Edge Of The City:Chapter Three

EDGE OF THE CITY Chapter 3 The taxi ride to the airport was a long one, with McKenna and Angelita not saying much to each other. Although Angelita had been born and raised in New York, she despised the city and hated the police department. She considered the department to be a cold and self-serving bureaucracy, and she felt she ought to know, having been a rookie cop when she had met McKenna before her problems with driving a police car in Manhattan had prompted her to quit. That was all for the best, she thought. She was happy in Florida and never wanted to go back, but now they had no choice. It was only right that Brian attend the funeral of his best friend's son. Nevertheless, she was in a mood, which suited McKenna just fine. He felt like getting in a mood himself. McKenna called Ray's house from the airport and got his daughter Ilene. Her father wasn't home, he was at the morgue. McKenna grimaced at the thought of seeing a son at that place. He had the number for Ray's mobile phone, but didn't want to disturb him at such a time, so he just asked Ilene to give her father the message that they were on their way to New York. Then he bought a copy of the New York Times at the airport and they headed for their plane. Angelita still didn't feel like talking and neither did he, so he read the paper during the flight. The headline read POLICE COMMISSIONER'S SON KILLED IN EAST SIDE SHOOT-OUT WITH ROBBERY RING. The story took three columns on the front page and was continued on page three in Section A, which was a break with tradition since crime stories and other metropolitan news were usually carried in the B section of the Times. On the front page was a picture of the crime scene on East 45th Street, with the two bodies covered by blankets and surrounded by detectives. Page three carried a picture of Dennis in uniform graduating at the top of his police academy class and a photo of the Brunette home in Bayside, Queens. As usual, the Times had a lot of information. McKenna read how Dennis had been at his regular post at the United States Mission to the UN when he had observed a woman being beaten and robbed half a block away. Brunette intervened, and while he was struggling with the perpetrator, three accomplices drove up and one of them shot him with a shotgun. Wounded in the legs, Brunette returned fire and it was believed he hit one of the men seated in the car before being killed by a second shotgun blast. Then another accomplice, in a vicious act of revenge, executed the female victim with a single bullet to the brain before taking her purse and calmly driving away. According to police, the victim was still unidentified and described as a well-dressed White female in her thirties. Police said that the car used in the robbery had been stolen in Coney Island the day before and had been identified in two previous purse-snatches during the evening, one in Queens Plaza and the other on the West Side of Manhattan. In both previous crimes the MO was the same. One robber followed the victim on foot, grabbed her purse, and was picked up by his accomplices in their stolen car. A police spokesman declined to comment further, but added that it was expected that the case would be solved and the perpetrators arrested. The paper reported that Inspector Steven Tavlin of the Major Case Squad was assigned to supervise the investigation and a special confidential phone number had been set up for those willing to provide any information on the robbers. A reward of $100,000 was offered by the PBA, with an additional reward of $100,000 to be provided by Cop Shot, a New York philanthropic organization. The reward would be given to any person who could provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killers. The Brunette family was described as devastated by the tragedy, but holding up under the pressure. The police commissioner declined to give an interview, but stated that he would not be personally involved in the case. He asked that all questions be referred to Inspector Tavlin who, paradoxically, also declined to be interviewed. The story ended with a short history of young Dennis Brunette, reporting that he had been a high school track and baseball star and had gone on to attend John Jay College of Criminal Justice, graduating as the class salutarian with a degree in criminology before joining the police department. Several officers and supervisors in the Seventeenth Precinct described him as likable and competent, and as someone who would have had a bright future in the police department. Throughout the article McKenna had noticed that the press attributed their information to "a high-ranking department source" or "a police official who spoke on condition of anonymity," and that worried him. It had been his experience that, when a newsworthy case was going well and arrests were expected soon, there was usually no shortage of chiefs who were willing to be propelled before the cameras to outline for their public the wonders their brilliantly supervised men had performed, ending the interview by giving the assembled press the correct spelling of his own name and none other. That wasn't happening here, which led McKenna to believe that the case wasn't going well. Reading on, McKenna found that the Times featured an article summarizing Ray Brunette's police career on the front page of the B section. It stated that Brunette was a third-generation New York City police officer who had joined the department in 1964 after serving in the Marine Corps. He rose rapidly through the civil-service ranks after being treated for alcoholism in 1974, and was now a teetotaler. He spent most of his career in the detective division, obtaining a law degree from St. John's in the process, and rose to national prominence when, as chief of detectives last year, he supervised the rescue of a prominent Peruvian who was being