COPS SPIES & PI'S: The Four Novel Box Set Page 11

  From behind her came a shuffling sound. Elaine noticed a woman bent with age, holding a large brown shopping bag.

  Elaine shrugged, opened the door, and stepped into the small entryway. The sound followed.

  “Excuse me, miss,” the old woman called in a quavering voice.

  “Yes?” Elaine asked, pausing.

  The old woman said nothing; she climbed the steps until she was only two feet from Elaine. She smiled.

  Elaine thought it was an odd-looking face—surreal and masklike. “Yes?”

  “Inside! Now!” the old woman commanded.

  Elaine became aware of two things: The old woman’s voice had changed, and her gloved hand held a strange weapon.

  “Move!”

  Elaine Samson’s eyes locked on the weapon.

  “Please,” she said, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  <><><>

  April 2

  The Atlantic Avenue section of Brooklyn, which once housed hundreds of thousands of Jews, was now a teeming confluence of misplaced Arabs: Palestinians, Libyans, Iraqis, and Syrians living within its confines.

  On this Friday night, Atlantic Avenue teemed with thousands of Arabs, many of whom were welcoming the end of the Moslem Sabbath, which had passed with the sun.

  Groups of men and women, mostly college students, sat in coffee houses, drinking the thick coffee of their homeland and discussing philosophies of insurrection.

  At one small table, surrounded by eight students, Barum Kaliel held court. He was from Jordan and did not hide his leftist politics as he railed against the workings of the democratic country he studied in. His own country, and the Arab countries surrounding Jordan, were indeed in the thrall of the United States, he said, and as long as they stayed that way, Israel and the Zionists would always be able to keep them separated and weak. He espoused a doctrine of solidarity: He believed that by uniting all the Arab countries under a single socialist regime they would become one of the most powerful forces in the world.

  One of the students, a Palestinian, laughed at him. “And how would you do that when a single country can’t even run itself properly?”

  “By making it run properly. Our history is long, and in it one can see that there has been no unity since the time of the Crusades.”

  “Since before that,” said a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student, her black eyes good-naturedly mocking Kaliel.

  “How would you go about unifying the Arab world?” asked a nineteen-year-old Palestinian boy.

  “By creating a unilateral movement in each country with a core of believers who would grow within each government and regime. When the cores reach the inner heights of the governments, they would unite. At that point, each country would become a separate state, run as such, but under the authority of one central government.”

  “The United States of Arabia,” said another student.

  “The name is unimportant. Only the act is important.”

  “If enough optimists can be found. But Barum,” said the female graduate student, “Muslims are not predisposed to optimism.”

  “But youth is. And that is where we must recruit from.”

  “We?” asked an Iranian student.

  “We,” Kaliel agreed, looking from face to face.

  “It is late,” the Iranian said, pushing his chair away from the table. “Goodnight.”

  Barum Kaliel stood. It was almost two A.M. He said goodnight to the rest of the students and started toward his apartment building.

  He walked along Atlantic Avenue for five blocks before turning onto a small side street. The lampposts glowed dully in the cool night. A swirling mist thickened the night.

  His building was halfway down the street. He walked slowly, his mind whirling with the thoughts of revolution.

  He saw a bent old man shuffling toward him. Kaliel shook his head. He would never allow them to beat him down like that poor fool. When he drew nearer to the old man, he saw the man’s eyes were on him.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked.

  The old man straightened, smiled. A mass of wrinkles spread across his face. His eyes glistened. “You!”

  Barum Kaliel stared at the old man. He stepped back, but he was too late.

  The old Arab pulled a weapon from beneath the folds of a ragged cloak.

  Kaliel looked at the gleaming black cross. He sensed danger. “Who are you?” he asked, raising his hands.

  The old man remained silent. He squeezed the trigger smoothly.

  A stainless steel projectile propelled forward.

  Barum Kaliel screamed. The scream lasted only the time it took for the steel tip to pass through his left eye and lodge in his brain.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Raymond Hyte left the window and returned to his desk. The overcast afternoon, so typically March in April, offered little to dwell on. His desk, littered with reports of the sex crime unit and borough homicide squads was equally gray.

