Chapter 1

Inside the grand expanse of her cubicle, a change bled through the air. It came immediate but silent, like a cloud covering the sun. It was Thursday afternoon and ASAC Hogan was due to storm in there at any minute, crash into Chase’s cubicle, and ruin her day. He’d come down on her with some arbitrary rule, some box she forgot to check, some idiotic report she didn’t file—and give her hell for it. And then she’d be filing all weekend long.

It wasn’t like she didn’t do her job. She did it damn well in fact. How many collars had she brought into the New York Field Office so far? Murderers, bank robbers, cultists, motorcycle gangs, and radical political nuts bent on homegrown justice. Yet that was somehow never enough.

It wasn’t enough to just catch the bad guy. If you wanted to get ahead at the Bureau, you had to cut through red tape and kiss ass like a champ. FBI Special Agent Heather Chase didn’t have it in her for that. She’d learned from a young age to keep other people at a distance. And that’s why she sat there in the corner of the office like a bad egg in spite of her impressive arrest record.

The Assistant Special Agent in Charge came at last, crashing in on a wave of cologne, his scent overwhelming like rubbing alcohol. Hogan’s broad chest stretching out his government-white shirt, his thick neck clenching as a heavy chin perched atop it, smirked wide open.

“Okay,” Chase said. “Give me the bad news.”

ASAC Hogan adjusted his stiff, white shirt. He then adjusted his stiff white smile. “What makes you think the news is bad, Agent Chase? That famous intuition of yours?”

“Let’s say yes.”

“Well, it’s on the money this time.” He casually threw a manila folder onto the desk, hefty and thick like a bag full of newborn puppies. Chase slipped open the top, already knowing it would be a case everyone else had rejected: a non-career-maker. Most of the offices here at the Federal Plaza were trying to make it to the brass at Virginia. They didn’t want to wade around in the grungy dirt of NYC all their lives.

Chase perused the document, pretending not to smell Hogan’s cologne all over it. “A dead woman,” she said without much excitement.

“Not just any dead woman. You’re looking at Deborah Doyle right there. As in, the wife of Connor Doyle. The property baron—”

“I know who he is. He’s got his monopoly houses dotted all over Long Island.”

“The very same.”

“So that’s why no one else wants the case,” Chase said. “He was connected to high society. Which means ruffle the wrong feathers and say goodbye to your career.”

“I figured that wouldn’t be a problem for you.”

“But then there’s also his rumored mob connections. Did someone ‘whack’ Mrs. Doyle?”

“Organized Crime says this one wasn’t a mob hit. Doyle’s mob connection was the Vigotti Family over in New Jersey, and according to informants, no one would dare take out a hit on someone connected to Vigotti.”

“Oh, that makes me feel a lot better.”

The funny thing was, it did make her feel better. Once she knew Hogan’s angle, she could relax. For one thing, at least it wasn’t paperwork. She breathed a little easier now as she scrutinized the photos of the body—the woman wore a $1,000 hairdo of long, auburn hair and a fake tan that almost shone green over the lividity. She looked to be around five-foot-ten with long legs and a toned, sensual body that was now sprawled lifeless on a lawn. Her high-end cosmetics came off as perverse on her strained, bluish face. She once had everything, but now she had nothing.

Chase flipped through the photos of Deborah Doyle one by one until the outline of the dead woman burned into her retinas and then deep into her mind. She could feel her own face turning pale and green, chest tightening, and her breath dissolving out from her like a soul set free. The faint sound of traffic went silent, the lights of the office dimmed. Her heart ached as it struggled to keep up with the demands of her rushing blood.

The room faded out, little by little, until all that remained was the faintest memory of Hogan’s cologne. And then that vanished, too. Four walls grew up around her—it was a courtyard of some sort. She could feel the wet grass under her exposed legs and between her clenched hands. Her head—the dead woman’s head—Chase’s head—tilted upward at an odd angle, straining to look up at the sky; she was becoming a dark stain on the grass. What was she looking at? Who was she looking at?

Chase dwelled in the place of grass and blood for the space of a dream until the sweet decay clung to her skin and told her the regrets of the dead—maddeningly familiar words that would drag her along until the end. I don’t deserve this.

She was walking again, without shoes, without socks, the slush underneath slimy against her bare feet. The shadows of the surrounding buildings boxed her in: outside yet inside. One of the shadows was familiar. The police would not have to search for her body. It would be dumped right here, soaking in its own cold regret, implicating just who it was meant to.

A sob tore up through her body and Deborah was ready to wail when she blinked into the realization she wasn’t the dead woman at all. No, she was still Special Agent Heather Chase, her reflection staring back at her from the office window, a pale ghost face under darkish red hair with eyes so brown they were black. Agent Chase, persona non grata at the New York Field Office, dead person in her spare time.

