Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 68 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

“Thirteen?”

“Thirteen was a cop.”

“Crooked?”

“Straight. He was investigating the possibility that we’ve got a rogue group inside the police department, inside intelligence, systematically killing people.”

There was a moment of silence as Lucas digested it. “Sonofabitch,” he said finally. “They’ve killed thirteen people for sure, and maybe forty?”

“The cop who was killed—his name was Walter Petty—claimed there were twelve, for sure. He’s the thirteenth. We think. He said there could be thirty or forty more.”

“Jesus Christ.” Lucas pulled at his lip, turned away from her, blankly staring at the microwave. Forty? “You should’ve picked it up . . . .”

“Not necessarily,” Lily said, shaking her head. The short hair whipped around her ears, like a television advertisement, and he caught a smile and suppressed it. This was business, she said. “For one thing, they were killed over a long time. Five years, anyway. And most of them died like you’d have expected, knowing their records. Except more efficiently. That’s what you notice when you decide you’ve got a pattern: the efficiency of it. Bang, bang, they’re dead. Never any cops close by—once or twice, they were actually decoyed out. There are never any good witnesses. The getaways are preplanned. No collateral damage, no mushrooms getting knocked down.”

“So you’ve got a pattern of small-time assholes killed by big-time shooters,” Lucas said.

“Right. Like this one guy, I met him myself, years ago, when I was just coming off patrol. Arvin Davies.” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and wet her lips, remembering the file. “He was forty-two when he was killed. He was a doper, a drunk. A brawler. He had twenty priors going back to age twelve, and he’d been picked up for one thing or another maybe twenty more times. All small stuff. Street muggings, burglaries, car thefts, rip-offs, possession. He’d get his nose clogged up with angel dust and beat his victims. He killed one five or six years ago, but we could never prove it. He spent twenty years inside, all short time. The last time he got out, he did a couple of muggings and then somebody put him on a wall. Shot him twice in the heart and once in the head. The head shot came when he was already down, a coup de grace. The shooter walked away,” she said, hopping back up on the breakfast-bar stool across from him.

“A pro,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. And there just wasn’t any reason a pro would go after Arvin Davies. He was small-time, chickenshit. But whoever killed him took a real asshole off the streets for good. Maybe forty or fifty nasty crimes a year.”

“All the miscellaneous hits are like that?”

“Yup. I mean the techniques are different, but they’re all cold, efficient, researched.”

Lucas nodded, studying her. “All very enlightening—but where do I come in?”

She looked straight into him, fixing him. “A couple of guys in intelligence spotted the pattern. They got nervous about it. All of the victims, or whatever you’d call them, were heavy in intelligence files. Like the files had been used to choose them. Once they made the report, a secret working group of six ranking officers was set up to monitor it. Petty was eventually brought in to do the dog work.”

Lucas interrupted. “He was a shoofly, or whatever you guys call them?”

She shook her head. “He was a crime-scene guy for most of his career, and later on a computer specialist. He was officially a detective second. In this case, he was reporting to the working group under the direct supervision of my boss, John O’Dell. John chairs the working group.”

“So there was no past internal-affairs work that might have left a grudge,” Lucas said.

“No. And just before he was shot, there was an odd break on the case . . . .” Lily put a hand on top of her head as if she were patting herself, a gesture of thought. “The black guy who was killed, the loudmouth, was named Waites. The file is still open, we still have people digging into it. As a matter of routine, Walt got all the reports coming out of the active cases. He found a report that said a supposed witness to the Waites killing had recognized one of the shooters as a cop. The witness was named Cornell, last name probably Reed. The trouble is, when Walt went looking for him, Cornell Reed had disappeared. Maybe left town. But Walt found him, somehow. He tried to get in touch with us that afternoon, he came by the offices, and when he couldn’t, he left a note on voice mail. He said he knew where Reed went.”

“Where?”

“We don’t know. And Walt was killed that night.”

“Jesus—somebody got the voice mail?”

“Unlikely; it’s coded,” Lily said. “And the shooting was too well set up. They’d planned it ahead of time. If finding the witness had anything to do with it, it was just the trigger that made them go ahead with the shooting.”

“Huh. How about Petty’s records? Notes?”

“Nothing in his office, but he wasn’t keeping anything there, anyway, because of the sensitivity,” she said. “He was working out of his apartment, mostly. And that’s another thing: somebody got to his apartment before we did. All of his computer disks were gone, and the internal drive—hard drive, is that it?—had been wiped somehow. I don’t know how you do it, but there was nothing recoverable.”

“Another computer freak?”

