Colin Harrison - The Finder

"You could?" she said, her voice disgusted.

"I will turn up the heat. I'll roast the asshole."

"Then go do it, Bill, and stop telling me how fucking miserable I am!" His beautiful wife put her hands on her hips and looked ferociously at him, and in that moment they both knew, again, happily, why he had married her.

She was in more danger than he realized. Ray put down the phone. One of his father's old friends from the job, Detective Pete Blake, now on the brink of retirement himself, had filled Ray in on the murder of the two Mexican girls. A loner who'd never married, Blake used to come to the house for Thanksgiving dinners, throw a football in the alley with Ray while his father raked leaves before going inside for the feast Ray's mother had cooked. "Yeah, we found them laid out on the parking lot," Blake had said. "Couple of days ago. Aerosol mace dispenser on the pavement. Somebody filled the car with sewage. The guys had to have a pump-out truck, some kind of vehicle that holds septic waste."

"I thought the whole city is tied in to the sewers."

"It is, but people still need pump-outs when their pipes are clogged or break. Plus you got some old septic tanks still in operation here and there."

"So you look for one of these trucks?"

"The thing of it is that the state Department of Environmental Protection shows computer records for 918 such vehicles licensed to operate in Brooklyn, Queens, and western Suffolk County. Take a long time to knock all those out. Course, the truck could be unlicensed, too, maybe even be from Jersey or north of the city. So maybe it's smarter to work it through the girls. They'd been drowned before being pulled out of their car. Smart way to kill somebody in some respects. There's no DNA. I mean, there's too much DNA, all of it contaminated. Plus we don't really know who these Mexican girls were. They had ID but it was all fake, fake green cards, everything. No driver's license, of course. No bank accounts, used one of those check-cashing places, probably. Telephone is in the name of somebody who doesn't live there anymore, utility bills paid by money order. It's like that with all these people. Might be a drug thing, girls smoked a bit, there were boyfriends in the trade. Lots of Mexicans selling drugs in Brooklyn these days. We know who some of them are. The thing of it is that all these organizations are always fighting for turf, showing how fricking vicious they can be. The Albanians are very tough. So are the Salvadoran kids. Last month we had a dead guy, they put him through a band saw, put the top half on a pole like some kinda Mexican scarecrow. So killing a couple of wetback girlfriends is good advertising. Your girlfriends are shit, you are nobody-this is the way these people think. We found traces of stuff in the trunk of the car, glove compartment. Car is still drying, we'll see if there's anything else. We got people to talk to, snitches, rats, nice people like that."

"Didn't see it in the news."

"Didn't nobody tell you, Ray?"

"What?"

"There's no news in Brooklyn. You want news? Commit your crimes in Manhattan, and try to do it south of, like, Ninety-sixth Street. No, actually we kept it quiet, to help us with any informants. One of the tabloids got it but ran it small. Anyway, someone broke the two front side windows with a chunk of asphalt to open the doors, failed to save the girls, then disappeared. That means the car was locked from the inside, and that means that either the girls were already incapacitated or were trapped in the car and someone locked the doors after they were incapacitated. There was a wine bottle in the car, maybe they had passed out, we don't have complete toxicology and autopsy body weight back yet, which is disgraceful, if you ask me." Blake made a coffee-sipping sound. "Still too hot. Anyway, whoever tried to save them is probably too scared to get involved, and who could blame them? Rain fell pretty steadily on the bodies for maybe an hour, washed out the car like that." Blake paused, and when his voice came back, it was professionally softer, a little slower, slipping in a question. "Why you interested, anyway?"

Ray wasn't going to mention his evening with Chen and his men-not yet, anyway. "My old girlfriend works at the same company they did. I think she saw them earlier that night."

"Then we might want to talk to her."

"That makes two of us. She's not around, if you know what I mean."

"You find her, let me know. She's a person of interest. What's her name?"

"Jin Li."

"Chinese? Real Chinese?"

"Yes." Ray knew this fact would stick in Blake's brain.

"Off the boat, I mean?"

"So to speak." He wanted to change the topic. "So how do you go after the guys who did it?"

"Tough-nobody saw nothing, so far, anyway. Right before dawn. We'll work the drugs, see what we get. Trucks can't go on the Belt Parkway legally, but if it did, we got cameras. Sometimes they work, sometimes they didn't get serviced. Course, if you know the side roads you don't have to take the Belt." Blake barked a laugh. "Your father'd be tearing up the parking lot drains, looking for whatever he could find."

"You do that?"

"Not yet. We can't go into the drains."

"Why?"

"Federal wetlands. That's a tide zone. Environmental regulations. We screw up the drains, then we can pollute the ocean, something like that."

Blake was fastidious, Ray remembered, but also methodical. He collected New York subway memorabilia: hats, badges, uniforms, tokens, subway signs, regulation booklets, all displayed in frames or binders. He had a copy of almost every New York City subway map ever published, quite an accomplishment considering the subway had opened in 1904, its maps updated every year or two as the system grew and the original private subway companies consolidated into the Metropolitan Transit Authority. He'd seen Blake's collection: each document was kept in an archival Mylar folder and thoroughly cataloged. A weird pursuit for a middle-aged man. Maybe not so strange for a detective who lived by himself. "That's the reason, the ocean?"

"Nah, the real reason is that if we tear up that pipe we got a big traffic problem in that parking lot this summer. People can't park, you got flooding, a mess. Also, no cop is ever going to crawl up a drainpipe stuffed with sewage, especially since it will all wash out into the gulley there anyway." Blake gave a long sigh. "How's your dad doing?"

"Not too good, Pete."

"You want me to come around, say hello?"

"He might like that."

"Honest with you, he told me he was dying and that he was saying good-bye to me. This was like three weeks ago."

"Drive by in a couple of days. Mornings are better."

"You got it."

After the call, Ray stared at an information sheet that came with the Dilaudid going into his father's arm. He'd grabbed it when the nurse wasn't looking. Effects of Dilaudid to the general and central nervous systems, said the flyer, include "sedation, drowsiness, mental clouding, lethargy, impairment of mental and physical performance, anxiety, fear, dizziness, psychic dependence, mood changes (nervousness, apprehension, depression, floating feelings, dreams), light-headedness, weakness, headache, agitation, tremor, uncoordinated muscle movements, muscle rigidity, paresthesia, muscle tremor, blurred vision, nystagmus, diplopia and miosis, transient hallucinations and disorientation, visual disturbances, insomnia, sweating, flushing, dysphoria, euphoria and increased intracranial pressure."

I'm going to lose him to drugs faster than the cancer, Ray thought, heading toward his father's bed. But of course Dilaudid was amazing stuff; he'd received it himself, to help with the pain of his stomach burn and the skin grafts. The drug made you feel warm and heavy, removed all hunger and pain. Removed sexual desire, too. Eight times more potent than real morphine. People called it "drugstore heroin." He wouldn't mind sampling a tiny bit again sometime, either.