Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [19]
“Keep your facts straight, honey,” Mary said, taking a long sip from a can of Dr. Brown’s cream soda. “Ralph and Alice didn’t have a kid.”
Frank stood up, walked over to his mother, and kissed the top of her head. He took a step back, looked down at the .38-caliber revolver in her hip holster, and smiled.
“Alice didn’t pack heat either,” Frank said, leaving the kitchen for the sanctuary of the den.
Mary Silvestri watched her son disappear around the corner. She rested her soda on a napkin and lit a Kool.
“Alice should’ve had a gun,” she whispered to herself, clutching the cigarette between her teeth. “She would’ve shot him dead for damn sure.”
• • •
MARY SILVESTRI WAS thirty-six years old and for a dozen of those years had been a member of the New York Police Department. As a rookie, she’d started working out of the Ozone Park section of Queens, moved to Brooklyn and plainclothes, and from there to her true calling, a homicide unit in the Wakefield section of the Bronx.
She had an affinity for the death detail and, each year, her conviction rate placed her in the top tier of detectives across the five boroughs. She never tossed a folder into the unsolved pile. The fewer the clues, the less the logic behind each murder, the more fascinated Mary Silvestri became.
She exploited her talents.
Silvestri studied forensics at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice and then spent three months working alongside the chief medical examiner, trying to understand what he looked for at a crime scene, what crucial information could be picked up from a cold body. She took courses in abnormal psychology at Queens College, wanting to know as much about the killer as she would end up knowing about the deceased. In her free time, Mary Silvestri read mystery novels and true crime accounts of sensational cases. She made ample use of all the available technology and was one of the few NYPD detectives familiar with the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, then in its infancy. VICAP, when effective, searched for patterns among at-large serial killers and would then draw up psychological profiles. Most street cops scoffed at such notions. Mary Silvestri used one profile to capture a car salesman on Tremont Avenue who had razor-slashed to death four teenage prostitutes.
Mary was an attractive woman but paid little attention to keeping up her appearance. She was tall, close to five-ten on the few occasions she wore pumps, and svelte despite a steady cop diet of pizza, deli, and coffee. Her long red hair was often unruly and hastily brushed, held in place most mornings with clips. She dressed in a nondescript mix of L. L. Bean outdoor and S. Klein’s indoor, favoring short skirts and sneakers, blouses open at the collar. She seldom carried her gun and always had a pack of saltines in her purse.
The homicide cops in her detail, all of them male, took delight in her flakiness. When Mary worked a case, she was so focused, so zeroed in on the most minute aspects of the murder, she would forget everything and everyone around her. The more disheveled she grew, the more foglike she walked around the office, the closer, they knew, she was to cracking the case.
Homicide detectives see themselves as elite members of the department. They carry themselves with confidence and arrogance. Many wear their motto on a T-shirt under their shirts and sweaters. The shirt has a chalk outline of a dead body. Above the sketch are the words OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS. HOMICIDE.
Among such a group, Silvestri was considered the best, and her skill earned her the street name “Mrs. Columbo,” the female version of the rumpled TV detective.
Mary was the badge others turned to when the case seemed beyond solving. She was also the one that other detectives trusted the most in the interrogation room. She could crack a suspect in less time than it took to play a regulation hockey game. Once again, she used everything at her disposal—from sex appeal to physical force—to break down the man in the bare-back chair. She never