The Silent Bride (28 page)

The killer thought of how perfect Tovah had been for her march down the aisle straight to heaven. Tovah was an angel in heaven now, not a slave in a bad marriage. Why wait? The gun was under the poncho. The poncho hidden by an umbrella. Umbrellas were everywhere. Channel Thirteen umbrellas. Museum of Natural History umbrellas. Chase Bank umbrellas. Black ones, red ones, even American flag ones, touting patriotism.
Ha.
The killer didn't return to the church, and didn't walk away, either.

Prudence hadn't arrived yet. Every second felt like an hour. On Fifth Avenue, the line of limos was a lot longer. The cars were queued up along the block two deep with the windows closed and all fogged up. The killer watched even more cars arrive. The groom arrived. But no Prudence. Things must have gotten stalled by the weather.

Finally!
The family and the bridesmaids arrived. The drivers got out to help the old people and the twelve girls in their colorful gowns and feathered headdresses. So gaudy and tasteless.

Suddenly chaos. The girls were running. They were running to the church, everybody was running. Tovah's killer emerged from the side of the cathedral as Prudence got out of the car.

All in white, no raincoat or anything, Prudence was supported by her portly father and the driver, both wearing tails. One was on each side. They were trying to hurry her along. But Prudence was being careful of her beaded shoes, of the train secured around her wrist by a satin-covered elastic band. She was holding back for her mother and the flurry of squeaking girls in their fluffy chiffon parrot dresses to all get inside first. She had a serene expression on her face despite the rain, as if she knew she was going to a better place. The killer's umbrella went down to hide the gun. Then went up when the shot was fired. It happened in seconds. The first shot grazed Prudence's neck, but it hit an artery and blood bubbled out.

She looked surprised. She stumbled, but was held aloft by the two men on either side of her. Still a good target. The next two shots hit her in the eye and chest. One of the men went down with her. Thunder rumbled in the distance as the screaming started. Prudence's killer had slipped away and war was back.

Thirty-seven

T
he phone on Bellaqua's desk rang. The task force was busy so she let it ring. Seconds later a detective from the Hate Squad hurried in.

"Inspector?"

"Yeah, Rudy, what you got?"

"There's been a shoodng at St. Patrick's. Another bride is likely."
Likely
in police jargon meant likely to die.

"Oh, no." April put her hand to her heart, couldn't help herself.
Oh, shit.
They'd missed something.

"Jesus Christ!" Bellaqua swore. She reached for her purse. Mike said nothing. He was already on his feet. They were out the door.

Down in the garage, Inspector Bellaqua and her driver headed for her four-by-four. Mike wiggled his finger at April. She got into a shiny Crown Vic with him, and they followed the inspector out. Bellaqua's driver, a former helicopter pilot, drove like a maniac, occasionally popping the siren for a few seconds to get through a clot of stalled traffic.

April was quiet as Mike turned on the police radio. It crackled with other matters, the airwaves already shut down tight. As Mike wove the unit through traffic, she studied his tense profile.

"Spooky," she murmured.

"More than spooky." He didn't look over at her.

"Connected?"

Tovah's murder was supposed to be like every homicide, a tornado they couldn't have predicted. A second one was a disaster. April's stomach knotted as if it were all her fault. She shouldn't have slept in, shouldn't have gone shopping this morning, shouldn't have been thinking about herself.

Mike's voice came as a surprise. "Don't be so hard on yourself. Could be a copycat. Could have nothing to do with it."

"Hmmm." She could tell by the furrows in his forehead that he didn't think so, and the instant call to Inspector Bellaqua meant no one else thought so, either.

Ordinarily, no connection would be made between a homicide at a synagogue in the Bronx and a homicide at a church in Manhattan a week later. The fact that the victim was another bride on her wedding day yanked them and Bias right back in. It was a bride case, a certainty now that someone was killing brides. It wasn't religious. It wasn't personal. The trigger was the bride herself. Sick.

Mike got off the drive and headed across town to Fifth, where traffic was already showing the strain. Fifth Avenue was closed between Fifty-third and Forty-eighth streets. Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets were closed between Fifth and Madison. Cars and buses were all snarled up on Madison. News vans with their satellite dishes had already begun to assemble, trying to get as close to the action as possible. Mike hit his siren to get through, then clipped his shield onto his jacket pocket for the two uniforms at the barricade on Fifty-third. April did the same.

The uniforms waved them through, and they drove down the three cleared blocks to Fiftieth. There, the entire front section of St. Patrick's had been cordoned off with yellow tape. At least two dozen officers and brass had assembled to view the first homicide in the Seventeenth Precinct in two years.

Mike parked the car on the west side of the avenue and they got out. The rain had finally stopped, and the sun was just beginning to stab through deep banks of clouds as April looked across the street and saw a body lying there on the red carpet. Mike crossed himself, and April's eyes instantly became a camera.

Click, at the line of limos on Fifth Avenue, their windows all steamed up. Click, at the drivers out of their cars talking to officers in front of Saks. Click, at the two ambulances, doors open. Click, at the two men in tails, one of them large, beefy, stunned-looking with his head cocked to one side as he listened to talking brass. The bride's father? The other man, tall, thin, was talking rapidly, gesticulating while a detective wrote down what he said.

