Most Wanted

16

MELANIE COULDN’T DECIDE WHICH PART OF HER job she loved best-the courtroom or the investigating. She was crazy for the courtroom. Standing up there in front of the jury, all eyes on her, she felt like a movie star. But discovering a smoking gun in a hot investigation-that was a huge thrill, too. Smoking gun. What a great phrase. It made her think of finding a murder weapon in the bushes when everybody else had missed it. That’s how she felt tonight, like she’d picked up a gun with smoke rising from the barrel, held it in her hand. Only the gun was a cassette tape.

She kept a tape recorder in her bottom drawer. They’d stopped issuing them to prosecutors when wiretaps went digital. Now you could listen to recorded calls on your computer speakers. She’d meant to turn her recorder in to Supply, but who had time for administrative details these days? Lucky she hadn’t, or she would’ve had to wait until morning to hear the tape. The C-Trout Blades wiretap was old style; the calls were all stored on cassette. She was so giddy with discovery she couldn’t have stood the delay.

The animal-torture photos led her to it. When she saw the pictures of the black dog training to kill at Jasmine Cruz’s apartment, she knew Slice had been there. Not only been there but hung out there, maybe even lived there, treated the place like his own anyway. You don’t teach your dog to kill in an environment you don’t control. And if he spent a lot of time there, no matter how careful he was, Slice must’ve talked on that phone. She would read every transcript in every box, if that’s what it took to find it.

The task turned out to be easier than it looked, precisely because Slice was so careful. The regular players openly used Jasmine Cruz’s phone every day. The wiretap monitors quickly learned their voices and labeled the transcripts of their calls with their names. The call she was looking for, she quickly realized, would stand out because it wouldn’t bear the name of a regular player. Slice would be called “UM”-unidentified male. It would be a slip up, a one-shot deal, made in an emergency or in anger. Once she figured that out, things moved quickly.

She recognized it the instant she found it. The monitor had marked it as non-pertinent because they weren’t discussing drugs. Maybe it wasn’t pertinent to their investigation back then, but it was sure as hell pertinent to hers. She read along on the transcript as she listened to the tape, sure in her gut the “UM” was Slice. Who else would have that voice-low and urgent and dangerous?

(Incoming from cell phone)

JULIO ONE-EYE: Yo.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yo, son.

JULIO ONE-EYE: What up?

UM: Put Jasmine on.

JULIO ONE-EYE: She sleeping.

UM: I said put her on! Wake her up, then. Fucking bitch, sleep all day!

JULIO ONE-EYE: Yo, awright.

(Pause)

JASMINE: Yeah, baby, what up?

UM: You got something you want to tell me, bitch?

JASMINE: No. What you talking about?

UM: If you got something to tell me, you know I better hear it from you first. You know that, or you know what happen, right?

JASMINE: Come on, now, don’t talk crazy like that. I don’t know what you mean. I ain’t do nothing.

UM: Yeah, that the problem, you ain’t do nothing. You supposed to do something, but you ain’t do nothing. See, you figured it out. You ain’t as stupid as you look.

JASMINE: Oh.

UM: Oh! Stupid cunt! My dog smarter than you. You don’t do your job, and I catch you fuckin’ sleeping!

JASMINE: Last night was real busy at the club, baby, so I couldn’t do it. But tonight I see him for sure, and I get what you need. Don’t you worry.

UM: You think you got the only pussy in town? You ain’t handling this right. Mighty Whitey gonna lose interest, and then I ain’t got no back door to him. If that happen, you useless to me. Think about what that mean for your survival rate.

JASMINE: Don’t worry, baby. He like me real good. I be his criminal girl, you know? Word, I get you the shit tonight.

UM: You better, or you wake up with me standing over your bed. And I ain’t be there to fuck you.

JASMINE: Okay, baby.

UM: Do it.

JASMINE: Yeah, baby, I promise, okay?

(End of call)

Calm down, Melanie told herself. She shouldn’t assume the “Mighty Whitey” they were talking about was Jed Benson. Just because Rosario Sangrador said Slice had referred to Jed Benson as “Mighty Whitey” at the town house last night didn’t mean anything. He probably called all legit people that, anybody who wasn’t street. Slice and Jasmine were discussing somebody else. Assuming otherwise was taking a huge leap. She’d made an important discovery just by tying Slice to this location. She should be satisfied with that, not jinx it by asking for the moon.

