The Alamo - John Milton #11 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  Mackintosh reviewed the interviews that she had taken on the evening of the murder and had started to put together a list of follow-up questions that she wanted to put to the kid and to John Smith. She was especially interested in him. There was something about him that she found curious. His attitude had been matter-of-fact, an iciness that was unusual given the scene that had greeted him when he went into the bathroom. Most witnesses, when facing a murder scene that was as bloody as this one, would have been frightened. Most would have required coaxing and gentle persuasion to extract the details of what they had seen. Smith had not been like that at all. For a man who professed to be a cook, he had answered her questions with smooth efficiency. It was the kind of matter-of-fact response that she would have expected from an officer. It was incongruous, and she determined that she would dig into his background a little more.

  She entered his details into the National Crime Information Center. It was an electronic clearinghouse of crime data that recorded details of crimes and criminals across the continental United States. There were twenty-one separate databases; she logged into the Violent Persons file and requested a search on John Smith, adding in additional identifying details that would, she hoped, filter the flood of responses that she anticipated would be generated by such a common name. The data would take time to be returned, but she put a reminder in the murder book for herself to check tomorrow.

  There was something about John Smith that was off, and she meant to find out what that might be.

  69

  Milton opened his laptop and navigated to the website of the tracking company. He browsed to his account and clicked on the tracker that he had attached to the Ford F-150. The tracker was in motion, heading west along the Northern State Parkway. Milton glanced up at the time in the top right of the window: it was 3.35 p.m. The officer was heading back into Brooklyn for his 4 p.m. shift.

  Milton closed the laptop, grabbed his coat and headed down the stairs.

  The ride was challenging, to say the least. The main roads had been cleared and gritted, but the smaller connecting streets and avenues were often treacherous. Milton rode slowly and deliberately, aware that there was likely to be ice hidden beneath the snow that covered everything.

  The snow started to fall more heavily again as he merged onto the Southern State Parkway. It was a three-lane route, eastbound and westbound traffic separated by safety rails and a grassy median between them. It had been ploughed thoroughly, and, as Milton passed beneath the Wantagh State Parkway, he saw a big yellow snow plough rumbling in the opposite direction.

  He returned to the property on Shore Road and checked his watch: it was five in the afternoon. Darkness was falling quickly and the internal lights of the houses that faced the harbour twinkled brightly. Milton pulled over a quarter of a mile from the officer’s property and walked the rest of the way. It was bitterly cold. Snow was falling lightly again, blown into his face by gusts of icy wind that rushed in off the water. The area was quiet. The harbour, to his right, was a wide-open space, the opposite shore marked out by a sparkling of lights that ended at the open channel leading out to the ocean. The bank comprised a thin strip of scrub, mostly covered over with drifts of snow that had been tossed there by the municipal snow ploughs, and then a line of poles that bore telephone and electricity cabling. Milton walked along the side of the road, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his eyes on the houses that he passed.

  He reached number 87, the number denoted by a small mailbox fixed to a wooden post that emerged from the drift. The property shared a driveway with number 85, the second house set back another fifty feet from the road. The driveway was empty and the house looked unoccupied—dark, with no lights shining from any of the windows. He had no idea whether the officer lived alone or with family, but it appeared as if Milton had been fortunate.

  He looked left and then right and, happy that he was alone and unobserved, he crossed the road and hurried up the drive. There were two tracks just visible in the drift that would have been left by the Ford as it pulled out onto the road an hour or so earlier. Milton followed those, careful not to leave footprints.

  The side of the property that ran adjacent to the shared driveway would be visible to anyone in the second house fifty feet farther on. Milton turned off the drive and tramped through the drift across what would have been the front lawn. He left footprints here, but there was nothing that he could do about that. The snow continued to fall and would eventually erase the evidence of his trespass. He continued across the lawn until he reached the steps that led up to the veranda. He paused, listening carefully, but could hear nothing: no television, no radio, no voices or any other sign that someone was at home.

  The steps had been shovelled clear of snow, and Milton climbed them and stepped forward into the shelter of the porch. The main entrance to the house was through a tall door, the frame painted green and with a large pane of glass in the centre. Milton walked around to the right, but that side of the house was overlooked by the property at number 85. He went back to the front: despite being visible from the main road, it was still—given the lack of traffic and the fact that it wasn’t overlooked by the neighbours—the easiest way to get inside without being seen.

  Milton knelt before the door and examined the handle. The door itself looked as if it was original but, at some point in the recent past, it had been fitted with a new spring bolt lock. Milton reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and slid out a YOUR NAME HERE card that had been sent to him in the mail. He wedged the card into the narrow gap between the door and the frame, held it flush against the frame and then worked it down until the edge was against the smallest part of the lock. He pushed the card in and bent it away from the doorknob. He felt the latch slide back and, pressing a little more forcefully, he turned the handle and opened the door.

  He went inside and closed the door behind him.

