COPS SPIES & PI'S: The Four Novel Box Set Page 13

  He kissed her fingertips, feeling a familiar rush of desire for her.

  “Don’t let her goad you. She has a reputation for being catty if she doesn’t get the answers she wants.”

  “How do you know about her reputation?”

  Emma smiled. “I know people in the business.”

  The producer returned. “Lieutenant, if you and Miss Graham will come this way…”

  They followed him into the hall and through another door that opened into a pale blue and empty room. A velvet modular couch dominated the far wall. Across from it was a large table complete with coffee urn, donuts, bagels, and soft drinks.

  A monitor hung from a single pole, catty-cornered to the seating area. “You’ll be on in fifteen minutes. Someone will come for you.”

  When the producer left, Emma covered his hand. He leaned back, exhaled, and prepared himself for the inevitable.

  <><><>

  Sy Cohen looked down at the body. The bloated, disfigured woman resembled a plastic blow-up doll more than a real body.

  He looked for more wounds but saw none. There was only the small, strange-looking arrow jutting from her shoulder.

  She was dressed in the remnants of a stewardess’s uniform. The blouse and skirt had ripped as the body distended. Moving around the body, Cohen saw the gold wings of her nametag.

  He read the name. Elaine Samson.

  What the smell hadn’t been able to do to him, the name did. Sy Cohen went to his knees and spewed up his dinner.

  <><><>

  “We have time for one more question, Lieutenant,” Joan Leighton said. “Do you think Joseph Dantan will go to jail or plead insanity? I mean, wouldn’t you call a man who raped forty-two women insane?”

  “I’m not a psychiatrist, Miss Leighton. I won’t hazard a guess. Dantan has not had his trial, and I wouldn’t want to infringe on his civil rights by answering that question.”

  “Then on a personal level, what do you think?”

  “I think that Joseph Dantan should stand trial for the crimes he’s suspected of committing. If found guilty, he should go to jail.”

  “For all the women in our audience, I would like to thank you for apprehending Joseph Dantan and for joining me here, tonight.”

  The instant the announcer took over, Hyte detached the microphone and stood. Joan Leighton favored him with a searching stare. “Maybe the next time I ask for an interview, you’ll be a little more available.”

  “Don’t count on it,” he said as his beeper went off.

  The second he entered the green room, he went to the phone and dialed central. “Lieutenant Hyte,” he said.

  “Identification please,” the operator asked. “Color of the day and tax number.”

  “Silver,” Hyte replied, and gave his tax identification number.

  “Lou,” the operator said, “we have a homicide at six twenty-two East Eighty-Second Street. Sergeant Simon Cohen requests your presence.”

  “On my way,” Hyte said. He turned to Emma.

  “She was a real bitch, and it showed when she tried to play with you. But you more than held your own.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Emma, I’ve got—”

  “I heard. What happened?”

  “A homicide. It may be part of something—I don’t know. I’ll make it up to you.”

  Her eyes played across his face. “Don’t worry,” she said, smiling gently. “Go to work…Call me later, or come by.”

  He cupped her chin and drew her mouth to his. He kissed her, brushing his lips lightly across hers. “I’ll try.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hyte spotted Sy Cohen next to Lieutenant Cal Severs of the Borough Homicide Squad. Both men were leaning against the medical examiner’s car. He went over to the two cops and shook their hands. He noticed Cohen’s face was grim, his coloring unusually pale. “What’s up?”

  Cohen ran his fingers through his gray hair. He didn’t look directly at Hyte. “An old-timer was first on the scene. He did it all by the book. Nothing was touched. He didn’t even open a window. When I got here and saw the MO, I called you. Crime scene and Doc Lester are upstairs.”

  “The victim?”

  Cohen paused and moistened his lips. “You knew her, Ray. Elaine Samson from the 88 hijacking.”

  Hyte’s bowels locked. A sense of disorientation flushed through him. First Flaxman, and now the stewardess! What in the hell is going on? He was surprised to find himself trembling. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Inside apartment 5-D, Sy Cohen and Cal Severs hung back when Hyte approached the body.

