Джеффри Дивер - The Midnight Lock

“I’m going to need you to step into the hall,” he said firmly.

“I... why?”

“It’s official business.” He shot her a particular look and she gathered up mobile and purse and stepped out.

When the door closed Rodriguez said to Rhyme, “Let’s get it over with.”

The criminalist nodded.

They pushed into Evans’s office — first Rodriguez, then the other detectives, then Rhyme, followed by Thom. The room was a large space on whose wood-paneled walls were hung photos and paintings of former NYPD brass.

Evans, as distinguished as ever, looked up, blinking in surprise. But the reaction faded quickly. A brief sigh. A tightening of his lips. He stood.

“You’re not armed, are you, Brett?”

He shook his head.

Still, Rodriguez nodded at the detectives who stepped forward and frisked him. Rodriguez himself cuffed the commander.

“Brett Evans, you’re under arrest for obstruction of justice, conspiracy, larceny, accepting bribes. There’ll be other charges added later. Including homicides.” Rodriguez gave him the Miranda warning.

Evans offered a soft laugh. “It’s been so long since I’ve arrested anyone that I don’t think I could do that without a prompt.”

“You want to waive your right to an attorney?”

“I don’t believe I will.”

Rodriguez said to the detectives, “Central Booking. Lieutenant Sellitto’ll be there. He’s familiar with the charges.”

“Sure, Al.”

Evans was led out silently by the two big men.

Rodriguez pinched his handlebar mustache and said to Rhyme, “You ready to meet the mayor?”

He nodded. “This should be interesting.”

In a dress shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, Mayor Tony Harrison rose and strode past the men in his office.

He gripped the door and seemed to debate slamming it. The panel was quite heavy, though, and it would not have been a particularly dramatic gesture. Besides, Rhyme sensed that he felt he should maintain some decorum.

Even under these circumstances.

Rhyme and Thom, along with Al Rodriguez and football-build Richard Beaufort, were in the spacious office, decked out with a museum’s worth of New York historical memorabilia and offering quite the splendid view of the city, though a view that was a mere sliver of the urban sprawl that the man governed. Ironically one window faced north and in the far, far distance — invisible from here — was Albany, the place on which his sights and hopes were aimed.

Although Lincoln Rhyme had zero interest in politics, if he’d been forced to govern, he would have picked New York City in an instant over the state as a whole.

Harrison returned to his chair.

“Explain.” The grating word was directed at Rodriguez. “ Brett Evans arrested — and not him?” A look at Rhyme.

Rodriguez said, “A couple of weeks ago I asked Captain Rhyme to help me run a sting operation. It’s been with full knowledge of the chief of department, the district attorney, and the department’s general counsel.”

“Sting? About what?”

“To get to the bottom of why there’ve been so many investigations and prosecutions compromised lately.”

The mayor’s eyes narrowed at this — the very incidents that his opponent for governor had been using as campaign fodder against him.

Beaufort sat and was silent, though he glanced toward Rhyme once or twice uncertainly.

Rodriguez continued, “I spent days looking over what went wrong, how stakeouts got made, how CIs had changes of heart — or ended up in the Gowanus Canal. I found dozens of incidents ruining investigations — incidents that just could not have happened unless somebody was tipping off suspects and defendants.”

“Somebody inside...” Harrison muttered. “We had a mole.”

Rodriguez nodded. “The only lead seemed to be that they were selling NYPD information to Viktor Buryak. So the DA had one of his prosecutors, John Sellars, bring a case against Buryak — for the murder of Leon Murphy.”

“Which I threw,” Rhyme said.

The mayor whispered, “You... you intentionally screwed up the case?”

“I did indeed.”

Rodriguez added, “It was touch-and-go for a while. We weren’t sure the jury would acquit Buryak but, thank God, they did. That put him back in play, on the street, with one big fear: that Lincoln — who’s known, all respect, to have a bit of an ego—”

“Not a worry.”

A faint smile appeared beneath the handlebar mustache. “A big fear that Lincoln would continue to go after him. We even made sure that Buryak heard that Lincoln was going to do anything he could to bring him down.”

“How?”

“Oh, Buryak’s people bugged the prosecution’s briefing room in the courthouse. We thought it might happen and scanned it. Left the bugs in place long enough to deliver the message.”

“The fuck.”

Rhyme added, “We were sure Buryak would use the department mole to find out what I was up to.”

Beaufort snapped, “So you were running an operation and didn’t tell me or the mayor?”

Rhyme hated obvious questions and tended not to answer them.

But Rodriguez offered, “We didn’t know where the leak was. Your office is copied on a lot of classified NYPD information. Somebody here could have been skimming it.”

The mayor gave a laugh. “I was a suspect too.”

Rhyme didn’t point out the embarrassing fallacy that it hardly made sense for Harrison to deal in stolen info since screwing with investigations and prosecutions worked against his interest as a candidate.

Rodriguez answered more delicately. “Not you, sir, but you have a big infrastructure here. The leak could have come from anywhere.” He continued, “The mole had to be pretty high up, someone with access to investigative information across all the divisions. That would include City Hall.”

Beaufort asked, “How did you get to Brett Evans?”

“Just like what we hoped would happen: Buryak put one of his people on me to stop my supposed renegade investigation against him. Aaron Douglass.”

Rodriguez explained, “He’s a gold shield with the OC Task Force working undercover in Buryak’s operation.”

“Maybe he was legit but he was the only connection we had to Buryak, so Amelia and I made up a story about some drug drops at the Red Hook piers in Brooklyn.”

Rodriguez said, “I put a team on Douglass. We ended up with this. Recorded at an outdoor café on the East Side. We got an undercover at a table next to Douglass and who shows up but Evans?” He put the transcript on the mayor’s desk.

EVANS: How’s Buryak?

DOUGLASS: Thank Christ he doesn’t watch the news. I told him I nailed that Sachs bitch downtown, ran over her. Then, the fuck, she shows up on TV talking about help us find the Locksmith.

EVANS: You could talk your way out of it.

DOUGLASS: Yeah, Viktor trusts me. More and more. Still. [Garbled noise.]

DOUGLASS: Listen, I’ve got something good you can sell to Viktor. There’s going to be a series of narc drops at the Red Hook piers. A lot. If you can get me details Viktor’ll put it up at one of his auctions. He’s got some customers’d pay large to know when a crime scene bus is taking the shipment to the Queens lab. Easy to knock over, especially if it’s late at night.

EVANS: Excellent. I’ll get on the horn with Narcotics now and get back to you... Aaron, let me ask you a question. You’re walking a tightrope here. You haven’t nailed Buryak yet. Isn’t your captain getting impatient? Six months with nothing solid against him. You have an endgame?

DOUGLASS: I’m banking ten K a week. I hang in for another, maybe, five, six months, and then I’m out. Retiring.