Linda Fairstein - Cold Hit

“Can you talk?”

“About what?”

“Never mind. You’ll explain where Daughtry is later, I guess.”

“Sure. No big deal. Is it our guy?” I whispered into the receiver.

“Order a magnum of the champagne, Coop. Anthony Bailor is about to have an incurable case of gangrenous balls. He’s not talking, but he’s the man.”

“What do you mean he’s not talking?”

“He still denies everything, including his name. But I’ve got his mug shots, and the Jersey police ran his prints this morning.”

“Have you arrested him?”

“Why? You gonna give your pal Jake a scoop for the nightly news? No leaks on this one till we know who’s behind it. Bailor took the fall for someone in that last theft he was involved in. There’s got to be a link to somebody in this investigation.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I just want to know what to do next. Should I go down to the office and draw up a complaint on Deni’s homicide? You’re going to have to lodge a warrant so we can start extradition proceedings from New Jersey.”

“Take it easy. I haven’t even told the lieutenant yet. Let me see how the boss wants me to handle it and what the Jersey cops want to hold him on out here. You find out anything useful about Caxton?”

“Not a thing. Where do you want to meet?”

“I’ll call you back as soon as I sort this out. I’ll pick you up at Hogan Place and take you to Saint Vincent’s.”

I hung up and walked the phone back to Wrenley, who seemed absorbed in his checklist.

“Good news? You look a lot happier now than you did ten minutes ago.”

“Please tell Mr. Daughtry I was here. Perhaps he could give me a call tomorrow, and I’ll set up a time to see him.”

“You’ve decided not to wait?” Wrenley stood up, looking at me and shielding his eyes with his right hand. He was facing directly into the sun, which had now saturated the atrium. “Must have some new developments on the case. Have you found Lowell Caxton?”

“No, it’s another matter altogether. Nothing to do with the Caxtons. You’ll probably hear it on the news tonight-an assault in a midtown hotel. I’ve got to get some things started on that one before morning.” No point giving him any information on Anthony Bailor.

“Well, good luck with this. For Deni’s sake I sure hope you get a break soon. I’ll be back up from Florida next week, if you need me for anything.” The late-August sun was like a ball of fire, coming over the tops of the low buildings across the street and sparkling through the wall of glass. I lifted my sunglasses off the top of my head and replaced them on my nose.

My heart was pounding as my mind pieced the clues together at precisely the wrong place and time. Like Anthony Bailor, Frank Wrenley had been raised in Florida. I picked up my bag to leave and did an involuntary double take at Wrenley, who was squinting back at me without benefit of sunglasses.

“You look as if you’ve seen an apparition, Ms. Cooper.”

“Sorry, I’m just very tired. I don’t feel well. I’ll see myself out.” I was backing away from the area around the two sofas, thinking of the sunglasses that had been vouchered at the scene of Marco Varelli’s murder a week earlier. How many coincidences does it take to make a fact?

Wrenley was walking toward me. I quickened my pace, knowing that Brannigan and Lazarro were waiting for me right outside the warehouse door.

“I suppose Detective Chapman has managed to get his hands on Anthony Bailor. Is that what put you in such a good mood, Ms. Cooper?”

I was holding on to the railing now, two levels above the obsolete train tracks cutting through the center of the gallery, dizzy from the combination of vertigo and the question that Wrenley had just asked me.

He broke into a run before I did, and was upon me in a second, grabbing my free arm and spinning me around to face him. He was holding a small-caliber revolver in his right hand, the kind that was probably used to put a hole through the brain behind Marco Varelli’s ear.

“Did Anthony’s wound get worse? Is that how you found him? I couldn’t come up with a physician anywhere to treat him. He’s not exactly John Wilkes Booth. Just couldn’t find a taker. And all I needed was another day or two to tie up loose ends so I could get myself out of town for good. I didn’t want this to happen.” His grip tightened on my wrist.

“So you, Ms. Cooper, will have to be the sacrificial lamb. You might take a terrible fall, say, from the level above us.” He prodded me in the ribs with the gun.

“You can’t get out of this building without me-alive and well.” My voice must have been trembling as I tried to construct a reasonable bluff. “If you kill-” I stopped, unable to complete a sentence that held the implication of my own death. “If you try to hurt me, you won’t be able to walk out the door. There are police officers stationed in the front and back of the building. They have orders not to let anyone in or out without my approval.”

Wrenley stood still, not knowing whether to believe me or not. With the gun held against me, he lifted the glasses off my nose and placed them on himself. Now I blinked as I tried to avoid the direct glare. “Why should I think that’s true? Have you seen the trucks unloading out front for the Dia exhibit? Not even a police car could get through that block.”

“There are two men in plain clothes standing at the entrance of the gallery,” I lied, “and a patrol car with two others out in back. You have yourself to thank for that. It all started after your efforts to kill me the first time, didn’t it? There have been bodyguards taking me everywhere since your attempts on my life.”

I remembered the day I had met Chapman and Wallace here to interview Bryan Daughtry. We had interrupted his meeting with Wrenley. My Jeep had been parked directly in front of the gallery, with my identification plate in the windshield. It was he who must have had me followed from Twentysecond Street to the garage at Lincoln Center. He’d had plenty of time to alert Bailor to try to run me down that night, after the ballet. Wrenley must have thought I’d known more than I did. Maybe he had relied on Mickey Diamond’s made-up headline.

He was considering his options. “I can offer you a livelier proposition, then. You’re going to be my passport out of town.”

Anything that would get me away from this unlikely mausoleum. “What do you mean?”

“Take me downstairs with you and have them drive us wherever I decide to go.”

My panic heightened at the thought of putting another police officer within range of a man with a loaded gun, of exposing Brannigan and Lazarro to this murderous thief. “That might not work,” I said. “If they don’t know you, they won’t fall for that.”

“It can’t be your friend Chapman down there, can it? He just called you from somewhere else. So it must be some uniformed cops who pulled this duty. I’m sure they don’t know you and all your colleagues, do they?”

I couldn’t figure where he was going with this, so I gave an honest answer instead of trying to outguess him. “They’re precinct cops. They don’t know me well.”

“And tell me how well you know Charlie Rosenberg?”

My head was spinning. I couldn’t follow him. The name sounded vaguely familiar but I couldn’t think of who or what he meant. “Who?”

He reached into his left pants pocket and pulled out the gray security badge issued by my office, which dangled from a silver-colored metal chain. With one hand, Wrenley slipped it over his head and let it hang around his neck, like I wear mine at the office. Now it clicked. Charlie was a young assistant who worked in one of the trial bureaus. Like McKinney, he was a morning jogger.