Most Wanted

17

GASPING FOR BREATH AND RAPIDLY GETTING soaked, Melanie dashed around the side of the building to the cavernous, echoing plaza beside the towering courthouse. The plaza was deserted of people except for a lone homeless man wearing a plastic bag, but cars whizzed by on the slick avenue. She rushed toward the street, bent on hailing a taxi and getting the hell out of here. But the sight of passing traffic calmed her enough that her curiosity kicked in. She managed to slow down and look over her shoulder. She wasn’t being followed. She heaved an enormous sigh. But then she remembered her bag, left propping open the metal door. She couldn’t pay for a taxi home.

She stood in the rain and agonized about whether to go back for it. She couldn’t just leave it there. Not only did it contain evidence she’d spent all night searching for, but it had her wallet and keys. If the person who’d chased her took those, he could gain access to her apartment, where Maya was sleeping. But she couldn’t go back either. Whoever had chased her might still be down there. No way was she risking running into him again. Who the hell was he? How could he possibly have gotten in? The building was so well secured these days. Federal marshals during the day and private security guards, all retired cops, at night. A guard was stationed at the main entrance. Several others executed regular patrols throughout the building. Yet somehow he’d managed to get in.

As she stood there dumbly, uncertain of what to do next, somebody behind her called her name. She turned. Dan O’Reilly was striding toward her, coming from the direction of her building.

“THANK GOD YOU’RE HERE!” MELANIE CRIED out when she saw Dan.

“Why? What’s the matter?” he said, rushing up to her. “Are you okay?” She told him about being in the basement, the lights going out, the intruder chasing her.

“Hey, hey, relax. It’s okay. Probably just a custodian or something, thought the lights were left on by mistake and he shut ’ em off. But come on, let’s go back and get your bag before somebody walks off with it.”

“No, Dan, I’m telling you, it wasn’t a custodian. Somebody came after me. I’m scared!”

“Don’t be scared. Here, look at this.” He lifted up his polo shirt to show her the butt of a silver gun protruding from his jeans’ waistband. Even in her distress, her eyes took in the smooth muscles of his stomach. She tried not to notice, but it was just there to see.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll be right there with you, and I’m armed. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He pulled his shirt down, taking her arm protectively, gently, leading her back toward her building. She relaxed, being with him. She felt safe, although she suspected he was merely humoring her.

“What the heck were you doing down there by yourself anyway?” he asked.

“I was working,” she said, making an effort to sound casual. “With you lounging around ordering room service with Rosario, somebody has to solve the case. Oh, hey, speaking of Rosario, who’s-”

“A guy from the PD showed up a couple hours ago, so I went to take care of some other stuff. Then I figured I’d swing by here to make sure those wiretap files showed up okay. Did they?”

“Yeah, they did, and, man, were they great. You’re not gonna believe what I found.”

Before she could describe the evidence to Dan, though, they reached her building. The security guard, a sour excop, refused to let her in without her ID.

“I left it in the basement-”

“I don’t care if you left it on the moon,” he snapped. “Rules are rules. You show ID or you can’t come in.”

“Let me explain. I was in the dead-file room, and somebody turned out the lights. Whoever it was started to come after me. I had to go out the emergency exit.”

“That was you who opened the emergency door? You know you set off an alarm?”

“I was running from somebody! There’s been a security breach. You should investigate!”

“Hey, hon, I been on duty since six o’clock, and I checked everybody going in or out. The only security breach tonight was you setting off the alarm. We got two guys down there right now trying to figure out what happened.” Shaking his head, he removed a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt and depressed a button.

“Yo, Pete, it’s Artie. You read me?” he barked into the handset.

The walkie-talkie crackled loudly. “Yeah, Artie? What’s up, over?”

“I got a prosecutor standing right in front of me cops to the whole thing. She heard a noise, thought someone was chasing her,” Artie said sarcastically. The guy on the other end howled with laughter, then said he was on his way back up. Melanie started to protest, but Dan cut her off with a sharp tap on her arm.

“I was thinking maybe she heard a custodian,” Dan said to the guard. “Anybody down there cleaning tonight?”

The guard shrugged. “Cleaning crew does the offices after hours, but they got no reason to go down to dead files. Maybe it was a pipe banging spooked her or something.”

Dan said, “She forgot her pocketbook, so I’m gonna take her back down there to get it, okay? I’ll escort her, and I’ll let you know if we find the…uh, intruder.” Dan practically winked at the guard.

“Right, okay, as long as you’ll take responsibility for her. Sign in,” he told Melanie. “I’ll verify your ID on the way out. And please, honey, do me a favor. Stay away from the emergency exits.” Smiling smugly to himself, he went back to his newspaper.

They got onto the elevator, and Melanie jabbed the “B” button furiously.

“What a jerk!” she said once the doors closed, quivering with rage. “How could you take his side? You don’t believe me?”

“I wasn’t taking his side, I was bullshitting him. I hate guys like that. Do their twenty years cooping under a bridge somewhere, ignoring their radios, and once they retire, it’s downhill from there. He couldn’t find his own ass in the dark with two hands and a flashlight. So I made sure we both got in, to do our own investigation.”

They reached the basement, and the elevator doors opened. Melanie hesitated and swallowed hard. But Dan was with her. It would be okay.

