A moment. “I know.”
Michael stopped pacing, every muscle tightening. Every instinct within him told him to go to the police. This was his training, this was his belief, this was consistent with every case he had ever tried, everything he had come to believe. If this were happening to a friend or colleague, it would be the advice he would give them.
But now it was his life, his wife, his children.
Michael picked up his office phone. He dialed his home number. There were two house phones in the Eden Falls house, two extensions of the land line. One in the kitchen, one in the bedroom. For some reason he got a disconnect recording. The sound of the disembodied voice chilled him. He dialed Abby’s cellphone. After a second, he heard it ring in the background. It was Abby’s special ringtone. His heart froze. The man was in his house.
“And now you have proof,” Aleks said.
“Look” Michael began, his rage a gathering gale. “If anything happens to my family there is nowhere on earth you will able to hide. Nowhere. Do you hear me?”
For a moment Michael thought, and feared, that the man had hung up.
“There is no need for anyone to be hurt,” Aleks said. His calmness was as infuriating as it was chilling. “But this is entirely up to you.”
Michael remained silent as the clock passed four o’clock. Any second now his office phone would ring. They would be looking for him.
“I am looking at your schedule,” Aleks said. “You should be in court. Are there problems?”
“No.”
“Good. And I see that later today you are due to meet some tradesman on Newark Street.”
The cold began to spread. Michael found that he had not moved a muscle in minutes. This man knew his whole life.
“You are to go about the rest of your day as if everything were normal,” Aleks continued. “You will keep all of your appointments. You will not contact anyone about this, or send anyone to this house. You will not call this house for any reason. You will not come home.”
“Let me talk to my wife.”
The man ignored him, continued. “You are being watched, Michael Roman. If you do anything out of the ordinary, if you are seen talking to anyone in law enforcement, you will regret it.”
My God, Michael thought. It was all connected. The brutal murder of Viktor Harkov, the stealing of confidential files. And now a madman had his family.
But why? What did he want?
“When you step out of the office, one of the people you encounter will hold the lives of your wife and these little girls in their hands. You will not know who it is. Be wise, Michael. I will contact you soon.”
“You don’t understand. When I go into the courtroom there will be all kinds of police officers, detectives, marshals. I can’t -”
“No one.”
The line went dead.
What Michael had feared, just a few short moments ago – the possibility he might lose his daughters in a long, protracted legal battle – was nothing.
Now he was fighting for their lives.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Queens Homicide Squad was located on the second floor of the 112th Precinct headquarters in Forest Hills, a square, nondescript building with mint-green panels below the windows, and a black marble entrance.
Of the twelve full-time homicide detectives, only two were women, and that was just the way Desiree Powell liked it. Although she had many female friends on the job, most of them were drawn to other squads as a career – vice, narcotics, forensic investigation. Powell knew she had a knack for this work, always had, even as a child. There was logic to it all, but it was more than that. As a student she had been far better at algebra than geometry. A always led to B then to C. Always. If it didn’t, you had the wrong A to begin with. She did not consider that she had a gift – few investigators were gifted at detection. She believed it was something that came from instinct; you either had the nose, and the gut, or you didn’t.
She had recently investigated a case in North Corona where the victim, a forty-nine-year-old white male, a family man with a wife and three children, was found lying on his backyard, middle of a nice summer day, his head bashed in. There was no weapon found, no witnesses, no suspects. There was, however, a ladder leaning up against the back of his house. The man’s wife said when she left for work that day, her husband told her he was going to replace a few shingles. CSU found blood on the roof, in the gutter as well, which led them to conclude that the man had been bludgeoned on the roof, and not in the backyard as they had originally thought.
Desiree Powell mused: Who climbs a ladder, bludgeons a man, watches the victim roll off, then climbs back down? Why risk being seen by the entire neighborhood? Why not wait until the guy was on the ground, or in the house?
Three times during the neighborhood canvass Powell found she’d had to stop for a moment and wait for the jets overhead to pass. The neighborhood was directly in the flight path of LaGuardia airport.
When the case stalled, Powell reached out to an old friend in TSA, who in turn called a few of the airlines and discovered that, on the day the man died, a cargo plane had reported some engine trouble on takeoff from LaGuardia. Powell visited the hangar and discovered that a piece of metal had come off the engine housing, a piece never recovered by investigators. She also discovered that the plane had passed directly over the community of North Corona. She brought back CSU, and they did a search of the chimney. Inside, they found a chunk of metal near the flue, a ragged piece that fit the engine’s housing perfectly. It was caked with the dead man’s blood.
Airplane, Body, Chimney.
ABC.
Sometimes Powell scared herself.
Marco Fontova walked into the duty room, dropped into his chair on the opposite side of the desk, one of nine or so desks in the small, paper-clogged office. He glanced once at the whiteboards on the wall, the board displaying who was in court that day, who was on the range. He checked his box for mail.
“Nice suit, by the way,” Powell said. She didn’t really mean it, but the kid was a peacock, and she liked to keep him happy. “New?”
Fontova smiled, opened up the jacket. The lining was mauve paisley. “Like it?”
It was a special brand of ugly. “Very becoming. What do we have?”
Fontova had a thick sheaf of paper in his hand, as well as a CD in a clear crystal case. “We have a printout of some of the files on Harkov’s computer, along with a copy of the original data files.”
“That was fast.”
“You want the big half or the small half?”
“I’ll take it all. You know I love this stuff.”
Fontova gave it to her.
Powell looked at the files. It was a database, a listing of Harkov’s clients. The dates went back ten years, and had to contain three hundred names. There were brief notations regarding the nature of the work Harkov had done for these people. Most were civil matters, but there were a number of criminal matters.
Was their killer in here somewhere?
The brutality of the murder suggested something other than a robbery. This was revenge. No one took the time to do what was done to Viktor Harkov just because they had a few hours to spare.
There were really only a few reasons to torture someone. Two, actually, that Powell could think of. One, the hatred for the victim ran so deep, the sense of vengeance was so strong, that nothing less than a slow, painful death would salve the loathing. The other reason was that you wanted information from that person, information the person was not ready to give up. That was pretty much it. Unless you just happened to have a taste for it, which, even for New York City, was fairly uncommon.
According to the database, Viktor Harkov was only a mediocre criminal defense attorney. He had won only
