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“Not so it makes any sense.”

We sat a minute more.

“My girls are eight and thirteen,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to do anything, to testify to anything. I just need to find out who did this to me. I got to know.”

Jocelyn took a deep breath and then said, “It was a man calling himself Adamo Cortez who brought Nathali Malcolm to me. He said that she’d been forced to have sex by you and was afraid for her life. He showed me the video.

“Five months later I was down at headquarters to meet with a psychiatrist over my increasing lack of interest in the job. I saw Cortez and approached him. He put me off and left. When I asked the woman he was talking to about where he went, she said he left the building but that his name wasn’t Cortez; it was Hugo Cumberland—a private specialist sometimes used by the department.”

“What kind of specialist?” I asked.

“Are you here to yoke me, Joe?”

“No. What kind of specialist?”

“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask.”

The air between me and Jocelyn was thick and soundless. She didn’t want to be talking to me but still felt a sense of duty. I didn’t want to know what I’d learned, but I couldn’t wipe it away.

“The woman didn’t tell you anything else?” I asked.

“No. But Adamo wasn’t at her office. He was sitting with a captain named Holder. I asked Holder’s assistant for Cumberland’s number, but she said that Cumberland was just a name he used and that his real name was Paul Convert.”

“Why she tell you that?”

“Girls can be chatty, Joe. And most of the time we don’t take men’s secrets so seriously.”

“He was a short guy with a mustache?” I asked. “Looked Puerto Rican?”

“That’s him.”

Walking north half a block on Broadway, I turned right on Exchange Place and had just crossed New Street on the way to Broad when two official-looking SUVs cut me off—back and front.

Four doors slid open and men in dark uniforms disgorged from the vehicles.

I considered going for my pistol, but when two more men jumped out, I gave up on that mode of self-defense. Instead I stood still with my hands a few inches from my sides. The men tackled me like I was a football dummy, took my gun, and clapped on restraints, hand and foot.

I saw a couple of shocked pedestrians before a black bag was put over my head.

The next thing I knew I was in the back of one of the SUVs. It was moving and I was not.

22.

The drive was a bit more than an hour, I figured. We went through the Battery Tunnel and into Brooklyn—I was pretty sure about that. We drove long enough to make it somewhere out in Queens but not much farther. Whoever had grabbed me wanted to stay in the city.

That alone told me a lot.

When the car parked I was getting ready to yell as soon as the door slid open. They might kill me, but I’d leave a marker that maybe Mel or Gladstone would find.

But my captors had thought of that. Someone shoved a rag filled with sweet-smelling chloroform over my nose and mouth.

I had to breathe.

Coming to on a basement floor, I was aware of being cold; chilled to the bone, as my father used to say. The air was dank, filled with fungal spores, bringing to mind the heavy atmosphere of graveyards and dungeons. My hands were cuffed behind me, but my legs were unfettered. I made it to my feet, trying to keep down the deep-seated anxieties of a man terrified by dark containment.

There was a low-watt bulb imparting its tame glow from the low ceiling. A pretty long and steep stairway led up through a hole-like corridor to an upper door. I put one foot on the bottom stair and a deep gong sounded.