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  “Lips here tells me you pretty good with a gun,” Magoo said, looking over his shoulder. “Took out one of his boys before he could even blink. That true?”

  “Pays to advertise,” Dead-Eye said.

  Magoo stopped, bringing the entire caravan to a halt. He turned to face Dead-Eye.

  “I ain’t too bad myself,” Magoo said. “In case you was wonderin’.”

  “I wasn’t,” Dead-Eye said.

  They stood before the entrance to a large housing complex. The benches around them were filled with sleeping homeless and users eyeing their next score. The few patches of grass at their feet were littered with bottles, used condoms, and split needles.

  “What sort of piece you carryin’?” Magoo asked Dead-Eye.

  “Askin’ to buy?” Dead-Eye answered with a smile. “If you are, it’s gonna cost you.”

  “I ain’t askin’,” Magoo said.

  Dead-Eye heard one of the leather coats to his left click a chamber into a semi. He looked over at the Spanish man, who smiled back at him and shrugged his shoulders.

  Dead-Eye unzipped his pea-green army surplus and reached into a side pocket. Magoo put a hand on top of his arm.

  “Do it slow,” Magoo said.

  Dead-Eye nodded and pulled out a semiautomatic, showing it to Magoo.

  “Release the clip,” Magoo said, looking at Dead-Eye and not the gun.

  “You ever do anything for yourself?” Dead-Eye asked, staring back, letting the silver cylinder slide from the gun to his cupped palm.

  “Only what I need to,” Magoo said, turning away.

  • • •

  THEY MOVED AS one, past a flurry of curious eyes. One of the leather coats held the heavy green door to unit number six open with one hand. The other stayed in his pocket, cradling a cocked gun.

  Dead-Eye walked with his head bowed, mind racing. He had just made the biggest mistake an undercover could make—he had trusted a marked man. He had bet his life that the Spanish man feared him more than he did Magoo. Moving down the urine-stenched hallway of the project, Dead-Eye knew he had wagered wrong. Worse, he had told no one about his meeting, stubborn in his belief that he could bring Magoo down alone.

  Now he had less than five minutes to figure out a way to save his life.

  “You ever seen my place?” Magoo asked, the group stopped in front of the double doors of the elevator.

  “Don’t think so,” Dead-Eye said, scanning the faces of the men he was up against.

  Except for the Spanish man, they were heavily armed and, considering the odds, confident enough to take him out at close range. Dead-Eye was down to one gun, a 9-millimeter Hauser, jammed in the back of his jeans. It might be good enough to drop two, maybe three. But in a large space, like Magoo’s apartment, Dead-Eye had no chance. Too open, too vulnerable. It left him with only one choice, one place to make his move.

  The elevator doors creaked open. The group got in and turned forward, one of the leather coats pressing the button for the fourth floor. Squeezed into the four-by-five space, they watched the doors close, then trained their eyes on the numbers above. The only light was a forty-watt bulb wrapped inside an iron basket.

  Dead-Eye had inched his right arm out of his coat pocket and moved it to where his hand could feel the handle of the Hauser. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and was ready.

  “These things are so fuckin’ slow,” the Spanish man said, watching the number move from one to two. “Be faster if we walked it.”

  “Healthier too,” Dead-Eye said, a smile on his face now.

  “What’s the rush?” Magoo said, looking over at the Spanish man and giving him a wink. “We got ourselves all night.”

  The elevator eased its way slowly from two to three.

  “I can’t stay that long,” Dead-Eye said. “I made some plans.”

  “Such as?” Magoo asked, still looking up at the numbers.

  Dead-Eye came out with his Hauser, coat slipping off his shoulder, and put one into the back of Magoo’s head. He then aimed up and shot out the forty-watt bulb, plunging the elevator into pitch darkness. Within a fraction of a second, all guns were drawn and fired, sparks setting off steady flashes of light. The noise was deafening, screams and shouts as loud as the steady fusilage.

  It lasted less than thirty seconds.

  More than sixty rounds were exchanged.

