David ed. - Face Off (2014) Anthology

“Why’d you kill him?”

“Because of you. I didn’t even know how close you were to finding him, even with all those clues I left for you. All those brass filings. But I had that shell, and a shell is a terrible thing to waste. You killed my pop. I thought they’d put you in prison, so you’d have all that time to think about it.”

“Why those victims, Andy? Why those particular women?”

But he didn’t answer, just stepped closer. Fist coming out of his pocket.

Lucas stepped through the door with his gun and shouted, “He’s got something in his hand, Lily, he’s got something.”

Lily jumped back, but Andy was right with her, grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back, looking around. “Stay away. Stay away,” he screamed. “I got a scalpel, I’ll cut her face off.”

Amelia and the other cops emerged from the stairway across the street and spread out.

“Get away. Get away or I’ll cut her throat, I swear to God, I’ll cut her fuckin’ throat.”

He yanked Lily backward, and Lily called to Lucas, “I can’t reach my gun. It got stuck under the damn vest when he pulled me back.”

Lucas: “Can you go down?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t try anything. I just want to go away. I walk her up the block and I—”

Lily, using both hands, grabbed his knife arm and pushed it away from her, just an inch, and at the same time kicked her feet out from under herself and dropped. Amelia and Lucas fired at the same time, and Andy’s head exploded.

Lily landed on her ass and rolled away from the falling body; the scalpel tinkled to the ground six feet away. “That was not optimal,” she said, as she got back to her feet and turned to look down at the body.

After that, it was mostly routine: checking the tape, calling crime scene. Andy Pitt had two bullet holes in his head, one right through the forehead and out the back, and the second in one temple and out the other.

As the scene was taped off, Lucas stepped over to Amelia and asked, “You okay?”

“I’m okay. How about you?”

“I’m okay,” he said. He looked her over and said, “Do you know that you smile when you pull the trigger?”

THEY SAT IN GOVERNMENT-ISSUE FURNITURE and wheelchair, across from the chief of detectives. His office.

Lucas, Lily, Amelia, and Lincoln. They were here for what Lincoln joked was the post postmortem. Maybe in bad taste, but nobody was all that upset that Andy Pitt was lying in the morgue at the moment.

Markowitz was on a call (nodding subconsciously, from which Lincoln deduced he was speaking, well, most likely listening, to his boss, the commissioner). Lincoln looked around. He thought the office was pretty nice. Big, ordered, with nice views, though Lincoln had no use for views. His town house, for instance, offered a nice scene of Central Park. He invariably ordered Thom to close the curtains.

Distracting.

Finally, Markowitz hung up. His gaze incorporated them all. “Everybody upstairs’s happy. I was worried, they were worried, well, it was a little radical what you wanted to do. But it worked out.”

Lincoln shrugged—one of the few gestures he was capable of—and turned his chair slightly to face Markowitz. “The plan was logical, the execution competent,” he said. Those were about his highest forms of praise.

It was Lucas who’d initially come up with the theory of who’d killed Verlaine and set Lily up.

Amelia, you know somebody in the NYPD evidence room?

He had a possible source for the shell casing with Lily’s fingerprint on it: the crime scene where she’d tapped Levon Pitt. Sure enough, the evidence log from that crime reported three slugs recovered but only two spent casings. Somebody, possibly, had pocketed the third.

“Okay, the gun at Verlaine’s belonged to Levon Pitt. The shell casing at Verlaine’s had been Lily’s, fired when Pitt was shot,” Lucas had pointed out when they’d learned this. “How could they be linked? Only through the one individual who had a connection to them both: Andy Pitt, Levon’s son, the kid who had—supposedly—been held hostage by his father.”

But what, Lucas speculated, if he hadn’t been a hostage? What if he was his father’s accomplice in the serial shootings back then? And he was enraged that Lily had killed his father?

It made sense, Lincoln had agreed, and he’d pointed out that Andy might’ve met Verlaine through his father’s junkyard, where, possibly, the sculptor bought metal for his art.

They’d found where the young man lived and worked and set up surveillance.

But no evidence implicated him. They needed more. They had to flush him, force him into making a move.

And Lincoln had come up with a plan. Using Lily as bait. They’d proved to Markowitz she was innocent and asked him to make the initial press announcement to that effect. Then Amelia contacted more reporters. Lily, too, had made her statement.

That virtually guaranteed that Andy knew Lily was getting close. He’d have to make his move.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Markowitz said. “I mean, you, Lucas, coming all the way from Minneapolis. That was really above and beyond the call.”

“Glad to help out.”

“Better get back to it.” Markowitz’s attention was elsewhere now. He was glancing at the notepad on which he’d jotted notes during his conversation with the commissioner. There were a lot of notes.

But nobody rose. Lincoln glanced at Lily, who was the senior law officer here. She said, “Stan, just one thing we were thinking about. One loose end, sort of.”

Still distracted. “Loose end?” He was ticking off something on the paper in front of him.

“You know what occurred to us? Remember we had the idea that somebody was using Verlaine to kill those women? Well, what if it wasn’t Verlaine they were using, but Andy Pitt?

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

Lily continued, “Sure, he had a motive to get even with me. But that doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t force him or hire him to kill those women, and Verlaine.”

Amelia said, “Like maybe somebody from Narcotics Four, after all. Andy Pitt never got to tell us why he picked those women. Why? Maybe the women could provide good info on drug operations in the city. Maybe it was Andy who got recruited by somebody in Narc Four.”

“And another thing that we were pondering,” Lincoln said. “Who exactly was it doing everything he could to protect the unit? The one who insisted that the killings had to be the work of a psycho, nothing to do with any cops?”

Lily took over again. “That’d be you, Stan.”

If the words didn’t have Markowitz’s full attention, the Glock that Lily drew and pointed more or less in his direction sealed the deal.

THE CHIEF OF DETECTIVES SIGHED. “Goddamnit.”

“What’s the story, Stan?” Amelia asked. Voice cold. She tossed her hair. Lucas was still looking.

There was a pause.

“All right,” Markowitz muttered. “I did pull some strings to get the drug side of the investigation downplayed.”

“Let me guess,” Lily snapped. “Because the women were tortured and killed to get information on the drug player in town so Narc Four could become the shining star of the department.”

“Guess again, Detective.” Markowitz gave a guttural laugh. “Do you think there might’ve been some other reason why Narc Four has such a great conviction record—other than hiring a psycho to torture and kill users?”

No one replied.

“How ’bout because the fucking head of Narc Four was on the take.”