Murder in Greenwich Village Read Free Page B

nowhere. They needed an angle, something different, something that would get them into Anthony’s skin, but she didn’t see how to do it. They would have to find the men in the crib. One of them could easily have followed Anthony into the street, even overheard his conversations at the pay phone, then taken him by car to the street where he was shot. But what had happened during the three hours between Anthony’s kidnapping and his murder? Had he gone willingly with his captors? They had not beaten him. No bruises or abrasions were found on his body. If they had handcuffed him or tied him up, they had managed to do it without leaving marks—not a likely situation. It looked as though he knew his captors, or they had contacted him to meet them and he had gone there willingly. But if the latter were true, they had not reached him on his cell phone or through his pager. That information would have turned up in the initial investigation. And if the people he had just left had told him to go somewhere, he would not have called Bowman to say he was done, or his wife to say he was on his way home. Someone had gotten to him after the phone calls.
    None of this qualified as original thinking. In a case as old and important as this one, someone on the job had suggested almost every possibility, explored it, and come up with nothing. This time around, they had to do something different.
    Her phone rang while she was trying to think what that different approach would be.
    â€œHow are you?” Hack said.
    â€œHi.” She smiled at the voice. “Where are you?”
    â€œDriving home. I spend more time driving than working these days, and I’m putting in lots of hours.”
    â€œWe’ve got a new case.”
    â€œTell me.” In his old assignment at One PP, he often knew it before she did. Now that he was a deputy chief and working in the Bronx Borough Command, his knowledge of and influence over her job was close to zero.
    â€œMicah Anthony.”
    â€œOh, shit.”
    â€œListen to Graves, he really thinks we can do it.”
    â€œDon’t give up your day job.”
    He was the red meat of her life, what kept her going and what would destroy her if she lost him. It had started ten years ago when he was a lieutenant, almost a captain, and she had just gotten her gold shield. Their attraction was as strong as a ton of magnets, and she had not struggled against it or thought about consequences. He understood consequences, but didn’t care. They were careful—very careful—and kept it secret. He had told her a thousand times that he would leave his wife if she would marry him, but she refused. An adopted child who had given up her own accidental child, she wanted his daughters brought up by two parents.
    She knew, because he had told her and she believed him, that sex with his wife had ended years ago. The intimation that his wife did not miss it filtered into an occasional conversation. It was likely that she knew something was going on, but it was more important to her that it remain secret than that it end. Jane and Hack did not talk about it.
    Although cops did not discuss such intimacies in her presence, Jane knew that Irish cops, now mostly Hack’s generation, complained about BIC wives, Bronx or Brooklyn Irish Catholic. But the initials were a euphemism. To those who used them, they meant Born Ice Cold.
    Jane was a Bronx Catholic, if not Irish, whose misadventure in her late teens left her parents almost paralyzed. That they had supported her was the reason she had turned into a confident, functioning human being. And she wasn’t ice-cold.
    She and Hack had gone to Paris in March, her first trip out of the country. He had picked the time so that she would celebrate her birthday in that city, and so that they would celebrate ten years of being together. Now they had started another year.
    â€œIf I had one,” she said, responding to his comment about a day