They were earlier on the scene here, and organization happened faster than it had in the Bronx a week ago. The body had been isolated to prevent further contamination. All individuals present at the time of the incident had been separated to prevent them from talking to each other and influencing one another's memories. Also to keep them as far as possible from specialists arriving on the scene. There were always complaints about the callous-sounding greetings and gallows humor of police arriving on grisly scenes. April heard there had been complaints about it from Tovah's family.

Click. No wedding guests were milling around outside. They couldn't be gone already, so the officers must have closed the front doors of the cathedral to keep the entire wedding party contained inside. April's first thought pertained to meaning. Tovah had died surrounded by family and friends. This girl hadn't made it inside. Different message, different shooter?

Click. The girl's body lying there in plain view, right between St. Patrick's and Rockefeller Center. Sometimes victims were left in the open like that while family members stood by, helpless and numb. No matter how mutilated or disturbing the dead looked, they could not be moved until the obligatory forensic work was done. Loved ones—children, mothers, wives, husbands—were left just the way they'd been in the last seconds of their lives, after all hope of sustaining them was gone.

Click. A sheet from one of the EMS vehicles had been thrown over the body. The sheet was not big enough to cover the long swath of bloodied, lacy wedding gown train that hid the girl's feet. The train puddled out from under the operating-room-blue drape like an unchecked milk stain.

They moved closer, walking at a normal speed, fighting the instinct to run. Run and stop it. Save the girl. Chase the perp. April stumbled on the high curb on the other side. Mike reached out and touched her arm. Going into situations, partners had many forms of communication. This wasn't a
watch out.
It wasn't a
slow down.
It wasn't even a
Cuidado, careful now.
He touched her arm in a different way, almost as if to make sure she was still with him. Still alive, and still his.

"Contigo." I'm with you,
she murmured.

He squeezed her upper arm, then let go.
Okay.

A few more steps across the sidewalk. Then, click, she saw the blood, almost black on the red carpet. Blood everywhere. Cops everywhere. Mike headed through rain puddles to the people in the know.

"Captain Coulter, Chief." Precinct captain. Chief of detectives, Avise. Present on a Saturday. They must have been gathered together for some event that was interrupted, April thought.

The two men looked grim. "Mike, glad you're here," the chief said. Today they didn't shake hands.

"You know Sergeant Woo."

"Sergeant." The chief nodded at her.

"Sir."

Two minutes later, Inspector Bellaqua turned up with wild hair. She shook her head when she saw that April and Mike had gotten there first. Her hotshot pilot wasn't such a hotshot after all. Humiliating for her. Then she saw the body.

"Who is it?" were her first words. She shot Mike and April a glance full of meaning neither understood, then listened as the chief answered.

"Prudence Hay. Her father's a big shot on Wall Street. Her husband-to-be is from Pittsburgh. Big money on both sides."

"Jesus. What's the story?"

The chief gestured. "The killer was waiting for her out here." He pointed to the cathedral door on the Saks side.

"We had two uniforms over there in front of Saks. Two more up there." He pointed toward Fifty-first.

They followed his finger as it swept in opposite directions.

"It was sheeting rain. None of them had a clear view. The shooter nailed her as she came toward him. In the face and neck. Ugly. She bled out in seconds."

"Any other witnesses?" Bellaqua appeared to be making some calculations. The body was half-off the sodden red carpet under the dripping canopy about thirty feet from the door. Close enough for both the limo drivers and her father to see something if they'd been looking.

Avise glanced back at the limos with their obscured windows. "It's like a steam room in those cars. None of them saw him."

"What about the father?"

"He was trying to keep his daughter dry. He didn't look up."

Bellaqua nodded. Then, smug as a cat, she took stock of each of them and dropped her bomb. "We have a break in the Tovah case."

April frowned at Mike. They did? When did that happen? He seemed as startled by the news as she was.

"You know that partial thumbprint on one of the shell casings they found at the scene? It took so much time because there was so little minutiae that the match couldn't be made by computer. The partial had to be eyeballed against the prints of every person connected with Tovah's wedding. But we do now have a possible match," Bellaqua reported. "I just heard from FAS."

"Anyone we know?" Mike asked.

Bellaqua paused, holding the moment. She looked at April with a slight shake of her head. That caused

Chief Avise to look at April. Mike looked at April.

What?

April felt the chill of the query, even though directly above them the sun finally pierced through the gloom of a gray, gray day. It shot down from an opening patch of blue with such intensity that the last flurry of rain droplets, hanging wherever they could take purchase, were suddenly transformed into strings of sparkling diamonds. Diamonds hung all around the church, the canopy, and trees in front of it.

April saw the shimmering diamonds of light reflected all around her and got it in an instant. She'd known it on Wednesday. She should have been all over it. She had been thinking backward, not forward. Prudence Hay had been next on Wendy Lotte's party list. But they had cooled on Wendy by then, were hot on Ubu.

"Wendy Lotte," April said with a sinking heart. The print was Wendy's. "Is she here?"

"You tell us. You wanted to be her contact," the chief accused.