“Not necessarily. Whatever they did wasn’t fancy. A couple of short commands apparently took care of it. Something like a reformat with a write-over? Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, yeah. Petty must’ve talked to somebody. It’s hard to believe he’d get a break and coincidentally be hit that same night . . . . Who’d he tell about the witness?” Lucas asked.

“We don’t know,” Lily said. “We do know he came up to our office, after hours, looking for us. O’Dell and I spend a lot of time in a car, going around, putting out political brush fires. We were talking to some people in one of the projects that night. Walt didn’t try the car—our driver was waiting in it, and nobody called. The thing is, when Walt came up to the office, he might’ve bumped into somebody from the working group, there in the hallway. He really wouldn’t talk to anybody else, not on this topic.”

“So he accidentally bumps into another member of the working group and that guy leaks?”

Lily frowned. “Well . . . the shooting was too quick for a careless leak. Whoever tipped the rogue group did it directly. A phone call. In other words, whoever leaked knows the killers. Maybe he even runs them.”

“Sonofabitch. But if you know it’s one of the six working-group guys . . .”

Lily shook her head and smiled. “Nothing’s ever that easy. For one thing, every one of those six reports to somebody, and they did. And every one of the six has assistants, and some of the assistants know what the working group is doing.”

“Doesn’t sound very secret,” Lucas said.

“Maybe fifteen people know details, and twenty-five know about the problem,” Lily said. “That’s pretty secret for the department . . . but you see where that leaves us. If one of the working group tipped the killers, he’s in a position to know everything. So we’re paralyzed. The working group appointed a new lead investigator, an unassigned captain, but he’s not doing anything. He’s just there to cover our asses, in case something leaks. You know, so we can say we’ve got an active case under investigation by a ranking officer.”

“And you want me to look into it,” Lucas said.

Lily nodded. “My boss and I talked it over. We need the work done off the books. Nobody will know but the two of us. It’s the only way. And because of Bekker, you’re a perfect fit. The goddamn media’s going nuts about Bekker, of course, the TV and the Post and News, Doctor Death and all that. You can’t get in a cab without hearing a radio talk show about him. So we bring you in, the guy who caught him last time. A consultant. But while you’re looking, we’re going to put you close to a couple of people Walt was looking at.”

“Huh.” Lucas sat and thought for a long moment, then he looked up. “This guy who got shot,” he said. “You called him Walt, like . . . he wasn’t just another guy. Is there something I should know?”

She looked at his face, but not into his eyes: her eyes seemed suddenly blank, as though she were seeing another face. “Walt was my oldest friend,” she said.

And she told him about the dream . . . .

The dream had started the night Petty was killed; it began not with a vision, but with an odor, the smell of ozone, as if electrical circuits were burning somewhere. Then she saw herself, through a haze, but with increasing clarity, seated on a simple marble bench, the kind found in cemeteries, with Petty’s bleeding, shattered body stretched across her lap. A pietà. She did nothing at all, but simply sat there, looking into his face. In the dream, the point-of-view closed on the face, like a camera creeping forward, and at the last moment, focused not on an image of Christ-like peace, but on a face that had been shredded by high-velocity slugs, at yellow molars slick with drying blood. . . .

A ludicrous image, but one that came, night after night.

But that wasn’t the way it had been, the night Petty was killed.

Petty’s seventy-one-year-old mother had called, confused, incoherent. Her only child had been killed, she said, her voice an ancient moan. Walt was dead, dead . . . Lily could see the old woman in her mind’s eye, the narrow gray face bent over the black telephone, body shaking, twitching, the withered hand with the handkerchief, the doilies on the TV behind her, the Sacred Heart on the wall. Lily could even smell it, cabbage and bread dough . . . .

The old woman said that Lily had to go to Bellevue to identify Walter. Was there a cop there, Lily asked? Yes, right here, and Father Gomez. And the mayor was coming.

Lily spoke to the cop. Take care of Gloria Petty, she said, the wife of a cop, the mother of a cop. The last one alive in this family. Then, trembling with fear and grief, she’d gone to Bellevue.

No pietà at Bellevue.

Just a body, waxlike, dead, sprawled on a blood-soaked gurney, raw from the pickup. The body was wrapped in layers of plastic, like beef being moved. She noted professionally that one of the slugs had ripped off Petty’s cheek, exposing his molars; a preview of Petty as a naked skull, a reminder of Petty’s naive, happy smile. The smile that flashed every time he saw her, delighted with her presence.

She recalled a day from their Brooklyn childhood, when the two of them were seven or eight. Late fall, blue skies, crisp weather, a hint of Halloween. There were maple trees on the block, turning red. She’d been sick and had been kept home from school, but her mother let her out in the afternoon to sit on the stoop.

