The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [30]
Less than thirty minutes later, John Stefanovitch was riding up in the same groaning warehouse elevator to view the remains of Oliver Barnwell.
Invisible men.
28
John Stefanovitch; One Police Plaza
STEFANOVITCH SPENT ALL day Saturday working by himself at One Police Plaza. He enjoyed the relative quiet and the solitude.
The Organized Crime Task Force now included more than sixty detectives cooperating in all the boroughs of New York. There were briefings every day, including a progress review with the commissioner and several precinct captains.
On Monday, visitors from Interpol, Scotland Yard, and the French Sûreté would arrive in New York. During the past week, related killings had occurred in Palermo, Amsterdam, and London, where police officials maintained that organized crime wasn’t the problem.
On Sunday morning, John Stefanovitch’s black van entered the Queens Midtown Tunnel at six-fifteen. At the end of the long, gray tunnel, beyond the sleepy rows of tollbooths, he began his ride east on the Long Island Expressway. The sky overhead was pink, rolling up into a crisp blue that was peaceful and gorgeous.
For an hour and a half, everything was right with Stefanovitch’s world. He could feel a slight tingle, an overall pleasant sensation sweeping through his body, even down into his legs.
He arrived at the outskirts of East Hampton, Long Island, at seven-fifteen. He ate a homemade sausage and cheddar cheese omelet at Gilly’s Wharfside, where he also performed his Sunday ritual of reading the Times: news, sports, theater, “The Week in Review,” books, and the magazine.
When he had been recuperating from his gunshot wounds in New York Hospital, he had read the Times cover to cover for forty-five straight Sundays. He had also read books, hundreds of them: fiction and nonfiction, more than he had read during the first thirty years of his life combined. One of his favorites, A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley, was about a screwed-up high school teacher who wound up with nothing in his life except reading the Sunday Times and watching the Giants play football. Every Saturday the guy would drive forty or fifty miles away from his hometown and go on a rip-roaring toot. On Sunday it would be even more drinking, plus the Times, and the pitiful “Jints” on TV. Always in some anonymous, down-and-out tavern where nobody knew who he was. Then it was home again, home again, to teach school on Monday morning.
After his breakfast, Stefanovitch entered East Hampton proper. Soon, he was passing comfortable old houses of no great distinction, sighting the broad fairways and monster greens of the Maidstone Club Golf Course, which flanked the road on the right. The imposing bulk of the clubhouse faced the ocean like a fortress-castle.
Three quarters of a mile beyond the golf course, entrances to impressive summer estates began to appear. Long, curling driveways led to improbably small sand dunes. Behind them, sprawling beach houses were quietly settled into the earth.
The short stretch along the beach road was exhilarating. He turned up the car radio, letting it blare and become an almost physical presence. He sang along with a Tina Turner song called “Private Dancer.” He opened both front windows, and the sea breeze whipped his brown hair around his ears and across his forehead.
29
THE HOUSE HE was looking for had a modest driveway that curved gracefully at the end, to begin a turnaround. The turnaround broadened into a circle for parking cars. The house itself was dominated by weathered gray shingles with white latticing. All the window frames on the two-story house were neatly trimmed in white. Glossy, bright blue shutters were already catching sparkles of sunlight.
Stefanovitch was a little in awe. He hadn’t been properly prepared for Sarah McGinniss’s beach cottage.
She was sitting out on the back porch, waiting for him to arrive, or maybe just sitting on the porch for no reason at all.
They agreed to meet and spend Sunday wading through her confidential notes,