  There had been eighty-two rapes in March: eleven by unknown assailants, sixty-nine by husbands and boyfriends, and two homosexual rapes.

  The monthly homicide report showed nothing unusual either. Of the twenty-seven violent deaths in March—a rather low number—only three were unsolved. The other twenty-four were, in the parlance of the Department, grounders, crimes that needed no investigation. Twenty-four deaths and twenty-four perps. Husbands, wives, or lovers had committed eighteen of the homicides. Two men died in a gang fight in Spanish Harlem; in Bed-Sty, a drug distributor who thought four men were robbing him, shot them. The distributor was out on bail.

  The three unsolved cases were still open. They were mysteries, and Hyte thought that they would stay that way. That’s what usually happened if they didn’t catch the perpetrator in the first week.

  He picked up his coffee. It was cold, but he drank it anyway. It was almost two. The daily computer report would be in soon.

  Hyte exhaled slowly, thinking about the changes in his life these past nine months. After the hijacking of Flight 88, he had undergone surgery to remove bullet fragments from Mohamad’s ricochet. There was permanent damage to his left shoulder. He would have only eighty percent use of the arm. It was, the doctor had added, enough to qualify him for a medical pension.

  He’d thought about retirement. It hadn’t been a pleasant notion. Two days later, Chief of Detectives Philip Mason, his mentor, had come to visit him. Mason had read the surgeon’s official report.

  “What are you going to do?” Mason asked.

  “I don’t know. Try to be a lawyer again?”

  “You’re a cop, not a lawyer.”

  “Not anymore. I’m not comfortable behind a desk.”

  “You could try it for a while. I want you on my staff. Remember that idea you came up with last year? The one about coordinating crime information between PDUs? Why not give it a shot? The worst that can happen is you add a little more time to your pension.”

  Hyte had agreed. During his metamorphosis from a lieutenant with the Criminal Investigation Resources Division Special Crimes Unit to a desk jock at headquarters, he’d come up with an idea to help spot pattern criminals faster. With Jon Rosen, one of the Department’s computer specialists, he had set up a special program in the main computer. Within two weeks, Hyte found his first criminal. A pattern burglar-rapist.

  The program gave him the means to come up with a thread that tied all the victims of the criminal together. He was then able to direct the detectives to the rapist. It took four months, but Hyte found the man, and the unit arrested him.

  The only hitch in the program was that it correlated every type of crime. He’d asked Rosen if he could narrow the program’s parameters. “It can do anything you want,” the sergeant told him, “but each time you have a new set of parameters, another program has to be set up. That will slow things down. Leave it alone, Ray. Get a human brain to sift through the debris.”

  He did. That human brain was Patrolman Sally O’Rourke, his combination assistant,
secretary, and roadblock. Patrolman O’Rourke was in much the same situation as Hyte. She had come to him from the Eighty-first Precinct, where a truck, driven by a man who disliked the fact that women were out on patrol and not in the kitchen, ran her down.

  O’Rourke was given a choice not unlike Hyte’s—disability retirement or a clerical spot at headquarters. O’Rourke, at twenty-seven, had opted for headquarters. Hyte was glad she did. She was invaluable.

  “Back to work,” he muttered, picking up the forty-eight on the top of his in basket. A forty-eight is Department code for official letterhead stationery. This particular one was from the first whip of the Twentieth Precinct—a follow-up to Hyte’s memo about a rash of burglaries plaguing Riverside Drive. The computer program had picked up a pattern. Hyte had sent it over to the Precinct Detective Unit.

  The PDU caught the man five days later.

  The intercom on Hyte’s phone rang. It was Philip Mason. “Come upstairs, now.”

  “On my way.”

  “I’ll be with the chief,” he told O’Rourke when he stepped into his outer office.

  Two minutes later, Hyte entered the chief of detective’s thirteenth-floor office. A woman with azure eyes sat on Mason’s couch.

