Stuart Kaminsky - Deluge

"I'm sorry, Jeffrey. I can't. Not for a few days. Then we'll find a way to be together. I promise."

She had almost called him "baby." He didn't like that.

"I've got to," he said.

She heard the toilet flushing. Not much time. Seconds.

"I'll kill myself if I don't see you today," Jeffrey said, his voice definitely trembling.

"Gronten Hotel on Twenty-seventh Street," she said. "Room eight-eleven. Say you're my nephew. Tell them I told you to bring me something, a book. Pick up a book."

"I'm sorry," Jeffrey said.

"Don't be," she said.

This time she called him "baby."

"That was fine," said the limping man, taking the cell phone from the boy's hand and closing it. "You don't have to be afraid. I'm not going to hurt you."

"What're you showing me?" Danny asked.

Lindsay sat in front of him, palms up. The palms were almost beet red.

"Palms without glass fragments," she said.

He held out his hands and said, "Palms without glass fragments. What's your point?"

"I sprayed glass fragments into my palms," she said.

"Sounds like fun," Danny said. He grimaced.

"Then I applied French green clay like the clay I found on one of the palms of the people at Wallen we examined."

"And you found?"

"The clay didn't remove glass fragments. I had to pry them out."

"That had to hurt," said Danny.

"It didn't feel good. The interesting thing is I got the glass out, but I didn't get rid of all the green clay stain. Our killer did the same."

"So we have a suspect," said Danny. "Someone with a slightly green palm, swollen like yours where the fragments were removed."

"We have a suspect," Lindsay said with a smile.

"Wrong, Montana," Danny said. "We've got two suspects. I took another look at the videotape, sections that hadn't been altered."

"And you found?"

"I'll show you," he said.

It was Danny's turn to smile.

They moved down the hall to where Danny had set up the videotape.

"There," he said. "Students in Havel's ten o'clock class going into the lab."

He stopped the image on each of the four students.

"Got it so far?" he asked.

"Nothing to get yet," she said, standing behind him.

"Right," he agreed. "But now we go forty minutes after the class ended. I've isolated images of all the students. Annette Heights."

On the screen, frozen with a click, Annette Heights, the girl with the cute round face and wavy dark hair, was openmouthed, talking to two other girls.

"Okay," said Danny, pressing a button.

The images shot by and then stopped.

"Karen Reynolds," he said.

The tall girl was walking alone down a corridor toward the camera. Lindsay examined the image and nodded. Danny moved to the next image he had isolated.

"James Tuvekian."

The boy sat at a table in the cafeteria across from another boy. It was the same table where Danny had interviewed the students and faculty.

"And finally, Cynthia Parrish," he said.

The girl was standing next to a locker. A boy was leaning over her, one hand resting on the wall over her right shoulder. She was looking up at him. She looked as if she were about to cry.

"See it?" Danny asked.

"I see it," Lindsay said. "One of our kids changed clothes."

"And why would someone do that?"

"Blood," said Lindsay. "Get rid of the bloody clothes. Alter the tapes."

"Let's go talk to our suspects," said Danny.

"I'll get my kit."

"Bring an umbrella," Danny said.

He hadn't been able to get the bloody clothes she had been wearing out of the building. Too many eyes. The alarm had come too quickly. The damned queer O'Shea had found Havel's body too soon.

He had improvised, gotten the gym bag out of her locker, helped her change. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Havel wasn't supposed to die. But it had happened and he had done his best to cover it up.

Now he had to dance just ahead of the two CSI detectives.

He was dancing as fast as he could.

If you were homeless, finding a reasonably or unreasonably dry place to get out of the rain was growing increasingly difficult. There were underpasses, but they were three inches deep with dark water. There were basements with broken windows, but they were minilakes with floating garbage. There were abandoned buildings, but they were thick with bottom-rung crack addicts or the clinically insane.

The Hat was in search of something better.

The Hat, of course, always wore a hat, whatever kind of hat he could find or filch. It was his trademark. It was all he really had to identify himself among the shaggy, skinny, toothless old men with unkempt hair and beards.

The Hat had another name. He hadn't forgotten it. He just had trouble attaching it to the creature of the streets he had become.

The Hat knew a place to get out of the rain, an office building that was almost finished. The Hat knew a window he could pry open. He would just have to keep watch for guards. There wouldn't be any contractors or builders or workers today, not with the rain.

All he needed was something to eat.

He wouldn't steal. No need. If you were willing to walk and knew where you were going, you could always get a free meal, a not-bad meal. You didn't even have to dig into the garbage bins down by the food court in Grand Central Station.

The Hat went through the window and almost lost the St. Louis Rams cap he was wearing. It tipped back when he went through the window, but it didn't fall off. He made a note to clean up the prints from the window before he left. The Hat closed the window behind him and stood quietly, sniffing the air.

Over the fumes of freshly painted office walls, he smelled peanut butter.

There wasn't much blood on the hospital blues that Charles Cheswith found in the hamper outside the open door of Room 203. A woman was mopping inside the room, speaking to someone in Spanish. Charles had been lucky. She was just across from the room in which he had been.

No one was looking down the corridor his way.

He might have found something cleaner, but he didn't have time to fish around. He took the blues and hobbled to a door marked "Custodial." The door was open. He clicked on the light and took off his hospital gown. The room smelled like solvent or cleaning fluid. Charles had always liked the smell of Lysol and gasoline. His brother, Mal-com, had a more delicate sense of smell. There had never been much compatible between them.

The small room contained white plastic bottles, packages of napkins, bolts of toilet paper, paper towels. Charles needed a pair of shoes or slippers. He needed crutches. He needed to get the hell out of the hospital.

He opened the door a crack and peered out. The cleaning woman with the hamper had moved farther down the corridor. Charles came out and went into the room she had exited.

Two beds, both occupied. A skinny, gray man in need of a shave lay sleeping in the nearby bed. His mouth was open. He was snoring. In the other bed, a short broad man with black wavy hair that looked dyed looked up at Charles and said, "Que pasa?"

"Stubbed my toe," said Charles with a rueful smile. "Just now coming out of surgery."

"You should take care of that, Doctor," said the man.

"On my way to do just that," Charles said. "Just checking on the patient here."

Charles hobbled to the first bed and looked at the chart at the foot of the bed. Then he looked up.

"Fine," he said.

"He's gonna die," said the man in the far bed.

"We all are," said Charles.

"Pero este hombre va a morir hoy o manana."

"Que lastima," said Charles. "Tengo a tomar sus zapatos."

"Por que?"

"He won't be needing them anymore," said Charles, holding on to the bed and leaning over. A pair of hospital slippers were just under the bed. He managed to fish them out without falling.