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  “The president-elect signals her support, too, Cecil.”

  More poison…

  Cecil King’s face grew as long as death.

  “But the current president is president until next January twentieth. And of course as we all know, he places security above everything else. Everything else. Which is why, Cecil, which is why…”

  Which is why Cecil King’s face was losing color, his latte-brown complexion giving way to a bilious morning-after-the-night-before green, the color of nausea, the color of hangovers and snakebites and paralyzing fears.

  The mayor took a deep breath and pushed forward to the heart of the matter. “The Secret Service is overextended, Cecil. Homeland Security got it up to their eyeballs, and Congress still hasn’t passed the Homeland budget. And the FBI, yes, I know they’ve got an investigatory mandate in this area, still they’re seriously shorthanded. Of course, the Pentagon would never get involved in domestic threats to civilians, even assassination threats, no matter how serious. And these threats on your life, Cecil, they’re getting damn serious, we all realize that. We take them as seriously as you do. Which is why, Cecil, which is why…”

  Which is why…a second shoe raised, poised to drop.

  “…the president is so regretful. But his hands are tied, you got to understand that. Whereas ours, Cecil, our hands…our best hands…are all right here in this room.”

  The mayor smiled, his fraternity-prexy, Hollywood-celeb, TV lights–brightest display of self-satisfaction.

  Senator-elect Cecil King looked about to vomit on the mayor’s shoes, maybe toss a cup of coffee in the mayor’s face, or perhaps give in to both impulses before stalking out of city hall and into his new life as the nation’s latest target of calls for patriotic assassinations, his life now denied federal protection before he took office on January first.

  “The feds,” the mayor explained, “simply can’t afford it, Cecil, bottom line. But we can, at least as far as we’re able to. Which is why, Cecil…”

  Which is why…a third shoe? The three-legged mayor was a virtuoso of suspense.

  “…which is why the commissioner and I are assigning the city’s best homicide experts…Lieutenant Ott and Sergeant Murphy here…to protect your life. To prevent a killing, not solve a killing ’cause there ain’t gonna be one. I’m convinced. Never on our watch. You’re in great hands here, Cecil. Congratulations.”

  Cecil King coughed before he spoke, a harsh sound, as if trying to bring up phlegm. His voice barely rose above a whisper. “I’m at a loss for words, Mayor. Thank you.” He let his face reveal all that went unspoken, a pained spectrum flashing anguish, disappointment, anger.

  The senator-elect turned to Flo Ott and Frank Murphy, his eyes shattered prisms. “I commend myself to your good hands.” He managed a weak smile, which was more than the two detectives could produce. Neither was able to muster so much as a thank-you.

  And neither saw any need to ask for further information. They received this announcement—the first assignment in their careers protecting the life of a Very Important Person—with less than enthusiasm.

  Nor were they especially flattered, knowing the senator-elect—their good man, the DA, the intrepid prosecutor who gave meaning to the best years of their careers in homicide investigations—was being thrown to the wolves by the president of the United States.

  And for understandable cause, at least from the president’s point of view. Cecil King ran in foursquare opposition to the president, casting the mayor as the president’s poodle, a flip-flop pol once a Democrat, then a Republican, now an independent, a punching bag surrogate long viewed, after years of riotous nonstop fiascos, as the worst mayor in New York history, a title confronting a great deal of tough competition. Cecil King hung the presidential gofer millstone around the mayor’s neck. The charge sheet of irrefutable calamities was long enough to indict, by proxy, the hapless, helpless mayor a dozen times over.

  Flo Ott sipped the city hall coffee, a stale and bitter brew. She was struggling with a meds-resistant autumn cold. Her eyes ached and her tongue felt as dry and rough as sandpaper. The mayor waited for her reply.

  She said, “To start with, please, Mr. Mayor, no public announcements. If we’re responsible for Cecil King’s life, we don’t want it public. The less potential assassins know, the better. Let them imagine an army protecting the senator. We won’t disabuse them. No leaks from our side.”

