Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

“Do you and Brian and the guys want to play roundup again?” the sly Breezy Point Romeo wanted to know.

“Can’t tonight, Joe, but I’ll text you tomorrow, okay?” Juliana said curtly before letting the door close in his face with a bang.

That was odd, I thought, heading outside and up the porch steps after Joe left. I knew my daughter had a bit of a crush on the lad as well. What was up?

I figured it out when I saw Juliana through the new front window. She was sitting on the couch, laughing, painting Bridget’s toenails as Fiona and Shawna and Chrissy waited their turns. I spotted Jane sitting in the recliner with cucumber slices over her eyes.

I stood there shaking my head, amazed. Juliana knew how upset this whole Flaherty thing had made her little sisters, so she had scratched her plans in order to comfort them with some sister spa time. While I was itching to crack the seal on a bottle of booze, Juliana was stepping in, stepping up.

“Let’s have a hand for father of the year, Mike Bennett,” I mumbled as I plopped myself down on the front porch swing. I was still there when Mary Catherine came out. She frowned at my sad, self-pitying ass as she sat down beside me.

“And how are the Flahertys?” she asked.

I looked at her, about to deny my visit to the neighbors. Then I cracked a tiny smile.

“Bad news, Mary,” I said, looking off down the sandy lane. “Which is about par for the course lately, isn’t it? For this vacation. This city. This planet.”

She wisely went back inside and left me alone with my black mood. When my work phone rang a half hour later with my boss’s cell number on the display, I seriously thought about throwing it as hard as I could off the porch. Maybe taking a couple of potshots at it before it landed, my own personal Breezy Point clay shoot.

Then I remembered what my son Trent had said two days before. Who was I kidding? Vacations were for real people. I was a cop.

“This is Bennett,” I said into the phone with a grim smile. “Gimme a crime scene.”

“Coming right up,” Miriam said.

Chapter 26

AS I DROVE THROUGH Queens twenty minutes later, I thought about a documentary I once saw on cable about the annual NYPD Finest versus the FDNY Bravest football game.

At halftime with the score tied, the firemen’s locker room was about what you’d expect: upbeat, healthy-looking players and coaches encouraging one another. The NYPD locker room, on the other hand, was about as cheerful as the visitor’s room at Rikers. In place of a traditional pep talk, red-faced, raging cops opted for screaming horrendous obscenities at one another and punching the lockers like violent mental patients.

No doubt about it, we’re a funny bunch. Not funny ha-ha, either, I thought as I arrived at the latest atrocity, a murder scene along an industrial service road in Flushing.

I was a little fuzzy as to why I, of all people, needed to come to this godforsaken place in the middle of the night when I was already up to my eyeballs in the bombing case. But I was pretty sure I was about to find out.

Beside an electrical pylon at the top of the access road, half a dozen detectives and uniforms were taking pictures and kicking through the weeds, accompained by police-band radio chatter. In the far distance behind them, cars continued zipping by on the lit-up Whitestone and Throggs Neck Bridges. With the red-and-blue police strobes skipping through the trees, there was something bucolic, almost peaceful, about the whole scene.

Too bad peace wasn’t my business. Definitely not tonight.

A short, immaculately dressed Filipino detective from the 109th Precinct pulled off a surgical glove and introduced himself to me as Andy Hunt while I was signing the homicide scene log. The death scene Hunt guided me to was a new Volvo Crossover with a nice tan-leather interior.

Formerly nice, I corrected myself as I stepped up to the driver’s-side open door and saw the ruined bodies.

A middle-aged man and a younger woman leaned shoulder-to-shoulder in the center of the car, both shot twice in the head with a large-caliber gun. Green beads of shattered auto glass covered both bodies. I waved away a fly, staring at the horrible constellation of dried blood spray stuck to the dash.

“The male victim is one Eugene Keating. He was a professor at Hofstra, taught International Energy Policy, whatever the hell that is,” Detective Hunt said, tossing his Tiffany Blue silk tie over his shoulder to protect it as he leaned in over the victims.

“The redhead is Karen Lang, one of his graduate students. Maybe they were testing the carbon output on this electrical cutout, but I have my doubts, considering her panties on the floor there. What really sucks is that Keating has two kids and his pregnant professor wife is due for a C-section in two days. Guess she’ll have to call a cab to the hospital now, huh?”

“I don’t understand, though,” I said, resisting the urge to pull down the poor female victim’s bunched-up T-shirt. “Why does anyone think this twofer has something to do with today’s bombing?”

Hunt gave me an extra-grim look. Then he moved the light onto something white that was sitting in the dead man’s lap. It was an envelope with something typed across the front of it.

I squatted down to get a better look. You’re not supposed to let the job get inside you, but I have to admit that when I read my name on the envelope, I absolutely panicked. I froze from head to toe as if someone had just pressed an invisible gun to my head.

After a few minutes, I shrugged off my heebie-jeebies and decided to go ahead and open it. With thoughts of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, dancing in my head, I retrieved the envelope with the pliers of Hunt’s multi-tool. I borrowed a folding knife from one of the uniforms and slit the envelope open on the hood of the nearest

cruiser.