“We have to find the link,” said Hayes. “These people were murdered for a reason, and we need to find out why.”
“The link is your company. That’s what the link is.”
“It isn’t. Or it isn’t just that.”
“You want to talk about stunning bombs and gases, who do we know who makes that?”
“I’m telling you, Brightly has no idea what’s happening. Evans, either. I’d know.”
Garvey looked at him coldly. “Would you?”
Hayes sat up in his linens. He leaned forward and glared at him. “What?” he asked. “What’s that?”
“Would you actually know?” Garvey said. “Are you still that under control, even?”
“Oh, here we are. Here, I know why I must have misheard you,” Hayes said, and he ripped the bandages from his ear. “There, now.” He cupped one hand to the bloodied side of his head and said, “All right, what was that, Donald? What was that you said to me? Because I know it wasn’t what I thought you said, I know it had to be-”
“Be reasonable!” shouted Garvey suddenly. He got to his feet, fists at his side. “You’re having fainting spells! Swilling opium at every chance you have! You forget to give me Skiller, you fucking forget, and now I’m stuck chasing more bodies and I missed something that may have helped keep my whole damn Department from looking like common thugs for your company! For your company, for your fucking company!”
“All right, you want something?” said Hayes, sitting further up in his bed. “You want to look at something? Look at Tazz! Look at the unions! If the papers are saying you’re thugs, why isn’t Tazz? Why hasn’t the figurehead for this whole damn movement weighed in on what’s happening? Or have I missed something? Has he piped up?”
A nurse rushed in, drawn by the commotion. She raised her hands and clasped the air as if she were trying to strangle out the noise itself. “Gentlemen, you have to-”
“Have I missed something in the past two days? Have I?” asked Hayes.
“-You really must-”
“Hayes…” said Garvey.
“Come on, Garv, tell me. Tell me that.”
The nurse pressed on Hayes’s chest, murmuring to sit back, to please sit back.
“Come on, Garv,” Hayes kept on. “Go on, tell me I’m wrong.”
Garvey shook his head. “All right. No. He hasn’t. He hasn’t said a damn word.”
“Not a word!” shouted Hayes. “Not a fucking word! How’d I know? Huh? How did I know that one?”
“ Please be quiet,” pleaded the nurse. “You absolutely-”
“All right,” said Hayes to her. He put his hands in the air, surrendering. “All right. We’ll be quiet. We’ll be good little boys. Now run along. Run along and go cut on someone for me, would you?”
The nurse glared at him, then turned around and stormed out. Garvey and Hayes sat back down and they both stared into their laps.
“What did you find on Tazz?” asked Hayes finally. “Tell me that. You went to Savron, didn’t you? Went up to the Hill and tugged on your guard friend’s coat, right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
“And what’d you find there? What’d you dig up?”
“Almost nothing,” admitted Garvey. “Which wasn’t what I wanted.”
He had gone there the day Hayes and Samantha had seen Mr. Skiller’s lodgings, he said, just before the new murders. He’d surprised Weigel, who said he never thought he’d see Garvey again. They’d once worked Robbery together, way back when Garvey was just cutting his teeth and they both thought being a cop would be grand fun. But Weigel had found the realities and complexities of police work a little too daunting, and so had taken up a job as a guard for the state, as he found that work much more direct and satisfying. According to the records, Weigel had been stationed at Savron when Mickey Tazz first got thrown in.
Which is where the problem came in. Weigel had heard of Tazz, naturally. Everyone knew a little about him. But he’d been stunned to hear any news that Tazz had been at Savron at all, let alone when he was keeping watch. If anything, Weigel had said, Tazz was there before him, years before him, before anyone here, because that’d be something you’d hear about, wouldn’t it?
Garvey had agreed and then produced a bottle of whiskey, and the two men sipped and bullshitted each other. Eventually he’d persuaded Weigel to check and they both walked down to the records in the basement. Weigel, slightly drunk and dubious of Garvey’s suspicions, reluctantly began digging, and after a little less than twenty minutes they found what Garvey was looking for, to Weigel’s amazement. Michael Tazarian, a happy denizen of Savron Hill from 1912 to 1917, South Sector C, Cell 145, under Corporal Dobbs. Who, of course, Weigel barely knew of. The man had retired two years ago, he said. He had no idea where he’d be, they weren’t exactly buddies.
From there the file was nothing but framework. Nothing but scraps and locations. Behavior reports, none. A bare handful of appeal hearings and even those pretty skinny. Physical reports, nonexistent. Tazz’s stay in the Hill had been a quiet one.
“No one’s that clean,” said Garvey. “No one passes through Savron and leaves that tiny of a paper trail.”
“No,” said Hayes, thinking. “No one ever does. Think there was anything missing?”
“I can’t say. Had all the essentials. It was weird, though. Weigel asked the other guards if they remembered him. Some said they did, a little.”
“But they weren’t sure.”
“Not sure, no.”
“Hm. I’ll want those records, if you can get them. Give them to Sam for me. We’ll store them somewhere for further examination.”
“Why?”
“Skeletons in the closet,” said Hayes. “Everyone has a few misdeeds in their past. And if those records turn out to be lying, then Tazz’s must be pretty sizable, wouldn’t you say?”
“How are you going to come at it?”
“By asking him,” Hayes said simply.
Garvey laughed. “He’s in hiding. You said it yourself. No one knows where he is. How do you plan to crack that?”
“You leave that to me. What are you going to do?”
“Get what I can on Skiller from Samantha. She’s going to be turning it in at Central later today. Then I’ll work that and I’ll keep working the trolley and the tennie murders. Just keep working it until I’ve worked it to death and then I’ll take the corpse apart. And yeah, I’ll catch other murders in the meantime. Pile them up if I have to. Can’t work them, this is priority.”
“What will your squad think of that?”
“What they usually think. That I’m fucking odd. For working alone and working with you, and working directly under Collins. And they won’t like me for it, but what are you going to do.”
“Hm,” said Hayes contemplatively. “You know, I remember the first time I was quite impressed with you, Garv.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. That rifle robbery down close to Blanton. Old man had been shot three times and someone spotted a boy running away with an ancient Winchester. Fucking cowboy gun. But you had no other witnesses and nothing to go by. So you trawled every gun shop in town, legal and otherwise. Took you a few weeks, and I don’t know how you kept it as quiet as you did, but you did. So you got word of a Winchester belonging to some wharf rat down at the docks, something he had taken out to show off to the other firearm fans, and when you couldn’t win a warrant you sat on the house in the freezing cold, day and night, for four days. And then the little bastard tried again. Caught kicking in the door of some old biddy’s house, cowboy rifle in hand. He folded like a wet napkin once you sat him down in the cells. Then you caught a cold and were bedridden with a fever for a week after. I thought you wouldn’t make it. Remember that?”
“Yeah.”
“That was good. Good police work. Just working it to death, something always shakes loose, yes?”
“Sometimes. Other times not.”
