A Clean Kill

Mike pulled off the protective suit. 'I'm done

here. I've got to go. I spoke with Avise. He says it's okay. He'll give you thirty-six.'

Thirty-six hours? Were they crazy? April kept her back to the house, where people could be watching. She was fuming and didn't want anyone to see them fighting. 'Mike, we agreed that we weren't going to do this anymore,' she said.

'Come on, querida, think of her kids. It's probably a simple thing, boyfriend/girlfriend thing. You could do this case in your sleep.'

She shook her head. 'If it's such a simple thing, get someone else to do it.' Then she thought of the cute little boys, who now had no mother. What was wrong with her? Not long ago she would have schemed to get on a homicide like this. She'd always been driven to be the one who nailed the killer. Now she was identifying with the babysitter who kept butcher knives in her knapsack. She was worrying about Sergeant Gelo's dress code, and she was thinking of her honeymoon. Not good. Skinny Dragon Mother used to say she had too much yang for a girl. She'd never find a man to marry her. Now she was married and had softened up, and sometimes she wondered if she had enough yang left to be a good cop.

'Mi amor,' Mike murmured, 'do the right thing.'

Shit. Usually he was urging her to do the right thing and stay out of it. Now he wouldn't let her out of it. It was tough. She hated to think that the. babysitter who wanted to be a chef could have killed her boss over a cooking job. It was hard to imagine anyone having a strong enough motive to stab a young mother to death a dozen times in her own shower. But early this morning someone had done just that.

She sighed. If she identified the killer fast, she could go back to the strip clubs and Fish could make the arrest. It was ironic how yin she'd gotten. She was more interested in sitting on a beach far away with her honey than in getting the credit. It almost made her laugh.

Ten

Eloise, it's me. What's going on?' Woo was on the phone.

'Boss.' Sergeant Eloise Gelo was parked at her desk, but not alone. Sitting across from her, Detective Charlie Hagedorn had been filling her in with some background information on the senator's kid who'd overdosed at some club, and ended up ten hours later in psych lockup at St. Luke's. She'd been listening to Charlie, studying a spot high over his head, and occasionally taking a mental note.

The lieutenant wanted to know what was going on in the squad room. Gelo ran through the list in her head. A drunk who'd exposed himself one time too many on Broadway had been brought in by two uniforms and was now in the holding cell, sobering up. Three detectives were out on cases. The unit secretary was yelling at someone on the phone in Spanish. And Hagedorn, making a pitiful attempt at some form of human interaction, was staring at her breasts. Everything was copacetic.

'It's quiet, boss. Where are you?' she replied.

'We've got a homicide on Fifty-second Street,' the lieutenant replied.

'We do?' Eloise was shocked. No one had called it in.

'Yeah, East Side.'

'Oh.' Maybe somebody's homicide, but not theirs. 'Who is it?' she asked.

'A young mother. Madeleine Wilson, that restaurant guy's wife.'

'Oh fuck. That's too bad.'

'Eloise, the language,' Woo retorted.

'Sorry, sir,' Eloise replied cheerfully. April Woo was a sir to her.

'Look, I'm going to be stuck here awhile,' Woo went on.

'Are you working the case?' Eloise took the chance of asking something her boss might not want to tell. She'd never heard of a detective unit CO working a homicide in another precinct.

'No, no,' the lieutenant said easily. 'I'm just on a look-see.'

'Uh-huh.' It still didn't sound right to her, but she knew things were not exactly regular in this particular unit.

Eloise tapped her fingernails on the table, and Hagedorn chose that moment to lift his eyes from her breasts to her face and stretch his goofy mouth into a lopsided grin. She rolled her eyes. 'You there, boss?'

'Yeah, I want you to work on the Peret case. Find out where the kid went, who served him booze, where he got the drugs, the whole thing. Check his credit card records for that. He may have charged it. Then talk to the girls.'

'Sounds good to me,' Eloise said.

'I'll fill you in later. Call me if anything comes up.'

'Sure thing, boss.'

The phone went dead, and Eloise hung up elated. This was the kind of thing she'd returned to the bureau for. If she couldn't be in a counterterror unit, at least she could do something useful until she got what she wanted. 'The boss is working a homicide in the Seventeenth,' she told Charlie.

Hagedorn mugged surprise. 'No kidding.'

'That a usual thing?' From the moment that Gelo been assigned this unit, she'd been anxious about working for Woo/Sanchez. Her boss was famous, but not exactly known for being a team player. Going in, she knew that she had a lot to live up to. Charlie took a minute more to stare at her before giving her a serious answer.

'Her husband Mike is the precinct CO; he probably asked for her.'

'Of course, I knew that.' She knew they were married, anyway, and that they'd worked together in the past. What it all meant for her career, however, was still the big question.

Eloise Gelo had moved up and was in her first few weeks of having an office with a door to call her own. She was still basking in the glory of the promotion, and simultaneously disappointed not to be playing a role in defending the city against the biggest bad guys. The door was nice, but the top half of it was glass, so anyone could look in and see what she was doing at any time. Sometimes the males in the unit stood around, pretending to be having a conversation, but actually gawking at her.

What was the big deal? She was a female, but Woo was a woman, too, and they didn't gawk at her. Eloise looked for a pen to jot down her orders. 'Damn.' Her pen was missing. She was sure she'd been using it only a few minutes ago.

'Did you take my pen?'

Hagedorn snorted.

'Give it back.'

He laughed, but not in an unfriendly way. 'I didn't take it. Here, use mine.' He held his out, but she ignored the offer.

'Somebody did.' She rooted around in her drawer for another one. She'd bought a box of pens only last week, but people seemed to enjoy taking her stuff as a kind of joke. She kept some red nail polish in there to annoy the alternate second whip, an asshole by the name of Tony Bobb, who couldn't seem to get over her being his equal. Tony Bobb was an anal kind of guy half her size and twice her weight, who didn't want to be perceived as a nelly. She always left a lot girlie stuff around in her space to bug him. The red nail polish was still there. It distracted her as she searched for a pen and worried about not being able to fill her new boss's shoes.

Gelo had worked for a lot of male officers, but had never worked for a woman. April Woo Sanchez was unreadable, quite the opposite of herself. Eloise was out there, a straight-up kind of person. She talked out of the side of her mouth like a tough guy, had a conspicuous mane of blond curls, which she piled up on the top of her head, wore bright red lipstick and clingy clothes. She had the figure for it and a name to make a girl cry. Wherever she went, in the department and out of it, she got attention. A lot of it—particularly the kind from asshole officers of every rank—was unwelcome. Eloise Gelo had her own philosophy about her style: I ain't changing for no one. I am who I am. Get used to it. Both the attitude and the name caused her a fair amount of grief from people she didn't give a shit about.

From time to time, however, she got the attention of someone worthy of her respect. Back in'97, when she'd been a detective third grade, her path crossed with that of Lieutenant Steve Whipet, a former marine who was CO of the chopper unit. She was smitten by him right away. Maybe it was the marine thing, a cowboy kind of allure—