Daughter of the Flames

Ah, well, whatcha gonna do?

Izzy had on work clothes: black wool trousers, a gray turtleneck sweater and a black jacket. Her black leather gloves were stuffed in her jacket pocket. New York at this time of year was dark clothes and darker skies. Izzy knew she looked pale, with deep smudges under her eyes. Her father and brother both had said something about her appearance, fretting over her as they’d walked three abreast through the snow to the church.

There was one other parishioner, an elderly lady sitting six pews back, all alone. Izzy had seen her a few times before. Daily morning Mass was always sparsely attended; Catholics were just as stressed out and overscheduled as anybody, trying to make a living and get the kids to soccer. Even Mass on Saturday night or Sunday morning was hard to fit in—the congregation had been steadily dwindling for years, with few new parishioners—newcomers to the neighborhood, babies—filling the pews.

It was six-thirty in the morning and chilly in St. Theresa’s, the little stone parish church three blocks from their row house, on Refugio Avenue. The lacquered pews smelled of lemon oil and the dim room flickered with light from four clear-glass votives among the three dozen or so unlit ones arranged before the statue of the Virgin. The DeMarco family had lit three of them.

It was the time in the Mass for the Prayers of the Faithful, when parishioners could petition for prayers for their special needs and concerns. Izzy cleared her throat and said, “For the repose of my mother’s soul, Anna Maria DeMarco, I pray to the Lord.”

All present responded, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

Ma, I miss you, Izzy thought, as her father sighed.

Then something shifted in the frosty air. The room sank into a deep gloom; the light from the leaded-glass windows angled in like the dull sheen of gunmetal. As she gazed upward, the arched stone ceiling seemed to sink. The sweet, young face of the Virgin became blurry and hard to see, and the votive candles at her feet flickered as if viewed through murky water.

Izzy glanced left, right, behind herself, trying to figure out what was creating the disorienting effect.

The other worshippers seemed not to notice that anything had happened. The priest continued with the Mass. In the back of the church, the elderly woman’s head was bowed in prayer. Gino and Big Vince were praying, as well.

“Izzy?” Big Vince whispered as she shifted again. He opened his eyes and gazed at her.

Maybe it was her mood. Her spirits were low and she hadn’t slept.

She shook her head and placed her hand over his to reassure him that nothing was wrong. Her mother’s black-onyx rosary was threaded through his large fingers and the smooth beads rolled across her palm.

“It’s nothing,” she whispered back. “I’m just tired.”

Then she jerked as a hand molded cold fingers along the small of her back. The frisson swept up her spine, cat’s-paw creeping, something ready to pounce….

Anxiously she glanced behind herself again.

Her father frowned, clearly puzzled. She shook her head and pressed her hands together in prayer.

I’m fine, she told herself. But she was beginning to wonder if she was losing her mind.

“Iz?” Gino said. He raised his brows. “You bored?”

“Shut up.” Brother-sister interactions; some things never changed.

Mass ended. The DeMarcos took the Five, riding the subway as a trio until Grand Central, where they got out.

“Well, I’m off to save the damned,” Gino said cheerfully.

With a big hug and a kiss for both of them, he raced off to catch his train to New Haven. Izzy and Big Vince transferred to the Six.

There were no seats in the rush-hour crowd, so Big Vince and Izzy stood. He was quiet and reflective as they watched a woman with curly dark hair knit a pretty fuchsia sweater. “A decade. Hard to believe.”

She nodded.

“I see an elevated white blood cell count on the streets today, I’m shooting it,” he declared. “Screw Internal Affairs.”

They both smiled grimly at his dark humor. Izzy saw the anger behind it, and the despair. She wondered if her father ever sensed a cold hand against his backbone. Maybe it was Death tapping her on the shoulder, reminding her that no one lived forever.

And could I be any more morose?

At the 103rd Street stop, they got off and joined the crowd going up to ground level. The noise and traffic of the day were in full force; commuters rushed everywhere and car horns blared. Bicycle messengers rang their bells.

Walking briskly together, they headed toward her Starbucks. He said, “You asking that man over tonight?”

She hesitated. “It’s Ma’s day—”

He waved his hand. “We talked about this, Iz. It’s fine. So?”

“Okay,” she replied. Then, “You know his name is Pat.”