  “Absolutely no leaks from my ship,” the mayor said. “Guaranteed. You have my solemn word.”

  Which word, if prior performance was any indicator, Flo suspected to be worth about zero cents.

  “What about manpower?” she said. “Budget?”

  “Budget.” The mayor’s face fell like a failed soufflé. “It’s tight, Lieutenant, tighter than a clam’s ass. Commissioner, do what you can.”

  The commissioner stroked his twisted nose and nodded, his eyes expressionless, chin pugnacious, commitment unspecified.

  And Flo’s suspicions were confirmed. Thrown to the wolves. She and Frank Murphy and Senator-elect Cecil King were entirely on their own.

  Double-A Defense

  7:43 A.M.

  Riding back to Brooklyn Police HQ, homicide detective Lieutenant Flo Ott needed no further explanations.

  She dreaded the next eight weeks.

  Cecil King had exactly that much time left in Brooklyn before he was sworn in as New York State’s next junior senator. Another two months before the United States Capitol Police would assume responsibility for his life at a date well after the announced deadline for Cecil King’s targeted demise, touted only three days before by a crackpot outfit new that year to the American television news cycle, the Aryan-American Committee for Defense of Homeland, Family & the Sanctity of Motherhood. Motto: “Faith & Freedom.”

  “The traitor Cecil King will die before Christmas. We have our quiver full of arrows…”

  …die before Christmas.

  The threat, the promise, the sworn oath was making headlines in papers and magazines across the country, now a 24/7 story on the television news, a topic on radio shout shows, where the hotheads sounded more pro than con when debating the issue of selective patriotic assassination…“It’s the death penalty and every traitor deserves it. A patriot’s duty.”

  The Double-A Defense Committee, as the wannabe patriots quickly came to be known, was taken seriously, at least in some quarters, and as well they might be, whoever they were, having already assassinated a gay congressman and a lesbian Episcopal bishop, as well as killing gynecologists working for Planned Parenthood, three professors of evolutionary biology, one each at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and the president of the American Civil Liberties Union. All since the previous Christmas.

  All murders announced in advance.

  All unprevented, though preventable.

  And all the perps still unknown.

  …die before Christmas. Who exactly, Flo and many others asked, was the Aryan-American Committee for Defense of Homeland, Family & the Sanctity of Motherhood? Though well within the homeland, the Double-A Committee’s victims received protection no more effective than they would have enjoyed in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other war zone.

  For Flo Ott, however distasteful she may have found the mayor’s role as presidential toady and messenger boy, keeping Cecil King alive loomed as a far larger anxiety, as much a personal challenge as it was a professional duty she would never think of refusing.

  Frank Murphy saw the assignment similarly.

  Together, to stop an assassination, they’d bring almost thirty-five years of combined experience investigating homicides after the fact. The difficulty was that neither of them ever had to solve in advance a publicly announced, targeted assassination, political or otherwise. Murders, in their long experience, were committed either for commercial reasons—narcotics, failure to repay usurious loans, eliminating a crime competitor, robbery—or simply for neurotic satisfaction, often in family disputes or during sex cri
mes or, far too often, for the furious drink-driven, drug-driven hell of it.

  At first thought, the Double-A, to Flo’s mind, most closely resembled murderers who killed for the furious hell of it, except Double-A killers were permanently intoxicated not by drink or drugs, but by delusions. Unshakable believers in their own self-deceiving dogmas. Armed with information, money, and expertise, they could plan, publicize, and execute at will.

  Double-A Committee assassinations, as Flo saw it, were like all terrorist acts of violence, cruelties committed by people feeling intense humiliation, most often delusional, warped individuals suffering perceived impotency, for whom killing was a reassuring proof that somehow they counted, whether they were killers who were simply psychotic garden-variety wackos like John Lennon’s assassin, Ronald Reagan’s failed murderer—or ruthlessly fanatical men and women possessed by all-embracing coherent if grandiose visions, ignorant of doubts afflicting those unable to blind themselves to reality.