  70

  Milton took out his phone and switched on the flashlight. He was in a front hall. There was an open passage ahead, a door to the left and a flight of stairs leading up to the right. There was a small table just inside the door with a cordless telephone and a small pile of unopened correspondence. Milton shone his flashlight on the envelopes as he shuffled through them: some were for Robert Carter; others were for Rebecca or Becky Carter. They looked like bills. Milton photographed them and then left them where they were.

  He opened the door to his left and went into the living room. The windows were shuttered and he was able to shine his flashlight without fear of the light being seen from the outside. There was a couch and a matching armchair, an LCD screen mounted on the wall and an old vinyl record player on a sideboard. There were magazines spread out on the coffee table that sat before the couch: there was an issue of American Baby, the pregnant woman on the cover smiling at the camera as she sat on a swivel chair. Milton filed away the possibility that Robert and Rebecca Carter were expecting a child.

  The living room offered access to the dining room through a set of double doors that looked as if they were usually left open. Milton passed through them. There was a dining table with six chairs, a dresser that displayed a set of plates, and a large potted plant in the corner of the room. There was a framed picture on the wall that looked like it had been staged during a wedding: the Carters, Milton assumed, with Rebecca wearing a white dress as she perched on the hood of a yellow New York cab, her husband in a tuxedo as he held her hand. Milton photographed it. There was nothing else of interest.

  Milton continued through the open door, passed along a narrow corridor that offered access to a small pantry and stepped into the kitchen. Once more, there was nothing out of the ordinary: appliances that looked brand new, clean surfaces, a small table with two chairs, a bunch of flowers in a bright yellow vase.

  He went upstairs. The layout was as he had expected: three bedrooms accessed from the hall and a family bathroom. The first bedroom, at the front of the house, was around fifteen feet by fifteen feet and
was evidently used as the master suite. Milton went inside and searched it quickly and efficiently. There were two free-standing wardrobes: one was filled with a woman’s clothes and the other with a man’s. Milton concentrated on the latter, taking out the piles of shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe and feeling for anything that might suggest a false floor or a hidden compartment. He found nothing. He went to the bed. There were bedside tables on either side: the one to his left held a copy of a Naomi Klein book and a collection of aromatherapy bottles. The table on the other side of the bed had a Kindle, a trailing cable used to charge an iPhone, a copy of Sports Illustrated and a scattering of change. Milton opened the table’s drawer and found a nest of cables, a runner’s watch with a heart monitor that was worn on a strap, an old-fashioned alarm clock, and more superfluous cables. Nothing of interest. Milton dropped to his belly and looked under the bed, then lifted the rugs on either side and tried the floorboards in the event that one of them was loose. None of them were.

  The other bedroom at the front of the house was in the process of being turned into a nursery. The walls were painted pink and a mobile had been fixed to the ceiling above the spot where a crib might be placed, animals with friendly faces twirling gently as Milton nudged them with his shoulder.

  Milton crossed the hall to the rear of the house. There were two more rooms: a bathroom and a further bedroom that had been turned into a study. Milton eliminated the bathroom first. There was nothing of interest save for a bottle of pills in the wall-mounted cabinet. Milton held them up so that he could photograph the label: ROBERT CARTER, Xanax, 0.5mg tablets.

  Milton went into the study. It was around thirteen feet by fifteen feet and dominated by a large antique desk. There was a roller chair with leather cushions behind the desk, and Milton sat down in it as he searched. There was more correspondence in the name of Robert Carter. Nothing of note was apparent to Milton, but he photographed it all anyway. The computer on the desk was on; Milton tapped a key to wake it and was presented with a photograph of the man he now knew was Carter fishing off the side of a boat. He tapped again and was presented with a box to enter a password. Milton ignored it.

  He was about to leave the desk when he noticed a framed photograph that had been allowed to fall forward. He picked it up and had his first success: the picture in the frame was of the white man he now suspected of being Robert Carter and the black man he had been with the night before last, the man whom Freddy had seen outside the restroom. The two of them were on a boat—it appeared to be the same as the one that Milton had seen on the screensaver—and were both holding up bottles of beer, the photographer catching them in an easy moment of shared laughter. There was nothing to identify the other man, but, on a hunch, Milton turned the frame over and flicked the clasps that held the mount in place. He slid it away and took out the photograph. Someone had written on the back of the print: Me and Shep, June ’15, Jamaica Bay. Milton took a picture of both sides of the photograph and then replaced it in the frame and left it as he had found it, face down on the desk.

  There was a rug on the floor. Milton wheeled the chair to the side of the room and pulled it back. It was obvious that one of the boards was loose; it wasn’t flush with the others, and, as Milton looked at it more closely, he saw tiny splinters protruding from the shorter edge. The board had, at some point, been worked up with a screwdriver. Milton took a metal ruler from the desk drawer and used it to gently pry the board up so that he could get his fingers beneath it. He pulled carefully, removing the board and revealing the space beneath. He shone his phone’s flashlight down and saw that a small stash was kept there. He took out a metal box, two passports and a bundle of bills inside a plastic Ziploc bag. He reached down again and felt the familiar lines of a pistol. He removed it: a Sig Sauer P226 and, as he reached down a third time, a box of 9mm ammunition.

