Full Frontal Murder Read online

  She made a vague gesture with both hands. “I think it’s a very reasonable explanation … if we find Rita has been holding out on us. If she does have another lover tucked away somewhere, he’ll be our suspect, all right. But right now I’m more worried about what the killer will do next.”

  Murtaugh scowled. “He’s not finished?”

  “Well, look at all the elaborate plans he’s made to keep his identity hidden. He did his dirty deeds through Nickie Atlay and Julia Ortega and then got rid of them before they could become a problem. Next Bradford Ushton appears on the scene—although I don’t see how the killer could have had a hand in that. But then when Rita shot Hugh, we were supposed to think she was behind everything that’s happened. And if that didn’t work, he had a backup plan in place that would hand us her lawyer—Dorian Yates—as the big bad killer. So what happens? Last night I go on television and say the case is not closed. You think he’s going to let it rest there? No, he’ll try something more. He has to. He can’t leave it alone.”

  The captain swore. “That,” he said heavily, “is bad. But how much further can he go without making a slip? He must be getting desperate by now.”

  “I wonder. At first I thought all that rigamarole about sending those false reports to Rita was an act of desperation. But now I’m not so sure.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I think he’s enjoying himself.”

  He looked at her gloomily. “You don’t know how much I hope you’re wrong.”

  Marian sighed. “Me too. But he’s committed two murders and manipulated a third … and got away with all three. He must be feeling pretty pleased with himself along about now.”

  “The lists of possible suspects that Hugh and Rita drew up—anything there?”

  “Not yet. Walker and Dowd have eliminated only one name so far, a man who was out of the country when Nickie Atlay was killed. They’re still working on it.”

  “Dammit, we need a line on him!” Murtaugh growled. “Before he does something else.”

  But it was not to be. At eleven o’clock Marian got a call from Annie Plaxton in Hoboken, saying her laundromat had been firebombed.

  19

  Holland wrapped up an informal meeting with the two investigators he’d assigned to a fugitive case, an embezzler whom they were tracking electronically through the movement of the money he’d stolen. The embezzler had gone about it the right way, siphoning off relatively small amounts at a time and transferring the funds to new accounts, which he kept moving from bank to bank all over the world. But now two of the accounts had come together in one bank in Mexico City; the embezzler was running short of cash. If he drew upon the Mexico City account, they had him.

  On his way back to his office, Holland paused to look in on André Flood. The faint sound of hard rock leaked out of the earphones the young man wore as he worked. André had not taken the full week Holland had given him to decide whether he wanted to stay with Chris Carnell or not; he’d resigned at the end of the first day.

  In the reception area, Mrs. Grainger was signing for a package. “This is for you, Mr. Holland.”

  It was an ordinary mailing bag. Holland took it into his office and pulled the tab on the back: a videotape, no label. He slipped the cassette into the VCR.

  And found himself watching Marian. Getting out of her car somewhere in Manhattan. Looking in a store window. One brief shot of her having lunch with Gloria Sanchez. Standing in front of the station talking to Murtaugh. Picking up her dry cleaning. The picture wobbled once in a while and occasionally the top of Marian’s head was cut off; but the camera must have had an autofocus feature because the images were crisp and clear. Marian was wearing different clothing in the various vignettes, so the tape must have been made over a series of days.

  Holland felt a vein pulsing in his temple. Marian was being stalked.

  Then Holland was looking at himself. It started with a long shot of the two of them at the outdoor café near Lincoln Center where they’d gone for lunch on Saturday. Then the camera zoomed in on Marian talking on her phone. The lens moved over to Holland, showing him slowly savoring his food as he watched Marian. Whoever had done the taping had followed them into the park, capturing them watching the mime and then, a little later, in a more intimate moment when they thought they were alone.

  The last pictures were of Marian coming out of the Galloway Building and telling the reporters gathered at the entrance that there would be no statement until the next of kin had been notified.

