Silent Prey ld-4 Page 5

  "But… all of that aside, there's something else."

  He laughed. "A third layer? A Lily Rothenburg layer? What're you doing?"

  "The thing is, we've got serious trouble. Even bigger than Bekker, if you can imagine it." She hesitated, searching his eyes, intent, then balled up the paper napkin and did a sitting jump shot into a wastebasket before continuing. "This can't come out anywhere."

  Irritated, he wordlessly backhanded the comment away, like a bothersome gnat. She nodded, slipped off the stool, took a quick turn around the kitchen, picked up an enamel coffee cup, turned it in her hands, put it down.

  "We're looking at thirteen murders," she said finally. "Not Bekker's. Someone else's. These are all… hits. Maybe. Of the thirteen-those are the ones we're sure of, we think there are more, as many as forty-ten were out-and-out assholes. Two of them were pretty big: a wholesaler for the Cali cartel and an up-and-coming Mafia guy. The other eight were miscellaneous small-timers."

  "Number eleven?"

  "A lawyer," Lily said. "A criminal defense lawyer who represented a lot of big dopers. He was good. He put a lot of people back on the street that shouldn't have been there. But most people thought he was straight."

  "Hard to be straight, with that job," Lucas said.

  "But we think he was. The investigation hasn't turned up anything that'd change our mind. We've been combing his bank records, along with the IRS and the state tax people. There's not a goddamned thing. In fact, there wouldn't have been any point in his being crooked: he was pulling in so much money he didn't need any more. Three million bucks was a slow year."

  "Okay. Who was twelve?"

  "Number twelve was a professional black… spokesman," she said. "A community leader, a loudmouth, a rabble-rouser, whatever you want to call him. But he wasn't a crook. He was a neighborhood politician trying to climb the pole. He was shot in a drive-by, supposedly a couple of gang-bangers. But it was very slick for gang-bangers, good weapons, a stolen car."

  "Thirteen?"

  "Thirteen was a cop."

  "Crooked?"

  "Straight. He was investigating the possibility that we've got a rogue group inside the police department, inside intelligence, systematically killing people."

  There was a moment of silence as Lucas digested it. "Sonofabitch," he said finally. "They've killed thirteen people for sure, and maybe forty?"

  "The cop who was killed-his name was Walter Petty-claimed there were twelve, for sure. He's the thirteenth. We think. He said there could be thirty or forty more."

  "Jesus Christ." Lucas pulled at his lip, turned away from her, blankly staring at the microwave. Forty? "You should've picked it up…"

  "Not necessarily," Lily said, shaking her head. The short hair whipped around her ears, like a television advertisement, and he caught a smile and suppressed it. This was business, she said. "For one thing, they were killed over a long time. Five years, anyway. And most of them died like you'd have expected, knowing their records. Except more efficiently. That's what you notice when you decide you've got a pattern: the efficiency of it. Bang, bang, they're dead. Never any cops close by-once or twice, they were actually decoyed out. There are never any good witnesses. The getaways are preplanned. No collateral damage, no mushrooms getting knocked down."

  "So you've got a pattern of small-time assholes killed by big-time shooters," Lucas said.

  "Right. Like this one guy, I met him myself, years ago, when I was just coming off patrol. Arvin Davies." She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and wet her lips, remembering the file. "He was forty-two when he was killed. He was a doper, a drunk. A brawler. He had twenty priors going back to age twelve, and he'd been picked up for one thing or another maybe twenty more times. All small stuff. Street muggings, burglaries, car thefts, rip-offs, possession. He'd get his nose clogged up with angel dust and beat his victims. He killed one five or six years ago, but we could never prove it. He spent twenty years inside, all short time. The last time he got out, he did a couple of muggings and then somebody put him on a wall. Shot him twice in the heart and once in the head. The head shot came when he was already down, a coup de grace. The shooter walked away," she said, hopping back up on the breakfast-bar stool across from him.

  "A pro," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. And there just wasn't any reason a pro would go after Arvin Davies. He was small-time, chickenshit. But whoever killed him took a real asshole off the streets for good. Maybe forty or fifty nasty crimes a year."

