Michael had no idea if and when they would ever do anything with the property. At first he wasn’t sure how he even felt about the gesture. Over time he came to understand that it somehow kept his parents closer, and for that he could never thank his wife enough. It was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever done for him.

To this day, he had not been back inside.

TOMMY WAS WAITING FOR him in front of Angelo’s. He had on his court face.

“Hey,” Tommy said.

“Hey.”

“Fucking city.”

“Fucking city.”

Tommy told him what he knew about the case, which was not much. The 911 call had come in at 4 AM that morning.

All 911 calls for the entire city of New York were routed to a central Manhattan-based location. After the location of the call was determined, the call was routed to the local precinct and sector therein. In Astoria, it would be the 114th precinct.

The detective assigned to the case would be the one next “up” for the assignment, which was, by tradition, selected by rotation throughout the squad. Michael had never been a fan of the system, which was deeply entrenched in the NYPD, because it sometimes led to the most challenging cases being assigned to the detective with the least imagination and initiative. Detectives were 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade, with 1st being the highest. Promotion of grade was based on another tradition, a combination of time-in-grade, seniority, office politics, performance and timing. Injustice was sadly the all-too-frequent result.

When Michael saw the tall, regal figure standing in the doorway leading up to People’s Legal Services, it was good news and bad news. The fact that Detective First Grade Desiree Powell was the lead investigator into the suspicious death of Viktor Harkov was good news for the friends, family, and loved ones of the deceased, among whom Michael Roman could be probably be counted. It was bad news for anyone who had anything to hide, anyone who had even the most peripherally shady dealings with the lawyer, of whom Michael Roman might also well be grouped. If it was there, Desiree Powell would find it. She was relentless.

The scene was crawling with uniforms, suits, forensic investigators, brass. It wasn’t that Viktor Harkov was a celebrity victim, or that this case was necessarily going to make headlines for more than a day, but Harkov knew a lot of people, on both sides of the law, and whenever a defense attorney was killed, the ripples went far and wide. The NYPD wanted a ring around this potential circus as soon as possible.

As Michael and Tommy crossed the street, toward the building that housed Viktor Harkov’s office, Powell looked up from a report at which she was glancing. She gave a slight dip to her chin, acknowledging Michael. Michael waved back, knowing that in the next few minutes he would talk to Powell and everything he said would become part of the record, part of the maelstrom surrounding this place where evil had visited, and once again left its indelible mark.

SIXTEEN

Desiree Powell was a striking woman – soft-spoken, fastidious in her dress and speech, a legendary ballroom dancer. She was of Jamaican descent, born and raised in a small village in the Blue Mountains north of Kingston.

Powell had now been a police officer for twenty-four years, the first seven in uniform on the streets of the 103, patrolling Hollis and South Jamaica in those hard years when crack came to south-eastern Queens.

When you’re a female police officer in your twenties you get it from all corners – suspects, witnesses, fellow officers, ADAs, judges, CSU techs, chiefs, captains, commanders and, providing it was not a homicide, quite often from the victims themselves. When you’re just shy of six feet tall, you get even more. More than once she’d had to mix it up, and in all the years, she had not lost that edge.

These days, on the good days, when the light hit her right and she put in her forty-five minutes on the treadmill, she could pass for a decade younger than her forty-six years. Other days she looked and felt every second, plus. She knew she could still turn heads, but sometimes the effort wasn’t worth the whistle.

Standing on the corner of Newtown and 31st Street, directing a perimeter, Powell knew that it may have been her gold badge that gave her access, but it was her manner that gave her authority.

What she had seen in that blood-splattered office was in every way wrong. The worse the scene, the more she wanted it.

Two men from the DA’s office approached. Michael Roman and Tommy Christiano. Powell had worked with both of them. The Glimmer Twins. They were stars in the office, and, although the police and DA’s office were in theory on the same side, sometimes ego trumped justice.

And, Detective Desiree Powell thought, there was definitely ego to spare on this corner, on this day.

SEVENTEEN

Powell glanced between them, back and forth. She wore an impeccably tailored black suit, lavender blouse, a simple gold chain around her slender neck. Her nails, which she had wisely cut short – a necessity for fieldwork – were highly polished, the color of her blouse. She and Michael were the same height.

“Do we have a suspect in custody I don’t know about?” Powell asked.

As a rule, any number of officials could be summoned to the scene of a homicide – Squad Commander, Chief of Detectives, Crime Scene Unit, Medical Examiner. Representatives of the district attorney’s office were routinely called only when the suspect was detained or arrested at the scene. There were, however, many exceptions to this.

“No,” Tommy said. “I just can’t resist a woman in a suit.”

“Where’s Paul?”

She was asking about Paul Calderon, the originally assigned ADA. “Paul needed some personal time,” Tommy said. “So lucky you. You got me.”

“A girl could do worse.”

“I have two exes who would disagree.”

Powell smiled, glanced at Michael. “And the Stone Man himself,” she said. “Been a while.”

She and Michael shook hands. They had not seen each other in nearly a year. It happened that way sometimes. “How have you been?” Michael asked.

“Better days.” Powell gestured over her shoulder, at the crime scene. “Some fuckery this, eh?”

“Bad?” Tommy asked.

“Bad.”

“What happened?”

Powell teased her short hair. It was perfect to begin with, but Desiree Powell was nothing if not fussy about her appearance. Michael had not once seen her in jeans and running shoes. “We don’t know too much yet. But it looks like he was tortured. Burned.”

“Burned?”

Powell nodded. “This is not the worst of it either.”

Worse than tortured, burned, and murdered, Michael thought. What the hell happened up there? More importantly, why?

“Was it a robbery?” Tommy asked.

Powell shrugged. “Too early to say. Place was not ransacked. There was money in his wallet. Only one drawer in the file cabinet was open. It wasn’t pried.”

Michael felt his heart skip a beat. The fact that a file drawer was open didn’t mean anything. Yet.

“Who called it in?” Tommy asked.

“The son. He stopped by on his way home from work. He’s a night man on the MTA. When he could not reach his father on the phone, he became concerned.”

“Are we looking at the son?” Tommy asked.

Powell shook her head. “Not now. Viktor Harkov had some shady dealings, though, I believe. He knew some bad people, did some bad business. Some times these t’ings come back to haunt you, ya no see it?”

Michael had forgotten how Powell sometimes slipped into her Rastafarian jargon. He had seen the woman on the stand many times, and when the proceedings called for it, Powell could speak like a professor of linguistics. On the street though, she sometimes spoke in her patois. Desiree Powell could work a group, big or small.