But what if Mighty Whitey was Jed Benson? What if-four years earlier-Jed Benson had had a relationship with a woman who had a relationship with Slice? What if Slice had used Jasmine Cruz to get to Jed Benson, or to get something from him? Then something had gone wrong, and Slice went after Jed? No, it couldn’t be. Impossible. It was completely inconsistent with everything she knew about this victim. Unless, unless, she didn’t know everything there was to know about this victim.

That reminded her. She’d never followed up on that strange incident in the elevator at Jed Benson’s law firm. It seemed less significant in contrast to this exciting new discovery, but still, it would take only a second to cover that base. She hopped on the Internet and pulled up the directory for the Reed firm. The firm’s Web site posted photographs. Bingo. Within seconds she’d identified the woman in the pink suit. One Sarah Elizabeth van der Vere, a recent graduate of Columbia Law School. Sarah was twenty-six, from Grosse Point, Michigan, and she specialized in securities and ERISA law. Melanie clicked “print,” and Sarah’s bio emerged from her printer. She exited the Reed Web site and went to a telephone-directory program. Sarah lived within walking distance of the Reed firm, off Second Avenue in the Sixties. Melanie jotted the address and phone number onto the printout of the bio, grabbed the dog photos, the transcript, and the cassette tape, and stuffed everything into her big black leather shoulder bag.

She turned off her light, lingered for a moment in the doorway to bid a fond good night to her darkened office, then headed for the elevator with a light step. With all these leads, she’d wrap up this case in no time.

WHEN SHE CHECKED HER WATCH IN THE ELEVATOR, it was after ten o’clock. Her finger paused in midair, about to press the “Lobby” button. All she wanted was to go home and watch Maya sleep, put her hand on that little tummy, follow it up and down with each breath. But she’d made a promise to Rommie Ramirez. They were putting a lot of faith in her with this case. She sighed and pressed “B” for the basement instead.

Closed files were stored in a secured room in the basement of her building. The basement stayed lit twenty-four/seven, and Melanie was grateful for this as she walked down a deserted mustard yellow corridor and came to a metal door marked DEAD FILE STORAGE. Even brightly lit, the basement was creepy enough to justify a door with the word “Dead” on it. She swiped her card key through the magnetic lock. The door swung open onto a vast, windowless file room, dimly lit by emergency lights. She would have to hunt for the main switch.

As she stood on the threshold, the room seemed oppressively silent. She imagined getting locked in. Nobody knew she was here. She could be entombed for days until somebody else came looking for a file. The thought thoroughly spooked her. Holding the metal door ajar with her hip, she rifled through her bag anxiously and pulled out her cell phone. No reception. If she did get locked in, she couldn’t even call for help.

She propped her shoulder bag in the doorway to keep the door from slamming shut. There, problem solved. She stepped into the room, located the main switch and flipped on the lights, illuminating the enormous space. The ceiling was low, the room lined from end to end with rows of metal shelves tightly jammed with boxes, creating an enclosed, cryptlike effect. She walked to the central aisle, her heels ringing on the hard concrete floor and echoing back at her like the sharp reports of a pistol. The room stayed cool because it was in the basement, but the ventilation was terrible. The stagnant air, redolent of ancient cardboard and mold, tickled her throat. Melanie walked deeper into the maze of shelves, scanning the dates labeled on each row until she found the Delvis Diaz files-far from the metal door where she’d left her handbag, almost at the opposite wall of the building.

The Diaz files consisted of at least thirty boxes, packed tightly on a lower shelf, running the full expanse of a row. She hauled down the first few and began opening them to see which looked important. A box of evidence about the three teenage gang members who were murdered seemed worthy of more careful study, so she opened it and started going through folders. One file held photocopies of news clippings about the trial. The stories referred to the victims as the “Flatlands Boys” because their dismembered bodies were discovered inside an old refrigerator that had been dumped in the Flatlands, a Brooklyn landfill.

Melanie studied the grainy photographs of the boys, wholesome and smiling in their school pictures. They were so young-two were fourteen and the third fifteen-but still, according to the news reports, they were old enough to guard a heroin stash for the Blades. Several kilos of heroin had gone missing from that stash, and Delvis Diaz was convicted of murdering the boys in retaliation. The boys had been shot execution style at the stash house, dismembered with a hacksaw in the basement, and then transported to the Flatlands in heavy-duty plastic trash bags.

