“Is that a dove?” Fiona whispered as she crouched alongside her. “No, wait. A plover, right?”
“Yes, very good, Fiona,” Jane whispered back, flicking and stopping on a page to make a notation. “That is a plover. A semipalmated plover, I believe.”
As they continued on, a loud croak began echoing through the trees.
“Is that a bird, too?” said seven-year-old Chrissy, looking around excitedly.
“No, Chrissy,” Jane said, patting her little sister on the head. “I’m pretty sure it’s a frog.”
“I believe it’s a semipalmated frog, to be exact, Chrissy,” called Ricky from the back, to the snickering delight of the boys.
That’s when it happened. Trent saw it first. He stopped as if he’d hit an invisible wall and began jumping up and down as he repeatedly stabbed a pointing finger toward the undergrowth to the left of the trail.
“Yeah, well, what the heck is… that?” he screamed.
Arriving at the scene of the commotion, Mary took a couple of seconds to piece together what was going on. Between the shafts of sunlight, sprawled along the forest floor beside an elm tree, was a large gray silhouette. When the form snorted out a breath, Mary realized it was a deer, a large doe, lying on her side. She also realized there was something on the loamy forest floor beside her, a bulbous gray-green form, slick with moisture. Wisps of steam were rising off the curious blob. It was moving slightly.
As the prone deer turned and began to lick at the form, Mary Catherine realized what they were witnessing. The deer had just given birth.
“Ugh!” Trent said.
“What?” Ricky said.
“Ewwwwww!” Eddie said.
“Quiet, children. Hush!” Mary Catherine said, urging them all to crouch down.
As they kneeled, watching from the trail, the mother deer suddenly stopped licking. The wet gray caul of the newborn deer bulged and then split and a tiny face emerged. The wet creature wriggled and blinked furiously as it rolled out of the steaming birth casing and onto the forest floor.
Mary Catherine glanced from the wonder they were witnessing to the rest of the crew around her. Every one of the kids was floored, absolutely astonished. Even the boys. Especially the boys. She’d never seen them so wide- eyed. The miracle of life had utterly silenced the peanut gallery.
They all gasped in unison a moment later as the mother deer suddenly rose in a long, graceful, almost regal movement, her head and ears cocked directly at them. The fawn, still on its side, blinked at its mother and then began to rock, trying to roll over and get its long legs underneath it.
“Come on. You can do it. Come on,” Chrissy prompted.
As if hearing Chrissy’s encouragement, the newborn finally stood on all fours. They all watched as it wobbled in place, its legs trembling, its wet eyes wide, its fur in the shafts of light as fuzzy as a bumblebee’s.
“Oh, my gosh! It looks like a bunny, a long-legged bunny,” Shawna said, clapping with delirious excitement. “It’s the cutest ever, ever, ever.”
No, that’s you, thought Mary Catherine as she kissed the bouncing little girl on the top of her head. The miracle of life, indeed, she thought, looking from the fawn to the surrounding crowd of crazy sweet kids who had somehow become her life.
CHAPTER 1
THEY SAY THE neon lights are bright on Broadway, but from where I sat, beside an upstairs window of the Thirty-Fourth Precinct’s brown brick pillbox on Broadway and 183rd Street in Washington Heights, I was seriously having my doubts. In fact, the only illumination I caught at all as I stared out that cold predawn morning was from an ancient set of cheap Christmas lights strung across the faded plastic awning of a bodega across the street.
And they weren’t even blinking.
Yawning down at the grim street, I knew it could have been worse. Much worse. Back in 1992, the year I started in the NYPD up here in the Heights-once one of northern Manhattan’s most notorious, drug-riddled neighborhoods-if you saw any twinkling lights in the sky, it was most likely a muzzle flash from a gun being fired on one of the rooftops.
I was twenty-two back then, fresh out of the Police Academy and looking for action. I got it in heaps. That year, the three-four stacked up a staggering 122 murders. Death really does come in threes, the precinct detectives used to joke, because every three days, like clockwork, it seemed someone in the neighborhood was murdered.
In the early nineties, the neighborhood had become a wholesale drug supermarket, an open-air cocaine Costco. At 2:00 a.m. on Saturdays, it looked like the dinner rush at a McDonald’s drive-through, as long lines of jittery customers idled in the narrow, tenement-lined streets.
But we had turned it around, I reminded myself as I looked out at the still-dark streets. Eventually, we locked up the dealers and boarded up the crack houses until the cokeheads and junkies were finally convinced that the Heights was back to being a neighborhood instead of a drugstore.
And by “we,” I mean the veteran cops who “raised” me, as they say on the job-the Anti-Crime Unit grunts who took me under their wing, who showed me what it was to be a cop. A lot of them were actual Vietnam veterans who’d traded a foreign war for our unending domestic drug war. Day in and day out, we cruised the streets, making felony collars, taking guns off the street, putting bad guys behind bars.
Sitting here twenty years later, working my latest case, I kept thinking more and more about those fearless cops. As I sat looking out the window, I actually fantasized that they would arrive any minute, pulling into the special angled parking spaces below and hopping out of their cars, ready to give me some much-needed backup.
Because though we’d won the battle of Washington Heights, the war on drugs wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.
I turned away from the window and looked back at the pages of an arrest report spread across the battered desk in front of me.
In fact, the war was just getting started. It was about to flare up bigger and badder and deadlier than ever before.
CHAPTER 2
I SIFTED THROUGH some photographs until I found the reason why I was up here so early. I propped the color shot over the screen of my open laptop and did what I’d been doing a lot of in the last few weeks-memorizing one of the faces in it.
The photograph showed three men standing in a run-down Mexican street beside a brand-new fire-engine red Ford Super Duty pickup truck. Two of the men were wearing bandannas and baseball caps to cover their faces and gripped AR-15 assault rifles with extended magazines. Between them stood a bareheaded, broad-shouldered, light-skinned black man. A gold Cartier tank watch was just visible above the cuff of his dark, tailored suit as he smoothed a Hermes tie.
I stared at the man in the middle-his pale blue eyes, his cropped salt-and-pepper hair, his expensive attire. Smiling as he glanced in the direction of the camera, the handsome dusky-skinned black man had the casual grace of a model or a sports star.
He was a star, all right.
