Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 74 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

CHAPTER

9

The car slowed and the window between the front seat and the backseat dropped an inch. The early-morning traffic was light, and they were moving quickly, but O’Dell was grumpy about the early hour. Lily hadn’t slept at all.

“You want a Times?” Copland asked over his shoulder.

“Yes.” O’Dell nodded, and Copland eased the car toward the curb, where a vendor waved newspapers at passing cars. A talk show babbled from the front-seat radio: Bekker and more Bekker. When Copland rolled his window down, they could hear the same show from the vendor’s radio. The vendor handed Copland a paper, took a five-dollar bill, and dug for change.

“I’m worried,” Lily said. “They could try again.”

“Won’t happen. They didn’t mean to kill him, and coming after him again, that way, would be too risky. Especially if he’s this tough guy you keep telling me about . . . .”

“We thought they wouldn’t go after him the first time . . . .”

“We never thought they’d try to mug him . . . .”

Copland handed a copy of the Times into the backseat. A headline just below the fold said, “Army Suspects Bekker of Vietnam Murders.”

“This has gotta be bullshit,” O’Dell grumbled, scanning the story. “Anything from Minneapolis?”

“No.”

“Dammit. Why don’t these assholes check on him? For all they know, the Minneapolis story could be a cover for an Internal Affairs geek.”

“Not a thing, so far. And the people in Minneapolis are looking for it.”

Silence, the car rolling like an armored ghost through Manhattan.

Then: “It must be Fell. It has to be.”

Lily shook her head: “Nothing on her line. She got one call, from an automated computer place saying that she’d won a prize if she’d go out to some Jersey condominium complex to pick it up. Nothing on the office phone.”

“Dammit. She must be calling from a public phone. We might need some surveillance here.”

“I’d wait on that. She’s been on the street for a while. She’d pick it up, sooner or later.”

“Had to be Fell, though. Unless it really was muggers.”

“It wasn’t muggers. Lucas thinks they were cops. He says one of them was carrying a black leather-wrapped keychain sap; about the only place you can buy them is a commercial police-supply house. And he says they never went for his billfold.”

“But they weren’t trying to kill him.”

“No. But he thinks they were trying to put him out of commission. Maybe break a few bones . . .”

“Huh.” O’Dell grunted through a thin smile. “You know, there was once a gang on the Lower East Side, they’d contract to bite a guy’s ear off for ten bucks?”

“I didn’t know that,” said Lily.

“It’s true, though . . . . All right. Well. With Davenport. String him along . . . .”

“I still feel like I’m betraying him,” Lily said, looking away from O’Dell, out the window. A kid was pushing a bike with a flat tire down the sidewalk. He turned as the big black car passed, and looked straight at Lily with the flat gray serpent’s eyes of a ten-year-old psychopath.

“He knew what he was getting into.”

“Not really,” she said, turning away from the kid’s trailing eyes. She looked at O’Dell. “He thought he did, but he’s basically from a small town. He’s not from here. He really doesn’t know, not the way we do . . . .”

“What’d you tell Kennett, about why Davenport was at your place?”

“I . . . prevaricated,” Lily said. “And I could use a little backup from you.”

“Ah.”

Lucas hadn’t been badly hurt, so Lily flagged a cab, took him to Beth Israel, then reported the attack. Because she’d fired her weapon, there had been forms to fill out. She’d started that night, and called Kennett to tell him about it.

“Should I ask why he was at your place at two in the morning?” Kennett had asked. He’d sounded amused, but he wasn’t.

“Um, you don’t want to know,” Lily had said. “But it was strictly business, not pleasure.”

“And I don’t want to know.”

“That’s right.”

After a moment: “Okay. Are you all right? I mean, really all right.”

“Sure. I’ve got a busted window I’ve gotta get fixed . . . .”

“Good. Get some sleep. I’ll talk to you tonight.”

“That’s all? I mean . . . ?”

“Do I trust you? Of course. See you tonight.”

Lily looked out the car window, at the city rolling past. Maybe she was betraying Lucas. Maybe she was betraying Kennett. She wasn’t sure anymore.

