Vivien opened the door and got out of the car. As soon as she turned on her cellphone, it started ringing.
She lifted it to her ear and instinctively replied as if she was sitting at her desk. ‘Detective Light.’
‘Bellew here. Where are you?’
‘Just outside. I’m coming in.’
‘I’ll go down. Let’s meet in the lobby.’
Vivien climbed the steps, opened the glass-fronted door, and was inside the building.
A black man with his hands cuffed behind his back stood in front of the desk, with a uniformed officer beside him holding him by one arm. One of the officers behind the desk was taking down the details of his arrest.
As Vivien entered, she returned the officer’s wave. She turned right and found herself in a large room, painted a nondescript colour, with rows of chairs in the middle and a whiteboard on the wall facing them. Another whiteboard stood on an easel next to a raised desk. This was the room where the officers on duty gathered for roll call, to be given the rundown on the current operations and assigned their tasks for the day.
Captain Alan Bellew, her immediate superior, came in through another door facing the entrance. Seeing her, he came towards her with that rapid walk of his that gave an impression of physical vigour. He was a tall, highly capable man who loved his work and was good at it.
He knew all about Vivien’s difficult love life. In spite of that, and her youth, her unquestionable qualities in the job had led him to hold her in high regard. A relationship of mutual respect had sprung up between them, and whenever they had worked together they’d always achieved excellent results. One of Vivien’s colleagues had once called her ‘the captain’s pet’, but when Bellew had found out about it he had taken the officer aside and given him a little talk. Nobody knew what he had said, but from that moment on all comments had ceased.
Coming level with her, he did what he always did: he came straight to the point.
‘A call just came in. We have a homicide. The body’s apparently years old. They found it on a construction site during demolition. It was inside a wall between two basements.’ He paused, just long enough to give her time to focus on the situation. ‘I’d like you to handle it.’
‘Where is it?’
Bellew made a vague gesture with his head. ‘Two blocks from here, on 23rd and Third. The crime scene team should be there by now. The ME’s on his way, too. I already sent Bowman and Salinas to keep an eye on things until you get there.’
‘Isn’t this something for Cold Case?’
Cold Case was the squad that dealt with long-unsolved homicides. From what the captain had said, this sounded completely like their thing.
‘We’re handling it for now. Later, we can consider if it’s appropriate to transfer it to them.’
Vivien knew Captain Alan Bellew regarded the 13th Precinct as his personal territory and didn’t like anyone who didn’t work directly for him muscling in.
Vivien nodded. ‘Okay. I’ll get right on it.’
Just then, two men came through a door to the right of the desk. One was older, with grey hair and a tanned face.
Sailing, maybe, or golf.
His dark suit, leather briefcase and serious demeanour were like a sign around his neck, marked Lawyer.
The other man was younger, about thirty-five. He was wearing dark glasses, and there was several days’ growth of beard on his drawn face. His clothes, distinctly more casual than his companion’s, bore traces of the night he had spent in a cell. That wasn’t the only thing he bore traces of: he had a cut on his lip and the left shoulder seam of his jacket was torn.
The two men went out without looking around. Vivien and Bellew watched them until they disappeared beyond the swaying of the glass-fronted door.
The captain gave a half smile. ‘We had a celebrity guest in the Plaza last night.’
Vivien knew what that meant. Upstairs in the squad room, along with the detectives’ desks, which were so close together they made the place look like an office furniture showroom, there was a cell. This was where the arrested were kept, sometimes for a whole night, waiting to be either freed on bail or transferred to the jail in Chinatown. With a sense of irony, given how uncomfortable the long wooden bunks fixed to the walls were, they had dubbed it the Plaza.
‘Who is that guy?’
‘Russell Wade.’
The captain nodded, the smile fading abruptly from his lips. ‘Yeah, that’s the guy.’
Vivien knew when there was a touch of bitterness in her chief’s voice. And few things made him more bitter than when people deliberately, almost complacently, destroyed themselves. For reasons of her own, it was a situation she was familiar with.
‘We picked him up last night in a raid on a gambling joint, blind drunk and resisting arrest. I think he caught a punch from Tyler.’
Bellew immediately filed that brief parenthesis away among the closed files and came back to the matter in hand.
‘No offence to the living, but I think you have a dead man to deal with. He’s been waiting a long time – best not to keep him waiting any longer.’
‘I think he has every right.’
Bellew left her. Vivien went outside again, into the mild air of that late spring afternoon. She descended the short flight of steps, and as she did so she had a fleeting vision of Russell Wade and his lawyer disappearing into a chauffeured limousine, over to her right. The car pulled away from the curb and glided past. The guest who had spent a night in the Plaza had now taken off his dark glasses, and their eyes met through the open window. For a moment, Vivien found herself looking into two intense dark eyes and was astonished by the immense sadness she saw in them. Then the car was past her and that face disappeared behind the screen of the electrically operated window.
The site where they had found the body was so close, it was easier to get there on foot. And in the meantime she was already processing the small amount of information she had in her possession. A construction site was often an ideal place to get rid of an unwanted person for ever. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. A murder, a body buried in concrete, an old story of violence and madness.
Those wolves had been battling it out since the dawn of time. Over the centuries, there
