David ed. - Face Off (2014) Anthology

“Doesn’t keep you from checking out the market,” Lily said.

“I don’t think she’s on the market,” Lucas said. He made a circling motion with an index finger. “I mean, can they—?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said. “Why don’t you ask? Just wait until I’m out of there.”

“Maybe not,” Lucas said. “I’m getting over it, but I’m not that far over it. And he’s not exactly Mr. Warmth.”

“Somebody might say that about you, too,” Lily observed.

“Hey. Nobody said that to me while getting busy in my Porsche.”

Lily laughed and turned a little pink. Way back, back before their respective marriages, they’d dallied. In fact, Lucas had dallied her brains loose in a Porsche 911, a feat that not everyone thought possible, especially for people their size. “A long time ago, when we were young,” she said, as they climbed the steps to Lincoln’s front door. “I was slender as a fairy then.”

Lucas was a tall man, heavy in the shoulders, with a hawk nose and blue eyes. His black hair was touched with a bit of silver at the temples and a long thin scar ran from his forehead across his brow ridge and down onto his cheek, the product of a fishing accident. Another scar, on his throat, was not quite as outdoorsy, though it happened outdoors, when a young girl shot him with a piece-of-crap .22 and he almost died.

Lily was dark-haired and full-figured, constantly dieting and constantly finding more interesting things to eat. She never gained enough to be fat, couldn’t lose enough to be thin. She’d never been a fairy. She was paid as a captain in the NYPD, but she was more than that: one of the plainclothes influentials who floated around the top of the department, doing things meant to be invisible to the media. As someone said of her, she was the nut cutter they called when nuts seriously needed to be cut.

Like now. She’d brought Lucas in as a “consultant” from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, because she didn’t know who she could trust in her own department. They might have a serial-killer cop on the loose—or even worse, a bunch of cops. And if that was right, the cops wouldn’t be out-of-control dumbass flatfoots, but serious guys, narcotics detectives who’d become fed up with the pointlessness and ineffectiveness of the war on drugs.

The four dead were all female, all illegal Mexicans, all had been tortured, and all had some connection to drug sales—although with two of them, Lucas thought, the connection was fairly thin. Still, if they were dealing with the cartels, and if there was a turf war going on, they could have been killed simply as warnings. And torture was something the cartels did as other people might play cards.

On the other hand, the women may have been tortured not as punishment, or to make a point, but for information. Somebody, the commissioner feared, had decided to take direct action to eliminate the drug problem, with the emphasis on eliminate . The bodies were piling up: so he called his nut cutter and the nut cutter called Lucas. The duo had just been downtown checking out and talking with the honchos that made up the department’s famous Narcotics Unit Four. Or infamous, some said. The trio of shields—two men and a woman—had earned the highest drug-conviction rate in the city with, the rumors went, less than kosher tactics. Lately they’d been running ops in the area where the women had been killed.

Lily pushed the doorbell.

Amelia Sachs came to the door, chewing on a celery stalk, and let them in. She was a tall woman, slender and redheaded, a former model, which pushed several of Lucas’s buttons. Given all of that, their relationship had been testy, maybe because of Lucas’s initial attitude toward Lincoln and his disability.

Lincoln was in his Storm-Arrow wheelchair, peering at a high-def video screen. Without looking at them, he said, “You got nothing.”

“Not entirely true,” Lucas said. “All three of them were dressed carelessly.”

Lincoln turned his head and squinted at him. “Why is that important?”

Lucas shrugged. “Anyone who dresses carelessly bears watching, in my estimation,” he said. He was wearing a Ralph Lauren Purple Label summer-weight wool suit in medium blue, a white dress shirt with one of the more muted Hermès ties, and bespoke shoes from a London shoemaker.

Amelia made a rude noise, and Lucas grinned at her, or at least showed his teeth.

“Easy,” Lily said. To Lincoln: “You’re basically right. We got nothing. We weren’t exactly stonewalled, we were know-nothinged. Like it was all a big puzzle, and why were we there?”

“Were they acting?” Lincoln asked.

“Hard to tell,” Lucas said. “Most detectives are good liars. But if somebody put a gun to my head, I’d say no, they weren’t acting. They didn’t know what we were talking about.”

“Mmm, I like that concept,” Amelia said.

“What?” Lucas asked. “Lying?”

“No. Putting a gun to your head.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “Amelia.”

“Just having fun, Lily,” Amelia said. “You know I love Lucas like a brother.”

“And I hope it stays that way,” Lincoln grumped. “Anyway . . . while you were out touring the city, we’ve made some significant progress here. There were some anomalies in the autopsy photos that I thought worth revisiting. The bodies were found nude, of course, and so dirt and sand had been comprehensively impressed in the victims’ skins, along with grains of concrete. However, in examining the photos, I noticed that in several of these flecks, we were getting more light return than you might expect from grains of sand or soil or concrete. The photos were taken with flash, of course, a very intense light. The enhanced light return would not have been especially noticeable under the lights of an autopsy table. I sent Amelia to investigate.”

“I found that all four victims had tiny bits of metal ingrained in their skin. The cut surfaces were shiny, which is why Lincoln was able to see them in the high-res photos,” Amelia said. “There weren’t many of them, but some in each. I recovered them—”

“And brought them here,” Lincoln said. “They were uniform in size, and smaller than the average brown sugar ant. We ran them through the GDS 400A Glow Discharge Spectrometer, a Hewlett Packard Gas Chromatograph, and a JEOL SEM-scanning electron microscope. Those’re instruments for determining the composition of a liquid, gas, or solid—”

“I know what they are; I’m a cop, not a fucking moron,” Lucas said.

Lincoln continued without acknowledging the interruption. “And found that they were flecks of bronze.”

Lily said, “Bronze. That’s good, right? We need a bronze-working shop.”

Amelia said, “It’s good in a way. The fact is, bronze has become pretty much a specialty metal—it’s used to make bells, cymbals, some ship propellers, Olympic medals, and bronze wool replaces steel wool for some woodworking applications. It’s used in high-end weather stripping for doors.”

Lincoln, impatient, said, “Yes, yes, yes. But the flecks are not bronze wool, and they are rounded, with no flat sides, as you would get from weather stripping, and so on. Nor do they appear to be millings, which you would get with propellers and cymbals and such, because the grain size is too consistent.”

“How about sculpture?” Lucas asked.

Lincoln was momentarily disconcerted, then said, “I concluded that since the grains were so uniformly sized, and so sharply cut, they most likely came from a hand-filing process. The most common hand-filing process used with bronze involves . . . sculpture casting.”

Lucas said to Lily, “That was apparent to me as soon as they mentioned bronze.”