Sunrise Highway Read online

  “But you don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.” Brendan had started to tremble. “I might lose my license…”

  “We’re a long way past that exit, counselor.”

  She tried to shrug off his concern, but something about seeing a grown man not just scared, but palpably unnerved, like a child on the verge of tears, made her unlock her hands and sit up straight.

  “We better get back,” she told Bogdan. “If we’re gone too long, he’ll start to think something is up.”

  51

  NOVEMBER

  2017

  Only a handful of people still remembered when the place was called the Brazen Fox. Not that many more recalled closing time at Cheers Too or even the TGI Fridays for that matter. Now the location was a Chipotle—naturally—with what looked to Joey like at least a half dozen illegals behind the counter, veggie options, and “responsibly raised meat” on the menu, and those tall tables with the high chairs that made you feel like you were dangling and off-balance while you were eating.

  He was near the back with Kenny Makris and Plunger. Buzzing and sweating in his chief’s uniform, blue shirt sticking to his back, jaw sore from grinding his teeth.

  “No one’s cutting anybody’s lifeline.” Kenny paused from fussing with his rice and beans. “But I’m not going to lie either. The senator is concerned about where this is going.”

  “Tell Steve Snyder that I have done nothing wrong,” Joey said, for maybe the third time since they’d sat down. “This fuckin’ little dago bitch Robles is just looking to get another white man’s scalp on her belt and she thinks mine’s worth more because I happen to be a chief.”

  “A lot riding on this, Joey.” Mr. DA looked down into his bowl—three decades in public life and the aging altar boy still had trouble meeting your eye. “The president’s coming out next week for a big speech and Steve promised him a solid backdrop of blue uniforms and smiling faces. Something breaks right before he arrives, it’s not going to be good for any of us.”

  “What’s going to break?” Joey stooped his shoulders. “More rumors? Kenny, I can’t catch every piece of trash in the wind. All I can do is pick it up after it’s landed and put it in the garbage where it belongs.”

  “What’s your sense of things, Brendan?” The DA looked over at Plunger. “How close is the task force to making an arrest?”

  “Why the hell you asking him?” Joey lowered the burrito he’d been trying to hold together. “Last time I checked, I was still chief of the police department.”

  Again, they fell into that little pocket of quiet while everyone else in the restaurant was still talking. Like they were waiting for a noisy train to pass overhead.

  “My office just got hit with four more subpoenas for cases you were involved in as a uniform officer.” Kenny leaned across the table. “Obviously, someone is talking to them, a lot, and giving them information that supports probable cause. Brendan is as likely as you are to hear who that is through back channels.”

  “I got nothing for you.” Plunger showed empty hands.

  Joey stared at him for an extra beat. Still uneasy with him since Robles had called him into the other room and Plunger had come back looking like an Eagle Scout with a hard-on and saying that this was beyond what he should be handling as a union lawyer, and Joey should reach out to a more seasoned criminal defense attorney to handle these overly aggressive inquiries.

  “Kenny, can’t you see what this is?” Joey dropped the burrito in a heap. “It’s politics, pure and simple. These fucking libs from the city want to expand their failed policies, so we’ll be overrun with rampant crime, illegal immigrants, and street drugs like they are. That’s why they put a fat little Hispanic female with no intelligence or real experience on this so-called task force and let her boss around a bunch of dickless wonders who ought to know better. Don’t tell me you’re falling for this too.”

  It made him a little crazy, the way neither of them looked at him or said anything after he was done talking. What was he, a pariah?

  The sweat on the back of his shirt turned cold and the roof of his mouth felt dry. He’d started getting high again on and off, after the hurricane disaster with the girl a few years ago, but this was the most consistently he’d been using in years. Mostly weed to take the edge off, but cocaine was slipping back into the mix as well. It heightened his situational awareness and helped him stay alert to the threat of potential enemies in the vicinity, but at times it gave him sensory overload to the point of distorting reality.

  He noticed how the court officers at the next table turned their backs as they carried their bags away. From the kitchen, the sounds of stainless steel utensils banging on counters and cooks calling out to each other in Spanish made him clench his fists and press his fingernails into his palms.

  He turned and watched as Plunger kept unfolding and refolding his fajitas, trying to keep all the elements together. He didn’t like how long Brendan had been alone with Robles and that one-browed yak from the FBI. And he didn’t like the way Brendan had started recommending expensive private lawyers he should use, instead of handling this as a union matter.

  In practical terms, there should have been nothing to worry about. Plunger couldn’t implicate Joey in any of the other murders without the risk of Joey turning around and ratting him out for Kim and the more recent girl.

  On the other hand, people under pressure in a criminal investigation didn’t always think practically. If they’d gotten in trouble because they’d panicked in the first place, they might do it again. They might be induced to act against their own best interests. They might start talking when they should have kept their mouths shut. They might turn on their allies. They might come apart and spill like the flour roll coming apart in Plunger’s hands.

  Not for the first time, he thought about slapping a GPS on Brendan’s car and hacking his cell phone, to see who he was talking to. But as he watched rice and onions ooze out between his friend’s fingers, he realized that might not be enough. Other people could be spilling as well.

