Kill Again Read online

  “We need to pick him up,” said Nick, “before he fillets another woman.”

  “We aren’t going anywhere,” Wilkes answered.

  “Boss—”

  “Don’t boss me, Nick. You know better than to even ask. We’re gonna do this right—with an arrest warrant and Emergency Services backing us up at two in the morning when the bastard’s out cold and you can’t see a goddamned thing. And even if we were gonna bust him at high noon I’m not crazy enough to send an unarmed man after a guy with a history of gunplay.”

  “I don’t think you’ve made your case,” retorted Nick in the wise-ass tone that signaled to Wilkes he wasn’t going to argue the point any further.

  “Okay, where does this guy live?” asked Wilkes.

  “Bay Ridge,” Nick answered.

  “Take Simms, Frost, and Lynch,” Wilkes ordered Savarese. “Get a couple of surveillance vehicles from Narcotics, go out to Brooklyn, and sit on this guy’s place. I want him at night but if he tries to split before then, we’ll take him any way we have to.”

  “Got it, Boss,” said Savarese, who walked out of the office. Nick and Claire were about to follow when Wilkes stopped them. “I’m not done with you two yet.”

  “Do you need us for something else, Inspector?” asked Claire.

  “Damn right I do,” Wilkes said, looking into Nick’s eyes, imagining what his former star detective was feeling. “I’m not cutting you out of this, Nicky. When the team brings this scumbag in you’re gonna do the interrogation.”

  “I appreciate that, Boss,” he said.

  “Doc, you’re in this too,” the inspector said to Claire as he rose from his chair. “Both of you go over Welch’s record. Come up with a strategy for Nick to use when he sweats this scumbag.”

  Nick couldn’t help but think something was off as Wilkes walked around his desk, rubbing his palms on his cuffs and leaving streaks of sweat.

  “All we’ve got on Welch is that surveillance photo from the deli and a partial DNA hit,” Wilkes said. “Which means the DA’s office will tell us we don’t have dick on him. So unless you can get him to give it up, he could walk.”

  “Dolan okayed me doing this?” Nick asked, smelling a rat.

  “He suggested it,” Wilkes said, turning away.

  Nick now realized who the rat was. “He wants a fall guy. And the blind cop is expendable.”

  Wilkes spun around, busted. “I’m not gonna lie to you. I owe you more than that,” he said. “It’s for the wrong reason, but it’s still the right move. If anyone can get this sonuvabitch to spill, it’s you.”

  Nick didn’t care. If this was the price for getting back into the game, he was willing to pay it.

  “Don’t worry,” Nick said. “I will.”

  “I don’t get it,” Claire said, without looking up from the piece of paper she was reading. It was after midnight and they were sitting alone in the Major Case Squad’s windowless, utilitarian conference room on ugly metal chairs. The matching table, equally hideous, was littered with take-out cartons, paper plates, and coffee cups along with piles of papers and the red files. Nick sat at the head, Claire next to him on the right, unable to hold her tongue any longer.

  “Get what?” he asked, putting a folder back in one of the cartons.

  “How they can treat you like this after all you’ve done for them. And why you’re not upset.”

  Nick rose from the hard chair in which he’d sat way too long and stretched. “I’m lucky they’re letting me do this at all,” he replied. “I’d rather be here, however they’ll have me, than find something else to do and have to start all over again. Without being able to see.”

  “They have you over a barrel,” said Claire.

  “I’ve been over bigger ones,” Nick said, sitting back down and leafing through papers to find a way to end the conversation. “At least this way I’m in control of what happens.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “I can get Welch to confess.”

  A yellowed DD-5, the form NYPD detectives used to document every step of every investigation, now caught Claire’s attention. “According to this report, Jonah Welch wouldn’t answer any questions the detectives asked him back in seventy-seven.”

  “That’s because they had him cold,” Nick replied. “Not only was the victim willing to testify, they also brought in a forensic dentist who matched a bite mark on her left breast to Welch’s teeth. And his blood type matched the semen they found inside her. Before DNA profiling, that was as solid a case as you could have against a rapist.”

