Sunrise Highway Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For my mother

  No crime if there ain’t no law!

  —THE DAMNED

  PROLOGUE

  OCTOBER

  2012

  He liked to have his house in order, which was why he’d never had a family or pets. He liked his routines and there was nothing wrong with that. Every day, in the summer months, he wore his father’s old fire department windbreaker, with a blue FDNY polo shirt, khaki shorts, and flip-flops, so he could walk down to the beach without getting a chill from the ocean. When the weather turned, he had a half dozen identical blue sweatshirts that he wore with velour track pants and thick wool socks for going out on the deck that faced the Atlantic on one side and Jamaica Bay on the other. Fortunately, he only had to go out once a week for groceries at C-Town, because the settlement he got from the city after the accident let him stay home and mind his business. So naturally he wasn’t going to open a door to a stranger in the middle of a hurricane.

  The doorbell started ringing just after the first commercial break for the Cheers rerun. He didn’t like sports or these new shows with singing and dancing contests, where crazy people screamed with joy and disappointment and there was no telling how things would end up. It was much better when you could anticipate and prepare yourself beforehand. Not that he hadn’t been paying attention to the weather reports about this Sandy. He had the generator running and the storm windows his brother had put in latched tight, with foam and sealing tape around the edges to keep the air out. It gave him a secure feeling when he heard the little drops on the glass like the claws of hungry animals that would eventually give up and go look for shelter somewhere else.

  The rain started falling harder at four. By sunset, it was a deluge. But the roof was new and tight. So he had nothing to worry about. Until the bell rang.

  It was a soft, modulated two-tone, the same one his parents had put in when they bought the house in 1970. He liked it because it didn’t disturb him too much when he had to get up and answer the door for a delivery. He ignored it the first time it rang because it was after seven o’clock, and who would be out on a night like this? It went a second time a half minute later and he reached for the remote to raise the volume. All his life he’d lived in Rockaway, maintaining his parents’ house just the way they’d had it—plus painting the shingles every four years and putting in fiberglass insulation and a new alarm system—while the rest of the neighborhood was going to hell and the ocean was getting filthy. He could count on less than one hand the times a stranger had come to his door for a legitimate reason. Ten seconds later, the bell went a third time, like someone poking a dirty finger into his ear over and over.

  He crossed his arms and crossed his ankles, and made himself all taut and tense as he leaned back in the BarcaLounger, wishing they’d just stop and go away. But of course, they didn’t. The bell started ringing more frantically, the two tones on a continuous loop, so that he couldn’t hear his show, couldn’t think about anything except why wouldn’t people just leave him alone, until he realized he was going to have to get up or else this would be going on all night.

  As he went to look out the peephole, he could hear the wind howling and feel the storm trying to get in the house. Just standing by the threshold put the dampness in his bones. Someone was on his doorstep. A silhouette with long dripping hair. Like a wraith from a Japanese horror movie, with curtains of wild monsoon rain moving back and forth behind it.

  “Hello?” it called out in a high shaky voice. “Is anybody home?”

  He kept his eye at the peephole.

  “I know this is going to sound crazy.” The voice was girlish and, of course, untrustworthy. “But your house is the only one with a light on the block…”

  She stopped and hugged herself, shivering as she coughed. Rain from her baggy clothes was puddling on the porch. Some kind of manacle was on her wrist with a chain attached. One of those moronic fashion accessories kids wore these days, like dog collars and rings through the nose like a bull. He tried to see who else was out there with her. It was a trick of some kind. The “okeydoke” they called it on police shows. Using an innocent-sounding girl or a child in distress to get you to open your door to home invaders. Unbelievable that someone would try to use a night like this as a pretext.

  “Sir? Ma’am? I know you’re in there. I can hear the television.”

  She suddenly reached out and banged with the brass knocker. It had been years since anyone had used it and he jumped back, almost slipping on his mother’s old throw rug. From the living room, he could hear the laughter from the Cheers audience, reminding him of the warmth and comfort he’d left behind. His tea and cell phone were on the coffee table. But he knew it would be useless to try to call 911. With the way the government had been whipping people up about this hurricane, he knew the police and fire department would never come. He was alone and totally unprotected.

  “Please,” she said. “I’m begging you. It’s not safe for me out here.”

  “Get away,” he yelled.

  It was awful the way his voice cracked when he was stressed and made him sound more like his mother than his father. He should have kept pestering his brother, the big New Jersey state trooper, to help him get a gun a few years ago, instead of letting the subject drop when it was suggested that he could drive to Pennsylvania or Florida and buy one himself with just a driver’s license. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen. But now he was here by himself, abandoned and defenseless, with this creature at his door, demanding to be let in.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she called out. “But someone is after me. And if they find me, they’re gonna kill me.”

  She turned sideways to look behind her and he could see a bump under her shirt.