“What a name for a man.” He rolled his eyes. “Well, whatcha gonna do?”

“I’ma gonna invite him,” she said, giving him a lopsided smile.

He kissed her forehead. “I love you, baby,” he said, and trotted off to the station house, which was located on 102nd Street between Lexington and Third, while she went to fetch her coffee drink.

Twelve minutes later, heavily fortified with a venti latte with an espresso shot, she made certain her work badge was visible as she walked through the station house, answering all “good mornings” as she sailed down the hall toward the elevator. The switchboard—actually a pair of push-button phones—chimed incessantly; the patrol officers’ utility belts and leather shoes squeaked; doors slammed opened, slammed shut.

Captain Clancy was in; her frosted-glass door was half-open and Izzy heard her talking on the phone, although she couldn’t make out the individual words. Detective Attebury hurried past Izzy, giving her a wave as he talked on his cell.

At the end of the hall, in front of the elevator, she swiped the first of three IDs necessary to admit her into her subterranean domain: the Twenty-Seventh Precinct Property Room. Like most NYPD Prop rooms, the Two-Seven’s was located in the basement of the building, which had seen better days. It used to depress her; down in the bowels and away from the action, she felt as if she were buried alive. But now that she had a plan to get up and out, she felt a growing nostalgia for the familiar odors of dirt and old, musty furniture.

The elevator dinged and let her out. She walked the short distance to what looked like the reception area of a doctor’s office and tried the door. It was locked, and she didn’t see Yolanda in the cage beyond it—she had probably secured the door to use the restroom—so Izzy punched the code in the keypad beside it. It clicked open and she left it open as she walked through the area. Once she was in the Prop cage, it was all right to leave the reception door unsecured.

She glanced around to make sure everything was in order. On the wall beside the sofa, the damaged bookcase still sat; the pale orange silk flowers on the coffee table needed dusting. The aging linoleum floor smelled of lemon polish and decades of grime that couldn’t be cleaned away. She glanced through the slide-open window into the Prop cage itself. It was deserted, but someone was always on duty in Property, 24/7, unless there was a lockdown. That happened twice a month at most.

She coded in the Prop room lock and swiped her badge. The metal door clicked and she pushed her way in. The warning buzz vied with the zing of the overhead fluorescents for most annoying sound of the day.

The Property cage looked just like that—a cage, ringed with diamond-mesh lockers of various sizes, one by one by one up to longer sizes to accommodate rifles and shotguns. Metal chart holders like those on the doors of medical doctors’ examination rooms held the paperwork for the property in each locker. The individual three-by-five cards told the story of the chain of custody for each item, through a series of tags with bar codes, signatures and a rainbow of tapes. Each individual who received the evidence, from collection to storage, had their own rolls of identifying tape. Prop’s evidence tape was candy cane. After a few months on the job, Prop personnel could tell at a glance who had custody of what, and when.

Each person who worked in Prop had their own territory consisting of various lockers and they—and no one else in Prop—had a set of keys to their set. Izzy’s were all over the place, mingled in with those who had come through Prop and moved on to something else. Aside from two retired police officers—Joe Fletcher and Steve Jones—everyone else, like Izzy, was a civilian who had two years of college and had completed the ninth-month internship program.

The Dread Machine—their computer—hummed along. The radio beside it was playing banda music—Yolanda Sanchez’s choice—and Izzy turned it down low. She still needed a little time to get her work groove on.

Beside the radio was a yellow stickie from Yolanda. “Morning, Izzy, in the ladies’.”

She set down her latte and logged in on the computer. She took a brief tour of the cage—both online and visual—to see what had gone on over the weekend and during Yolanda’s graveyard shift. Lots of newly filled lockers. Business had been brisk.

She flipped open the logbook, the cover of which was plastered with Yankees stickers—the guys, a couple of Marc Anthony stickers—Yolanda and a Holy Apostles sticker from Gino. There, on the two-foot-long sheets of security paper printed with thermochromatic ink, were Yolanda’s careful notations and the UPC codes she had generated.

Less than a minute later her first pissed-off customer of the day was blustering at her. He would not be the last, because she did her job well.

“This is ridiculous,” Nick Nelson flung at her. He was tall and muscular, and very photogenic. “You are obstructing justice.”