held in New York by the Shining Path terrorist army. The Times reported that as police commissioner Brunette was popular in the ranks and had recently been at odds with the mayor because of his advocacy of incentive pay for those members of the department with college degrees and those who spoke Spanish or Creole. The Times article speculated that the mayor was afraid to remove him because his popular police commissioner had been mentioned as a potential candidate for many statewide and city offices, including that of mayor. McKenna learned nothing about Brunette that he hadn't already known, so he read the rest of the metropolitan section and found that not much else had changed in New York. There was a mounting budget deficit, a breaking scandal in the Department of Social Services with checks being issued to nonexistent clients, and the threat of a longshoremen's strike which would close the harbor, the city's raison d'être. Angelita snapped out of it as they were landing in New York. She had felt the baby move for the first time and she wanted to talk again about names, which was one of the things that drove McKenna crazy. They couldn't agree because she liked a couple of Spanish names he hated and, oddly enough, some Waspish names like Brad and Dane. He was only happy with the old Irish standbys that ran throughout his family. She didn't like those, he suspected, because she didn't like the people in his family that carried them. So once again they got nowhere. McKenna was surprised to find Dennis Sheeran waiting for them when they picked up their luggage in La Guardia Airport. Sheeran was an old friend and the deputy inspector in charge of the NYPD end of the Joint Terrorist Task Force. A personable guy with a boyish grin, he was thought to be one of the department's rising stars. "Glad to see you, Dennis, but what are you doing here?" McKenna asked. "Ray told me to find you and get you to the Gramercy Park Hotel," Sheeran said as he shook McKenna's hand. "He's got a suite reserved for you. That okay with you, Mr. McCoy?" "Just fine. You can give me the real deal on the case on the way in." Angelita wasn't happy with that. "Can't we talk about something else?" she asked. "This whole thing is depressing enough as it is." "Yes, we'll talk about something else, but after we talk about the case," McKenna answered, giving her his please-don't-break-my-balls look. Angelita opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. They picked up McKenna's suitcase and Angelita's three bags and headed out. Parked outside the terminal, Johnny Pao sat behind the wheel of an unmarked car. Pao was a big, handsome man, a former Marine, and one of the department's sharpshooters. He was half Chinese and half Irish and McKenna always used to kid him, telling him the only reason he was alive was because McKenna's father had run out of ammo when he was shooting at Johnny's father at the Chosen Reservoir in the Korean War. They put the suitcases in the back, then Sheeran got in front while McKenna and Angelita took the backseat. "Yeah, Brian, my father's still fine," Pao said with a smile as they climbed in. "That's good news, Johnny. Tell him my father sends his best." "Yeah, right," Pao said as he pulled from the curb and headed for the Grand Central Parkway. Pao's still the same grouch I remember, McKenna thought before asking Sheeran, "What's to know that I haven't read in the papers?" "Tavlin's keeping quite a bit under wraps," Sheeran answered. "We got the getaway car this morning. The dopes ran it out of gas on the Jersey Turnpike near Newark Airport and left it there. Bad news is that they wiped it down and we got no prints from the car. Good news is that apparently Dennis killed one of them. No body, but we found a bullet in the backseat that had lung and liver tissue on it, and those are two organs you gotta have to stay alive. The medical examiner ran tests on the blood in the car and says the dead guy was probably an illegal alien from some Third World country in South America." "They got that from his blood?" Angelita asked, suddenly interested. "Yeah. No antibodies in the blood for rubella, mumps, or polio, so he had to be from the wilds of someplace poor. He would have been vaccinated if he entered the country legally, and the witnesses say he was Hispanic." "How about drugs?" asked McKenna. "None. He must've been a clean-living guy, a little unusual in his profession. No drugs or alcohol in his blood. But that's not all we got from the car. There were three pocketbooks in back, all empty, but the first two victims have identified them as theirs and the witnesses on Forty-fifth Street say the third one is the one they took from the lady before they killed her." "Got her identified yet?" "Nope, it's gonna be a hard one. No jewelry and all her clothes were German. Fingerprints come back negative, no record. We asked all around the neighborhood and nobody knows her. She had some alcohol in her blood, so maybe she was lost. Some guys from the Missing Persons Squad are working on it and they sent her prints to Interpol." "How long before they get an answer?" "A couple of days, if she was ever fingerprinted in one of their member countries." "How many witnesses you got?" McKenna asked. "Plenty. The victim made quite a racket and woke everybody up on Forty-fifth Street. The original purse-snatcher is a Hispanic, short and skinny, maybe fifteen or sixteen. The guy who shot the girl looked like Godzilla, Hispanic, maybe five nine, plenty well built, real mean-looking, they say. Nobody could describe the guy with the shotgun because he never got out of the car. Funny part is, they said the guy Dennis shot was wearing a suit. Don't see that too often in a purse-snatcher." "What did the first two victims say about them?" "That it was the same kid who took their purses, but they couldn't describe anybody else in the car. Said there