O’Dell said, “Cretins,” and his paper shook with anger.

CHAPTER

10

The reporters came and went, the naive ones swallowing Lucas’ story that he had been mugged, others not so sure. A reporter from Newsday said flatly that something else was going on: that Bekker had a gang, or that somebody else was trying to stop Lucas’ investigation.

“I don’t know about muggers in Minneapolis, but in New York they don’t work in professional tag teams. Unless you’re lying, you were done by professionals . . . .”

After they were gone, Lucas took a few more Tylenol, wandered down to the bathroom and got back in time to see Lily coming down the hall.

“You look . . . pretty rough,” she said.

“It’s my cheek. My cheek hurts like hell,” he said. He touched a swollen magenta bruise with his middle finger. “At least the headache’s going away. They’re letting me out after lunch.”

“I heard,” Lily said.

“Thanks for sending the jeans over. The other pants . . .”

“Are shot.” Lily said.

“Yeah.”

“O’Dell’s fixed the Mengele speech—there’ll be a notice in all the papers this afternoon, the Times tomorrow morning, and we’re asking everybody to do a note about it. TV, too. We found a guy, a legit guy, who already lectures on Mengele.”

“Terrific,” Lucas said. “When?”

“Monday.”

“Jesus, that quick?”

“We gotta do everything quick. Maybe we can get him before he does another one . . . .” Lily backed into a hospital chair, dropped her purse by her foot. “Listen, about last night. Are you absolutely sure they were cops?”

“Fairly sure. They could have been professional bone-breakers, but it didn’t feel that way. They felt like cops. Why?”

“I was thinking about another possibility.”

“Smith?”

“Yeah. After you chopped up his putting green . . .”

Lucas pulled his lip. “Maybe,” he said. “But I doubt it. One thing you learn as a sleazoid businessman is to roll with the punches.”

“Have you talked to Fell this morning?”

“She’s on her way over. We have a line on a couple of people who might know something about Bellevue. She’s been talking to Kennett, to make sure we don’t step on any toes . . . .”

“Okay. I’ve got Bobby Rich coming over. He’s the guy who took the tip about the witness.”

“The witness Petty found . . .”

“Yeah, the day he got killed. And there’s still some more paper to look at.”

“That’s pointless, I think,” Lucas said. “With these guys, the dead guys, we won’t find anything in their lives that’ll point to the killers. It has to be bureaucratic: who pulled their files, and when . . .”

“That’s impossible.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So we’re stuck?”

“Not quite, but it’s getting sparse. Maybe Rich’ll have something. We’ve still got Fell. I want to take a look at Petty’s apartment, his personal stuff. And I wouldn’t mind seeing the place where he was shot.”

“That’s about a half-mile from my apartment—we could walk. His apartment’s sealed. I’ll get some new seals and take you over. When?”

“Tonight? After we talk to Rich?”

“Fine.”

“What’d you tell Kennett . . . ?”

“About you being at my apartment? I said you came over to visit. I told him that sex was not a consideration, last night or in the future. I told him that you weren’t making any moves on me and I wasn’t making any moves on you, but that we had things to talk about.”

“Sounds pretty awful,” Lucas said, grinning.

“It could have been, but I just came out with it. I also told him O’Dell was there part of the time. John will back that up.”

A few minutes later, Kennett and Fell arrived together, and Lily blew up: “For Christ’s sakes, Dick, what’re you doing here? Did you walk all the way in?” Hands on hips, she turned to Fell, angry. “Barbara, did you let him . . . ?”

“Shut up, Lily,” Kennett said. He touched her cheek with an index finger. To Lucas, he said, “Well, you look like shit.”

“What do you think, Barb?” Lucas asked.

Fell had taken cover behind Kennett, and she peered out and said, “He’s right. You look like shit.”

“Then it’s unanimous,” Lucas said. “That’s what Lily said when she came in. The only one who didn’t was a twenty-four-year-old Times reporter with a great ass, who thought I looked pretty good and would probably like to hear more about this case from the hero of it . . . .”

“Gotta be a concussion,” Fell said to Lily.

