The Con Man's Daughter

Chapter 35

Wednesday, April 15

2:00 A.M.

Because of the brazen murder of two people in the El Greco diner, an elite group of law-enforcement officers gathered without fanfare in the early hours of Wednesday at NYPD headquarters in One Police Plaza. Press and TV crews remained camped in Brooklyn, bemoaning the lack of investigative progress while focusing their cameras on the bloodstains at the foot of the diner's steps. The entire city seemed stunned by the callous nature of the crime: A mother singing "Happy Birthday" to her daughter had been brutally murdered in front of her family. Eddie Dunne, referred to as an "unnamed eyewitness," provided a face to the tragedy. The scowl of the madman Sergei Zhukov terrified viewers of every newscast in the tristate area. The city of New York, riding the crest of the largest homicide reduction in its history, was not about to allow one incident to trigger a backslide.

"How did they treat you in the dyke bars tonight?" Detective Babsie Panko asked.

Since early afternoon, Eddie Dunne had been visiting every known lesbian bar in the city. His source was a free magazine he'd picked up in Manhattan.

"Mostly, they were nice," he said. "Too nice. That's what worries me. They knew about me, and treated me like some sad old uncle, down on his luck. They took my card and promised they'd call if they heard anything about Kate or Zina. They were sweet, sympathetic. I think I liked it better when they were throwing hand grenades."

Babsie and Eddie took seats in the back of the auditorium. The auditorium, on the first floor of One Police Plaza, was an odd mixture of brick and Danish-style wooden slats, but it was well capable of handling a force of over one hundred. The walls on opposite sides of the room were lined with large pieces of cardboard displaying hand-drawn numbers. The numbers corresponded to the teams that would be handed separate assignments. They caught Matty Boland hustling toward the stage.

"What's my role here?" Eddie asked.

"Finger man," Boland said. "We can depend on you to pick Sergei Zhukov out of a roomful of Russkies. Babsie's here as a courtesy, mostly. Intersecting cases and all. You're both riding with me."

"Lucky us," Babsie said.

The bulk of the manpower had been drawn from the vast pool of the NYPD, forty thousand strong. Officers had been pulled from a variety of different specialties, and most didn't know one another. Each team consisted of at least one member of the FBI's Joint Russian Task Force, two investigators and one supervisor from the Organized Crime Control Bureau, plus two uniformed and heavily armed members of the NYPD Emergency Services Unit. At the briefing, names would be read aloud and squad numbers assigned. They'd be told to meet with fellow squad members under the posted number on the wall, make the introductions short, and get on the road. A cadre of technicians and specialists, including a dozen cops from the Auto Crime Division, had been handpicked by Detective Matty Boland. As soon as Eddie saw all the Auto Crime cops, he knew it had to be a junkyard.

"How did you find him?" Eddie said.

"Sources," Boland said, winking. "We have solid intelligence reports that he's in Flushing Salvage, waiting on a ship going east. Let's leave it at that."

Because he knew how the NYPD worked, Eddie knew Boland's information couldn't have come through intelligence channels. The desk jockeys on the upper floors of the Puzzle Palace tended to milk their exposure to an operation this big, enhancing their visibility. This had all happened too quickly. It had to be hot off the bug they'd just put inside the Mazurka. Info snatched from a fresh conversation held deep inside the Russian nightclub.

Boland then told them that Yuri Borodenko, owner of Flushing Salvage, had buried a single-width two-bedroom mobile home on the property. Entrance to the underground trailer was down through a new metal storage building in the center of the huge junkyard. Word was they used the buried trailer as a central processing location for cash and contraband.

"Our problem," Boland said, "is they've been digging tunnels from the trailer out. The tunnels end beneath the shacks across the street. Exactly how many, we don't know. Minimum, three. That's why we needed so many teams. We've absolutely got to cover all possible escape routes."

"Hit fast and hard."

"No shit," Boland said. "But the whole block needs to be totally surrounded long before we hit the gate."

"Entree courtesy of Freddie Dolgev's keys?"

"No keys this time. Bolt cutters and battering rams all the way. Noisy as hell, but it doesn't matter. Their dogs will be going apeshit anyway."

"This underground trailer would be a good place to hide someone else," Babsie said, reminding Boland they had a kidnapping investigation going, as well.

"I didn't mean to gloss over that," he said. "I tried to put Kate's picture in all the packets, but the attorneys nixed it. They don't want it to appear like a fishing expedition; Kate's not the subject of the warrant, and we have no evidence that she's in there. But if she is, you'll have her home tonight."

Eddie's pulse fluttered for a moment when Boland said "tonight." But tonight? No way. The favorite saying of his doomsday Irish mother was "Don't get your hopes up." He wasn't about to. But Babsie was right: The buried mobile home would be a great spot to hide Kate. The tunnels provided easy entrance and escape routes for the kidnappers, but the size and intensity of this operation would contain any quick exit. No matter how many baklany were inside, the punks from Brighton Beach would just throw up their hands when they saw this army. Eddie knew that under ordinary circumstances there was no way a search of this size would ever have been put together. He owed it all to the mother of a birthday girl, who'd died because he hadn't used his head.