  He opened the passports. The first was in the name of Peter Marino and the second was in the name of Alissa Marino. Robert Carter’s picture was in the passport for Mr Marino. The picture for Mrs Marino was the same woman that Milton had seen in the framed picture downstairs. He photographed both documents and then put them back in the bag.

  He took the money and riffled through it. It was a collection of fifties and twenties; Milton estimated ten thousand dollars. Ready money, he thought. Just in case. He put the cash back in the bag, too.

  The pistol was in excellent condition, but the least interesting of the items that he had taken from the stash. He replaced it and the ammunition beneath the floor.

  The box was the final item that he examined. It was small, only a little larger than Milton’s wallet. It was hinged at the top and would, once unlocked, open to allow access to what could only have been a very small compartment. The front had an alphanumeric keypad and the rear was printed with the manufacturer’s details: it was a CodeBox product, in their junior line. Milton guessed that Carter used the box to keep a key, which would then offer access to a locker or storage container that he kept off-site. There was nothing that Milton could do with the lock. He would have been able to call Tech Ops at Vauxhall Cross if he was still working for the Group, and they would have been able to send back the manufacturer’s override code, but that wasn’t an option for him now. And, even if he could have relied upon Tech Ops to help him open the box, and if he was right that the box was used to hold a key, he would have no idea how to find the lock that the key opened.

  He replaced the items—the box, the money and the passports—in the hiding hole, put the loose board back in place and covered it over with the rug.

  He took out his phone and the card that Polanski had given him at the restaurant. He dialled the number as he made his way back down the stairs.

  The call connected. “Hello?”

  “It’s John Smith,” he said.

  “Hello,” Polanski said.

  “I need to see you.”

  “It’s late. I was about to leave.”

  “It’s urgent.”

  “Can’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “No,” Milton said. “It’s about González. I know who killed him.”

  71

  The Brooklyn North division of the Internal Affairs Bureau was at 179 Wilson Avenue, just to the north of Bushwick. The building looked almost ecclesiastical in design. It was on the corner of Wilson and Dekalb and it was large, constructed in heavy red brick with decorative insets that framed the vertical rows of windows in a design that Milton thought looked unfortunately phallic. The roof was embellished with crenelations and there was an ornate portico held up by four ugly concrete pillars. The building was separated from the sidewalk by an extraneous set of iron railings, and someone—a protestor, Milton guessed—had decorated the railings with pink and white tinsel and one single word: HOPE.

  There were two entrances. The first was beneath the portico, although it didn’t appear to be open. The second offered access to a smaller building that was connected to the main office by way of a single-storey addition. There were bars on the window and the glass in the double doors had been stencilled with the shield of the NYPD and the legend ‘Patrol, Borough—Brooklyn North’.

  There was a bike store and a store offering refurbished cellphones to the right of the building. Opposite was a Chinese restaurant, a store advertising liquor and wine, and a small independent coffee shop. Milton was in the coffee shop, sitting on a stool, a coffee on the wooden counter before him. He was next to the window and able to watch the comings and goings on the street outside.

  He didn’t have very long to wait.

  The double doors of the bureau office opened and Polanski stepped out. He paused, looking left and right, then, stepping carefully on the icy surface, he crossed the street and came into the coffee shop. Milton raised his hand and Polanski saw him. The detective walked over to him.

  “Thanks,” Milton said.

  “This is all very mysterious. You couldn’t come into the office?”

  “Didn’t think that would be safe.” />
  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “Because I think you have a big problem.”

  Polanski looked as if he was about to reply, but he did not. Instead, he sat down and spread his hands. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll play along. Who killed González?”

  “I need you to give me some assurances first. I’m not here for myself. It’s someone else—I’m trying to keep them out of trouble.”

  “Assurances? For who? The kid?”

  Milton didn’t answer. “Are you investigating officers in the Seventy-Fifth Precinct?”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

  “Then we have a problem. I need to know I can trust you.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’m a detective, Mr. Smith. You can trust me.”

  Milton had no way of confirming that Polanski was on the level. What could he do? There was no one to ask, no references that he could take. All he had was his instinct. Milton was a good judge of character and had told enough lies and been lied to enough times that he trusted his gut when it came to deciphering truth from falsehood. He would have to rely upon it now, but the complication here was that it was not simply his own future that was in play. Freddy was inextricably caught up in the very same mess, and the accuracy of Milton’s assessment of whether Polanski was honest and dependable would have consequences for him, too.

  But Milton didn’t have a choice. They needed help, and they had no other options. Who else was there? Mackintosh worked in the Seven Five. She could be involved with Carter. Polanski worked in the bureau. He rooted out the bad apples. That wouldn’t make him popular with other officers, and it was that unpopularity that set him apart.

  Milton had given it plenty of thought and it was what it was: Polanski or no one.

  He spoke quietly. “The other night, at Euclid. Freddy Blanco said he didn’t get a good look at either of them.”