Chapter 4 - The Dragnet
By two o'clock in the morning, the safehouse in White Plains smelled of stale black coffee, printer toner, and industrial antiseptic.
I sat on a metal folding chair near the window, a thick wool blanket draped over my shoulders despite the summer humidity. A female federal agent named Chen had spent forty-five minutes gently cleaning the lacerations on my arms, taping butterfly bandages across my split cheek, and taking high-resolution digital photographs of every bruise, scrape, and handprint Charles had left on my body.
"Evidence of battery under color of authority," Vance had explained from his desk across the room. "If we can tie Mark's presence and encouragement to an active conspiracy to intimidate a federal witness, we don't just have them on racketeering. We have them on civil rights violations with physical injury. That takes bail off the table."
My burner phone had been dead for three hours, but Vance's secure laptop was chiming every twenty seconds with real-time intelligence intercepts.
"They're using the precinct network," Vance said, his fingers clicking across the mechanical keyboard. "Mark just logged into the NYPD's Omniform database from a personal laptop. He’s running your social security number, your old banking cards, and every license plate registered to your friends from college."
"Can he find us here?" I asked, clutching the paper cup of lukewarm tea Chen had handed me.
"This facility is leased through the General Services Administration under an environmental consulting cover," Vance said calmly. "To the city of New York, this building is an office for soil testing on the Hudson River aquifer. He won't find you. But he’s getting desperate."
He spun the monitor around so I could see the screen.
A state-wide alert had been posted to the local law enforcement bulletin boards across three counties. My face—an old photograph from my driver’s license renewal five years ago—was plastered below a bold red header:
**CRITICAL WELFARE CHECK / ENDANGERED ADULT**
*SUBJECT: ELLA ROSE CONNER. KNOWN HISTORY OF EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE. MAY BE ARMED AND SUICIDAL. APPROACH WITH CAUTION. IF LOCATED, DETAIN AND CONTACT DETECTIVE M. CONNER, OCCB, IMMEDIATELY. DO NOT CONTACT FEDERAL LIAISON.*
I stared at the screen, my heart hammering against my ribs like an iron bar against a cage. "He's hunting me. He's using the entire state police network to hunt me."
"He's trying to get someone to put you in the back of a squad car before we can get you before a grand jury," Vance said. "If a local cop picks you up on an endangered adult warrant, Mark picks you up from the precinct house. Once you’re in his car, you have an 'accidental overdose' in a motel room in Montauk, and the ledgers disappear into an evidence locker that accidentally catches fire."
I looked down at my hands. They were still trembling slightly, but the numbness had passed. The fear that had kept me pinned to the floor of my childhood bedroom for twenty years was gone, burned away by the cold wind on the curb and the sound of my brother’s hands clapping together.
"He won't get the chance," I said, my voice steadying. "There’s more."
Vance paused, his hands hovering over the keys. "More than what was on the drive?"
"The drive has the money," I said, looking Vance dead in the eye. "It has the kickbacks from the shipping lines, the altered manifests, the shell companies. But it doesn't have the gun."
Vance leaned forward, his entire demeanor changing. The casual, bureaucratic calm fell away, replaced by the razor-sharp intensity of a hunter who has suddenly spotted blood on the trail. "What gun, Ella?"
"Summer of 2017," I said, the memory rising up through the dark floorboards of my mind like cold swamp water. "There was an eighteen-year-old kid in the South Bronx named Julian Diaz. Mark was still a patrolman in the Four-Two. There was a bodega robbery on 163rd Street. The suspect ran through an alley. Mark fired four rounds through a wooden fence."
I took a slow, painful breath, feeling the bruise on my ribs throb.
"The kid on the other side of the fence wasn't the robber. He was a high school senior carrying home two gallons of milk for his mother. Mark hit him twice in the neck. Julian died in the dirt behind an auto body shop."
"I remember that case," Vance said, his voice dropping an octave. "The department ruled it justified. They said Diaz was holding a snub-nosed .38 revolver."
"The revolver was Charles’s," I said. "It was an old off-duty piece Charles took from an unregistered lockbox in our attic the night after the shooting. I watched my father wrap it in an oily rag, drive down to the precinct at two in the morning, and walk into the back entrance of the Four-Two without signing the visitor log. The next day, the gun miraculously appeared under Julian Diaz’s body in the morgue photos."
"And the real gun?" Vance asked. "The gun Mark used to kill that boy?"
"It wasn't a department-issued weapon," I whispered. "Mark was carrying an illegal serialized Sig Sauer he’d bought from a confidential informant six months earlier so he wouldn't have to account for his rounds. When Charles gave the detectives the throwaway revolver, he took Mark’s Sig. He told Mark he threw it off the Throggs Neck Bridge."
"He didn't throw it," Vance guessed, his eyes widening slightly.
May you like
"Charles never throws anything away that gives him power over someone else," I said, a bitter laugh catching in my throat. "Especially his own son. He kept that Sig. It’s in the house. Right now."
***
