Little Girl Blue Part 4

It was Reid's turn to respond and he managed a less than heartfelt chuckle. "Do you plan to re-canva.s.s the blocks around Seventy-third Street?" he asked.

"How'd you know?"

Reid ignored the question. "There are folks in that community," he told his niece, "who don't want you poking around."

"Right, and we call those folks the bad guys."

"Julia, not only is that whole neighborhood money, it's old money."

"And what's the old money saying?"

"The old money is saying there are reporters following your detective, knocking on doors, asking if someone in the building is a suspect. The old money says your detective is rude and overbearing."

Julia tried to imagine Frank Turro, the most laid-back detective in C Squad, browbeating some Fifth Avenue matron. It was like trying to imagine Mother Teresa abusing an invalid beggar. "Thanks for the warning, Uncle Bob."

"Z)e nada, my niece. I'll speak to you soon."

Julia disconnected, consulted her phone book, then was again drawn to her reflection in the mirror. She knew she was attractive because she could see it in the flicking eyes and outright stares of her male colleagues, but on this night she was only aware of her flaws. She focused initially on three small folds just below her navel, a byproduct of her pregnancy that'd defied many thousands of abdominal crunches in the thirteen years since Corry's birth. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s had suffered as well, had remained swollen through her pregnancy and while she nursed her daughter, then failed to snap all the way back when her milk dried up. The weight bench hadn't helped, though she'd grown considerably stronger, and neither had a Nautilus when she'd switched to a private gym.

What you are, girlfriend, she finally told herself, is h.o.r.n.y. You always hate yourself when you're h.o.r.n.y and there's n.o.body around.

She sighed, then slid into her gym shorts and pulled the T-shirt over her head. Life, she reflected, would be so much easier if she dated cops.

A minute later, Frank Turro's sleepy, "h.e.l.lo," had Julia muttering, "Hey, sorry I woke you, Frank."

Turro responded with the traditional, "That's okay, loo. What's up?"

"I want you to go right into the field tomorrow, without coming to the house. Call Serrano and take him with you. And be thorough, Frank, because the way it's shapin' up, we're not gonna get another shot."

TEN.

WHEN JULIA awakened from her nightmare, she was sitting upright, her feet dangling over the edge of the bed. For just a moment, she imagined herself a child again, waking up to make breakfast for herself and her mother before heading out to school. She lost the dream in the process, and though she tried for a moment, she couldn't get it back. Then the LED display on the clock radio next to the bed flicked from 6:11 to 6:12, catching her attention. Time to get up, get going.

Drawn by the sc.r.a.pe of shovels, she crossed to the window and raised the shade far enough to look out. The snow had been lighter than predicted and New York City was up and running. Go Team Go. Meanwhile, she could have brought her Jeep home, left it in the driveway. Now she'd have to walk the eight blocks to Queens Boulevard.

A half-hour later, showered and dressed, she was sitting on a ha.s.sock, pulling on her boots, when she heard her daughter's voice.

"You leaving?" Still in pajamas, Corry was standing in the doorway o her bedroom.

"Gotta go," Julia said, instantly guilty. "Drive carefully," her daughter responded.

I H E CALL was waiting for her when she finally got into the house, after two hours of crawling around a string of fender-benders that climaxed in the closing of the lower level of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge for nearly forty minutes. The call was from Commander Harry Clark, his second attempt to reach Julia that morning.

"We're getting complaints," he told her, "from the locals." There was no anger in his voice, none that Julia could detect, at least. If anything, he sounded weary.

"About what, commander?"

"About C Squad's .. . interaction with the citizenry. Your people are being a little rough. That's what they're saying. And they don't like the implications."

"The implications?"

"Yes, lieutenant, the implication that one or more of them saw the child and didn't call the police, and the implication that one or more of them, the males anyway, is a pedophile."

"Right, I understand what you're getting' at." Julia decided to go with her best defense, before the hint of impatience she'd detected in Clark's tone exploded into outright hostility. "But, see, now that we've put the victim's face out there and n.o.body's come forward, our only real hope is to work backwards. We know the victim was on Seventy-third Street, moving from east to west, at eleven minutes past two. If we can find someone, say, who was on Madison between Seventy-second and Seventy-third at 2:10 and didn't see her, we can work by process of elimination. I'm not saying we're gonna put her in a particular building, but I think we can narrow it down to a couple of blocks."

"You're talking about a thousand apartments. What will you do, turn the neighborhood over, see what falls out, hope it isn't the mayor's phone number?"