“He’s always been like this,” Lily said. “I think it’s native stupidity.”

Kennett, shaking his head, said, “Goddamn women, they’re always impressed by a beat-up face. I used to get beat up whenever I needed to get laid. Worked like a charm . . .” He stopped, and frowned at Lucas: “Are you trying to get laid?” and his eyes flicked sideways at Lily.

Fell said, “Not very hard.”

Lucas and Kennett laughed; Lily didn’t.

Kennett said, “Listen, I wanted to tell you. Go ahead with those names you got. Barb’s run them down . . . .”

“One good address and one probable,” Fell said.

“Junkies?”

“Nope. Neither one of them. Not the last anybody heard, anyway.”

“All right.” Lucas eased down from the hospital bed. “Let’s go down to the nursing station. Maybe I can talk my way out before lunch.”

The charge nurse said the attending physician wanted another look at him: she’d send him down as soon as he arrived, which should be within the next few minutes. “We’ll see you first,” she said.

“All right, but pretty quick?”

“Soon as he gets here.”

Lily said, “I’ve gotta go. Take it easy today.”

“Yeah.”

He walked gingerly back to the room with Fell, trying not to move his head too quickly. At the door, he looked back toward the elevators. Kennett and Lily were waiting, looking up at the numbers above the door, then Kennett leaned toward Lily, and she went up on her toes, a kiss that wasn’t taken lightly by either of them. Lucas turned away, and caught Fell watching him watch Lily and Kennett.

“True love,” he said wryly.

The hot, hazy sun left him feeling faintly nauseous, and the headache lurked at the back of his skull.

“You look pale and wan,” Fell said.

“I’m all right.” He looked up at the storefront: Arnold’s TV and Appliance, Parts & Repair. “C’mon, let’s do her.”

A bell tingled when they went through the door; a heavyset woman looked up from a ledger, slapped it shut, and moved ponderously to the counter. “Can I help ya?” She had a cheerfully yellow smile and an improbable West Virginia hills accent. To Lucas: “Whoa, you look like you’ve been in a dustup.”

“We’re police officers,” Fell said. She lifted the flap of her purse, flashed the badge. “Are you Rose Arnold?”

The woman’s smile sagged into a frown. “Yeah. What’d you want?”

“We’re looking for a guy,” Lucas said. “We thought you could help.”

“I ain’t been here all that long . . . .”

Lucas dug in his pocket, took out his money clip, freed his driver’s license and handed it to Arnold. “Barbara here”—he nodded at Fell—“is a New York cop. I’m not. I’m from Minneapolis. They brought me in to help look for this Bekker dude who’s chopping people up.”

“Yeh?” Arnold was giving nothing away, watching him with her small wandering eyes like a pullet who suspects the axe.

“Yeah. He killed my woman out there. Maybe you read about it. I’m gonna catch him and I’m gonna do him.”

Arnold nodded and asked, “So what’s that got to do with me?”

“We think he’s getting stuff—drugs and medical equipment—from Bellevue. We know that you handle stuff out of Bellevue.”

“That’s bullshit, I never touch nothing . . . .”

“You moved five hundred cases of white Hammermill Bond copy paper out of there two weeks ago, paid a dollar a case, and sold it to a computer supply place for three dollars a case,” Fell said. “We could bust you if we wanted to, but we don’t want to. We just want some help.”

She looked at them, quietly, a gleam of strong intelligence in her eyes. Calculating. Lucas had a quick vision of her jerking some crappy piece of hillbilly iron out of a drawer, something like a rusty Iver Johnson .32, and popping him in the chest. But nothing happened, except the sound of flies bumping against the front window.

“Killed your woman?” she asked. She tipped her head, looking at him from the corner of her eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s real personal.”

She mulled it over for another few seconds, then asked, “What do you want?”

“I need the name of a guy who rips stuff out of there on a regular basis.”

“Will this come back on me?”

“No way.”

She thought about it, then mumbled: “Lew Whitechurch.”

“Lew . . .”

“Whitechurch,” she said.

“Who else?”

