Hot Pursuit (3 page)

T
he police detective was not impressed. “What is it, exactly, that you would like us to do?”

His name was Michael Callahan and he was young and not quite handsome, unless you went for the vaguely Popeye-esque, third-generation New York Irish cop type. Strawberry blond with blue eyes that could twinkle on command or look flat and bored, as they did right now. Lean face with sharply chiseled angular features, and a wiry, compact body. He played shortstop in the local softball league, Jenn would’ve bet her turkey-on-seedless-rye on that.

She answered his question with a question, aware that the interns were watching her. “What is it you usually do in situations like this?”

Situations in which a computer-printed note—obscene and rambling, but not quite a death threat—had been stuck to Assemblywoman Maria Bonavita’s New York City office door with a sharply bladed knife, while Jenn and the interns had all been out at lunch.

Truth be told, Jenn hadn’t expected the death threats to start
quite
so soon. Cranky e-mails were one thing, but this … ?

It was only Maria’s second week in office, and wasn’t there supposed to be a so-called honeymoon period for an elected official?
Perhaps a solid month, maybe two, before they’d have to make a call to the police?

“What we usually do is waste valuable lab time examining the fingerprints on the weapon,” Callahan said, “and confirming the fact that everyone here touched it before calling us.”

Ron and Gene looked abashed, and Jenn stepped to the interns’ defense. “The note contains offensive language. There’s a pediatric dentist’s office right down the hall—”

“So you tear the paper,” Callahan pointed out, “and leave the knife.” He sighed again. “Not that it would’ve mattered. Whoever left this probably didn’t leave prints. We wouldn’t’ve found anything—at which point I would’ve called you back, and told you to be careful.”

“Be careful,” Jenn repeated.

“And to give us a call if you see anyone or anything suspicious.”

“That’s it,” Jenn said. “Seriously. That’s all you can do? I mean, thank God no one was here—”

“Whoever did this probably waited until he was sure that no one was here.”

“Probably?”

“Lookit, for a threat this vague—” he started.

She interrupted, reading from the note,
“Next note gets pinned to your face
is vague?”

“Yeah, it is,” he said. “Whose face? There’s no mention of the assemblywoman. Maybe whoever wrote this was targeting the dentist down the hall and got the suite number mixed up.”

“Her name is clearly on the door,” Jenn pointed out.

“Okay,” he said. “So when’s this pinning going to take place? Today? Tomorrow? Two months from now? Maybe you want us to post a guard in the hall, 24/7 … ? Of course, if we post a guard in the hallway of everyone in this city who’s received a threat from some crackpot, we’ll need to hire at least two million more uniformed
officers. You might want to check with your boss, see if she thinks she can’t find the funding to make
that
happen. Hey, I know, she could cut ammunition
completely
out of the budget, outfit both the Staties and the NYPD with swords, get one of those whetting stones for each department and boom—we’re done.”

Jenn had had enough. “Are you?” she asked sharply. “Done? Because Assemblywoman Bonavita was fact-finding, okay? She asked a simple question—does the State of New York really need to spend
that
much money on ammunition? She had no idea that police training was constant and required that many bullets, and when she found out, she agreed—completely and absolutely—that this was
not
a line item that could be cut or even marginally reduced. She’s been vocal—throughout her campaign—about her support of New York’s need for additional first responders, both in the police and fire departments, and about the
supreme
necessity of giving them the supplies and equipment required for them to do their jobs. Which is what
you
should be doing—your job. Whether or not you think that the assemblywoman asked a stupid question, whether or not you believe that questions that upset the status quo should never be asked at all, whether you voted for Maria or for the idiot, I don’t care. Check it, Detective, at the door, and tell me what I need to do to keep my boss and my staff safe from
crackpots
who like to play with knives.”

She’d stunned him into silence. Not so Ron and Gene, who’d expected her to blow—having seen it happen many times before. And oh, good, Hank the UPS man was standing in the open doorway, a package in his hands, grinning his handsome ass off. Gene went to sign for it, but he took his sweet time as they all just stood there, in her post-outburst silence, waiting to see what would happen next.

The detective was looking around—at the campaign posters that still adorned the walls, at the big whiteboard that they used to
keep track of all of Maria’s special projects, at the clutter atop Jenn’s desk, at the radiator that clunked and hissed and made the office far, far too warm, and finally at her.

At her shoes, at her legs, at her dress, at the necklace she wore at her throat, and finally at her face.

And it was only then, as he met her eyes, that Detective Callahan laughed.

And it wasn’t a nasty, you’ve-crossed-the-line-bitch laugh. It was genuinely amused—as if the mean, bored robot cop had been replaced by a real human boy.

And when he finished laughing, he was still smiling, and that smile, with the accompanying warmth in his eyes, further transformed him, and he was no longer not-quite-handsome. He was now stunningly good-looking—completely jello-knee inducing—like the even-more-attractive love child of Denis Leary and Damian Lewis. And he was particularly attractive because he was now looking at Jenn as if she were not just interesting, but an interesting
woman
.

“I voted for the idiot,” he admitted. “But he was the idiot I knew, so …” He shrugged expansively, charmingly.

Hank sent Jenn an air kiss as he closed the door behind him. Now that the show was over, Ron and Gene, too, escaped into Maria’s office with the package.

