Sandra Brown - Ricochet

Worley consulted his small spiral notebook and read off the address.

Duncan knew the street; he’d been walking up and down both sides of it just a few hours ago looking for a trace of Elise or her car. “That’s a rough neighborhood,” he said, hoping his voice sounded neutral.

“Well, it wasn’t the street Napoli was interested in,” Worley said. “It was the car parked on the street. The car that didn’t fit the neighborhood and stuck out like a sore thumb. The taxi driver said Napoli didn’t want to be let out at any particular house number and tipped him real good to forget he’d ever seen him.

“But when the guy saw Napoli ’s picture on TV this morning, he figured what the hell? What was Napoli going to do to him if he told about it now? So when I called, he was eager to talk. Driving around a murder victim hours before he got popped has made this guy a celebrity among his coworkers.”

Worley straddled the nearest chair and asked Kong if he had any more doughnuts. Kong apologized for having eaten the last one.

Duncan asked, “Did the cabdriver describe the car parked on the street where Napoli was dropped?”

“Elise Laird’s,” Worley replied as he frowned at Kong for hogging the doughnuts. “He didn’t get the license number or anything, but he described it to a T. So, I guess that solves the mystery of where they linked up. Oops. Don’t tell His Judgeship I used that ‘vulgar’ phrase again.” He explained to Kong how Judge Laird had jumped him for suggesting that his old lady’s meeting with Napoli had been prearranged.

“We haven’t confirmed that it was prearranged,” Duncan reminded him.

“No,” Worley replied a shade irritably. “That hasn’t been confirmed, but what else would Mrs. Laird be doing in that neighborhood?”

Screwing a cop, Duncan thought.

He had left Elise around eleven forty, eleven forty-five. Had she stayed there, waiting for Napoli to join her at twelve twenty-six? Why? To enlist his help, since Duncan had refused his? Or to solve her problem once and for all? If it hadn’t been a prearranged meeting, how had Napoli known where to find her?

Struck by a sudden thought, he asked, “Where’s her car now?”

“In the pound.”

This time he made it to the door, saying over his shoulder, “Call me as soon as anything else breaks.”

An hour later Duncan upended the brown paper evidence bag and dumped the small, round object onto Bill Gerard’s desk. “A transponder.”

“ Duncan found it under Mrs. Laird’s car,” DeeDee explained.

She and Duncan had met at the car pound. She had accompanied Napoli ’s car when it was towed from the church parking lot to the garage. Duncan had given her a Cliffs’ Notes rendition of Napoli ’s taxi ride.

“So what are you doing here?” she’d asked.

“Looking for a tracking device.”

Napoli had been sloppy about hiding it, and in under a minute Duncan had found it. He’d wasted no time getting it back to the Barracks.

“She didn’t meet him there,” he told Gerard, DeeDee, and Worley, who were grouped around the captain’s desk looking at the transponder as though it were a specimen of some foreign matter. “He tracked her there.”

“How’d he get this gizmo on her car?” Worley asked.

“He did stuff like this for a living. You can order surveillance equipment off the Internet. He could have put it on her car while she was parked outside the hairdresser’s. He could have got a flunky like Trotter to do it while she was having lunch with her husband. It wouldn’t have been hard. Couple of seconds and the deed was done.”

“Okay, that bug is pretty incriminating. Napoli was tracking Mrs. Laird. But what was our esteemed judge’s wife doing in that run-down neighborhood last night?” DeeDee tossed out the question, but no one picked it up, especially not Duncan.

Finally Worley said, “The first thing we need to do is ask the judge was he having his wife followed again.”

“Even if he was, he’ll deny it,” DeeDee said. “And how can we prove it now?”

“Is the neighborhood being canvassed?” Gerard asked.

“As we speak,” Worley said. “I’ve got two uniforms working it.”

DeeDee said, “Maybe you should have used plainclothes-men.”

“In that neighborhood it wouldn’t matter,” Duncan said. “Whoever we sent would be marked for cops.”

Without saying it, the three veterans knew that the canvass would be a waste of time and manpower. In that part of town, anyone who was friendly with cops today could be the victim of a seemingly random drive-by shooting tomorrow. No one was going to talk to two uniforms going door-to-door asking questions.

Gerard’s desk phone rang. He answered with a brusque, “Gerard.” He listened for a moment, then said, “I’ll tell ’em, thanks.” He hung up and said, “ Dothan ’s ready to perform the autopsy on Napoli.”

“I’ll go,” Duncan offered. If Napoli ’s corpse produced any of his assailant’s DNA, he wanted to be the first to know. Carefully he picked up the transponder and returned it to the evidence bag. “I’ll drop this at forensics.”

Gerard said, “Worley, let’s get the names of residents for each address on the street where Mrs. Laird’s car was found. See if we can connect her to anyone.”

“I’ll get somebody on it. Then I’ll pay the judge a visit. Tell him about the transponder, hint that in all probability his old lady was being followed by Napoli, see what his reaction is.”

“Good. Take DeeDee with you. She’s good at reading people.” Gerard paused, then added, “It wouldn’t hurt to check out resident names on the surrounding streets in that neighborhood, too.”

As they filed out, Duncan was hoping that the unnamed owner of the ramshackle house where he’d met Elise wouldn’t easily be flagged as an acquaintance of hers.

One good thing, running down information like that was tedious and time-consuming. It could take days before a comprehensive list of homeowners and current lessees was compiled, especially in that neighborhood, where aliases were as commonplace as cockroaches. Finding the connection to Elise would take even longer. Weeks, perhaps.

Surely she would be found before then.

Surely.

But one week crawled by. The fervor with which everyone began the search for Elise Laird waned a little each day that passed without uncovering a single clue to her whereabouts.

Napoli ’s autopsy proved the initial guess correct: he had died of internal hemorrhage due to the puncturing of several major organs. “Even if he’d made it to a trauma center alive, I don’t think a surgeon could’ve saved him. Blood loss was too quick and too significant,” the ME told Duncan. “The shooter knew where to aim to make it deadly.”

Just like Gary Ray Trotter’s shooter.

Lost in that thought, Duncan almost missed Dothan telling him that the bullet he’d removed was from a.22-caliber pistol.

“You mean a twenty-five,” Duncan said.

“I mean a twenty-two.”

“ Napoli carried a twenty-five.”

The medical examiner shrugged as he handed Duncan the evidence bag containing the bullet. “Not my job.”

“What about his hands? Did you scrape anything from under his nails?”

“They were clean as a newborn’s.”

Back at the Barracks, Duncan shared these two discrepancies with DeeDee and Worley. She said, “I was hoping for some tissue for DNA testing later, if it was needed.”

“None there,” Duncan said.

“Damn! I was sure he’d been shot with his own twenty-five,” Worley said.

“Well, he wasn’t.”

They were stockpiling questions without answers.

They plodded through several more unproductive days.