I, Michael Bennett

Half the Newburgh PD showed up. Ed Boyanoski was there with his wife, Celia, and three kids as well as Bill Moss and his wife, Cordelia, and their two daughters. Even the gang-unit cops, Walrond and Groover, showed up with their respective clans.

Walrond’s clan included his new wife and beautiful four-month-old baby girl, Iris. My girls—including Mary Catherine, for some strange reason—surrounded Iris’s car seat and could not be peeled away during the entire party.

All’s well that was ending well, at least for the current moment.

Even the kids’ surgeon, Dr. Mary A

“So many people have written off this town to the gangs, Mike, but I know we can turn it around,” Ed said. “This place is my home. I’m never leaving.”

Ed was a top-notch guy. They all were. Good people who truly cared about their community and were trying to do their best in a bad situation.

“Man, you know how to toss a soiree here, Mike,” a swim-trunk-clad Groover called from a floating i

“I haven’t had too much to celebrate in a while, so I’m pulling out all the stops, my man. You guys deserve it. Now my family can put all this nonsense in the rearview.”

“How many kids do you have, anyway?” Groover wanted to know.

I shook my head. “Dude, I lost count a long time ago.”

Groover looked down into his beer thoughtfully before raising his plastic cup.

“The more the merrier,” he called.

I looked over at my son Eddie, talking and laughing with one of Ed Boyanoski’s kids, and raised my own.

“The more the merrier,” I agreed with a smile.

Damn right.

It was the Be

CHAPTER 66

AT AROUND NINE, the party wrapped up pretty much the way all cop parties do—with some beery high fives and fist bumps and promises to do it again real soon.

It had really been a fun time, even for all our cop kids, who had broken into teams and had wrapped up the night playing an epic game of ring-a-levio. Eddie had been the last one caught as he made a heroic attempt to free his team from jail.

Hearing his squealing laughter again as he was tackled was by far the best part of the night. Hell, the best part of the month.

“These Newburgh guys are all right in my book,” I said to Mary Catherine as we waved good-bye to the last set of retreating headlights from the porch.

“Is that just the beer talking?” Mary Catherine asked, eyeing the half-full Heineken in my hand.

“Well, maybe not just the beer,” I said sheepishly.

Even though the house and backyard and especially the dock looked like they’d been attacked by a host of marauding barbarians, Mary Catherine and I turned our backs on the paper plates. We left all our sleeping, sunburned charges in Seamus’s care and decided to take a long walk around the lake.

We ended up taking the secluded forest path I’d frantically scoured the week before when I’d searched for Eddie and Brian. At the top of the hill, Mary Catherine suddenly stopped and turned around.

“Look. It’s beautiful,” she said.

I followed her pointing finger just above the treetops to a bright, glowing sliver of quarter moon, tinged with pink. All around it, stars—too many to count—sparkled against the seemingly endless navy-blue sky. We could have been the only people in the world, in the universe.

We sat, and I broke out the midnight picnic I’d packed. An old fla

I laid out the blanket in the middle of the forest clearing and poured wine into a couple of plastic glasses.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to mix beer and wine,” Mary Catherine said, leaning back with the cup on her stomach and staring up at the sky.

“Midnight picnics are the exception,” I said, sitting cross-legged across from her.

Mary Catherine yawned and closed her eyes.

“You know what would be really great, Mike?”

“What’s that?” I said.

“If we could really go on vacation. You know, one where you’re not working and actually here?”

I laughed.

“That’s quite a concept,” I said. “A nonworking vacation, is it?”

Mary Catherine sighed.

“Or how about for once we could go on a real date, Mike? Three or four hours of just me and you. No kids, no phones. Just two adults together alone, enjoying each other’s company. I would like that so much. Wouldn’t you?”

“You’re right, Mary Catherine,” I said feeling suddenly very guilty.

How could I be such an insensitive clod? I had to stop taking this wonderful woman for granted or I was going to be very sorry.

“Enough of squeezing in a moment here and there,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll arrange the whole thing. We’ll put Seamus on duty and go wherever you want. Down into the city. We’ll paint the town red. Where do you want to go?”

I waited for a few moments. But even after a full minute, she was still silent. I turned and glanced at her, laughing to myself as I watched her sleep.

“Oh, Sleeping Beauty,” I said as I gathered up the remnants of our picnic. “What did I do to deserve someone as lovely as you?”

CHAPTER 67

IT WAS STILL dark when I heard the doorbell ring the next morning. Hungover and bleary-eyed, I went ass over teakettle into a beanbag chair as I tripped over an i

“Good morning,” I said, opening the door.

The young, attractive, black female cop smiled and blushed a little when she saw my bamboozled face and skimpy attire.

“Detective Be

“What about him?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“He was murdered in jail last night,” she said.

That got me moving. I threw on a pair of jeans and a polo shirt, grabbed my gun, and took a ride into town with the good-looking rookie cop, whose name was Belinda Saxon. Bill and Ed were already outside waiting for me in the Newburgh PD parking lot. Behind them, the sun was just coming up over the Hudson.

“Let me guess. The party’s over?” I said as I got out of the cruiser.

“So’s our friend James Glaser,” Bill Moss said, opening the unmarked Ford’s back door as though he were a chauffeur.

After some coffee and a quick breakfast at the diner out by I-84, we headed to the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in nearby Wallkill, New York, where Glaser had been transferred. The su