Full Frontal Murder (20 page)

Holland didn't like it, but he could do nothing but accept it. “And where will you be? Selling ice cream to the kiddies?”

“I'll be there, but you won't see me.” Murtaugh looked at his watch. “I'm going now. Wait another fifty minutes before you leave. That should get you there close to five o'clock. He started out but turned at the door. “Holland … good luck.”

Holland nodded, said nothing.

He walked the entire length of the subway train twice during the long ride to Coney Island, but he saw no familiar faces among the other passengers. That proved nothing, however. Holland didn't know all the detectives under Marian's command; Murtaugh could easily have put someone on the train with him.

Holland had been with the FBI long enough to come to understand what was derogatorily referred to as the police mentality. That need to
nail
a perp sometimes grew so strong it overrode all other considerations, including the safety of the innocent; it became a compulsion. He'd seen it happen time and again, both among federal agents and municipal police. He simply didn't share Murtaugh's faith that all the men and women at the stakeout in Coney Island would keep their cool.

He preferred to rely on his own assessment of the situation, but that didn't mean walking into danger unprepared. In the shoulder holster under his jacket was a .38, and strapped to his ankle was a .22; it was the first time since he'd left the FBI that he'd carried a weapon. If the meet stayed out in the open, he would need neither gun. If he was frisked elsewhere, perhaps the smaller gun would be overlooked. But he had no intention of meeting a potential killer unarmed.

The ride seemed interminable, but it did finally end. Holland stepped off the train and paused, automatically checking out the ground-level station. It was crowded, but not overly so. One man was elbowing his way frantically toward the men's room. Two women were talking in overloud voices. Two muscular young Hispanic street toughs stood bracketing the steps leading down to the street.

Warning bells. The two Hispanics were glancing over the disembarking passengers with a studied casualness that would fool no one who was really looking. Yet their eyes slid right over him, as if he weren't even there. Holland was prosperous looking and he was alone; he should be at least one object of their attention. They were only pretending not to have noticed him.

He swore to himself. I
don't have time for a mugging now!
It was almost five.
The Hurricane, five o'clock
.

He fell in with the small crowd pushing toward the exit stairway. He timed it so that at the last minute he could break into a run and dart between the two young Hispanics and on down the stairway. When the moment was right, he made his move.

And got past them! He whirled to face them, .38 in hand. They both froze on the top step, watching him. “That's right,” Holland said with ice in his voice. “Stay like that and you won't get hurt.”

He started backing down the stairway. A middle-aged man myopically pushed his way between the two Hispanics and on down past Holland, unaware of the gun or anything else. A flicker in the eyes of one of the muggers warned Holland; but by the time he turned, the two who'd been waiting at the bottom of the stairs had jumped him.

Among the four of them, they managed to get the .38 away from him—almost breaking Holland's arm in the process. He lashed out with fists and feet and prayed his assailants weren't carrying knives. The other passengers screamed and jostled one another in their haste to get out of the way. No one rushed to help.

It was hard to get a good footing on the steps, so his four attackers eventually were able to wrestle him down on his back. “Hey, stop fightin', man,” one of them panted. “We gotcha.”

Holland was aware only of the time ticking away. “All right,” he said quickly. “Take what you want. Inside jacket pocket—wallet.”

“Why, thank you, man,” the talking one said. He took the wallet. He also took Holland's watch. “But we already got what we came for. We got
you
. Get up. You comin' with us.”

Suddenly they were all four holding knives.

Holland got slowly to his feet, trying to think.
They could have cut me at any time
—
what's going on?
He faked a stumble and made a run for it.

They caught him before he reached the street. He couldn't get to his .22, but he twisted his body and used elbows and knees and felt himself making some headway until a searing pain tore through his head, his vision dimmed, and he blacked out.

Consciousness returned slowly. By inches.

At first he was aware only of several blurs of light around him, yellow and indistinct. He closed his eyes but quickly opened them again; the temptation to yield to sleep was too strong. He wondered if he was concussed.

