Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [73]
A connection from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms then gave Boomer a stat sheet filled with her known lift-and-drop locations. A neighborhood friend now working for a Secret Service unit in Maryland gave him a detailed report on her money-laundering capabilities and how the fast cash was washed overnight between one flight and the next.
In seventy-two hours, using the sources available to him, Boomer Frontieri knew as much about Lucia Carney as any cop in the country. He studied up on crack and read assorted medical documents detailing its instant addiction. He learned about mules and smurfs and the women who carried drugs and cash for Lucia and the men who killed at her whim. The more he read, heard, and learned, the more determined Boomer Frontieri grew. His anger wasn’t fueled by the fact that she was a drug queen. He had heard about other such women working the distribution end of the drug business.
It wasn’t even the amount of money involved, even though it totaled out to a numbing multibillion-dollar-a-year network.
It was the way she did it.
Lucia Carney was as cold and as heartless as any drug runner Boomer Frontieri had ever seen. Life meant nothing to her, especially an innocent life that had yet to begin.
That’s why he read and reread the folders until his vision blurred, quietly steeling himself toward making the most difficult decision of his life.
• • •
DR. CAROLYN BARTLETT sat on a gray folding chair, her legs crossed, blond hair combed back into a tight bun. The room was filtered with shadows, lit only by a fluorescent bulb attached to the center of the wall, just above the roll-away bed. She read over the contents of a yellow folder which was clutched in her hands, crammed with the detailed notes and observations she had made over the previous four days.
Dr. Bartlett, though only thirty-six, was in charge of the hospital’s rape and trauma psychiatric unit. In her four years at the hospital, she had seen all the horror imaginable.
Until the afternoon they wheeled in Jennifer Santori.
The sight of the young girl, the condition of her body, the sunken look on the face of the man who had brought her in, made Bartlett, for the first time, truly question what it was she did and what, if any, difference it made.
She closed the folder, resting it on the ground next to her Cuban-heeled black Ferragamo shoes, and ran her hands across the starched white sheets of the bed. She took a deep breath and touched the soft hand of the young girl asleep beneath those sheets.
She studied the silent, bandaged face. The girl’s rest was disturbed only by the occasional twitch and moan. There were three IV pouches draining off into her right arm and bandages covering a multitude of wounds. Her left hand was in a cast that brushed up to her elbow, an empty space where the index finger should have been.
Dr. Bartlett leaned closer and touched each of the wounds with a gentle hand. She had clear blue eyes, a taut athlete’s body, and a face that had not begun to betray her years. She had seen a great deal of abuse in her four years at Metro, but never anything close to this. It had taken nurses and interns two full days to wash off the caked blood and three days for Bartlett to get the child to give her anything more than a nod.
She had paid a visit to the suspect. She always made a point of doing that, even though some doctors in the department frowned on the idea. But it was important to her, allowing a rare