Storm Rising Page 7

  Lucy was startled. “How do you know all that?”

  “By lifting passages from various press articles, and adding a few things Garrett told me.”

  “Garrett?”

  “I called him. I’m sorry. I wanted to have some facts so I could make it clear how innuendo works. So, do you see what I mean?”

  “I do. And there was a story about us staying at the Miramar.”

  “I read it. It was published in 2007. You’re past the limitation period for suing on it. What the newspaper did in this recent story was use the rather unremarkable fact that you’ve returned to Bayonne as a pretext to recycle old material. It’s reprehensible, Lucy, it’s detestable, but I don’t believe we can base a successful lawsuit on what they’ve done.”

  Reflecting on it, Lucy had to admit to herself that Jackson’s analysis made a kind of sense, but the effect of the entire episode was to cause her to draw even more into herself. Apart from her students, most of whom—with the exception of a few smart-asses—she was coming to enjoy, and Garrett Lindsay, she determined to keep the rest of the world at arm’s length and just get on with doing her job and raising her son.

  * * *

  Raising her son …

  That normally quotidian undertaking was becoming more and more perplexing.

  She’d always known that Kevin was different. In his first weeks of life, she’d wondered if he was damaged in some way. Cognitively challenged, as the zealots of political correctness delicately phrased it. But she’d quickly realized he wasn’t. She’d been there every minute—for his first smile, his first tooth, his first word, his first step … his first moment of understanding the purpose of the alphabet. Her son had hit most of his development milestones early.

  There was just this strangely alert maturity about the boy.

  With increasing frequency, Lucy would notice him standing or sitting in one spot—as if some deeply profound thought or sensation had arrested him mid-action. After several seconds, he would come out of his trance and resume his play as if nothing had happened. She had asked him about his behavior, about what was happening, what he was thinking, but the only time she managed to get a response, it was confusing.

  “It’s the man.”

  “What man, sweetheart?”

  “The man … from before.”

  Lucy felt like she’d crossed into another dimension.

  She questioned Kevin’s teacher and the daycare supervisor, but neither had noticed similar behavior. Both described him as well behaved, and his teacher added that he was “remarkably serious-minded” for a child of his age. Lucy had a catalog of reasons for concurring with that assessment, but she kept them to herself.

  One evening, while Lucy was working in the kitchen, The Police’s old hit, “Every Breath You Take,” came on the radio. An odd feeling came over her. She turned. Kevin was standing in the dining area, watching her with eerie intensity, and mouthing the words of the song. It had been one of Jack’s favorite songs.

  At the end of May, as she was about to read him a bedtime story, Kevin said: “Can I tell you a story, Mommy?”

  “Of course, sweetheart.”

  He looked up at her. For a fleeting second, she felt a wash of recognition.

  Jack …

  “Do you know about following cars?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, like a spy?”

  Lucy didn’t recall ever letting him watch a spy movie.

  “Where did you see a spy movie?”

  “I don’t know. They got movies at Gerry’s.”

  Gerry was Geraldine, his daycare supervisor. As far as Lucy knew, all she showed the children were kids’ cartoons. With rising uneasiness, she asked, “What about following cars?”

  “If there’s this big highway, ’n lots and lots of cars, all you need is a screw thing.”

  No…!

  “Screw thing, Kevin?”

  “Yeah.” He made a twisting motion with his fist. “One of them things.”

  “Do you mean a screwdriver?”

  “Yeah. You make a hole.”

  “Where do you make a hole?” Her voice was a whisper.

  “In the red thing, you know, on the car.”

  Lucy felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Her throat constricted. She struggled to control a rising tide of shock.

