“He’s right,” Cates said. “A smart defense attorney would have beat it down to a cakewalk.”
“That’s probably what the killer thought, which is why Tinsdale wound up wearing a Tyvek jumpsuit under an exit ramp on the Harlem River Drive a half a block from a kids’ playground. Kylie and I went there after school this afternoon.”
Cates frowned. “And let me guess. The kids said even less than the old man with emphysema. Nobody heard nothing. Nobody saw nothing. Nobody knows nothing. It’s the code of the prepubescent black drug dealer. Growing up, I watched sociopaths like Tinsdale destroy young lives. I became a cop to get bastards like him off the street. And now a couple of vigilantes with a movie camera are doing it for me. You know what really sucks? It’s my job to track these lunatics down and keep them from killing any more scumbags. These Hazmat boys got one thing right. There really is no justice.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Cates called out.
It was Cheryl, looking every bit as beautiful as she had when I made an ass of myself at the diner this morning. “If you guys are having a group grope on Hazmat,” she said, “can I join the group?”
“Absolutely,” Cates said. “Jordan, give her your theory about the two men in the black SUV.”
I spelled out my scenario of two killers luring their victims by posing as cops. “What do you think, Dr. Robinson?” I asked.
She smiled at me, and my brain jumped a few hours ahead to being alone with her at dinner, the wine warming us both. And then my testosterone took over, and my brain fast-forwarded to the two of us naked. She moaned and called out my name and said—
“What do I think, Detective Jordan?”
I snapped out of my fantasy.
“Right. That’s what I asked. What do you think of my idea that the killers could be posing as cops?”
“I think it’s a fascinating theory,” Cheryl said, still smiling. “But I think you’re wrong.”
Chapter 41
Gideon had been the one who picked Alex Kang as their first houseguest.
A year earlier, Kang had tried to gun down Giap Phung, the leader of the rival Vietnamese gang NBK—Natural Born Killers. Kang had chased Phung into the Canal Street subway station and unloaded his Springfield nine-millimeter semiautomatic into the crowd. Phung got away, but Kang hit four bystanders. One of them, Jenny Woo, a beautiful young honors student at Hunter College, clung to life for ten days before she died.
Everybody knew Kang was the shooter. Jenny’s parents begged someone—anyone—to come forward and identify him. But fingering a gangbanger was tantamount to suicide, so Kang walked.
Gideon convinced Dave that they should be the ones to avenge Jenny Woo’s death.
“She was a college girl with her whole life ahead of her,” Gideon said. “Just like your sister.”
“I thought what we did was a onetime thing,” Dave said.
“Maybe for you, but I’ve been thinking. We were sixteen when we killed Enzo. We had no idea what we were doing, and we were lucky that bastard didn’t gut the two of us and feed our kidneys to his dog.”
Dave nodded. It was his fault that Enzo had been able to pull a knife on them. If Gideon hadn’t whacked him over the head with that bottle of vodka…
“Alex Kang is even more dangerous than Enzo,” Gideon said. “He’s what Enzo would have become if we hadn’t killed him. But we’re a lot smarter now, and this time we’re not going to make any mistakes.”
“I’m listening,” Dave said.
Gideon laid out the plan.
“I really like the video confession part,” Dave said. “Kind of wish we thought of that for Enzo. But scumbags like Kang don’t confess in five minutes. We need a place to stash him. My cousin Todd has this old cabin he only uses in the summer. It’s up in the Adirondacks.”
Gideon shook his head. “When you’re snatching someone like Alex Kang, you don’t want to give him five hours in a car while you drive him upstate. Too much time for him to figure out how to get away. We need to keep him as close to home as possible. I’m thinking we can find something in Long Island City.”
They spent a week scouting, driving past factories, warehouses, and storage facilities, some occupied, some not. Then they found it—88 Crane Street—a graffiti-covered garage on a dead-end block that bordered the Long Island Rail Road rail yard.
It was not only an eyesore, it was an earsore, with diesel engines idling all day, drowning out any sounds that might remotely come through the thick walls.
“Not exactly a neighborhood that’s going to attract people,” Dave said.