  Then, after a break, the camera lingered on what looked like a large poster board with a message stenciled on it: If you want to see her alive again, you’re going to have to do something for me. Something big. Take the subway to Coney Island, this afternoon. Do not drive your car, do not take a cab. Be there by five o’clock. Go to The Hurricane and wait by the entrance. If you are not alone, she’s dead.

  Holland whipped around and grabbed the phone. He called Midtown South and asked for the captain. “Murtaugh, it’s Holland. Where’s Marian? Right this very minute.”

  “This very minute? On her way to Hoboken. She left about ten minutes ago. What—”

  Holland broke the connection and punched out Marian’s cell phone number. He got a recorded voice telling him the number he was trying to reach was temporarily outside the service area.

  But that was the standard recording used whenever there was no answer; it could mean anything from a dead battery to to a sabotaged handset. And if Marian had left Midtown South only ten minutes ago, she wouldn’t have had time to reach one of the tunnels yet; she’d still be inside the service area.

  He called Murtaugh back. “Call out your troops—there still may be time to stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop Marian from being abducted,” he said.

  The two men stood in Holland’s office watching the tape. The patrol cars Murtaugh had dispatched to the entrances of both the Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel had failed to spot Marian’s car. A phone call to the Hoboken police confirmed that she’d not showed up at Annie Plaxton’s laundromat on Meegat Street.

  They’d been too late.

  “You can’t go meet him alone,” Murtaugh said when the tape had finished.

  “Of course I have to go alone,” Holland snapped. “The only reason I called you was that there was still a chance of preventing the abduction. But from this point on, the police are out of it.”

  The captain shot him an odd look. “Do you really think we’re going to step aside because you say so? She may be your Marian, but she’s also my lieutenant. I want you wearing a wire—”

  “That’s the first thing he’d look for. He’s not sloppy—he’s been planning this for a while. That tape covers several days.”

  “All the more reason to proceed with caution. But all right, no wire—you may be right. We’ll have police inside the booths all the way to the entrance to The Hurricane.”

  Holland shook his head. “It’s a long ride to Coney Island, even on the subway. There’s no time to set something up even if that were the right way to go about it.”

  “I’ve already set it up. The minute you told me what was on this tape. They’re on their way now.”

  Holland flared. “Just what we need—a bunch of heavy-handed cops spooking this guy before we find out where Marian is!”

  “Give us some credit,” Murtaugh answered mildly. “They know not to reveal themselves. And they’ll follow him after the meet, whether he drives or takes a cab or rides the subway. We’ll get him and find Marian both.”

  “It’s too risky,” Holland argued. “Let me meet him and find out what it is he wants me to do. That alone will give us a clue to his identity. And there’s always the chance that I already know him.”

  “What’s risky is your going in without backup. This is a police operation now, Holland, and we’re going to do it by the book.” He popped the tape out of the VCR and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Just keep in min
d that once you leave the subway station, you’ll never be out of sight of the police all the way to the roller coaster.”

  Holland didn’t like it, but he could do nothing but accept it. “And where will you be? Selling ice cream to the kiddies?”

  “I’ll be there, but you won’t see me.” Murtaugh looked at his watch. “I’m going now. Wait another fifty minutes before you leave. That should get you there close to five o’clock. He started out but turned at the door. “Holland … good luck.”

  Holland nodded, said nothing.

  He walked the entire length of the subway train twice during the long ride to Coney Island, but he saw no familiar faces among the other passengers. That proved nothing, however. Holland didn’t know all the detectives under Marian’s command; Murtaugh could easily have put someone on the train with him.

  Holland had been with the FBI long enough to come to understand what was derogatorily referred to as the police mentality. That need to nail a perp sometimes grew so strong it overrode all other considerations, including the safety of the innocent; it became a compulsion. He’d seen it happen time and again, both among federal agents and municipal police. He simply didn’t share Murtaugh’s faith that all the men and women at the stakeout in Coney Island would keep their cool.