  He needed to get ahold of the situation and put Robles in her place. As soon as this meeting was over, he was going to call his own man Ramirez and see how he was doing with the sister situation.

  “J, take it easy,” Plunger said. “People are starting to give us the stink eye.”

  Joey dabbed his mustache with a paper napkin. “All I’m saying is there’s nothing to any of this.” He addressed Kenny in a more modulated voice. “We’ve been over it. The girl who washed ashore in Rockaway was an escort who got mixed up with the gangs. The rocks in her throat were a message to someone else to stop snitching. She was probably murdered in Queens and NYPD is playing a numbers game by trying to keep it off their ledgers.”

  “Then what about all these others?” Kenny said. “They’ve asked the office about cases going to the 1980s. It’s not all a numbers game. Is it?”

  “For Chrissake, open your eyes.” Joey crumpled the napkin in disgust. “Nassau might have had a serial back then dumping bodies on our side of the line, to fool the Keystone Kops over there. But if you subtract Rockaway, it’s obvious that he hasn’t been active in years. He’s either dead, locked up for something else, or retired.”

  “Retired?” Kenny shot him a withering glance. “I didn’t know serial killers retired. Do they get a pension?”

  “You know what I’m saying.” Joey didn’t bother trying to ingratiate himself with a smile. “They stole this case from Nassau and now they’ve got nothing. So they’re grasping at straws, trying to make it look like they have something.”

  “Maybe not.” Kenny took off his glasses and rubbed them with his tie; no wonder he’d never run statewide. “Sounds like they’ve got multiple sources. They already had your time sheets and entries from logbooks of over thirty years ago. They’re deep into this.”

  “Oh, now we’re really off in the ozone.” Joey shoved his plate away. “What do you want me to say about that, Kenny? You know wh
o I am.”

  “Do I?”

  Kenny had his chin down as he spoke the words. Like he was talking to himself.

  “Of course you do,” Joey said. “I put you where you are.”

  He shouldn’t have even had to say it out loud. To either of them. Not after he’d kept Brendan off the hook for what happened to Kim Bird Dog that night. Not after he’d started dropping hints to Kenny that he might have seen the son of then–district attorney Philip O’Mara in the vicinity of the football field at the time of the murder, but might be able to conveniently forget that minor detail, information that allowed Kenny to have a frank conversation with his boss behind closed doors, which in turn led to Philip O’Mara’s surprise decision not to run in the next election cycle. Clearing the way for Kenny to run for DA himself.

  “And I put you where you are,” Kenny reminded him. “And right now I am telling you that you are getting much too close to the flame. I need it put out, stat, before the whole house burns down.”

  “What do you want me to do, Kenny? Polygraph everyone in my department to find out who the leakers are? Let’s be honest. I might be better off polygraphing everyone at your office. What do you think of that?”

  Kenny’s face pruned up like a wet fingerprint.

  “Just shut this down.” Kenny wiped his hands. “I don’t need to know the who or the how. Just keep it away from me. It’s gone too far already.”

  “What about loyalty, Kenny?” Joey looked up. “What about all I’ve done for you?”

  “We settled our accounts when you got appointed chief. Now clean up this mess before it gets on anyone else.” The DA started to turn toward the glass doors and then stopped to turn back. “Oh, and a word to the wise? I wouldn’t try to put this lunch on your expense account, if I were you.”

  52

  NOVEMBER

  2017

  The cell phone on the night table started ringing right after Lourdes finally fell asleep. The clock said 1:07 as she fumbled to pick it up and croaked hello.

  “Hey, baby. What you wearing?”

  The voice was a white man trying to sound black, almost like he was channeling Jay-Z or the dude who did the cook’s voice on South Park.

  “I don’t know, chief.” Lourdes switched the cell phone to her left hand and turned on the recording app. “What are you wearing?”

  He laughed, a little more at ease than she would have liked.

  It was a couple of days since they’d had Tolliver in the interview room and pulled his lawyer out for a secret-squirrel side deal. Since then, Lourdes had been going at the case full tilt, 24/7, ratcheting up the pressure on Brendan O’Mara to officially sign a cooperation agreement committing him to testify, working with the federal prosecutors to justify more subpoenas, and trying to pinpoint where “Joey,” as he was known, would have been assigned when various women disappeared over the years.

  The pieces were forming but not quite coming together yet. Brendan had hired his own lawyer, slowing down the process several steps. Kenneth Makris was trying to get the newer subpoenas quashed. And even cops who’d long since left the job were reluctant to talk about Tolliver in any real detail.

  “Let me tell you something,” a retired detective named Mullins had informed Tierney and Bogdan. “Most cops out here are honest but no one’s going to talk to you willingly, because Joey’s got something on everyone. Shit, man, you ever get in his house, you’ll probably find a closetful of J. Edgar Hoover’s dresses in the attic.”

  Most of the officers they spoke to had either been kept far enough away not to know anything about Tolliver or sounded like they were still working for him, asking more questions than they answered. It was more like investigating a mob boss or a military dictator in a separate country, someone with the means to control and intimidate not just regular witnesses but officers of the law. Which meant right now that the case was not so much at a standstill but at a dangerous standoff.

