Cover-up (23 page)

“I know you’re in there,” he said.

And he reached into his pocket and pulled something out. Melanie saw the bright glint of metal. A gun, a knife? She backed up fast and slammed into a huge marble sarcophagus. Her head connected with the stone and she grunted in pain. She looked around for an exit, but the gallery came to a dead end. The only way out was back between the statues, right past her pursuer.

“You can run, but you can’t hide,” he called out, and this time Melanie listened to his voice. It was deep and resonant, with a heavy Australian accent.

She stepped around the case, so mad she could have spit.

“What the hell are you doing, Gilmartin?”

“I’m working on a breaking story, Vargas.” He pushed a button on the small silver tape recorder he carried. “Duncan Gilmartin reporting from the Clyde Williams benefit at the Metropolitan Museum, speaking with Assistant U.S. Attorney Melanie Vargas.”

“Put that thing away!” she snapped.

“I’m giving you a chance to respond to the allegations,” he said. “I’d take it if I were you, or things might get unpleasant.”

“What allegations?”

“The allegations of a cover-up. The allegations that Clyde Williams will go scot-free despite all the evidence pointing to his involvement.”

“Don’t you people worry about libel laws?”

“Oh, we study them carefully, looking for loopholes. Truth is a defense. It’s true Suzanne Shepard was murdered after she aired a segment on Clyde Williams. It’s true that you’re friends with the Williams family. What I make of that truth is protected speech.”

“Go to Clyde’s press conference. You’ll see what good friends we are.”

There were no limits to what this guy would do to advance his career. As Melanie looked at Gilmartin in disgust, something clicked. Something in his height and build, in the way he carried himself.

“Wait a minute, you followed me onto the subway the other day, didn’t you?” she said.

“I do what it takes to get the story, Miss Vargas.”

“Stay the hell away from me.”

Melanie turned and hurried toward the exit, pleased with herself for finding Gilmartin out, for refusing to let him get over on her. Then she realized that his tape recorder had been on the entire time. So much for outmaneuvering the tabloid press. She’d be hearing her bold words played back to her on the eleven o’clock news.

30

M
elanie slept like the dead,
and didn’t wake until eight o’clock on Saturday morning when she heard Maya chirping from her crib in the next room.

“Mama mama mama mama mama!”

She rushed into the nursery to find all of Maya’s stuffed animals on the floor and the little girl standing up holding on to the crib rail.

“How long have you been awake,
pobrecita
?” Melanie asked. “I’m so sorry. Mommy was really tired.”

“Toast!” Maya said.

“I’ll bet you’re hungry. Did you throw these poor babies down? Don’t do that, Maya. It makes them sad.”

Melanie bent over and started picking the animals up and tossing them back into the crib. Down the hall, the telephone shrieked, so she lifted Maya up and deposited her on the floor.

“Hold on, sweetie. I’ll change you in a sec,” she said, sprinting back to her room to catch the phone before the machine picked up. Melanie worried with each step that it was Susan calling to tell her she was fired. Susan had been very reassuring last night as they watched
the eleven o’clock news together over the phone from their respective apartments. And in truth, not only had Clyde Williams’s press conference been better than Melanie had feared, but Duncan Gilmartin had restrained himself from playing the tape of her telling him to go to hell. Maybe he hadn’t liked the prospect of getting taken down a peg on national TV.

She swiped the phone from its cradle just in time. “Hello?”

“Melanie. Julian.”

“Julian,” she said, relieved. “What’s going on?”

“Good news. I popped your boy Miles Ortiz with enough product to put him away for a good long stretch.”

“How much?”

“Sixty grams of crystal meth.”

“Whoa. That’s a ten-year mandatory minimum.”

“He knows that. And now the man would like to talk.”

“Fantastic work. We need to hold a proffer session right away. Make sure you have him execute a Waiver of Speedy Arraignment first so we don’t have to take him to court today.” If Miles got arraigned in open court, his arrest would become public knowledge, and he’d no longer be useful to do undercover work for them.

“I’m not down with paperwork, sister,” Julian said. “Not my style. When you get here, you get him to sign whatever you want. I paged O’Reilly, and he’d like to participate in the debriefing, too.”