“He’s the only one, right out of Bellevue . . . .”

“Any chance he might be peddling pills, too?”

“I think he might. I never touch them, but Lew . . . he’s got a problem. He takes a little nose.”

“Thanks,” Lucas said. He took a personal business card from his pocket, turned it over, wrote his hotel phone number on it. “Have you handled, or know anybody who has handled, a load of emergency-room monitoring equipment?”

“No.” Her voice was positive.

“Ask around. If you find somebody, have them call me. It’ll never get past us, I swear it on a Bible. I’m only in this because Bekker cut my woman’s throat.”

“Cut her throat?” The fat woman touched her neck.

“With a bread knife,” Lucas said. He let the bitterness flow into his voice. “Listen: anybody dealing with Bekker is liable to find himself strapped to an operating table, eyelids cut off, getting his heart sliced out while he’s still alive . . . . You read the papers.”

“Watch TV.” She nodded.

“Then you know.”

“Fuckin’ lunatic, is what he is,” Arnold said.

“So ask around. Call me.”

Outside, Fell said, “You’re a scary sonofabitch sometimes. You sorta used your friend . . .”

“My friend’s dead, she doesn’t care,” he said. And he shrugged. “But hillbillies understand that revenge shit.”

“What’s the name?”

“Lew Whitechurch. And she thinks he might deal pills.”

“Let’s get him,” Fell said. As they were flagging the cab, she said, “If I bust Bekker myself, I’ll make detective first before I get out.”

“That’d be nice.” A cab zigged through the traffic toward them.

“More pension. I could probably afford a straight waitress job. I wouldn’t have to dance topless,” Fell said.

“Aw,” he said. “I was planning to come down for your first night.”

“Maybe we could work something out,” she said, and climbed into the cab before he could think of a comeback.

They caught Lewis Whitechurch pushing a tool cart through a basement hallway at Bellevue. His supervisor pointed him out, the hospital’s assistant administrator hovering anxiously in the background. Kennett’s people had been there earlier, had talked to two employees, she said, but not Whitechurch.

“What?” Whitechurch said.

Fell flashed her badge, while Lucas blocked the hall. “We need to talk to you, privately.”

Whitechurch shook his head. “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“We can talk here or I can call a squad and we can go over to Midtown South.”

“Talk about what?” Whitechurch shot a glance at the supervisor.

“Let’s find a place,” Lucas suggested.

They found a place in the hospital workshop, sitting on battered office chairs, Whitechurch spinning himself in quarter-turns with the heel of one foot. “I honest to God don’t know . . . .”

Five hundred cases of paper, they said.

“I ain’t gonna talk about nothing like that,” he said, his Jersey accent as thick as mayonnaise. “You want to talk about this other guy, Bekker, I’d help you any way I can. But I don’t know nothing about him, or any medical gear. I wouldn’t touch that shit . . . .” He caught himself. “Listen, I don’t take nothing out of here, but if I did, I wouldn’t take that stuff. I mean, people might die because of it.”

“If we catch the guy who’s helping Bekker . . . that guy’s going down as an accessory. Attica, and I’ll tell you what, man: there’d be no fuckin’ parole, not for somebody who helped this asshole . . . .”

“Jesus Christ, I’d tell you,” Whitechurch said. He was sweating. “Listen, I know a couple of people who might know something about this . . . .”

“What do you think?” Fell asked.

“He covered himself pretty well. I don’t know. We got names, anyway. We’ll come back to him. Let him stew . . . .” Whitechurch had given them two more names. Both men were working.

“Jakes is an orderly—he oughta be around,” the assistant administrator said. She was getting into the hunt, falling into Fell’s laconic speech pattern. “Williams—I’ll have to look him up.”

They found Harvey Jakes moving sheets out of the laundry.

“I don’t know about this shit,” he said. He was worried. “Listen, I don’t know why you’d come looking to me. I never been up on anything, never took anything, where’d you get my name . . .”

Williams was worse. Williams worked in the laundry, and was stupid. “Said what?”

“Said you boosted stuff out of here and . . .”

“Said what?”

