A Killer in the Wind Read Free Page A

have to serve three years on patrol. So I scored my gold shield after eighteen months. And now I was a detective—thirty-three because of my late start, but still plenty young enough to be on fire with ambition.
    And I was more than on fire. I had nothing else in my life to distract me. No wife, no family. Nothing but the job. I worked it hard. I developed a hunger inside me. I hammered through my two-week eighty-hour pay periods and then past the twenty-five overtime cap whether the department approved the money or not. Then I worked on into secret, sleepless, unknown nights, and screw the union rules. I combed through hot cases and cold cases. I pawed through buried files in basement boxes that had never even been scanned into the system. I busted my way up from prosses to pimps to mobster traffickers in women and children—all manner of modern slave-traders who preyed on foreigners and the poor. I even did my part to bring down a state senator once, a man of the people trading his vote for high-priced call girls on the side.
    Over the course of a couple of years, I developed . . . I’m not sure what to call it—a preoccupation, say, with a perp known to me only as the Fat Woman. She was a specialty broker. A seller of human beings without flaw or blemish, supplying the finest in flesh and souls—in women, girls, and boys—to the very highest class of clients. That’s what my sources told me at least. There was no record of her anywhere—no pictures, no prints. She was just a word on the street, a passed remark, a knowing mutter over the body of a dead child. An elite and legendary monster, like the devil himself. In fact, it’s a good comparison because, as with the devil himself, you only saw the effects of her while she remained invisible. As with the devil himself, some people, even some police, didn’t believe she existed.
    But I did. I believed. And I wanted her. I had an eye out, always, for any sign she had passed by.
    Then came the day—it was deep winter—I got a call from a friend in the one-seven. Their module was working a luxury pross ring run out of a building on Sutton Place. My friend, one of the investigators, a detective named Monahan, had been camped on the street outside for a week. He’d snapped a stakeout photo of a john who frequented the place.
    If uncles like me were the rebels and artistes of the force—the “dope smokers and faggots,” as Monahan poetically put it—investigators like him were usually big, meaty, Irish, or spiritually Irish, guys who didn’t need uniforms to look like cops. Monahan, in particular, was one of these thick-necked musclemen who stretched his shirts to the breaking point. Face of an overfed schoolboy. Red hair worn belligerently short, except on his knuckles, where it was long.
    “Dig this,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of his desk. He pointed to the computer monitor, the picture there. I leaned in for a better look, pressing my fists against the desktop. “The john’s name is Martin Emory. Private financial consultant. Referrals only. Works with millionaires. Is a millionaire.”
    The building that headquartered the luxury pross ring was a tower of red brick and concrete. In the photograph, this Emory guy was just pushing out of its black glass front door and stepping onto the sidewalk.
    “Now watch what happens,” Monahan said.
    He tapped the keyboard to change the shot, then changed it again. I saw Emory move from the building to a sleek black Mercedes parked at the curb. In the next picture, he was inside the car, in the passenger seat.
    “Yeah?” I said. “So?”
    “See the driver?” said Monahan.
    I couldn’t. Not much. The car’s window was rolled up and dark. But if I squinted, close to the screen, I could make out the shape of her: a woman, immensely obese.
    I wagged my head—a kind of shrug. “Maybe it’s his mother,” I said. I said it as blandly as I could. But the truth was, I felt like I was a buzzer that had just