Sunrise Highway Read online

  “Mall cops.” Lourdes shook her head. “What’s dangerous duty out here? Traffic control? Getting kitties down from the trees?”

  “First of all, there’s plenty of real work out here, if you know where to look.” B.B., refusing to take the bait, steered them onto the Lynbrook exit instead. “Second of all, you telling me you wouldn’t jump at the chance?”

  “I don’t know. Would I?”

  “Used to be we looked down on them because they weren’t real cops. Now they look down on us, because so many NYPD officers are trying to get out here and earn some real money. Fact, I’m trying to help my older boy get on the job in Suffolk.”

  He touched the bald spot hidden by his pompadour so self-consciously that she almost felt sorry for him. Three wives, at least five kids on an NYPD salary. No wonder B.B. was always trying to hustle security gigs on the side to pick up extra money. But she still missed working with Sullivan. Not that they’d even been together that long, but his quiet assurance centered her while B.B.’s tetchy mansplaining made her want to spike him with a stiletto heel sometimes.

  “Forget about it, Robles. I live in Massapequa. And once you have kids, the suburbs are heaven. Unless you think living in the projects and going to shitty New York City public schools is okay.”

  “Hey, look how well I turned out.”

  Not that she wouldn’t want to move into one of these sweet little Cape houses with shady willows, front porch swings, and backyard pools if she ever did break down and decide to have a family with or without Mitchell. They passed a store the size of a supermarket called TrainLand that just sold toy trains, and she had a vision of herself on her hands and knees laying tracks with a little boy in front of one of these idyllic homes.

  But then they turned down a narrow side street and pulled up in front of an aluminum-sided A-frame with wrought-iron rails on crumbling front steps, an old-school Big Wheel trike on the patchy brown lawn, and a new navy Malibu in the driveway with a cherry-light visible in the back window. So much for daydreaming. Lourdes suspected it was the vehicle of the Nassau County police detective who was supposed to meet them here in fifteen minutes to do the death notification.

  A piercing shriek came from inside the house. Lourdes rolled her eyes, unbuckled her seat belt, and got out of the Impala ahead of B.B. A droopy-faced tan-and-white boxer was at the screen door, woofing vociferously. The smell of burnt eggs was in the air. A blond anchorwoman was shouting down some liberal dweeb on the Fox News flat-screen visible in the living room. And the voice that had shrieked was now dissolving into sobs.

  “Now it’s a party,” B.B. muttered, ringing the doorbell.

  A gangly, sunburnt man of about forty-five came to the door, shield dangling from a chain around his neck, Ray-Ban sunglasses perched atop his buzz cut. “Jason Tierney, Nassau County detectives.” He opened the door and offered his handshake. “And I guess you guys know this gentleman.”

  He stepped aside and Danny Kovalevski, Lourdes’s old patrol sergeant from the Seventy-Eighth Precinct, came around the door, as unnecessarily tall and determinedly square-jawed as ever.

  “Dan the Man.” As surprise subsided, Lourdes forced a smile. “What are you doing here?”

  “You know I transferred to the Nassau Department last year, right?” Danny said. “And when I heard you guys were coming out to look at one of our cases, I figured I stick my head in.”

  “Great.” Lourdes gave B.B. a slight head shake.

  A part of her always knew she shouldn’t have kicked Danny to the curb so callously, after they’d briefly dated. But that was the kind of girl she was back then. Love ’Em and Leave ’Em Lourdes. She’d done some growing up since, but every once in a while she’d run across a heart she’d trampled on and get reminded that every goodbye had a cost. She wondered how many strings Danny had to pull to get in on this so he could give her a hard time.

  “You guys get lost coming out here?” Danny asked. “I would’ve figured B.B. to know the route.”

  “We said three-thirty on the phone, it’s three-fifteen.” Lourdes noted the time on her pad.

  “Might as well come on in.” Danny made a welcoming gesture like one of the celebrity chefs on the reality shows he’d loved to watch when they were dating. “We’re kind of already in progress.”