  He preferred to rely on his own assessment of the situation, but that didn’t mean walking into danger unprepared. In the shoulder holster under his jacket was a .38, and strapped to his ankle was a .22; it was the first time since he’d left the FBI that he’d carried a weapon. If the meet stayed out in the open, he would need neither gun. If he was frisked elsewhere, perhaps the smaller gun would be overlooked. But he had no intention of meeting a potential killer unarmed.

  The ride seemed interminable, but it did finally end. Holland stepped off the train and paused, automatically checking out the ground-level station. It was crowded, but not overly so. One man was elbowing his way frantically toward the men’s room. Two women were talking in overloud voices. Two muscular young Hispanic street toughs stood bracketing the steps leading down to the street.

  Warning bells. The two Hispanics were glancing over the disembarking passengers with a studied casualness that would fool no one who was really looking. Yet their eyes slid right over him, as if he weren’t even there. Holland was prosperous looking and he was alone; he should be at least one object of their attention. They were only pretending not to have noticed him.

  He swore to himself. I don’t have time for a mugging now! It was almost five. The Hurricane, five o’clock.

  He fell in with the small crowd pushing toward the exit stairway. He timed it so that at the last minute he could break into a run and dart between the two young Hispanics and on down the stairway. When the moment was right, he made his move.

  And got past them! He whirled to face them, .38 in hand. They both froze on the top step, watching him. “That’s right,” Holland said with ice in his voice. “Stay like that and you won’t get hurt.”

  He started backing down the stairway. A middle-aged man myopically pushed his way between the two Hispanics and on down past Holland, unaware of the gun or anything else. A flicker in the eyes of one of the muggers warned Holland; but by the time he turned, the two who’d been waiting at the bottom of the stairs had jumped him.

  Among the four of them, they managed to get the .38 away from him—almost breaking Holland’s arm in the process. He lashed out with fists and feet and prayed his assailants weren’t carrying knives. The other passengers screamed and jostled one another in their haste to get out of the way. No one rushed to help.

  It was hard to get a good footing on the steps, so his four attackers eventually were able to wrestle him down on his back. “Hey, stop fightin’, man,” one of them panted. “We gotcha.”

  Holland was aware only of the time ticking away. “All right,” he said quickly. “Take what you want. Inside jacket pocket—wallet.”

  “Why, thank you, man,” the talking one said. He took the wallet. He also took Holland’s watch. “But we already got what we came for. We got you. Get up. You comin’ with us.”

  Suddenly they were all four holding knives.

  Holland got slowly to his feet, trying to think. They could have cut me at any time—what’s going on? He faked a stumble and made a run for it.

  They caught him before he reached the street. He couldn’t get to his .22, but he twisted his body and used elbows and knees and felt himself making some headway until a searing pain tore through his head, his vision dimmed, and he blacked out.

  Consciousness returned slowly. By inches.

  At first he was aware only of several blurs of light around him, yellow and indistinct. He closed his eyes but quickly opened them again; the temptation to yield to sleep was too strong. He wondered if he was concussed.

  He was lying facedown, his right cheek resting on a hard surface that was rough and gravelly. Something—a pebble?—was pressing against his temple. He tried moving his head; the pain that exploded in his skull forced him to lie completely still for several minutes.

  When the pain began to subside, he tried again. This time he managed to pull his head far enough back to free himself of … not a pebble, but something metal that his temple had been lying on. He scraped his cheek on the rough surface but barely felt it. He lay with the small metal object only inches from his eyes, willing it to assume a recognizable shape. Eventually it did: a bottle cap. As he watched, it seemed to grow, and grow, and grow …

  Despite his best effort not to, Holland slipped away into sleep.

  When he woke again, his first thought was: Marian! He’d missed the five o’clock meet. His breath came short; had he signed Marian’s death warrant? What would Murtaugh have done when he didn’t show? Why was he here and where was “here” anyway? Was Marian nearby? Was she still alive? He drifted off again trying to puzzle it out.