  "All the miscellaneous hits are like that?"

  "Yup. I mean the techniques are different, but they're all cold, efficient, researched."

  Lucas nodded, studying her. "All very enlightening-but where do I come in?"

  She looked straight into him, fixing him. "A couple of guys in intelligence spotted the pattern. They got nervous about it. All of the victims, or whatever you'd call them, were heavy in intelligence files. Like the files had been used to choose them. Once they made the report, a secret working group of six ranking officers was set up to monitor it. Petty was eventually brought in to do the dog work."

  Lucas interrupted. "He was a shoofly, or whatever you guys call them?"

  She shook her head. "He was a crime-scene guy for most of his career, and later on a computer specialist. He was officially a detective second. In this case, he was reporting to the working group under the direct supervision of my boss, John O'Dell. John chairs the working group."

  "So there was no past internal-affairs work that might have left a grudge," Lucas said.

  "No. And just before he was shot, there was an odd break on the case…" Lily put a hand on top of her head as if she were patting herself, a gesture of thought. "The black guy who was killed, the loudmouth, was named Waites. The file is still open, we still have people digging into it. As a matter of routine, Walt got all the reports coming out of the active cases. He found a report that said a supposed witness to the Waites killing had recognized one of the shooters as a cop. The witness was named Cornell, last name probably Reed. The trouble is, when Walt went looking for him, Cornell Reed had disappeared. Maybe left town. But Walt found him, somehow. He tried to get in touch with us that afternoon, he came by the offices, and when he couldn't, he left a note on voice mail. He said he knew where Reed went."

  "Where?"

  "We don't know. And Walt was killed that night."

  "Jesus-somebody got the voice mail?"

  "Unlikely; it's coded," Lily said. "And the shooting was too well set up. They'd planned it ahead of time. If finding the witness had anything to do with it, it was just the trigger that made them go ahead with the shooting."

  "Huh. How about Petty's records? Notes?"

  "Nothing in his office, but he wasn't keeping anything there, anyway, because of the sensitivity," she said. "He was working out of his apartment, mostly. And that's another thing: somebody got to his apartment before we did. All of his computer disks were gone, and the internal drive-hard drive, is that it?-had been wiped somehow. I don't know how you do it, but there was nothing recoverable."

  "Another computer freak?"

  "Not necessarily. Whatever they did wasn't fancy. A couple of short commands apparently took care of it. Something like a reformat with a write-over? Does that make sense?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Petty must've talked to somebody. It's hard to believe he'd get a break and coincidentally be hit that same night… Who'd he tell about the witness?" Lucas asked.

  "We don't know," Lily said. "We do know he came up to our office, after hours, looking for us. O'Dell and I spend a lot of time in a car, going around, putting out political brush fires. We were talking to some people in one of the projects that night. Walt didn't try the car-our driver was waiting in it, and nobody called. The thing is, when Walt came up to the office, he might've bumped into somebody from the working group, there in the hallway. He really wouldn't talk to anybody else, not on this topic."

  "So he accidentally bumps into another member of the working group and that
guy leaks?"

  Lily frowned. "Well… the shooting was too quick for a careless leak. Whoever tipped the rogue group did it directly. A phone call. In other words, whoever leaked knows the killers. Maybe he even runs them."

  "Sonofabitch. But if you know it's one of the six working-group guys…"

  Lily shook her head and smiled. "Nothing's ever that easy. For one thing, every one of those six reports to somebody, and they did. And every one of the six has assistants, and some of the assistants know what the working group is doing."

  "Doesn't sound very secret," Lucas said.

  "Maybe fifteen people know details, and twenty-five know about the problem," Lily said. "That's pretty secret for the department… but you see where that leaves us. If one of the working group tipped the killers, he's in a position to know everything. So we're paralyzed. The working group appointed a new lead investigator, an unassigned captain, but he's not doing anything. He's just there to cover our asses, in case something leaks. You know, so we can say we've got an active case under investigation by a ranking officer."

  "And you want me to look into it," Lucas said.