  The photo identifying their victim from Far Rockaway was already faceup on the coffee table. Her name, Lourdes had learned yesterday, was Renee Williams. A DNA sample from a 2010 drug conviction had helped to identify her otherwise unrecognizable body. Her mug shot was maybe the saddest Lourdes had ever seen. A girl of eighteen, perhaps a shade or two darker than herself, barely reaching the five foot hash mark, her hair in pigtails, her eyes brimming with tears, and her mouth crooked like she was in the middle of apologizing for all the grief she was causing.

  “Oh my God.” A white woman with dyed red hair, approximately seventy years of age, in a Rolling Stones red tongue t-shirt, had collapsed and curled up into a corner of a couch.

  A gray-haired man in a checked shirt was holding onto her, his corrugated gate of a face pulled down hard and his lumpy body shaking like he was barely keeping it together himself.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Williams?” B.B. squared off, head bowed and hands clasped, like a funeral director, instead of the unregenerate pussyhound he was normally. “On behalf of the New York City Police Department, we’re sorry for your loss.”

  “I thought I’d be relieved when I finally knew.” The woman tried to catch her breath. “Now I wish you people never got here. Just so I could pretend a little longer.”

  B.B. gave Lourdes a little chin wag, lines like bicycle spokes leading away from the corners of his eyes. Still the worst part of the job, he’d said on the way over. “Doing it since Reagan was in the White House and it sucks every time.” Like cutting the line and watching someone float off into dead space. Lourdes wondered how she’d keep breathing if someone dropped by like this to tell her about Izzy.

  “I told them that we were working this case together as part of a multi-jurisdiction task force.” Jason Tierney’s chest heaved with a weightlifter’s impatience to get his hands on the bar. “They understand what we need to do.”

  Lourdes caught B.B.’s eye this time: Long Island Charm School. More territorial pissing.

  “Ma’am, pardon me if you’ve covered this already, but when was the last time you saw your daughter?” Lourdes asked, aware of Danny staring daggers at her from across the room.

  “Granddaughter.” The gray-haired man looked up.

  “I’m sorry, Renee was your granddaughter?” Lourdes studiously ignored Danny and checked her notes. “On the 2010 arrest report, she gave this as a home address.”

  “Her mother, Gwen, is our daughter,” the grandfather said. “She stopped having anything to do with Renee when she was young, because Gwen was too busy running with the wrong crowd and getting mixed up with drugs. I’m sure you’ve heard it all before.”

  “And one of them got her pregnant: a black fella called himself Prescient.” The grandmother cupped a hand beside her mouth, like she was giving up a state secret. “Which he wasn’t or he wouldn’t have gotten her knocked up. Then she decides to keep the baby like that would make him stay. Instead he took off like a rabbit and she went after him, left Renee with us to raise. And that was pretty much the last we heard from her. We don’t even know if she’s alive or dead now or if she’d even care what happened to Renee.”

  The grandfather studied the mug shot for another second and then pushed it away, as if that was all the reality he could handle for the moment.

  “The thing I can’t believe…” He paused to gather himself. “Is that we did everything we could to raise her the right way. I stopped drinking and running around. Held onto my job at Sanitation for another twenty years…”

  “And I changed my habits, started going to church regular and sent her to the best parochial school in Nassau,” the grandmother interjected. “And what happens? She starts doin
g the same thing as her mother. Missing school, running in the streets and getting mixed up with the wrong people. A girl who was reading when she was four. Who made us buy her books every birthday, instead of makeup or jewelry. Top of her class three years in a row. Best grades.”

  Lourdes saw a small collection under the TV and recognized the spines of a couple of Nancy Drews and Encyclopedia Browns she’d read as a kid, salted in among more adult titles like White Oleander, The Deep End of the Ocean, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and the Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

  “Were those books hers?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Mrs. Williams nodded. “She joined Oprah’s Book Club, because she wanted to be smart, instead of one of these dumb hussies gets all the attention. And what does she do? Gets herself locked up for buying drugs and selling her body. Just like her mother. When she was eighteen. I swear, it makes you wonder about the life you’ve led.”

