She saw no sign of the glove-wrapped thumb drive. He must have slipped it into his pocket.
“Jaime and Marino are across the street—not here, across the street from Terri’s apartment in Murray Hill,” Morales said, keyed up and impatient. “The witness who called in the animal-cruelty report? She’s not answering her phone or the intercom. The light’s out at the building’s entrance, and the outer door’s locked. Marino said when he was there earlier, the outer door wasn’t locked.”
They were walking out of Oscar’s apartment. Morales didn’t bother resetting the alarm.
“Apparently, there’s a fire escape ladder and a roof hatch,” he said, tense and impatient. “The roof hatch is propped open.”
He didn’t bother with the deadbolt, either.
One tenant had returned home since Marino was here earlier, the man in 2C, the second floor. When Marino had walked around to the side of the building a few minutes ago, he could see lights on and the flickering of a TV behind opaque shades.
He knew the tenant’s name because he knew the names of everyone. So far, the tenant, Dr. Wilson, a twenty-eight-year-old resident physician at Bellevue, wasn’t answering the intercom.
Marino tried again, while Berger and Lucy stood by in the cold wind, watching and waiting.
“Dr. Wilson,” Marino said, holding in the intercom button. “This is the police again. We don’t want to force our way into the building.”
“You haven’t said what the problem is.” A man’s voice, presumably Dr. Wilson’s, answered through the speaker by the door.
“This is Investigator Marino, NYPD,” Marino repeated himself, tossing Lucy his car keys. “We need to get into Two-D. Eva Peebles’s apartment. If you look out your window, you’ll see my unmarked dark blue Impala, okay? A female officer is going to turn on the grille lights so you can see for a fact it’s a police car. I understand your being reluctant to unlock the door, but we don’t want to forcibly enter the building. When you came in, did you see your neighbor?”
“I can’t see anything. It’s too dark out,” the voice replied.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Marino said to nobody in particular, the button released so Dr. Wilson couldn’t hear him. “He’s been smoking pot, what you want to bet? So he doesn’t want to let us in.”
“Is this Dr. Wilson?” Marino asked over the intercom.
“I don’t have to answer your questions and I’m not going to unlock the front door. Not after what happened across the street. I almost didn’t come back.”
One of his windows slid up, and the shade moved.
Marino was sure the guy was stoned, and he remembered what Mrs. Peebles said about her neighbor who smoked pot. Son of a bitch. More worried about getting charged with possession than about whether the elderly widow in the apartment across from his might be in trouble.
“Sir, I need you to unlock the front door right now. If you look out the window, you’re going to see the entrance light is out. Did you turn the light out when you came in earlier?”
“I didn’t touch any lights,” the man’s voice said, and now he sounded nervous. “How do I know you’re police?”
“Let me try,” Berger said, and she pushed the intercom button on the panel to the right of the door while Marino shone his flashlight on it, because they were completely in the dark.
“Dr. Wilson? This is Jaime Berger with the district attorney’s office. We need to check on your neighbor, but we can’t do that if you don’t let us into the building.”
“No,” the voice came back. “You get some other real police cars here, maybe I’ll think about it.”
“That probably made things worse,” Marino said to her. “He’s been in there smoking weed, I guarantee it. That’s why he opened his damn window.”
Lucy was inside Marino’s car, and the high-intensity red and blue flashing lights started bouncing off glass.
“I’m unmoved,” the voice came back again, even more resolute. “Anybody can buy those.”
“Let me talk to him,” Berger said, shielding her eyes from the rapid bursts of blinding blue and red.
“Tell you what, Dr. Wilson,” Marino said into the intercom. “I’m going to give you a number I want you to call, and when the dispatcher answers, you tell him there’s a guy outside your building who says he’s Investigator P. R. Marino, okay? Ask him to verify it, because they know I’m right here right now with Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger.”
Silence.
“He’s not going to call,” Berger said.
Lucy trotted back up the steps.
Marino said to her, “How ’bout doing me another favor while I stand here and babysit.”
He asked her to return to his car and radio the dispatcher. She asked him what happened to his portable radio, or were police not bothering with portable radios anymore. He said he’d left his in the car and maybe she could grab it for him while she was requesting an unmarked backup unit and an entry tool kit, including a battering ram. She said it was an old door and they probably could pry it open with a Gorilla Bar, and he said he wanted more than just a Gorilla Bar, and that he wanted the prick doctor who was stoned on the second floor to get an eyeful of a Twin Turbo Ram like they used to bust in doors at crack houses, and maybe then they wouldn’t need to use it because the asshole would buzz them in. Marino told her to request an ambulance, just in case Eva Peebles needed one.
She wasn’t answering her phone or the intercom. Marino couldn’t tell if any lights were on inside her apartment. The window that her computer was in front of was dark.
He didn’t need to give Lucy radio codes or any further instructions. Nobody needed to teach Lucy a damn thing about being a cop, and as he watched her duck inside his car, he felt a tug from the past. He missed the old days when the two of them rode motorcycles together, went shooting, worked investigations, or chilled out with a six-pack, and he wondered what she was carrying.
He knew she was carrying something. For one thing, there was no way in hell Lucy would run around unarmed, even in New York. And he knew a Pistol Pete jacket when he saw one, and he’d noticed hers the instant she’d gotten out of the cab while he and the other officer were loading the packaged chair into the back of the van. What looked like a black leather motorcycle jacket had an outside breakaway pocket big enough to hold just about any pistol imaginable.
Maybe she was carrying the forty-caliber Glock with a laser sight that he’d given to her a year ago this past Christmas, when they were both in Charleston. Well, wouldn’t that be typical of his lousy luck. He’d never gotten around to transferring the title over to her before he’d vanished from her life, so if she did anything that was whacked out, the damn gun would be traced straight back to him. All the same, the idea that she might care enough about the gun to risk breaking New York law and maybe going to jail made him feel good. Lucy could have any gun she wanted. She could buy an entire gun factory, probably several of them.
She climbed back out of his unmarked car as if it belonged to her, and jogged back to them, and he was thinking he should come right out and ask her if she was carrying, and if so, what, but he didn’t. She stood next to Berger. There was something between them and it hadn’t escaped his notice any more than the Pistol Pete jacket did. Berger didn’t stand or sit close to people. She never let anybody break through the invisible barrier that she had to have around her, or believed she had to have around her. She touched Lucy, leaned against her, and watched her a lot.
Lucy handed Marino his portable radio.
“You must be a little rusty. Been out of real policing too long?” Lucy said to him with a serious tone and straight face, what little he could see of her face in the dark. “Bad idea leaving your radio in the car. Little oversights like that? Next thing, somebody gets hurt.”
“If I want to take one of your classes, I’ll sign up for it,” he said.
“I’ll see if I have room.”
He got on his portable radio and called the unit en route to find out where he was.
“Coming around the corner now,” came the reply.