  Lily nodded. "My boss and I talked it over. We need the work done off the books. Nobody will know but the two of us. It's the only way. And because of Bekker, you're a perfect fit. The goddamn media's going nuts about Bekker, of course, the TV and the Post and News, Doctor Death and all that. You can't get in a cab without hearing a radio talk show about him. So we bring you in, the guy who caught him last time. A consultant. But while you're looking, we're going to put you close to a couple of people Walt was looking at."

  "Huh." Lucas sat and thought for a long moment, then he looked up. "This guy who got shot," he said. "You called him Walt, like… he wasn't just another guy. Is there something I should know?"

  She looked at his face, but not into his eyes: her eyes seemed suddenly blank, as though she were seeing another face. "Walt was my oldest friend," she said.

  And she told him about the dream…

  The dream had started the night Petty was killed; it began not with a vision, but with an odor, the smell of ozone, as if electrical circuits were burning somewhere. Then she saw herself, through a haze, but with increasing clarity, seated on a simple marble bench, the kind found in cemeteries, with Petty's bleeding, shattered body stretched across her lap. Apieta. She did nothing at all, but simply sat there, looking into his face. In the dream, the point-of-view closed on the face, like a camera creeping forward, and at the last moment, focused not on an image of Christ-like peace, but on a face that had been shredded by high-velocity slugs, at yellow molars slick with drying blood…

  A ludicrous image, but one that came, night after night.

  But that wasn't the way it had been, the night Petty was killed.

  Petty's seventy-one-year-old mother had called, confused, incoherent. Her only child had been killed, she said, her voice an ancient moan. Walt was dead, dead… Lily could see the old woman in her mind's eye, the narrow gray face bent over the black telephone, body shaking, twitching, the withered hand with the handkerchief, the doilies on the TV behind her, the Sacred Heart on the wall. Lily could even smell it, cabbage and bread dough…

  The old woman said that Lily had to go to Bellevue to identify Walter. Was there a cop there, Lily asked? Yes, right here, and Father Gomez. And the mayor was coming.

  Lily spoke to the cop. Take care of Gloria Petty, she said, the wife of a cop, the mother of a cop. The last one alive in this family. Then, trembling with fear and grief, she'd gone to Bellevue.

  No pieta at Bellevue.

  Just a body, waxlike, dead, sprawled on a blood-soaked gurney, raw from the pickup. The body was wrapped in layers of plastic, like beef being moved. She noted professionally that one of the slugs had ripped off Petty's cheek, exposing his molars; a preview of Petty as a naked skull, a reminder of Petty's naive, happy smile. The smile that flashed every time he saw her, delighted with her presence.

  She recalled a day from their Brooklyn childhood, when the two of them were seven or eight. Late fall, blue skies, crisp weather, a hint of Halloween. There were maple trees on the block, turning red. She'd been sick and had been kept home from school, but her mother let her out in the afternoon to sit on the stoop.

  And here was Walter, running down the street, a paper held overhead, flapping, joy in his eyes. Her spelling test from the day before. A perfect score. Common enough for Lily, but Walter, so generously pleased for her, that smile, that young blond hair slicked down with Vaseline…

  Come to this, the bloody teeth.

  "That's Walter Petty," she told a tired assistant M.E.

  At home again, changing clothes, preparing herself to see Petty's mother, she thought of her school yearbook. She went into the living room, pulled a box from a built-in cupboard, and found three of them. And his senior picture: his hair never quite right, his face too slender, the slightly dazed smile.

  Lily broke and began to weep. The spasm was uncontrollable, unlike anything she'd experienced before, a storm that ended with dumb exhaustion. Wearily, she finished dressing, started for the door.

  And smelled Petty: Petty in the morgue, the stink of the blood and the body in her nose. She ran back to the bathroom, washed her face and her hands, over and over.

  Early the next morning, after the nightmare interlude with Gloria Petty, as she fought for an hour or two of sleep, she dreamed and saw herself on the marble bench, Walter Petty draped on her lap, broken, torn, his bloody teeth leering from the side of his face…

  Petty was gone.

  "Jesus." Lucas was staring at her. "I didn't know you had…"

  "What?" She tried to smile. "That kind of depth?"