  But her look told him something was bugging her. “You’re not convinced I can get him to spill?” he asked.

  “It’s not that,” said Claire, not quite sure where to start. “Welch was nineteen in seventy-seven, when the two sets of bones were found in Brooklyn. But he didn’t commit the rape until 1982.”

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t do other rapes in between that never got reported.”

  “He’s out of prison ten years,” Claire answered. “Not once during that time was he even suspected of, or questioned by the police for, a sex crime. And no women disappeared right after his release.”

  “You’re saying he doesn’t fit the profile of someone who dismembers women and boils their bones,” Nick said.

  “I just don’t see it,” Claire answered. She spread her arms over the table at the sea of files and paper. “There’s nothing in any of this to suggest his paraphilia is cutting up women. He never missed a meeting with his parole officer, never left New York State, worked seven days a week at two jobs, and is now fifty-seven years old.”

  “Two jobs?” asked Nick. “Where’d you see that?”

  “On his latest sex offender registration form. He listed dishwasher at a lunch place down in the Financial District and truck driver for the New York Ledger.”

  “Delivering papers is a night job.”

  “Which means Welch might not be in his apartment when your team goes to arrest him.”

  “Or comes home from work, sees our guys waiting, runs, and we never see him again.”

  Nick pulled out his cell phone, but something stopped him from dialing.

  “What is it?” asked Claire.

  “Their phones’ll be turned off,” Nick said. “And their radios’ll be tuned to a special band used for operations like this.”

  “Can you call them on that?” asked Claire.

  “I can but I wouldn’t. If someone has their radio turned up, I call and Welch is walking by the wrong place at the wrong time, I’d blow the operation. Or, even worse, he’s in his apartment and hears a police radio out in his hallway. . . .”

  “But we have to warn them,” Claire said.

  “Yes, we do,” Nick said, rising. “Grab your things.”

  Two unmarked navy blue Dodge Sprinter vans slowly turned the corner off Lincoln Road and cut their lights as if on cue. The neighborhood, on the east side of Prospect Park and once one of Brooklyn’s toniest, had fallen into the blight of drugs and crime back in the late seventies. Currently it was seeing the beginnings of the gentrification sweeping across the borough.

  The vans stopped across from the Prospect Park subway station on an overpass from which a Q train emerged from underground, heading south to Coney Island, its roar reverberating off the prewar apartment buildings flanking both sides of the tracks.

  On the same side of the block, closer to Flatbush Avenue, sat an unmarked Dodge Charger in which Wilkes, riding shotgun, was smiling, his hands raised like a maestro conducting the arrival of the vans and the screeching of the subway, the final movement of the great urban symphony he’d composed. Savarese sat in the back, watching Wilkes, wondering if his boss had finally qualified for a disability pension. Behind the wheel, a handsome, young, black detective named Billy Simms waited for orders.

  “You gonna part the Red Sea, Boss?” Savarese said.

  “Let me enjoy this flippin’ moment, you idiot,” Wilkes said. “I forgot the su
bway came above ground here.”

  “So what?” asked Savarese.

  “Train runs right next to Welch’s building,” observed Wilkes. “We get everyone in position while the next one passes and he won’t hear a goddamned thing.”

  Savarese checked his watch. “One fifty-eight,” he said.

  “We good with the super?” Wilkes asked.

  “Should be waiting in the lobby right now to let us in. He shut off the elevator to the west side of the building too.”

  Wilkes opened his door. “Let’s move.”

  The aging blue Chevy Impala sped down Flatbush Avenue, its crappy shocks doing little to cushion the ride over the pothole-ridden street.

  “Take it easy,” Nick said to Claire, who was driving like a cop, pedal to metal.

  “We’re running out of time,” Claire retorted, dodging a dip in the road.

  “We hit something, it’s my ass,” said Nick.

  And indeed it would have been. As his impending blindness was a secret to all but a select few, Nick had grabbed the keys to one of Major Case’s unmarked police cars.

