Ambush (Michael Bennett 11)

“Who is we?”

“The boys in our crew.”

“The Dominican gunmen?”

“There’s no way you get away with this. One word from me and you’ll live in misery for a week before they let you die.”

“Then I guess I better not let you give the word.”

When she was finished, she left the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and casually walked out the hotel’s rear exit.

Now she had another complication with this contract.

Chapter 49

I arrived at the hotel in East Harlem about two o’clock in the afternoon. No one in this neighborhood seemed terribly surprised to see police activity around the building. There were a few hotels in every neighborhood that attracted people interested in doing their worst.

I chuckled at the cheap neon sign. FINELLI BUDGET INN. FBI. It had to be on purpose.

I saw the young homicide detective I was looking for. Roddy Huerta was a solid investigator and had proved his reliability over the past few years. He wasn’t particularly big on imagination or finding creative ways to solve cases, but he was a good cop. He was the new breed. Young, fit, smart, and college-educated. But he went by the book. On everything.

I came from the school of investigation that said you had to clear cases and actually get murderers off the street. And to do that, sometimes you had to take chances.

But this was his show, and I was just trying to gather information.

Roddy glanced up from his notebook and pushed his glasses back onto his nose. He looked surprised and said, “Hey, Detective Bennett. What are you doing over here?”

“Just curious to see if it’s related to something I’m working on. Whatcha got, Roddy?”

He followed me as I walked into the hotel. Some detectives would be offended to have someone wander onto their crime scene, but I knew Roddy was more interested in showing me how smart he was.

The younger detective said, “I’ve got a Hispanic male victim laid out in the bed. It looks like he’d been bound at the wrists and died from a single-edge-weapon wound to the chest.”

I said, “Technically to the heart.”

“The ME will have to determine that. Why are you interested?”

“Not the first I’ve seen this week.”

He perked up. “A serial killer.”

“Drug war.”

He looked disappointed, and I understood why. He was one of those homicide detectives who worked a very specific geographic area and really didn’t want to know about anything else going on. To catch a serial killer in an area like that would be something to crow about. Drug wars were a little more common.

We stepped into the room, and I saw the forensics people, wearing complete biomedical suits, processing the scene.

Roddy said, “It was a little tight in there, and the body had been in the bed at least twelve hours. I did my initial examination and decided it would be better to let the forensics people do their thing.”

“Have you canvassed potential witnesses?”

“The clerk doesn’t remember anyone coming in, and there’s no record of this room being rented. There are so many patrons coming and going that we probably won’t get anything useful out of processing it.

“The victim moved from the Dominican Republic sixteen years ago. He has sixteen arrests and four convictions and has never done any prison time.”

Roddy looked at me and said, “And please don’t just write this off as a Hispanic thing. Not all Hispanics are involved in the drug trade.”

“Did I say or do anything to make you think that?”