Marcus Sakey - The Blade Itself

But apart from their echoes, the garage was silent. There was nobody here. Nolan could sense it, like returning home after a vacation, the way a place just felt empty. They went through the motions on the rest, checking the remaining cover: inside the truck, the small shop bathroom at the rear, the closets, but they found no one. Nolan’s nerves settled. He straightened and holstered his weapon. “You want this one or the other?”

“I’ll check the living room.” Matthews turned and walked back the way they’d come.

Nolan moved through the garage, careful not to touch anything. Tools lay strewn on the floor, a pile of tarps in one corner. There was a workbench with a Saint Christopher’s medallion hanging on it. He guessed you could take the man out of the parish, but not the parish out of the man. A radio on the floor, what they used to call a ghetto blaster back before things got politically correct. The bathroom was tidy, the toilet and tile clean. The floor had plenty of stains, but most of them looked like oil.

There was no pool of blood to be found.

He cursed quietly. Murder cases had infinite variations, but only two categories – those with witnesses and evidence, and those without. If you caught a break within forty-eight hours, then the first category had a good chance of being cleared. Unfortunately, this one was shaping up to be the latter. The body had been in the water about a week, invisible until the expanding gases in the belly brought it to the surface. That would have given a killer plenty of time to clean up his mess. The river also destroyed most physical evidence; about the best they could hope was that the medical examiner would pull a bullet they might be able to ballistics match. And with nothing at Patrick’s place, their likeliest crime scene had turned up snake eyes.

He sighed and walked back into the living room.

“You knew this guy, right?” Matthews was poking around with the tip of a pencil, lifting a newspaper from the coffee table. Normally they would need a warrant for all of this, but in the case of a body, the residence was fair game.

“A little.” Nolan moved to the small refrigerator by the bed, put on a pair of gloves, and opened it: a couple of take-out containers and a six-pack of Harp. Nothing smelled too foul – it hadn’t been abandoned long. “We grew up in the same neighborhood.”

“He run with bad people?”

“Last I heard he was small-time, a car thief. He got busted a couple years ago in somebody else’s Caddy.”

“He go down for it?”

“No.” Nolan turned in a slow circle. No sign of violence, no furniture knocked over, no broken glass. “Owner turned out to be dealing heroin out of an apartment in Uptown, and the whole thing fell apart.”

Matthews nodded. “So what now?”

“Interviews.” Murder cases were like reading a book in reverse. There was a personal drama that ended in a body. That was where the police came in. Without evidence, the thing to do was work backward, talking to family and friends, a boss if the victim had one. You were trying to figure out who saw him last, because that was the guy that dumped him in the river.

Matthews groaned. “We don’t find a witness, state’s attorney’s going to kick this back to us.”

“Yeah.”

“You ask me, the first squad on the scene should have thrown rocks at the body till it drifted back across the river. Let Area Four deal with it.”

Nolan laughed. There was an answering machine on the dresser. He went to look at it. The old-fashioned tape kind. The message indicator was blinking, and he pushed PLAY.

“Paaaaaatrick,” a woman’s voice. “Where are you, my bad boy? David’s in Milwaukee, and I’m lonely.”

Nolan rolled his eyes at Matthews, walked over to check the bedside drawer. Condoms, a couple of motorcycle magazines. The woman went on for another minute, hung up without leaving a number. They’d have to pull the phone records and find out when she’d last seen him, work forward from there. Sounded like she was married – the husband could be a suspect.

After that were a couple of hangups, and then a male voice came on, blues thumping behind it. “Patrick, it’s Danny.” Nolan straightened, his fingers tingling. “I need your help. It’s – it’s about that thing we talked about. Look, just call my mobile when you get this, would you? Day or night.” The machine beeped again.

The detectives looked at each other. Nolan pressed REWIND and then PLAY, and the voice came back, the captured blues riff repeating behind it. He listened carefully, trying to filter out the noise behind the voice, the distortion of the crummy answering machine. “Huh.”

“What?” Matthews asked.

“I think I know that guy.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. It made sense – if he remembered right, Danny and Patrick had been friends back in the old parish. Now Danny was running scared, with Evan out of prison and shaking him down. Maybe Danny decided he needed help. Maybe he thought back and remembered a name, a tough-enough character.

Maybe, just maybe, Danny Carter had hired Patrick to take Evan out.

It was thin. Way too thin for a warrant. But worth exploring.

“I think,” Nolan said, “we need to have a chat with a guy I know, claims he’s in construction.”

The walk from the fenced parking lot into the back corridor, past the stale-cigarette reek of the break room, through the double doors that separated the blue-collar portions of the office from the posh bleached-wood-and-stainless-steel lobby the clients saw, and up the hall to his office with its modular desk and narrow window took maybe thirty seconds. A brief enough time, but this morning, Danny’s first back in the office, it felt like an eternity.

He held his smile up like an ID, pointing it this way and that, nodding at Richard’s assistant, muttering something noncommittal in response to a question he hadn’t quite caught. His stomach felt buoyant, crowding upward into his chest.

Blue flecks dotted the gray carpet in his office. He’d never noticed that before.

Danny took his appointment book from his satchel, set it on top of a stack of architectural magazines and trade show invitations, and dropped into his high-backed chair, one of those office store jobs designed without sympathy for the human body. They were standard issue to everybody but Richard, who sat in a seven-hundred-dollar Herman Miller throne.

Good reason to kidnap his son , he thought to himself, then, immediately, Stop it .

After everything had gone down yesterday, he’d still had to make an appearance on the job sites, and it hadn’t been easy. He’d felt a fraud, moving through the buzz of honest labor, giving directions like he deserved to be there. The whole time knowing that he was poison, the worm in the apple. But somehow, it had been easier than sitting in his own office. He used to take great pride in it, the idea that Danny Carter, from Bridgeport, was the senior project manager, an invaluable, trusted member of a team. He’d enjoyed worrying about the delicate budgets of half a dozen jobs, the work schedules of forty men. He used to know that he could put in an honest day, and that when he went home, he would have earned the life that awaited him there.

Now, all he could think about was a construction trailer, and Evan with a gun, and the teetering structure of lies that had become his life.

Stop. This will all be over soon. Tomorrow we make the second call, Thursday we get Tommy back to Richard, Friday everything goes back to the way it was.

He wasn’t sure that was true, not 100 percent convinced, but it was what he had. So he picked up his pencil, opened his papers, and started working.