were four of them, though, and these guys always drove away slow so they all got the plate number." "That was a little careless of them, don't you think?" McKenna asked. "Yeah," Sheeran said, "but they were real careful in their planning. In all three purse-snatches, right before they pulled them, they had somebody call in a phony run to 911, always a heavy job, and always at the opposite end of the precinct where they were gonna do the robbery. Same male caller, all three times. Had a bit of a Spanish accent. They did a voice-print match on the 911 tapes." "How about location of the calls?" "They did their homework. They knew that when you call 911 now, the location of the caller comes up on the 911 operator's screen. So he was always at the location where he said he was, right near the bullshit job he was calling about." "So they had to have radios. First they find the victim they wanna do, then they radio the guy to make the call," McKenna surmised. "Pretty sharp, but now we know there has to be four of them left." "Yeah, they're pros," Pao said. "Sounds like it," McKenna said, but it didn't make sense to him. What are the benefits of being professional purse-snatchers? he asked himself. How much could they make from ripping off some ladies' pocketbooks, split at least five ways? Not enough to justify all the trouble they went to, he concluded. "Something on your mind?" Sheeran asked. "A few things that don't add up, like driving so slow that everybody gets their plate. Then there's the deal with running out of gas on the Jersey Turnpike. Somebody must have seen them get out of the car and, once you let that into the papers, you're gonna be getting hundreds of calls from people looking to cash in on the reward, telling you they saw them there on the turnpike." "Maybe they're sharper than we think," Sheeran mused. "Maybe they ran out of gas near the airport so we think they left town, but they're still here. They had to know that they're real hot after shooting a cop." "Maybe," McKenna said, but he wasn't so sure. "But there was one definite mistake they did make," Sheeran said. "They left something for us on Forty-fifth Street. When Dennis shot the guy, he dropped his gun. The witnesses said it bounced under their car and they never saw it when they took off. But that gives us an even bigger mystery." "What did they do? File off the serial number?" "They didn't bother. The gun was brand new, never been fired. There was still Cosmoline in the barrel. It's a forty-five-caliber Colt automatic, Model US 1911A." "Government issue?" "Yep. We called the Colt company and they told us the gun was manufactured for the government in 1974. Then we called the General Services Administration and were told it was delivered to the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps said it was at the Marine Corps Ordnance Depot in Albany, Georgia, so we called them up and they checked their records. Said the gun was still there. So Tavlin said, `Oh yeah? Then go get it.'" "Then they found out they had a real problem," McKenna ventured. "You got it. The whole case of guns was missing. The box was there, filled with scrap, but the guns were gone. So now they're doing a complete inventory." "And?" "It's not done yet, but a lot of their toys have disappeared. They don't know exactly what yet, but they've got a real scandal brewing and they're pretty upset about it. We won't get the complete inventory for a couple of days, when they finally figure out how bad they been hit." "What was the girl shot with?" "Forty-five-caliber Colt," Sheeran answered. McKenna thought long and hard as Pao drove onto the Triborough Bridge. Then he said, "I don't like it. If they have two of the stolen guns, they might have everything that's missing. That doesn't add up to purse-snatchers to me." "What are you thinking?" Sheeran asked. "Sendero ?" McKenna noticed that just the mention of Sendero caused Angelita to shudder, but he still had to think it out. "Maybe," he speculated. "They sure wouldn't mind hurting Ray. But if they were gonna kill his kid, why would they go to all the trouble to make it look like an ordinary robbery instead of an assassination? If it were Sendero , they'd be bragging about it by now. There's still too much in this that doesn't make sense." They were approaching Manhattan, and the panoramic lighted skyline of the city lay directly in front of them. Nobody seemed to notice except McKenna, and he couldn't take his eyes off it. God, that's beautiful, he thought. I'm home. But he dared not say it. He tried to take his mind off the thought and asked, "How's Ray holding up through all of this?" Nobody answered. "Well?" McKenna insisted. "Tell me." "He's breaking up and blaming himself for all this," Sheeran said. "He says Dennis came on the Job just to please him and continue the tradition, but that the kid really wanted to be an architect, not a cop. His reasoning is that if Dennis didn't become a cop just to make him happy, he'd still be alive." "That's nonsense," Angelita said, surprising everyone. "Dennis always wanted to be nothing else but a New York City cop. If I know that, why doesn't Ray? He shouldn't be punishing himself like that." "But he is," Sheeran said as Pao drove onto the East River Drive. "He doesn't care about anything anymore." "How about the investigation? Tavlin isn't really running it, is he?" McKenna asked. "Sure is, with no help from Ray. Ray says, `What difference does it make if another four murdering lowlifes go to jail? They'll be quickly replaced in this city and nothing'll bring Dennis back.'" "He might be right about that," Angelita said. "But it's still not his fault." "It's even worse than that," Sheeran said, "which is one of the reasons I'm glad you're here." "What could be worse?" McKenna asked. "He's hitting the sauce again, heavy, and it shows." That was the last thing McKenna wanted to hear.