"Okay, I understand they don't want it to appear like a fishing expedition," Eddie said, trying to clear up a loose end. "That means the entire focus is on Sergei, the subject of the arrest warrant."

"Correct."

"And you know he's in there?"

"As of an hour ago. We have people sitting on the place as we speak."

"But no one from Homicide is here?"

"Howie Danton is here, along with his partner," Boland said.

"Only two of them, and all these FBI agents, including wire men?"

Boland shrugged. "No sense wasting a golden opportunity."

Boland handed Eddie a handwritten working copy of his affidavit for the court order. He read down to where a registered confidential informant had told them that located in the trailer was a set of black binders containing the papers for dummy corporations used to funnel criminally obtained U.S. currency into offshore banking institutions.

"These are the binders I'm supposed to have stolen," Eddie said.

Boland shrugged. "Our informant claims he saw them in the trailer."

The informant also told them that meetings were held in the trailer to discuss disbursement of monies from illegal enterprises, such as the sale of Russian military equipment, including nuclear weapons. The affidavit pled the usual case that all other means of obtaining evidence had been exhausted. But Eddie knew that once the words "nuclear weapons" appeared in a warrant application, no judge would refuse to sign.

"Everything always works out good for you, Matty," Babsie said.

"So this isn't really about Sergei," Eddie said.

"We want Borodenko to think it is. But as long as we're in there…"

Immediately after the briefing, the squads formed, decided on vehicles, and headed for Queens. Eddie had been on a few of these large raids in his career. He'd always hated them. The mere size of the force gave everyone the feeling they were invincible. The worst was the mass arrests of the Thirteenth Division cops in the seventies. It was a hastily organized mass raid, just like this. The target was a Brooklyn plainclothes division on the take. Dozens of cops had been indicted. When word of the indictments leaked out, the commanding officer, one of those named in the indictment, rented a room in a hotel near the courthouse and blew his brains out. Fearing a rash of suicides, the upper echelon ordered everyone to be picked up immediately. In the middle of a nice afternoon, Eddie was pulled in from a Manhattan squad to arrest a young plainclothesman. He walked into the house of a cop he'd never met, and while his pregnant wife sobbed, he waited while the young cop took his guns from a box in a bedroom closet and handed them to Eddie. After they left, he could hear the wife crying for blocks.

"The thing that surprises me most about Sergei," Boland said, "is that he never came after you."

"I wish he had," Eddie said. "I wish they all had. What they're doing to me now is worse."

Boland took the Town Car. They drove over the cobblestones of the Fulton Fish Market, which was jumping with activity in the middle of the night. Truckers from all over the East Coast unloaded crates of crab, cod, halibut, and lobster while buyers from local restaurants and supermarkets moved from stall to stall, inspecting the catch. At the tip of the island of Manhattan, the almost-full moon lit New York Harbor. In the crisp, clear night, the Statue of Liberty appeared small and distant. Eddie liked the view better in bad weather. There was something about a haze, the way the torch would shine through the fog, that made her loom larger.

"Eddie, you have to stay in the car tonight," Boland said as the silent convoy left the Belt Parkway. "Too much brass on this caper. They see you marching in with us, the shit will hit the fan. I'll come back and get you if we need you to identify Sergei. Or if we have good news. You can count on that."

The Queens County they rode through was not Archie Bunker's neighborhood. The streets around the junkyard loomed as surreal as a moonscape. An eight-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire encircled the huge lot. Across from the junkyard sat a collection of phantom factories, sandwich shops, and uninhabitable mystery shacks. The roadway, sidewalks, and grass were painted black with oil. No lights, no signs, no civilization. Packs of wild dogs owned the night. Skeletons of cannibalized cars were scattered about the streets like the abandoned caissons of a retreating army.

Boland donned his vest and a blue nylon jacket with NYPD in Day-Glo letters, then grabbed a portable copy machine from the trunk. He left the car running. The police radios had been set to a special frequency so they could hear the play-by-play. The commander of Emergency Services was running the show. They'd be the guys going through the door first.

"They don't need me in there," Babsie said.

"You don't have to baby-sit," Eddie said.

"Like you can afford my baby-sitting fee," she said.

"I'm just pissed at Boland. He should have given us a heads-up, so we knew how to dress. No way I'm getting grease on this new jacket. But I am a little surprised you didn't fight him. I thought for sure you'd want in on the door-kicking party."

"They'd keep me so far in the background, my ass would still be in Brooklyn."

"Yeah," she said, not quite buying his story. "They got enough bodies here to invade the Kremlin."

