Ed Dee - The Con Man's Daughter

"I can't answer that, but think about who's dead: Lukin and both Caruso brothers. You're the only possible conspirator left."

"Oh, now I'm a possible conspirator."

"It's the only thing that makes sense. The reason they haven't come back here is because cops have been all over this place."

"They already searched my house."

"What about Paulie's boat?"

"He sold it before he went to Sicily," Eddie said. "But boats have VIN numbers, like cars. It's traceable. The marina might have old records."

"Didn't they find Misha's body dumped in this same marina?"

"Yeah, but quite a distance from where ours was kept."

"Ours?"

"Well, it wasn't mine, but I probably spent more time on it than Paulie did. I told you that I slept on it many nights when I was too tired or too drunk to drive home."

Babsie made notes on the boat. The picture didn't show the registration number. It did show the slip number.

"Is that a ninety-one or a sixteen?" Babsie asked.

"It's a ninety-one. The slip numbers were stenciled on the dock, facing the boat."

"Where did they dump Misha's body?"

"On seventeen."

"But he crawled there from sixteen. The bloodstains started on sixteen. They thought it was ninety-one."

"You've been watching too much Columbo ."

Eddie remembered the boat far better than anything else that had occurred during those years. Sitting on a dock, twenty yards from traffic on Emmons Avenue, it seemed like another world-a world too good to last.

"I'll stop by and check the marina tonight," he said.

"You're going back to Brighton Beach already?"

"I never finished all the lesbian bars. Sooner or later, I'll find Zina in one of them."

"Yeah, well, you won't have that much time to chat with the girls tonight. Matty Boland called again. They have another big operation going. They want us at One Police Plaza. Two a.m."

"Both of us?"

"Don't worry, I'll drive my own car. You go do your dyke-trolling thing. Just meet me at police headquarters."

'TWO A.M.?"

'Two a.m.," she said. "I'll bet it's another operation generated off information from you. Boland is using you like a trust fund. You'd think the guy would spend at least one day working on Kate. He pretends he's Mr. Concerned, but he's nothing but a self-absorbed prick."

Eddie turned the picture around. He looked closely at Caruso, and for the first time he saw a heavy-lidded, brooding face. When he'd first met Paulie, Eddie envied him as a person capable of living in the moment. The change came later; the anger followed. Time and circumstance changed you in ways you could never imagine. Or maybe they brought out the real you. Shafts of light filtering through the oak trees streaked the kitchen floor.

Wednesday, April 15

2:00 A.M.

Because of the brazen murder of two people in the El Greco diner, an elite group of law-enforcement officers gathered without fanfare in the early hours of Wednesday at NYPD headquarters in One Police Plaza. Press and TV crews remained camped in Brooklyn, bemoaning the lack of investigative progress while focusing their cameras on the bloodstains at the foot of the diner's steps. The entire city seemed stunned by the callous nature of the crime: A mother singing "Happy Birthday" to her daughter had been brutally murdered in front of her family. Eddie Dunne, referred to as an "unnamed eyewitness," provided a face to the tragedy. The scowl of the madman Sergei Zhukov terrified viewers of every newscast in the tristate area. The city of New York, riding the crest of the largest homicide reduction in its history, was not about to allow one incident to trigger a backslide.

"How did they treat you in the dyke bars tonight?" Detective Babsie Panko asked.

Since early afternoon, Eddie Dunne had been visiting every known lesbian bar in the city. His source was a free magazine he'd picked up in Manhattan.

"Mostly, they were nice," he said. "Too nice. That's what worries me. They knew about me, and treated me like some sad old uncle, down on his luck. They took my card and promised they'd call if they heard anything about Kate or Zina. They were sweet, sympathetic. I think I liked it better when they were throwing hand grenades."

Babsie and Eddie took seats in the back of the auditorium. The auditorium, on the first floor of One Police Plaza, was an odd mixture of brick and Danish-style wooden slats, but it was well capable of handling a force of over one hundred. The walls on opposite sides of the room were lined with large pieces of cardboard displaying hand-drawn numbers. The numbers corresponded to the teams that would be handed separate assignments. They caught Matty Boland hustling toward the stage.

"What's my role here?" Eddie asked.

"Finger man," Boland said. "We can depend on you to pick Sergei Zhukov out of a roomful of Russkies. Babsie's here as a courtesy, mostly. Intersecting cases and all. You're both riding with me."

"Lucky us," Babsie said.

The bulk of the manpower had been drawn from the vast pool of the NYPD, forty thousand strong. Officers had been pulled from a variety of different specialties, and most didn't know one another. Each team consisted of at least one member of the FBI's Joint Russian Task Force, two investigators and one supervisor from the Organized Crime Control Bureau, plus two uniformed and heavily armed members of the NYPD Emergency Services Unit. At the briefing, names would be read aloud and squad numbers assigned. They'd be told to meet with fellow squad members under the posted number on the wall, make the introductions short, and get on the road. A cadre of technicians and specialists, including a dozen cops from the Auto Crime Division, had been handpicked by Detective Matty Boland. As soon as Eddie saw all the Auto Crime cops, he knew it had to be a junkyard.

"How did you find him?" Eddie said.

"Sources," Boland said, winking. "We have solid intelligence reports that he's in Flushing Salvage, waiting on a ship going east. Let's leave it at that."

Because he knew how the NYPD worked, Eddie knew Boland's information couldn't have come through intelligence channels. The desk jockeys on the upper floors of the Puzzle Palace tended to milk their exposure to an operation this big, enhancing their visibility. This had all happened too quickly. It had to be hot off the bug they'd just put inside the Mazurka. Info snatched from a fresh conversation held deep inside the Russian nightclub.

Boland then told them that Yuri Borodenko, owner of Flushing Salvage, had buried a single-width two-bedroom mobile home on the property. Entrance to the underground trailer was down through a new metal storage building in the center of the huge junkyard. Word was they used the buried trailer as a central processing location for cash and contraband.

"Our problem," Boland said, "is they've been digging tunnels from the trailer out. The tunnels end beneath the shacks across the street. Exactly how many, we don't know. Minimum, three. That's why we needed so many teams. We've absolutely got to cover all possible escape routes."

"Hit fast and hard."

"No shit," Boland said. "But the whole block needs to be totally surrounded long before we hit the gate."

"Entree courtesy of Freddie Dolgev's keys?"

"No keys this time. Bolt cutters and battering rams all the way. Noisy as hell, but it doesn't matter. Their dogs will be going apeshit anyway."

"This underground trailer would be a good place to hide someone else," Babsie said, reminding Boland they had a kidnapping investigation going, as well.

"I didn't mean to gloss over that," he said. "I tried to put Kate's picture in all the packets, but the attorneys nixed it. They don't want it to appear like a fishing expedition; Kate's not the subject of the warrant, and we have no evidence that she's in there. But if she is, you'll have her home tonight."