Worst Case

“Where is Jacob?” I yelled, ignoring his grating litany. “I’m here. I’ve done exactly what you said. Where do I go?”

“Out back through the courtyard, go through the laundry room door on your left.”

We found a door at the end of the lobby and went back out into the rain. A cracked toilet lid floated beside half a dozen faded phone books in the courtyard’s standing water. I sca

I handed Emily my flashlight as I drew my gun and pulled open the door in the left-hand wall. I found the lights. No Jacob. Just a rusted-through sink beside an ancient coin-op washing machine.

“Where is he?” I yelled again.

“The stairs on your left. Take them down.”

Beyond the washing machine, iron steps descended through a raw concrete stairwell. The beams from our flashlights flickered wildly as we flew down the steps two at a time.

Dank heat hit me like a wall through the door at the bottom. In the distance, a boiler screamed as if it were being tortured. The basement walls looked like hewn stone, and I felt like we were entering a cave. Or a dungeon, I thought.

“This is where I’ll have to end our little conversation for now, Mike. Down the hall to your right. Take Jacob away. He’s all yours,” the kidnapper said and hung up.

Chapter 12

I COVERED EMILY as she jogged ahead. Even in the dimness, I could see her eyes widen in shock as she stuck her light and gun through the right-hand doorway.

I arrived a split second behind her. Emily’s flashlight showed a figure slumped over a child’s desk. Something stung my cheek as I raced toward it. It was a pull chain. I wrapped my hand around it and yanked.

The hanging bulb clicked on and then swung back and forth, heaving shadows of Jacob’s motionless body up and down the raw cement walls.

No! Damn it! Not like this! I thought.

Jacob was in his underwear, and his hands were cuffed behind his back. I checked for a pulse. Nothing. I sca

“His hair,” Emily said quickly behind me. There was a crusted pool of blood at the top of his head. His hair was matted with it.

A bullet wound gaped at the crown of his skull. I turned away. Wiping the sweat from my face, I glanced at the blackboard, the desk, the naked cement wall, and then back at the body.

I ripped my phone from my belt, ready to smash it against the wall. The sick son of a bitch had been leading us along, whispering not-so-sweet nothings in my ear, and the whole time the kid had been dead.

“He lied to us from the get-go,” I said, desperately trying to throttle the life out of my RAZR phone. “This kid was long dead when he called. God, I want to nail this son of a bitch.”

“I’ll hold the nails while you swing the hammer,” Emily said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “This is a shock. Maybe we should take a quick breather. Do you want to go up top for some air?”

You better believe I wanted to take a breather. I wanted to get the hell out of that steaming South Bronx crypt.

My thumb found my boss’s listing instead.

“Tell me some good news, Mike,” Chief Fleming said.

“I wish I could. I’m in the basement of two-five-oh Briggs Avenue. We need the Crime Scene Unit and the medical examiner.”

“Goddammit,” my boss said. “How?”

“He blew the kid’s brains out,” I said. “I’d give the notification duty to Georgina Hottinger, if I were you. She likes to play cop with her flashing lights. I wouldn’t want to deprive her of getting all the way in on the act.”

I met Ramirez and Schultz in the hallway when they finally arrived five minutes later.

“Canvass everyone you can find in this dump,” I said. “Especially the super. Roust him and the landlord as well. This guy took his time with this kid down here. I want to know why nobody noticed.”

Chapter 13

WHEN I RETURNED, Emily had her jacket off and was hovering over the body. She had her blouse sleeves rolled up and was wearing green rubber surgical gloves she’d gotten from somewhere. Her bag probably. I was impressed.

“The back spatter on the floor here and the lividity in the legs indicate he was killed in the chair,” she said without looking up.

I probed Jacob’s arm gently with my thumb.

“Looks like a semi-advanced state of rigor,” I said. “I’d say he was killed sometime early this morning. The handcuff cuts on the wrists and his scraped knees look like he was treated pretty roughly before he was killed. Tying this in with the question-and-answer stuff from the first call, I’d say this looks like a teacher-student domination fantasy or something.”

“Yeah,” Emily said, waving away a fly. “Welcome to Hell one-oh-one.”

I peered at Jacob’s face. He had his mother’s dark hair and creamy complexion, his father’s blue eyes. Those eyes were frozen open forever now, along with his mouth in a rictus of shock and horror. There was a smudge on his forehead that I hadn’t noticed before, a gray mark like a small X.

“Hey, Mike,” Emily said a second later. She was standing at the other side of the room. “I think you need to see this.”

I joined her on the other side of the blackboard. On the back, someone had written:

MEMENTO HOMO, QUIA PULVIS ES, ET IN PULVEREM REVERTERIS.

“What is that? Latin?” Emily said.

“It is,” I said, staring at it. “My Catholic high school’s preferred method of torture. Memento means ‘remember,’ I think. Pulvis is ‘dust.’”

Cold numbed my back like a spinal tap as I suddenly realized its meaning.

“‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,’” I cried. “It’s what Catholic priests say on Ash Wednesday when you get your ashes. Which must be what’s on the kid’s forehead. He gave Jacob ashes?”

Emily snapped her rubber-gloved fingers loudly.

“Wait a second! That’s it. ‘Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.’ The poem is called Ash Wednesday, by T. S. Eliot. What does it mean? How does it tie into the kidnapping?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think the clock just started.”

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes.

“Ash Wednesday is only three days away,” I said.

Chapter 14

THE SUPER WAS nowhere to be found. The closest occupants to the basement were in a crack house on the second floor, but to no one’s surprise, the strung-out inhabitants hadn’t noticed anything.

I was happy for the cold rain now as I climbed out of that hot pit. I needed something to wash the smell of death from my clothes, off my skin.

Despite our attempts to keep things under wraps, I spotted the police reporter from the Post standing behind the police tape among the half dozen Briggs Avenue drug dealers. Once the word was out, reporters and producers would pounce on Briggs Avenue like sharks on chum. A billionaire’s kid getting kidnapped and ritually murdered wasn’t just news, it was the next news cycle.

I headed for my car when I spotted the first news van. Media storms were like real ones, I’d found. The only way to truly withstand them was to evacuate immediately.

Emily was coming out of the corner bodega as I got to the car. She took the items from the bag as I cranked the heat in the front seat. Paper towels and a couple of cans of Coke.

“They didn’t have any Scotch, but at least it’s full sugar,” she said, handing me one.

I put the cold can to the back of my neck before I crunched it open.

“Full sugar,” I said. “I just might have to tell your supervisor about you, Emily Parker. Not for nothing, but you were great in there. You know your way around a body. I thought you were just a kidnapping expert.”

“I did time in the Behavioral Analysis Unit as a profiler,” she said offhandedly. “Lucky me, huh?”