Linda Fairstein - Bad blood

“What is it?” Mike asked, stepping forward to watch as KD picked up the object.

“Looks like a belt buckle.” He held it up for us to see, a silvery metal clasp with bits of shredded leather extending from its sides.

“Give me that light again,” Mike said, pulling a pair of rubber gloves from his rear pocket and practically sticking his nose into the soot-filled car. “Right here.”

KD focused his powerful beam over Mike’s shoulder, as I squatted beside him.

I covered my mouth with the plastic mask that hung around my neck as I stared at the thick, white finger that sat atop the pile.

“Bag it, KD. It’s no bomb that ripped that digit off,” Mike said. “Look at it, Coop.”

He scratched the ashes away from it, exposing the tip of the dirt-encrusted nail down to the beefy knuckle that had caught his attention.

“What do-”

“Too even. Damage from an explosion would be much more ragged. My money’s on a serrated knife,” Mike said. “Somebody sliced this guy’s finger off while he was still breathing. Sawed it off like a hunk of steak.”

“What do you figure, Mercer?” Mike asked. “You think the minute she’s through making love, Coop gets out of bed and heads for the locker room?”

Mercer was pouring drinks in my den as I walked in from the bedroom. I had changed into a collared T-shirt and jeans and was toweling off my wet hair. “Clean is good, Mr. Chapman,” he said. “I wasn’t down in the shaft half as long as you two and I can’t wait to get that smell out of my nose either.”

“You take more showers than any broad I know. Don’t you like it with a little dirt on your uniform, like you just stole second, sliding into base? Be a little daring?”

“I’m taking a break from daring for the long weekend. What did the ME say?”

“Ah, Ms. Cooper is going into her Vineyard tranquillity mode. A walk on the beach, late-afternoon massage, sunset swim. Enough to make you forget the island of Manhattan is about to implode. You remember the drill, don’t you, Mercer?”

“This is all about Joan’s wedding, guys. It’s not too late to change your minds. I can make room for you at the house.”

Joan had come to know Mike and Mercer almost as well as I did. And although the small guest list was a mix of her family and friends, she had sincerely wanted them there with us. Mike was still trying to cope with Val’s sudden death when the invitation came and told Joan that he didn’t want his mood-gloomy and remote-to put a pall on her happiness. Mercer wouldn’t think of going without Mike.

Mike steered the subject back to the water-tunnel death investigation. “Dr. Kestenbaum says antemortem amputation. Hemorrhage in the adjacent tissue. Believes it’s this one,” he said, flexing the first knuckle next to his thumb. “Duke Quillian-that’s a confirmation on the DNA from the mobile lab-was alive when that finger took a walk from the rest of his hand.”

“Any prints on file?” I asked.

“Nope. Never been collared.”

“You figure how we missed a connection to Brendan yet?”

“I’ve been going over and over the possible links all day, since I heard the news. It intrigues me as much as it does you. But there’s not even one damn phone call that suggests that the brothers talked to each other in the last year.”

“Any word on the tire iron?” I asked, sitting on the sofa with my Scotch.

“Like the proverbial hound’s tooth, Alex,” Mercer said. “Nothing on it.”

“Don’t take it too personally, kid,” Mike said, switching the channel from the news to the final few minutes of Jeopardy! “That was just a get-out-of-our-hole signal to all of us interlopers.”

“Those hogs don’t want us down there,” Mercer said. “It’s like they think they’re going to handle this entire investigation themselves. What happened in Water Tunnel Number Three stays in Water Tunnel Number Three. No one we talked to saw people near the shaft at the time the damn thing fell, there’s no video cameras on top, and the cops were all so busy keeping the reporters out of the yard that they weren’t any better at figuring what went on.”

“We’ve got subterranean jurisdiction, don’t we?” Mike asked, restoring the sound with the clicker just as Alex Trebek turned to the big board for the last question.

“Battaglia? If there was an intergalactic crime and a light beam from another planet bounced off the sidewalk in Manhattan, he’d claim jurisdiction. Six hundred feet down? Not an issue.”

“I’m counting on it. Nothing worse than finding a suspect, convicting him of the bombing, and watching while some legal asshole takes this all the way to the Supremes claiming we got no standing south of the subway system. Those are your people, Coop. That’s what they do with a friggin’ law degree.”

“Feathered Friends,” Trebek said. “We haven’t seen this subject in a while, gentlemen. Feathered Friends.”

“I’m out,” Mike said, getting up and walking toward the kitchen. “I’m a city boy. The only bird I know is the pigeon. DNA all over my car and occasionally on the top of my head.”

“Twenty bucks,” I said. “Everybody plays.”

“Speaking of birds, you got anything to eat? Cheese and crackers?”

“Not even that. Sorry. I’ll order in from P. J. Bernstein’s whenever you’re ready.”

“Known as the Lord God bird for its stunning plumage and great wingspan, it was thought until recently to be extinct,” Trebek read aloud from the square blue answer board.

Two of the contestants couldn’t even fake their expressions into a bluff. The third scrawled a short answer on his screen.

“You got it, Coop?” Mike asked, leaning in the doorway of the room.

“Not a clue.”

“Peking duck,” he said.

“Great wingspan and stunning plumage?”

“Not Trebek’s bird. The question is, what do I want Mercer to buy me for dinner?”

“You two need to get a little more religion in your lives,” Mercer said as Trebek subtracted two thousand dollars from the winnings of the Nashville firefighter who had taken a stab at the dodo. “What is the ivory-billed woodpecker?”

“The Lord what?” Mike asked. “You bird-watching on the side?”

“You have to know the swamps and tupelos of Alabama,” Mercer said. “My granny Wallace told me all about it when I was a kid. Got its name ’cause that’s what folk use to cry out when they saw the creature. She had a stuffed one in the attic that she got at a flea market, used to scare me half to death. Lord God bird is right.”

“You can do better than dinner from the deli, can’t you now, Mercer? Shall we upgrade to Chinese?” Mike asked.

“Fine with me,” Mercer said, and I opened the drawer of the side table to find the Shun Lee Palace menu.

Mike’s beeper vibrated on the bar as I took a food order from each of them. There was no point in placing it until he returned the call. He stepped into the living room and came back several minutes later.

“Don’t light any candles or dust off the crystal, Coop. I’m out of here.”

Mercer was on his feet at once. “Where to?”

“Westchester County Sheriff’s Office. Two guys were picked up an hour ago at the Kensico Dam,” Mike said. “It’s a major stop on the Croton Reservoir system that brings water to the city. Used wire cutters to get through the chain-link fence.”

“Sandhogs?” I asked.

“Hardly. Saudi nationals. One of them had a map of the entire system, right down to the hole on West Thirtieth Street.”

“Explosives?”

“No sign of any blast equipment on or around them, and the driver who was waiting for them got away. They’re not talking, but someone called in an anonymous tip fifteen minutes ago. Says the men were planning a chemical attack-dumping a bacterial pathogen in the New York City water supply.”