A Clean Kill (4 page)

Four

W
hen the homicide call came in, Lieutenant April Woo Sanchez, commanding officer of the Midtown North Detective Unit, was about to go on vacation. It was Monday. She was leaving Friday. Her mind was on cleaning things up at the shop so she could bolt, and never had she wanted to escape work as much as she did now. She was excited, almost vibrating with vacation anticipation as she rode in an unmarked black Lumina with her driver, Detective Woody Baum.

She was on her way back from a meeting with the chief of detectives, Chief Avise. He'd called her downtown, and as was common with his meetings, they'd met at police headquarters, which was near Chinatown where she'd grown up and begun her career but worlds from where she lived and worked now. From her West Fifty-fourth Street precinct, she and Woody had traveled downtown on the West Side Drive. An hour and a half later they were returning the same way.

At ten a.m., they were circling the tip of Manhattan where the Statue of Liberty could be seen in the bay, holding up the torch of freedom. April's thoughts were crowded with the ten thousand tasks

she had to accomplish at Midtown North before leaving for her first real vacation ever. She and her new husband, Captain Mike Sanchez, were off on the honeymoon they'd already postponed two times since tying the knot in a big Chinatown wedding the previous fall.

Twice NYPD business had gotten in the way, but not like in the old days when Mike had been head of the Homicide Task Force. Back then, they'd often worked together on cases, and it was murder that wrecked their plans. Now things were different. Mike had been promoted to captain. She'd been promoted to lieutenant. They'd moved up in the food chain, had become bigger bosses, and didn't have time to get hitched, move from Queens into their house in Westchester, and take off on a-honeymoon all at the same time. So they'd married, moved into their dream house, and gone back .on the job a week later. Honeymoon postponed. Then an orange alert at New Year's postponed it again, and something came up again in the early spring.

Nearly nine months had passed, and there had been no exotic location, no sitting on the beach, no mai tais or pina coladas. Still, April considered herself more than half lucky. In normal times a promotion would have required her to leave the Detective Bureau and go back into uniform as a supervisor, or an administrator, like Mike.

But nothing post-9/11 would ever be normal times again. The bureau had lost so many ranking officers to retirement and to special counterterrorist units that experienced detectives were at a premium. Mike had left homicide to become commanding officer of the Seventeenth Precinct. But April remained in the bureau assigned to the commanding officer slot at Midtown North after her boss and nemesis, Lieutenant Arturo lriarte, retired. It had seemed like a good thing at the time.

The advantage of rank was that she could come and go without anyone yelling at her. The problem was that freedom was limited by responsibility. All the crimes that occurred in her precinct were on her shoulders. A lot of activity occurred in midtown on the West Side of Manhattan. She was in charge of every complaint—every mugging, theft, break-in, assault, homicide, missing person, whatever. She assigned the detectives in her unit, oversaw every investigation, and followed each case to arrest, prosecution, and trial. Every day, whether it was quiet or busy in the precinct, she had the job of juggling schedules, skills, personalities, and personal problems. She was buried deep in administration, and her head was lost in process almost 24/7. But this time she was determined to make her precious escape.

It was a June morning, weatherwise a perfect New York day—neither too hot nor too cold. The sun was on high. The squawk box was on low. Officers' conversations with the dispatcher were further muted by Woody's whistling through his teeth. It wasn't a real whistle, more like a tuneless little hiss. Usually it bothered her enough to tell him to shut up. Today she paid no attention to it. She was thinking about how every time she went downtown, the rules changed just a little, and change always caused chaos for somebody. In this case it was a big problem. It was a sad thing, but something she shouldn't be handling at all.

Strictly speaking Vice should be in charge of the strip clubs. Vice or DEA. Her task should be limited to preparing her new second whip, Sergeant Eloise Gelo, for taking command while she was gone. The trouble with Eloise was she looked like a lap dancer with a badge. That gave the male officers who dominated in the caveman detective unit an excuse for staring at her with drool hanging out of their mouths rather than taking her seriously. A male problem in a circular kind of way that was not unlike what called her downtown to Chief Avise's office. Girls distracting boys caused disorder at every level of society.

In this case the young son of a U.S. senator from another state had squandered his entire trust fund (she was surprised that this particular senator's son had a trust fund) in some local strip clubs, and he wasn't even twenty-one. So he shouldn't have been served the alcohol, much less the cocaine, that caused him to lose all sense of reason. On top of that, young Peret's cocaine overdose had landed him in a psych ward, where last night he'd been a raving psychotic. Chief Avise was taking the case personally as a serious embarrassment to New York City. He wanted war on the clubs that served underage customers, and the strippers who pushed two-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne, as well as ecstasy, methamphetamine, weed, and cocaine, on boys (and men) who wanted to touch their bodies.

It was a tall order since strip clubs had gotten very popular again. This was a sad irony because free sex was available everywhere. Thousands of single women thronged to the bars. every night to drink themselves silly on exotic martinis and try to get laid. Free sex, though, posed the problem to men of having to relate. They had to make strangers like them and hope for a real connection when they had no interest in that at all. At the strip clubs, customers didn't have to make friends. The strippers came to them and would do anything—for a price. The oldest con in history was alive and well. Clientele seeking excitement mingled with naked lap dancers who primed them for bigger things. Sometimes, in the private rooms, the girls got the out-of-town customers wasted, then lifted money and other items from their wallets. At four in the morning a lot of things happened.

The descent into hell was always worse for the kids. In three months Justin Peret had gotten addicted to thrills he couldn't get anywhere else. He'd squandered a hundred grand and was working on reducing his nostrils from two to one. Still, he was one of the lucky ones. ER rooms all over the tri-state were jammed with ODs every weekend, and sometimes they couldn't be revived.