“This is procedure,” she shot back. “You filled out my form wrong. Fill it out right, and you get your evidence.”

Nelson scowled at her as if he wanted to reach through the reception window and throttle her. The media darling of Forensics, he was running late for court and he wanted her to hand over the murder weapon in his case, a .44 Magnum, right this very minute. That would not have been a problem if he hadn’t written the incorrect case number on his Evidence Order form. He wanted to scribble it out and write over it. No could do. Big procedural sin. No write-overs, no correcting fluid. Ever.

She had already handed him a fresh form and suggested he hop to it…and that he do so before she left the cage window to retrieve the gun. No, she would not bring it out until he had complied. She was very serious about breaching chain of custody.

He was livid. She stood her ground. Yolanda had nearly gotten fired last month, and if the boys around here thought Izzy DeMarco had gone by the book before the incident, they were in for even more bad news.

On December fourth at 3:12 in the morning, a tired cop named Elario “Haha” Alcina, already on overtime, had brought in a bomber jacket from a crime scene. He could have had Prop drive it in—there were Prop van drivers on-call 24/7 for just this purpose—but he had his own reasons, which he did not share, for dropping it by himself.

He told Yolanda, who was the evidence clerk that night, that the jacket had been thoroughly checked out and was ready to be admitted into the Prop room. Yolanda had no cause to disbelieve him, so she’d processed it in and put it in one of her lockers.

Alcina went back upstairs, filed the rest of his voluminous paperwork and went home. A week later, Forensics wanted the jacket.

Her locker, her key: Yolanda had efficiently complied, fetching the jacket in the plastic bag she had closed a week before with a red paper security strap. The card with its signatures, UPC tag and evidence tapes matched the logbook: yellow from the initial collection, black dot for Alcina, candy cane from Prop.

And just as she handed the bag to the forensics tech, a loaded SIG-Sauer P-228 semiautomatic concealed in a hidden pocket discharged. The round barely missed the tech’s hand and now there was a sign on the shattered remains of the bookcase in the receiving area that read Yolanda Shot Me!

The brass wanted to blame Yolanda, of course. She was a civilian and she was brand-new, twenty-two years old and still on probation. She was in the most vulnerable position; cops took care of their own first. The official argument went that the Prop Department was supposed to refuse to process any and all firearms that weren’t rendered safe, and a loaded weapon had remained unaccounted for for a week because of her “negligence.” Maybe Yolanda hadn’t checked carefully enough, but surely this one was on someone else’s shoulders—whoever collected the jacket, who maybe was or maybe wasn’t Alcina—Prop was not getting a clear answer on that.

It was Christmastime and Yolanda had worked hard in Prop for sixty-four days. Her probationary period was ninety days. Besides, she had just broken up with her hideous boyfriend and moved in with her girlfriend Tria and Tria’s little boy. She had enough to contend with.

“Orale, they’re blaming me, Izzy,” Yolanda had sobbed in their break room after she had had yet another meeting with the bosses. They seemed determined to fire her—despite the fact that six months before, an officer in the men’s locker room had dropped his loaded weapon, caught it and almost blown his own head off—with total impunity.

Incensed, Izzy had stormed out of the cage and through reception to the elevator, with the express intention of going upstairs to their precinct captain, Lisa Clancy, and demanding justice. Thirty years her father had been on the force; is this how they treated people who worked for this woman’s newer, friendlier NYPD?

Luckily—in more ways than one—she had run into Detective Pat Kittrell instead. She was not in a position to demand anything from Captain Clancy, and the last thing she’d needed was a reputation for attempting to pull rank because she was a cop’s kid.

No matter, of course, that every detective in a hurry tried to pull rank on the Prop staff. NYPD figured they were doing the “real” work. So if they wanted some slack, Prop should give it to them, right?

So wrong. Especially when their own failure to follow correct procedures nearly got a sweet young woman like Yolanda canned. So…there would be no quarter given when someone wanted Izzy to leave the labyrinth of codes and procedures to save his lazy butt from a redo.

She calmly sipped her latte while the imposing cop tried again.

“If we lose this case because of you —”

“Talk to the form,” she said, tapping the Evidence Order with a short, unadorned fingernail.