  The third time he woke his vision had cleared; the bottle cap was only a bottle cap, old and rusty. The blurs of yellow light had resolved themselves into lanterns, four of them, placed in a semicircle around him. Beyond the feeble light cast by the lanterns lay solid darkness. The floor he was stretched out on was cement, covered with litter and filth.

  He’d been lying on his hands and they too were hurting now. Slowly and cautiously he eased over onto his side. But when he tried to use his hands to help push himself up to a sitting position, he found they wouldn’t separate. He brought his wrists up to eye level, and saw they’d been manacled.

  The manacles were attached to a thick chain. Wonderingly, Holland followed the chain hand over hand to its other end: an iron ring set in the cement wall behind him.

  He opened his mouth and roared out his anger and frustration, setting off another explosion in his head. But in spite of his pain and the beginnings of despair, one part of his mind noted the four quick echoes that followed his cry of rage. This place is cavernous.

  He used the chain to pull himself shakily to his feet. In the yellow light he could make out that the iron ring in the wall was new, and the cement immediately around it was clean and a lighter gray than the rest of the wall. Holding on to the chain with both hands, he got both feet up flat against the wall and pulled with his whole weight. The iron ring didn’t budge.

  The effort took a lot out of him. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. When the jackhammer in his head started to slow down, he opened his eyes and looked around. From his new vantage point, he could see over the tops of the four lanterns placed on the ground; and what he saw was a mound of something behind each lantern.

  He moved as close to the lanterns as the length of chain would let him, but he still couldn’t quite make out what was piled behind them. He used his foot to push one lantern a little farther out. The yellow light finally revealed what had been concealed in shadow: Holland looked on the peacefully slack face of the young thug who’d taken his watch and wallet.

  As quickly as he could manage, Holland moved the other three lanterns. T
hey were all there, all four of his attackers.

  And all four of them had been shot.

  20

  “I had car trouble,” Marian had explained to Captain Murtaugh. “And my phone wouldn’t work. But the garage said the fuel line had been cut, clean through. So I left the car there for them to put in a new one and took a bus to Hoboken.”

  When she’d finally arrived, late in the afternoon, at the laundromat on Meegat Street, Annie Plaxton told her the Hoboken police had been there looking for her. Annie’s phones had been taken out by the firebombing—which was more extensive than that at Rita Galloway’s house on East Seventy-fifth—so Marian had gone to the nearest Hoboken police station. A few phone calls and she learned Murtaugh and most of her detectives were in Coney Island trying to rescue her.

  Even riding the bus, she got back to Midtown South before the others. The garage where she’d left the car was closed for the day, so she had to take a cab for the last leg of her journey.

  Murtaugh had shouted “Where the hell have you been?” when he first heard her voice on his phone.

  “In Hoboken,” she’d replied with a touch of irritation, still not knowing what had happened. “Just where I said I was going.”

  Murtaugh ordered her to stay in the stationhouse, not even to stick her nose out-of-doors until they got back. So she waited until they all returned from Coney Island, arguing among themselves, confusion and tension thick in the air.

  Then they told her the bad news.

  Marian’s stomach started to churn when she heard Holland had been taken. Murtaugh allowed her a little recovery time, but not much; he expected her to act like a cop no matter how much she was hurting. Marian resented his demand even while acknowledging it was the best thing he could do for her. She washed her face with cold water and went downstairs to the briefing room.

  “The whole thing was an elaborate setup,” Murtaugh was saying. “The firebombing in Hoboken was done for one reason only—to get Lieutenant Larch out of the way during the crucial time. Our Mr. Machiavelli even sabotaged her car and her phone to slow her down, to delay her return to the station even longer. Then he sent Curt Holland a videotape he’d made of the two of them over several days’ time, to show he could get close to them when he wanted to. Yes, Sergeant?”