April brooded on the problem. Her unit didn't have the manpower (or womanpower for that matter) to do undercover work in the clubs. And the precinct captain, who was in charge of reducing crime in his area, should be relying on the Conditions Unit—the detectives in charge of monitoring unusual criminal activity in the precinct—to take care of these problems. Vice and DEA should also be involved. The captain should do the mopping up, not the detective unit that was responsible for all other crimes. April wondered what Avise was up to, asking her to go around the end zone on the precinct captain. In any case, the assignment was a threat to her honeymoon.

She wished she didn't always have to pay such close attention to her boss. When she was little, her old-style Chinese mother had to yell to get her attention. "You stupid, ni? You blain go on vacation, Howaday Inn?"

Before she was a cop, she didn't listen to anything she didn't want to hear, and she blew tasks off whenever she felt like it. For the police, however, every incident could have life-and-death consequences. Even though she wished her brain and her body could go on vacation to Holiday Inn, she couldn't ignore an order. The parent she called Skinny Dragon Mother still had a name for her: worm—triple stupid for being a cop, and a thousand times stupider than that for marrying another cop, who wasn't even Chinese. And ten thousand times stupider than all the previous stupids, for letting a bunch of white ghosts boss her around. Sometimes she was right.

"Homicide in the Seventeenth," Woody -said, breaking into her reverie.

"What?" Reluctantly, April tuned in.

"Female, Fifty-second Street, town house, four hundred block. That's way east."

"Shit," April muttered. The Seventeenth was Mike's precinct. The last thing they needed was a homicide now. Her cell phone began to ring in her purse. She plucked it out and saw that caller ID was blocked. That meant it could be anybody in the Department, or even her Skinny Dragon Mother.

"Lieutenant Woo Sanchez." Sometimes she called herself Woo and sometimes Woo Sanchez to distinguish herself from her husband, the former Lieutenant Sanchez.

"Querida,
where are you?" As usual Mike's voice was calm in the eye of a storm. But she could feel his tension just the same.

"Just heading up the West Side Drive,
mi amor.
What's up?" April already knew what was up, the new homicide. She glanced at Woody.

"I want you to take a look at a body," he said quietly, then gave her the address.

She heard the name. It was familiar, but she couldn't quite place it. Didn't matter. Someone was murdered. That always changed everything. "I'm on my way," she told him.

Five

H
omicides always caused a peculiar vibration in April's body. She could feel it start as the car changed direction and they headed east to look at the victim, instead of uptown to deal with drug-dealing strippers. April had been planning to put Sergeant Gelo, who'd fit right into the club scene, on the Justin Peret case. In the old days she used to drop her vacation plans and take care of everything herself, shut down whoever needed to be shut down. But now she had to get used to being a boss, and was trying to learn to delegate responsibility. She couldn't personally take on every single problem that came her way. Still, it didn't matter whose problem rogue strippers should be; when Avise told her to jump, she asked how high. She was a loyal officer, who always did what she was told. Almost always.

Murder was the ultimate crime that pushed everything else onto the back burner. Each time it happened April was jolted into high gear. The harmony of life was shattered, and she wanted to jump out of the car, race after the perpetrator, and catch him quickly before he had a chance to escape. Or she did—whoever it was. Each time she was overwhelmed by rage at the wrong that had been done and felt an urgency to correct it. But this wasn't her case. She shouldn't be thinking about this. She didn't want to be involved. She just wanted the world to be safe for once so she could go on her honeymoon.

And something else bothered her. She and Mike hadn't worked a homicide together in almost a year, not since she and her parents had been attacked by a murder suspect in their home in Astoria, Queens. After that case, they'd moved on in separate jobs; and they had an unspoken rule to keep it that way. Mike's call both surprised'her and made her anxious. She had other plans. She had to get Sergeant Gelo on track. Then they were taking a plane to paradise. She didn't want anything to interfere with that. Even as she was thinking this, she knew her feelings were entirely selfish and felt bad about them.

"What's up, boss?" Woody tried to make conversation, but she wasn't in the mood.

Her mood darkened even more when they got there. Two Hispanic male uniforms manned the blue barricade that partially blocked Fifty-second Street on the east side of First Avenue. As Woody drove across the street, the taller one tried to wave them north. Woody kept going until the uniform could see the ID clipped to April's new purple spring jacket.

"All right. You can put it there." He pointed to the last open slot in a long line of blue-and whites and unmarked Department vehicles that reached down practically to the river.

Woody pulled into the spot, and April was out of the car before he'd even killed the engine. "Boss?" he called after her.
Don't I get a look?

No.

He didn't have to say it, and neither did she. Like old partners who'd been through it all dozens of times, they communicated in shorthand. She patted the air over her shoulder as she walked away.
Stay here. Make friends with the neighbors; start asking questions. Shoot some candids with your little digital camera. Figure it out.

"Whatever you say, boss." The preppy-looking cop who didn't always get things right had his uses.

She hurried down the tree-lined street past the clots of dog-walkers and gawkers. Like an old beat cop, she found herself sniffing the air. After another long frigid winter, the sun had finally returned to warm the city. Trees dressed in lush new leaves lined both sides of the street. Greening ivy trailed out of the square tree plots, which were enclosed by little iron fences with spokes to keep the dogs out. Details like this made the difference in a neighborhood.

This wasn't a commercial area like Midtown North. This was a high-priced residential East Side neighborhood where order was required. When violence shattered that order, the status of the residents alone demanded something be done about it. April didn't want to get entangled in the kind of politics she knew would be involved in a case like this. Mike was not asking her to take a look, then walk out like the other brass, who left the job of investigation to others. She'd never been able to do it anyway. Like a reporter or a first responder to a catastrophic event, once she showed up at the party she had to stay to the end. She was thinking,
Be smart this time. Walk in and walk out.