Lucas looked at him closely, then at Fell, and shook his head. “He’s not faking.”

“What?” Williams looked slowly from one to the other, and they sent him back to his laundry.

“We’re into a black market—pretty casual, hard to pin down, picking up the occasional opportunity,” Fell said as they ambled down the hall. Like the rest of New York, the Bellevue interior was mostly a patch, painted white with black trim. “Doesn’t feel like a real tight ring. Whitechurch might be bigger, if he really organized a truck to haul that paper out of there. Jakes and Williams are small-time, if they’re stealing anything at all.”

“That’s about right,” Lucas said. “Whitechurch might be something, though.”

“Want to go back on him?”

“We should,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “But I fuckin’ hurt . . . .”

“You keep poking at your cheek,” she said. She reached out and touched the bruise, and her light hand didn’t hurt at all. “So what are we doing?”

“I’m going back to the hotel. I need a nap, I feel like shit,” Lucas said.

“We’re stuck?”

“Except for Whitechurch, I don’t know where we go,” Lucas said. “Let’s think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

CHAPTER

11

At the Lakota, Lucas examined his swollen cheek in the mirror. The color of the bruise was deepening, a purple blotch that dominated the side of his face, shiny in the middle, rougher toward the edges. He touched the abraded skin and winced. He’d been hit before, and knew what would happen: the abrasions would scab over while the skin around them turned yellow-green, and in a week, he’d look even worse; he’d look like Frankenstein. He shook his head at himself, tried a tentative grin, ate a half-dozen aspirin and slept for two hours. When he woke, the headache had faded, but his stomach was queasy. He gobbled four more aspirin, showered, brushed his teeth, fished an oversize Bienfang art pad from under the bed and got a wide-tipped Magic Marker from his briefcase. He wrote:

Bekker.

Needs money.

Needs drugs.

Lives Midtown w/friend?

Has vehicle.

Hasn’t been seen. Disguise?

Chemist skills.

Medical skills.

Contact at Bellevue.

Night.

He tacked the chart to a wall and lay on his bed, studying it. Bekker needed money if he was buying drugs, and he almost certainly would be. In the Hennepin County Jail he’d begged for them, for chemical relief.

Therefore: he had to be talking to dealers, or at least one dealer. Could he be working for one? Not likely as a salesman: even the dumbest of the dumb would recognize him as a time bomb, if they knew who he was. But if he was working as a chemist—methedrine was simple to synthesize, with the right training and access to the raw materials. If he were running a crank line, that would explain where he’d get money, and drugs, and maybe even a place to stay.

The car was another problem. He was dumping the bodies, obviously from a vehicle. How would he get access? How would he license it? Everything pointed to an accomplice . . . .

He stood, wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The abrasion was stiffening. He probed it with a fingernail, lifting a flake of skin, and blood trickled down his cheek. Damn. He knew better. He got a wad of toilet paper, held it to his cheek, and went back to the bed.

He looked at the chart again, but his mind drifted away from Bekker, toward the other case. Why had they jumped him? And had they really gone after him, or was something else happening? They could have taken him with guns: they had him cold. If they hadn’t wanted to kill him, they still could have gotten to him more quickly, with baseball bats. Why had they risked resistance? If he’d had a gun in his hand, he would have killed them . . . .

Why had Lily looked out the window when she did?

But the major puzzle was more subtle. He wasn’t getting anywhere, and Lily and O’Dell must see that. All he could do was look at paper, and listen to people talk. He had none of the insider information, the history, that could point him in the right direction. And yet . . . he was surrounded by people who might be involved: Fell, Kennett, O’Dell himself, even Lily. And not coincidentally.

At eight-thirty he got up; he dressed, went out to the street, flagged a cab, and rode ten minutes to Lily’s apartment. She was waiting.

“You still look rough,” she said as she opened the door. She touched his cheek. “Feels hot. Are you sure you want to do this? It’s a lot of running around.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Rich is set for nine?”

“Yes. He’s nervous, but he’s coming.”

“I don’t want him to see me,” Lucas said.

“Okay. You can sit in the kitchen with the lights out, talk to him down the hall.”