Clark gave off a tiny contemptuous snort as he finished. Unsurprised, Julia fielded his volley and slammed it back across the net. "Well, sir," she said, "I'm open to suggestions, but like I said, n.o.body's come forward and we have no physical evidence. Bottom line, I don't see another way to go."

Julia willed herself not to speak first. In essence, she'd just threatened her superior officer. She'd told him that withdrawing her field detectives would shut down the case, and that she was not prepared to do so unless ordered. If he instructed her to back off, the ultimate responsibility, given the number of leaks already out there and the ident.i.ty of Julia's uncle, would fall on his head.

The challenge was dangerous for two reasons. First, and most obvious, Clark might decide to award the job to somebody a little more cooperative. Second, Julia had pa.s.sed the captain's exam and would probably be promoted within the next year or two. But captain was as far as civil-service examinations could take her. All the higher ranks, from deputy inspector through chief, were strictly by appointment. Thus, making an enemy of the Manhattan North Detective Commander wasn't exactly in her best interests.

"What you did with the witnesses," Clark finally said, not only changing the subject, but neatly reversing the position he'd taken on the previous day, "it worked out all right. The reporters are tearing them to pieces." He laughed. "Imagine waking up one day to find you're living on a little island surrounded by sharks. You step outside your door, you get eaten."

Julia listened to him chortle for a few seconds, then said, "I thought we could take some heat off the job, put it on the bad guys. And they were definitely bad guys."

"Now, now, lieutenant, as police officers you know we're not allowed to punish."

Julia couldn't believe her ears. Clark was joking with her. Next thing, he'd offer to take her out for drinks. "No, sir," she replied, but we are commanded to seek justice."

"Good, good." He cleared his throat. "Now, are you gonna put a team in the field today?"

"They're already out there."

"They have cell phones?"

"Yes." "Call them, tell them to take it very easy, but to do what they have to do. That's for today only, lieutenant. They don't go back out unless I okay it first. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," Julia quickly replied. "I'll tell them to put on the kid gloves."

D Y THE time Julia entered the office of a.s.sistant District Attorney Lily Han, who'd been running the DA's s.e.x Crimes Unit for the past ten years, one more piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Serology tests on fluids taken from the victim indicated the presence of Demerol, a synthetic opiate, at the time of her death. The level, Solomon Bucevski had been quick to report, did not contribute to her death, the cause of which he now declared to be exposure.

"We should have met sooner," Han said, extending her hand. She was a tall, slender Korean, with a round face, perfect almond eyes, and a broad telegenic smile. In some ways at the very nexus of a burgeoning old-girls' network, Han was rumored to be in the running for the DA's job when Robert Morgenthau finally died. There was no longer any hope that he'd retire.

"We should've," Julia replied as she sat down. "I don't know why we haven't."

They chatted about Bea Shepherd for a few minutes, exchanging anecdotes. "The indomitable Bea Shepherd," Han called her at one point, whereupon Julia nodded solemnly before intoning, "Amen to that." Then, abruptly, Han settled back and crossed her legs. "Bea explained your situation to me," she said, her tone all business now. "For the record, I'm offering my sympathies."

"It's a little early for that," Julia replied.

Han ran a polished fingernail over the surface of her desk. "I'm going to speak to you now as a prosecutor. As if you'd discovered where Blue came from, then brought me the case. First, if the cause of death is exposure to the elements, then you'll have to prove that somebody dumped her on the street before we'd look at a charge of deliberate murder."

As she had with Harry Clark, Julia put forth her best case. "A little girl ran naked into the freezing cold. If somebody living with her had reported the incident, we'd have had fifty cops out looking for her. Maybe she would've survived, maybe not, but either way it sounds like depraved indifference to human life. Or criminally negligent homicide. Or something equally heinous."

Despite Julia's impa.s.sioned tone, Han was unimpressed. "Tell me, detective, was anybody home when she left? If so, did that individual, or individuals, know she was gone? If so, when did they know? At the time she left? Or several hours later? It's nearly impossible to address these questions without witnesses."

"Like the other children in the apartment?"

"They'll do for starters."

Julia relaxed. Han wasn't giving up. She was suggesting a very reasonable course of action while at the same time requesting that Julia not embarra.s.s the DA's office by presenting a weak case, then demanding a vigorous prosecution. "I keep thinking," she said, "that there might be other children involved. It's eating at me, you know? And the only way I can put it to rest is to find out where Blue came from. I feel like I have to do at least that much."