  • • •

  THE DOOR TO the fourth floor slowly slid open. An old woman pulling a shopping cart stood by the entrance, a look of horror across her face. The light from the hallway entered the elevator with a sudden jolt. Blood dripped down the sides of the walls. Magoo’s body slumped forward and fell onto the hallway floor. Two of the leather coats were piled on top of one another in a corner of the elevator. The other two lay wounded on the ground.

  The Spanish man had taken three in the chest, yet stood with his back against the elevator buttons, a sly smile still on his face.

  Dead-Eye was against the far wall of the elevator, facing the old woman. He was shot in the leg, chest, and both arms. His empty gun was still in his hand, blood pouring down his fingers. His face was splattered with other men’s blood, thick enough to blur his vision. The pain was so intense, he could barely speak. He knew he couldn’t move.

  “My God!” the old woman said, shaking where she stood.

  “Maybe you should wait for the next one,” Dead-Eye said to her, trying to manage a smile.

  “I’ll call the police,” she said through quivering lips.

  “Doctor be better,” Dead-Eye whispered.

  Dead-Eye fell to his knees and tossed the empty gun to the side, watching it land in a large circle of thick blood. He rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes, waiting for whatever help would arrive.

  Dead-Eye wasn’t in any rush. Not anymore.

  It was March 8, 1981.

  His last day as a cop.

  3

  Mrs. Columbo

  MARY SILVESTRI STARED at her husband across the kitchen table. He had his head down, forking apart a chicken leg, trying to avoid another night of arguing. Their fourteen-year-old son, Frank, sat between them, immune to his parents’ squabbles.

  “Are you going to answer me or not, Joe?” Mary asked with an edge she usually reserved for work.

  “Can we give it a rest?” Joe looked up from his plate. “One night. That’s all I ask. One night when we don’t have to talk about it.”

  “I need to talk about it,” Mary said, hands resting flat on the pine surface. “And I need to talk about it now.”

  “You always need to talk about somethin’ now,” Joe Silvestri said, pushing his chair back and folding his arms across his chest. “You ask your questions and then you want your answers. And you don’t ask them like a wife or a mother. You ask them like a cop. You treat me and Frankie like we’re two suspects. Well, not tonight, Detective. You want any answers outta me, you’re gonna have to arrest me.”

  Joe Silvestri walked out of the kitchen, turning his back on his wife and son, and grabbed a jacket from a hook in the mud room. He slammed the door behind him.

  Frank looked over at his mother and managed a meager smile, fork poised against the side of his plate.

  “It’s like an episode of The Honeymooners in here every night,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Keep your facts straight, honey,” Mary said, taking a long sip from a can of Dr. Brown’s cream soda. “Ralph and Alice didn’t have a kid.”

  Frank stood up, walked over to his mother, and kissed the top of her head. He took a step back, looked down at the .38-caliber revolver in her hip holster, and smiled.

  “Alice didn’t pack heat either,” Frank said, leaving the kitchen for the sanctuary of the den.

  Mary Silvestri watched her son disappear around the corner. She rested her soda on a napkin and lit a Kool.

  “Alice should’ve had a gun,” she whispered to herself, clutching the cigarette between her teeth. “She would
’ve shot him dead for damn sure.”

  • • •

  MARY SILVESTRI WAS thirty-six years old and for a dozen of those years had been a member of the New York Police Department. As a rookie, she’d started working out of the Ozone Park section of Queens, moved to Brooklyn and plainclothes, and from there to her true calling, a homicide unit in the Wakefield section of the Bronx.

  She had an affinity for the death detail and, each year, her conviction rate placed her in the top tier of detectives across the five boroughs. She never tossed a folder into the unsolved pile. The fewer the clues, the less the logic behind each murder, the more fascinated Mary Silvestri became.

  She exploited her talents.

