He called back twenty minutes later.
“Your vic has an older sister, Claudia Davenport Moretti. She works in the financial aid office at Barnard College. Her husband, Nick Moretti, is an air traffic controller out of La Guardia. Two kids. No record, no drama. From what I can tell, they’re as normal as bumps on a gherkin.”
He gave me an address on West 74th Street in Manhattan.
Ten minutes later, Kylie and I were back in the car on our way to break the bad news. She drove. I curled up against the passenger door, closed my eyes, and drifted off to the hum of our tires on steel bridge plates.
My cell woke me up. It was Cheryl.
Dr. Cheryl Robinson is the forensic psychologist attached to Red. Despite her predominantly Irish roots, she inherited the smoldering Latina looks of her Puerto Rican grandmother. When we met four years ago, Cheryl was married, so for me she was just another coworker who happened to be magnetically desirable, mind-numbingly beautiful, and totally unavailable.
Then she suddenly became an unmarried coworker, and I wasted no time trying to see if my fantasies could become a reality. Much to my amazement, they have. She’s the first woman I’ve fallen in love with since Kylie, and I wake up every day hoping I don’t torpedo my good fortune.
This was the fifth time she’d called me since the bomb went off at The Pierre. I picked up the phone.
“Don’t you stalkers ever go to sleep?” I said.
“I was asleep,” she said, “but I woke up, turned on the news, and they keep rerunning videos of the explosion. Zach, you could have been killed.”
“But I wasn’t. I’m fine. Just exhausted. Kylie and I are still out on the road.”
“Call it a night, but don’t go back to your apartment. Come over here. I need to give you a hug.”
“We picked up a second case. We’re on the way to notify the victim’s family. Can I get a rain check on the hug?”
“You’re in luck. My rain checks come with dinner and a sleepover. You interested?”
“I said I was exhausted, not dead. Tonight. I’ll be there.”
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you,” I said. I could have whispered it back, but I didn’t. I wanted to make sure Kylie heard me.
CHAPTER 7
They say New York is the city that never sleeps. But at a quarter to three on a moonlit Tuesday morning in May, the stretch of Central Park West that we were driving on was crapped out like a cat on a porch swing.
Another hour or so, and things would start to stir: the predawn joggers, the early morning sanitation crews, and those age-old, break-of-day stalwarts, the New York Times delivery trucks, dropping off bundles of last night’s bad tidings to every doorman along this strip of overpriced real estate.
Kylie and I also had some bad news to deliver. Only we couldn’t leave it with the doorman and move on. We had to wake up a family in the middle of the night and change their lives forever. It’s the suckiest part of our job, and it never gets easier.
Aubrey Davenport’s sister, Claudia, and her brother-in-law, Nick Moretti, lived on the eighth floor of a prewar, redbrick building on a tree-lined street between Broadway and West End Avenue.
We had the doorman ring up first. It wouldn’t soften the blow for the Morettis, but it gave them a few minutes to brace themselves. By the time Kylie and I got to their door and showed them our badges, they were expecting the worst. We were there to confirm it.
“Is it Aubrey?” Nick Moretti asked.
“Yes, sir,” Kylie said. “Her body was found on Roosevelt Island. She was murdered. We are both very sorry for your loss.”
Claudia was wearing a lavender robe. Nick had thrown on a pair of jeans and a Jets sweatshirt. She fell into his arms and began sobbing into his chest. Holding her tight, he eased her onto a sofa, and they sat down.
We stood.
It took five minutes before either of them looked up. Finally, Nick asked the inevitable. “Do you know who did it?”
“Not yet, sir,” Kylie said. “But we will.”
Claudia leaned over and whispered something in her husband’s ear.
He shook his head. “Don’t go there, Claudia.”
“How could I not go there?” she said, pulling away and turning to me. “I warned her. Over and over and over. I was the pushy big sister—the voice of doom—but I was right, and now she’s dead.”
The people who are closest to the victim are the ones who can help us most in the investigation, but usually they are too numb to answer questions immediately, so we try to schedule an interview as soon as they get past the initial shock. But Claudia Moretti seemed to have answers that couldn’t wait.
“You warned her about what?” I asked.
“Janek. I said, ‘Get a restraining order. Get a gun. He’ll kill you.’”
“Tell us about Janek.”
“Janek Hoffmann, her cameraman. Her protégé. She hired him out of film school. He was a kid—maybe twenty-two—and she was thirty-eight. She said he was talented, but who knows? She was sleeping with him.”
“But what made you tell your sister to get a gun?” Kylie asked, trying to get Claudia back on track. “Why did you think Janek was going to kill her?”
“They fought all the time. One minute they’d be like two lovebirds, and the next minute they were like cats and dogs. He was unpredictable. And scary. The man has a terrible temper.”
Nick jumped in. “Temper, my ass,” he said. “It was straight-up ’roid rage. He was always juiced up. One time they were at a restaurant, and Janek got pissed at the waiter, so he smashed him in the face with one of those oversized pepper mills. Sent the guy to the hospital with a broken jaw.”
“Did he ever hit Aubrey?”
“Plenty,” Nick said.
“Did she call the police?” Kylie asked.
“Aubrey wasn’t the type to do anything like that,” Claudia said. “She always needed to solve things her own way, in her own time. She fired him a couple of times, but she always took him back. I could never understand why.”
“Jesus, Claudia. Take the blinders off. That muscle-bound dick was always belting her around. She kept coming back for more because that was a turn-on for Aubrey. She was a total sex—”
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Claudia screamed.
Nick reached out to put his arms around her. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
She shoved him aside. “She’s dead. Stop judging her!” Claudia shrieked, and ran out of the room in tears.
Nick took a few steps after her, stopped, and then turned to us. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Don’t go.”
We didn’t move. With or without his invitation, we had no intention of going anywhere.
CHAPTER 8
Claudia didn’t hold back her anguish. The crying that was coming from behind a closed door escalated to a full-blown wail as she tried to come to grips with the news of her sister’s murder. Before long, her voice was joined by a younger, more piercing one, and Nick, whose patience and compassion had broken down rapidly, yelled out, “You happy? Now you woke the fucking baby.”
It took fifteen minutes before things settled down and Nick emerged from one of the bedrooms.
“Sorry about the ruckus,” he said. “Claudia never could deal with her sister’s issues. She’s from the if-you-pretend-the-problem-isn’t-there-it-will-eventually-go-away school of denial.”
“But she told us that she warned Aubrey about Janek Hoffmann,” I reminded him. “That doesn’t sound like she was pretending the problem wasn’t there.”
He shook his head. “You’re missing the point. Janek wasn’t the problem. I’m not saying he didn’t kill her. Maybe he did. But it could also have been any one of a thousand other guys. The real problem was Aubrey. She was one of those women—they used to call them nymphomaniacs. I think the politically correct term these days is sex addict. But with Aubrey…”
I thought he was groping for words, but he wasn’t. He’d clammed up.
“You want something to drink?” he asked. “Water? Or I could make coffee.”