And here was Walter, running down the street, a paper held overhead, flapping, joy in his eyes. Her spelling test from the day before. A perfect score. Common enough for Lily, but Walter, so generously pleased for her, that smile, that young blond hair slicked down with Vaseline . . .

Come to this, the bloody teeth.

“That’s Walter Petty,” she told a tired assistant M.E.

At home again, changing clothes, preparing herself to see Petty’s mother, she thought of her school yearbook. She went into the living room, pulled a box from a built-in cupboard, and found three of them. And his senior picture: his hair never quite right, his face too slender, the slightly dazed smile.

Lily broke and began to weep. The spasm was uncontrollable, unlike anything she’d experienced before, a storm that ended with dumb exhaustion. Wearily, she finished dressing, started for the door.

And smelled Petty: Petty in the morgue, the stink of the blood and the body in her nose. She ran back to the bathroom, washed her face and her hands, over and over.

Early the next morning, after the nightmare interlude with Gloria Petty, as she fought for an hour or two of sleep, she dreamed and saw herself on the marble bench, Walter Petty draped on her lap, broken, torn, his bloody teeth leering from the side of his face. . . .

Petty was gone.

“Jesus.” Lucas was staring at her. “I didn’t know you had . . .”

“What?” She tried to smile. “That kind of depth?”

“That kind of old-time relationship. You know about me and Elle Kruger . . .”

“The nun, yes. What would you do if somebody murdered her?” Lily asked.

“Find whoever did it and kill him,” Lucas said quietly.

“Yes,” Lily said, nodding, looking straight at him. “That’s what I want.”

The late-afternoon sun had gone red, then a sullen orange. A heavy atmospheric hush, accompanied by a distant rumbling, announced the line of thunderstorms that Lucas had seen from the roof. When Lily first arrived, Lucas, sitting on the roof, had said, “You’re absolutely gorgeous.” She’d cooled the sense of contact with a quick, “Don’t start, Davenport.” But there was an underlying tension between them, and now it sprang up again, riding with them as they moved out of the kitchen, into the living room.

Lily perched on a couch, knees together, fumbled through her purse, found a roll of Certs, tipped a couple of them into her hand, then popped them into her mouth. “You’ve changed things,” she said, looking around the house.

“After Shadow Love, the place was pretty shot up,” Lucas said. He dropped onto a leather recliner, sitting on the edge of it, leaning toward her. “Some wiring got wrecked and I needed a new floor. Plaster work. He was shooting that goddamn M-15, it was a mess.”

Lily looked away: “That’s what they used on Walt. An M-15. A full clip: they emptied a full clip into him. They found pieces of him all over the block.”

“Jesus . . .” Lucas groped for something else to say, but all he could find was, “How about you? Are you okay?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, and fell silent.

“The last time I saw you, you were on a guilt trip about your old man and the kids . . . .”

“That’s not over. The guilt trip. Sometimes I feel so bad I get nauseous,” she said.

“Do you see the kids?”

“Not so much,” she said sadly, looking away from him. “I tried, but it was wrecking all of us. David was always . . . peering at me. And the boys blame me for leaving.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“I don’t love him,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t even like him very much. I look at him now, and it all seems like bullshit, the stuff that comes out of his mouth. And that’s weird, because it used to seem so smart. We’d go to parties and he’d spin up these post-Jungian theories of racism and class struggle, and these phonies would stand around with their heads going up and down like they were bobbing for apples. Then I’d go to work and see a report on some twelve-year-old who shot his mom because he wanted to sell the TV to buy crack, and she wouldn’t let him. Then I’d go back home and . . . shit. I couldn’t stand listening to him anymore. How can you live with somebody you can’t stand listening to?”

“It’s hard,” he said. “Being a cop makes it worse. I think that’s why I spent so much time with Jennifer. She was a professional bullshit artist, but basically, she knew what was what. She spent the time on the streets.”

“Yeah . . .”

“So where’re you at?” he asked again.

She looked at him unsteadily, not quite nervous, but apprehensive somehow. “I didn’t want to get into that right away—I wanted to get you committed first. Will you come?”

“Somebody new?” he asked, his voice light.

“Will you come?”

“Maybe . . . so you’ve got someone.”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of? What’s that?” He hopped off the chair and took a turn around the room. He wasn’t angry, he thought, but he looked angry. He reached down and turned on the TV and a tinny, distant voice instantly cried, “Kirrrbeee Puck-it.” He snapped it off again. “What does ‘sort of’ mean? One foot on the floor at all times? Nothing below the waist?”

Lily laughed and said, “You cheer me up, Davenport. You’re so fucking crass . . . .”

“So . . . ?” He went to the window and looked out; the thunderheads were gray, with soaring pink tops, and were bearing down on the line of the river.

