FiFty Fifty

Chapter Five

KATE

For thirty seconds or more, Kate had stood in the cold beside Levy's Mercedes with the keys in her hand. There were house keys on the ring, as well as the car fob. She had thought about running the house key the full length of the paintwork on the Mercedes and watching a ribbon of ten-thousand-dollar metallic paint curl itself into a spiral.
She could always claim it was like that when she found it.
In the end, she put the fantasy aside, enjoyable as it had been, used the fob to open the car and got into the passenger seat. It didn't feel right, somehow, to sit in the driver's seat. Leaning over, she fumbled for a few seconds when she tried to put the key fob in the ignition. Then she realized there was no ignition. This was one of those cars that only needed the key to be near the car. Kate was a long way from owning a vehicle like this, or being able to afford to run any kind of automobile. She knew Levy's Jaguar from carrying boxes of files to and from the small document vault he kept in the trunk.
That was a memory she didn't want to dwell upon. Once a week, on Friday nights, she would ride the elevator to the basement lot with Levy. He would lean against the opposite side of the elevator car, pretend to look at his phone, while Kate stood with a box of files at her feet. She could feel him watching her, staring at her ass and her legs. She could almost feel his gaze intensifying when she bent to pick up the boxes from the floor.
Levy never carried anything heavier than his cell phone.
The memory made her shiver. She touched the control panel on the dash, locked the doors on the car and selected the heating options. Within seconds, warm air was flowing through her seat. She needed it tonight.
Looking down at her training shoes, she saw the file of papers she had taken from Levy in the station. She was supposed to put those in the trunk safe. What was it he'd said about them? They might upset Alexandra?
The precinct entrance was visible from where Levy had parked. Kate took a long look, making sure her boss didn't suddenly come charging out. He could be in there for most of the night. Kate picked up the file, opened it and began to flick through.
Scott had put together a dossier on Frank Avellino, and his daughters. Most of
 
it came straight from the internet. Photographs of Avellino when he'd been elected for the first time. He stood at a podium, flanked by his second wife, Heather, and a much younger Alexandra. There were no pictures or mentions of Sofia in this article. Avellino ran on an anti-corruption ticket. He was going to clean up the unions, the lobbyists and City Hall.
A familiar story. And Kate knew how that had turned out.
Six months into his first term and Avellino was facing an investigation into receiving off-the-books payments from two construction unions and an investment fund that bankrolled casinos. It didn't take long for Avellino to steamroll the story.
For someone who was anti-corruption, dirt seemed to follow Frank Avellino like that kid from the Peanuts cartoon. There were pictures of Frank in restaurants and at social events with movie stars, writers, directors, real-estate moguls and well-known mobsters like Jimmy 'the Hat' Fellini. His revitalization programs always seemed to have accounting difficulties, like the two-million- dollar clean-up scheme he ran in the Bronx, which somehow had three hundred grand unaccounted for. It was a construction firm with affiliations to Jimmy 'the Hat', which carried out renovations to the First Precinct, and it had been no surprise the valuable iron doors that had been part of the old cells were inexplicably lost during the works.
There were another two dozen articles and Kate skipped through them, looking for something on the family.
Then she found a puff-piece profile lifted from an online edition of a popular magazine. It detailed Avellino's modest roots in Brooklyn, and his rise through a business empire based on flipping real estate, right up to his re-election as mayor. There were pictures taken in the family home in Franklin Street. The article was three years old. No sign of the second wife, Heather. It was just a series of photographs of Frank at home, with the exception of one picture.
He sat in what looked like a study. There was a bar beside a long desk, and TVs on the opposite wall. Frank sat behind the desk, flanked by two young women. One was tall and blonde, the other shorter and dark-haired. Light and dark. The caption said 'At home with Frank: L – R Alexandra Avellino, Frank Avellino, Sofia Avellino'. Kate noticed that the two girls stood with their backs to Frank, and each other.
There was little mention of the family in the article. Frank merely said that Alexandra showed great promise as a businesswoman, and was already making a name for herself in the Manhattan real-estate community. And he had high hopes for Sofia as an artist. He knew his girls would make it on their own – they were smart and both had been chess prodigies even though neither of them played