From where they were parked, Eddie could barely see the front gate. The barking dogs behind the fence, however, could be heard for miles. A heavily protected Emergency Services cop lumbered up to the gate and aimed a tranquilizer gun through the chain-link fence. One pop, then a howl. Yard-long bolt cutters snipped the chain as if it were strung popcorn. Another dog bit the dust. The cops yanked the chain through and tossed it to the ground. They swung the gate open and went in. One more dog barked pitifully, and then there were none.

The NYPD believed in the strategy of overkill. Always bring more cops to the party than you need. Four teams followed the ESU through the front gate. In the pitch-blackness, wavering flashlight beams were the only show as the cops moved around the stacks of front ends and quarter panels, past the mounds of tires, wheels, and hubcaps. Lights popped on here and there, small bulbs behind filthy windows. He wondered if Kate's world was like this: darkness, then pinpoints of light. He hoped her worst enemy was isolation. The Dunnes could handle isolation.

Only fifteen minutes passed before grim-faced Matty Boland returned. Eddie watched him cut across the beams of car headlights, his head down. He opened the driver's door and leaned in. A swath of grease cut across his cheek.

"We didn't find her, Eddie," he said.

Eddie felt the blood drain from his face. This was okay. This was fine. It meant they still had hope. Hope was everything, all they had.

"Tunnel thing was mostly bullshit," Boland said. "Only one tunnel, built for midgets, looks like. We got five live Russkie types, and a body we want you to look at." Then, as an afterthought, he said, "Male DOA."

They followed Boland through a tin warehouse building filled with deep shelves made from fresh lumber. On the shelves were hundreds of used auto transmissions. Cops from Auto Crime examined them for hidden serial numbers. They entered a new metal shed and climbed down through a trapdoor to a tight wrought-iron circular staircase, almost as narrow and twisting as the staircase up to the crown in the Statue of Liberty.

Down one level, the floor of the mobile home was intact, carpeting almost new. It had not been heavily used. The entrance to the tunnel in a side wall had been covered by a blue plastic shower curtain. Climbing in required a two-foot step up from the floor and good flexibility. The damp smell of fresh dirt prevailed. A draped body lay halfway into the entrance.

"We think they killed him here," Boland said. "One of the teams grabbed two guys running toward a pickup truck with a camper. The back hatch of the camper was open. They were getting ready to drop him somewhere else."

The body was partially wrapped in a brown woolen military blanket with writing in the Cyrillic alphabet. The face remained uncovered; no reason to protect the public down here. He'd been shot once in the center of his forehead.

"Sergei Zhukov," Eddie said.

The stippling around the entrance wound indicated it had been at close range. A harsh fluorescent ceiling light glared off the fake wood paneling and cast all faces in the same pallor as Sergei's.

"Is this legit?" Danton asked, handing Eddie a ring. "It was in his pocket."

It was a Claddagh ring-a common Irish gift-two hands clasped around a heart. This one was inscribed on the inside "To Kate from Dad."

"I gave it to her when she graduated from Sacred Heart," Eddie said, fighting to clear his throat as he stared at the ring. He'd bought it for her in Ireland, in a small shop in Galway, right after they'd walked through Claddagh, a small fishing community on Galway Bay and the Atlantic, the place that gave the symbol its life.

'This is a setup," Howie Danton said. "They put the ring on this mook to take the focus off Borodenko. He gets rid of the problem child, Sergei, plus he gets to blame him for Kate. It's this guy's MO. He plants more shit than Johnny Appleseed."

As they rode back to One Police Plaza, Eddie tried to get his mind around this. What did it mean for Kate? If she was dead, they could have just disposed of her body. Borodenko had ample means for causing bodies to evaporate, either Sergei's or Kate's. So why go through all this trouble, planting the ring on Sergei? Why would it matter who got blamed? It meant Kate had to be alive. That made sense, didn't it? Didn't it?

"Quit mumbling to yourself," Babsie whispered, squeezing his hand.

Too tired to con himself anymore, he began to wonder what he might have to say to his granddaughter. No harm in just thinking. Besides, it was good to think about the worst case, defusing God's sacred element of surprise. He'd talk to Grace about angels, because if there ever was a time to believe in sweet angels, this was it. The rest sent shivers. Aunt Martha and the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church would insist on a High Mass after a nightmare wake. He'd just hold Grace through all the ceremonial weeping and gnashing. That was best. Hold her. And when the smoke of the incense cleared from the air, he'd ask Babsie to move in with them. He'd get the best lawyer money could buy to fight his son of a bitch of a son-in-law. Then he'd spend his nights in Brighton Beach, with blood on his hands. As many nights as it took.

That's the worst-case scenario, he told himself. Paulie said the worst case never happened when you stacked the odds in your favor. He always said that only losers believed they had to play the hand they were dealt. Eddie Dunne needed to turn the odds in his favor. Lie, cheat, steal, it was all recommended in Paulie's book. Eddie didn't have an ace up his sleeve, but he had a key in his pocket.