the US Open for tennis. At one time or another the borough had been the residence of a number of celebrities, both famous and infamous, including Tony Bennett, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Gotti. It was by far the most culturally diverse borough, boasting more than one hundred nationalities.
The office of the district attorney, a modern ten-story building located in Kew Gardens, looked as if it had been built by five different architects and builders, composed of a series of additions added in different eras, a pastiche of style, materials, and methods. One of the busiest DA’s offices in the country, it was home to more than three hundred attorneys, and five hundred support personnel.
The Major Crimes, Investigations, Trials, Special Prosecutions and Legal Affairs divisions of the office were responsible not only for the prosecution of arrest cases brought to the office by the New York City Police Department and other law enforcement agencies, but also for proactively seeking out wrongdoers and aggressively undertaking investigations of suspected criminal conduct.
The DA’s office, too, boasted its own stars. Frank O’Connor, a former Queens District Attorney, figured prominently in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film The Wrong Man.
To some, mostly those who were not inside the elite divisions of the office, the building was called the Palace. Those who did work in Major Crimes never did anything to discourage the practice. And while a palace can really only boast one king – in this case it was the District Attorney, Dennis R. McCaffrey – it can have a number of princes.
When Michael Roman, inarguably the most favored prince at the bar, arrived at the Palace on the day before the Ghegan trial was scheduled to begin, there were only a handful of people. If Saturdays turned the New York legal system into a ghost town, Sundays rendered it virtually barren. Only the newest and most ambitious young attorneys, along with royalty like Michael Roman, ventured into the office. The second floor was all but deserted.
As much as Michael enjoyed the buzz and noise of the office when it was in full swing, he had to admit he liked having the place to himself. He did his best thinking on the weekends. There was a time when the DA’s Homicide division was located in a dumpy little building in Jamaica that looked like a check-cashing store and, for a number of prosecutors, Michael included, it was almost a pleasure to try cases out there, off the beaten path, away from the boss’s scrutinizing eye.
After five years of working in these trenches, vaulting his way up from the Intake Bureau to the Felony Trial Bureau, Michael cemented his reputation with the trial and conviction of the Patrescu brothers, a pair of vicious drug dealers who had cold bloodedly murdered six people in the basement of a fast food restaurant in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Michael and Tommy Christiano had worked nights and weekends on that case, backed by a capital investigation team with hundreds of detectives from the DA’s office and the NYPD.
Marku Patrescu was currently serving six life sentences in the Clinton Correctional Facility, better known as Dannemora. His brother Dante, who had pulled the trigger, had been executed that March. After Dante’s sentence was carried out, Michael began to hear interesting stories from DAs all over the city. It seemed that apprehended suspects, in a wide range of crimes – rapes, assaults, robberies – cited the Patrescu execution as a major reason not to carry a weapon, or use a weapon in their possession during the commission of a felony. It was this sort of evidence of cause and effect for which prosecutors live.
The same team that worked tirelessly to convict the Patrescu brothers helped put Patrick Sean Ghegan behind bars. Ghegan’s trial began in just over twenty-four hours. Michael had everything in place – the ballistic evidence tying Ghegan’s weapon to the crime, a line-up that positively identified Ghegan as the man who had been observed threatening Colin Harris in his florist shop, along with surveillance camera footage that showed Ghegan
