While Hanson rolled back across the floor towards me, the kid stopped on the doorstep to shake his umbrella off outside, then carefully shut it and put it in the stand near the door. He took off the raincoat and hung it on the coat stand, habitually checking the pockets before he left it there. Then he turned, straightened his tie in a way that told me he wasn’t used to wearing one, and let his eyes rest on me once more.
He was, as Hanson had dubbed him, baby-faced. But his suit sat over broad, hard shoulders and skimmed in to a tight waist. He was about as tall as I was and had the clean-cut, Boy Scout look of most Feds, but lacked the weary hardness around the mouth of experienced law enforcement officers. His eyes leaned caramel, which was a shame for him; darker brown might have made him more intimidating as he glowered at me from across the room.
As it was, he reminded me of a puppy trying for its first bark. A puppy kept in check, like Hanson had taken him out for a walk but left him outside because he still tended to make a mess on the floor.
He sure was an eyeful, though. A good-looking kid.
I stayed there on my bar stool as he walked towards me with the same laser-focused stare, and the sound around me died away as I returned his look with the same level of intensity. He had a strange, wary gait, as though he might bolt at any moment—or pull a gun on me. But all the while he walked across the floor I was thinking of my early childhood in Sicily, of fishing with my grandfather, and the first time I had successfully caught and reeled in a bite.
“Captain’s asking for us,” was the first thing he said, and I assumed he meant it for Hanson’s ears, though he kept my eyes.
“Fuck him,” Hanson grunted as he heaved his mass back on the barstool.
I let my gaze travel over the kid from head to foot and back up again, and then I smiled. His full lips parted as though in silent protest.
I put out my hand, just to see what he would do. “Angelo Messina,” I said.
“I know who you are,” he said, ignored my hand, and turned to Hanson. “I’m telling you, Hanson, we gotta go.”
“Don’t you wanna get an autograph?” Hanson asked with a grin. He had something stuck between his teeth. “This kid has a thing for you, Messina. You thinkIwas on your ass? Babyface wrote the book on you, literally. What? You did,” he said, as the kid—still nameless—gave him a frown and a shake of the head. “Wrote his master’s thesis on you.”
“Hanson,” the kid said, clipped and irritated. “Captain’s asking for us.”
“Alright, alright.” Hanson gave a sigh that suggested great personal calamity, and the kid walked off to wait for him at the doorway.
I watched him go, wondering exactly how hard that young body was under his off-the-rack suit. Shoving the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, Hanson said indistinctly, “Big changes coming, Messina.”
“The one constant.”
He slid off the stool and then, leaning heavily on its seat, shook his head. “You know what it reminds me of? Back when things were getting outta control. Too many drugs, too many of your pals grabbing for power. You remember how that ended up. The Mob Wars took out a lot of your best men.”
“Took out a lot of cops, too,” I said. “Or so I hear.”
Hanson looked past me. “That’s true, Messina. That’s true. There were casualties on both sides. Not sure New York could survive another war like that.”
I thought about Hanson saying that a week later when I read about his death in the papers.
But most of all, I thought about that baby-faced agent, the way he’d stared at me like a specimen he’d love to cut open.
Chapter One
Baxter
“It’s the fuckin’ Morellis.” Captain Matthew Walsh was pacing up and down at the front of the room against backdrop photographs of blood, bone and brain matter. Our regular morning meeting had devolved, as usual, into Walsh’s personal vendetta. He scowled at us all, bloodshot blue squint roaming the room. “That son of a bitch Luca D’Amato is taking out the competition. He got one little taste of power with this new Commission and now he wants it all.”
There was a murmur of agreement throughout the incident room. I glanced around at my fellow task force members. We were the not-so-proud members of a joint state and federal task force set up two months ago to look into a recent spate of hits on rumored and confirmed Family members occurring in and around Central Park—and now, starting with Detective Jim Hanson, it was starting to look like our side was fair game, too.
It was a multiagency interdisciplinary task force, which sounded impressive, but only meant that multiple different law enforcement cultures were clashing daily. Members had been drawn together from the NYPD, the DOJ, the FBI, the ATF, the DEA… An alphabet soup made worse by too many cooks in the kitchen.
There was only one acronym I was interested in. LCN: La Cosa Nostra, the Italian Mafia operating in America. They had various offshoots and permutations here in New York, and I was dedicated to, in the words of the task force guidelines, disrupting and dismantling LCN networks. And in particular, we were dedicated to keeping Central Park safe, since the recent spate of mob kills had happened within its boundaries.
Operation Safe Center wassupposedto be conducted as a collaboration of the best and brightest. But a month in, I was beginning to regret having let my FBI supervisor and mentor, Ethan Villiers, talk me into coming along with him. It was an incredible break, one that could launch my career into the stratosphere. I was a new graduate of the FBI Academy at 26, and most agents had years of investigatory experience before they were even looked at for the Behavioral Analysis Unit. But BAU was what I’d been gunning for since my undergraduate days, and I’d been lucky enough to attract Villiers’ attention during one of his stints as a visiting psychology lecturer at my alma mater. He’d supervised my master’s thesis and supported my application to the FBI. And now he’d given me an opportunity in the task force for which any Quantico grad would have killed.
But it was only Villiers’ presence that was giving me hope.
We’d been sent to represent the BAU and to consult on the psychology behind organized crime. In reality, no one was interested in our point of view. At first I’d thought they just had a problem withme. I was the youngest task force member by several years, and there seemed to be a feeling that I’d jumped the line, that Villiers had brought in his lapdog over other agents who could have been more use. But then I saw that Villiers tended to receive the same offhand contempt from our colleagues that I did, though more veiled. The cops wanted action, the ATF wanted arrests, and our fellow FBI colleagues from different areas of the agency seemed to be of the opinion that psychology and profiling were about as helpful as psychic predictions.
Captain Walsh, our fearless leader, was the ranking NYPD officer, pulled from his precinct on secondment to us. His level was supposed to indicate the importance of our work. In practice, it just made collaboration more difficult, because Walsh was inclined to pull rank, favor NYPD theories, and what was supposed to be a flatter structure had become what Villiers, in private to me, had dubbed “a fucking mess.”
