Chapter 1.
It was a bitterly cold November night in New York City. At this late hour, the streets were fairly quiet by New York standards, the cold and dark keeping people inside, and causing those who were outside to hurry as fast as they could to someplace warm. The people on the street hurried along, bundled up in thick coats, their heads covered in hats and the lower portion of their faces covered by scarves.
Jenna Malone was closing up the diner where she worked. Her thoughts were on her children, Todd and Katie. Todd would already be on his way home from Iraq. She couldn't wait to see him. She worried about him so much when he was over there, with all those horrible IED things she was always hearing about on the news. She hoped little Katie was asleep, and hadn't talked old Mrs Weiss into letting her stay up late again. A few muffins hadn't been sold, and Salvatore, the owner of the diner, had insisted she take them home for Katie, who was like a granddaughter to the old man.
Suddenly, the door opened. Jenna looked up, to inform the customer that the diner was closed, but the words froze on her lips as she saw the figure in the doorway. He was slim and stood about five foot five. His hands were white. She couldn't see his face because it was covered by a balaclava. What she could see, all too clearly, was the black gun in his hand.
The figure moved into the diner, and stood about a foot away from the counter.
'Gimme the money, bitch,' he said. His voice shocked Jenna, he sounded so young she thought.
Jenna opened the till and took out the money. Salvatore had told all his staff to always just hand over the money in a situation like this, saying he'd rather lose a day's takings than a member of put the money, about $150, on the counter.
'Where the fuck is the rest of it?' screamed the robber.
'I...there isn't any more.'
'You're lying!' he yelled, and he pulled the trigger on the gun.
Jenna Malone's last thoughts were of her children.
Todd. Katie. Oh, my babies. I'm sorry...so sorry.
Mac was awake when the call came in just before 5am. He had been awake for a couple of hours, having jerked awake, sweating, from a nightmare. He had showered and made himself coffee, and was looking over some case files he'd brought home. Focusing on the boring but necessary paperwork helped him push the images of his nightmare to the furtherest possible reaches of his mind, where it was almost possible to ignore them. Images of Sgt. Lucas, of the blood staining his desert cammies, of the absolute terror in the man's voice as he screamed. Of the man's steel blue eyes fixed on his as Mac, virtually unaware of his own injuries, knelt over him in the back of the helicopter as it lifted off. Their Navy corpsman, Simmons, was already dead, his lifeless body lying next to Lucas. Mac's uniform was stained with his own blood and that of Lucas, who he had dragged to the helicopter while the remainder of his team returned fire with their ambushers. Mac had been hit sometime between getting to Lucas and getting back to the others, or so they told him later, all he remembered was falling to the ground as he felt something impact his body, then dragging himself up and continuing to drag Lucas to safety.
'Captain Taylor, sir, you're hurt, sir. You should...'
'Goddamn it, Corporal Weaver, not now. Help me with Lucas first, he's not gonna die. You hear that, Lucas, you're not going to die, do you get that?' Mac was dimly aware of Weaver beside him, trying to stem the bleeding from Lucas's abdominal wound while Mac tried to stop the wound in the man's chest. He had no idea how much time passed when Weaver said, softly, his voice breaking,
'He's dead, sir. Lucas is dead.'
'No...fucking no...' Mac barely whispered.
The dream always ended there. Mac had jerked awake in the darkness of his room, and as always, in that moment, missed Claire with a piercing desperation and sense of loneliness, as intense as that of the time immediately after her death. He missed how, when he awoke from the nightmare, she would gently ease him back down to the bed, pulling his head to her chest and stroking his hair with one hand while holding him close to her with her other arm. She never spoke in those moments, never asked him what the dream was about, she was just there, silently offering him comfort and love, and he would close his eyes and let the tension and fear drain from his body as she held him. Now she was gone, he could only get up and try to lose himself in work, to try and stave off the memories of the nightmare, and of her.
When his cell rang, it took Mac's tired, paperwork-befuddled mind a second or two to place the sound. He answered it.
'Taylor.'
'Mac, it's Jo. We've got a case. Female vic, late forties. Gunshot.'
Mac closed his eyes briefly.
'Where?' he said.
'Queens, Maspeth, Salvatore's Diner,' said Jo, and gave him the address. 'Don and I are headed to the scene now.'
'I'll be there soon,' Mac said.
He hung up, changed quickly from the ancient Marines t-shirt and black boxers he wore to bed into his work clothes, got his gun, and headed out the door. He wondered what further depravities of humanity this case would reveal. A woman in her forties could have a husband or partner, maybe even children. People to whom Mac would. yet again, break the worst news it was possible to receive. People whose lives would be changed forever by a single act of violence. Mac sighed as he climbed into his truck. He felt an all too familiar weariness settle on his shoulders as he headed for the crime scene.