  Silvestri studied forensics at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice and then spent three months working alongside the chief medical examiner, trying to understand what he looked for at a crime scene, what crucial information could be picked up from a cold body. She took courses in abnormal psychology at Queens College, wanting to know as much about the killer as she would end up knowing about the deceased. In her free time, Mary Silvestri read mystery novels and true crime accounts of sensational cases. She made ample use of all the available technology and was one of the few NYPD detectives familiar with the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, then in its infancy. VICAP, when effective, searched for patterns among at-large serial killers and would then draw up psychological profiles. Most street cops scoffed at such notions. Mary Silvestri used one profile to capture a car salesman on Tremont Avenue who had razor-slashed to death four teenage prostitutes.

  Mary was an attractive woman but paid little attention to keeping up her appearance. She was tall, close to five-ten on the few occasions she wore pumps, and svelte despite a steady cop diet of pizza, deli, and coffee. Her long red hair was often unruly and hastily brushed, held in place most mornings with clips. She dressed in a nondescript mix of L. L. Bean outdoor and S. Klein’s indoor, favoring short skirts and sneakers, blouses open at the collar. She seldom carried her gun and always had a pack of saltines in her purse.

  The homicide cops in her detail, all of them male, took delight in her flakiness. When Mary worked a case, she was so focused, so zeroed in on the most minute aspects of the murder, she would forget everything and everyone around her. The more disheveled she grew, the more foglike she walked around the office, the closer, they knew, she was to cracking the case.

  Homicide detectives see themselves as elite members of the department. They carry themselves with confidence and arrogance. Many wear their motto on a T-shirt under their shirts and sweaters. The shirt has a chalk outline of a dead body. Above the sketch are the words OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS. HOMICIDE.

  Among such a group, Silvestri was considered the best, and her skill earned her the street name “Mrs. Columbo,” the female version of the rumpled TV detective.

  Mary was the badge others turned to when the case seemed beyond solving. She was also the one that other detectives trusted the most in the interrogation room. She could crack a suspect in less time than it took to play a regulation hockey game. Once again, she used everything at her disposal—from sex appeal to physical force—to break down the man in the bare-back chair. She never came out of that cold room without a tired look and a signed confession.

  The only thing Mary Silvestri wasn’t good at was marriage.

  She hated housework and cooking and had little patience for family gatherings. She had no siblings and both her parents were dead. Her husband was a mechanic who owned two Bronx Mobil gas stations and from day one groused about not having a stay-at-home wife. It was a lament encouraged by her in-laws, none of whom ever resigned themselves to having a cop in the family—let alone a female cop.

  Mary loved her son and would sometimes take him out of school and bring him on the job with her, sitting surveillance in unmarked sedans. It was her version of bonding, and Frank ate up every minute.

  “You want me to be a cop?” Frank asked one day as her police car sat in a Taco Bell lot.

  “Not unless you want to be,” Mary said between bites.

  “Then why bring me along?” Frank asked.

  Mary looked out the window, took a sip of coffee, then turned to her son. “So you understand what I do,” she said. “And maybe why I am the way I am.”

  “When are you and Dad gonna get a divorce?”

  Mary was surprised at the question. “Who says we are?”

  “Somehow I don’t think I have to worry about throwin’ a surprise fiftieth anniversary party,” Frank said, finishing off a chicken burrito.

  “We were kids when we married,” Mary said. “Too stupid to know better. I finished high school and he pumped gas. I went to the Academy and he pumped gas. I was pregnant with you and there he was, still pumping gas.

  “And this is better?” Frank asked. “Sitting in cold cars, waiting for some guy to make a mistake?”

  “For me it is,” Mary said. “Putting cuffs on a guy that iced somebody who should still be alive beats a ten-dollar fill-up in my book.”

  “Dad likes what he does,” Frank said. “He’s good at it.”

  “I like what I do,” Mary said. “And I’m good at it.”

  “You still love him?”

  “In my own way,” Mary said. “I do. It’s just that my own way may not be good enough for him anymore. If it ever was.”

  “Would you be happier married to a cop?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Mary smiled at her son. “They’re good to have around at work, but a waste of time otherwise. Just like me. Given a choice, I’d stick with the guy pumping gas.”

