A Clean Kill

Ten

Eloise, it's me. What's going on?" Woo was on the phone.

"Boss." Sergeant Eloise Gelo was parked at her desk, but not alone. Sitting across from her, Detective Charlie Hagedorn had been filling her in with some background information on the senator's kid who'd overdosed at some club, and ended up ten hours later in psych lockup at St. Luke's. She'd been listening to Charlie, studying a spot high over his head, and occasionally taking a mental note.

The lieutenant wanted to know what was going on in the squad room. Gelo ran through the list in her head. A drunk who'd exposed himself one time too many on Broadway had been brought in by two uniforms and was now in the holding cell, sobering up. Three detectives were out on cases. The unit secretary was yelling at someone on the phone in Spanish. And Hagedorn, making a pitiful attempt at some form of human interaction, was staring at her breasts. Everything was copacetic.

"It's quiet, boss. Where are you?" she replied.

"We've got a homicide on Fifty-second Street," the lieutenant replied.

"We do?" Eloise was shocked. No one had called it in.

"Yeah, East Side."

"Oh." Maybe somebody's homicide, but not theirs. "Who is it?" she asked.

"A young mother. Madeleine Wilson, that restaurant guy's wife."

"Oh fuck. That's too bad."

"Eloise, the language," Woo retorted.

"Sorry, sir," Eloise replied cheerfully. April Woo was a sir to her.

"Look, I'm going to be stuck here awhile," Woo went on.

"Are you working the case?" Eloise took the chance of asking something her boss might not want to tell. She'd never heard of a detective unit CO working a homicide in another precinct.

"No, no," the lieutenant said easily. "I'm just on a look-see."

"Uh-huh." It still didn't sound right to her, but she knew things were not exactly regular in this particular unit.

Eloise tapped her fingernails on the table, and Hagedorn chose that moment to lift his eyes from her breasts to her face and stretch his goofy mouth into a lopsided grin. She rolled her eyes. "You there, boss?"

"Yeah, I want you to work on the Peret case. Find out where the kid went, who served him booze, where he got the drugs, the whole thing. Check his credit card records for that. He may have charged it. Then talk to the girls."

"Sounds good to me," Eloise said.

"I'll fill you in later. Call me if anything comes up."

"Sure thing, boss."

The phone went dead, and Eloise hung up elated. This was the kind of thing she'd returned to the bureau for. If she couldn't be in a counterterror unit, at least she could do something useful until she got what she wanted. "The boss is working a homicide in the Seventeenth," she told Charlie.

Hagedorn mugged surprise. "No kidding."

"That a usual thing?" From the moment that Gelo been assigned this unit, she'd been anxious about working for Woo/Sanchez. Her boss was famous, but not exactly known for being a team player. Going in, she knew that she had a lot to live up to. Charlie took a minute more to stare at her before giving her a serious answer.

"Her husband Mike is the precinct CO; he probably asked for her."

"Of course, I knew that." She knew they were married, anyway, and that they'd worked together in the past. What it all meant for her career, however, was still the big question.

Eloise Gelo had moved up and was in her first few weeks of having an office with a door to call her own. She was still basking in the glory of the promotion, and simultaneously disappointed not to be playing a role in defending the city against the biggest bad guys. The door was nice, but the top half of it was glass, so anyone could look in and see what she was doing at any time. Sometimes the males in the unit stood around, pretending to be having a conversation, but actually gawking at her.

What was the big deal? She was a female, but Woo was a woman, too, and they didn't gawk at her. Eloise looked for a pen to jot down her orders. "Damn." Her pen was missing. She was sure she'd been using it only a few minutes ago.

"Did you take my pen?"

Hagedorn snorted.

"Give it back."

He laughed, but not in an unfriendly way. "I didn't take it. Here, use mine." He held his out, but she ignored the offer.

"Somebody did." She rooted around in her drawer for another one. She'd bought a box of pens only last week, but people seemed to enjoy taking her stuff as a kind of joke. She kept some red nail polish in there to annoy the alternate second whip, an asshole by the name of Tony Bobb, who couldn't seem to get over her being his equal. Tony Bobb was an anal kind of guy half her size and twice her weight, who didn't want to be perceived as a nelly. She always left a lot girlie stuff around in her space to bug him. The red nail polish was still there. It distracted her as she searched for a pen and worried about not being able to fill her new boss's shoes.