As Mac ducked under the yellow crime scene tape, he felt the bitter cold bite through his latex gloves, freezing his fingers, felt the icy blast of the wind nip at his cheeks and the tips of his ears.
For a moment, the sensation took him back to his childhood in Chicago, playing football with his friends in the street, not wearing gloves because that was the cool thing to do, his fingers frozen as he waited for the ball, his breath puffing out like smoke, running and skidding and falling with his friends, their laughter loud in the cold air.
As he entered the diner, the happy memory faded to be replaced by all too familiar feelings of sadness and anger. Behind the counter lay the body of a woman Mac estimated to be in her mid-forties, wearing a blue uniform blouse over jeans. The blouse was saturated with blood. The woman's blue eyes were open and staring. Lindsay was taking pictures of the body while Danny dusted for prints. Flack was accompanying a man Mac placed somewhere in his sixties out of the diner. The man's horrified eyes met Mac's.
'Someone killed her. There is no money in till. I think it was a robbery. But there was only $150 dollars in till. Who would kill someone over that? I always say to my staff, if a robber comes, give them the money. Just give it. So why would they shoot her? Why?'
He kept repeating the question as Flack guided him out of the door. Mac wondered the same thing. Was this just a robbery? If it was, why kill the woman after she'd handed tge contents of the till over?
He walked over to the body, where Jo was, and crouched beside her.
'44 year old female, her name was Jenna Malone. She closed up here last night. Salvatore, the guy Flack was taking out? He owns the diner. Says he last saw her at midnight when he left. That's all we could get out of him for now.' Jo said.
'Gunshot wound to the chest,' Mac noted, 'From the amount of damage and blood, our shooter would have been, what, 2 to 3 feet away?'
Jo nodded.
'Till was open, which suggests robbery,' she said, 'Our killer dropped this.'
She held up a plastic evidence bag with a $20 bill inside. The bill was spotted with blood spatter and Mac saw the partial imprint of a shoe on it.
'Partial shoe imprint,' he said, 'Maybe we'll get a match.'
Jo nodded.
The ME van arrived and the woman's body was covered and taken away. Mac felt an indescribable sadness as he watched the procedure. When this woman had started her day, she'd had no idea it would end like this. A woman her age might well have a husband or partner, and kids. People Mac would have to break the worst possible news to.
'Do we have any further information on our vic?' he asked.
'We found her handbag in her locker out back,' Jo said, gesturing to some evidence bags laid nearby.
'Anything to give us more idea of who she was?' Mac asked.
'Regular woman stuff, make up, a hairbrush, keys, old bus tickets and a Metro Card. A book. And this, in her purse. It gets worse, Mac.'
Thinking of the dead woman, of her frozen eyes, of her carefully ironed uniform blouse covered in blood, of the lousy $150 dollars that seemed to be the motive for the crime, of the utter waste and sadness of it all, Mac wondered how it could possibly get worse. Jo handed him a photograph in a clear plastic evidence bag, and Mac felt the grief and fury hit him again, seem to rise from the pit of his stomach up his throat like bile. He took a harsh breath.
The photo showed the woman, smiling broadly, standing next to a young man in his early twenties, in a Marine uniform, lieutenant's bars gleaming. In front of the young Marine, with his hands on her shoulders, stood a smiling girl, with big blue eyes and a dark mess of hair who looked about five or six years old. Flipping the photo over, Mac saw written on the back 'Todd, Katie and me.'
The picture was dated 2008, three years ago, which would put the young Marine somewhere in his mid-twenties, and the girl at maybe eight or nine years old.
Somewhere out there, in the early morning darkness of the winter-bound city, two children were not even yet aware that they had suffered an unimaginable loss.
Mac closed his eyes briefly, as sorrow washed over him. It was moments like this when he truly struggled to cope with the sheer pointless brutality of the world.
'Mac?' Jo asked, concern in her voice.
Letting out a slow breath, Mac pushed the sorrow away into the darker recesses of his mind. He felt no hot fury now, that he pushed away for later. Now, he felt only a hard, cold, determination. He opened his eyes and met Jo's.
'We're going to find the bastard who did this, Jo.'
Jo read the look on Mac's face. She saw how he had controlled, if only for a while, the intense emotions the scene inevitably evoked, and how he'd used some of that emotion to fuel that now calm, yet utterly deadly, determination she saw in his eyes and heard in his voice. She felt a similar determination rise in her, allowing her to push away the anger and grief that had been throbbing through her ever since she arrived at the scene.
'Damn straight,' she said.