He snatched it from her and stomped off like the diva he was.

“He thinks he’s all that since he got that profile on ‘Court TV,’” Yolanda grumbled as she reentered the Prop cage from the bathroom. As usual, she had on so much makeup that she looked like an airbrushed Maxim model. Yolanda was wearing brilliant red polish that matched her lipstick. Her smooth black hair was pulled back with a red-and-silver ponytail clip. Her earrings were red-and-silver hoops. As a rule, Izzy appreciated her flamboyant style.

Despite her successful FBI background check, upstairs wasn’t fully aware of some of the rough patches Yolanda had been through. They didn’t need to know; Yolanda was trying hard to “overcome” her past, as she herself liked to phrase it. Izzy supported her in that, protective of the young woman and of her budding self-esteem.

So when she invited Izzy over to “fix her up”—i.e., to teach her how to trowel on a few layers of foundation and do something, anything, with her crazy hair—Izzy went. But Yolanda’s evil boyfriend had hung around, making gibes at Yolanda and coming on to Izzy when Yolanda had to use the bathroom. It was too depressing to repeat the experience, so Izzy had found reasons not to go over to Yolanda’s again. They socialized by going out for lunch during the workday and occasionally out to dinner. Because she didn’t want to go to Yolanda’s, Izzy didn’t invite her into her own home, either. Now that Yolanda had moved, maybe they could try again.

“It doesn’t matter if he’s on every cable channel,” Izzy said to Yolanda. “We’ve got rules for a reason. We do it wrong, the bad guys walk. It’s that simple.”

“Okay, well, I’m getting out of here,” Yolanda said. Then she looked past Izzy to the window and said, “Oh, hey. Hi.”

“Yo, Yo, Yo, Yolanda.” John Cratty, a plainclothes from SNEU—Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit—trotted up to the window with a doughnut-size box filled with plastic Baggies. It was bagged in a very large Ziploc-style container, and a little paper-and-metal tag, like the price tag at a yard sale, was attached to the zip-tie. His signature turquoise tape was attached to the tag.

His brown hair was long and dirty, and in his jeans and Kurt Cobain T-shirt, he looked like an underachieving, very low-end drug dealer. It was a good look for him.

Yolanda said, “Yo, yo, yourself. You brought your own stuff in again?”

“Van drivers had been on sixteen hours,” he explained. “I said I’d do it.”

“You’re so nice,” Yolanda cooed. She said to Izzy, “I can get it.”

Izzy glanced at the computer and said, “I already logged in. You’re off the clock, girlfriend.”

“No, I’ll catch it. I need to show a little more effort. I, um, spent a little time in the bathroom….”

Putting on makeup, Izzy silently filled in. And perfume. Whoa, is she seeing Cratty?

Izzy read the case number off the tag and typed all the specs into the computer—case number, detective on the case, date, yada yada. The NYPD had made over four hundred thousand arrests in the prior year; fifteen hundred of the Two-Seven’s arrests had been in the seven major crime categories: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft. By contrast, the Nineteenth Precinct, which was a much nicer neighborhood, had three thousand, nine hundred and forty-two arrests, most of them for grand larceny—theft of personal property of one thousand dollars or more.

She knew all these stats because the Dread Machine took her raw data and added it to the enormous NYPD database and processed it. There were two end results: updated stats for them that cared and a set of UPC tags for her. Since this was drugs, she ordered a good dozen of the tags.

She put one strip in the logbook and began to write in all the data.

Watching her, Cratty rested his forearms on the ledge of the window.

“You look tired, Ms. Iz,” he said. “You go out dancing last night without me again?”

Looking up, Izzy gave him a faint half-smile. “When have I ever done that, Justin Timberlake?”

She accidentally brushed the back of his hand with her fingertips as she picked up the bag, and remembered a time when her fingers had touched more than the evidence she was booking for him in a street bust. Not that they had gone to bed. It had ended before then. Not so much ended as fizzled out. Never started.

Which was a bit of a pity. When he wasn’t working the streets, Cratty cleaned up nice, with his square jaw and his hazel eyes and his sandy-brown hair. She’d had a brief crush on him about two years ago, but she’d known even then that he didn’t really think of her as a girl.