Gelo had worked for a lot of male officers, but had never worked for a woman. April Woo Sanchez was unreadable, quite the opposite of herself. Eloise was out there, a straight-up kind of person. She talked out of the side of her mouth like a tough guy, had a conspicuous mane of blond curls, which she piled up on the top of her head, wore bright red lipstick and clingy clothes. She had the figure for it and a name to make a girl cry. Wherever she went, in the department and out of it, she got attention. A lot of it—particularly the kind from asshole officers of every rank—was unwelcome. Eloise Gelo had her own philosophy about her style: I ain't changing for no one. I am who I am. Get used to it. Both the attitude and the name caused her a fair amount of grief from people she didn't give a shit about.

From time to time, however, she got the attention of someone worthy of her respect. Back in'97, when she'd been a detective third grade, her path crossed with that of Lieutenant Steve Whipet, a former marine who was CO of the chopper unit. She was smitten by him right away. Maybe it was the marine thing, a cowboy kind of allure—the short blond hair, the ramrod posture. The take-charge, I-can-get-it-done attitude. Whatever.

Their paths crossed when she was on a team that needed a bird in the sky to reach a suspect up in the Bronx. Whipet also had a name to contend with. She liked that about him. He was introduced to her as the guy who'd rescued a bunch of people from the roof of the World Trade Center. Back then, there had been only one World Trade Center bombing. And taking a pregnant woman off the tower had been a big deal.

Whipet recruited her from the Detective Bureau and challenged her to take flying lessons. She became the first female copter pilot in NYPD. A lot of people weren't too happy about it, but she never let negativity get in her way. She was good at whatever job she had, and she and Steve had some fun for a while. But he changed after the Fire Department made a rule to shut down access to all tall rooftops in the city. He became a worried man.

After the first tower bombing, the powers that be had decided it was too hard and too dangerous to evacuate people from above. So, in a massive sweep, they'd locked all the roof doors of the office towers in the whole city. Whipet feared that an event on a lower floor anywhere could create a death trap for those working on the higher floors. And that was what happened in the second World Trade Center attack. Everybody above the sixty-fifth floor had no exit. Eloise had been in one of the birds, hovering just out of reach of the hundreds of people frying inside. She hadn't been at the controls, but she'd been there.

In the forty minutes before the first building collapsed, she'd seen the faces of desperate people as they broke the windows to jump out eighty, ninety, a hundred floors above the street. Whipet knew the building well, and it drove him nuts thinking of the dozens of people trapped on the stairs leading to the roof—locked inside where he could not get to them. His unit had been warned off by the FD and by his PD bosses. They didn't want those choppers to burst into flame, trying to save people they felt couldn't be saved. But Steve had believed that he could have rescued some people. While he'd been in the air; he'd shot a bunch of photos. He had his opinions about what he could have done if they'd been allowed to land on the roof.

Afterward, he'd come down to earth to work the site and deferred his retirement for months. Even after he was out, he returned there from time to time. And he still believed that more could have been done. Both he and Eloise continued to have nightmares about it, and the relationship ended. Two years ago Steve bailed for good. He retired from the Department and went somewhere far away with the wife he always said he'd never much liked. He and Eloise didn't keep in touch anymore.

After a fruitless search in her drawer for the missing pens, Eloise finally gave up looking. Hagedorn was still offering the one from his pocket, so she took it. "Thanks."

"What does she want?" he asked about the Woo conversation.

"Oh, she wants us to investigate the Peret case, find out where he went, how he got in, who served him booze. And of course where he got the blow."

"This doesn't sound like our kind of case. Are we going after the clubs?" Charlie said excitedly.

"Not clear." Eloise didn't know what else to answer.

"It sounds pretty clear to me. Lieutenant Woo went downtown this morning. The chief has her on something." He rubbed his hands together. "This is great. We've been too easy on these creeps. The plastic trail should make a good start. We could shut them down."

"Right," she said quickly. She was new to the job. She had no idea what he was talking about. Did precinct units do club raids?

"Also his cell phone. His incoming and outgoing calls might place him inside one of the clubs, or more than one. We could get lucky there." Hagedorn was already on it.

"Check," she said. "You work on the credit cards, and I'll see what we can do about that phone."

Charlie returned to his computer, and Gelo tapped her fingers on the pen, wondering when Woo might get back to the shop and tell her what was going on.