  Years ago, Jack had told her a police anecdote. He’d accumulated a large collection of them, although she knew he kept the grislier ones to himself. He told her he’d heard this one from a retired British policeman. The man had worked on some secret unit that targeted the IRA. He told Jack that they sometimes needed to tail vehicles being driven by suspected IRA bombers. At night, it was almost impossible to keep track of these cars on a busy freeway (“motorway,” as the Brits called them). This was in the days before electronic tracking devices. So, before the operation started, an officer would use a Phillips head screwdriver to punch a small hole in a rear light lens of the target vehicle. That way, they would have no trouble picking out the vehicle from the sea of cars on the roadway ahead—the only one with a bright white dot in the center of one of its red taillights.

  Lucy had never repeated that story to anyone—certainly not to her little boy. And it was far too sophisticated an account to expect any young child to understand, or to relate.

  Lucy was beginning to believe that, against all reason, her beloved Jack had left something behind.

  His memories …

  Either that, or the impossible conversation she had just engaged in with her four-year-old son had never taken place, and Lucinda Arianna Hendricks, née Cappelli, had finally, terminally, and incurably … lost her sanity.

  Either way, she could never reveal what she had just heard.

  Sobbing uncontrollably, Lucy hugged the bewildered boy to her breast.

  10

  Jersey City was the so-called “sixth borough” of New York City—the back office community that most people passed through on their way to the real Gotham. It was also the home to a few dozen multi-story parking garages and, at this moment, Jack was prowling through a four-story monstrosity near the Newport Centre. He was searching for a particular vehicle. He had watched it enter the parkade. He just needed a private moment with it before settling in for the next step in his investigation into the sub rosa activities of Detective Cal Parrish, lately deceased.

  He completed his survey of the first floor. Rather than take the stairs, he hiked up the curving vehicle ramp to the next level. Nearing the top, he heard an engine start. He quickened his pace. As he rounded the last turn, he noticed a black Ford Explorer backing out of a space on his left.

  It was the vehicle he was looking for!

  His eyes swept the area, looking for a place to step out of sight.

  The Explorer’s engine suddenly roared and the vehicle reversed toward him, tires shrieking on the sealed concrete of the garage floor.

  Stunned into action, Jack dodged to one side.

  Too late.

  The left rear corner of the big SUV drove him into the concrete wall and pinned him there, upright and in shock.

  The engine kept revving and the rear wheels kept spinning. Seven thousand pounds of Dearborn steel demolished Jack Hendricks’s right shoulder, pulverized the right side of his pelvic girdle, and destroyed his hip. His screams of agony were drowned out by the redlining rpm’s as the big V-8 crushed muscle and bone and cartilage into mush.

  As suddenly as it had started, the rpm’s dropped, the transmission thunked into gear, and the Ford pulled forward five feet.

  Jack’s broken body dropped like a sack.

  The passenger door of the vehicle swung open. Footsteps approached. A form appeared above Jack’s gasping form. Mangled and in shock, he tried to free his weapon, but his right arm wouldn’t move.

  The figure looming above him held a silenced Ruger .22. The gun fired once … twice. The first slug entered Jack’s chest, and the second blasted through the middle of
his forehead.

  The last thing Jack’s dying senses detected before his body went still was the smell.

  The driver’s door opened and another figure joined the assassin. He kneeled and quickly searched Jack’s pockets. He found a screwdriver, and set it aside. He went through Jack’s wallet. He found a slip of paper tucked behind his driver’s license. He unfolded it, read what was inscribed there, and pocketed it. He replaced the wallet. When he finished frisking the body, he pried Jack’s mouth open and used two fingers to jam an object deep into his throat.

  Seconds later, the vehicle drove away.

  It was 9:45 P.M. on Friday, December 1, 2006.

  Twenty-five minutes later, a trio of happy-hour revelers found Jack Hendricks’s body.

  11

  The doorbell rang at seven minutes and sixteen seconds after midnight.

  Lucy would always remember the exact time, because she’d been lying in bed, trying to read, but mostly watching Jack’s Big Ben alarm clock with the sweep second hand.

  She’d been watching it because Jack was late.

  Really late.

