Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“Miriam, I love you,” I said as I briefly embraced my loyal lady boss in the elevator. “I’m not kidding. Call your husband, Daniel, and tell him you’re sorry but your thirty years plus together just isn’t going to cut it. You’ve found another man.”

“Yeah, well, you should love me, Mike,” the stylish, affable, silver-haired sixty-year-old said, smiling, as she stiff-armed me away. “Favors don’t come cheap when that shark Starkie is involved, believe me.”

“You’ve been working behind the scenes, haggling on my behalf the whole time, haven’t you?” I said. “And here I thought all rabbis had to be men.”

“Can the blarney charm cease forthwith before I change my mind, would you please, Mike?” she said with a laugh. “This is going to cost you more than words, words, words. I want dinner, and not potluck back at that Upper West Side shoe you live in with all those kids, either. I’m thinking you need to help me brush up on my French after what I just pulled. You know, words like Per Se or Jean-Georges?”

Major Crimes’ office space was brand-new. Fresh white paint on the walls, glass-partitioned offices. In all the cubicles were new computers and sleek blond-wood desks and even those futuristic ergonomic chairs. I couldn’t wait to park my butt in one and get to work.

We went into Miriam’s glass fishbowl office and I sat on a leather couch next to Doyle. The full-length window by my elbow had a spectacularly dramatic view of the low neon sprawl of Chinatown. I smiled down at the familiar vista as Miriam lifted a fat file off a conference table in the corner and came back.

“Catch,” she said as she dropped it in my lap.

There were photos in the folder. The first one showed the inside of a small store. By its front door was a horseshoe of glass-and-wood display cases, each and every one of them smashed to smithereens. Shattered bits of glass carpeted the floor next to an overturned advertising sign that had sparkling diamond earrings over a caption that said, How Badly Do You Want to Play Golf This Weekend?

“I see,” I said, sitting up. “So this is about that jewelry heist out in Brooklyn?”

“Did you see that act of deduction, Officer Doyle?” Miriam said. “Observe closely, young man, and maybe one day you, too, will make detective first grade.”

CHAPTER 49

“YES, MIKE, IT’S ABOUT the jewelry heist,” Miriam continued, “except you got the noun form wrong. It’s not jewelry store heist singular. It’s jewelry store heists plural.”

“How many have there been?” I said, shuffling through the photos.

“Four, we think. But it could be as many as seven. We looked at the usual suspects, Mob crews and high-end-robbery guys who might have gotten out of prison recently, but no go. These guys are new, and they’re fast. They got in and out in about three minutes. We got there in five, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of them.”

“But what’s the major problem?” I said, showing her the shot of the trashed store. “I mean, this is bad and all, but this store isn’t exactly Tiffany’s, is it? Aren’t these people just a bunch of smash-and-grabbers?”

“We think smashing the cases was a front. What we left out of the paper was that in the back of the store at the time of the robbery was the owner’s brother-in-law, a clerk from a ritzy Madison Avenue designer-jewelry shop who’d stopped in to get some pieces reset. The thieves put a gun to his head and walked out with a briefcase with almost a million in diamonds and black pearls.”

“Not bad for three minutes’ work,” Doyle said.

“If you can get it,” I said.

“Oh, they get it, Mike. And they’re damn good, too. In the last six months, they hit two places out in Jersey and one in Greenwich, Connecticut.”

“How do you know they’re the same people?”

“The same way you know it’s Mozart playing on the radio,” she said. “The excellence in execution. These guys are real craftsmen. In Connecticut, they bypassed alarms and actually busted a safe after they defeated motion and light detectors and a fifty-thousand-dollar glass s

ecurity door. And we have no leads. The commissioner is under enormous pressure with the upcoming Midtown diamond show. Merchants are coming in from all over the world, France, Russia, Antwerp.”

“Not exactly the best time to have a crew of mysterious, highly professional jewel thieves picking up steam, is it?” Doyle said.

“No, it isn’t,” Miriam agreed.

“And I’m supposed to catch them, huh?” I said, piecing through the evidence. “Mike Bennett to the rescue?”

“In two weeks or head back to the ombudsman office.”

“For real?” I said.

She nodded.

“That’s the deal I cut for you. It’s not the best, Mike, but even a rabbi like me can only do so much. What did you do to Starkie, anyway? That guy really freaking hates you.”

“Long story,” I said.