"Was this a special occasion?"

"I have no idea. But, yeah, that's his boat. The Bright Star."

"He name it himself? Seems a little… I don't know… gay… from what I know of Paul Caruso."

"He took a lot of shit over that name. Guys figured he'd give it some obscene name. Goombah Mama, one cop suggested. Pussy Galore-you know, from James Bond. We had a lot of good times on that boat."

"You guys don't exactly look like sailors to me."

"Not me, but Paulie knew what he was doing. A little anyway. He really loved the big inboard diesel engines. He talked more about horsepower than he did about anything to do with the sea. It was all about speed for him. Faster the better."

"Who is the woman?"

"Paulie's girlfriend, Lana."

"Good-looking lady."

Eddie fixed cereal for himself while Babsie sipped coffee and stared at the photo. He sliced a banana, poured the milk, and sat down across from her. He'd have breakfast, then get back to Brighton Beach. Eddie had asked Boland to steer him in the right direction as far as finding Zina. Zina had not returned to her apartment on West Nineteenth. She had to be sleeping somewhere. He realized Boland couldn't officially reveal the contents of any transcript from the Mazurka bug. But he could find a back door, a wink, or a nudge. Maybe accidentally leave a coffee stain next to a specific location on the list of Borodenko's locations. Just point him in the right direction.

"Are you going to make me ask the obvious question?" Babsie said.

"What question?"

"How the hell did this picture find its way into the apartment of Fredek Dolgev?"

"They probably got it from Paulie somehow. Angelo said they tore his house apart in Sicily."

"But why take this picture from Sicily in the first place? Then rip it up on West Nineteenth Street in Coney Island?"

"I wish I knew that myself."

"But you see what I'm trying to say. You have to admit this all comes down to your connection with the Caruso brothers. You yourself said you always wondered about the Rosenfeld shooting. It sounds like a setup, right?"

"No doubt about it."

"Maybe I should talk to this Lana," Babsie said.

"Good idea, but she's dead."

"The bottom line here, Eddie, is that somebody thinks you have the missing money from the gas-tax scam. Maybe Paulie told them. I don't know."

"It was fourteen years ago. Why did it take them so long to come after it?"

"I can't answer that, but think about who's dead: Lukin and both Caruso brothers. You're the only possible conspirator left."

"Oh, now I'm a possible conspirator."

"It's the only thing that makes sense. The reason they haven't come back here is because cops have been all over this place."

"They already searched my house."

"What about Paulie's boat?"

"He sold it before he went to Sicily," Eddie said. "But boats have VIN numbers, like cars. It's traceable. The marina might have old records."

"Didn't they find Misha's body dumped in this same marina?"

"Yeah, but quite a distance from where ours was kept."

"Ours?"

"Well, it wasn't mine, but I probably spent more time on it than Paulie did. I told you that I slept on it many nights when I was too tired or too drunk to drive home."

Babsie made notes on the boat. The picture didn't show the registration number. It did show the slip number.

"Is that a ninety-one or a sixteen?" Babsie asked.

"It's a ninety-one. The slip numbers were stenciled on the dock, facing the boat."

"Where did they dump Misha's body?"

"On seventeen."

"But he crawled there from sixteen. The bloodstains started on sixteen. They thought it was ninety-one."

"You've been watching too much Columbo."

Eddie remembered the boat far better than anything else that had occurred during those years. Sitting on a dock, twenty yards from traffic on Emmons Avenue, it seemed like another world-a world too good to last.

"I'll stop by and check the marina tonight," he said.

"You're going back to Brighton Beach already?"

"I never finished all the lesbian bars. Sooner or later, I'll find Zina in one of them."

"Yeah, well, you won't have that much time to chat with the girls tonight. Matty Boland called again. They have another big operation going. They want us at One Police Plaza. Two a.m."

"Both of us?"

"Don't worry, I'll drive my own car. You go do your dyke-trolling thing. Just meet me at police headquarters."

'TWO A.M.?"

'Two a.m.," she said. "I'll bet it's another operation generated off information from you. Boland is using you like a trust fund. You'd think the guy would spend at least one day working on Kate. He pretends he's Mr. Concerned, but he's nothing but a self-absorbed prick."

Eddie turned the picture around. He looked closely at Caruso, and for the first time he saw a heavy-lidded, brooding face. When he'd first met Paulie, Eddie envied him as a person capable of living in the moment. The change came later; the anger followed. Time and circumstance changed you in ways you could never imagine. Or maybe they brought out the real you. Shafts of light filtering through the oak trees streaked the kitchen floor.

Chapter 35

Wednesday, April 15

2:00 A.M.

Because of the brazen murder of two people in the El Greco diner, an elite group of law-enforcement officers gathered without fanfare in the early hours of Wednesday at NYPD headquarters in One Police Plaza. Press and TV crews remained camped in Brooklyn, bemoaning the lack of investigative progress while focusing their cameras on the bloodstains at the foot of the diner's steps. The entire city seemed stunned by the callous nature of the crime: A mother singing "Happy Birthday" to her daughter had been brutally murdered in front of her family. Eddie Dunne, referred to as an "unnamed eyewitness," provided a face to the tragedy. The scowl of the madman Sergei Zhukov terrified viewers of every newscast in the tristate area. The city of New York, riding the crest of the largest homicide reduction in its history, was not about to allow one incident to trigger a backslide.

"How did they treat you in the dyke bars tonight?" Detective Babsie Panko asked.

Since early afternoon, Eddie Dunne had been visiting every known lesbian bar in the city. His source was a free magazine he'd picked up in Manhattan.

"Mostly, they were nice," he said. "Too nice. That's what worries me. They knew about me, and treated me like some sad old uncle, down on his luck. They took my card and promised they'd call if they heard anything about Kate or Zina. They were sweet, sympathetic. I think I liked it better when they were throwing hand grenades."

Babsie and Eddie took seats in the back of the auditorium. The auditorium, on the first floor of One Police Plaza, was an odd mixture of brick and Danish-style wooden slats, but it was well capable of handling a force of over one hundred. The walls on opposite sides of the room were lined with large pieces of cardboard displaying hand-drawn numbers. The numbers corresponded to the teams that would be handed separate assignments. They caught Matty Boland hustling toward the stage.

"What's my role here?" Eddie asked.

"Finger man," Boland said. "We can depend on you to pick Sergei Zhukov out of a roomful of Russkies. Babsie's here as a courtesy, mostly. Intersecting cases and all. You're both riding with me."

"Lucky us," Babsie said.

The bulk of the manpower had been drawn from the vast pool of the NYPD, forty thousand strong. Officers had been pulled from a variety of different specialties, and most didn't know one another. Each team consisted of at least one member of the FBI's Joint Russian Task Force, two investigators and one supervisor from the Organized Crime Control Bureau, plus two uniformed and heavily armed members of the NYPD Emergency Services Unit. At the briefing, names would be read aloud and squad numbers assigned. They'd be told to meet with fellow squad members under the posted number on the wall, make the introductions short, and get on the road. A cadre of technicians and specialists, including a dozen cops from the Auto Crime Division, had been handpicked by Detective Matty Boland. As soon as Eddie saw all the Auto Crime cops, he knew it had to be a junkyard.