Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“Well,” I said, “my boss told me to come down for a nine-o’clock meeting with him.”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” the congenial cop said, lifting his phone with a smile. “Wouldn’t be the first time. What’s your name? I’ll check with his secretary.”

The veteran cop hung up a minute later.

“The secretary said the commissioner apologizes about the last-minute change of plans, but your meeting has been shuffled over to Chief of Detectives Starkie. He’s on the tenth floor.”

“Chief of Detectives Starkie? Raymond Starkie?” I said.

“That’s the man,” the cop said with a nod.

“What happened to Ronnie Child?” I asked.

“Child retired three months ago,” he said.

I nodded as I headed for the elevators, trying to think.

Dealing with any COD, the NYPD’s second-in-command, was notoriously hazardous. The Chief of Detectives was usually the commissioner’s hatchet man, the court strangler, the guy who assigned the kinds of unpleasant tasks that the commissioner didn’t want to dirty his hands with.

But the fact that the new one was Raymond Starkie was particularly worrisome, since he and I had some history. Back when we were rookies, we had been friendly rivals of sorts, working the same evening shift at the Bronx precinct where I started my career. Both of us ambitious and gung-ho, we’d competed to see who could come up with the most collars.

But that wasn’t our only competition. Starkie had been first to meet my wife, Maeve. Long before Maeve lost her courageous battle against ovarian cancer, she had been an emergency room nurse at the Bronx hospital near the precinct. In fact, Maeve had agreed to go out with Starkie before she met me, and I made her cancel on him.

Starkie never forgave me for that or for the fact that I was named Bronx rookie of the year over him, and our rivalry became a lot less than friendly. It got physical once at a retirement party at a bar on Norwood Avenue, where he gave me a cauliflower ear and I gave him a chipped tooth.

After that painful parting of ways, Starkie had gone the administrative route in the department. He attended NYU law school and had risen quickly through the ranks. He was an effective and efficient manager, they said, if a tad heavy-handed.

As I stepped into the elevator and hit ten, it suddenly occurred to me how out of touch I’d been. The power structures and politics in the department could change in a New York minute, to borrow a cliché, and here I’d been away for nine months.

After all my morning’s enthusiasm at being back, it suddenly occurred to me that I was a man without a country, with no turf, no rabbi, and maybe no immediate prospects.

CHAPTER 6

EVEN AFTER ALL THESE years, Starkie was a still a tall, strapping, good-looking guy. He had short-cropped white-blond hair and twinkly blue eyes. When I spotted his friendly, open smile at his office door, I was actually hopeful, for a beat, that maybe Starkie was ready to let bygones be bygones.

But then his smile soured as he elaborately checked his watch. It was a Rolex, gold and shiny as the four spit-shined brass stars winking from his tailored dress uniform’s shoulder.

“Late, huh, Bennett?” he said, shaking his head instead of my hand. “But I guess, what’s a few more minutes after nine months, right? This way.”

Bennett? I thought, following him into his spacious office. By using my last name, Starkie was immediately letting me know that history or no history, he was my superior. Uh-oh.

There was a bank of computers behind Starkie’s walnut desk, a flashing six-screen array like an investment banker’s. Staring at the monitors, I suddenly remembered that Starkie was a vocal champion of CompStat, the computer- and statistics-based method of policing that the NYPD had first spearheaded in the ’90s. Because of this, his nicknames included Numbers, Compstarkie, and HAL 9000 for his sometimes emotionless, single-minded devotion to the computer-driven stats.

There were stacks of paper on another desk in the corner, obscuring a commanding view of the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a chair opposite his desk, but he didn’t offer me a seat, so I just stood there.

As Starkie sat, he lifted a white file folder off his desk and leaned back in his big tufted leather chair, licking a thumb as he leisurely went through it. It was my file, I realized. It wasn’t too hard to pick up on his ham-handed theatrics. My career was literally in his hands.

“So, how was California? Did you enjoy your leave of absence?” Starkie said, glancing at me over the edge of the file after a long minute.

Leave of absence? I thought, perplexed. Why did he somehow make my being forced into witness protection with my family seem frivolous, like I was trying to take a stab at landscape painting?

r /> “Busy,” I said.

Between tanning sessions, I teamed up with the feds and helped bring down the cop-killing Mexican drug cartel kingpin Manuel Perrine, I thought but didn’t say. Maybe you heard about it?

“Well, since you haven’t been around,” he said, finally setting down the file, “you’ll find that there are a lot of new things happening here in the department. I know in the past you’ve benefited from loosened departmental guidelines, from superiors looking the other way. So let me be the first to inform you that those days are over.

“This is the new NYPD, Bennett,” he said, gesturing at the computers behind him. “That’s why I’m here. To shake things up, to usher in a new era of accountability and a new emphasis on chain of command.”