She shook her head, pushed her hair back behind her ears, and pulled out the next file. Between the two of us we’d already gone through ten boxes. There were twenty more to go. A long day was becoming an even longer night.
Judge Kingsman had called it the key to everything. It was. But only in the literal sense—so far. He’d handed us his key for a small locker at a self-storage facility in Yonkers, about twenty minutes north of his home. In the locker were thirty large boxes containing files of every case he’d presided over in the past thirty years. That was it. That was everything. There was nothing else Kingsman kept in the locker besides the files.
There was something not quite right about it all. I just couldn’t figure out what.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t obvious. The boxes were organized by year, and the files within them were alphabetized according to the last name of the defendant. Within minutes, Elizabeth and I had easily found the files for each of the victims. They were right where they were supposed to be in their respective boxes.
So what is it? What’s not right?
There was nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the labeling or the folders themselves. They were all the same color, that typical drab green.
Beyond the alphabetizing there was no system, no further means by which to differentiate one case from another. Murders were mixed in with assaults that were mixed in with drug smuggling, arson, and every conceivable form of racketeering. In the never-ending debate as to whether people are inherently good or evil, this was the mother lode of ammo for the evil argument.
“Needle in a haystack,” groaned Elizabeth as she put the top back on a box and reached for another. She groaned again. Each box weighed a ton.
“We should be so lucky,” I said. “At least with a needle in a haystack the needle exists.”
That was the fear, of course—that we would reach the last box and be no closer to knowing the identity of the queen of hearts.
In the meantime, all we could do was guess. It was like a game, a brainteaser. We went back and forth. Who’s the queen of hearts?
“The writer of a romance novel,” I said.
“A prostitute,” said Elizabeth.
“A drag queen.”
“A descendant of royalty.”
“A female heart surgeon.”
“A female champion hearts player.”
“No,” I said. “A female heart surgeon.”
Elizabeth looked up from the file in her hands to see me looking up from the one in mine. I had opened a new box and was about to go case by case, as with every other box, my thumb moving from tab to tab.
Only this case was right on top. The file was lying flat on top of all the others. I couldn’t miss it.
That was the whole point.
Chapter 80
WHOOSH.
We were back in Manhattan, the Upper East Side.
“No way, not unless you’ve got a goddamn warrant,” said the superintendent, standing in our path at two in the morning and trying his best to sound like a tough son of a bitch. The fact that he was fresh out of bed and wearing a fluffy blue bathrobe with little sailboats on it, however, wasn’t exactly helping his cause.
Still, what were the odds? A building super who was going to law school at night. How much he enjoyed telling us that, too. Almost as much as Elizabeth enjoyed telling him that he should probably ask for his tuition money back.
There was only one thing we needed to get him to open the door of apartment 2402, and she practically had it pressed against his nose. Her badge.
“Besides, we’re not trying to arrest Dr. Bensen, we’re trying to protect her,” Elizabeth added. “Now, open the goddamn door.”
So much for our tough-talking soon-to-be law-school graduate. The super dug into the pocket of his fluffy blue bathrobe and began fumbling with an overcrowded key chain. Bensen’s swanky high-rise building only looked like a hotel. There was no master key.
“Shit!” Elizabeth suddenly shouted. “Move!”
She’d heard the same loud crashing noise behind the door that we all did.
The super, slow with the keys, was even slower to move. Elizabeth promptly shoved him to the ground. She reached for her Glock, took one step back, and raised her foot, all in one smooth motion.
You want to break down a door? There’s only one way to do it. Never with your shoulder. Never with a running start. You need to kick and kick hard, landing your heel a few inches to the left of the lock. Anywhere else and you might as well be kicking a concrete wall.
All that said, you still only have a coin flip of a chance.
“Do you plan on just watching?” asked Elizabeth after her first attempt failed.
“I thought women kicking down doors was like men asking for directions,” I said, sidling up next to her. “Count of one, okay?”
“One,” said Elizabeth.
Our technique hovered somewhere between Chuck Norris and the Rockettes, but the timing was spot-on, our heels landing simultaneously to the left of the lock. The wood splintered, and the door flew open. Instinctively I peeled off as Elizabeth crouched behind her Glock, shrinking herself as a target. She’d been trained well.
“Stay here,” she said.
“No problem,” I replied. She had a gun; I didn’t.
Tell that to the super, though, who thought he could fall right in line behind her. Have you never seen a single cop show, buddy?
I grabbed him, yanking him out of the doorway. For the second time in less than a minute the guy was getting shoved to the ground. We were doing wonders for his self-esteem. At least he wasn’t about to die stupid.
I waited as Elizabeth checked the apartment.
How do you gauge what someone means to you? Have her walk into danger when there’s little you can do about it. Scary how much I could care about a person I’d only known for a short while. Actually, it wasn’t scary at all. It was all too human.
“Clear,” she finally said.
Although the way Elizabeth said it suggested there was a little more to it. That is, I was clear to come in, but there was still something to see. Something not good.
It’s amazing how much one little word can tell you.
Chapter 81
“CLEAR.”
How fitting…
I walked into Dr. Bensen’s apartment through the foyer and into the living room, stepping over the shattered glass remains of what had surely been a vase. The flowers lumped on the marble floor amid the shards removed any possible doubt.
The flowers were also dead, I noticed.
“In here,” Elizabeth called out.
I followed her voice down a short hallway to see her standing in front of an open bedroom door, culprit in hand. Actually, cradled in her arms was more like it. Dr. Bensen’s cat was of course a Bombay. What other color but black could it have been?