Lisa Unger - Smoke

On the way down, she’d found herself hoping that it wasn’t Rosario Mendez that they’d found. But then she thought, if it’s not her… then who. Sometimes it seemed like there was nothing to hope for in this line of work. She watched Evelyn, who kept her eyes on the boat, trying to see the face of the corpse no doubt. She looked strained and exhausted; she paced the end of the pier with her hands in the pockets of her thick parka. Evelyn’s partner, Wong, was on medical leave after knee surgery. And with Mount in trouble, they were assigned to each other.

“Can you keep your mind on the job?” asked Kepler when she’d returned to the station.

She nodded, not really sure if she could. But she didn’t have the luxury of flaking; she had Benjamin. As much as she’d like to run off on a crusade to prove Mount’s innocence, she needed to do her job and do it well for her son. Luckily, she had a repentant ex-husband with a lot of time on his hands.

“Good. Because there’s nothing you can do for him right now,” said Kepler, sitting down at his desk. He actually sounded human. She found herself examining him as he sifted through papers on his desk.

“You know he didn’t do this, right?”

He looked up at her and gave her a quick shrug. “That’s not for me to decide. Innocent until proven guilty, as far as I’m concerned,” he said with no feeling at all.

“Right,” she said.

He looked at her, seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but then the moment passed. Finally, he said, “Wong’s out on leave. Work with Rosa until things are… resolved.”

He didn’t look up at her again, started scribbling something on the page in front of him. She wondered, not for the first time, what made this guy tick. He obviously didn’t give a shit about the job or the people who worked with him. Why be a cop if you just didn’t care at all? Nobody was in it for the money. She nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her, and left his office. Fifteen minutes later the phone rang about a floater in the East River.

Jesamyn and Evelyn watched as the boat approached the pier, engines sputtering, smoke filling the air with the aroma of gasoline. One of the guys on board threw a line which Evelyn caught and tied off on a cleat. She jumped on board as another guy tied off the stern line. Jesamyn stayed on the dock and watched as Evelyn uncovered the body and stood staring for a second. She laid the sheet back down after a second, looked at Jesamyn, and nodded. She felt a dryness in her throat.

Jesamyn climbed on board and stood beside Evelyn, who lifted the sheet again. The wind whipped around them. Rosario’s face was bloated and green, badly decomposed but not unrecognizable from the photos Jesamyn had seen. There was a tiny lump beside her on the gurney where they’d laid her, which Jesamyn was careful to keep covered. That was something she didn’t want to see.

She lifted a hand to her nose against the wet, heavy stench that came off of the body. Something had been at her, probably more than one thing. Jesamyn pulled back the sheet farther. She wanted to see what Rosario had been wearing. A long gray knit cotton dress, like a nightgown. Not something you’d wear to the club. Something you’d wear if you were pregnant and tired and home for the evening.

“The guy that pulled her out says it looks like there was a blunt-force trauma to the back of her head. But it’s hard to tell at this point,” said Rosa.

“She didn’t get dressed to go to the clubs,” said Jesamyn.

“What?” asked Evelyn.

“Baby Boy said that Alonzo was hounding her that night to go out. When Baby Boy came home, he said that what she’d been wearing when he left was folded on the bed. That he figured she’d gotten dressed and gone out to avoid a fight.”

Evelyn nodded. “But she didn’t get dressed.”

“It doesn’t appear so,” said Jesamyn lowering the sheet. Evelyn was quiet a moment, looked at the gray sky turning black over Jesamyn’s head.

“So what are you thinking?” she asked. Her voice was smoky and deep, her eyes heavy and thoughtful.

“I’m not sure,” Jesamyn said. The medical examiner came up behind her quickly and startled her.

“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t sound sorry at all as he nudged her out of the way. She stepped aside and let him start taking pictures. As she stepped off the boat onto the dock, she saw an unmarked Caprice pull up, and two guys she recognized from Midtown North homicide stepped out. She couldn’t remember their names, but she remembered Mount saying he didn’t like the tall one with the bad skin and the strawberry blond hair. She hadn’t heard anything too bad about his Latino partner, other than that he was a bit of a dog.

“Hey, Breslow,” said the redhead as they approached. “I heard you got a floater.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking at him. She tried to remember his name but it wouldn’t come to her.

He looked at her a second. “I heard some fucked-up shit about your partner today,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. There was a kind of malicious glee there that made her want to slap his pale white face.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said, squaring off her shoulders at him.

“I don’t,” he said, raising his palms and giving her a condescending smile. “Seriously, though. What’s the deal?”

Her cell phone sounded then and she’d never been so happy to hear its annoying little ring.

“You can talk to Evelyn over there. She’s the principal on the Mendez case,” she said, giving him a look and answering the phone.

“Breslow.”

“You’re my one phone call,” said Mount.

“Jesus,” she said, feeling her heart skip she was so happy to hear his voice. She walked away so that the others wouldn’t hear her conversation.

“Get me the fuck out of here, Jez.”

She sighed, looked at the cold gray waters of the East River. Two seagulls fought in the air over something one of them was holding in his mouth. They were screaming bloody murder.

“How would you like me to do that?” she said quietly. “You’re envisioning a jailbreak maybe?”

She heard him breathing on the other end. “Tell me you know I didn’t do this.” He sounded tired, afraid.

“I know, Matt,” she said without hesitation. “I know you couldn’t do it.”

“They’re doing this… The New Day.” She believed that, too. But something about the way he said it made him seem so desperate, a little unstable. She knew no one would believe him, unless they could prove it somehow.

She didn’t say anything.

“You need to figure it out, Jesamyn,” he said when she didn’t answer. “How they got that videotape, planted the evidence in my car, how they got that witness to tell the story he told.”

“What about the fingerprints? How did they get your fingerprints in there?”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “My fingerprints would have been in there already.”

She sighed. “Oh, Matt. Christ.”

“I was there that night, the night she was killed. They must have been waiting for me to come and go.”

She exhaled through pursed lips in a soft whistle. That was very bad news. Yeah, Officer, I was there that night with the prostitute but she was fine when I left her. I swear .

“I-cared about her. She was a good person,” he said, his voice catching. “She didn’t deserve this.”

“Okay,” she said, pushing any uncertainty from her voice. “We’re going to figure out how they’re doing this to you. We’re going to prove that you’re being set up.”

“Start with that witness.”

“We’re already on it.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Dylan’s got some time on his hands.”