Cover-up Read online

  COVER-UP

  Michele Martinez

  For my mother

  Contents

  1

  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  2

  In order to view the body, Melanie and Dan were…

  3

  Melanie had a special talent for investigating the ugliest crimes—homicides,…

  4

  Detective Julian Hay held up the recording device and pushed…

  5

  After Lieutenant Deaver left, Melanie turned to Dan in a…

  6

  Before the press conference, they convened an impromptu team meeting…

  7

  It was just past four on Thursday morning, warm, blustery,…

  8

  The sun was up over the East River, and doormen…

  9

  Melanie hadn’t slept all night. She was still in the…

  10

  There was so much to do that Melanie hardly knew…

  11

  Back in her office, Melanie began her workday as she…

  12

  Melanie and Janice sat at the conference table, which was…

  13

  It was late Thursday afternoon and the arraignment court was…

  14

  Melanie was concerned with more than just avoiding blame if…

  15

  Melanie called Dan O’Reilly’s cell phone as she hurried toward…

  16

  It had been more than six years since Dan O’Reilly’s…

  17

  Friday morning, on her way to an appointment with the…

  18

  The director of security for Target News was a big…

  19

  Clyde Williams was on Melanie’s mind, and not only because…

  20

  Bernadette authorized Melanie to approach Clyde Williams with the limited…

  21

  Forty-two hours had passed since Suzanne Shepard’s murder.

  22

  Back at her desk, Melanie was feeling the pressure. It…

  23

  As Melanie walked down the hall toward her office, anxiety…

  24

  I have some big news,” Dan said.

  25

  It was seven o’clock on Friday night, and Melanie was…

  26

  David Harris was on the telephone with his wife, and…

  27

  The facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had recently…

  28

  Even under normal conditions the Temple of Dendur was a…

  29

  Melanie made a complete circuit of the Temple grounds, working…

  30

  Melanie slept like the dead, and didn’t wake until eight…

  31

  Melanie sat in the war room on th sixth floor…

  32

  Miles Ortiz had met Dr. Benedict Welch eight months earlier in…

  33

  After the proffer session, Melanie left the agents and the…

  34

  They found Bob Adelman pacing outside the open door of…

  35

  Melanie—[the e-mail began], Show some respect and write back or…

  36

  Melanie might be reckless, but she wasn’t stupid. Once she…

  37

  Half an hour later, Melanie took her seat at the…

  38

  The upside of having her plan to catch the Butcher…

  39

  In New York, the line between the cops and the…

  40

  In front of her building, Melanie told Agent Crockett that…

  41

  Melanie opened her eyes to dazzling sunlight and a shrieking…

  42

  Melanie and Mark Sonschein sat in his office, strategizing their…

  43

  The man who went by the name Benedict Welch was…

  44

  But when Melanie called Mark Sonschein to crow about her…

  45

  Benedict Welch’s apartment was situated in a premier Fifth Avenue…

  46

  A trip to California to interview Harvey was simply not…

  47

  The second Melanie walked into the ceremonial courtroom, she heard…

  48

  Disheartened and anxious, Melanie trudged back to her office to…

  49

  With two potential killers after her, Melanie suddenly found herself…

  50

  It was a thick summer afternoon in New York City, nearly…

  51

  As soon as she broke the connection to Dan, Melanie…

  52

  Melanie spent the next couple of days curled up in…

  53

  Dan drove Melanie to Peter Terrozzi’s funeral. When she cried,…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Michele Martinez

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  FBI Agent Dan O’Reilly looked through his windshield at the large crowd milling on Fifth Avenue. It was eleven o’clock on a rainy Wednesday night in June, but the blazing spotlights from the television news vans made it feel like high noon. His companion in the car, federal prosecutor Melanie Vargas, was surveying the scene with obvious alarm. Here and there, recognizable faces stood out—celebrity reporters from the local news channels.

  “You didn’t warn me about this,” Melanie said.

  “Famous victim. You’ve got to expect press.”

  The NYPD had set up a barricade at the Seventy-ninth Street entrance to Central Park. Inside the gates, a short walk into the Ramble, a tabloid-TV personality lay dead. Suzanne Shepard, the glamorous blond scandalmonger, had been viciously raped and stabbed, and Dan and Melanie had come to view the crime scene. But after a tough year, Melanie was fighting serious burnout, and she hardly needed a high profile case right now. Twenty minutes earlier, she’d been enjoying a romantic evening, getting hot and heavy with Dan on her living-room sofa after taking him to dinner for his birthday. She hadn’t been in the market for anything like this. Then his pager started shrieking.

  “Press coverage kicks everything up a notch,” Melanie said. “More pressure. More scrutiny. I should never have let you drag me out here.”

  “Admit it. You can’t say no to me.”

  In the semidarkness of the car, Dan smiled. He had a movie-star smile, a football-hero body, and intense blue eyes. He was right. These days, Melanie wasn’t refusing him much. Which probably wasn’t the smartest move mere months after she’d divorced her cheating husband, and with a little girl to raise.