“Fine.” Lucas, hands in his pockets, wandered down toward the kitchen.

“Anything new on Bekker?” she asked, trailing behind.

“No. I was thinking, though, he must be out only at night.” Lucas perched on a tall oak stool and leaned on the breakfast bar. A handicraft ceramic bowl full of apples sat on the bar, and he picked one of them up and turned it in his fingers. “Even with stage makeup, his face would be too noticeable in daylight.”

“So?”

“Would it be possible to make random stops of single men driving inexpensive cars, after midnight, Midtown?”

“Jesus, Lucas. The chance of picking him up that way would be nil—and we’d probably get three cops shot by freaks in the meantime.”

“I’m trying to figure out ways to press him,” Lucas said. He dropped the apple back in the bowl.

“Do we really want to chase him out of here? He’d just go somewhere else, start again . . . .”

“I don’t know if he can. Somehow, I don’t know how, he’s got a unique situation here. He can hide, somehow,” Lucas said. “If he travels, he loses that—I mean, look, right now Bekker’s one of the most famous people in the country. He can’t go to motels or gas stations, he can’t take any kind of public transportation. He can’t really ride in a car without a lot of tension—if he gets pulled over by a cop, he’s done. And he needs his dope, he needs his money. If we pushed him out, if he tried to run, he’d be finished.”

She thought about it, then nodded. “I suppose we could do something. I wouldn’t want to make a lot of stops, but we could announce that we are, and ask for cooperation from the public. Maybe make a couple of stops for the TV crews . . .”

“That’d be good.”

“I’ll talk to Kennett tomorrow,” she said. She perched on a stool opposite from him, crossed her legs and wrapped her hands around the top knee.

“How’d he get on this case? Kennett?” Lucas asked.

“O’Dell pulled some strings. Kennett’s one of the best we’ve got on this kind of thing, organizing and running it.”

“He and O’Dell don’t like each other.”

“No. No, they don’t. I don’t know why O’Dell pulled him, exactly, but I can tell you one thing: he wouldn’t have done it unless he thought Kennett would find Bekker. Back in Minneapolis, you can control the bureaucratic fallout, because the department’s small and everybody knows everybody else. But here . . . We’ve got to find Bekker, or heads’ll start rolling. People are pissed off.”

Lucas nodded, thought about it for a second, and said, “Kennett’s an intelligence guy: are you sure he’s not involved with Robin Hood?”

Lily looked down at her hands. “In my heart, I’m sure. I couldn’t prove it, though. Whoever’s running this thing must have a fair amount of charisma, to hold it together, and good organizational skills . . . and certain political opinions. Kennett fits.”

“But . . . ?”

“He has too much sense,” Lily said. “He’s a believer in, what? Goodness, maybe. That’s what I feel about him, anyway. We talk about things.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not exactly proof,” Lily said. She was tight, unhappy with the question, chewing at it.

“I wasn’t asking for proof, I was asking for an opinion,” Lucas said. “What about O’Dell? He seems to be running everything. He runs you, he runs Kennett. He’s running me, or thinks he is. He picked Fell out of the hat . . . .”

“I don’t know, I just don’t know. Even the way he picked Fell, it seems more like magic than anything. We may be on a complete wild-goose chase.” She was about to go on, but chimes sounded from the door. She hopped off her stool and walked down the hall and pushed her intercom button. A man’s voice said, “Bobby Rich, Lieutenant.”

“I’ll buzz you in,” Lily said. To Lucas, she said, “Get the lights.”

Lucas turned off the lights and sat on the floor, legs crossed. Sitting in the dark, he watched Lily as she waited by the door, a tall woman, less heavy than she once was, with a long, aristocratic neck. Charisma. Good organizational skills. Certain political opinions.

“How did you talk O’Dell into bringing me here?” he asked abruptly. “Was he reluctant? How hard did you have to press?”

“Bringing you here was more his idea than mine,” Lily said. “I’d told him about you and he said you sounded perfect.”

Rich knocked on the door as Lucas thought, Really?