  The crime scene unit had already dusted for prints and was in the process of measuring the angles and distances from the body in relation to the walls and doors and windows so that their sketches would be accurate.

  The assistant medical examiner, Dr. Harry Lester, hovered over the body, his face perplexed. Hyte stopped near the M.E. to look down at Elaine Samson. At first, he didn’t see the bloated features; he saw the young face of a woman terrorized by an insane fanatic. “Harry?”

  The M.E. glanced up. “‘Lo, Ray.”

  “How long?”

  “The condition of the body puts it somewhere between nine and twelve days. No more than twelve. The body’s still too bloated. All the windows are closed. The weather’s cool, so there are no flies and maggot castings.”

  He thought about the computer printout, and he knew the when. “Make it ten days, on a Friday night into Saturday morning…Cause?”

  “The only thing I can find right now is the crossbow bolt in her shoulder,” the M.E. said, pointing to the aluminum shaft. “It may be a quarrel, but I won’t know until I take it out. It didn’t kill her, not where it is. Very little blood around the impact point. No, something else did. I’ll know more when I do the autopsy.”

  A phrase from the computer report popped into his mind. Cause of death from a projectile resembling a short arrow. It wasn’t just a short arrow; it was a very specific arrow—a crossbow bolt. “When?”

  “First thing in the morning,” the M.E. said. “Ray, do you have another crazy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. She shouldn’t have died.”

  He caught the flash of surprise that crossed Harry Lester’s face. “You knew her?”

  “I met her...once.” Hyte took a breath of the foul air. Death was a smell you never want to recall, but this time he wanted to remember it.

  Signaling to Cohen and Severs, he started out of the apartment. “What do you have so far?” he asked Cohen when they were in the hall.

  “A blank. No one here has seen her in the last two weeks.” The super said she flew a lot.”

  “You call Trans Air?”

  “Yes. Roberts caught the case. I’m supervising. He’ll go to see personnel tomorrow. If homicide has no objections,” he added, looking at Severs, “I’d like Roberts to stay on this one.”

  “We’ll have to clear it with your boss,” Severs told Cohen, “but it’s okay if he wants to work with us.”

  “I want everything,” Hyte said, ignoring the interdepartmental byplay. “I want the sixty-one report on my desk tomorrow and I want to see every piece of paperwork that’s done on the case. I don’t want a single word breathed to the press.”

  “Ray, what’s going on?”

  Hyte worried his lower lip before answering Cohen.

  “Elaine Samson is the second hostage from Flight 88 who’s been killed,” he said. “The copilot, Flaxman, was killed three weeks ago. The cause of death is listed as a short arrow.”

  Sy Cohen’s already strained face seemed to age before Hyte’s eyes. The sergeant blinked. “Why would anyone want to hurt them after what they’ve been through?”

  <><><>

  The dark and choppy waters of the East River lapped at the cement embankment twenty feet below where Hyte sat. He’d been at Carl Schurz Park for over an hour, trying to sort out his thoughts. The chill breezes blowing off the water assured him of solitude.

&nb
sp; Behind him and to his left, the lights of Gracie Mansion glowed. The mayor was having another reception. Hyte didn’t dwell on that. He thought about Elaine Samson and Richard Flaxman.

  What about the other victim? Barum Kaliel. He had been number two. What connection, if any, did he have with Samson and Flaxman? Why were these people dying? Revenge? By whom? Could others of Rashid Mohamad’s terrorist group be trying to murder the former hostages to avenge the deaths of the hijackers?

  He rejected the notion. If that were the case, there would have been propaganda statements as soon as they’d killed Flaxman. Why would someone use an archaic weapon when there were so many alternatives available? Just where in hell does one get a crossbow? A museum?

  The only thing Hyte was certain of was that someone had killed three people, two of whom had been hostages on Flight 88. Coincidence? He wondered if he would find a deeper connection between Samson and Flaxman.