There was no arguing with that sentiment and Han didn't try. "I have someone," she announced, "who might be able to help you. This is an officer who's been working undercover for the last four years. He tracks pedophiles, gathers evidence, then turns the cases over to our investigators. He never testifies. His name is never revealed on any doc.u.ment. From the defendant's point of view, he doesn't exist." Han flashed a broad smile. "In some ways, he doesn't exist for us either. He basically does what he wants to do exactly when he wants to do it. Once, when I tried to rein him in, he pretty much told me to go f.u.c.k myself."

"Nice."

"Well, he works with the feds, too, on out-of-city cases, which means that he has options. Without doubt, he'd turn in his badge if he was a.s.signed to other duties."

"Sounds like he's committed. Not to mention obsessed."

"He's obsessed all right, and for good reason. Four years ago, his only child, his daughter, vanished. Patti was six years old, in preschool, and somehow she failed to make it from her cla.s.sroom to his wife, who was waiting outside. Then, two years later, his wife cut her wrists in the bathtub while he was on his way home from work. She was dead when he walked in the door."

"And the child was never found?"

"Not a trace," Han said. "My guess, for what it's worth, is that looking for her is what he's all about."

Julia thought it over for a moment, then asked, "What makes you think he'll work with me?"

"I don't really know if he'll work with you, but I spoke to him and he said he'd talk to you. His exact words were, "Send her over, let's see how far she wants to go.""

"Great." Julia's small mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. "I think I'm about ready to accept those sympathies you offered earlier. You sure this guy can help me?"

"All I can say for certain is that he's the only police officer in New York who really knows the pedophile scene. Just don't let him manipulate you. You'll think you understand him, you'll even think you're controlling him, but he'll be the one running the show. The man has his own agenda." Han slid her chair back and stood. "Anyway, if you decide to meet him, he'll be in a bar on First Avenue at six this afternoon. His name, by the way, is Peter Foley."

ELEVEN.

BY THE time Julia left C Squad's headquarters late that afternoon, the temperature had risen into the high forties and the previous night's snow had been reduced to salt-saturated puddles collected above blocked storm drains at a hundred thousand intersections. In an effort to preserve her boots, Julia leaped across these puddles, following a ma.s.s of pedestrians who hesitated briefly before launching themselves forward, like penguins at the margin of ice and sea. The sun had been down for more than an hour, but Third Avenue was brightly illuminated as stores of every kind, especially restaurants, four and five to a block, vied to attract the attention of a returning workforce. The neighborhood supermarkets would do the lion's share of their weekday business in the next two hours.

Julia found her Jeep where she'd parked it that morning, in a no-parking zone on Seventy-sixth Street near York Avenue. She looked around for a ticket, but her Restricted Parking Permit, displayed on the dash, had gotten her through another day. Every cop in the NYPD, all forty thousand, had one of these permits. A very generous perk in a city where garage s.p.a.ce began at $350 dollars a month, and one for which Julia was properly grateful because it allowed her to forgo a nasty commute that would otherwise involve two subways.

The Jeep started on the first pull and Julia quickly headed north on York Avenue, toward Seventy-ninth Street and an entrance to FDR Drive. The traffic was heavy, though not abnormally so, and she was glad of the slow pace. An hour earlier, Bert Griffith had summoned her to the squad room for a little show-and-tell. He'd seemed very much the proud little boy as he'd stood before a map studded with pushpins and declared, without a trace of irony, that the Jane Doe, better known as Little Girl Blue, had emerged from a building on Seventy-third Street between Madison Avenue and the Sherbourne.

The pushpins represented various citizens two cops stopped for a meal break on Madison Avenue, a doorman who'd come out for a smoke, a pair of lovers making their way home after a night at the clubs, an attorney for AT&T who'd slaved into the wee hours putting the finishing touches on a very complex contract with the Republic of China. What they had in common was that they were on the street at the time Blue made her run, and that they hadn't seen her.

There were nine pins in all, covering Madison and Park Avenues from Seventy-second to Seventy-fourth Streets between two o'clock and 2:25 in the morning. "True," Griffith had told Julia, "the times aren't exact and the victim might have slipped through, but then there's this."

Smiling the faintest of smiles, he'd pulled a remote control from his shirt pocket, pointed it at a small TV, and pressed a b.u.t.ton before drawing his arms across this chest. On the other side of the room a videotape, already cued up, displayed a nearly static landscape: a sidewalk, a row of parked cars, an empty road, another row of parked cars, another sidewalk. Despite the poor lighting on the residential block, the picture quality was exceptionally good, the time-and-date stamp in the lower left hand corner easily discerned. It read 2:05 A.M. when the tape began to roll, and 2:20 A.M. when Griffith finally shut the VCR down. A few cars had pa.s.sed in the fifteen minute interval, but no pedestrians.

