possible. The murder rate in the five boroughs is now over seven a day, and most of them don't get a lot of play in the media. Still, if you take a woman off a street in front of a bunch of witnesses, it makes the papers. If you've got a similar case sitting in an open file, you probably hear about it. And you almost have to draw a connection.
On the other hand, Francine Khoury had been snatched off the street in front of witnesses, and nobody in the press or the One-Twelve knew the first thing about it.
Maybe they really had lain low for a year. Maybe one or more of them had been in jail for all or part of that year, maybe a predilection for rape and murder had led to still worse crimes, like writing bad checks.
Or maybe they'd been active, but in a way that hadn't drawn any attention.
Either way, I knew something now that I had previously only suspected. They had done this before, for pleasure if not for profit. That lowered the odds against finding them, and at the same time it raised the stakes.
Because they'd do it again.
Chapter 7
Friday I spent the morning at the library, then walked over to Forty-second Street to meet TJ in the video arcade. Together we watched a kid with a ponytail and a wispy blond mustache run up the score on a game called Freeze!!! It had the same premise as most of the games— i.e., that there were hostile forces in the universe, apt to leap out at you without warning at any moment, bound on doing you harm.
If you were quick enough you could survive for a while, but sooner or later one of them would do you in.
I couldn't argue with that.
We left when the boy finally crapped out. On the street TJ told me the player's name was Socks because his own never matched. I hadn't noticed. According to TJ, Socks was about the best on the Deuce at what he did, often able to play for hours on a single quarter. There had been other players as good or better, but they didn't come around much anymore. For a moment my mind spun with visions of a previously unknown motive for serial homicide, video-game aces rubbed out by an arcade proprietor because they were eating up his profits, but that wasn't it. You got to a certain level, he explained, and then you couldn't get any better, and eventually you lost interest.
We had lunch at a Mexican place on Ninth Avenue and he tried to get me to talk about the case I was working on. I left out the details, but I probably wound up telling him more than I intended to.
'What you need,' he said, 'you need me workin' for you.'
'Doing what?'
'Anything you say! You don't want to be runnin' all over town, see this, check that. What you want to do is send me. You don't think I can find things out? Man, I'm down here on the Deuce every day findin'
things out. It's what I do.'
'SO I gave him something,' I told Elaine. We'd met at the Baronet on Third Avenue to catch a four o'clock movie, then went to a new place she'd heard about where they served English tea with scones and clotted cream. 'He'd said something earlier that added another item to my list of things to find out, so I figured it was only fair to let him run it down for me.'
'What was that?'
'The pay phones,' I said. 'When Kenan and his brother delivered the ransom, they were sent to a pay phone. They got a call there, and the caller sent them to still another pay phone, where they got a call telling them to leave the money and take a hike.'
'I remember.'
'Well, yesterday TJ called me and talked until his quarter dropped, and when I wanted to call him back I couldn't, because the number wasn't posted on the phone he was calling from. I walked around the neighborhood on my way to the library this morning, and most of the phones are like that.'
'You mean the little slips are missing? I know people will steal absolutely anything, but that's the stupidest thing I ever heard of.'
'The phone company removes them,' I said, 'to discourage drug dealers. They beep each other from pay phones, you know how it works, and now they can't do that.'
'And that's why all the drug dealers are going out of business,' she said.
'Well, I'm sure it looked good on paper. Anyway, I got to thinking about those pay phones in Brooklyn, and I wondered if their numbers were posted.'
'What difference does it make?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'Probably somewhere between not much and none at all, which is why I didn't chase out to Brooklyn myself. But I can't see where it would hurt me to have the information, so I gave TJ a couple of dollars and sent him to Brooklyn.'
'Does he know his way around Brooklyn?'
'He will by the time he gets back. The first phone's a few blocks from the last stop on the Flatbush IRT, so that's fairly easy to find, but I don't know how the hell he's going to get to Veterans Avenue. A bus out of Flatbush, I suppose, and then a long hike.'
'What kind of neighborhood is it?'
'It looked all right when I drove through it with the Khourys. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention. A basic white working-class neighborhood, as far as I could tell. Why?'
'You mean like Bensonhurst or Howard Beach? What I mean is will TJ stand out like a dark thumb?'
