David ed. - Face Off (2014) Anthology

“What part are you missing, Stan? If you announce, he burns his fucking apartment down, there’s no evidence left, and the case goes to shit. He gets off . . . and goes on to kill somebody else.”

The thing about nut cutters is they sometimes cut any nuts in their path, not just the ones you want them to.

“Detective,” he snapped. “You’re going to hear on the news in a half hour that we have a suspect in the serial killing of those women. If that means you’ve gotta get your ass in gear and work faster and harder—then do it!”

Click.

He looked into the outer office and nodded. The stocky woman was in her forties, blond, and with a dry complexion and eyes that suggested she’d never laughed in her life. Her clothes were dowdy.

She looked around to make sure they were alone. Markowitz nodded at the door. Detective Candy Preston swung it shut.

He whispered, “We’ve got some problems.”

“I heard.” The woman was a nut cutter, too. But she had the most melodious voice. He could hear her reading stories to children.

“I need you to move forward with what we talked about.”

“Now? I thought we were taking things slow.”

“We don’t have the luxury of taking things slow.” The chief of detectives unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and handed her an envelope. It was thick but not as thick as you’d think. Fifty thousand dollars, in hundreds, really doesn’t take up a lot of space.

“I’ll do it now,” said Preston. She was one of the senior members of the Narcotics Unit Four detail. She slipped the money into her purse and rose, walked to the door. Her feet, he noticed, were as delicate as her voice.

Just before she touched the knob, Markowitz said, “Oh, some advice, Detective?”

She frowned at the implication that she was green. Stiffly she said, “I’ve handled things like this in the past, Stan. I know—”

“That’s not my advice. My advice is don’t fuck up.”

AMELIA WAS SWITCHING BACK AND forth between WABC and WNBC and said, before anyone else did, “We’re screwed.”

“Maybe,” Lucas said. He turned to Lincoln: “I understand from my BCA people that fires mess up DNA?”

“That’s right,” Lincoln said. “Theoretically, if he dumped a few gallons of gas down that basement—if the basement is the kill room—he could wipe out the most critical evidence. We wouldn’t get DNA unless we found an actual body.”

Lucas said to Lily, “You know what I think. If those are trophies hanging on his wall—”

“They are,” Lincoln said.

“Then we’re dealing with a lot more than four dead. Even if we don’t have what we need for a search warrant, we need to go in there anyway.”

Lily shook her head. “We need a warrant.”

Lucas turned to Lincoln. “Help me out here.”

Lincoln said, “We took samples from the poured concrete steps outside the building, for which we didn’t need a search warrant, and we found that the concrete matched the flecks of concrete in the victims’ backs. We also found flecks of bronze which are chemically identical to the bronze found in the victims’ backs.”

“But—” Amelia said.

Lincoln raised his hand. “Quiet.”

“That’s certainly enough for a warrant,” Lily said. “At least, if I go to the right judge, and I will. If you’ll write out the specs for the application, I can have it in an hour.”

“I’ll do that,” Lincoln said. And to Lucas: “If you’ll go back to the building with a couple of collection pads, get those samples for me. Backdate them to this morning. There may not be any bronze, but we’ve got a fair collection of it now. Take a few flecks with you. You know. Just in case.”

They all looked round at each other, then Lucas said, “At least a dozen trophies.”

“After you make the collection, just wait there,” Lily said. “I won’t be long behind you.”

“I’ll go with Lucas,” Amelia said. “If we need to block the back of the building, or he needs backup while we’re there.”

“You might want to bring an entry team,” Lucas said to Lily.

“Entry team? I’m bringing everybody. I’ll make a courtesy call to the FBI, they’ll want to have an observer.”

“I’ll be there,” Lincoln said. “I don’t want your entry team trashing my evidence.”

They took Amelia’s car, a maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane, kicking out nifty 405 horsepower, with 447 pounds of torque. They made the twenty-minute trip in twelve minutes. Eight minutes out, she looked at Lucas and said, “You’re not holding on to anything.”

“You know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re almost as good as I am.”

She snorted: “What do you drive?”

“A 911.”

“I always heard”—she paused in her comment to chop the nose off a town car as she took a left turn—“that 911 drivers—”

“Have small penises. I know. Every time I meet somebody who can’t afford a 911, I get the ‘small penis’ line. So I ask them how large a sample they’ve looked at.”

She grinned as she said, “I’ll tell you what, though: in a fair run, I’d eat your 911 alive.”

“I don’t like the word ‘fair,’ ” Lucas replied. “ ‘Fair’ always means, ‘to my advantage.’ If it’s not to my advantage, it’s ‘unfair.’ If you guys ever get to Minneapolis, bring your car. I’ve got a run just across the border, in Wisconsin. Narrow blacktop, blind hills, twenty miles long, maybe two hundred braking curves.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, but she grinned again, and threw the Cobra down an alley, the walls whipping by, two feet away on each side, six inches from Lucas’s window when she dodged a trash can. Lucas yawned and said, “Wake me up when we get there.”

He tilted back in his seat and then said, “By the way, I’m one of the best action shooters around.”

Amelia dropped off Lucas, who was dressed in jeans, a polo shirt, and running shoes, at Verlaine’s apartment. He was carrying a backpack loaned to him by Amelia. There were four men on the long block, two on each side, each one by himself.

Amelia was headed around the block, where she could watch the back of the building. Lucas sat on Verlaine’s stoop; he was too well fed to be a street person, but from a distance, with the pack by his feet, he could pass. They’d put a few bronze flakes in the bags with the sampling pads before they left, and now he took them out, one at a time, trying to look like he was shaking cigarettes out of a pack, and pressed them into the stoop. When he had five samples in place, he put them in the pack and zipped it up.

That done, he stood and ambled up the block, took out his cell phone, and called Lily, Lincoln, and Amelia, and said the same thing to all of them: “We’re good to go.”

Lily said, “Forty minutes.”

“What’s taking so long?”

“Nothing. You just got there quicker than you should have. I’ve got the application, I’m seeing the judge in about two minutes, and the entry team is gearing up. So, easy, boy.”

Lucas continued up the block, and on to the next block, and then walked back, and finally, with nothing at all going on at Verlaine’s building, he turned the corner and walked around the block, where he found Amelia’s car, parked, with Lincoln’s Chrysler van right behind it. Amelia climbed out of the passenger’s side: “Want to leave the pack?”

“Yeah.” He looked at his watch. “Half an hour, yet. I’ll find another place to sit.”

“Stay in touch,” Lincoln said, from the back.

Lincoln’s aide, Thom, who was driving, said, “I brought some sandwiches along. These two can spend hours at a crime scene. If you want a ham-and-cheese—”