Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

Zooming in on the front-seat occupants. The windows slightly tinted, but the video quality far superior to anything a POD camera could give us, good enough to see two guys wearing baseball caps.

Two white guys.

“Those look like Imperial Gangster Nation to you?” she says. “Like they’d be partners with Prince Valentine and Junior Peppers?”

No, they don’t.

But they do look like the guys who shot at me two nights ago inside Shiv’s house.

She lets the video keep playing, an explosion of gunfire from the back seat, Frisk shot in the back trying to escape, Shiv and Evie rattled with bullets on the front porch.

“Can’t make out the back-seat shooter,” she says. “But that wasn’t the Nation, Harney.”

I drop in a chair.

“Someone was operating that camera,” she says. “Working it. Moving in and out.”

She picks up a pencil, eraser end down, and uses it to push a piece of paper over to me. Trying not to touch it or infect it.

I look at it without touching it. It’s printed off a computer, not handwritten:

Latham took this. I don’t want to end up like him. He’d want you to see this.

“Latham,” I say. “Any idea?”

Carla shakes her head. Leans back in her chair, looks up at the ceiling. “You know what this means. You know what this means.”

Yeah, I know what it means. But I’ve thought this for a long time. I just never told her. I wanted to handle this myself.

But now she knows.

“It means we didn’t solve K-Town,” she says.

Chapter 74

IT DOESN’T take long.

An hour, tops, to figure out that the Latham in the note is Latham Jackson, who lived just up the street to the north of Shiv’s house. According to the notes from the canvass, his mother said he wasn’t home during the shooting, and on recanvass, Latham himself claimed not to have seen anything.

It took less than an hour after that to learn that Latham died the same day as the recanvass, found dead only hours after one of our patrol officers interviewed him. The fucking detectives in the Eleventh didn’t bother to tell us, seeing it as a run-of-the-mill B and E in K-Town that SOS didn’t need to know about. Latham surprised the burglar, apparently, and the offender put two bullets in Latham’s chest and skedaddled with his video equipment.

It makes sense. It might be true. But I don’t like it. Neither does Carla.

Doesn’t take us long, either, to get a look at Latham’s email account, courtesy of his mother. Latham sent this video of the K-Town shooting to his cousin Renfro, who works at the DMV. Renfro, obviously, is the one who delivered it to our station house.

We pay him a visit at work downtown, the secretary of state’s office. He’s not so thrilled to be hearing from us, but we keep it on the down low, not flashing badges or anything, meeting him at his break time midafternoon outside 69 West. He admits he sent us the tape but swears up and down that Latham didn’t see anything live, only recorded it, so anything he knows, we know. Carla works him over a little, mentioning the idea of a blackmail scheme and how it would be a shame if Renfro didn’t help us right now. Renfro looks like he’s going to faint, but he swears there’s nothing more to tell. We decide we believe him.

“Now what?” Carla says. “Solving K-Town so fast stopped a riot. We let it out that we got it wrong, that riot’s gonna happen. But we can’t ignore it, either.”

“Talk about riots,” I say. “Imagine if it came out that we had a video of white guys shooting up that house and sat on it, let a couple black guys take the fall.”

“I wasn’t suggesting we sit on it,” she says. “I was suggesting we investigate quietly. Like, real quietly. Like, Sosh and Rodriguez don’t need to know. Not until we can be sure. We can’t let this out until we’re ready to arrest those white guys, whoever they are.”

Keeping Mat and Sosh in the dark is fine by me. I wanted Carla in the dark, too.

I catch Carla staring at me, her eyes squinting in the sunlight. Or one of her eyes, I should say; the other is all but swollen shut, the left side of her face still puffy and purple, tape and gauze still across her cheek.

“You’ve been thinking this for a while, haven’t you?” she says to me. “That’s why you’ve been so interested in the identity of our Jane Doe. You think this murder is about her, not drugs or drug turf.”

“Me? No. I don’t think that.”

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why you’ve been so secretive. Searching the house behind my back. Searching Shiv’s phone, finding those calls to Romania—”

“On my own time is all,” I say.

But she’s warming to her idea. “This girl—Evie, right? She was trafficked. That’s what we think, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You think the traffickers killed her? Those white guys in the car were sex traffickers?”

“Getting way ahead of ourselves, Detective.”

“Yeah, okay.” She doesn’t look convinced. “Seems like you’re way ahead of me, though. What happened to no more secrets?”

I open my hands. “What do you want me to say? I’m learning all this at the same time as you.”

I’ve found, over time, that I can bullshit with the best of ’em on the job, certainly when I have a suspect in an interview room or some skell on the street.

Up close and personal, I don’t wear the same poker face. Valerie could read me like a book. So can Patti.

“Come clean with me, Harney,” Carla says.

“I am. I have.”

“If you’re worried about Prince Valentine—look, he was selling dope,” she says. “He was violating his probation. He ran when we knocked on his door. And he shot at you first. Even if he didn’t do K-Town, it was still a righteous shooting—”

“What, you think I’m covering my ass? Covering up a mistake? Gee, thanks a lot, Carla. If I was doing that, the last thing I’d be doing is reopening the case and looking at Evie. I’d want this case wrapped up and put behind ten locked doors.”

Absolute truth, and not a bad comeback. Until a hint of triumph plays on Carla’s face and I realize she played me.

“My point exactly,” she says. “You aren’t locking it behind ten closed doors. You’re reopening it and looking at Evie. So maybe it’s time you told me why.”

“Jesus, you missed your calling,” I say, exasperated. “You shoulda been a lawyer.”

She allows for that. She goaded me into an admission.

“Well, then I only have one further question of the witness,” she says. “Tell me, Harney, once and for all, what the hell is going on?”

Chapter 75

I TOLD her, but I didn’t tell her.

I told her what she’d already figured out—that I suspect that Evie, not a bunch of drug dealers, was the target in the K-Town shooting.

But I didn’t tell her anything else. I didn’t tell her that the same human garbage that killed Evie may have killed my wife. She doesn’t need to know that.

That part I will handle myself.

“Yeah,” Carla says, her face up close to the screen of the footage from two nights ago, the POD camera at Van Buren and Kolmar. “Yeah, looks like the same guys from the front seat of the 4Runner.” She sits back in the chair. “So the same guys in the front seat of the shooter’s car come back to the house and try to hide all evidence of Evie from us. I mean, shit, Harney.” She throws up her hand. “This thing had nothing to do with drugs or turf. It’s all about a girl with a black-lily tattoo on her ankle.”

“So now you know everything,” I say.

Everything except how this involves Valerie. Or General Boholyubov.

But she knows enough. Enough to quietly reopen the K-Town investigation.