“I don’t think Paul Battaglia knew you well enough to trust you, Mr. Kwan,” Mike said. “But I happen to disagree with Ms. Cooper. I don’t think you have to be in so deep to betray someone, do you?”
“Battaglia didn’t know me well,” Kwan said, caught in the middle of that thought, “You’re right about that. But I never gave him any reason not to trust me.”
“We’ve got an eye on you, Mr. Kwan,” Mike said, swiveling around to talk to the man. “And we’ve got a high-powered scope attached to it. Keep that in mind as you go about your day.”
He saw an object on Kwan’s desk and picked it up. It was a magnifying glass—a beautiful object—resting on top of the Sunday Times. It had brass trim and its long, carved handle was made of ivory.
“Worth killing for?” Mike asked.
“It’s an antique, Detective,” Kwan said, quite defensively.
“I didn’t mean your ivory trinkets, Mr. Kwan,” Mike said, putting down the glass. “I meant the district attorney.”
“Only his killer can tell you that, Detective.”
“Well, if you run into him—or her—be sure and mention that we’re getting really close to bagging our prey,” Mike said, walking toward the door of the dark room.
George Kwan put his hands in the pockets of his smoking jacket.
Mike wasn’t quite done. “And if I’m thinking right that there’s a price on Alex Cooper’s head, too,” he said, glancing in my direction before I interrupted him.
“Don’t go there, Mike,” I said. I took a deep breath. I could almost feel the flames from Friday night’s Molotov cocktail licking at my neck.
“There won’t be anyplace on this planet I wouldn’t go,” Mike said, “to put a bullet in the brain of the mastermind behind that idea.”
FORTY-TWO
“Give me a list,” Mercer said.
The three of us were sitting at the back table at P J Bernstein Deli on Third Avenue, less than ten blocks from Kwan’s house. Mike had stopped at a street vendor’s cart to buy me a baseball cap, thinking that with the hat, my collar turned up, and shades on, some of the neighborhood regulars wouldn’t make me and butt in.
“We can do this all together,” I said.
It was eleven A.M. I had ordered an egg-white omelet while the guys both went for scrambled eggs and bacon.
“No, we can’t, Alex. I can go to One PP,” Mercer said, laughing at me, “but you’re off-limits there.”
“We’ll eat,” Mike said, “and I’ll run you back up to Three Sisters.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, peppering my omelet.
“It’s safe,” Mercer said. “What do you need?”
“I know the tech guys have been going over hours and hours of street surveillance,” Mike said. “If Kwan’s behind this, I’d start checking on whether Battaglia was being followed by someone from Kwan’s team from the time he left the town house.”
“That was Friday afternoon,” I said. “The murder was Monday night.”
“So let’s assume the shooters weren’t sitting near Battaglia’s apartment—in plain sight of his own bodyguard—on Monday only,” Mike said. “They might have figured he was tucked in for the night by that hour, and the fact that he rushed out so late could have suggested there was some urgency to his appointment.”
“I get it,” I said. “Whoever’s behind this killing must have had a team on Battaglia—probably for days.”
“Exactly. TARU needs to find street surveillance tapes from near the DA’s home and play them till a week before the murder,” Mike said to Mercer. “It’ll take all the men they’ve got to free up and watch hours of this stuff. Possible tails from when he came and went from the office, coordinated with his meetings and breakfast stops—they can find them in his diary. They’ll have to scan the streets from dozens of yards away.”
“That might give us license plates—even faces, ’cause they wouldn’t have been wearing masks until the moment of the kill.”
“All on the theory that at some point, the man in charge of ordering the hit was ready to have a sharpshooter take Battaglia out—if and when that became necessary,” Mercer said.
“And it seemed only to become necessary on Monday night,” Mike said. “But that doesn’t mean the guys tailing him—possibly gunmen—weren’t in place before then. Days before then.”
“TARU it is,” Mercer said. He was chewing on a strip of crisp bacon. “Big job, but at least they can get started today.”
“This guy, Pedro Echevarria,” Mike said. “He’s good with a gun. But I can’t imagine anyone, especially a whiz like Kwan, would use someone as visible as Pedro to do this killing—someone who goes out in the world with Kwan, does business with him, and was even scheduled to shoot with Battaglia in Montana.”
“You’re probably right about that,” Mercer said.
“Where do you learn to shoot around New York?” I asked.
“The NYPD range is at Rodman’s Neck,” Mercer said. “In the Bronx.”
“Yeah, but that’s the only one I know of,” I said.
Cops have to go twice a year to be retrained, but civilians aren’t welcome. I had been several times to observe police procedures and never saw an outsider.
Mike was on his iPad, Googling shooting ranges. “There’s something called West Side Rifle and Pistol Range on Twentieth Street,” he said. “Coyne Park in Yonkers. Ranges in Woodhaven and in Bay Ridge. They seem to be all over the place.”
“We got some calls to make,” Mercer said, jotting down the names. “Looking for—exactly what?”
“Cross-check all the names we have. See where Echevarria practices shooting, if you can find it,” Mike said. “Maybe he’s been giving lessons to young sharpshooters. No law against that.”
“I want to check Kwan for a juvenile record,” I said.
“That’s hopeless,” Mike said. “Even if he had one, it would be sealed by now.”
“Ask Catherine to take a court order to a judge tomorrow. A friendly judge,” I said to Mercer. “Let’s see if there’s a record first, and then get it unsealed, if there is one.”
“George Kwan?” Mercer asked.
“No, no. Get Kwan’s date of birth, which is in my Wolf Savage file, but run it with the name Ko-Lin Kwan—throw in a ‘Junior’ after the name—and an address on Pell Street.”
“Ancient history,” Mike said.
“History repeats itself every now and then,” I said. “Humor me.”
Mike was adding assignments to the task force list faster than I could think.
“That kid who dumped the bicycle and ran into the Central Park Zoo,” I said.
“Henry Dibaba,” Mike said. “What about him?”
“You said his narcotics arrest was made in the Bronx. Do you know where?”
Mike pointed at Mercer. “Check it out, will you? It was near the East 180th Street station. The Dyre Avenue Shuttle.”
“I realize I’m never going to be Miss Subways, but I didn’t even know that line existed. What’s the Dyre Shuttle?”
“It’s a short run that begins where the Lexington Avenue line ends,” Mike said. “Just four or five stops farther east, into the Bronx.”
“While you’re getting us that information,” I said to Mercer, “tell me where Pedro Echevarria got locked up when he was selling drugs. That’s also in the Bronx, if I’m not mistaken.”
“It’s a big borough, Coop.”
“I’m looking for a common denominator; that’s all.”