  And why not? So little discouraged killers like them. They could announce their victims in advance and count on applause from at least some quarters, and they were guaranteed attention. Possessed by dreams that justified sacrifice—the sacrifice of others—they were so far driven to murder with impunity for the Double-A Committee. They called themselves “a quiver full of arrows.” And God—they claimed—was their legitimate authority, ordering them to commit justified killings. And they were good at killing; they had either military training or a great deal of criminal expertise. They didn’t live in the same area as their victims, as they struck almost anywhere, which made them less likely to be thwarted by local law enforcement intelligence. By evading justice so far, and in spite of their YouTube videos, they existed in the shadows almost like ghosts, impossible to build a concrete picture of them as individuals despite the particularities of their victims. For Flo Ott and Frank Murphy, this was a kind of killer they hadn’t encountered before in Brooklyn. The best hit men, the ones who got away—and a third of New York homicides went permanently unsolved—were so adept that the death of their victims raised little or no suspicion of any specific killer and more often seemed to be simply the result of natural causes. The most successful killers didn’t broadcast themselves, much less publicly announce their targets in advance.

  The traitor Cecil King will die before Christmas…

  The target judged.

  His sentence passed.

  A timeline set.

  Only the killing field remained to be discovered.

  Victim ID

  7:47 A.M.

  Frank Murphy stayed busy on a cell phone call to Sergeant Marty Keane, the third member of their homicide team.

  Flo Ott sat in the backseat next to Senator-elect Cecil King.

  Frank turned around. “You all right back there?”

  “Yes,” Flo said. “Why?”

  “Just got a hit. Nothing to do with the Double-A Committee, Senator. But it’s near you, Flo. Some crazy perp right around the corner from where you live. Bashed a guy’s head in on Twelfth Street. You know the factory condos?”

  “Sure.”

  “In the courtyard, maybe four, five o’clock this morning. The body was discovered at five-thirty by a lady going early to work. A bond trader.”

  Flo said, “Senator, how about we drop you back at the office and meet you there later? A lot of people we got to talk to on Twelfth Street. And they’re going to be very pissed off. They all want to get to work. Not to mention what a bashed-in body does to their condo values.”

  “Who was he?” Cecil said.

  “Owen Smith,” said Frank. “Anyway, that’s his legal name. His business name was Ballz Busta. You know that rap guy in the Russian vodka ads? Him. A star. He lives, or lived, up the other end of Park Slope with his wife, three kids, and her mother. In a big brownstone on Montgomery Place. Servants, the works.”

  “What’s he doing on Twelfth Street?” Flo said.

  “One of his girlfriends, according to Marty. Busta kept her in an apartment he owned there in the factory condos. And now she’s going bananas. Better hang on. With the press all over this, the block will be crawling with jerks.”

  “In that case,” Cecil said, “I’ll definitely meet you back at the office.”

  A murder scene was no place where the new senator-elect relished being hounded by media.

  Crime Scene

  8:03 A.M.

  When Flo Ott and Frank Murphy reached Twelfth Street, they encountered a police cruiser blocking off the corner on Seventh Avenue.

  Farther up the block, two more cruisers were parked in front of the courtyard at the factory condo complex, as were two unmarked vehicles and a police ambulance.

  More than a dozen people were waiting in the courtyard, lined up alongside a police barricade of yellow crime-scene tape. All were building residents expecting to be questioned.

  Outside the courtyard entrance, a small crowd of curious neighbors gathered.

  A young man and a woman, both in hospital greens, leaned against the rear of the ambulance, the woman listening to an old iPod, the man smoking, his cigarette cupped against the wind. They appeared to be the only people uninterested in the courtyard events.

  A chalked outline inside the yellow tape marked the spot on the cobblestones where the victim’s body had fallen.

  Flo Ott and Frank Murphy walked through the entrance. They were joined by Marty Keane, the officer in charge at the crime scene. They approached the police doctor repacking his equipment.

  “At this point, I can’t really conclude much,” the doctor said. “Smashed skull, obviously, probably with one hard blow. Steel or iron or a lead-lined weapon. On the victim’s fur coat, I guess it’s his blood where the weapon might have been cleaned off.”