She shrugged, looked out the window past him. “So, I was seeing a guy. I still am. We hadn’t started looking for an apartment together, but the possibility was out there.”

“What happened?”

“He had a heart attack.”

Lucas looked at her for a minute, then said, “Why does that make perfect sense?”

She forced a smile. “It’s really not very funny, I’m afraid. He’s in terrible shape.”

“He’s a cop?”

“Yeah.” The smile faded. “He’s like you, in some ways. Not physically—he’s tall and thin and white-haired. But he is—was—in intelligence and he loves the streets. He writes articles for the Times op-ed page about the street life. He has the best network of spies in the city. And he has a taste for, mmm . . .” She groped for the right phrase.

“Dark-eyed married women?” Lucas suggested, moving closer.

“Well, that,” she said, the tentative smile returning. “But the thing is, he likes to fight . . . did like to fight. Like you. Now he can’t walk two dozen steps without stopping for a breath.”

“Jesus.” Lucas ran a hand through his hair. He’d had nightmares of being crippled. “What’s the prognosis?”

“Not so good.” Tears glistened at the corners of her dark eyes. At the same moment, she smiled and said, “Shit. I wish I didn’t do this.” She wiped the tears away with the heel and knuckles of her hand. “This was his third attack. The first one was five years ago. That was bad. The second one was a couple months after the first, and wasn’t so bad. Then he was coming back. He’d almost forgotten about them, he was working . . . . Then this third one, this was the worst of all. He’s got extensive damage to the heart muscle. And he won’t stop working. The doctors tell him to spend a year doing graded exercise, to stay away from work, from the stress. He won’t do it. And he’s still smoking, I think. He’s sneaking them. I can smell them on his clothes . . . in his hair.”

“So he’s going to die,” Lucas said.

“Probably.”

“That’s not so bad,” Lucas said, leaning back, looking at her, his voice flat. “You just say fuck it. You do what you want, and if you go, you go.”

“That’s what you’d do, isn’t it?”

“I hope so,” he said.

“Men are such goddamn assholes,” Lily said.

After another long silence, Lucas asked, “So what are you doing for sex?”

She started to laugh, but it caught in her throat, and she stood up and picked up her purse. “I better get going. Tell me you’ll come to New York.”

“Answer the question,” Lucas said. Without thinking about it, he moved closer. She noticed it, felt the pressure.

“We’re . . . very careful,” she said. “He can’t get too carried away.”

Lucas’ chest felt curiously thick, a combination of anger and expectation. The electricity between them crackled, and his voice was suddenly husky. “You never really liked being careful.”

“Ah, Jesus, Lucas,” she said.

He stepped up to her until he was only inches away. “Push me away,” he whispered.

“Lucas . . .”

“Push me away,” he said, “I’ll go.”

She stepped back, dropped her purse. Outside, the first heavy drops of rain careened off the sidewalk, and a woman with a dog on a leash dashed past the house.

She rocked back on her heels, looked down at her purse, then grabbed his shirt sleeve to balance herself, lifted one foot, then the other, pulled off her shoes, and stepped into the hallway that led to the bedroom. Lucas, standing in the living room, watched her go, until halfway down the hallway she turned her head, her dark eyes looking at him, and began to unbutton her blouse.

Their lovemaking, she said later, sometimes resembled a fight, had an edge of violence, a tone of aggression. They might begin with an effort at tenderness, but that would slip and they would be bucking, wrenching, twisting . . . .

That night, as the last of the storm cells rumbled off into Wisconsin, with the room smelling of sweat and sex, she sat on the edge of the bed. She seemed weary, but there was a smile at the corner of her lips.

“I’m such a goddamned slut,” she said.

“Oh, God . . .” He laughed.

“Well, it’s true,” she said, “I can’t believe it. I was such a nice girl for so long. But I just need. It’s not intimacy. You’re about as intimate as a fuckin’ bear. I need the sex. I need to get jammed. I really can’t believe it.”

“Did you know you were going to sleep with me?” Lucas asked. “When you got here?”

She sat unmoving for a moment, then said, “I thought it might happen. So I went to the hotel first, and checked in. In case anyone called.”

He ran a fingernail down the bumps of her spine, and she shivered. She was going back to the hotel in case “anyone” called . . . .

“This guy you’re sleeping with? ‘Anyone’?” Lucas said.

“Yes?”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“Nothing. He doesn’t need to know.” She turned toward him. “And don’t you tell him anything, either, Davenport.”

“Why?” Lucas said. “Why would I ever see him?”

“His name’s Dick Kennett.” In the half-light of the bedroom he could see a tiny, rueful smile lift the corner of her mouth again. “He’s running the Bekker case,” she said.