Werewolf Cop (2 page)

Now Muldoon stepped into the doorway and began to say, “They apparently took the duct tape with them after—”

But Goulart silenced him with a raised hand. Goulart knew his partner, and he'd come to recognize when Zach had gone into what Goulart liked to call “hyper-focus mode.” The Cowboy's body had gone still and the crow's-feet crags at the corners of his eyes gathered. He peered down into what seemed nothing more than another thick splotch of blood on the chipped paint of the rotten floorboards. Pulling a pair of rubber gloves out of his back pocket and working them onto his hands, he crouched over it. He reached into the sticky mess and plucked from it . . . what? What was it? Zach held it up before his eyes and turned it this way and that in the light. Goulart crouched down beside him and squinted until he could see it more clearly: it was a piece of fluff of some kind with, perhaps, a thread attached to it.

“Say there, people?” Zach called out.

His tone was casual—as if he were about to ask someone to help him recall a name he had forgotten—and yet something in his voice brought Molly hurrying to one doorway and some CSU guys peeking in at another. Zach held the piece of fluff up to all of them.

“Any of you folks find a little plastic disc—or maybe a glass disc—about the size of a button, maybe designed to look like half an eyeball? An eyeball for a stuffed animal?”

“I found that.” This was from the CSU man right behind him, a roundish young fellow blinking with surprise through misting glasses. “I already tagged and bagged it. You want me to—”

But Goulart raised his hand again and cut him off as he had Muldoon.

Because now Zach, still squatting, was turning on his toes, turning his head in a slow-motion swivel that panned his narrowed gaze from one end of the room to the other. Not only Goulart, but Muldoon and Molly and the rotund CSU guy and the other ME techs and CSU's stopped to watch him—and all of them tensed internally when his eyes came to rest on what (he later explained to Goulart) was the faintest smear in the dust of one section of wall. It was only just barely visible in the space beneath an arc of blood spatter and beside a low built-in knick-knack shelf in the corner.

“Well, look-a-there,” Zach murmured.

He stood. He strode across the room and crouched again—crouched this time before the low knick-knack shelf. The shelf was empty. Its clutter of ashtrays, baseball caps, magazines, broken watches, pens, and spare change had already been cleared away by the forensic team.

Taking hold of the edge of the shelf with both hands, Zach tugged—and then tugged again.

Molly said “Oh!”

Muldoon cursed.

The shelf came away from the wall, bringing a section of the wall with it to reveal the hidey-hole secreted behind it. Muldoon cursed again and one of the CSU guys cursed too, and the shocked Molly covered her mouth with her gloved hand.

The late Marco Paz had been a fence, a trader in stolen goods, an expert in converting hot valuables into cash. Naturally, he had needed a secret place in which to hide that cash, and so he had fashioned this shelf-and-hole dodge for the purpose.

But it wasn't the 275 thousand dollars in neat stacks of small bills that brought forth the gasps and curses of the investigators.

It was the child. Six-year-old Mickey Paz. He was huddled beside the money stacks. He was kneeling and stooped to fit into the cramped hideaway. He was trembling with terror, sucking the thumb of one hand—and clutching in his other hand a bedraggled Teddy bear with one eye missing.

2

DOMINIC ABEND

W
omen make crap detectives,” said Martin Goulart. “The only good ones are lesbians—you ever notice that? Lesbians and fat black women. I don't know what that's about. I'm thinking of that two-ton Negro broad—what was her name?—Susie—used to work the one-seven. She was all right. But for the most part, being a detective, what is it, right? Reason, unemotional observation, a sense of responsibility, guts—why would you hire a female to do a job like that? It'd be like hiring me to do sensitivity training.”

This was typical Goulart. He was always saying stuff like this. He'd been called on the carpet for it a dozen times, sent to—speaking of sensitivity training—sensitivity training himself, twice. Didn't help. He was incorrigible. Nothing changed him. An all-American mongrel of French, German, Italian, and Scottish extraction with some Jew in there somewhere, he was a bubbling cauldron of urban energy, a walking flashpoint on the lookout for a flame. In service to that quest, he felt it was his duty to say just about anything that would offend just about anybody, just about anything you were not supposed to say.