  “Mister, it’s dark out here. I’m pregnant and I’m scared. Cars are getting carried away by the water in the street.”

  He saw now that blood was dripping from her wrist. But someone else could still be standing to the side of the door, where he couldn’t see them.

  “What’re you doing out in the middle of a hurricane?” he shouted. “Am I supposed to believe you just got lost?”

  “If you let me inside, I’ll explain.”

  “No. Leave me alone.”

  She lifted one foot, then the other. Then she suddenly flung her whole body up against the door. “Sir, I wouldn’t be out here if I wasn’t desperate.” Her voice was clogged with snot and self-pity. “I know you want to do the right thing.”

  So what if it wasn’t a trick? Did he really need trouble in his life? Some unwed pregnant teenager coming into his house and trying to make it her own. To soak his furniture and bleed on the fluffy, white bathroom rugs. She’d want to warm up in his shower and use the nice towels. Then she’d ask to go in his bedroom and look in his closets for dry clothes. Next thing he knew she’d be sitting in his BarcaLounger, using the remote to change the channel and watch her own programs.
<
br />   Or worse, she would want to talk. She’d want to tell him about all the misery that happened in her life that had led to her being out on the street in the middle of a hurricane and he’d be expected to nod, listen, and say the right things in response without wanting to scream and jump out of his skin. Then she’d yawn and smile and put her hand on top of his and ask if it would be all right if she just stayed until the storm passed and the sun came up. And after that, he knew he would never be able to get her to leave.

  “Get off my porch,” he yelled. “I’m warning you.”

  He was standing a foot back from the peephole, clenching his jaw and bracing in case she hit the door again or started crying. He could hear the wind off the ocean getting fiercer now, pelting the rain harder against the side of his house, and ripping away part of the awning over the front door. It went flapping away, while his garbage cans went rolling down the street and sirens wailed in the far distance, attending to other people’s emergencies.

  “Sir, I’m begging you,” she sniffed again. “If you can’t let me in, can you please just make a call for someone to come and get me? I don’t even need to dial the number myself.”

  From the living room, the Cheers crowd was laughing again, enjoying being in a friendly place where everybody knows your name.

  “You think anyone’s coming on a night like this?” He cut her off.

  Why did he have to say that, pointing out his own vulnerability?

  “Oh my God.” She started to double up. “They’re gonna come find me any minute.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “But they’re gonna kill me.” She was weeping now.

  “I’m warning you. I have a loaded shotgun here.”

  The shakiness of his voice betrayed the pathetic weakness of the lie.

  “Shit.” She sank into a wailing squat, pulling the hem of her sweatshirt over her knees. “Why do people have to suck so much?”

  “Welcome to the world,” he said. “If you’re not gone by the count of three, I’ll shoot through the door. One…”

  “No, no, mister. Please—”

  “Two…”

  He looked around for an umbrella or a cane to defend himself, in case she had accomplices about to kick the door down.

  “Three…”

  He shut his eyes and turned his back to the door, just wishing she’d disappear and take her sobbing and her dire needs with her. He braced again, waiting for the next plea. But there was only the sound of the yowling winds tearing planks off the boardwalk and sluicing water into the streets.

  On the TV, the show was getting interrupted briefly for a weather update and a test of the emergency broadcast system. But then he heard the warm return of laughter and the tenuously hopeful piano music they used between scenes. He went back to his chair and told himself that none of this had really happened or mattered. A man had a right to be left alone. Who could hold you responsible for anyone else’s bad choices? Or their bad luck. He used the remote to turn up the volume and drown out the sounds of the sirens in the storm. So he could concentrate on Sam, Diane, and their friends at the bar. A place where people cared about each other. They didn’t make them like that anymore. What happened?

  1

  AUGUST

  2017

  As seagulls swarmed like screeching boomerangs, Lourdes looked out toward the shore and saw two little girls making sand castles.

  They looked to be about seven and five. Both with dark hair, olive complexions, pudgy knees, and the kind of bubblegum pink bathing suits Lourdes and her sister Ysabel had worn when they were young. The girls were digging with their bare hands instead of shovels and using coffee cups instead of pails to build their towers. And just like Izzy, the younger one made a point of falling on the older one’s castle and wrecking it when it started looking too good.

  A small wave came in and washed away the remnants, and the girls ran off, shrieking in fake horror, oblivious to the uniformed officers trying to shoo the birds away from the crime scene being processed some thirty yards down the beach.

  Lourdes had just arrived at the tip of Far Rockaway, with her partner and fellow Brooklyn exile, Detective Robert “Beautiful Bobby” Borrelli. The call about a body washed up on the beach had come in about an hour before at the Queens Homicide Task Force and they had been crawling through traffic from Forest Hills because of city drivers’ refusal to move over for a car with a siren.