Most of the guys thought of her as one of the guys—someone to drink beer with after work, shoot some pool and ask for advice about the girls they wanted to date. Girls who had learned about hair and makeup back in high school, and frequently returned to the Secret School of the Feminine Arts for refresher courses.

Girls exactly like Yolanda.

Cratty whistled “Rock Your Body” to himself, grinning abstractedly at her.

“Hey, you see that Justin Timberlake special the other night?” Yolanda asked Cratty.

He gave her a look. “I’m a man,” he said. “A real man.”

“Well, you’re a real silly man,” Yolanda retorted. “Because he had these hot backup dancers.”

“Bet none of them were as pretty as you two girls,” Cratty replied, taking in Izzy, too.

“Yeah, but they were half-naked,” Yolanda said.

“HBO naked?” Cratty asked, more interested.

They launched into the vulgar sort of repartee that police precincts are known for, no matter all the seminars and counseling sessions about how to act in public. Police work wasn’t lollipops and teddy bears unless you worked in traffic safety or child abuse. It was harsh and nasty and cold. It was the front line and being on point. So personnel blew off steam, repackaging their hostility and angst in sexual innuendos and merciless teasing.

As long as it didn’t get out of hand, most women in the station house dealt with it in one of three ways: recognizing it for what it was and letting it go; showing the guys the line in the sand that they’d better not cross; or giving as good as they got. It was pretty much a tap dance any way you looked at it.

The dance was more extreme if you were a female cop, because suddenly you were challenging an army of alpha males on their home turf. They were already jockeying among themselves to be leader of the pack. They didn’t need any bitches getting in their way. Civilian women as a rule were less intimidating because their jobs were in admin support.

“You could see all that? ” Cratty asked Yolanda incredulously as she continued to needle him about what he had missed by boycotting Justin Timberlake.

Izzy hid her grin. Yolanda was giving him the business. After Izzy put on a pair of blue latex gloves, she laid a fresh evidence bag on the scale and zeroed it out. Now the scale would not include the weight of the bag when she checked in Cratty’s evidence.

She picked up her wire cutters and snicked off the zip-tie on the evidence bag.

She broke the red paper security sticker, reached in and gathered up the box.

Her stomach clenched; her skin felt too tight. Sweat broke out across her forehead. She wondered if she ought to excuse herself and head for the restroom. But she didn’t feel sick, exactly. Just…very tense.

“Iz?” Yolanda asked.

“I’m okay,” Izzy replied, and just as suddenly as the moment arrived, it left. “Really.” She smiled to prove it.

Yolanda glanced over Izzy’s shoulder and stabbed at the topmost page of the intake stack. “Where’d you go to school, J.C.? You spelled contraband wrong.”

“The streets are my halls of higher education,” Cratty shot back. “But give me the form back and—”

Yolanda exhaled impatiently. “By the book, Detective,” she informed him. “We’ll take it as is or you can redo the whole thing.”

Cratty huffed. Yolanda and Izzy smiled pleasantly at him, a wall of solidarity.

Izzy put the bag on the weight scale and peered at the digital readout. She said tactfully, “It’s a little light, John. I weigh the bag in at two hundred forty-eight grams.”

“That’s how much my earrings weigh,” Yolanda said, mocking herself as she wagged her head. “You confiscated my earrings in drugs. Good for you.”

Cratty looked confused and pointed to the form. “That’s what I wrote down. Two hundred forty-eight Undertaker.” Undertaker was a brand name for heroin. There were all kinds of brand names, and sometimes rival dealers murdered each other for trademark infringement.

“No, you said two hundred fifty-three,” Izzy replied. She was confused. “Didn’t you just tell me it was two fifty-three?”

“What?” Cratty paled. He looked from her to the scale, then craned his neck to read his paperwork upside down. She glanced down at his hands, clenched so tightly that his knuckles were white.

“You said two-five-three. When you walked up,” Izzy insisted. She thought back, replaying the last couple of minutes, and realized that he hadn’t.

“No.” He ducked forward and reached out his hand as if he were trying to yank the paperwork back from Yolanda. “I wrote—”

“Two hundred forty-eight, Izzy,” Yolanda read off, pointing at the appropriate spot on the form. She held it up for Izzy to inspect. “See?”

She recognized Cratty’s writing: 248 gm.