Robert Crais - Chasing Darkness

“Yvonne Bennett made it my business, Marx. So do the Repkos and Ida Frostokovich and the other families you’ve lied to. You told those people it was finished. They’ve buried their children, but they’re going to have to dig them up again. What in hell were you thinking?”

He hooked a thumb at Pike.

“How many people besides you and this one know what we’re doing?”

“A few.”

“Poitras is probably helping you, isn’t he?”

“Poitras doesn’t know anything.”

“We need their names.”

“Forget it, Marx. There’s no chance in hell.”

Munson had gone to the sliders.

“Sweet. You got your privacy, you got your view, you have your stolen police property. Not everyone would have the balls to break into a deputy chief’s house.”

“You have me confused with someone else.”

Munson laughed. He was probably a pretty good guy and I would probably like him if he was someone else.

“Please, Cole. Really. Who else could it be, the way you’ve been dogging us. Now we have this problem.”

Pike, floating between the dining room and kitchen, said, “We don’t have a problem.”

Munson hit Pike with the grin.

“Look at Pike here. Pike looks like he wants to shoot it out. What do you say, Chief? We could kill’m, say they resisted arrest.”

Bastilla glanced up from stacking the files.

“You’re not helping.”

“That was humor. They know I’m kidding.”

Marx looked at me with the unfocused eyes of someone who had considered it and hadn’t been kidding.

“We could have gotten the warrants and brought along some boys from Metro, but we didn’t. I can’t force you to cooperate, but we have to contain this. If Wilts finds out, we may never be able to make the case. That meant lying about our investigation, but now this is where we are, and you’re here with us.”

“You believe Wilts killed those women.”

“Yes.”

“Then why close the case on Byrd? Why tell those families it was over?”

“Because that’s what Wilts wants us to think.”

Munson pulled a chair from the table and swung his leg over it like he was mounting a horse.

“We believe he engineered Byrd’s death so we would close the Repko case-probably because he was scared we might find something on the security disk. He forced our hand with this damned death book. When we realized that’s what he wanted, we gave him Byrd to buy ourselves more time.”

Pike said, “Why Byrd?”

Munson shrugged.

“Byrd was already connected to one of the victims-Yvonne Bennett. He’s gotta be thinking, when we find Byrd with this picture of Bennett, we’ll think it’s a slam dunk. If you’re asking how Wilts and Byrd are connected, we don’t know. Wilts might have picked him because of the Bennett connection, but maybe they knew each other.”

I said, “That’s a helluva risk to take, thinking you’ll call it quits just because Byrd has the book.”

Marx’s lips pressed into a hard line.

“Well, Cole, I guess he thought it was worth the risk, didn’t he? Repko wasn’t some streetwalker-he screwed up by killing someone close to him, which was a mistake he hadn’t made since Frostokovich.”

A knot of anger grew in my shoulders.

“Have you bastards known he’s been killing people for seven years?”

Munson made a grunting laugh that caused Bastilla to glance up, but Marx glowered.

“Of course not. Only since the book.”

“You must have known since Frostokovich.”

“Goddamnit. I took care of some things for him, but nothing like this. He was a nasty bastard, all right, but I was investigating one of my friends. You never think someone you know could do something like this.”

“So you let it go? You fixed it for him?”

“Fuck off, Cole. The girl’s friends told us about running into him that night at dinner, so we questioned him. He told us he went to an apartment he kept over by Chinatown after seeing them at dinner. Alone. So we had the coincidence of the meetings, and we knew he was a prick, but that was it. We couldn’t clear him, but we couldn’t find anything solid. You can’t make a case on coincidence, so we all went on with our lives. After a while I told myself it was silly to suspect the guy. Hell, he was my friend, and all we had was the coincidental meeting.”

Pike said, “Until Repko.”

“Repko got us started, but it was really the book. When we saw Frostokovich everything came back. Wilts knew some of these girls. Wilts was the common demoninator.”

Munson picked up where Marx left off by explaining they had discovered a connection between Wilts and the fourth victim pictured in the book, twenty-five-year-old prostitute Marsha Trinh. In reviewing her arrest record, it was learned she was one of five prostitutes Wilts had hired for a private party to influence prominent supporters one month before her murder. This contact put Wilts with three of the seven victims. Three out of seven was convincing.

Munson said, “We still have a long way to go, Cole. We can’t have you drawing attention to this. The man has to believe he’s safe.”

“How close are you?”

“We would arrest him if we had something. We don’t.”

“You think he’s a flight risk?”

“You never know, but no, I don’t think so. People like this, they think they can beat you and some of them do. They get off by thinking they’re smarter than us. He wanted us to think Byrd is the guy, and right now he believes we bought it. That’s why we played it the way we did. As long as he believes he’s safe, we have a shot at making a case. You cannot kill seven people without making a mistake. It cannot be done.”

Munson nodded like he believed it, then stared at me.

“We’re busting our asses to make this case, but right now our biggest problem is you, asking around at Leverage, scaring the shit out of the Casik girl, getting Alan Levy worked up-”

I raised my palms, stopping him.

“Waitaminute. How did I scare Ivy Casik?”

Marx scowled at me.

“That’s why I hate goddamned private operators like you-you don’t know how to handle yourself.”

I looked at Bastilla.

“What’s this about, Bastilla? Did you find her?”

“I didn’t have to find her. She called. She wanted to file a complaint against you.”

“For what?”

“She said you accused her of being a drug dealer.”

“I asked if she picked up the oxys for Byrd.”

“She heard it as a threat.”

“What did she say about the reporter?”

“There wasn’t a reporter, you dipshit. She made it up to get rid of you. Then she got worried she might get into trouble, so she called us to straighten it out.”

I flashed on Ivy Casik. I wondered if Levy had found her and if she had told him the same thing. Then Bastilla put the last of the files in the box and stacked the murder books on top.

“That’s everything, Chief.”

Marx nodded, then studied me again. His brow was so deeply furrowed it looked like rows of midwestern corn.

“So what are you going to do? Can we get some cooperation here?”

I glanced at Pike, and Pike nodded.

“I don’t like it, but I understand what you’re trying to do. I’m not going to sit out the game, Marx, but I won’t spoil the play. I’m better than that.”

“We’ll see.”

Marx put out his hand. The gesture surprised me, and maybe I hesitated too long, but I took it. He left without saying anything else, then Munson followed with the files. Bastilla was trailing after Munson when I stopped her at the door.

“When you bust Wilts, everything about the chief’s prior relationship with him is going to come out. It isn’t lost on me that he knows that.”