He was lying facedown, his right cheek resting on a hard surface that was rough and gravelly. Something—a pebble?—was pressing against his temple. He tried moving his head; the pain that exploded in his skull forced him to lie completely still for several minutes.

When the pain began to subside, he tried again. This time he managed to pull his head far enough back to free himself of … not a pebble, but something metal that his temple had been lying on. He scraped his cheek on the rough surface but barely felt it. He lay with the small metal object only inches from his eyes,
willing
it to assume a recognizable shape. Eventually it did: a bottle cap. As he watched, it seemed to grow, and grow, and grow …

Despite his best effort not to, Holland slipped away into sleep.

When he woke again, his first thought was:
Marian!
He'd missed the five o'clock meet. His breath came short; had he signed Marian's death warrant? What would Murtaugh have done when he didn't show? Why was he here and where was “here” anyway? Was Marian nearby? Was she still alive? He drifted off again trying to puzzle it out.

The third time he woke his vision had cleared; the bottle cap was only a bottle cap, old and rusty. The blurs of yellow light had resolved themselves into lanterns, four of them, placed in a semicircle around him. Beyond the feeble light cast by the lanterns lay solid darkness. The floor he was stretched out on was cement, covered with litter and filth.

He'd been lying on his hands and they too were hurting now. Slowly and cautiously he eased over onto his side. But when he tried to use his hands to help push himself up to a sitting position, he found they wouldn't separate. He brought his wrists up to eye level, and saw they'd been manacled.

The manacles were attached to a thick chain. Wonderingly, Holland followed the chain hand over hand to its other end: an iron ring set in the cement wall behind him.

He opened his mouth and roared out his anger and frustration, setting off another explosion in his head. But in spite of his pain and the beginnings of despair, one part of his mind noted the four quick echoes that followed his cry of rage.
This place is cavernous
.

He used the chain to pull himself shakily to his feet. In the yellow light he could make out that the iron ring in the wall was new, and the cement immediately around it was clean and a lighter gray than the rest of the wall. Holding on to the chain with both hands, he got both feet up flat against the wall and pulled with his whole weight. The iron ring didn't budge.

The effort took a lot out of him. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. When the jackhammer in his head started to slow down, he opened his eyes and looked around. From his new vantage point, he could see over the tops of the four lanterns placed on the ground; and what he saw was a mound of something behind each lantern.

He moved as close to the lanterns as the length of chain would let him, but he still couldn't quite make out what was piled behind them. He used his foot to push one lantern a little farther out. The yellow light finally revealed what had been concealed in shadow: Holland looked on the peacefully slack face of the young thug who'd taken his watch and wallet.

As quickly as he could manage, Holland moved the other three lanterns. They were all there, all four of his attackers.

And all four of them had been shot.

20

“I had car trouble,” Marian had explained to Captain Murtaugh.
“And
my phone wouldn't work. But the garage said the fuel line had been cut, clean through. So I left the car there for them to put in a new one and took a bus to Hoboken.”

When she'd finally arrived, late in the afternoon, at the laundromat on Meegat Street, Annie Plaxton told her the Hoboken police had been there looking for her. Annie's phones had been taken out by the firebombing—which was more extensive than that at Rita Galloway's house on East Seventy-fifth—so Marian had gone to the nearest Hoboken police station. A few phone calls and she learned Murtaugh and most of her detectives were in Coney Island trying to rescue
her
.

Even riding the bus, she got back to Midtown South before the others. The garage where she'd left the car was closed for the day, so she had to take a cab for the last leg of her journey.

Murtaugh had shouted
“Where the hell have you been?”
when he first heard her voice on his phone.

“In Hoboken,” she'd replied with a touch of irritation, still not knowing what had happened. “Just where I said I was going.”