“What do you see, Chase?” ASAC Hogan said from somewhere back in the real world.

“A bitter end to a sweet life,” Chase said.

“They found her body right in the middle of a garden. You know, one of those courtyards inside of a flashy condo up in North Hills.”

“For those kinds of closed-in gardens, there’s only one way in or out… but it’s not suicide.”

“What makes you say that?” ASAC Hogan’s eyebrows stretched an inch. He was obviously testing her. Testing her with rookie-tier forensics—probably made him feel like a big man.

“Contusions to her neck are a pretty big giveaway. She didn’t get those from a fall. Although, the fall is what killed her.”

“Right. The perp just left her there like an undressed turkey. Didn’t even bother to clean the table afterward.”

“So, who are we looking at for the murder?”

“Cops think the case is pretty cut and dry. The husband did it.”

“Then why is it on my desk?”

“See Chase, here’s the thing—Connor flew the coop. Fled the state, in fact. Which, like it or not, makes it our business. But think of it as a freebie—the dumb SOB used his credit card in Newark. Our boys will likely pull him in any minute. You just have to tie him to the body.”

“If it was such a free lunch, ASAC Hogan, seems to me one of the hungry wolves around here would have already gobbled it up. Political aspirations or no.”

“Perceptive as always, Agent Chase.”

“So what aren’t you telling me?”

“We’re sharing the case with the NYPD Homicide, on account of them finding the body.”

“Oh great, so I have to play stroke-the-ego with the donut munchers now? I knew I should have gone home early.”

“Well at least you won’t have to do it all alone.”

“Sir?”

“Oh yeah. Did I forget to mention? As of today, I’m assigning you a new partner: Special Agent Bob Fairfax will be lending his bountiful experience to help you make short work of this one.”

“Bob the Bookman? You’re teaming me up with him?”

“Listen, Bob is one of the hardest working agents in this office. Makes sense, doesn’t it, Chase? You can never stay inside the lines, and Bob is the Bureau’s straight arrow.”

“He’s so straight he’s going to take my eye out. With the corner of one of his ledgers.”

ASAC Hogan shot her a smile laced with poison—he was daring her to try and complain after the brouhaha she’d stirred up on her last case when she’d kept the perp she’d known to be the killer in lockup for 16 days while she looked for evidence, almost getting the case thrown out for habeas corpus. This was punishment, pure and simple.

Chase saw this new murder case stretch from the simple A4 page in her hands into reams and reams of print outs, authorization slips, requests for information, and hand-sitting for weeks on end until her hands grew numb and white and doughy— any trace of the original murder long since buried under blowhard nonsense.

“All right Chase, I’ll let you get started,” Hogan said, strutting away from her cubicle to go find someone else’s day to ruin.

Ever since she was a kid, Chase had always smelled trouble before it arrived. And lately, more often than not, it stank like cologne.

 

 

Chapter 2

Cops waved traffic along a narrow lane where some loon had totaled on the freeway last night. Special Agent Bob Fairfax calmly slowed the car and waited for his turn through the gauntlet. He fixed his pale-yellow tie and picked lint off the shoulder of his beige jacket, then flattened his graying hair in the rearview mirror. Bob Fairfax was all mustard and no ketchup. Chase half expected him to start examining his teeth for any stray stalks of salad—instead, he just tapped on the steering wheel.

They sat there in an awkward silence, hardly exchanging a few words since Hogan introduced them. If there was one thing Chase had learned over the years, it was to avoid giving someone a first impression. Once they cemented their version of you in their minds, there was no way of getting out of the pigeonhole. If you came off as a problem case, as Chase generally did, then everything she said after that would be met with hostility. And since her method of investigation was already unorthodox, she decided not to give her future self that extra hindrance.

It was sometimes exhausting, having to play this mind game with everyone. But that was the only way to function in society. Outside, smoke billowed up around them into a thick cloud, and through it only the red of taillights and white blurs of headlights on the opposite lane broke through. The sun had vanished, not even its cold disk visible through the blanket of smog.

“Agent Chase?” Bob Fairfax said.

“Hmm?” Chase looked around, and the fog seemed to lift—in its place just rows of metal boxes with impatient people sitting inside. It was rush hour, and the sky was leaking orange like a battery.

“I know people exaggerate my tendency for doing things by the book,” he said, “but you don’t have to be so on guard around me. I’m not any different to anyone else. I just follow protocol.”

He was trying to be friendly, or sociable, or something.

“At the end of the day,” Chase said, “you are who the world made you, and that is that, Agent Fairfax.”

“Call me Bob. And can you explain that position?”

“Okay, Bob, it’s like this. You can try and interface with others, try and get on their level. But it’s mostly a lossy exchange, there’s too much noise on the line. And if you connect, like if you really connect? Then you’re in worse trouble.”

“What do you mean worse trouble?” His hands were perfectly placed on the wheel.

