The Finishing School

50

MELANIE WAS CLIMBING the walls. She’d been sitting on her butt in the hotel room, supposedly waiting to play switchboard operator, but since the rest of the team was incommunicado, they hadn’t required her services. Dan and Bridget had driven off to El Yunque hours ago with five enormous local cops in mirrored shades and flashy uniforms. By now they should have taken up position around El Baño Grande, a decrepit and overgrown stone swimming pool in El Yunque park where the drug deal was supposed to go down in two hours. They were maintaining radio silence, so Melanie couldn’t exactly call for an update. Nor could she reach Lieutenant Albano or Ray-Ray Wong, who presumably were on a plane to San Juan tailing Trevor Leonard. At least she hoped that’s where they were. Trevor’s safety was her greatest worry right now, and there’d been no news on him since she’d first learned he’d dropped from view.

She decided to check her office voice mail back home in order to have something productive to do.

“You have two new messages.”

The first was left at 1:47 P.M.-Shavonne Washington from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office.

“Hey, Melanie, we just got the results on that comprehensive tox screen you requested, and they’re pretty interesting. Brianna Meyers’s came out like you’d expect, just heroin. But Whitney’s tox had a little added bonus. Lethal levels of not only heroin but OxyContin-repeat, OxyContin. Oxy’s a powerful prescription painkiller. People do use it recreationally and overdose accidentally. But you should also know it’s the drug of choice for murders made to look like ODs. Whitney had about twenty times the therapeutic dosage in her blood. To get levels that high, you’d have to cook the Oxy and heroin together and shoot up the cocktail, but still, you woulda had to make one huge wrongheaded mistake on the dosage. If you recall, the doc found fresh tracks between her toes, so that looks good for point of entry. But like you said, where’s the syringe? This is all starting to smell kinda funky, you ask me.”

Whitney Seward had been murdered, and somebody had gone to great lengths to make it look like an accidental overdose. Melanie and Dan had suspected this from day one; now there was official confirmation. The obvious explanation was that Esposito had done it, of course. Maybe Whitney had become a liability somehow. Maybe she’d threatened to go to the police, tried to blackmail him. A guy like Esposito hardly needed an excuse to order a hit. But, tempting as it might be to bow to the obvious, that theory just didn’t sit right with Melanie. If Esposito had been responsible, he’d want to keep his name out of it. So why fake an OD using Golpe packets that would lead the cops right back to his operation? Why erase all the numbers but his own from Whitney’s cell phone?

Melanie was already thinking “frame-up.” Then she listened to the next message, and became a hundred percent convinced.

The message had been left on her office voice mail at 7:20 P.M., which, adjusting for the time difference, was less than an hour ago. “Um, hi, it’s Lulu. Look, I said I told you everything I know, but that wasn’t true. Carmen was real upset about something going down in the school office at Holbrooke that didn’t have nothing to do with Jay Esposito. The Esposito thing…well, somebody made me say that, okay? I can explain. Please call me, because I’m real scared and I need to talk to you.”

The school office at Holbrooke? Melanie didn’t know what to make of that one. She listened to that message three times through to get a clearer understanding, and the major thing she came away with was that somebody was out to frame Jay Esposito. Lulu Reyes had been ordered by an unknown individual to implicate him in Carmen’s disappearance. Falsely. That could mean Expo didn’t have Carmen. Beyond that, it could mean he wasn’t responsible for the deaths of Whitney Seward and Brianna Meyers either. So what did that say about the entire direction of their investigation? Or even about this drug deal tonight? Was the hand-to-hand in El Yunque for real but just unrelated to Whitney and Brianna’s deaths? Or was the drug deal orchestrated by the true killer, an elaborate ploy intended to throw off the cops? A hoax, a diversion-God forbid, an ambush?

Melanie dialed the Reyeses’ apartment with shaking hands, thinking of Dan out in the rain forest. Was he walking into a trap?

Luis Reyes answered. Melanie immediately told him she had no news about Carmen, in order not to get his hopes up, but said she needed to speak to Lulu right away.

“She not here right now. She got ice-skating practice in Chelsea Piers till ten o’clock tonight. I think it’s good she keep up her routine, you know?”

He gave Melanie the number for the Chelsea Piers Sky Rink. She called there right away, but the woman who answered the phone refused to get Lulu off the ice, claiming she was too busy to leave her station. Melanie insisted it was an emergency. The woman grudgingly took a message, but Melanie had zero confidence Lulu would ever see it. Damn.

Melanie paced like a caged animal, agonizing over her next step. She wanted to go find Dan in the rain forest and warn him the drug deal might be some kind of hoax. That’s what she wanted to do, but she kept telling herself it wasn’t smart. She was a prosecutor, not a cop. She could screw things up, barging into the middle of a surveillance. Not to mention get hurt.

The phone shrieked, and Melanie jumped. She grabbed the receiver, hoping it was Lulu calling back.

“He-hello?”

“Yo, Ms. Vargas, Frank Leary, Manhattan South Homicide, calling to give youse a heads-up on developments with this Deon Green murder.”

“Oh, sure, Detective,” she said, struggling to focus her brain on something other than what was happening in El Yunque.

“We locked up the pross in question earlier today. One Samir Khan, aka Sammy. Guy rolled right away. Claims he was paid off to lure the vic into a beatin’ by none other than your boy Jay Esposito.”

“Huh. Really.” Melanie fell silent. The thought that Fabulous Deon had thus in all likelihood been killed for snitching made her sick to her stomach. But another part of her experienced a guilty jolt of relief. If Expo were responsible after all, then Dan was just surveilling a normal drug deal. Nothing to worry about.

“Hello?” Leary asked after a moment.

“Yes, I’m still here,” she said. “I hate to hear that. It means Fabulous Deon was probably murdered in retaliation for his work with us.”

“Jeez, sorry about that.”

“God, that’s just awful. Deon was a good man.”

“So let’s move fast on this Esposito asshole, make him pay.”

“Yes, definitely. Our team’s set up right now at a location about forty-five minutes from here, where Expo’s people are doing a hand-to-hand tonight. We’re expecting him to show up there.”

“Expo? In Puerto Rico? No way. He’s in New York tonight. I got good intelligence says he’s at one of his clubs.”

“Are you sure? That’s different from what we’ve been hearing.”

“The snitch I’m working with is real reliable, so I’m pretty confident. My partner and I are gonna take a ride right now and bring ’im in.”

“Detective, do me a favor and let me know as soon as you’ve got Esposito in custody? If he’s not down here, we need to know.”

“Sure thing.”

Esposito at one of his clubs in New York? What could that mean, other than that she’d been right? Somebody was playing them. They were being set up. Jesus, she’d better warn Dan. But he had his phone and his radio turned off.

Melanie desperately started dialing team members, even though she assumed nobody would answer. She left messages on Dan’s and Bridget’s cells begging them to call her at the hotel because she had important new information. Then she called Ray-Ray Wong. Much to her shock, he picked up on the first ring.

“Ray, it’s Melanie. I’m so glad I got you! Did you land yet?”

“Did I what?”

“Are you in San Juan? I couldn’t reach you before, so I figured you guys and Trevor were already on the plane. I have some important new information.”

“Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait. We got a serious problem up here.”

Melanie felt suddenly cold and light-headed, like she was sick with something. She knew what was coming. The thing she’d tried so hard to avoid. She closed her eyes and saw Trevor’s face.

“Tell me,” she demanded with quiet urgency.

“It’s Trevor. He never arrived at the airport. The Escalade they had him in hasn’t been seen in hours. We’ve lost them somehow.”