  Lourdes looked over at the mantle and saw pictures of Renee as a little girl sitting on her grandfather’s lap, reading a splayed-open book. Lourdes had a picture just like it with her father, trying to read her a Grisham book right before he got locked up. There but for the grace of God go I, she thought.

  “You asked about the last time we saw her. It was after we bailed her out.” Mr. Williams put his hands up to the sides of his face. “She said she was going to get her life together and enroll at Nassau Community College. We gave her three thousand. About three years after the crash. End of 2011, early 2012. Most of our investments still hadn’t come back. And that was the last we saw of it, and her. Until now.”

  “And did you have any knowledge of her maybe being pregnant?” Lourdes asked.

  The grandmother went sideways as if she’d been shot. The grandfather put a hand on his chest and closed his eyes.

  “I guess that’s a no,” Lourdes said.

  Danny Kovalevski gave Lourdes a sullen look.

  “How far along?” The grandfather reached for the side of the couch and tried to keep himself steady.

  “We don’t know,” Lourdes said.

  “Boy or a girl?” the grandfather interrupted.

  “We don’t know that either,” Lourdes said. “I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.”

  Tierney, the Nassau detective, put his shoulders back and touched his Ray-Bans, like he’d just as soon flip them down and drive away at this point.

  The old man reached over and took his wife’s hand. “You’re telling us that someone killed both of them, my granddaughter and what could have been my great-grandchild.”

  “That appears to be the case, sir,” Lourdes said, ignoring a long sniff from Danny.

  “How?”

  The old man had hiked up his lower lip, so that it was trembling but holding the rest of his stoic expression in place.

  “Sir, the ME is yet to put down a cause of death,” B.B. said, as a table lamp caught the lacquered gloss of his pompadour.

  “Don’t shine me on,” Mr. Williams glared. “I picked up other people’s garbage for twenty-five years before I got a desk job. Tell me what you know.”

  Lourdes puffed out both her cheeks and let the air out slowly, hoping one of the men in the room would do the explaining. But B.B. was checking his nails, Tierney was fiddling with his sunglasses, and Danny was just standing there, looking down at his feet and feeling sorry for himself.

  “There were stones found in Renee’s windpipe,” she said. “We don’t know if it was the cause or something that was done after. But we need you to keep that under your hats and out of the media.”

  “Christ.” The old man squeezed his wife’s hand harder and the boxer came over to lie by his feet.

  “Who would do a thing like that?” The grandmother stared blankly.

  “Ma’am, that’s why we’re sharing the information,” Lourdes said deliberately, making sure Danny and Tierney were paying attention as well. “Does that sound like something that anyone who knew Renee would be capable of?”

  “No, of course not. It’s crazy.” Mrs. Williams looked at her husband. “Whoever even heard of a thing like that?”

  The old man was still in a head-shaking daze. Lourdes decided not to share Rakesh’s theory about the shrunken wrist and the handcuff. These poor people had enough to contend with.

  “Lemme ask you one other thing,” Lourdes said. “You just told us the last time you saw Renee was after you bailed her out in 2011, 2012. But when was the last time you spoke to her?”

  Mrs. Williams grabbed onto the side of the couch, like she was trying to pull herself up in a lifeboat. “You already know that. Don’t you people talk to each other?”

  “Ma’am?” Lourdes turned to B.B., ready to scorch him.

  “Not him—them.” The old woman was pointing a shaky finger at Tierney and Danny. “I told the Nassau police that Renee had been calling me until five years ago, checking in and asking for money. And then all of a sudden, nothing.”

  “When did you tell me this?” Tierney’s voice cracked, making him sound twelve years younger. “This is the first time we’ve talked.”

  “Hey, I just came to this department.” Danny had his hands up automatically.

  “I told your idiot colleagues when I reported her missing all those years ago.” Mrs. Williams sat up, invigorated by her anger. “I gave them names, phone numbers, and addresses of everyone I’d ever heard of knowing her. Five years ago. And no response. I tried calling one of your colleagues in Mineola every week for two years, and all I ever got was a form letter telling me to stop bothering him.”