Rich was a tall black man, balding, athletic, hair cropped so closely that his head looked shaven. He wore a green athletic jacket with tan sleeves, and blue jeans. He said, “Hello,” and edged inside the apartment. Lily pointed him at a chair where Lucas could see his face, and then said, “There’s another guy in the apartment, in the kitchen.”

“What?” Rich, just settling on the chair, half rose and looked down the hall.

“Don’t get up,” Lily snapped. She pointed him back into the chair.

“What’s going on here?” Rich asked, still peering toward the kitchen.

“We have a guy who’s getting close to Robin Hood. Maybe. He doesn’t want you to see his face. He doesn’t know who to trust . . . . If you don’t want to talk about it, with him back there, we can cut it off right here. You can go back into the bedroom while he leaves. Then it’ll be just you and me . . . but I wanted you to know.”

Rich’s tongue slid over his lower lip, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. After a minute, he relaxed. “I don’t see how he can hurt me,” he said.

“He can’t,” Lily said. “He’s mostly going to listen, maybe ask a couple of questions. Why don’t you just tell me what you told Walt? If either of us has questions, we’ll break in.”

Rich thought about it for another moment, looked into the dark, trying to penetrate it, then nodded. “Okay,” he said.

He’d been at home when he got a call from an ex-burglar he’d busted a couple of times, a man named Lowell Jackson. Jackson was trying to go straight, as a sign painter, and was doing okay.

“He said an acquaintance of his had called, a kid named Cornell, nicknamed Red. Cornell had said he’d seen Fred Waites go down and that it wasn’t no gang-bangers—that one of the guys in the car was an old white guy and Cornell thought he was a cop. Jackson gave me an address.”

Old white guy?

“Did you go after Cornell?” asked Lily.

“Yeah. Couldn’t find him. So I went and talked to Jackson.”

“What he say?”

“He said right after he talked to me, that same day, he saw Cornell at this playground on 118th—this is all in my report . . . .”

“Go ahead,” Lily said.

“Cornell came down to a playground on 118th and said he was going home. Getting out of town. Nobody knew where he went. His last name is Reed. Cornell Reed. He’s got a sheet. He’s a doper, into crack. But he used to be some kind of college kid. Not a regular asshole.”

“How old is he?” Lily asked.

“Middle twenties, like that.”

“New York guy?”

“No. Supposedly he came from down south somewhere, Atlanta maybe. Been here a few years, though—Jackson said he didn’t talk about where he came from. There was something . . . wrong. He just wouldn’t talk about it. Used to cry about it, though, when he was drunk.”

“How many times was he busted?”

“Half-dozen, nothing big. Theft, shoplifting, minor possession. We looked for background on him, NCIC, but there’s nothing—his first busts were here in New York, addresses up in Harlem.”

“And he’s gone.”

“Nowhere to be found. We checked Atlanta, but they don’t know him.”

“Dead?”

Rich frowned. “Don’t think so. When he took off from the playground, he had some new shoes and a big nylon suitcase. That’s what the guys at the playground say. He came up to 118th to say good-bye, they were sitting around. Then he jumped a cab and that’s the last they saw of him.”

“You wrote a report on all of this?”

“Yeah. And we’re still looking for him. To tell you the truth, he’s about the only thing we ever got on the case.”

“What were you doing for Petty?” Lucas asked.

“Just looking at guys, mostly,” Rich said. “Made me a little nervous, tell you the truth. I tried to get off it. I don’t like looking at our own people.”

“How’d you get assigned to the case?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t know. Someone downtown, I guess,” Rich said, his forehead wrinkling as he thought about it. “My lieutenant just said to report down to City Hall for a special assignment. He didn’t know what was going on either.”

“All right,” said Lucas. Then, “How did Cornell know the white guy was old?”

“Don’t know; if I find him, I’ll ask him. Maybe just because he knows him from somewhere . . .”

They talked for another half hour, but Rich had almost nothing that wasn’t in the reports. Lily thanked him and let him go.

“Waste of time,” Lily said to Lucas.

“Had to try. What do you know about him? Rich?”

“Not much, really,” she said.