  He gave a mental shrug. All the speculation in the world was useless without facts. He would have to wait until tomorrow, when more reports came in.

  He wished he had a cigarette. Then he wished the day could start over again. Then he laughed at himself. He could have remained a lawyer, he could have stayed married to Susan and by now be on the board of directors of her father’s bank. If he had, he’d be home, helping his daughter with her homework.

  He could have done many things, but he hadn’t.

  He thought about Emma. He wanted to see her. No, he corrected himself; he needed to see her, just as he’d needed to see her after the hijacking.

  He stared into the darkness. Was he in love with Emma, or was it something else? Maybe it was compulsion, a psychological need, to be in love with a woman who was the opposite of his ex-wife.

  Laughing at himself, Hyte left the park. He walked to York. There, he looked up at the tall building on the corner of Eighty-Seventh Street: forty-one stories of cooperative apartments that sold for a minimum of six hundred thousand dollars.

  He followed the curved drive to the main entrance, where he asked for Emma Graham, gave his name, and waited for the doorman to call apartment 36-H.

  A familiar build-up of anticipation began, one he always felt when he was going to see Emma. It was a good sensation.

  The ride up took two minutes. As he walked down the long hallway, Elaine Samson’s bloated face appeared before him. He stopped halfway to Emma’s door and pushed aside the image.

  The door opened. Emma’s brown eyes gazed at him in concern.

  “Hi,” she said. She kissed him lightly and handed him a Scotch.

  He smiled. “I see you were prepared.”

  “Anxious, I guess,” she said as they walked into her living room. The room never failed to amaze him. It was about twenty-two by thirty with surprisingly high ceilings for a modern building. The furniture was contemporary, with smooth flowing lines and sharp but uncomplicated angles. The color scheme was a mélange of earth tones, from brown to pastel rust.

  Set on its own wall, with a double spotlight shining down, was a Picasso. Jonah and Anita Graham had given it to Emma on her twenty-seventh birthday—the same day her father promoted her to vice president of Graham International.

  “Are you okay?” Emma asked.

  Hyte sat next to her. “I’m fine.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Yes, he wanted to talk about it, but he didn’t want to bring the Job into their personal lives. He didn’t want to dirty Emma’s world with what he had seen tonight; even more, he didn’t want to alarm her.

  “The homicide was a woman who was murdered about ten days ago. She was killed in the same way as two other people.”

  She frowned. “Do you know who did it?”

  He shook his head. “I have no idea. And I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  She reached up hesitantly. Her fingers grazed his cheek.

  “All right.” She lowered her hand but did not turn away from him. “Are you comfortable with me?”

  “With you or with us?”

  “Both. It’s something we’ve never talked about.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I’m comfortable with you, and with us.”

  She sighed. It was a gentle whispering sound. “I’m not trying to press you about our relationship.”

  He caught her hand between both of his. “A cop’s life isn’t easy. The hours are long and the job interferes with relationships. I know that what I’m saying sounds like a worn-out cliché, and maybe it is. It’s the way things are for me. Even when I’m off duty, I’m on. I want you to think hard about me, Emma, and about any future we might have together.”

  Her eyes locked on him. “I have, Ray. Believe me, I have.”

  The intensity of her words startled him. He searched her face, seeking for something but not sure of what. “I can’t promise you a hell of a lot.”

  Her mouth grew taut. “I don’t want promises. I don’t believe in them. What I want is you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Thought you’d be here sooner,” Harry Lester said, in his Bellevue Hospital office.

  “What do you have so far?” Hyte asked.

  “It wasn’t a quarrel. It was a broad head.”

  Hyte studied the projectile Lester removed from Elaine Samson’s shoulder. The doctor had put it into a clear plastic bag. The innocuous looking bolt had a black plastic double fletching, set at a hundred and eighty degree angle, rather than the triple fletching of a standard arrow. The shaft was gold anodized aluminum.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The quarrel derives its name from medieval times,” Harry Lester explained. “A quarrel’s tip is a quartered head—a narrow X—so it can penetrate armor. If it hit an unarmored man, it would go straight through. A broad head is for hunting. It’s meant to be stopped in flesh.”