  “Lieutenant Hyte,” Philip Mason said, “may I introduce Deputy Commissioner McMahon, of Public Affairs.”

  Hyte went over to McMahon and shook her hand. She had a firm grip. Her skin was dry and cool. “Commissioner,” he said guardedly.

  “Lieutenant,” she replied with a curt nod.

  “Scotch?” Mason asked them both.

  The offer of the drink was unusual; Mason knew he rarely drank at this hour. It raised a warning flag.

  He took a seat across from McMahon, while the chief poured the drinks. Mason’s actions added to his sense of discomfort. The chief of detectives does not pour a drink for a lieutenant, not even for the man who had called him “Uncle Phil” for most of his life; usually, Mason would tell Hyte to make himself a drink. Mason was putting on an act for the deputy commissioner and Hyte took his cue.

  He used the opportunity to study McMahon. According to Department rumor, she was barely thirty-six and too inexperienced for her job. Looking at her traditional Irish face, he got a sense she was a lot tougher than anyone gave her credit for.

  Mason handed out the drinks, still maintaining his silence.

  McMahon raised her glass and sipped. When she lowered it, she looked at Hyte. “The commissioner wants you to know he thinks you did a top-notch job with the West Side rapist.”

  “Thank you,” Hyte said. His drink remained untouched. He disliked praise, especially when it came from the higher levels of the Department. He knew there would be a kicker—there always was.

  McMahon set the glass on the marble coffee table. “I’m a bit puzzled about your declining Joan Leighton’s request for an interview on the evening news. Why was that?”

  “I don’t believe in giving other people ideas about how to commit crimes, or how to get away with them.”

  “Please, Lieutenant,” McMahon said. “Discussing the method of apprehending a criminal can’t be considered as giving guidelines to would-be rapists.”

  “More than you think. Besides,” Hyte said, crossing his leg, “I shouldn’t be the focus of attention. There were a dozen men on that case. All of them responsible for the capture of Dantan. I just gave them the means.”

  McMahon’s face did not change; her tone did. “That’s very noble; however, there are certain people who seem to draw the focus of the press. You happen to be one of them.” She paused to sip her drink. “The PC and the mayor feel that the Department has had too much bad press lately. We think it would be in the Department’s best interest for you to do this interview.”

  Hyte held McMahon’s stare. “In other words, you’re ordering me to do the interview.”

  “Let’s say it’s good advice for you to call Leighton today,” McMahon said. She stood. “Nice meeting you, Lieutenant.”

  “Do it, Ray, it’s the right move,” Mason said when they were alone.

  Hyte easily translated Mason’s statement. If he wanted ‘to be made’—promoted to captain—he’d better do what he was told. Things worked that way on the Job. You follow orders and you get somewhere, as long as you have someone behind you, like the chief of detectives.

  The phone rang. Mason went behind his desk to answer it. Hyte gazed at his mentor.

  Phil Mason was fifty-nine. Hyte’s father and Mason had grown up together in Brooklyn, and had joined the Department at the same time. They’d gone through the Academy together, had even been assigned to the same precinct.

  Raymond Hyte, Sr., and Philip Mason had risen through the departmental ranks until the time had come for them to make their most important career decisions. Patrol or detective.

  Raymond Hyte, Sr., had elected to stay with patrol—he believed in the presence of the uniform. Philip Mason went for a detective’s gold shield. Yet their careers continued to parallel each other’s.

  They made sergeant at the same time, and then lieutenant, and finally captain. Hyte’s father had become a precinct captain; Hyte’s godfather, Philip Mason, had become the captain of an elite unit that eventually became the foundation of the Organized Crime Control Bureau. Both men wanted to become a chief. A sniper’s bullet prevented Raymond Hyte, Sr., from reaching One Police Plaza.

  Mason hung up the phone. “Ray?”

  Hyte nodded. “All right, Phil, I’ll call the TV station.”

  “Today.”

  “Today,” Hyte agreed.

  <><><>

  “Six o’clock,” Hyte said and hung up.