  Five years. If she’d really been killed that long ago, it’d be surprising if there were any remains at all. The perfect storm of circumstances, Rakesh had said. Or maybe somebody really was trying to keep her relatively intact. In a place no one else could possibly know about.

  Danny looked to B.B. for sympathy. “Yo, Bobby, this is the first I’m hearing about any of this.”

  “We’ll need to put our heads together.” Lourdes patted the air, trying to keep everybody cool.

  “Yeah, I think you better.” The grandfather was on his feet. “Because if my granddaughter and my great-grandchild were murdered because of someone’s irresponsibility, I’m not gonna stay quiet about it.”

  The boxer was baring its teeth at Danny’s pant leg.

  “Sir, I hear you.” Lourdes softened her voice for the dog as well as the people. “And we’re gonna put everything we have into this…”

  “Now let me ask you something.” The old man was hiking up his pants and shaking out his arms like he was about to take a swing at one of them. “Any of you got kids of your own?”

  B.B. showed five fingers, eliding the number of women who’d produced them.

  Tierney put up two fingers and grabbed his sunglasses as they started to slide off.

  Danny sheepishly held up one finger, a fact that he’d curiously neglected to share when he’d been sleeping with Lourdes.

  All eyes, including the dog’s, went to Lourdes. “Not yet,” she said quietly.

  “Then how can you say you know what we’re going through?” the grandfather asked.

  “I didn’t.” Lourdes said pointedly. “Everyone’s pain is different.”

  The old man sat down again and began to weep. His wife put her arm around him and the dog put its head on his knee.

  “Don’t forget about our girl,” the old woman said. “That’s all we’re asking.”

  “Goddamn it,” said her husband. “I am tired.”

  Lourdes watched them cling to each other and for a second could see them as the young couple in the framed Polaroid on the mantle, swarthy and new to love and just happy to have someone to kiss. Before they expanded and multiplied and gave their hearts a better chance of getting smashed to pieces.

  She wondered if she’d ever let anyone get close enough to do that much damage.

  8

  SEPTEMBER

  1982

  Now that he’d become a
cop, working midnights on Sunrise Highway, Joey liked to park his cruiser off in the trees by the side of the road and wait like a hunter.

  There were never that many cars out late during the week and the dispatcher was usually asleep anyway, so basically he could do the job in whatever way he wanted to.

  When cars came around the curve on the deserted stretch right before Bohemia, he’d hit the high beams so that the headlights streamed directly into oncoming traffic and drivers had to slow down to avoid getting blinded. As soon as the spotlight hit the driver’s face, it was Star Time.

  Sometimes it was a bunch of drunken white kids back from a club night in the city, so that was an easy DWI summons and money in the bank for overtime. Occasionally he’d lock in on a black guy going too slow or too fast or driving with a broken taillight or use some other bullshit excuse to pull him over and—what do you know?—screw your probable cause, there’s a bag of weed under the front seat or a .38 in the glove compartment, and bingo, here’s your felony arrest, rookie.

  Praise from cops with twenty years on the job. Officer of the Month twice in his first year. A commendation for bravery in the line of duty. And, of course, quiet acknowledgment from people like Kenny Makris and Billy the Kid, who’d helped him get in the department in the first place.

  We’re gonna have to start calling you Blood Hound. When are you gonna start working day tours like a normal cop?

  But he liked being the lone wolf, especially on nights like this. When the moon was half-hidden. And the radio was playing. And the hot chocolate was still warm in the thermos. And the cars were as few and far between as thoughts you’d never had before.

  Rich people could drive back and forth on these highways every week and never have a clue what Long Island was really about. They thought it was all white beaches and clay tennis courts, summer in the Hamptons and the Montauk lighthouse, Gold Coast mansions and yacht clubs. They didn’t know about the real horrors of Amityville, that the ghettos of Wyandanch and Roosevelt could be as dangerous as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, that there were shooting galleries in Smithtown and Riverhead, that you could get stabbed breaking up a bar fight in Babylon or find children starving and wandering around in soiled diapers at ramshackle houses in Flanders. There was a reason they called the Long Island Expressway the LIE.