“Our website was extensive and easy to access,” Jenn told the detective, hiding her fluster and resisting the urge to fix her hair. There was nothing she could do to make it look better anyway, and if she touched it, her body language would shout that she was vulnerable to his charm. She wasn’t certain of much—except for the fact that she wanted to keep that newsflash from him. Instead, she pushed her glasses up her nose and folded her arms across her chest. “It still is. The assemblywoman’s positions are clearly outlined.
She’s
your champion, Detective. The
idiot
thought the solution to budget cuts was to downsize the police department and instead impose
a strict youth curfew. A curfew, in the city that Frank says doesn’t sleep.”

“Really?”

“You voted for him, and you don’t know that? His position was that cuts to the police and fire department were inevitable. Maria, on the other hand, has been outspoken in her belief that New York needs to grow both departments—”

“And pay for it how?”

“We’re still working on that,” she admitted. “Hence the line-byline perusal of the budget—”

“Hence,” he said, with another laugh. “Who says
hence?”

“—and the accompanying hoopla over the question about ammunition,” she continued.

“Hoopla
, I like,” he told her, the twinkle in his eye on full power.

“The hoopla,” she repeated, enjoying the eye contact. Was he actually flirting with her? “… is nothing compared to the full-on uproar over the Ten Commandments issue, which is what this”—she gestured to the threatening note and the knife—“is about.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I actually heard about that one.”

One of the newly elected assembly members from a more conservative upstate district wanted to reinstall an antique plaque with the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the building that housed Maria’s office in Albany. It had hung there over fifty years earlier, was removed during renovations, believed lost, but had now been found.

Maria had made a statement announcing that because her many constituents in New York City had a wide variety of religious beliefs, the presence of this plaque in a state building should also mean that other religious icons and messages could now be placed in the lobby as well.

It was then that the flood of angry e-mails and phone calls started—most of them from out of state. They’d received a number
of anonymous threats, all of which they’d reported according to legislative guidelines, but it wasn’t until this ugliness—delivered at the end of a very sharp knife—that Jenn became more than just mildly concerned.

Maria was worried about it, too—enough to drive back from Albany, even though Ford was developing an odd-sounding cough.

“The really stupid thing,” Jenn told the detective now, “is that it’s over. Completely. We all compromised—we found common ground. The plaque
is
a part of New York’s heritage, and everyone agreed that in order to preserve it, it should be in a special glass case.” With another plaque documenting its history, as well as a clarification from a local constitutional scholar as to the importance of separation of church and state.

“In the back of the lobby,” Callahan pointed out. “Near the rest -rooms.”

“Which nearly every guest to the building visits,” she countered.

He laughed. “Nice spin.”

“Both sides are satisfied,” she told him. “But we’re still getting the angry e-mails—more each day. I’ve done some research—basic Google searches—and I found out that some wing-nut radio talk show hosts are targeting us.”

“Isn’t that part of the job description?” he asked. “Both theirs and yours?”

“Not when it incites something like this.”

She could brush aside the threats that came from brainwashed people sitting on their sofas with their laptops, able to send an e-mail, but too lazy to actually get off their butts.

Someone clearly had, however, gotten off his butt this morning.

As Callahan glanced over again at the threatening note that was atop her desk, his expression turned rueful. “I wish there were easy answers, but…” He shook his head. “I’m not going to lie to you, Jennifer—”

“Jenn’s short for Jennilyn,” she corrected him.

“Jennilyn,” he repeated, making a note on the scruffy little pad that he’d pulled from the inside pocket of his leather jacket when he’d first arrived. “Pretty name. Two words? Hyphenated?”

“One word,” she told him, spelling it for him, spelling her last name, LeMay, while she was at it. “And I’ve found that people usually say
I’m not going to lie to you
before they actually, you know, lie to you?”

He smiled again as he nodded. “Yeah, me too. It’s just… there’s not much to go on. The paper that the note’s printed on is standard copy paper. Maybe the lab could tell us whether this was printed on an inkjet or some other kind of printer. They could certainly ID the font, but—”

“I can do that. It’s Times New Roman, size eighteen or twenty,” Jenn said.

“There you go,” the detective told her. “That’s narrowed our suspects down to most of the people in Manhattan. And who’s to say he or she”—he looked at the knife and made a choice—
“he
didn’t come in from out of town—and don’t start screaming that I’m being sexist—”

“I’ve been assuming it’s a man, too,” she cut him off, “which is definitely sexist, but probably true. Men often suck.”

“Not all of ’em,” he said. “And as far as the knife goes …” He picked it up. “It’s a Wüsthof—a high-end kitchen knife, sold not just in a set but also separately at Macy’s, and the only reason I know
that
is my cousin Julie just got engaged and there was this whole crazy thing with my aunt about not giving or getting knives as a gift. Turns out if you do, the world will end and … Just… Trust me. They sell ’em, by the dozens at Macy’s and God knows where else. So …” He shrugged again. “Short of my sitting outside your door day and night, I think the first thing you should do is upgrade your security system. Both here and at yours and the assemblywoman’s residences.”

He looked around the tiny front office, at the two desks and the
conference table that was covered with stacks of files from the school-safety project. “Any other full-time staffers in the office?”

“No,” she answered. Savannah hadn’t returned since Ken was injured. With Jenn’s help, she’d managed the campaign long-distance from beside her husband’s hospital bed, and had only come back to town—very briefly—for election day and their victory party. She still stayed in touch by phone, though. Jenn was looking forward to her input and opinion on how to keep Maria safe. In fact, she was going to call Savannah immediately after the detective left. “Just interns and the occasional volunteer.”