  “That’s good, Mom,” Frank said, smiling back.

  “And speaking of gas,” Mary said, holding her stomach, “why the hell do you always make me eat these damn tacos?”

  “Don’t forget,” Frank said. “You’re the one went in there once and asked for their recipe.”

  “Had to flash my badge to get it too,” Mary said with a full laugh.

  • • •

  THE BODY OF the thirty-two-year-old bookkeeper had been hanging from a closet door for three days. The skin on his face was ash white, his limbs were stiff, eyes open and bulging. His feet had been cut off at the ankles and tossed on top of a nearby bed. There were puncture wounds, large and small, up and down the front and back of the seminude corpse. His hands were tied behind his back, held together by black leather straps, and his throat was slashed. Rats had feasted on the remains and maggots were starting to fester.

  “Did a knife do that to the throat, Doc?” Silvestri asked the M.E. on the scene.

  “Worse,” the medical examiner said in a weary voice. He was short, bald, and looked older than his forty-eight years. Three years on a job that averaged close to two thousand homicides a year, and he was already looking for the fastest way out.

  “What’s worse, Jerry?” Mary asked.

  “Corkscrew,” the doctor said. “Same one that was used to open the bottle of wine over on the bureau.”

  “How long’s something like that take?” Tony Russo, Mary’s partner on the case, asked.

  “As long as the killer wants it to,” the doctor said with a shrug, walking with head bowed away from the crime scene.

  “You wanna get some coffee?” Russo asked Mary. He watched as the forensic team went about their business of taking photos, dusting for prints, bagging evidence, sealing up the cramped one-bedroom second-floor apartment that overlooked the Bronx River Parkway.

  “You have to really enjoy killing to end a life like that,” Mary said, eyes focused on the young man hanging from the closet door. “How else do you explain it?”

  “You can’t,” Russo said. “Not until we have ourselves a cup of coffee. And maybe a sweet roll.”

  • • •

  THE BOOKKEEPER, JAMIE Sinclair, was single and unemployed. He had held one job over the last two years, working freelance on and off for a Manhattan firm specializing in TV commercials. He ran t
hree miles a day, and, when he did work, attended an aerobics class four nights a week. He had a brother who lived in Jackson Heights and worked for the city in the marriage license bureau. His mother died in 1980 after a long battle with a brain disorder, and his father shared a two-bedroom Co-op City apartment with a twice-divorced mother of two. In a life that had spanned thirty-two years, there wasn’t much else for Silvestri and Russo to go on. There were no known girlfriends or boyfriends. There were few friends of any kind. All indications were that Jamie Sinclair preferred to spend his time alone.

  Except on the night he died.

  “Uniform on the scene saw no sign of a break-in,” Russo said, taking a huge bite from an apple turnover. “Whoever sliced and diced him was let in.”

  “Or was already there when Sinclair came home,” Mary said, hands wrapped around a container of black coffee.

  “Either way, the victim knew the perp,” Russo said.

  The detectives looked down the street, neat row houses mingling with three-story apartment buildings. Two blocks up, the el rumbled over White Plains Road. A squad car blocked off traffic access, and yellow crime-scene tape was spread across the front of the murder building. Onlookers stared from stoops and the tops of parked cars.

  “Where you wanna start?” Russo asked her, finishing off the turnover.

  “Let uniform do the first pass around the neighborhood,” Mary said. “We’ll follow up later. Let them look for the usual. Make sure they ask about anyone not from the area hanging around. Especially these past couple of days and especially if it’s a woman.”

  “You kiddin’ me?” Russo put one hand on Mary’s elbow. “You know somethin’ already? You were up there only, what, ten minutes.”

  “Relax, Sweet Tooth,” Mary said, pulling her arm away. “When I know, you’ll know.”

  “Tell you one thing, Mrs. Columbo,” Russo said. “I hang around you, I’ll be a captain before I lose my hair.”

  Mary looked at Russo’s thin strands of dark hair rising in the mild spring wind. “Then we better work fast,” she said.