Unholy City Read online

  The EMT preparing for defibrillation worked quietly and efficiently, Roger noted. He was cutting through the shirt, shaving patches of the hairy chest, positioning white adhesive pads on the shaved skin, and waiting for the defibrillator to analyze the heartbeat. When the digital voice said, “Shock advised,” Susan ceased her lifesaving efforts, and the EMT shouted, “Clear!”

  The charge sent a spasm through the body. A few seconds later, the defibrillator voice said, “It is safe to touch the patient.” The EMT felt for a pulse, shook his head, and the other EMT resumed ventilation and compression with Susan’s help.

  They gave the body a second shock. Rose Bartruff, Roger observed, was watching the scene with wide, unblinking eyes. Vivian Wakefield’s lips were moving—she was praying, he supposed—and Peter Linton had stepped back from the bright flashlight beam and was texting rapidly with both thumbs despite the disapproving glare of the police sergeant. Susan Bentley turned up the collar of her thin blazer and shoved her hands in the pockets as if this cool but pleasant April night was subzero. Roger peeled off his tweed jacket and threw it over her shoulders as the EMTs attempted to revive the body with a third shock. When the shock had been administered and the pulse checked, Roger heard the taller, thicker EMT announce the verdict. “We’re done. Call it in.”

  “Well, that’s that,” Susan whispered just loud enough for him to hear.

  “You did all you could, Susan.” He patted her shoulder.

  “Thanks, Roger.” She removed her hands from her pockets and clasped his right one—in gratitude for his assistance, he supposed—and they stared at each other in silence.

  Then the NYPD sergeant stepped forward. “Who found him?”

  “I did,” acknowledged Rose. “After the vestry meeting. I came back here to check on the mint and—”

  “The what?”

  “The mint. This is an herb garden. I was walking, and I tripped over him in the pathway.”

  “And he was dead?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose answered.

  Rose was such a tentative person, thought Roger as he read the sergeant’s name under his shield. Zamora.

  “Rose rushed back inside and got me.” Susan came to Rose’s rescue. “I’m a doctor. Roger and I”—she pointed to him—“came out here with Rose. Philip—he’s our senior church warden—was lying here on his side. He had no pulse. We called nine-one-one, and I started CPR immediately.”

  “And disturbed whatever evidence was here,” noted Zamora in a tone that struck Roger as accusatory.

  “I was trying to save a life,” Susan responded curtly.

  Good for her, Roger thought as he slid his right hand into his pants pocket. She was no pushover.

  Then Zamora panned the sets of eyes that formed a half circle around the lifeless body. “All right, listen carefully,” he said in a crowd-control voice that wasn’t necessary. “You’re all going to follow Officer O’Donnell into the church.” He pointed to his junior partner. “Do not talk. Do not make any phone calls or send any texts. Is that understood?” He gave Peter Linton a hard look. Then he turned to the EMTs. “This body stays right where it is until we get a detective and crime scene unit here. Step back from it now.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Detective Claire Codella reached for her phone. But it wasn’t her ringtone. The sound she heard was coming from Detective Brian Haggerty’s cell phone on the other side of her bed. She shook his shoulder. It wasn’t that late—only eleven fifteen—but sex had sent him into a deep sleep, while she lay awake as usual. She shook him again, spoke his name, and finally he groaned, rolled over, and grabbed the phone. “Yeah?”

  Codella sat up in the darkness.

  “Where?” he asked.

  She turned on her bedside lamp.

  “How?”

  She watched his blond eyebrows furrow, recognizing his look of intense concentration. She knew what it meant, and she wanted to snatch the phone out of his hands. No detective wanted to sit by while another detective caught a case—even if that detective shared your bed.

  Haggerty ran his fingers through his curly blond hair. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” He ended the call, got up, and threw on the jeans and shirt he’d stripped off an hour ago. “There’s a body at St. Paul’s Episcopal,” he told her as he grabbed his shield from the top of her dresser and stuck his arms through his shoulder holster. “Someone cracked him over the head.” He grabbed his blazer off her closet doorknob.