It was April Gomez who had gotten him started today. Plus the fact that he was bored. He and Zach had been standing in a storage-slash-observation room of the city's one-six precinct for the past half hour. Slouched amidst file boxes and broken computers in their habitual shoulder-to-shoulder position. Gazing sleepily at the monitor which was now showing live video of NYPD Detective April Gomez interviewing little Mickey Paz in a language neither agent understood. Which April had been called in to do because the little boy had been traumatized and because children generally responded better to women and because April was proficient in the Castilian dialect common to Venezuela which, in his traumatized state, was the only language little Mickey could remember how to speak. So Goulart felt it was necessary to explain to Zach that April Gomez had only been promoted to detective in the first place to fulfill some sort of minority quota because she was Hispanic and female—and the rest of his diatribe followed from that.

Zach, as usual, could only roll his eyes and shake his head. Some people were shocked by Goulart's rants and some secretly agreed with them, but Zach just found them comical and ridiculous. Goulart could say whatever he wanted about women—or blacks or Hispanics or homosexuals or French-German-Italian-Scottish-maybe-Jews, for that matter: Zach took none of it seriously. For him, there were only two kinds of people in the world: sinners and criminals. If you were the former, he considered himself your brother and protector. If you were the latter, he considered himself the flawed but relentless instrument of a just and terrible God.

Goulart's nonsense was obnoxious at times, if Zach bothered to pay attention to it. But, on the other hand, the New Yorker was one of the best detectives he had ever worked with. Goulart had an instinctive sense about people that was almost like mind-reading. He was funny. And generous, for all his blabber. Basically, a good partner all around.

And there was this, too: despite all the hogwash the Brooklyn hard-ass spewed out, there was always a bit of truth mixed in. April Gomez
had
, in fact, been promoted to detective because she was a Latina and because some loud-mouthed pol and the media had complained about the absence of Latina detectives on the job. She was a sweet girl and by no means stupid, but she had as much business being called to a crime scene as a vase of carnations. Everyone in the department who knew anything about it knew that this was true.

That said, April was doing a good job with the boy right now. The kid seemed mesmerized by her gentle sisterly gaze. Still clutching his one-eyed Teddy bear, he was speaking to her in a fluid half-whisper.

So when Goulart started up again: “It's like we're all supposed to pretend that women are what they aren't and if we pretend hard enough that's going to somehow make it true. Which is the opposite of police work, when you think about it. Which I mean is, what? It's figuring out what's true no matter
what
you want it to be. Take the Muzzies, for example . . .”

. . . Zach lifted a finger and said, “Turn your face off and listen.”

Goulart's voice trailed to silence, and the two of them focused on the monitor, standing just beneath them on an old conference table.

“I think April just asked him if he heard any names mentioned,” said Zach.

The boy's tremulous voice continued, only just audible—and suddenly April Gomez, assuming the detectives were watching her, glanced up, startled, at the video camera hanging in one corner of the ceiling above her.

And simultaneously Goulart said, “What?”

And simultaneously Zach said, “Did you hear that?”

April apparently couldn't believe it either, because she turned back to the boy and asked him to repeat himself: “
Dijo
Abend?”

The boy nodded solemnly. In a corner of the room, an older black woman from Children's Services looked on with her hands folded on the skirt of her purple dress. Even she seemed to understand that something important had happened.

“
Si
,” said Mickey Paz. “Señor Abend. Señor Abend.” Then he went off into another musical strain of something akin to Castilian.

Zach and Goulart listened, leaning their heads forward as if that would help them understand.

“Are you getting any of this?” said Goulart. “What exactly did he say about Señor Abend?”

Zach, who knew just enough Texican to avoid a bar fight, said, “I think he said one of the men was named Abend, that someone called one of the killers Señor Abend.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” said Goulart. “You mean, as in: Abend was there himself? In the room? Standing there while they're hacking these people apart? You think that's even possible?”

“No,” Zach murmured. “I don't. Sure ain't likely, anyway.”