  “The ambulance leaving now?” Flo said.

  “Up to you people.”

  “Sure,” Marty said. “We made a good sweep of the yard before everyone came down. Nothing so far.”

  The doctor turned to leave. “See you at the lab, Flo.”

  Flo turned to Marty Keane. “Who’s on your line here?”

  “Apartment owners. People who live on this side of the building. We’re letting them out, one by one, after a few questions. No witnesses so far. We got two patrolmen knocking on all the doors across the street. And the girlfriend is still up in her apartment. Climbing the walls. She’s not going anywhere yet.”

  Flo examined the faces of the worried and impatient people waiting alongside the police barricade in the courtyard. Although a lifelong resident of this south end of Park Slope, she recognized no one. The neighborhood was always filling up with new people.

  “That one with the dog has been griping,” Marty said, indicating a woman in the line.

  “I’ll talk to her,” said Flo.

  8:15 A.M.

  The griper was short and late middle-aged, a woman bristling with indignation and focusing a mean-eyed assessor’s squint on Flo as the detective approached her.

  The tight lines around the woman’s mouth and eyes appeared to indicate permanent personal umbrage, an impression reinforced by her steel-gray crew cut, which stuck up as stiff as a Brillo pad. The put-upon woman was lecturing a young couple behind her in the line, apparently sharing her opinion of another tenant…“Brains get taxed, that slut he lived with gets a refund. Any dumber and you’d have to water her twice a day…”

  Cowed into listening, the couple looked too fearful to reply, a captive audience with nowhere to run. Their lecturer was accompanied by her panting brute, a Doberman on a choker-chain leash.

  “A filthy tramp, believe me.” The woman thumped the young man’s chest with a day-old copy of the Times, New Yorkers’ favorite doggie pooper-scooper. “Six o’clock they wake me up, banging on her door and then raising all hell out here.”

  The angry woman repeated her outburst for homicide detective Flo Ott. “Lookit, Officer, this is outrageous keeping us in the yard lined up like a bunch of Nazi prisoners. It’s col
d out here, you know that?”

  “Your name?” Flo said, showing the woman her police shield.

  “I’m Marjorie Mary Hopkins.”

  “We’ve only got a few questions.”

  “So?” In one word, Marjorie Mary Hopkins’s voice managed to convey her extreme displeasure at this singular moment of human contact and her intense disapproval of the entire world.

  “Ms. Hopkins, this morning, at around four, four-thirty—”

  “I was asleep, ferchrissakes. What do I look like, a night owl? Somebody’s bimbo? We got several of that type living here. Go bother them. They sleep all day, they’re out all night. They ought to know something, whatever it is you’re looking for—”

  “We’re wondering if you heard any unusual noises, that’s all, if anything woke you up.”

  “You cops woke me up. Hell happened anyway?” Her voice quivered with anxiety.

  “Someone was murdered, right here in this courtyard.”

  “And no cops? You’re needed and where the hell are you people? Kids get killed every day in this town and all you cops ever do is give tickets.”

  “Those are traffic police, not criminal,” Flo said, as angry with Marjorie Mary Hopkins as she was with herself for spending time with this creep. “You know, Ms. Hopkins, bad drivers kill more people in a year—”

  “Just jaywalkers. I could’ve been goddamn murdered. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, right here on my own private property. Thank goodness I got a Doberman. That’s what I’m thinking now, you know—Me next. They could’ve killed me, all this protection we’re paying for and that we never get.”

  “All we’re asking, Ms. Hopkins—”

  “All I’m saying is you won’t get away with this. I’m complaining to the mayor. Directly. I’ll get a lawyer. I’m suing the city. First, the tramp next door, that stinking slut and her riffraff, and now the cops driving me crazy? I never expected it, spending a million and a half on my place, and that’s what, four, five years ago now. And today it’s got to be way over two. At that price, you’re entitled to a little peace and quiet, so help me God, even in Brooklyn.”