“Nine and three,” Chase said.

“Excuse me?”

“Your hands are at nine and three. What happened to ten and two?”

“Oh right.” Bob smiled, making his forehead wrinkles arch up into a second smile. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes also turned upward, until his whole face looked like a dishrag. “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration actually changed their stance on that. They now believe nine and three are the safer positions.”

“They changed it?”

“That’s right,” Bob smiled.

“So, it was arbitrary then.”

“No, Agent Chase, not arbitrary. This way is just safer.”

“So, we were doing it wrong all along then.”

“Right.”

“But had someone tried holding the wheel at nine and three before, like at a driving test—”

“They would have gotten a warning for that.”

“Yet they would have been in the right.”

“Right.”

“Weird how that works out.”

“I get what you’re trying to say, Agent Chase.”

“I’m not trying to say anything. Just making conversation until we get through this traffic.”

“We should have taken the Manhattan Bridge, probably. The Brooklyn Bridge is always choked this time of day.”

“Let’s change the subject. What do you make of the case, Bob?”

He looked at her with that puppy dog face, his soft gray eyes throwing her for a loop. But this was a practiced expression—the kind of faux-vulnerability you throw at a witness to take them off guard. This was the Bureau at work. Had Bob been trying to profile her discreetly? Probably. Even if there wasn’t an ulterior motive behind it—it was just an occupational hazard.

“The case,” Bob said, concentrating on the unmoving road again. “Well, we have one dead woman dropped in a very public place. The very same condo her husband was about to put on the market. Somewhat fishy, for sure.”

“Fishy isn’t the word for it. Let’s assume that Connor Doyle really did kill his wife. Why would he be stupid enough to leave the body on his own property, let alone run afterward? He has alleged mob connections; he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. Dumping a body in your own backyard is the height of stupidity. It’s amateur hour.”

“Logic would dictate a crime of passion. Being that it was his own wife, he couldn’t be rational about it. He panicked, then fled. It’s not unheard of.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“What makes you say that?” Bob’s face wrinkled into consternation. “You’ve only seen that one file. Isn’t it a tad early to start jumping to conclusions?”

“I’m not jumping to conclusions; I’m just saying I don’t buy that it was a crime of passion.”

“Okay, based on what?”

The Nissan in front edged forward, and Bob eagerly stepped on the gas, but when its taillight blinked red again, they rocked to a halt. “I hope the traffic lets off once we get into Brooklyn,” he muttered.

“If it was a crime of passion, that meant it was a spontaneous act. Deborah was thrown off the roof, right? Then what were they doing up on the roof to begin with? Working on their tan?”

Bob shot her a quizzical look.

“Besides, Bob, think of what he’s leaving behind by going on the lamb—tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property. He owns half of Long Island. He could probably afford a real shark of a lawyer, too.”

“Sure, that’s the cool rational analysis. But maybe he ran first, and by the time he calmed down, it was too late to come back.”

“Maybe. But you don’t get to be a real estate baron in one of the hottest spots of the country by turning yellow under stress.”

“That I can get behind.”

“You make it sound like I was talking out of my ass before.”

“No, Agent Chase, I just find it hard to accept theories that aren’t based on hard evidence.”

The traffic finally gave way, and Bob eased the Taurus through a crowd of metal, soot, and sunshine. It slid along as if by its own weight, like they were riding on a stick of butter. This was preternatural driving that Chase was witnessing here. She’d been driving a Taurus for years and never felt it move this way. Just how many hours of driving training had Bob clocked?

Through the windshield, Chase studied the movements and expressions of pedestrians walking the streets of Brooklyn: toughened scowls heavily engraved into hard faces, marking out past stress into permanent gullies. Going into November, the air had picked up a chill, but the faces outside were pink with that frenetic heat you only see in rough areas—where everyone’s got a hair trigger and waiting to blow.

Men and women who’d worked all their lives stumbled along haggard and hunched, pulling themselves across the cracked concrete—just another day. Until one day, it’s all rendered to dust when they get clipped in a convenience store robbery—wrong place, wrong time. They all lived in a cesspit, a pool of crime and sin.

Like so many millions of others, the citizens of this town were just letting themselves get weathered away bit by bit until one morning they didn’t have to get up again. And then there were guys like Connor Doyle who seemed to have everything, who bought half the city, and pushed the price of rent to unsustainable levels.

The sloping hill gave way to a peak, and the flat gray horizon of Queens stretched out behind them. The dirty, wet kiss of the city planted right on their ass as they waved goodbye to the squalor and rolled on into the gentrified neighborhood of North Hills just as the sun was starting to set.

Chase saw the condo rising out of the tree-lined street, and her heart nearly burst with recognition. She had come here before in a daydream, but now it was time to set foot in reality.

 

Continue Reading Silent Witness