  Really late because after he’d left for work, she’d checked his roster. He wasn’t scheduled to work that night. He’d mentioned something a few days ago about a surveillance operation, but he hadn’t said anything about it tonight. She didn’t suspect for a moment that he was on a personal mission. That he was hiding something from her. That he was seeing another woman, for example. In her entire romantic life as an adult, brief though it had been, she’d never felt more certain about the unconditional love of a man.

  When the knock came, she’d been about to break their agreement and call Jack on his cell. The routine was that he would phone her if he was going to be late, unless he was in the thick of something and couldn’t make the call. He’d always been reliable about that. So she’d tried not to worry, but now, at this time of night …

  And then the doorbell rang.

  Lucy pulled on her housecoat. She descended the stairs, her bare feet chilled on the polished steps. She heard the doorbell again, followed by insistent knocking on the door. She put her eye to the peephole and saw Ernie Tait standing there, wearing some kind of sweat suit instead of his usual jacket and tie. At his side was a uniformed female officer she didn’t recognize.

  She opened the door with a thump in her chest and a knot in her stomach.

  She saw the expression on Ernie’s face, and she plunged into the darkness that would never leave her. The last wisp of memory she had of that night was of Ernie carrying her in his strong arms to the couch, and of a young, stricken policewoman holding her hand.

  After that … only blackness and despair.

  What Lucy didn’t learn until days later was that it had taken from 10:10 P.M., when Jack’s body was found, until 12:07:16 A.M. for the Jersey City cops to get word to the Bayonne Police; for a supervisor to send someone to the scene to confirm that the deceased was Detective Jack Hendricks; for that officer to confirm that Jack was definitely, positively, dead; for the BPD’s deputy chief to contact Ernie; for Ernie to find a policewoman to accompany him; and for the two of them to drive to Jack and Lucy’s home to deliver the devastating news.

  What Lucy kept turning over and over in her mind—what kept her stomach roiling for months afterward—was that while she sat on their couch that evening watching Law & Order, Jack was already dead.

  While she brushed her teeth and got ready for bed, Jack was already dead.

  While she lay under the covers, vainly trying to concentrate on John Grisham’s The Innocent Man, Jack was already dead.

  * * *

  The following week turned into one of unrelenting torment.

  The chief of police placed an honor guard outside the entry way of the funeral home, and stationed officers at each end of Jack’s casket. Lucy’s early private viewing had been something she’d both craved and dreaded, and it almost destroyed her. The sight of her once vibrant, laughing, loving, gorgeous husband, now an embalmed waxwork, was cold steel through her heart. An ambulance had to be called, and her sister and brother-in-law, newly arrived from Florida, had rushed to the hospital to be with her.

  Unknown to Lucy, who was in no state to make her wishes known, the chief had sent out a NCIC All Points Broadcast, announcing the line-of-duty funeral of his fallen officer. On the day of the service, a flood of uniforms from departments across the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, and as far away as Washington State descended on tiny Bayonne, New Jersey. The chief ordered Avenue C closed from Twenty-seventh Street to Thirty-first Street to provide space for the visiting officers to muster. Dozens of volunteers from the Hudson County Sheriff’s Department, the Port Authority Police, and the New Jersey State Police pitched in to perform traffic control and security duties.

  Despite the chief’s good intentions, for Lucy the day of Jack’s funeral was an impenetrable brume of prayers, hymns, eulogies, marching uniforms, bagpipes, and motorcycle escorts. The drive to the cemetery wound slowly past shops and residences decked out for Christmas. In the dark world of her despair, Lucy couldn’t fathom why anyone would dare to display festive decorations when her Jack was dead. She couldn’t understand why cars and pedestrians still filled the streets, why planes flew overhead, why TVs flickered and children laughed. She couldn’t understand how life could just go on, as if nothing had happened.