  Codella pulled on shorts and a T-shirt as he pushed his feet into loafers. She followed him to the front door. She could feel his barely contained excitement. He was a mass set into motion by the unnatural force of death, and now the inertia of a nonstop investigation would keep him in that motion for days, maybe weeks. He opened the door, paused, and turned back to kiss her. “Get some sleep for both of us.”

  He was trying to be considerate, she thought, but all she felt was envy and irritation. The last body she’d caught had turned out to be an overdosed heroin addict lying under a bench in Strauss Park, and there had been nothing for her to do except wait for the medical examiner and complete a shitload of paper work. “Be careful,” she told Haggerty, doing her best to conceal her disappointment until he disappeared down the fire stairs.

  She closed the door and went to her living room window. She wanted to be down there on Broadway flagging a taxi and speeding to a crime scene. Nothing compared to an all-encompassing homicide investigation. To Codella, it was the ultimate form of self-expression, a pursuit that required the use of all your senses, stamina, and mental powers. You pieced together the solution to a crime like a master builder. Your bricks were forensic evidence; careful chronologies of dates, times, and places; the confirming and contradictory accounts of witnesses; suspects’ unintended slips of the tongue. And you arranged these blocks with the stiff mortar of analytical reasoning to erect a solid, impenetrable wall of truth that could withstand the forces of dispute and denial.

  Codella hadn’t realized how much her work defined her until it was taken away sixteen months ago. That was the day she told her boss, Lieutenant Dennis McGowan, she’d been diagnosed with lymphoma and had to check in to the hospital the next day to begin her treatments.

  “Jesus, Codella. So fast? That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s not,” she’d said, unsurprised by his lack of tact. She hadn’t expected any sympathy from him—she’d just been promoted to his Manhattan North homicide squad, and he hadn’t wanted her there in the first place.

  “How long will you be out?”

  “I don’t know.” Maybe forever, she was thinking.

  He didn’t visit her in the hospital. He didn’t send a card or flowers. And when she was ready to return to work after six cycles of grueling in-hospital chemotherapy and weeks of rehab, he made her submit to a fitness-for-duty psychological exam in addition to her physical.

  “Why?” she asked him as casually as she could because he was one of those insecure and volatile men who didn’t like to be questioned, especially by women. “I had cancer. I didn’t use excessive force or try to throw myself off the George Washington Bridge.”

  He crossed his arms over his thick chest and smirked. “You’ve been out ten months. You want back in, then you sign the informed consent and show up for the exam. That’s the deal, Codella.”

  So she’d shown up, signed the papers, and answered the questions on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 as honestly as she could. And she was careful not to display defensiveness during her one-on-one interview with a psychologist who seemed determined to make her acknowledge her vulnerabilities.

  “You’ve got an impressive clearance record, Detective,” he began benignly enough.

  His short black hair was meticulously gelled into place, and she sensed that his conversation would be equally stiff. “Thank you.”

  “What do you attribute that to?”

  She shrugged. “Persistence, I suppose. Good listening skills. An
d a little bit of luck, of course.”

  “You’re a classic overachiever?”

  The label, she knew, was intended to subtly deflate her accomplishments, but she kept her irritation to herself. “All good detectives are overachievers. We don’t like to give up without getting the bad guy.” She smiled.

  He maintained a stingy poker face. “And you think you still have the mental fortitude for the job?”

  “I wouldn’t come back if I didn’t.” She looked him in the eyes. “I know what’s at stake.”

  “But cancer has lasting effects on people.”

  “That’s true,” she acknowledged.

  “How has it affected you?”

  “Well, for one thing, I have a permanent case of dry mouth. Chemo has a funny way of destroying your salivary glands. I don’t recommend it.”

  He didn’t appear amused. “You think that’s the only way it’s affected you?”

