become swallowed by the smoke as they charged the garage. He hoped for a quick resolution. The night air was filled with the sound of communication radios spitting static, of children crying and adults sobbing, and an endless roar of orders being shouted about. To the lay person, the bystander, the efforts of the emergency crews seemed chaotic and disorganized. But Dart knew better.
He crossed his arms tightly to fend off the cold.
A harsh and unforgiving voice whispered, “Don’t turn around, Ivy. Nod if you can hear me.” Dart nodded. He smelled the stale aroma of cigar smoke despite the petroleum in the air, and he recognized the deep slow voice and the way that voice spoke his nickname. “I can’t afford the attention,” Walter Zeller said. Dart, stunned, could feel the man’s presence as he stepped closer and continued in a hushed whisper. “Your Volvo has had a slight problem, is all-an electrical short under the dash; if there had been less plastic in it, it might have never burned at all.”
Dart had so many things to say that nothing came out, his thoughts bottle-necked somewhere near his tongue. What with the fire and the chaos, and the surprise that Zeller had orchestrated all of this to make contact with him.
“You’ll figure this out. At least if you have any sense left in you, you will.” He added, “I can’t do your fucking work for you, kid. I told you that. Wish I could. But then you wouldn’t hold up on the stand, would you? You gotta do this yourself. You gotta get your mind off your pecker and back onto your desk.
“What I want you to think about, Ivy, is-and I want you to remember this: You’re looking at what you know, what you’re familiar with, rather than digging in and finding what’s really the cause here.” He added, “That they’re all connected.”
“The gene therapy,” Dart said.
“Maybe you
“So you torched my car?” Dart said, exasperated. He made a move to turn around, but Zeller stopped him with a stern “Don’t!” He added, “It’s not safe for me.”
“For
“They’re murders, Ivy, but it’s not what you think. I
An old beat-up car pulled into the far end of the alley. Not a police car, not fire. In the flashing lights Dart couldn’t make out the color or the face of the man who opened the car door and peered out quickly before climbing back in and driving off as a patrolman approached him to tell him to move.
“You see that?” Zeller asked. “They’re after
Dart said softly, “The hormones.” He waited a second and turned his head slightly and said: “A treatment of some sort.”
Zeller didn’t answer.
Dart attempted to turn around for a second time, expecting his effort to be blocked, but instead faced the dark shadows immediately behind him broken only by the rhythmic, hypnotic pulse of vehicle emergency lights.
Zeller was gone-vanished, though Dart could still hear the man’s whispers over his shoulder.
His teacher. His mentor.
Gone.
His killer?
For a fraction of a second Dart wondered if he had imagined this conversation. He scanned the area again, carefully probing every possible hiding place.
Gone.
Dart felt sick to his stomach. The smoke curled into the night sky, and then it too was gone.
CHAPTER 29
Over the course of the transition between day and night tours, detectives worked poorly, sometimes falling asleep at their desks, in the middle of interrogations, or even during phone calls. Moods went sour, and tempers flared. Haite’s unit, including Dart and Kowalski, had just switched to the graveyard shift, and walking through CAPers was like entering an area laden with land mines. To make matters worse, the building was going to shit; a leak that no one seemed able to stop ran a slow but constant drip into a five-gallon white plastic container in the far corner by the coffee machine. The uninterrupted sound of it was a source of constant irritation, covered only by the drone of activity to which Dart and his colleagues had long since become accustomed.
Dart cleared a domestic stabbing in the north end-a black woman had killed her drunken lover. He felt lucky because it was an early call, eight-thirty at night, and that took his name off the phone list. The rest of the night would be spent writing up an easy report, speaking with the on-call prosecuting attorney, and waiting for sunrise to free him.
He was midway into his report when the familiar banter inside CAPers slowly trickled down to nothing and the room was silent. This took a moment to register, at which point Dart looked up and spun around to see Ginny Rice standing in the CAPers’ doorway. Everyone in the division had closely followed the drama of their split, and her unexpected appearance had quieted his colleagues.
She wore a pair of Gap khakis and a white shirt under a green sweater. She had two earrings in her left ear and a small gold chain worn as a necklace.
Dart stood and walked over to greet here, doing so in as quiet a voice as possible. “Hey there,” he said.
“Hey, Dart. Somewhere where we can talk?”
He lead Ginny to the crib and sat down with her at the scarred table, where a copy of
“I may be in some trouble,” she said. Up close, she appeared dazed, or overtired. Worn at the edges.
“What kind of trouble?”
“It may be nothing.”
He reached over and took her hand, a mass of confusion. He wondered how, after the pain she had caused him, he could feel so instantly comfortable with her.
She said, “The new policies. Remember? I accessed billing-” Twice Dart had covered for her, had helped her out of a legal knothole, only to have her caught hacking a third time. That had brought a federal conviction, something that Dart could not help with. Now he found himself feeling guilty about having asked her to do this.
“It turns out, there are
“Dozens?”
She nodded. “All males, and though I haven’t confirmed all of them, I know that at least three have wives who were kicked by the system as victims of abuse.”
“I think what happened was that I tripped a security gate going into Union Trust.”
“You broke into a bank.”
“Electronically,” she said, adding defensively. “How else could I identify who paid for all this insurance?”
“It was a perk,” he said, guessing that the insurance coverage had been used as an incentive to gain test subjects.
“What?”
“Never mind,” he said.
“I thought I had a hole in the firewall,” she explained. “I thought I had a clean entry. But maybe I stepped on something getting out. I’m not sure. All I know is that
“They