  “So is this really you, Chief Tolliver, or are you just some lackey doing the dirty work for him?”

  She got up and closed the bedroom door so as to not wake Mitchell, who was already dealing with this more than he was dealing with his own assigned cases and getting pushed up against the edge of his own considerable tolerance.

  “I’m your special friend, my lady,” the voice said, with a hint of digitization as if it was being run through some mechanism to disguise it. “The only one who understands you.”

  “Riiight.”

  She settled back down on the couch, wearing Izzy’s baggy old Derek Jeter hoodie and wool socks. Stacks of files and notebooks covered the coffee table in front of her.

  “Your sister says hi, by the way,” he said.

  “Does she?” She reached for a pad and a ballpoint pen to start taking notes.

  “Izzy, right? Short for Ysabel. Dizzy Miss Izzy. I like that.”

  “Do you now.”

  Head games. She wondered if any of the men on the task force were getting nasty calls like this at home. Or if this was just some personal hang-up Tolliver had about her.

  “Yo, your girl be cray-cray,” he said. “Like I see why you all don’t wanna have kids of your own. Seeing how her and your moms turned out.”

  She pulled down the hem of her sweatshirt, feeling a shiver of exposure. As if he could somehow see her in the living room, through the window of their fifth-floor walk-up.

  “Wow, I’m so impressed,” she said in a bland white-girl voice. “You got all this inside information about me from reading a Missing Persons alert that only went out to, like, every police department in the tristate area. You must be some kind of Master Sleuth.”

  He laughed again. “Yeah, baby. Just tell yourself that’s all it is. Ain’t nothin’ but a ho thang.”

  “What is?” She put down the pen for a second and reached for her wineglass.

  “That’s all your sister is. A ho. Which is why they locked her up on Long Island. And it’s all your mami is. And deep down, you know it’s all you really are.”

  “Uh. That hurts, stud.”

  She realized her grip was too tight, threatening to pop the head off the stem.

  “Hey, chief.” She swallowed the dregs. “Seriously now—this is me speaking to you from the heart. Is this how you worked when you were a street cop? Because if I could have got away with shit this lame, I would have moved on to your department years ago. Your standards must be low.”

  “Trash talk.” He gave a kind of happy mellow sigh. “Now that’s what I like.”

  She put the glass down and reached for the pen again. He was right. What was getting accomplished here? Maybe he was just probing her for weaknesses, to see where she was with the case, when she should have been turning the screws on him. Or maybe he was trying to see what it would take to intimidate her.

  “You sound tired, baby.” There was crackling around his voice, like he’d moved to a different location.

  She wondered where he was calling from. His home? An office? A safe house his department used for witnesses? The subpoenas had given them a partial list of properties he owned but it would take a while to get the full picture.

  “I am tired,” she said. “I’m tired of this case and I’m tired of this conversation. Why don’t you tell me something interesting for once.”

  He let out a lower, more feral little chuckle. “Oh, that’s good,” he said. “I like to be teased. Your sister’s a prickteaser. Did you know that?”

  “Yeah, that’s classy. How would I know that? And how would you know it?”

  “You still don’t believe she’s here with me?”

  “Put her on. Why don’t you?”

  There was a muffled female voice in the background. A little theatrical, Lourdes tried to tell herself.

  “She’s tied up right now,” he said. “Maybe I’ll let her talk to you in a little while.”

  “You’re boring me, chief. This is some lame-ass internet porn shit you’re playing in the background. If you bored
the ladies you killed this much, they must have been glad when you finally put them out of their misery.”

  “Girl, you so hard,” he said. “Why you so bad?”

  Something about his cadence reminded her of Izzy. She told herself it was just a generic imitation of a typical ghetto girl, meant to unnerve her.

  “Whatever it takes, chief. Whatever it takes.”

  “Why you keep calling me ‘chief’? Would you like me to be in charge? I bet you would. I bet I could make you call me ‘daddy.’”

  “That’s so pathetic. If I wasn’t about to lock you up for these murders, I’d nail you for harassment.”

  “Aii, mami. Lourdes be picking on me again.”

  Her knees came up under her chin. Where did he get the exact words her sister would have used?

  “Nice try,” she said. “You been watching the telenovelas on Univision in your office?”

  “You know, Izzy told me why you wanted to be a cop.”

  Something low, guttural, and overly intimate in his voice stopped her this time. As if the connection had suddenly become clearer and he was talking to her from the next room.

  “Yo, why don’t you shut the fuck up about things you don’t know?” she said.

  “Izzy told me the whole story.” She could almost feel his rancid breath in her ear. “That was some fucked up shit.”

  “I will fuck you up and make you cry if you mention her name again.”

  Mitchell had come out of the bedroom, awakened by her raised voice. She realized her throat was raw and a hot tear was rolling down her cheek. The hand holding the cell phone was getting clammy and unsteady against the side of her face.

  “It was the night they locked Papi up, right?” He’d started laughing again and going heavier with his hood voice. “They was all them po-po in the house with they guns and shit.”