David ed. - Face Off (2014) Anthology

Amelia searched the way she always did, walking the grid. This involved pacing step by step in a straight line from one end of the scene to the other and then turning around, moving slightly to the side, and returning. And then, when she was done with that, she covered the same ground again, perpendicular to the first search.

For an hour she walked the grid, taking samples of trace. She collected the necklaces and crosses in the alcove. Seeing them up close, Amelia realized that several of them looked familiar—and finally she knew why. In the pictures Verlaine had shown to her and Lily in the bar, the women he was playing his S&M games with had all been wearing necklaces like these. Yes, Lucas was right, they were trophies. Trophies not of the murder victims, but of his sexual conquests.

Then she turned to the steel door Lucas had told them about, the one leading to the basement. It had been unlocked when the team entered and she and Lily had cleared it fast. Now she searched it from the point of view of a forensic cop. The small underground chamber was brick-lined and had a raw concrete floor. The smells were of heating oil, mold, standing water, and sweat. Maybe that last scent was her imagination but she thought not.

She looked at the hooks protruding from the walls, the stains on the floor. Amelia walked down a set of rickety stairs into the thoroughly creepy place. She ran a fast fluorescein test on several of the dark patches; the results confirmed her initial hypothesis of blood. And there was no doubt about the bits of dark, elastic curls she popped into evidence bags. She knew dried flesh when she saw it.

Her gloved finger hit TRANSMIT and a moment later she heard Lincoln’s impatient voice. “Sachs. Where the hell are you?”

“On the other side of the steel door. In Verlaine’s basement.”

“And?”

“It’s almost a home run.”

“That’s like being nearly pregnant. But I’ll forgive the sloppy metaphor just this once. Get the evidence back ASAP.”

He disconnected without a good-bye.

LUCAS WAS STAYING AT THE Four Seasons on Fifty-seventh Street. He was lying in bed with his toenails scratching the top sheet, thinking about clipping his nails and then walking over to Madison Avenue to do a little shopping for an autumn ensemble, when his cell phone rang.

Amelia: “Get over here. Right now.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not good. And better not to talk about it on a cell phone.”

He needed to clean up: unless there was a shootout going on at Lincoln’s town house, he figured he had that much time. He was out of the hotel fifteen minutes after the call, and found a taxi outside the front door, dropping off a customer. Lucas got in the cab and gave the driver Lincoln’s address, and the driver said, “Not hardly worth turning on the meter for that.”

“Do what you want; I’ll give you a twenty when we get there.”

The driver drove with some enthusiasm, and Lucas was ringing Lincoln’s doorbell twenty minutes after Amelia called.

“What happened?” he asked, when she opened the door.

“Lily’s been detained by Internal Affairs. They could be coming for us next.”

“What?”

“I’ll let Lincoln tell you.”

Lincoln smiled when Lucas came in and said, “Now things are getting interesting.”

“Tell me.”

The evidence that Amelia had collected under Lincoln’s direction, which Lincoln conceded was “quite good, under typical circumstances,” had not been taken to Lincoln’s lab, but to the city laboratory.

First, they found some evidence that the dead women had been tortured and murdered in a small storage area in the basement of the sculptor’s studio. Not much evidence was visible, but the small stuff—tiny spatters of blood, flakes of skin, urine samples—proved that the dead women had been there.

The gun had also been examined—and that was where the problem arose.

“Last year, we had another psycho roaming around the city, but he was not particularly clever. He was a serial shooter. Guy named Levon Pitt. Owned a junkyard here in town. That’s where he had dumped the bodies. Lily ran the team that tracked him down. They had an entry team, and cracked his apartment but there was nobody home. So they set up outside the apartment to wait for him, and pretty soon, here he came, with his adult son. When the police approached him, he figured out what was about to happen, and pulled a gun, and actually tried to take his son hostage. In the scuffle, he fired the gun, once, and Lily shot him, firing three times, and he died on the way to the hospital.

“When the man had been shot, Lily froze the scene, and they brought in the crime scene crew. Among other things, they recovered seven different pistols in the man’s apartment. He’d used four different weapons in the murders that the police knew about, and after testing, they found that three of the guns they’d recovered were among the four used in the crime.”

Lincoln paused in his narration, and Lucas prompted, “So?”

“The gun we found yesterday, by Verlaine’s hand, was the fourth gun.”

“What?” Lucas was momentarily confused. “Verlaine was involved with Levon Pitt?”

“That’s not what they’re suggesting,” Lincoln said. “For one thing, there’s no apparent connection. For another, one of the shells in Verlaine’s gun had Lily’s fingerprint on it.”

It took Lucas a moment to get it. “So they’re saying, what? That she picked up a gun at the first site, and kept it as a throw-down? And then she went into Verlaine’s apartment sometime last night, killed him, and made it look like a suicide?”

“That’s what they’re suggesting.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lucas said.

“Internal Affairs doesn’t think so,” Amelia said. “The thing is, they can’t figure out any other mechanism for getting Lily’s fingerprint on that shell. She never touched the gun at Verlaine’s place.”

“But why would she do that? Why kill Verlaine? After I went in there, we knew we had him.”

“But we had no hard evidence, and that’s all Internal Affairs knows. That’s what Lily reported last night. We can’t tell them that we did have hard evidence, because then we’d have to tell them that you illegally entered. So their theory is she knew who the killer was, but couldn’t get at him, so she killed him. Got him off the street.”

“Aw, man, that’s not right,” Lucas said.

“There’s another aspect to it,” Amelia said. “Lily is an operator. She gets things done, but she steps on a lot of toes. That’s fine, when she’s got all that protection at the top. But now, with this, well, somebody leaked the lab results almost instantly. Probably some old bureaucratic enemy. It’s on every TV station in New York. They’re screaming for her head.”

“Don’t forget to tell him about what else is coming down the line,” Lincoln said.

“Oh, yeah.” Amelia pulled out her cell phone and looked at the time. “IA wonders if any of us had anything to do with it. We’ve got a couple of homicide cops on the way here. They want to talk to us. I know them. They’re hard-nosed guys.”

Lucas shrugged. “We leave out the burglary, leave out the evidence collection from last night, and tell them everything else. And we tell them that they’re being taken as chumps—that Lily couldn’t have done this, and that somebody is running a con on them.”

“That’ll piss them off,” Amelia said.

“Which is what we want to do,” Lucas said. “We want them on the defensive. We want them off our backs so we can figure out what actually happened. And we tell them that.”

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