The wall behind the desk was paneled in oak. On it hung framed color photos of the New York police commissioner and the chief of police. Around the photos were mounted Vandervoort’s plaques, medals, and framed commendations, along with photographs of Vandervoort shaking hands with pols and assorted department VIPs. Somehow a photo of O’Reilly shaking hands with the chief of police at an awards ceremony had found its way onto the wall. There was a lot of bright winter light streaming through the window and glancing off all the award plaques and photographs. It made O’Reilly’s right cheek appear especially pockmarked. Old acne scars, Stack figured.
O’Reilly stood up behind the desk, a tall man with a lean waist, wearing a white shirt, blue suspenders, and dark, chalk-striped suit pants. The coat that matched the pants was on a wooden hanger looped over one of the hooks on a coatrack near a five-borough map pinned to the wall. Despite the acne scars—or maybe partly because of them—he had a face like a mature, perverted cherub’s, with wary, rapacious blue eyes and receding ginger-colored hair, a lock of which was somehow always curled over the middle of his forehead. Stack had long ago pegged O’Reilly as a smart-ass with ambition, an eye for opportunity, and a blind spot the size of Soho. The assessment had proved accurate.
Obviously relishing his acting commander’s role, O’Reilly nodded to them solemnly and motioned for them to sit in the leather chairs facing the desk. Then he sat down himself, folded his hands before him, and smiled faintly, as if posing for a photograph. Took the acting part of his title seriously, Stack thought. He glanced at Rica, who had looked over at him, and knew she was aware of his thoughts. Not the first time. Damned, intuitive little—
“So fill me in on the Ardmont Arms fire,” O’Reilly said to Stack.
“The victim was Hugh Danner, forty-nine, single, a corporate tax attorney. He lived alone at the Ardmont for eight years. Well liked at Frenzel, Waite and Conners, his law firm. No known enemies so far. He’d been seeing a woman named Helen Sampson—”
“Seeing her?”
“Screwing her, by all accounts.”
“Okay, just so we’re clear.”
Stack heard Rica sigh, then pressed on. “The Sampson woman owns a little bookshop in the Village. She’s broken up, says she and the victim had been getting along well. That they’d always gotten along well.”
“And I guess she told you two how much everybody loved Danner.”
“More or less,” Rica confirmed.
“Well, don’t we know how people have different ways of showing love?” O’Reilly said, staring down at his desk.
A rhetorical question if ever Stack heard one.
He found himself also looking at the desk. It was uncluttered, barren of work in progress. Not at all like when the incredibly sloppy and overworked Vandervoort sat behind it.
“The ME said cause of death was shock and asphyxiation,” Stack said.
O’Reilly looked up at him. “Asphyxiation? Like smoke inhalation?”
“He breathed in flame when his shirt was on fire. It burned away his lungs.”
O’Reilly looked disgusted. “Mother of Christ! What a way to die!”
“The lab said the fire was started with, and helped along by, an accelerant. A combination of ordinary gasoline mixed with household cleaning fluid that makes it thicker. A detergent. That way it sticks to the body and won’t go out as long as there’s an oxygen source, sort of like napalm.”
“The lab’s trying to figure out the brand name of the cleaning fluid,” Rica said.
O’Reilly didn’t look at her. “And this Hugh Danner was tied up before he was set on fire?”
Stack nodded. “With strips of cloth, apparently. Most of it burned away, but not in time to help Danner.”
“So the guy was an attorney, solid citizen, all that crap,” O’Reilly said. “And it’s a dangerous thing, a fire in a high-rise building. Whoever used Danner as kindling put a lot of other tenants in peril. I’d like this one cleared from the books as soon as possible.”
Before Vandervoort gets back, Stack thought. He said, “We’re canvassing the building, and we’ll talk some more to the doorman, but so far nobody’s been much help. A search of the apartment didn’t turn up anything that seemed relevant. No drugs, no names of known felons in Danner’s address book. The techs say there was nothing unusual on his computer: some business correspondence; some downloaded soft-core porn; a stock and bond portfolio worth about a quarter of a million.”
“Soft-core porn?”
“Nothing that’d move you, unless you like to watch bare-breasted women operating jackhammers.” Stack was pretty sure he heard Rica roll her eyes. “There were no messages on his answering machine. Gold cuff links and a gold chain in a dresser drawer in the bedroom, and Danner was wearing a Rolex when he burned. It doesn’t appear the apartment was burglarized, but since we don’t know exactly what Danner might have had in there, we can’t be sure. His lady love, Helen Sampson, is going to look around the place with us today, take an inventory, and see if anything might be missing.”
“Good,” O’Reilly said. “You two keep me posted.” He stood up, signaling the end of the conversation.
“Will do, sir,” Stack told him. He and Rica stood also.
As they stepped into the hall, Stack closed the door behind them.
“What the hell was all that about?” Rica asked beside Stack, as they were walking back toward the squad room. “Does he think we’re just wandering around with our thumbs up our asses?”
“He might,” Stack said, “but what I think it was really about was O’Reilly wishing he were Vandervoort.”
And where, Rica wondered, is that going to take us?
FOUR
June 1997
Vernel Jefferson had screwed his neighbor’s ten-year-old daughter. He’d been arrested twice before for child molestation, never for anything violent done against an adult. Sweating like Niagara there in the dark tenement hall, Rica didn’t think she’d need her gun. Her partner Wily Stanford was at the other end of the hall, knocking on Jefferson’s apartment door so he could arrest him. Jefferson figured to cave like most child molesters and come along quietly, especially since he was in his sixties and only slightly over five feet tall. Rica the rookie cop was breathing hard, nervous, but she figured this was nothing she couldn’t handle.
The tenement hall smelled like a blend of every cooking spice known to man, with an underlying stench of stale urine. There was a single dim overhead lightbulb halfway down the narrow hall. Stanford, at the distant end of the hall, was a barely visible figure despite his six-foot frame.
Rica heard him knock on the door again, louder. “Mr. Jefferson, open up! This is the police!”
There was no way out of the fifth-floor apartment except through Stanford or down the fire escape. Another uniformed cop was waiting down at street level if Jefferson decided to bolt that way. Rica was insurance in the unlikely event the little pervert would somehow manage to get past Stanford.
Another apartment door opened near the middle of the corridor. A dark woman with cornrow hair stuck her head out and peered up and down the hall. When she looked Rica’s way, Rica silently motioned for her to get back inside. The woman nodded, drew back out of sight, and the door closed. Stanford pounded on Jefferson’s door now, impatient. It was damn near the end of the shift.
Rica tightened her perspiring grip on her baton as she watched Stanford hoist his huge foot with its size-twelve shoe and prepare to kick in the door.
At