  “You’re full of yourself, O’Reilly,” she said.

  Dan edged his G-car toward the barricade. Several cameramen walked backward in front of them, filming them through the car windows.

  “I can’t believe this. Look at these guys,” Melanie said.

  “Didn’t you tell me your boss was pissed at you for turning down that terrorism financing case?” Dan asked.

  “What choice did I have? It involved overseas travel, and I can’t leave Maya.”

  “Bring in a big murder case,” Dan said. “Bernadette’ll love you again.”

  “You know what they say. Big cases, big problems. Little cases, little problems. No cases, no problems.”

  “You know what else they say. No cases, no job. Trust me, you’ll be up on the dais accepting Prosecutor of the Year on this one. Then you’ll thank me.”

  Dan rolled his window down, and they both handed over their credentials to the cop stationed there, who studied them and proceeded to consult with somebody over a wal
kie-talkie. After a few minutes, he handed the creds back, pulled the barricade aside, and waved them through. Melanie had pushed Maya’s stroller through this very gate more times than she could count, but in the reassuring light of day. She wished mightily that she were doing that now. The park looked so different at night. Strange shadows loomed between the arcs of yellow light spilling from the lampposts, and branches flapped in the wet wind. What had happened to the old Melanie? Time was, she would’ve been eating this up instead of feeling the butterflies.

  They drove as far as the Boathouse before the path became too narrow for the G-car to pass. A traffic jam of blue-and-whites and American-made sedans with tinted windows had all stopped at the same place, parked every which way in front of the ornate brick building. Their drivers were nowhere in sight. Slapping a police placard in the front windshield, Dan got out and came around to open Melanie’s door.

  “At least the service is good,” she said, stepping out. He closed the door with a thud, and the sound seemed to echo in the gloom all around them.

  “Not as good as what you’re gonna get later. I wasn’t done with you.” Dan winked at her, giving her a jolt right down to her toes.

  It was a warm, rainy night, and the sky above them glowed lurid orange with reflected light from the city. They passed through a gate to enter the Ramble, and the manicured park immediately turned wild and overgrown, smelling of wet earth and rotting leaves. The woods closed in on either side, so the footpath was barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast. She couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. The ground was broken and uneven, and Melanie was glad she’d chosen boots with sturdy soles. A sudden scurrying noise in the underbrush made her start.

  “You okay?” Dan asked.

  “Yeah. Just a squirrel.”

  “Or a rat. This is Central Park after all.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I’d try to take him out with my Glock, but I haven’t been to the range lately.”

  Melanie laughed. “Oh, that gives me a lot of confidence.”

  The path sloped upward and opened onto a vista that would have been beautiful if it weren’t swarming with cops and blazing with strange artificial light. Portable klieg lamps had been set up around the edges of a ravine that dropped off precipitously from the pathway. Beyond the ravine—which measured maybe twenty feet deep by fifty feet wide—an inlet of the Central Park Lake glittered and a spectacular weeping willow swayed in the wet wind. Below, crime-scene detectives in protective white coveralls and face masks were busy photographing, bagging, marking, and sampling, their grim faces washed out to sepia hues by the glare.

  Melanie and Dan came to a halt by necessity. Both the path ahead and the steep trail down into the ravine where the detectives worked were blocked off with police barricades.

  “There’s Brennan,” Dan said. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Yo, Butch! Up here.”

  A tall, stocky man standing knee-deep in the underbrush in the middle of the ravine looked up. Butch Brennan was the supervisor of the crime-scene team, an old-timer, nearing retirement now, who’d waded through oceans of gore in his day without losing his happy-go-lucky attitude. In fact, the more brutal the crime, the more cheerful Butch got. And Melanie could tell that he was smiling broadly through his face mask now as he gave them a peppy wave.

  “He looks way too happy,” Melanie said. “I’m going home.”

  “You can’t leave. It’s pitch-dark, and there’s a killer on the loose.”

  “Stay there!” Butch yelled. “I’m coming to get youse!”

  Melanie shielded her eyes against the glare and watched Butch Brennan clamber up the side of the ravine. He picked his way carefully along a ragged schist outcropping, then doubled back toward them, careful not to disturb anything in the cordoned-off areas.

  “Dan, Melanie,” Butch said, nodding, breathing heavily as he yanked off a paper face mask. “Glad to see the feds on the case. We need all the help we can get.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Melanie commented.

  “It’s not,” Butch said. “Whoever did this is a major psycho. Janice Marsh from the D.A.’s office was here before. She saw the body, turned green, and ran off to hurl. Haven’t seen her since.”

  “What’s so bad?” Dan asked.

  “The victim’s hacked all to shit,” Butch said, “and the killer carved ‘bitch’ in her stomach with a hunting knife. I’ll tell you, I thought about puking myself, and I’ve seen everything.”

  “The D.A.’s office has dibs,” Melanie said to Dan. “I should bow out.” Melanie was a federal prosecutor, from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, whereas the D.A. was state. The two offices were constantly engaged in turf battles. Melanie wasn’t just looking for an excuse here. It a situation like this, the politics could get tricky.