“But that is what he's saying?”

“Near as I can make out. Have we found any security footage from the scene yet? Anyone who took a picture with a cell phone? Any pictures at all?”

“Last I heard, they were still canvassing,” said Goulart. “But I'll go check.”

He detached himself from Zach's shoulder and left the room. Zach stayed where he was, still gazing down intently at the monitor. He remained like that, in hyper-focus mode, for another few seconds; but as the boy was now rattling on much too rapidly for him to comprehend, his mind eventually drifted. To Dominic Abend. Who was said to be the chieftain of the BLK. Which had wafted out of the post-World War II gulags to infiltrate every level of Soviet tyranny; and had then become the very medium of Eastern Europe's post-Communist gangsterocracy; and had then, with the fall of the Iron Curtain that had once contained it, spread like a miasma over the free nations of Western Europe, infecting every organized crime operation on the continent and in Britain, transforming all of them into mere agents of itself.

Now, these last few years, the Brüderlichkeit was said to have traveled here, to the U. S. of A., breathing a new, poisonous, unifying zombie-life into the homeland's beleaguered organized crime operations—Cosa Nostra and Yakuza, the black Disciples and the Mexican mob, and the Russian Bratva, which had never been more than a tendril of the BLK anyway, and all the rest.

Back in Europe, journalists and academics had heard of the Brotherhood, though no one had yet seemed to grasp its pervasive dominance. But the fact that the organization had now come to America—this was unknown to the media and the professoriate alike. Evidence, testimony, reports, and statistics simply did not reflect the BLK's mushrooming influence in the U.S.

But law officers in all the major cities sensed it nonetheless, the way family doctors sense a new, more drug-resistant strain of an old disease. Coast to coast, the law dogs confided in one another: criminal operations were proceeding with heightened brutality and smoother efficiency. Gangs were harder to penetrate, their transactions harder to detect. Old capos, lieutenants, and muscle-men were vanishing without a trace. Suspects who once would have betrayed their mothers for a plea bargain suddenly preferred to take the fall. A new silence seemed to underlie the tips of even the most reliable confidential informants. None of the cops was certain, but they all felt it: a new cancer of corruption was eating into the country. The underworld was on the rise.

All of it was linked to Abend. In lawman legend, at least, Abend was the source and controlling genius of the invasion.

Dominic Abend was a German-Russian billionaire of unknown occupation and murky antecedents. He had gone invisible after the USSR collapsed, and then risen into the consciousness of Western law enforcement as more shadow than light, as an empty Dominic-Abend-shaped space at the center of what little information they had about him. There were a few old photographs of him. A few mentions of him in criminal testimony. Some hints from tipsters here and there. An occasional sighting. And, most recently, a digital snapshot taken by an ambitious plainclothesman working the crowd at Times Square on New Year's eve one year back. That last suggested Abend, like the BLK, might himself be in the country.

So little Mickey Paz's statement that Abend—the international criminal mastermind—had been personally present at the scene of a mass murder turned Zach Adams's blood hunter-hot with excitement. Because Abend and the BLK were the reasons Task Force Zero had been formed in the first place. Finding them—stopping them—destroying them: this was Extraordinary Crimes' underlying commission.

Zach's mind was called back to the moment by his phone buzzing in his jacket pocket—a text message, judging by the length of the vibration. He began to reach for it but stopped with his hand hovering in front of his sternum as something new developed on the Observation Room monitor.

The little boy in the Interview Room had begun speaking English. He had slipped into it unconsciously, it seemed, as April Gomez's warmth and gentleness slowly soothed and relaxed him.

“They kept saying to him again and again, ‘Where is it? Where is it?'” said Mickey Paz, the fingers of one hand absently massaging his Teddy bear's ear as if to comfort it. “But Papa didn't know. He said, ‘I don't know. I swear.' He kept saying that to them, but they wouldn't listen.”

“Where is what?” said April Gomez, who slipped into English just as smoothly as the boy in her effort to keep him comfortable. “What were the men looking for, Mickey? What were they trying to find? Did they say?”