  “No. There’s the nerve damage too. The tips of my fingers and toes tingle pretty much all the time now.” She held up her right hand. “But don’t worry, I passed my pistol qualification.” In the silence, she studied the single painting on the wall of his windowless office. It was the kind of cityscape she’d have expected to see in a guest room at a midtown Marriott, a predictable Manhattan skyline that evoked none of her deep feelings about the city she had fled to at the age of eighteen. She willed herself to be as two-dimensional as that painting. She knew very well the psychologist didn’t want to hear about her peripheral neuropathy. He wanted to catch her in a damaging admission of psychological vulnerability. But she had no intention of sharing the thoughts that kept her awake at night after Haggerty was soundly sleeping. Was her lymphoma going to return? Would she ever have to endure another chemo port implanted in her chest? Would she even be alive in another year or two? “I’m fit physically and emotionally,” she assured him. “I love my job and I want to get back to it.”

  He tapped his pen against the thick manila folder on his desk. “I read your background, Detective. Your father murdered a woman when you were a child—just ten years old—and you saw it happen.” Then he waited for her reaction.

  “That’s right,” she said matter-of-factly. “Her name was Joanie Carlucci, and my father swung a baseball bat into her body while I watched through a window.” Why was this guy bringing up ancient history? Because he’d failed to scare up her emotions about cancer? Had McGowan sent her here knowing full well that this psychologist would do everything in his power to provoke her to anger, guilt, or grief and pronounce her unstable? She recalled the Bible quote a Catholic priest had recited to her when she was thirteen, living with yet another set of foster parents and still having nightmares about the murder: “A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent.” What bullshit that was. She’d suffered in so many ways for her father’s violent act, and this guy was trying to make her suffer even more, but she wouldn’t let him win.

  “People describe you as pretty intense on the job.”

  “I call it hardworking.”

  “Do you think it’s because of what your father did?”

  “You mean am I compensating for his crime? Does it matter, so long as I get the job done?”

  “Physical and emotional traumas can impact an officer’s decision making.”

  Codella pointed to the manila folder on his desk. “You have fourteen years of my decision making right there,” she said. “I don’t think my father’s crime has affected my ability to put criminals behind bars.”

  The conversation continued as a long fencing match in which she parried his repeated advances and carefully avoided direct counter attacks that would fuel his hostility. She knew her only option was to wait him out, let him reach the point where he’d exhausted all his energy, used up all his strategies, and finally accepted the fact that their match would end in a draw.

  Now Codella turned away from her living room window and walked back to her bedroom. Of course she was compensating for her father’s crime. She had to see past Joanie Carlucci’s battered body every time she arrived at a new crime scene. But that was no reason to label her unfit. The fact that she’d lived with a homicidal monster and witnessed the brutal death of a terrorized woman was a constant reminder that her work mattered. She wasn’t just a really good cop. She was a good cop on a personal mission to right wrongs and fight for those who’d been unfairly silenced.

  But tonight wasn’t her night to right any wrongs. It was Haggerty’s night. So she got back into bed, closed her eyes, and finally sank into sleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  When Haggerty got to the church, Sergeant Zamora was standing at the south gate, his arms crossed and an everything’s-secured-here expression on his face. Haggerty didn’t doubt that the sergeant had done his job. Zamora could be irritatingly no nonsense, but he certainly knew how to follow protocol at a crime scene. “I’ve got five church people in a room, Detective, and Officer O’Donnell is making sure they don’t talk to each other.”

  Haggerty nodded. “What about the body?”

  “Around there.” The sergeant pointed. “Looks like somebody cracked his skull open.”

  “Did you find a weapon?”

  Zamora shook his head. “Didn’t want to disturb the crime scene any more than it already was. I called CSU and the ME. And more uniforms, of course. They should be here within minutes.”

  “Good. Any first impressions?”

  Zamora scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t know. When I got here, all those church people were swarmed around the body. One’s a doctor. She was trying to revive him before EMS arrived.”