  “My boss worked out the turf issues already with Manhattan North Homicide,” Dan said. “The investigation is joint state-federal. If the Bureau and the NYPD can play nice, I’m sure you can get along with the D.A.’s office.”

  “Don’t leave, really,” Butch said. “Janice ain’t coming back anytime soon. We need a prosecutor with a strong stomach on this case. I’ve seen you in action, Melanie. I know you can handle yourself,” Butch said.

  Given the mood she was in, the fact that the A.D.A. had vomited and fled the scene should’ve made Melanie run screaming all the way back to her apartment. But Butch Brennan wasn’t one to hand out compliments lightly, and his vote of confidence managed to scratch the surface of her attitude. If she said no, she’d risk losing Butch’s regard, and that wouldn’t feel good.

  “If you think so, Butch,” she said.

  Just then, the wind shifted. A warm mist blew into Melanie’s face, coming from the direction of the lake. It carried a whiff of something sharp that cut right through the lush scent of water and woods. A gamy, metallic odor Melanie recognized from crime scenes past, and from a terrible night in her own childhood when violence had invaded her home. Blood.

  “I do think so,” Butch said. “Let’s go have a look.”

  2

  In order to view the body, Melanie and Dan were required to don the white jumpsuits, shoe covers, and face masks worn by the crime-scene detectives. The suits were constructed from a space-age slippery microfiber that made Melanie feel like she was embarking on a trip to Mars. As Butch Brennan gave them a rundown of the other forensic evidence on their way down into the ravine, and the brutality of the crime became increasingly evident to her, a feeling that she’d stepped into some sick alternate universe took hold of her.

  “Assailant attacked the victim on the path up ahead here. He may have used a stun gun to subdue her, based on a small lesion on the side of her neck, three marks in a triangular formation. Then he stabbed her. There’s a shitload of blood. Lucky the rain let up. It didn’t wash away,” he said, unclipping a heavy rubber flashlight from his tool belt and training its beam on a cordoned-off portion of blacktop. Melanie couldn’t see anything but wet black pavement.

  “It don’t look like much to the naked eye, but it’s there,” Butch said. “When we sprayed the Luminol, the place lit up like the Fourth of July. We took infrared photos and samples of the victim’s blood. We also got what we believe to be samples of the killer’s DNA.”

  “How’d you get that?” Melanie asked.

  “The victim was sexually assaulted, and we swabbed. Plus she had long fingernails, and we took scrapings from under ’em. From that, and the defensive wounds on her arms, I’m betting she got her licks in. Our subject’s walking around with some nasty scratches and maybe a few contusions into the bargain.”

  “So you’ll submit those DNA samples to the FBI database for comparison?” Melanie asked. As reluctant as she’d been to come out, her brain was kicking in now, working on the puzzle.

  “We’ll do that. Not to rain on your parade, but just remember you only get a match if your killer was gentleman enough to provide his DNA profile to the FBI in advance. Other
wise there’s nothing in the CODIS database to match our sample to,” Butch said.

  “I understand,” Melanie said. “Now, from the spatters, you think she was actually attacked here in the Ramble? Not attacked elsewhere and dumped here?”

  “The attack definitely happened here,” Butch replied.

  “Huh,” Melanie said, interested. “What’s a woman doing walking around alone in the Ramble at night?”

  “Oh,” Butch said, “you mean because it’s—”

  “A major gay cruising location. Suzanne Shepard was a reporter in this town for a long time. You’d think she’d know that. Besides, it was raining. Not a terrific night for a jog in the park.”

  “The forensics can’t tell us why she was here,” Butch said. “But maybe they’ll tell us a thing or two about why she was killed. To me, looking at the brutality of the crime, it fits with a PCP or meth killing.”

  “PCP’s over, and there’s no meth in New York,” Dan said, shaking his head.

  “That’s not true; meth’s everywhere now,” Melanie said. “DEA’s been bringing us a lot of those cases.”

  “Whatever drug it was,” Butch said, “I’m thinking maybe a junkie confronted her, tried to rob her, she resisted, and it went south from there. The uniforms who notified next of kin radioed back that the victim was wearing diamond earrings and a gold Rolex when she left home this morning, which she ain’t now.”

  “Would a junkie rape her, though?” Melanie asked. “The rape strikes me as more consistent with a random sex crime.”

  “I hear you, but on the other hand, would a rapist rob her?” Butch asked. “This scumbag went through her wallet. We found it next to the body with streaks of talcum powder visible on the leather. The cash was gone, and her driver’s license. But the credit cards were still there. That’s a little unusual. Most killers who boost a wallet just grab the fucking thing and run.”

  “Talcum-powder marks. What’s that about?” Melanie asked.

  “Surgical gloves. They must’ve been wet from the rain, and the residue transferred. We found powder spots on her clothing, too.”

  The little hairs on the back of Melanie’s neck stood up. “What kind of junkie wears surgical gloves? That sounds like a psycho-serial-killer move. Maybe even somebody experienced, who’s committed similar acts before,” she said.