"The camera's set up on the corner, loo," Frank Turro declared when Griffith shut down the VCR. "You can't walk or run up Seventy-third Street from Madison Avenue without going past it."

Impressed, Julia had taken a moment to congratulate her detectives. Then Turro, at a nod from Griffith, took down the map from the bulletin board to reveal a hand-drawn chart beneath. "These are the buildings between the Sherbourne and Madison," he'd announced. "Four apartment houses, two on either side of Seventy-third, six townhouses on the south side, with the Indonesian Mission to the UN on the north. Three of the townhouses are occupied by single families, the others are divided into duplex apartments. The bad news is that we've been to every one of those buildings, including the mission, and we showed the victim's picture to anybody we could find. What they're sayin', one and all, is they've never laid eyes on her."

"Do you believe them?"

"Yeah, loo, gut instinct, I do."

Julia had accepted Turro's judgement gracefully, though it was obvious enough that Blue was known to the occupants of at least one dwelling, the one she'd fled.

HULIA EASED the Jeep onto FDR Drive and began the southward crawl toward the lower part of Manhattan and her meeting with Peter Foley. In the distance, the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge with its Erector-set superstructure cut a bright swatch over a slick black East River. Julia was trying not to think too hard about Peter Foley and his miseries, nor about the wisdom of putting someone who'd been through what he'd been through on the streets with virtually no supervision. True, as Lily Han was quick to explain, Foley had begun investigating pedophiles while off-duty, bringing forth cases unknown to his superiors. It was only after it became clear that he intended to persist that he'd been rea.s.signed to the s.e.x Crimes Unit.

But Peter Foley's determination wasn't at issue. He could have been ordered to stop, then brought up on charges if he failed to comply. From there, he might have been pushed into therapy or released with a three-quarters disability pension if all else failed. Instead, the job was using him for its own purposes, a devil's bargain.

There's a question, Julia decided as she parked the Jeep on Tenth Street, that begs to be answered here. A very simple question: What's in it for the devil?

Julia exchanged her Restricted Parking Permit for an ON OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS placard, then locked the Jeep and strode off toward First Avenue. Her movements were strong and confident, the unconscious body language of a cop who'd walked a beat in some of the toughest neighborhoods in a very tough city. Her Glock 9-mm rested at the bottom of a leather bag, a tote, which hung from her left shoulder. Again quite unconsciously, she held the purse against her body with her elbow, protecting what was hers.

HE TWELFTH Street Tavern was that rarest of commodities in gentrified Manhattan, a neighborhood bar: liquor bottles on gla.s.s shelves before a well-worn mirror, an oak bar scarred with graffiti, a bench fronted by round wooden tables opposite the bar. Two small neon signs graced a front window nearly as dirty as the one in Julia's office. The first, surmounted by a yellow harp, read, Guinness. The second, in blood-red script, read Budweiser.

All in all, Julia decided as the door swung shut behind her, the Twelfth Street Tavern was not a place you came to meet your soul-mate, or even for a one-night stand. With a single exception, everybody seemed to know everybody else in the crowded room. The exception was Peter Foley, who was sitting at a table by the front door and who rose as she entered, then waved.

"Hi," he said. "Glad you could make it."

Suppressing a rueful smile, Julia extended her hand. Somehow, she'd expected to find Foley unkempt and haggard, with dark, soulful eyes and a haunted expression, a character out of a Russian novel. In fact, he was startlingly attractive, a man in his mid-forties with a head of nicely barbered hair and clear blue eyes that betrayed a hint of amus.e.m.e.nt, as if he'd been counting on her reaction. Above a cleft chin, his mouth was thin, but not unkind; his smile appeared genuine.

"I recognized you right away," he told her, "from your news conferences."

A recrimination? Julia couldn't be sure, but she recalled Lily Han's admonition. Foley had an agenda of his own and could not be trusted.

"It's a little loud in here," she said, "for a private conversation."

"What? Can't hear ya." His grin expanded as he put a hand to his ear. "That was a joke," he explained.

"A very old joke."

"And a bad one, too. Just let me settle the tab and we'll be on our way."

TWELVE.

"I COME here for the collegial atmosphere," Foley explained. "It's a great place." He failed to add that he, himself, did not partic.i.p.ate in that collegiality, or that he spoke only to the bartender and limited even that conversation to the ordering of a single draft beer. Instead, he opened the door and waved Julia through. As she went by, the odor of the cologne she'd put on that morning drifted into his nostrils. The scent was too faint to be identified, which made it all the more enticing. Years had pa.s.sed since he'd been on the street with an attractive woman by his side.