The October List

and she glanced at the screen. A text had appeared. She smiled briefly. ‘It’s Frank. He’s not going out tonight. Everything’s fine.’
    ‘That’s one less worry we have. But I don’t know how I feel about Mr Frank “Complication” Walsh on your speed-dial list. I’m thinking I’d rather take his place.’
    ‘I could move you up to number two.’
    ‘Only two?’
    ‘Mom is first.’
    ‘That’s fair enough.’
    Daniel walked to a tall glass-fronted mahogany entertainment enclosure, circa 1975, she guessed, though it contained newer components. He turned the radio on to a local station. After five minutes of bad music and worse commercials it was time for the news. She strode to the device and abruptly shut it off.
    Daniel looked at her as she stared at the receiver. She told him, ‘I don’t want to hear about it. About what happened today – any of it! It has to be on the news. I’m all over the news!’ Her voice had grown ragged again.
    ‘It’s okay, it’s okay …’
    She started at the buzz of the intercom. It seemed as loud as an alarm. ‘Daniel?’ came the tinny voice through the speaker. ‘It’s Andrew.’
    Pressing the unlock button, Daniel nodded reassuringly to Gabriela, ‘The cavalry’s arrived.’

CHAPTER
31
     

2:15 p.m., Sunday
     

1 hour earlier
     

 
     
     

 
     
    Detective Brad Kepler watched his boss read the media release once, twice, again.
    Captain Paul Barkley looked up at the NYPD press officer, a wobbly young man with persistent acne, who sat before him in this hellhole of an operations room. Then, without saying a word, he looked down and read once more.
    Barkley’s stomach made a Harley-Davidson noise that everyone in the room pretended to ignore.
    Kepler knew that most Sundays, this time of day Barkley was tucking away his wife’s roast beef, along with – when she wasn’t looking – massive forkfuls of buttered mashed potatoes. The detective was aware of this routine because he’d been invited to supper a few times. He had three repetitive memories of the occasions: Barkley telling the same quasi-blue jokes over and over. The roast beef being very good. And Kepler’s spending the entire time trying to figure out if there was any possible scenario for telling Barkley’s know-it-all college-student daughter to shut the fuck up. Which, of course, there was not.
    Kepler himself read the release again.
    Fred Stanford Chapman, 29, … wife, Elizabetta, 31, two children, Kyle and Sophie … Surgery to remove a bullet lodged near his heart is planned for later today … Investigations continue … Prognosis is not good …
    Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera …
    ‘How many calls?’ Barkley asked the youngster.
    ‘From the press? A hundred.’
    Barkley snapped, ‘That’s an exaggeration.’
    Kepler thought: Probably isn’t. His partner, Naresh Surani, seemed to concur.
    ‘I wanted to keep it quiet,’ the captain said.
    ‘A shooting?’ From the PA youngster.
    Public affairs. Crap.
    ‘Yes, a shooting. In goddamn Manhattan. I wanted to keep it goddamn quiet. But I guess that didn’t work out, did it? This was a leak the size of the Titanic .’
    Kepler corrected, The Titanic wasn’t a leak. The Titanic was a ship that got fucked because of a leak.
    But, of course, the edit was tacit.
    Barkley snatched up a pen and began to revise.
    Which gave Kepler the chance to look around their new digs. This was the second room the Charles Prescott Operation – the CP Op – had been assigned to in the past two days. Sure, this happened to be a busy time for bad guys and little operations like the CP Op didn’t mean very much, in terms of chalking up cred, so they had to take whatever room was free at the moment. But this one was the pits. The twenty-by-thirty-foot space did have a few high-def monitors, but they were off, and they didn’t even seem hooked up. The walls were scuffed – nothing new there – and the government-issue furniture was cheap. Nearly a third of the floor space was devoted to storage. Something smelled off too, as if a take-out turkey sandwich had fallen behind one of the filing cabinets a long, long time ago.
    At least it couldn’t get any worse.
    Barkley slid the press release back like an air hockey puck. ‘Fix it. And by the way, no comment from me, other than the investigations continue. Stop at that. Nothing more.’
    The press officer tried again. ‘But a hundred calls, sir.’
    ‘Why’re you still here?’ Barkley