Next Melanie plucked a folder containing autopsy reports from the box. She held it in her lap, opened it, and gasped aloud. Body parts stared her in the face, in a photo stapled to the top of the pile. The victim’s name was Melvin Atuna. He was fourteen when he died, and she was looking at an eight-by-ten glossy of his dismembered limbs. Two arms, two legs, displayed like wares on the green plastic trash bag they’d been discovered in. The limbs looked so real, so normal, except they weren’t attached to anything, and they had several odd-looking wounds. The arms thick and chunky, the legs bulbous. She looked back to the article with the school photos. Yes, Melvin had been a tubby kid. The arms were laid out on the plastic bag to showcase their numerous crude tattoos, belying the broad, childlike face grinning in the other picture. The right biceps bore a clumsily drawn black gun, the words THUG LIFE written beneath it. The left displayed another, more significant home-drawn tattoo-a greenish blue dagger being struck by a red lightning bolt as two green droplets flew from the blade. So young, but not so innocent. According to the news articles, the tattoo meant Melvin was a member of the C-Trout Blades, the two droplets signifying that he’d already, at his tender age, killed two people on their behalf.

She could feel several more photographs stapled beneath the top one, but she couldn’t bear to look at them. Not here in this creepy basement room, her heart still fluttering with the shock of seeing the first. So she flipped ahead and began reading Melvin’s autopsy report. Halfway through she found something that made her gasp again. The report revealed that his dismembered body had been covered with dog bites, just like Jed Benson’s body. She forced herself to go back to the photograph. Jesus, yes. Those wounds on his limbs. They were exactly like the ones she’d seen on Benson’s corpse. How did she miss that? The tooth marks were unmistakable.

Rommie had predicted she would find similarities between the MO of Jed Benson’s murder and the murder of the three boys. He was right. But what did the similarities mean? When Slice and his crew killed Jed Benson, had Delvis Diaz ordered them to copy the methods of his own murder of the Flatlands boys years earlier? Why would he do that? What purpose could it serve other than pointing the finger right at him? Did the black dog that Slice used to attack Benson actually belong to Delvis Diaz? Could it be the same dog that had attacked Melvin Atuna nearly eight years before Jed Benson’s murder? She didn’t think so. The paws in the Polaroid from Jasmine Cruz’s apartment, presumably taken about four years after Atuna was killed, looked like those of a puppy, a successor, an imitator of the earlier killer mascot. But she’d study that carefully when she finished here. She was glad she’d thought to put the animal-torture Polaroids in her bag. She should just take these autopsy reports and head home right now, finish reading them in the comfort of her own living room. A deserted basement late at night was no place to study the handiwork of a psychotic killer.

As she began gathering up the autopsy reports, Melanie froze. What was that? She was certain the sound of shuffling paper had masked an unnatural noise back near the metal door. She held her breath for a moment, listening for the noise again.

The overhead lights went off, leaving the room lit only by the dim emergency lights. Chest heaving with fright, Melanie prayed it was a fluke. Por favor, let it be so. The powerful overhead lights must be on a timer to save energy. She got to her feet, her knees trembling, to go switch them back on. But even as she stood up, the emergency lights went out, too, plunging the windowless room into complete blackness. She stood utterly still, straining her ears to hear, close to panic. She was certain you could only turn off the emergency lights by flipping a circuit breaker and shutting down power to this room. It could mean just one thing: Somebody was in here. To get her.

A loud slam echoed through the room in the pitch dark-the metal door crashing shut. Was somebody locking her in here…or coming in after her? Either possibility struck her senseless with fear. She began to feel her way carefully along the row, her breath coming in shallow gasps. He would surely hear her breathing in the darkness and zero in on her location. Her glance flew around haphazardly and came to rest on an exit sign glowing red at the end of the aisle. She headed for it, stumbling over one of the boxes sitting on the floor, crying out in surprise. Now she was certain she heard footsteps heading toward her. Panting, she ran for the exit sign, praying she wouldn’t crash into anything.

It was an emergency exit. She didn’t hesitate. She hurled her full weight against the handle, setting off an alarm as she stumbled out into a brightly lit stairwell, one flight down from street level. She took the slippery steps two at a time, breathing raggedly, terrified of tripping in her high heels and getting cornered by whoever stalked her. The stairs were confusing. As the staircase curled around on itself, she wasn’t sure whether the metal door she came upon would take her outside or lead her nowhere, trap her. She heard something behind her. No time to decide. She crashed against the door, tumbling out into pouring rain. She was in the deserted loading dock behind her building, convinced the footsteps were gaining on her.