In his peripheral vision, Muñoz saw Blackstone glance over at him every ten seconds or so. The bombastic prick was talking at the top of his lungs deliberately. He wanted to catch Muñoz’s eye. He wanted an excuse to say, What’s the matter, Rainbow Dick? Am I interrupting your precious concentration?
And he was, of course, but Muñoz wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing his irritation. Muñoz kept his eyes on the computer screen. He had already accumulated three pages of notes on Merchant. His facility with the NYPD databases had improved exponentially in the last three months. Before then, he’d spent most of his time pounding pavement as a narc. He sat on park benches or strolled up and down St. Nicholas Avenue in ripped jeans and a hoodie buying twists of crack cocaine from low-level dealers and then busting them. And when he wasn’t uptown, he was down on Centre Street reading voucher numbers into the records in front of grand juries so his lab reports could be entered into evidence. It was a grind that might have gone on indefinitely if he hadn’t gotten shot in the shoulder and been promoted to Detective Grade 3.
He’d met Codella on his fourth day in the 171st. Captain Reilly got the call about a body and Muñoz was the only detective available. Reilly hadn’t thought Muñoz was ready to handle a body on his own, so he’d called Manhattan North and McGowan had sent Codella. She had taken Muñoz under her wing and they’d worked the Sanchez case together for five nonstop days. Those had been his best days as a detective so far, and he was happy to be working with her again, even if it was unofficial.
Muñoz had already downloaded Merchant’s history of traffic violations, the dates of his marriages and divorce, and his IRS case number on a tax evasion charge. None of that was going to help Codella very much when she faced Merchant in his executive suite. But now he had pulled up a three-year-old complaint in which Merchant was named. A twenty-four-year-old woman, Jackie Freimor, had accused him of sexually assaulting her at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Unfortunately there were no details in the records, and the complaint had been dropped the next day.
Muñoz jotted the name and badge number of the Midtown police officer who had taken Freimor’s statement. He picked up his phone, dialed Midtown, and got the desk sergeant. “You have an officer named Delibero? Nicholas Delibero?”
“Had,” said the Sergeant. “Left last year.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Don’t know exactly. Out of state. Some guys aren’t made for the city. They’d rather cruise the ’burbs in a cushy Crown Victoria, you know?” He chuckled at his own joke.
Muñoz thanked him and hung up. Freimor, he discovered with a little more digging, had married and now lived in the Westchester enclave of Pelham Manor. Her husband was Jack Hartley, who owned a food distribution company that serviced restaurants in the tristate area. Muñoz looked at his watch. There wasn’t time to drive all the way to Pelham, get Jackie Freimor’s story—if she was home and if she had a story worth getting—and be back in time to meet Codella at Edgar’s Café in an hour.
He went on the Internet instead and started digging through the twenty pages of results that came up when he searched for Thomas Merchant, Bank of New Amsterdam.