  “Any prints on the bolt?”

  “Clean as a baby’s ass.”

  “Did it kill her?”

  “No.”

  “What did?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m ordering full drug and tox screens.

  I’m going to run some scrapings from the broad head as well.”

  “Poison?”

  “From what I’ve seen,” he said, “her vital organs shut down. There are no visible signs of poison, but it’s been a long time since she died. There are exotic nerve poisons that exit the body with the fluids.”

  “So you can’t tell me anything, then?”

  “I can tell you a whole lot. She hadn’t had sex before she died. She had a low-grade vaginal infection from a recent abortion. Her nasal passages are lousy and she’d done coke sometime before death.” Hyte detected apprehension in the M.E.’s eyes. “It’s the weapon that bothers me. I’ve been a pathologist for twenty-six years. This is my first crossbow assault. “

  “Mine, too,” Hyte said. “Harry, if you find poison, and before you call in the chief M.E., check your counter-parts in Queens and Brooklyn. Each one has a victim.”

  “I’ll take the samples to toxicology myself. I’ll call you later.” The M.E. glanced at the bolt. “You do have another crazy, don’t you?”

  “Not a word, Harry. Not one fucking word to anyone.”

  <><><>

  Sally O’Rourke smiled at Hyte when he walked up to her desk. “I have the report on Kaliel, the copies of the PDU sixty-ones on both homicides, and the borough squad reports.”

  He motioned her into his private office, hung up his jacket, and sat at his desk. The handle of his service piece snagged on the seatback. He un-holstered it from his hip and put it in the top drawer.

  O’Rourke opened the thick manila file folder. “Barum Kaliel,” she read, “was in New York on a student visa. He was from Jordan, here attending N.Y.U.; Lou, he was a passenger on Flight 88.”

  “I don’t remem—” Hyte cut himself off and turned away from O’Rourke, grappling with the staggering implications her words brought to mind.

  It tied the three de
aths to a common point: the hijacking.

  For Hyte, it brought forth the knowledge that a part of that long ago night of torment and death was still not over.

  “He was a coach class passenger?” he said at last.

  “Yes. Immigration says there was no trouble with him at all.”

  Hyte wondered what the connections between the three could be. Had they been involved with Mohamad? He rejected the idea immediately. The copilot and stewardess had been too terrified during the hijacking to fake it.

  “What about Flaxman?”

  “The building canvass turned up a girlfriend. She was in the apartment at the time of the murder. Her name is Katherine Sircolli.”

  Once again, the unexpected took him off-guard. Katherine Sircolli was the only child of Antonio—Tony the Fist—Sircolli. The years peeled away with the mention of Sircolli’s name. Hyte had first met Katherine when she was six. She had been a cute child, with huge eyes and matchstick arms and legs.

  He had been undercover for seven months, working for Phil Mason and the Organized Crime Control Bureau when he’d met Sircolli, the head of the Tiacona crime family.

  It had been Hyte’s job to infiltrate that family. It had taken him almost four years to work his way close to Tony the Fist.

  “Go on,” he said.

  O’Rourke looked down at the report. “The last time she saw him was in his apartment, five minutes before he was killed. She said he told her to make sure she locked the door after he left. He was due back the next night. They were supposed to have dinner with her father. Flaxman had never met him.”

  “Who took the statement?”

  “Queens Homicide.”

  “When we’re finished, get me the dick who caught the case. What else?”

  “Nothing. Homicide interviewed his friends and co-workers. Flaxman was well liked. According to several stewardesses, he played around a lot.”

  “Is there an Elaine Samson listed?”

  O’Rourke skimmed the witness interview reports. “Yes. She stated that they had dated at one time, but didn’t see each other anymore.”

  He snorted. Two of the three victims knew each other intimately. Where, exactly, did Kaliel fit in? Could Tony the Fist be involved?