Hell Gate

FORTY-NINE

“The first thing we’re going to do is lock this door,” Kitts said, pushing me to the entrance of the great tower so that he could secure the bolt from the inside.

“Chapman and Wallace are-”

“Right down at the bridge. I heard that. I was in the basement, just hanging out with the water rats, when you so rudely decided to make yourself at home here. But they’ve got their hands full at the moment, what with the blood, the bits and pieces of brain matter they’re going to find.”

My stomach churned at the thought of what Kitts had done to Anita Paz.

“All we need is a few minutes to get you taken care of so I can be on my way.”

“What do you mean-?”

“Just have to get you up these stairs,” he said, nudging me toward the twisting staircase with his gun. “We’ll create a little diversion. If you’re half as smart as Chapman thinks you are, you won’t get hurt.”

I was replaying the words that Mike had used to explain the deaths of the victims who’d washed ashore. He and Stu Carella were the ones who said that panic kills.

“I’ll walk out of here with you, Rowdy. We’ll walk out together and you can just leave me in Mercer’s car and take off.”

“Damn, I wish it were that easy, Alex. Get you outside and if I put a gag over your mouth, it won’t look quite right to folks we pass along the way in the park. And if I don’t gag you, you might just scream. Then Chapman would jump for you like he always does, like his pants are on fire.”

“I won’t scream. I promise you.”

“Just climb, Alex.”

His strong, lean body pressed against mine as he tried to move me forward. He was dressed in ski clothes, his slicked-back hair revealing his sharp features-steely gray eyes, a pointed nose with a few ridges that made it appear it had been broken once or twice, and thin lips that drew tight into a menacing grimace when I didn’t comply with his orders. He was likely the figure I’d seen running from the Jumel Mansion half an hour ago.

“The guys will come back and find the door locked and call emergency services to break it open.”

“It’ll take an awfully long time to get a response from ESU just to come to the water tower. There won’t be any reason to think you’re here.”

The sight of the gun in the hands of someone as vicious as Rowdy Kitts, someone who despised me so intensely, terrified me. He was just as liable to shoot if Mike or Mercer interrupted his plans to get away. He was only likely to keep me alive as long as I might be viable to him as a hostage or a bargaining chip.

“That reminds me, Alex. Take off those gloves.” When I did, he grabbed them and tossed them across the room. “Sounded to me like Chapman was anxious to get rid of you. Open your phone for me.”

I did exactly as he said.

“Show me the screen. Good. Now bring up Mike’s number and text him. I’m watching. Just text like I say. ‘Rangers here. Taking me to the Three-three to get warm.’ ”

Rowdy Kitts dictated and I typed. He gave me no chance to insert any other message into the phone.

“Hit Send. Now give me your cell. By the time Chapman finishes what he’s doing and reads this, he’ll think the park rangers got you out of his hair and locked up this tower. Buys us a little time together.”

Then he let go of the phone, and I heard it clanging against the basement steps, echoing throughout the chamber as it bounced off one of them along the way and hit bottom. “So sorry, Alex. It just sort of slipped.”

Here, only hundreds of feet away from Mike and Mercer, Kitts was cutting me off without a lifeline.

“Start moving.”

“I can’t do it, Rowdy.” I tipped my head back and looked to the crown of the tower. The endless parade of metal steps-hundreds of them-curved above me, tapering off at the very top in a dizzying swirl of wrought iron.

“Climb, Alexandra. Step lively. Your life may depend on how fast you do it.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, placing my foot on the first platform. “I get vertigo. I get sick from heights. I’ll never be able to climb this.”

“You get queasy on my watch it could be fatal to you, girl,” Kitts said, wrapping his arm around my neck and pulling me back to him, whispering into my ear. “I just need to tuck you away up there so I can do what I’ve got to do. It’s not my plan to make you sick.”

Did he only want me to mount the staircase so he could throw me over from the top? Make it look like I had fallen while trying to see the view?

“Two suicides won’t work, Rowdy. No one will believe Anita went out on that bridge and jumped. You didn’t think about a note, did you?”

“Sure I did,” he said. “She was so despondent about her girlfriend Salma being killed. Worried that she’d lose her baby once her story came to light. Give the kid a better life and all that. Got the saddest little note she wrote right here in my pocket. Now I just need to get it to her house.”

Rowdy Kitts was half pushing, half lifting me up the steps. I gripped the banister tightly and paid attention to my footing.

“Is it money? You want money?”

“I’m drowning in money, Alex. Never knew what a grown man would pay to have sex with a beautiful girl.”

“I’ve got a pretty good sense of that.”

“Well, you should have told me a whole hell of a lot earlier, then. Could have quit this damn job ages ago,” Kitts said with a laugh. “You never took to me from the first time you met me, Ms. Cooper. You were always so high and mighty ’cause you didn’t like me sniffing around those girls in your office.”

He kneed me in the back and I edged up. He kept talking. “Or maybe you were just jealous.”

There were no landings along the staircase. It continued to wrap itself around the slick black pipes, the steps getting smaller and smaller and closer together. We had circled at least twenty feet up, maybe thirty. I couldn’t bear to bring myself to look down at the distance to the cement flooring.

“I didn’t make you for a snakehead, Rowdy. I’ve seen the crimes committed by the lowliest bastards on earth. I’ve witnessed every kind of pain and torture that a man can inflict on a woman, but trading in human lives-there’s nothing more despicable.”