Murtaugh ordered her to stay in the stationhouse, not even to stick her nose out-of-doors until they got back. So she waited until they all returned from Coney Island, arguing among themselves, confusion and tension thick in the air.

Then they told her the bad news.

Marian's stomach started to churn when she heard Holland had been taken. Murtaugh allowed her a little recovery time, but not much; he expected her to act like a cop no matter how much she was hurting. Marian resented his demand even while acknowledging it was the best thing he could do for her. She washed her face with cold water and went downstairs to the briefing room.

“The whole thing was an elaborate setup,” Murtaugh was saying. “The firebombing in Hoboken was done for one reason only—to get Lieutenant Larch out of the way during the crucial time. Our Mr. Machiavelli even sabotaged her car and her phone to slow her down, to delay her return to the station even longer. Then he sent Curt Holland a videotape he'd made of the two of them over several days' time, to show he could get close to them when he wanted to. Yes, Sergeant?”

“Is this a new case?” Buchanan wanted to know. “Or is it connected to somethin' we're already workin' on?”

“It's the Galloway case,” Murtaugh answered. “The laundromat in Hoboken that was firebombed is connected to the Galloway killings. As I just told you, the firebombing was a diversionary tactic, to draw Lieutenant Larch out of Manhattan so the killer could make Holland and the rest of us think she'd been abducted.”

“Who is this guy Holland anyway?” one of the detectives asked.

Murtaugh looked at Marian. She stood up and said, “He's my personal friend. The Galloway killer invaded my private life and took the single most important person there to use as a hostage.” She had nothing more to add and so sat back down.

“You must be gettin' close,” Buchanan remarked.

The detective who'd asked the question nodded, satisfied now that he had a label for Holland. The other detectives in the room who didn't know Holland—which was most of them—sneaked looks at her back over their shoulders.

Murtaugh continued. “The killer gave instructions on the tape for a meet … phony instructions, as it turned out.”

“Ransom demand?” someone asked.

“Of a sort. The killer said, ‘If you want to see her alive again, you're going to have to do something for me. Something big.'”

“Jesus.” Marian recognized O'Toole's voice.

“Something big … like what?” Sergeant Campos asked. “What kind of work does Holland do?”

“Holland is a former FBI agent who's now a licensed private detective with his own agency, on Lexington,” Murtaugh replied. “You'll not have crossed his path because most of his work has to do with electronic crime. Almost all of the investigators on his staff are computer detectives. Holland probably assumed he was needed to perform some computer wizardry—I know that's what I thought. But that was all part of the ploy. The idea was to make Holland think that Lieutenant Larch had been abducted as a way of getting to him, when in fact it was just the other way around.”

“So what went wrong?” Marian asked.

A number of things had gone wrong, beginning with a couple of those small unforeseeable incidents that can alter a carefully planned operation in the blink of an eye. Captain Murtaugh had told Sergeant Buchanan to assign two of his detectives to ride the subway with Holland. The meet at the entrance to The Hurricane might be a blind (as indeed it turned out to be); Murtaugh thought that the killer's insistence on Holland's taking the subway might mean contact would be made on the train.

So Buchanan had put a man named Provine and a woman named Grant on the job. But before the train had even left Manhattan, a crazy high on crack boarded, shouting evangelical pronouncements and slashing out wildly with a knife. He'd cut one woman and was going after another when Provine and Grant overpowered him. But even without his knife, the crazy was still dangerous; they couldn't kick him loose, and the woman he'd cut needed medical attention. So Grant got off at the next stop, supporting the bleeding woman with one hand and hanging on to the cuffed crazy with the other.

Holland had known nothing about all that; it had happened four or five cars away from where he was riding. After Holland had checked out the entire subway train twice, Provine moved to the car adjoining Holland's where he could keep an eye on him. But the constant swaying of the train during the long ride began to make the detective feel queasy. The farther they traveled, the sicker he got. Soon Provine was sweating profusely and his skin was hot; then his stomach started cramping.