“This way,” she said, stepping out and leading Dan back down the mustard yellow corridor toward the metal door.

“You came down here without an armed escort? Man, you got nerves of steel.”

“Yeah, and you should’ve seen the autopsy photos I was looking at when the lights went out! Severed limbs and everything!”

She managed a weak laugh. With Dan at her side, the whole experience might have been an amusing caper, or so she tried to tell herself. But when they reached the metal door, her laughter froze on her lips. The door was closed, her black bag missing.

“My bag is gone!”

“Huh. Maybe the guards found it?”

“Wouldn’t they have said something?”

Dan looked up and down the hallway. Ten feet away her bag lay on the floor beside some trash bins.

“There it is!” he said.

She ran over and grabbed it. Turning it upside down, she dumped the entire contents onto the floor, and began rifling through to see what was missing.

“Anything taken?” Dan asked, coming to stand over her as she opened her wallet.

“I had about thirty dollars cash,” she said. “It’s gone, but my credit cards are all here. Oh, look, the compartment with my checkbook is open! I always keep it snapped.”

“Any checks missing?”

“No. But the checks have my home address on them. Do you think that’s why he opened it? To see where I live?”

“It could have just come open when the guy tossed your wallet. With the money missing, this looks like a simple purse snatch to me.”

“Wait a minute!” Melanie exclaimed, suddenly realizing what wasn’t on the floor.

“What?” Dan asked.

She picked up the black bag and looked inside. It appeared completely empty. She stuck her hand in down to the bottom, feeling around to be sure. Nothing. The tape and the animal-torture Polaroids had been in there, and now they weren’t. They weren’t on the floor either. They were plain gone. She looked up at Dan, thunderstruck.

“I found some important evidence tonight in your wiretap boxes. It’s gone. I can’t believe it! Why would a thief care about that?”

“What evidence?”

“A wiretap tape and some photographs. From an apartment belonging to a Jasmine Cruz. Who is she?”

“She was the subscriber on our busiest phone. A stripper at a club in Times Square if I remember right, probably a top guy’s girlfriend. We never intercepted her in a drug call, so we left her out there when we took the case down. Why?”

“I think she was Slice’s girlfriend.”

“What makes you say that?”

She described the pictures in detail, how they showed the black dog being trained to kill and how they led her to the transcript of the call between Slice and Jasmine.

“I remember that call,” he said. “Pretty scary stuff, the way he talked. We were looking to ID that guy when we took the case down. I played that tape for every cooperator in the case, and they all claimed not to recognize the voice. More than once I wondered if they were lying to me.”

“I’m sure they were. They were all scared to death to rat on Slice.”

“Yeah. Huh.” He seemed troubled by something.

“But, Dan, it’s missing! The tape and the transcript and those torture photos. Oh, and something else. Information about a young woman who worked at Jed Benson’s law firm. I think she might know something. Stealing money I can understand, but why would a thief take evidence? Nobody would want that stuff unless they were involved with the case.”

“Jesus, look at this,” Dan said, his attention caught by something over her head. She stood up and twirled around, following his glance. A security camera, mounted to the low ceiling, pointed directly at the entrance to the file room. She hadn’t noticed it before. Standing on tiptoe and stretching out his arm, Dan was tall enough to reach it. He pulled a piece of shiny gray duct tape off the lens and showed it to her.

“This tape looks new. Somebody taped the lens, probably just now while you were in there.”

“Who would do that?” she asked, although she had a pretty good idea.

“Somebody who really didn’t want his picture taken,” Dan said gravely.

“But not a custodian, right?” A chill shot right down her spine.

“I doubt a custodian would think about taping a lens, even if he’s dirty and planned to toss your purse. That’s something a pro does when he’s planning something big. You could have been hurt.”

He looked at her intently, like he was afraid she would disappear before his eyes.

“Do you think it was Slice?” she asked, giving voice to her deepest fear.

“I have no way of knowing that for sure. But maybe.”

“Probably, right? Who else could it be? Jasmine Cruz wanting to hear the sound of her own voice?” She giggled nervously, but her whole body was trembling. “How the hell could Slice have gotten in here? He looks like a total thug. Even if the guy at the front desk is asleep at the switch, he’d’ve noticed someone like Slice. And the rest of the building is sealed up pretty tight. No windows that open, all the external doors alarmed.”

“I agree it’s strange,” Dan said.

“I mean, how would he even know where to look for me? He must’ve had inside help!”

“From who, a guard?” Dan asked skeptically. “That’s a serious charge. A guard probably wouldn’t do something like that. Lazy is one thing, but dirty is something else entirely.”

“Then how, Dan? You explain it to me.”

“I don’t know. If we can grab whoever chased you, we’ll ask him how he got in, okay? Who knows-maybe it was Slice, and maybe he’s still around. I need to do a floor-to-floor search.”

“I’m coming with you. I’m not staying here by myself,” Melanie said.

“Of course not. You shouldn’t have been down here alone in the first place. This is a serious case. We should be taking more precautions. You can wait in my car. I don’t want you in the line of fire if I find this guy.”

Under other circumstances she would have protested, but now she was too shaken up. When she went after the Benson case like a demon, she’d never imagined the killer might train his sights on her.