  He’d carefully driven it out of the garage underneath One PP, past the guard booths, raising no suspicion whatsoever. But he wasn’t stupid either. Once far enough away from headquarters, he pulled over and switched places with Claire in a maneuver that would’ve been comical if they weren’t in a hurry.

  Still, if caught allowing a civilian to drive a police vehicle, especially at high speeds down city streets, Nick would be suspended at best and summarily fired at worst; the latter scenario being the more likely.

  They were tearing south, down the stretch of Flatbush between Grand Army Plaza and the Prospect Park Zoo, approaching the traffic light at Ocean Avenue.

  “Where do I go at the light?” Claire shouted.

  Nick could just make out the green of the light ahead. “What’s the sign say?”

  “Eastern Parkway.”

  “Go right!” Nick exclaimed just in time.

  Claire palmed the wheel and the beat-up car responded. She wasn’t, however, expecting the immediate curve to the left that followed, and somehow managed not to sideswipe the line of parked cars on the right.

  “Whoa!” she gasped, spinning the wheel back left.

  “Slow the hell down,” Nick commanded. “Lincoln Road’s the next light.”

  “I see it,” she said, looking ahead to the light, now turning yellow.

  Nick saw it too. “Don’t run it,” he warned. “When it changes, go left and stop.”

  Claire brought the car to a stop at the intersection, another car stopping behind her waiting to make the same turn. Movement up Lincoln Road caught her eye.

  “We’re too late,” she said.

  “What do you see?” asked Nick.

  “Your Emergency Service cops piling out of a van up the street.”

  Nick thought fast. “Nothing we can do,” he said.

  “You still want me to make the turn?” asked Claire.

  “Yes, but pull into the first empty space you see.”

  “There’s a hydrant about four car lengths up,” Claire said, making the turn.

  “That’ll do. We’re not going anywhere,” Nick said.

  Claire pulled the car into the spot without parallel parking. “We’re sticking out,” she said.

  “It’s Brooklyn. Nobody’s gonna notice. Cut the engine.”

  “Now what?”

  “We wait,” said Nick, “until we see them bring Welch out. If he’s there.”

  Wilkes, wearing his bulletproof vest, brought up the rear as his detail of heavily armed cops entered the ornate but dilapidated metal doors of the behemoth, 1920s-era, brick apartment building. He recoiled at the stench that hit him and the others as the superintendant opened the inner security door.

  “Weed smoke and piss,” he muttered. “Jesus.”

  They moved into the vast lobby, once a palace of marble columns and floors, now covered with inexpensive, ugly, filthy, red-and-white ceramic tile that had been badly installed. Ahead of him, also clad in body armor, were Simms, Savarese, and six ESU cops brandishing compact AR-15 assault rifles.

  Wilkes could see the super pointing to the right. Wilkes had been in enough places like this to know the building had two separate sides, most likely with one small elevator for each side. He also knew no one in his party would be using an elevator. Tonight would be stairs only.

  He followed the team to the right, up a few wide stairs and then left down a hallway, passing the elevator and gathering at the stairwell. It had no door and was wide open, all the way up and one floor down. The sergeant running the ESU detail, Tanner, raised a fisted, gloved hand signaling all to stop. Wilkes saw his chance.

  He circumvented the cops in front of him to the head of the line.

  “We should wait for the next train,” he whispered to Sergeant Tanner.

  “There hasn’t been one in ten minutes,” Tanner shot back. “The longer we sit here, the more risk some insomniac tenant takes his garbage out and spots us. Or your perp. Subway’s running off peak now.”

  Wilkes was about to reconsider when he heard the low rumble he’d hoped for. He head-gestured Tanner. The train grew louder and the sergeant signaled his troops.

  They raced up four flights of stairs, reaching the fifth floor in less than a minute and perfectly timed so the train noise was at its peak. Moving single file, they covered the last fifty feet until they were just outside the door to apartment 5H. Tanner readied a flash-bang grenade as one of the ESU cops raised a maul and swung it into the door at the lock, smashing it open.