The mention of Dan’s name reminded her that she’d tried his cell phone three separate times last night to fill him in on what had happened at the museum, but with no success. She’d ended up leaving a curt message on his voice mail about how inconvenient it was not to be able to reach him, and he still hadn’t called back. Sitting awake last night in the chair in her bedroom with the phone in her hand, staring out at the sky, Melanie should have been worrying about the case or about her career. But instead she was in a panic over Dan’s mysterious disappearing act. If he’d been a different man—if he’d been Steve, cer
tainly—Dan’s sudden change in behavior would be enough to convince her he was seeing someone else. That was the reason men made themselves unreachable, wasn’t it—to sneak off with other women? Given Melanie’s personal history, her mind naturally went there. But this was Dan O’Reilly, she told herself. He was incapable of infidelity.

As hard as she tried to believe that, Dan’s phone had kept on ringing. Finally, Melanie had dragged herself into bed and fallen into a dreamless sleep, blank and deep, hiding from her life.

“Where do you want us to meet you?” Julian asked, snapping her back to the present.

Before she could answer, Maya came toddling into the room, and another unpleasant truth dawned on Melanie. It was Saturday. Her babysitter didn’t work today. Steve was in L.A., and she hadn’t heard a peep out of him, and Sophie had more than done her duty by watching Maya while Melanie went to the fund-raiser last night. Melanie had an important suspect to debrief and her boss’s wedding to attend. But in order to do those things, she needed to find somebody to watch her daughter.

She picked Maya up and kissed the top of her dark head.

“I’ll see you at my office in an hour,” she told Julian.

A
n hour later, Melanie struggled out of a taxi in front of her office with Maya on her hip, her dress for the wedding draped over her arm, and a diaper bag full of toys, snacks, and videos hanging off her shoulder. Melanie’s mother, Carol, would take Maya starting at three o’clock and keep her overnight. Carol helped out when she could, but she had a job and an active social life to work around. For the hours between now and then, Melanie had come up empty-handed. Steve hadn’t returned from his business trip or made any arrangements for Maya’s care despite the fact that this was his weekend. Sophie Cho was working on a rush project all weekend herself. And Melanie’s glam
orous sister, Linda, was on assignment in Miami for her job as an entertainment reporter with a Spanish TV network. That left Melanie with two options. Either she could bring Maya into the debriefing with Miles Ortiz, who was a thug, a meth dealer, and possibly a killer. Or she could leave her seventeen-month-old alone in a separate room where she couldn’t see her, with only a Barney video for company, at a moment when some psycho creep might or might not be stalking Melanie.

Signing in at the guard’s desk in the lobby, she saw that Shekeya Jenkins had come in an hour before. Beneath Shekeya’s signature, two other names were printed in childish letters—Khadija and Rashida, Shekeya’s little girls, who were seven and five. Melanie stopped on the Major Crimes floor on her way to the war room, and poked her head in to the chief’s suite to commiserate. Shekeya was at her computer. Her daughters sat on the floor nearby with their coloring books.

“Hey, girl. You brought reinforcements, too, I see,” Shekeya said, smiling at the sight of Maya.

Khadija, the older child, jumped up and ran over to Melanie.

“Can I hold the baby?” she pleaded. Melanie set Maya down. She immediately began giggling and running around in circles, which made Shekeya’s girls crack up.

“They’re getting so big,” Melanie said.

“I haven’t brought ’em into work in a while, so you haven’t seen ’em.”

“You’re working overtime?” Melanie asked.

“Actually, I’m filling out the application for the paralegal position. I waited till today so there wouldn’t be any chance of the boss showing up to look over my shoulder.”

“She’s getting her hair and makeup done, right?” Melanie asked.

“Mmm-hmm. I have the place to myself. By the way, thank you for the letter of recommendation. I know how busy you are, but you still found time to do it.”

“No problem.”

“What are you here for?” Shekeya asked.

“Proffer session.”

“You’re not bringing Little Miss Thang to meet your bad guy, are you?” Shekeya asked disapprovingly.

“I don’t have a choice. I got caught with no babysitting.”