  He disliked the reporter. Joan Leighton would do anything for a story, and she didn’t care whom she hurt when she went on the air. Phil Mason had asked, and he would do the interview. Leighton told him to be at the studio at six. The interview would be live.

  There was a knock on his door. Sally O’Rourke stepped inside. “Lou, the computer picked up something.”

  She put several sheets of paper on his desk. “Two homicides, one in Queens, one in Brooklyn. Two weeks apart. Both killed by similar weapons, both killed on a late Friday night or very early Saturday morning—between eleven P.M. and three A.M.”

  “What about the crime scene unit reports?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  Hyte looked at the first sheet. It was a duplicate of the original sixty-one, the crime report filed by the first officer on the scene.

  He read the victim’s name: Richard Flaxman. The name had a familiar ring, but he couldn’t quite place it. He noted the victim’s death was between five and six A.M. The murder weapon was a small arrow.”

  He turned to O’Rourke. “What the hell is a small arrow?”

  She shrugged.

  Then Hyte looked at the victim’s name again. He couldn’t shake the feeling of familiarity. He read further, and he remembered. His pulse sped up. Beads of sweat broke across his forehead. “No...”

  “Lou?” O’Rourke asked.

  Hyte didn’t hear his assistant; it was Rashid Mohamad’s taunting threats that echoed in his mind. He saw the face of the copilot of Flight 88. He smelled the stench of fear and blood inside the plane. His mind spun as the memory of the night came forth.

  Forcefully, he wrenched himself from the past and examined the report. There was nothing of any consequence in it, other than the strangeness of the projectile. He exhaled, calmed himself, and looked at the next report. The homicide occurred between two and three A.M., three nights ago—on Friday last. Death was by a six-inch projectile resembling an arrow.

  He studied the second victim’s name. Barum Kaliel. He did not recognize the name.

  The third and fourth sheets were the coroner’s reports on the cause of death. In Flaxman’s case, the ‘arrow’ severed an artery; the second victim died when the arrow penetrated his brain.

  Hyte forced himself to think about the crime, not the victim he knew. It wouldn’t be the
first time he’d known a homicide victim, he reminded himself.

  He looked up at O’Rourke. “We’ve got two points of connection—a similar weapon and the same day of the week. It may be something, but I don’t see any connection between the victims. We need more. Get the reports from the crime scene unit, the PDUs, and borough homicide. I want to know exactly who Barum Kaliel was.”

  O’Rourke started out; Hyte stopped her. He had an uneasy feeling that he was seeing the beginning of a new pattern of death.

  “Sally, after you call for the reports, do a PDU phone message—no teletype. Give the precinct dicks the MO and tell them I want to be notified immediately if there are any more victims that match—no press, no statements.”

  O’Rourke nodded and left the office. Hyte looked down at his desk. Richard Flaxman’s name leapt out at him from the top of the report. A sensation of déjà vu crept over him. He fought it. For months afterward, he had tried not to think about what had happened on Flight 88. He didn’t want to now.

  He had a date at seven, but the TV interview changed that. Again, his mind wandered back to that long night.

  Denying the memories, he picked up the phone and dialed. When his call was answered, he asked for Emma Graham.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He had gone to Anita Graham’s funeral. It had been on the day after Hyte had received a phone call from his ex-wife, Susan, telling him that she was taking Carrie back to Boston and Carrie would not be returning New York.

  Her cutting words caused him more pain than had Mohamad’s bullet; she used his love for Carrie to hurt him. Following the phone call, Hyte had left the hospital without the doctor’s permission. He’d caught up with Susan and Carrie at the airport. There, silently daring Susan to try to stop him, he’d talked privately with his daughter, explaining what had happened without making excuses. Then he’d promised Carrie he would come to Boston to visit her whenever he could.

  Instead of returning to the hospital, where he had been scheduled for surgery on Monday morning, he’d gone home and opened a fresh bottle of Scotch and watched the evening news rehash of the hijacking. He’d caught a reference that Anita Graham’s funeral was scheduled for eleven the next day.