  Now they were finally at the shore, under a late summer sky with a threat of rain in the wind. A familiar ripple of dread unsettled Lourdes’s stomach as she saw yellow tape blowing down the beach, threatening to catch on the gulls’ beaks. The crime scene techs were working at the water’s edge. It wasn’t just the awareness that she was taking on responsibility for a body under the tarp, but also that the sight of the narrow channel behind them, an inlet dividing New York City on her side and Long Island on the other, set off a firecracker string of wounding memories. The fat girl who couldn’t swim. Or stand to get her hair wet. Or afford to be seen in that pink bathing suit after she reached puberty. Though she was swaggeringly confident in most areas of her life, the sound of the surf could still turn Lourdes into a mass of quivering insecurities.

  Don’t you even think about pushing me in, blanco. She’d cocked a fist the first time she found herself poolside with her boyfriend Mitchell Vogliano.

  How can you not know how to swim? he’d asked naïvely. Half your family’s from Puerto Rico. It’s surrounded by water.

  Sand crept into her black shoes as she pushed through the gathering crowd of lookie-loos and marched toward the crime scene, B.B. grunting as he tried to keep up. She could hear the slap of rubber on concrete from the handball court nearby and the bark of a pit bull getting restrained by its owner. Project people living the boardwalk life. She noted empty Bacardi bottles, crushed Capri Sun juice packs, and what could have been used condoms or dead sea urchins as she stepped over the tape. Evidence of a party spot that could prove to be salient details leading to the cause of murder. If that’s what this turned out to be. She remembered what she’d learned from weird old Kevin Sullivan when they were working together in Brooklyn a couple of years ago. Never speculate, never assume. We don’t know what we don’t know.

  “Smell that?” B.B. looked at her sideways.

  “What?”

  “That rotten cheese thing—whaddaya call it…?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Adipocere.”

  A word from the police academy classroom, but a smell from the end of civilization. Decomposing human flesh. Putrefaction, which sounded bad, replaced by saponification, which sounded worse. An odor that trumped all other odors on the beach—sunblock, salt air, gasoline from passing motorboats—and declared the supremacy of death over all living things. A smell that got inside you and stilled your own internal processes. Nature demanding deference. She saw the pit bull catch a whiff and start to pull on its leash, trying to get away from the stench. Not even considering going inside the tape now.

  “Hope you had a light breakfast.” B.B., still trying to be stylish in his pompadour and pinstripes, pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and held it in front of his mouth. “This is gonna be ripe.”

  Lourdes wasn’t sure how she felt about him these days. He’d been okay working with her on the high-profile murder of a lawyer in Prospect Park that got both of them promoted to the Homicide Task Force. But his aging Lothario routine was starting to wear thin, as he became less Marc Anthony and more Rodney Dangerfield. It wasn’t just the graying of his hair or the thickening of his waistline causing a respect deficit. A seedy desperation had set in around the time his third marriage ended and his alimony payments ramped up. The old tricks weren’t working anymore, but he didn’t have the courtliness or the intuitive ability of a Kevin Sullivan to make up the difference. Instead he’d become just a little more crude and impatient as mandatory retirement drew nigh.

  A young medical-legal investigator with her po
nytail coming loose hustled away from the body, mouth askew and eyes streaming.

  “That bad?” Lourdes tried to stop her with a smile.

  The MLI covered her mouth and didn’t look back. Detective Menachem “Thugsy” Braverman, the only Orthodox Jew in Queens Crime Scene and surely the only one who had once been a commando with the Israeli Defense Forces, came over, palms raised.

  “Yo, yo,” he said. “You guys might want to take a sec.”

  “What up?” Lourdes tried to see around him.

  “Pit bull walker from the projects spotted something washing up on this shore at quarter past nine this morning.” Thugsy nodded toward the dog and its owner lingering at the edge of the crowd. “Came over to take a look with poochie et voila…”

  He thrust his chin toward what Lourdes could now see was a large black contractor bag with a few tears and strips of silver electrician’s tape wrapped around it in several places.

  “Can we tell anything yet?” B.B. asked.

  “Only that the remains were inside a bag that was weighted down with rocks,” Thugsy said. “We’re thinking accidental drowning is unlikely.”

  “Copy that.” Lourdes gave him a duck-face, lips pushed out like a bird’s bill.

  “We’re also thinking it’s been under awhile.” Thugsy put a hand to the back of his head, securing his skullcap against a stiff breeze. “My cousin Shmuel used to be a lifeguard around here. The channel gets very deep in the middle. Whoever plunked the body down there probably thought it would stay down. But they’ve been doing some dredging this summer, and with the warm weather and storm surges…”

  “Hey, who says climate change is all bad?” B.B. tugged on his collar, like he was playing a comedy club.

  “Anybody contact Nassau County yet?” Lourdes asked.

  She raised her eyes to the far shore, maybe less than a quarter mile away but a completely different jurisdiction.