  “Police!” shouted the ESU sergeant, throwing the flash-bang in and closing the door. It went off a second later. Wilkes could hear people moving behind the doors of the other apartments on the floor, sliding locks and chains open.

  “Police!” he screamed, his Glock in hand at his side. “Stay in your apartments!” He motioned Savarese and Simms to make sure no one came out. Then he heard voices screaming from inside Welch’s apartment:

  “Get down on the ground!”

  “Face down, now!”

  “Show me your hands!”

  “No, no!” a female, Hispanic-accented voice cried. “Don’t shoot!”

  “Shit!” Wilkes exclaimed, knowing that voice didn’t belong to Jonah Welch.

  “Stand down!” Tanner shouted as Wilkes entered the apartment and saw the cops, their assault rifles already lowered, helping a young man and woman to their feet. The man held a boy Wilkes estimated to be four years old. The kid’s frightened, tear-filled eyes met the inspector’s. Wilkes, who generally dismissed religion as bullshit for weaklings, thanked God that this family wasn’t lying dead in a pool of their own blood because a cop had mistakenly opened fire.

  “You’re not in any trouble,” Wilkes said to the family, though he knew nothing he could say would prevent the media shit storm that was sure to follow. “But I have to ask, does Jonah Welch live here?”

  “No, señor,” said the man. “We’ve been here tres años.”

  Wilkes turned to Savarese and Simms. “We sure about the address?”

  Savarese was scared too, mostly about the tongue lashing about to come from his boss. “Forty-two Lincoln Road, apartment five H,” he said. “I checked it myself a dozen times on the computer before I did the warrant application.”

  “Get the super up here, show him a photo of Welch, and see if the sonuvabitch even lives in the building,” Wilkes ordered. “And hope the guy says no, because if he heard us storming in here with our dicks sticking out of our pants, he’s long gone and we’re screwed.”

  Claire and Nick sat in the Chevy as patrol cars from the 71st Precinct flew past them toward the building, no doubt drawn there by frantic calls to 911 that a bomb had gone off at 42 Lincoln Road. It was three minutes since they heard the flash-bang. Claire peered through binoculars Nick brought along for her, waiting for the cops to emerge with Jonah Welch in cuffs.

  “Nothi
ng yet?” he asked.

  “Don’t you think I’d tell you?” she retorted. “What is taking so long?”

  “They’re probably securing the scene,” he replied, his voice more calm than he felt. “Give it another minute and I’m sure they’ll bring him out.”

  “What the—?” Claire stammered.

  “What do you see?” asked Nick.

  “Wilkes just came out with Savarese and Detective Simms.”

  “And Welch?”

  “No. It looks like your boss is ripping them a new one. Maybe we were right and Welch wasn’t there.”

  Nick frowned. “Wilkes wouldn’t yell at the guys for that. But he would if someone screwed up on the address.” He turned to Claire.

  “The only screwup would be if Welch gave a bogus address on the sex offender registry.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” mused Nick, more disappointed than pissed. “We might as well get back to headquarters before the boss knows we’re here. Make a U-turn and go back the way we came.”

  Claire sat, staring straight ahead.

  “You okay?” Nick asked.

  “I wanted to see Welch in cuffs,” Claire answered, turning the key and starting the Chevy. She was about to switch on the headlights when her eye caught a figure emerging from below the sidewalk and striding just a bit too quickly in their direction.

  Nick sensed her hesitation. “What’s wrong?”

  “Someone just came out of the building’s basement.”

  “Going where?”

  “He’s about to pass the car on your side.”

  “All I see are shadows,” said Nick, “but is the guy hunched over?”

  Sure enough, Claire now saw that the figure was wearing a baseball cap and had his head down. A chill ran through her.

  “It’s Welch,” she said to Nick.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I can see enough of his face to tell.”

  “Take out your phone and call nine-one-one,” Nick said.

  Claire was already opening the car door when Nick grabbed her arm. “Don’t even think about it.”