Betrayal

and almost spilled his coffee standing up to attention, saluting, yelling, 'Ten-hut!'

Glitsky felt the scar through his lips straining against the rare urge to smile. In the end, as usual, the smile never appeared. Some inspectors in the room looked up, of course, though nobody else went military on him. But Bracco was still on his feet, expectantly. He evidently had some knowledge of why the head of homicide, Lieutenant Marcel Lanier, had summoned the deputy chief. 'Marcel told me to keep an eye out for you, sir. I was just warning him that you're here.'

Glitsky stopped. 'On the off chance that he's misbehaving in some way?'

'You never know,' Bracco said. He fell in beside Glitsky, then nodded at another inspector, a woman named Debra Schiff, who looked up and was getting to her feet while Bracco went on. 'Schiff was in there with him with the door closed for an hour already this morning. To look at her, you'd never know she was a screamer.'

Schiff, gathering some stuff from her desk, nodded at Abe and replied in a conversational tone, 'Bite me, Darrel.'

Glitsky kept walking, Bracco and Schiff behind him. At Lanier's open door, he knocked. The lieutenant was on the phone, feet up on his desk, and waved everybody in. His new office upstairs was at least twice as large as the cubicle he (and Glitsky before him) had inhabited one floor below. There was room for as many as half a dozen people in front of his desk, with four chairs folded up against the back wall with its 'Active Homicides' blackboard. Glitsky unfolded one of the chairs and let the other two inspectors grab theirs.

'I understand,' Lanier was saying into the phone. 'Yes, sir. That's why I've asked Abe to come down and get briefed. No'-he rolled his eyes with the tedium of it all-'I realize we don't want to…' He moved the telephone away from his ear and Glitsky could hear a voice he recognized as Frank Batiste's, the chief of police. So whatever this was about, it had some profile already. 'Yes, sir,' Lanier repeated in the next pause, 'that's the idea. I will. Yes, sir.' Finally, he hung up, got his feet back down on the ground, and brought his upper body in close to the desk, elbows on it. 'That was the chief.'

'I got that impression,' Glitsky said. 'How's Frank doing this fine morning?'

'Frank's concerned about our citizenry, lest they panic.'

'And why would they do that?'

'Well, that's what I asked you down to talk about, since the media's going to be all over this if it gets out, and I know how much you cherish all things that give you face time in front of cameras.' Everyone appreciated the irony of Lanier's statement. Within the department, Glitsky was notorious for two things: He didn't tolerate or use profanity, and he hated interactions with any form of media. Unfortunately, this latter made up about eighty-five percent of his job.

Now, a tight look of resigned patience firmly in place, Abe sat back and crossed one leg over the other one, ankle on knee. 'Okay. What do we got?'

Lanier glanced at his two inspectors, came back to Glitsky. 'We've got the possibility of a serial killer.'

'Ah,' Glitsky said. 'And we haven't had one of those for a while.'

'Hence the panic,' Lanier said, 'which Frank would so like to avoid. Anyway, I thought I'd let Darrel and Debra get you up to speed and you can decide where we are exactly and how we handle things if it gets hot.' He nodded at his female inspector, whose pretty face she tried to make invisible, with limited success, by wearing a tough expression most of the time. 'Debra, you want to start?'

'Sure.' Bent over slightly in her chair, she had her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her. Raising her chin, she shifted a little to face Glitsky. 'It's not much of a story by itself, but last Wednesday, I got a late call down in the Mish, early a.m. There's a body in an alley down there around the corner from the Makeout Room. White male, decently dressed, his wallet's still in his back pocket. Turns out he's a thirty-six-year-old ex- Navy SEAL named Arnold Zwick. No criminal record, unmarried and unconnected, currently unemployed. But he'd evidently come back from Iraq recently where he'd done some work for Allstrong Security, which is based here in town.'

'What kind of work?' Glitsky asked.

'Whatever they do over there with former military guys. I went back to Allstrong and they told me that their main contract right now is protecting Baghdad Airport. But they didn't know where Zwick had gone to. The manager of the office told me they thought that he might have been killed over there. One day he just disappeared. Except that we now know he came back here. And some witnesses I talked to-neighbors he'd made friends with-seemed to have had the impression that he had a lot of money. But it's not in a bank account that I've been able to find, and there wasn't any cash in his apartment, so robbery might still be a motive, either that or he had the stuff hidden pretty well.'

Glitsky asked, 'Do you think it's possible he stole money from Allstrong over there?'

Debra nodded, apparently pleased at the question. 'That was my assumption, too, sir. Especially given the way he died.'

'And how was that?'

'Somebody snapped his neck.'

'Close work,' Glitsky said. 'Not that easy.'

'It's even harder when you factor in Zwick's training and that there was no sign of struggle or a weapon from his attacker. And Zwick was heavily armed. He had a knife in a sheath on his leg and a forty-five carried loose in his coat pocket. Both still on him when I got to him.'

'So his killer,' Glitsky said, 'was another commando. You were thinking probably with Allstrong, somehow, getting back their money.'

Debra nodded. 'That is kind of where I was going until Marcel called me yesterday and told me about Darrel's latest.'

Glitsky shifted his interest over to Bracco. 'Talk to me,' he said.

' Three street thugs, all with sheets. All of 'em young, strong, and armed, out for a good time on Saturday night in the Tenderloin. All of 'em killed by hand. Maybe they just decided to mug the wrong guy, the same guy who killed Zwick, but that's a stretch, don't you think?'

'The stretch is why he would have stayed around,' Glitsky said, 'if he's one of the Allstrong people.'

'There aren't any Allstrong people, though,' Debra said. 'The whole staff is over in Iraq. They've got a woman manager over here in a tiny office by Candlestick and a couple of clerks. None of 'em had ever met Zwick personally. And I believe them.'

'On the other hand,' Lanier interjected, 'maybe we got a bona fide wacko who's getting off on killing people with his hands. These Tenderloin meatballs, we got two broken necks and a septum jabbed up into the brain. But there's no connection we can come up with between Zwick and these dirtbags. None of the victims had anything stolen off them.'

Glitsky scratched at his cheek. 'How many broken-neck murders have you seen in the past twenty years, Marcel?'

The lieutenant nodded. 'I know what you're saying, Abe. And every one of the very few was in the course of some kind of a fight. These guys, there was hardly a sign of a struggle. The problem is that we got reporters already onto the story-I got a call at home this morning, and so did Frank-and they're salivating over this serial killer possibility.'

Glitsky chewed the inside of his cheek for a minute. 'And Allstrong hires Navy SEALs and guys like that for their security work over in Iraq?'

'That's what I gather,' Debra said. 'They've got nice brochures, but really, as I said, no people.'

'But let's not lose sight of the main question,' Lanier said. 'We don't want to spin this toward a serial killer loose in the city. Frank would have my balls. Excuse me, Debra.'

But Glitsky was standing up. 'I'm doing my very favorite Monday-morning press briefing in fifteen, Marcel. I'll put that fire out at least until we get another broken neck.'

'What are you going to tell 'em?' Lanier asked.

'I'll say I can't comment on ongoing investigations, except to say that it would be irresponsible to print or run rumors of a serial killer when there is no evidence to support it. And none of these victims are high profile. We got three dead brothers in the hood and one dead unemployed white guy in the Mish. This stuff is unfortunate but it happens. And the story goes away.'

'Even if this guy's the same guy,' Bracco said, 'who did all of them?'

'If it was,' Glitsky said, 'I've got to believe he's long gone by now and never coming back.'