  At the graveside she sat between Ricki and Jeff on one side, and Jack’s mother and younger sister on the other. After three seasons on a popular TV show, Jossie had attracted a pack of annoying paparazzi, whose presence along with press photographers only served to exacerbate the ordeal and deepen the insult to Jack’s memory. Lucy was wavering on the brink of collapse until the final rituals were completed. When the police chief approached and respectfully offered her the folded flag, she flinched so violently that Ricki had to intervene to accept it.

  * * *

  Lucy Hendricks couldn’t imagine a more horrifying week than the one she had just endured, but the following weeks, then months, almost proved her wrong.

  Somehow, through the fog of her grief, she noticed she had acquired a heightened sense of smell. This condition was brought home to her a few days after the funeral, when the smell of the spoiled milk in her neglected fridge sent her retching to the sink. As more days passed, her sensitivity sharpened to the point where even the smell of day-old leftovers began to revolt her.

  She knew her period was overdue, but she had put that down to stress.

  Now … she began to wonder.

  She was trying to suppress the intrusive train of thought when her phone rang.

  “Mrs. Hendricks?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Detective Eric Trousdale. I’m with the Jersey City PD.”

  Lucy’s stomach tightened. “Have you made an arrest?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m just touching base. I want you to know that your husband’s murder is our top priority. Our chief has promised all the resources we need, and we’re working closely with the Bayonne PD. We’re determined to get to the bottom of this.”

  Lucy’s eyes filled. “Thank you, Detective.”

  “Call me Eric. My partner and I will come to see you in a day or two. We’ll call first.”

  “Thank you.”

  Two nights before Christmas, Ernie Tait came to the house.

  Big, quiet, and respectful, he asked, “Did Jack mention anything he was working on?”

  “Wouldn’t you know what he was working on?”

  “No one knows why he was in that garage. Your statement says he left for work at five o’clock on that day, and that he’d mentioned a surveillance job. That doesn’t match anything we were doing together, and anyway, we weren’t on shift. The bosses want to know what he was working on.”

  “I don’t know. He told me a few days earlier that he would be on surveillance and might be working extra hours.”

  “Did he mention a target?”

  “No. He didn’t lik
e to bother me with his work.”

  Tait looked incredulous. “He never discussed our cases?”

  “Once in a while, but not usually. He didn’t want to upset me.”

  “Kinda old-fashioned for a young guy.”

  “He was, and I loved him for it!” Lucy was beginning to lose it. “He didn’t tell me what he was working on, Ernie! I can’t help you.”

  Tait changed gears. “Maybe he kept something here—a notebook, a file?”

  “He never brought files home.”

  “Do you mind if I look?”

  “What? Yes, I mind!”

  “Lucy, I’m just trying to help. There’s … talk around the station.”

  “What kind of talk?”

  “That Jack was … I’m sorry. That he was mixed up in something. Maybe…” He swallowed.

  “What?”

  “Maybe, on the take.”

  Lucy exploded. “That’s insane!”

  “He was seen drinking with a guy…”

  “So?”

  “This particular guy has Mob connections.”

  “This is New Jersey! Soprano-land, remember? Every second guy on the street is related to a Mob guy, knows a Mob guy, or went to school with a Mob guy’s kid! How can that mean anything?”

  “We’re not talking about some random mope, Lucy! This guy’s in deep!”

  “For God’s sake! They gave Jack an honor guard funeral!”

  “They were committed to it before doubts were raised. If they’d canceled, it would have led to questions.”

  Deeply insulted, Lucy ordered him to leave.

  “I’m sorry, Lucy, I really am! But you know, they won’t let go of this.”

  After he was gone, Lucy crawled into bed and cried herself to sleep.

  The next morning, bleary-eyed and nauseous with dread, she opened a package that had been sitting on her bathroom counter for the past several days. With trembling hands, she peeled the wrapping off a small plastic baton and tested her urine.

  Three minutes later, the device confirmed she was pregnant.

  In her heart of hearts, she’d already known. But at the sight of the positive reading, her head swam, her knees gave out, and she woke up on the bathroom floor.