  “Anybody look suspicious to you?”

  “Hard to say. One guy—short and bald—started texting while the EMTs worked. He didn’t seem too concerned about what was happening.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Zamora removed the notepad tucked in his belt. “Linton. Peter Linton.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “I’ll let you be the judge, Detective. It’s a pretty odd group.” He read off names and descriptions of the vestry members sitting in the church Community Room. Haggerty listened closely. Long ago, he’d discovered he had an uncanny ability to store and recall information without writing it down. Even Claire was impressed by his memory.

  Zamora was looking over his shoulder now. “CSU is here.”

  Haggerty turned and saw the familiar face of Adam Banks, the lead CSU investigator. Banks’s team emerged from their van and hauled equipment out of the rear as Banks approached Haggerty. “Show me the way.” He grinned as if they were setting off on an adventure.

  CHAPTER 6

  Anna opened her eyes and sat up. Flashing lights pulsed across the bedroom ceiling. She climbed out of bed and rushed to the window. On the street below, an ambulance, three police cars, and a police van were parked in front of the church. She looked at the clock. It was eleven twenty-five. She had only been home for half an hour. What could have happened in that time?

  Todd didn’t stir as she threw on clothes and dialed her thoughts back to just before she’d left the church. She’d broken away from Susan Bentley; waved to Rose, who was putting on her coat; and reminded Roger and Peter to lock the parish house doors. But she hadn’t seen Vivian. Had something happened to her? The junior churchwarden was, Anna knew, much older than she let on. What if she had collapsed?

  Anna hurried downstairs. She found her sneakers in the foyer. But no, she thought as she fumbled with the laces. Three police cars and a van didn’t show up just because someone was ill. Something more serious must have happened—a break-in, perhaps, or vandalism, or an incident in the church-run homeless shelter.

  She opened the solid front door and closed it behind her. The ten men who slept in the church basement on Monday through Thursday nights had all graduated from substance abuse programs and attended a work-training program during the day. In the three years the shelter had operated, there’d never been an incident. Nevertheless, some p
arishioners—including Peter Linton on the vestry—didn’t like social activism right in their basement, and if a guest had gone berserk, the St. Paul’s Weekday Beds program would be in jeopardy.

  She almost tripped as she flew down the brownstone front steps. As she ran the hundred feet to the south entrance gate, she heard Peter Linton’s voice in her head. Those people need to be in city-run shelters with guards in place. Peter listened to her sermons every Sunday, but he still put pragmatism above compassion.

  A police officer stood at the gate. “What’s going on here?” she asked him.

  “Police investigation,” he said.

  “What sort of investigation?”

  The officer was a few inches shorter than she was. She peered over his shoulder at bright light flooding the area at the back of the garden between the parish house and the rectory. “I’m sorry, ma’am. You need to move on.”

  “But this is my church.”

  “And you can come back on Sunday.”

  “You don’t understand,” she persisted. “I’m the rector here. If something has happened, I need to know. Who’s in charge? I want to speak to that person right now.”

  The officer made no move.

  “Now,” she repeated. “I run this church. I have a right to know what’s happening here.”

  Anna didn’t know if that was true or not, but the officer turned and walked toward the parish house steps. She watched him point to her as he spoke to an older uniformed officer. That officer headed toward the lights in the back of the garden, and the officer she had spoken to returned to the gate. “Wait here,” he said.

  She pulled up the collar of her jacket and stuffed her clenched fists into her pockets. The roof lights on the three squad cars flashed at different intervals like strobe lights in a fun house. She stared at the lights until a man in jeans and a blazer came to the gate and stopped beside the uniformed officer. The man was tall and thin with wavy blond hair combed back across his scalp. His eyes were blue. His firm jaw hadn’t been shaved in a few days, and the button-down shirt under his blazer was rumpled. “Detective Haggerty,” he said. “And you are?”