City Dark(78)

Cana left with the cop, but before Letty could restart the interview, her partner, Kevin Ito, called down the stairs. Of Japanese descent, Kevin was slight with a crewcut and round glasses. He motioned her up a few steps.

“What is it? I’m trying to get through this interview.”

“A couple of things,” Kevin said. “The body in the elevator shaft? MLI found a photograph of your witness, that old Black guy, in his pocket.”

“Wait. My witness downstairs?”

“Yes.” He pushed the John Lennon glasses up his nose. “One other thing—they found ID on the body. His name is Evan Bolds.”





CHAPTER 62


Ninth Precinct Squad Room


East Village, Manhattan

3:32 a.m.

“I was sorry to call so late,” Letty said to Zochi upon her arrival to the Ninth Precinct. “Your duty lieutenant said you were on the turnaround and might not be sleeping anyway. He gave me your number.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said. She didn’t know Letty, but she already respected her as a detective. Once things had calmed down and she was back at the squad room, Letty had done the right thing—dug up data on Bolds and also the mechanism by which it seemed the homeless victim had been killed. By connecting a few dots through the NYPD online system, she was able to see that a Detective Xochitl Hernandez from the Sixtieth Precinct was working on a case with a similar mechanism of death. On top of that, the deceased in Letty’s case, Evan Bolds, was the subject of a court case that Hernandez’s suspect had been working on right before he himself had been arrested. The connection was enough to attempt late-night contact with Hernandez.

Zochi wasn’t sure what to make of Letty’s case. DeSantos was in custody, so he wasn’t the perpetrator. The details were intriguing, though. One person had been killed in the same way her victims had. The other body had been a legal target of her suspect when he was still with the AG. She didn’t expect much, but who knew? Maybe DeSantos was still involved somehow and not working alone. Maybe he was still pulling strings from Rikers. She had seen that before. There was also a surviving eyewitness she could interview. All things considered, it was worth coming in early for and checking out. Letty was right; she didn’t sleep much on the turnaround anyway. She suited up and sped down to the city through warm night air with no traffic. Now in the squad room, the two women stepped away from the flurry of activity for a cup of coffee.

“What time did you come on?” she asked.

“Nine o’clock,” Letty said. “The bodies are packed up and the scene is secure, but there’s brass everywhere and everyone wants to be briefed. I doubt I’ll get out of here in under twenty-four hours.”

“Well, overtime.”

“Yep. First double homicide we’ve seen in a while.” Letty blew on her coffee. “I feel bad for this witness, Nate Porter? Seems like a nice old guy.”

“I don’t know anything about him,” Zochi said. “What he knows could shed some light; you never know. You sure he’s ready to talk to me?”

“He’s shaken up, but he seems okay to me. Less spaced out than most people who went through what he just went through.”

“So you think that Bolds—the dead guy in the elevator—killed the homeless guy, then attacked Porter, right?” Zochi was trying to keep it all straight. “That’s what I’m going on, so far.”

“Pretty much.” Letty glanced at her notes. “It looks like the homeless guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of the landlord’s thugs let him in. We’ve seen it before at that building. Homicide guys are looking at video from the street and talking to the landlord’s man about that. It depends on where the street cameras were placed, but we might be able to see when the homeless guy and Bolds entered. No cameras in the lobby, though, so we can’t see what happened inside.”

“One of the sergeants mentioned the ‘placement’ of the homeless guy,” Zochi said, putting air quotes around “placement.” “My understanding is that Porter found him first, on the way into the building. Tried to get him to leave, got some noise. Went up to get something to wave at the guy.”

“Exactly,” Letty said, nodding. “But when Porter got back downstairs, if what he says is true, the homeless guy was already dead. Head wrenched back. A second or so later he encountered the attacker—Evan Bolds.”

“Right,” Zochi said, picturing it. “Brief struggle, then down goes Bolds.”

“You should have seen him,” Letty said. The original grimace was back. “Bolds, I mean.”

“Yeah, I heard that too.” Zochi made a corkscrew-turning motion with her right hand. “And the head-wrenching thing with the homeless guy—is that really what it looked like? That’s important for my case.”

“That’s what it looked like, yeah. Back to Bolds for a second. He was what—a probationer for your suspect, DeSantos?”

“No, DeSantos is a lawyer. He was at the AG’s office. Bolds was his case, one of those sex offender civil commitment things. DeSantos’s mother turned up dead, then his ex-girlfriend a few days after. The DA authorized an arrest after DNA came back a match.”

“That’s why I called you,” Letty said. “Those two women out in Brooklyn. I heard about those cases. You’ve got a DNA match for both bodies, though, right?”