“I hear you. Kwame’s working today, and my sister’s putting on a potluck at her church. That’s why I brought these two in. But leave Miss Thang here. We’ll watch her for you.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. My girls love babies. Especially pretty ones with hair they can fix. You’ll make their day. Don’t be surprised if you get her back with a new hairstyle, though.”

31

M
elanie sat in the war room
on the sixth floor facing Miles Ortiz across the table. His eyes were glittery and sharp as ice picks. The left one was decorated with a jailhouse tattoo that looked like a stitched cut, as if Miles had just been sliced with a beer bottle in a bar fight. The pricey personal trainer dressed in pure gangsta-thug style—diamond studs in both ears, a nylon do-rag tied over his black hair, and a wifebeater T-shirt showing off lean, muscled arms. For the bored housewives of the Upper East Side, there was nothing sexier than violence.

Dan and Julian sat on either side of Miles. They’d been in place already when Melanie had arrived at the war room, putting to rest her faint hope of seeing Dan alone. She had plenty to ask him about. The status of his investigation into her Web stalker. Where Rockwell Davis and Clyde Williams had been at the time of Suzanne Shepard’s murder. And of course, why he’d ignored her phone calls again last night. But this debriefing was just too pressing. Her questions would have to wait.

Melanie slid a piece of paper across the table.

“You speak and read English?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Miles said. His voice was a hoarse growl.

“This is a Waiver of Speedy Arraignment form. Saturday arraignments happen only in the mornings. We can either bring you before the judge right now, in which case your arrest becomes known and your value as a cooperator diminishes accordingly, or else you can sign this and wait until Monday morning, when we’ll try to arrange for a closed-courtroom arraignment. There are no Sunday arraignments, so if you want to do the debriefing, you’ll have to spend tonight and tomorrow night in jail before seeing a judge. Are you comfortable with that?”

“It true what Pierre say, I’m looking at a ten-to-life?” Ortiz asked.

Despite his chilling appearance, Miles’s demeanor was matter-of-fact and intelligent. As a seasoned narcotics trafficker, he handled his arrest in a businesslike manner—exploring his options, unbowed but not whining.

“The quantity of methamphetamine you attempted to sell to Detective Hay carries a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years,” Melanie said.

“But I can get out from under the minimum if I talk?”

“If you cooperate, I can ask the judge to reduce your sentence. Otherwise, he’s required to sentence you to ten years. But cooperation isn’t just talking. For somebody in your position, with a significant criminal record, arrested selling a large quantity of a drugs, you need to make cases and testify.”

“Make cases. You mean wear a wire?”

“Do something that helps us arrest other violators. What that is depends on you, on what information you’re privy to. The whole point of talking today is to figure out what you can do, and whether it’s worthwhile for us to proceed.”

“But if I don’t go to court, I don’t get no lawyer?”

“If you want a lawyer, I can call somebody in right now to advise you on the cooperation process. That’s not a problem.”

“That would be good. I don’t need to go to court, but I want a lawyer to talk to before I decide.”

“Is there somebody in particular you’d like me to call?”

“Legal Aid is good with me. They always done right by me before.”

“Fine. I’ll make some calls,” Melanie said.

“If we just sitting around, any chance I could get a coupla Egg McMuffins?” Ortiz asked Julian.

Within half an hour, Jerry Siler from Legal Aid showed up to confer with Miles while Melanie, Dan, and Julian waited outside the war-room door. Jerry was an old-timer, a stoner, affable, burnt-out, cynical—all of which made him wonderfully easy to work with. Short and slight with graying hair, he wore red high-tops with his shabby suit and gave the impression of someone who wasn’t paying attention, which was far from the truth. Jerry got better results for his clients than virtually any other lawyer in Legal Aid. He’d been around the block a few times too many, and it showed in his face, but he knew his job inside out. After fifteen minutes or so, he called them back into the room. Jerry sat beside Miles now. The two of them had taken to each other with no fuss, like the professionals they both were.

“We’re good,” Jerry said, lacing his fingers behind his head and contemplating the ceiling. “Miles has some information I think you’ll be happy with. We need to execute a proffer agreement first to protect him in the event the cooperation doesn’t go forward.”