“You don’t like to hear that some of those girls actually enjoy what they do.”

“Maybe when you hold a gun to their heads like this, that’s what they tell you,” I said. “How many young women have you done this to, Rowdy? How many have you had to kill? Or is that all sub rosa, Detective Kitts? Is that all a big secret?”

Rowdy cracked the gun against my shoulder blade. I dropped on one knee, banging it against the edge of the step. When I straightened up I briskly climbed away from my captor, closing my eyes and revolving around the spiral.

“So you got the sub rosa bit, huh? Is that what Anita told Leighton last night? I had her all set up with a really high roller-”

“At the Jumel Mansion?”

“She threw away a good deal, Alex. She was still all spooky about Salma. Never gave the man a proper chance. I promised to help her. No need to call the fat cat with the Jaguar.”

How many young women were there who’d been subjected to this treatment? It was impossible to guess the extent of his network, in the city and well beyond.

“I saw the tattoos on their thighs. I knew Salma had been trafficked. I just didn’t know whose property she was. I didn’t know where to look first to find the rose.” I was several steps higher than Kitts and had rotated my body a bit to face him, gripping the banister with all my strength. “You were standing next to me in that makeshift morgue on the beach when I spotted the tattoo on that girl from Ukraine. I never liked you, Rowdy. I just didn’t take you for that much of a lowlife.”

He was coming toward me, and I backed myself up several steps. “I guess I got lucky, Alex. I was afraid you were more clever than that. I was actually afraid that morning that you and your first-grade dicks were going to figure it out about Jane Doe.”

“Figure what?”

“You’re all shaky, Alex. You got to hold on tight, ’cause these metal stairs can get slippery.”

Kitts was reaching out to touch me again and I turned away from him. I turned away from his gun, his outstretched hand, and the sick leer on his face to climb higher, fighting my fear and my nausea.

“Figure what?” I asked.

“The girl you call Jane Doe. The one who washed up on the beach.”

“Stabbed in the heart before she was thrown overboard to die,” I said, recalling the ugly circumstances of her death. “A knife, a sharp instrument-”

“An ice pick, Alex.”

How could he possibly know what had happened to her on the ship, unless some other snakeheads were on board?

“How’d you wind up with her makeup, Rowdy?”

He stopped in his tracks and I raced on ahead, daring to look back to see that I had surprised him.

“She had nothing to do with the Golden Voyage, Alex. The girl was never on that ship. Tell that to Chapman next time you see him.”

The entire disastrous seascape appeared in my mind’s eye like I was still standing on the windswept beach.

Rowdy Kitts, rogue cop who had worked for the disgraced and indicted former police commissioner. Rowdy Kitts, who owned a piece of a small marina near the site of the wreck of the shipload of slaves. Rowdy Kitts, who’d killed a still-unnamed young prostitute with an ice pick, and thrown her in the ocean, hoping she’d be counted as one of the lost souls of the tragic accident. Rowdy Kitts, the mayor’s bodyguard who knew as much about Gracie Mansion-and City Hall-as anyone with that kind of daily exposure to those places could.

“It was you who approached the ship in the middle of the night, flying the NYPD colors in your own speedboat so the authorities would leave you alone while you unloaded your cargo. Making the landing arrangements for your trafficked goods,” I said. The picture was coming together for me. “But you were late-”

“The damn mayor doesn’t keep regular hours, Alex. Can’t please everybody.”

“And some of the passengers went crazy when they finally saw your boat approach, ’cause they thought it really was the cops, coming to board them.”

Rowdy Kitts had been right under our noses since the first hours we stood on the beach, watching the bodies come ashore.

I flashed to the image of the Ukrainian interpreter who had been with me at the morgue when two male passengers viewed the body of the girl we called Jane Doe. I’d been annoyed when he injected his own opinion that she was too pretty to have been forgotten if those men had ever seen her. He’d been right, of course. She had never been on board the Golden Voyage.

“Human gold, Alex. And it all went up in smoke.”

“But that’s not why you killed the girl,” I said, clutching the banister to keep my balance as I tried to stare him down. “Who was she, Rowdy?”

“She was nobody, Alex.”

I started to tremble uncontrollably at his coldness, his calculation, his utter disregard for human life.

I was mad at myself for having missed the obvious. The girl on the beach had had a rose tattoo, like Salma and Anita Paz. But the others just coming to America-the girls like Olena, whose tattoo was a green dragon, her last owner’s mark-hadn’t yet been stamped with the small red rose. They wouldn’t become Rowdy Kitts’s property till he got them safely ashore, till he took control of their lives. Of course the beautiful young woman we called Jane Doe had not come on the Golden Voyage. She’d been Rowdy’s property long before last week.

“The girl had a name, Rowdy. Give her that much.”

“Now, don’t get all upset about it. She was just one more pitiful story, that’s who she was. I took her in with me too. Eugenia was her name. She was living on my boat, being treated pretty good the last six months,” he said. “But she was threatening to make trouble with the new girls. She was going to warn them off the life, before I even got them sorted out and signed up.”

“So you killed her, just to shut her up?” I was frozen in place, practically halfway up the tower.

Rowdy Kitts reached out with his left arm and grabbed my ankle. I started to kick but he clamped my foot down on the step and smiled. “It’s not the worst way to go, Alex. If I had a little better luck with the tides, Eugenia would have had a proper burial at sea.”