  "That kind of old-time relationship. You know about me and Elle Kruger…"

  "The nun, yes. What would you do if somebody murdered her?" Lily asked.

  "Find whoever did it and kill him," Lucas said quietly.

  "Yes," Lily said, nodding, looking straight at him. "That's what I want."

  The late-afternoon sun had gone red, then a sullen orange. A heavy atmospheric hush, accompanied by a distant rumbling, announced the line of thunderstorms that Lucas had seen from the roof. When Lily first arrived, Lucas, sitting on the roof, had said, "You're absolutely gorgeous." She'd cooled the sense of contact with a quick, "Don't start, Davenport." But there was an underlying tension between them, and now it sprang up again, riding with them as they moved out of the kitchen, into the living room.

  Lily perched on a couch, knees together, fumbled through her purse, found a roll of Certs, tipped a couple of them into her hand, then popped them into her mouth. "You've changed things," she said, looking around the house.

  "After Shadow Love, the place was pretty shot up," Lucas said. He dropped onto a leather recliner, sitting on the edge of it, leaning toward her. "Some wiring got wrecked and I needed a new floor. Plaster work. He was shooting that goddamn M-15, it was a mess."

  Lily looked away: "That's what they used on Walt. An M-15. A full clip: they emptied a full clip into him. They found pieces of him all over the block."

  "Jesus…" Lucas groped for something else to say, but all he could find was, "How about you? Are you okay?"

  "Oh, sure," she said, and fell silent.

  "The last time I saw you, you were on a guilt trip about your old man and the kids…"

  "That's not over. The guilt trip. Sometimes I feel so bad I get nauseous," she said.

  "Do you see the kids?"

  "Not so much," she said sadly, looking away from him. "I tried, but it was wrecking all of us. David was always… peering at me. And the boys blame me for leaving."

  "Do you want to go back?"

  "I don't love him," she said, shaking her head. "I don't even like him very much. I look at him now, and it all seems like bullshit, the stuff that comes out of his mouth. And that's weird, because it used to seem so smart. We'd go to parties and he'd spin up these post-Jungian theories of racism and class struggle,
and these phonies would stand around with their heads going up and down like they were bobbing for apples. Then I'd go to work and see a report on some twelve-year-old who shot his mom because he wanted to sell the TV to buy crack, and she wouldn't let him. Then I'd go back home and… shit. I couldn't stand listening to him anymore. How can you live with somebody you can't stand listening to?"

  "It's hard," he said. "Being a cop makes it worse. I think that's why I spent so much time with Jennifer. She was a professional bullshit artist, but basically, she knew what was what. She spent the time on the streets."

  "Yeah…"

  "So where're you at?" he asked again.

  She looked at him unsteadily, not quite nervous, but apprehensive somehow. "I didn't want to get into that right away-I wanted to get you committed first. Will you come?"

  "Somebody new?" he asked, his voice light.

  "Will you come?"

  "Maybe… so you've got someone."

  "Sort of."

  "Sort of? What's that?" He hopped off the chair and took a turn around the room. He wasn't angry, he thought, but he looked angry. He reached down and turned on the TV and a tinny, distant voice instantly cried, "Kirrrbeee Puck-it." He snapped it off again. "What does 'sort of' mean? One foot on the floor at all times? Nothing below the waist?"

  Lily laughed and said, "You cheer me up, Davenport. You're so fucking crass…"

  "So…?" He went to the window and looked out; the thunderheads were gray, with soaring pink tops, and were bearing down on the line of the river.

  She shrugged, looked out the window past him. "So, I was seeing a guy. I still am. We hadn't started looking for an apartment together, but the possibility was out there."

  "What happened?"

  "He had a heart attack."

  Lucas looked at her for a minute, then said, "Why does that make perfect sense?"

  She forced a smile. "It's really not very funny, I'm afraid. He's in terrible shape."

  "He's a cop?"

  "Yeah." The smile faded. "He's like you, in some ways. Not physically-he's tall and thin and white-haired. But he is-was-in intelligence and he loves the streets. He writes articles for the Times op-ed page about the street life. He has the best network of spies in the city. And he has a taste for, mmm…" She groped for the right phrase.