Dead Man's Song

one else. Are we clear on this?” His brown eyes bored into Colbert’s and the ME nodded, then moved away without another word.

As the doctor left LaMastra ushered the police photographer and the techs onto the scene. The photographer’s flash was popping wildly as Gus Bernhardt lumbered heavily up, his eyes now dry but still looking hurt. He had a cell phone in his hand and was flipping the lid closed as he approached.

“A word with you, Frank?” murmured Gus, touching his elbow and then guiding him to one side out of earshot. “Frank, we’re losing control of this situation.” Ferro gave him the kind of look a comment like that deserved, but Gus shook his head. “No, what I mean is that we really don’t have the manpower and resources to do this. Half the men we have on the force are local shopkeepers and gas station attendants dressed up like cops, and you know that as well as I do. They’re beat from working double shifts. These two poor sonsabitches—Cowan and Castle—they were local boys. No way we should have stuck them out here alone.”

“They were two well-armed and well-trained professional police officers,” Ferro said quietly.

“Yeah, okay. Maybe.” Gus wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was a massive, sloppy fat man in a poorly tailored uniform that was all decked out with whipcord and silver buttons. No matter what the temperature his face was perpetually flushed red and shining with sweat, though at the moment he was even redder and wetter than usual. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t have the words to express what he was feeling. Ferro didn’t much like the chief, but he felt sorry for him.

“Has the mayor been informed about this?”

“No one seems to know where he is. We’ve tried everything, but his cell is turned off, he’s not in his office, and his wife said that Terry wasn’t home.”

“That seems odd, doesn’t it? Did his wife seem agitated? Was she worried?”

“Well, I didn’t think to ask,” Gus said, and saying it reinforced for both of them the difference between him and Ferro. The Philly cop would have asked, and would have done it as a matter of routine, and they both knew it. Gus changed the subject. “Could Ruger have done this before he set out for the hospital last night?”

LaMastra, who had just joined them, said, “No, sir. Jimmy Castle had called into your own office at 4:57 A.M. That’s what? Just shy of two hours ago. He’d called in a request for coffee and hot food because it was getting cold out here.”

Gus’s face was screwed up in puzzlement. “That don’t make sense. Ruger was dead by then. Macchio’s been dead for two days and Boyd was spotted in Black Marsh yesterday, apparently heading southeast. So…who’s that leave?”

“Has to be Boyd,” LaMastra said. “No one else it can be.”

“But why? From what you guys told me Ruger was the only killer. Boyd was a flunky. What’d you call him? A ‘travel agent’…he mostly just got real crooks out of the country and stuff like that. Why would a guy like that screw up his own getaway to come back here and kill two cops? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Christ, Chief, nothing about this case has made a damn bit of sense since Ruger and his buddies wrecked their car here,” LaMastra said.

“Wish I could say that I had a working theory about what’s going on,” Ferro said, “but I don’t. Perhaps the ME’s report will give us something we can use.”

A few yards behind them, hidden in the lee of an ambulance, was a small, balding man with wire-frame glasses and a handheld tape recorder. Willard Fowler Newton, who doubled on news and features for the tiny Black Marsh Sentinel, was staring at Ferro’s broad back, and like Chief Bernhardt and the coroner, he was sweating badly despite the cold. He had slipped through the police cordon in hopes of getting enough for a good news story for the morning papers, but he sure as hell didn’t expect to get this.

Chapter 3

(1)

“Let’s go inside. I’m freezing my nuts off out here, Frank,” complained LaMastra, shivering in his light blue PHILA PD windbreaker. Ferro didn’t seem to mind the cold as much, or at least had more discipline and didn’t show it, but he offered no argument when LaMastra repeated his suggestion. They moved into the Guthrie farmhouse, which was already crowded with cops of various kinds. Most of the officers looked expectantly at Ferro, but one glance told them that he had nothing new to say. The detectives went into the kitchen and the local officers seated at the table cleared out as soon as LaMastra gave them The Look. Ferro sat down and sipped his coffee; LaMastra strolled over and peered into the big pot that stood on the stove. The turkey soup was two-days cold and there was a thin film of grease congealed on the surface. “I’ll just heat this up a bit,” he said, looking at Ferro for approval. “Shame to let it go to waste. Think it’s still good?”

Ferro was too tired to care either way, so LaMastra stirred the soup vigorously, replaced the lid and sat down across from his partner. Vince LaMastra was a big blond ex-jock who had played wide receiver for Temple University before entering the police academy. At thirty he still had the narrow hips, broad shoulders, and bulky muscles of a college ballplayer, but now there were the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of his bright blue eyes and laugh lines etched around his mouth. Not that he was laughing at the moment as he sat hunched over, forearms on the table, frowning at Ferro. “Gus was right—this case is getting away from us, Frank.”

Ferro snorted. “We never really had our hands on it. This was a runaway train from the first.” Frank Ferro was older and more battered than his partner, his dark brown skin marked here and there by faded pink scars— souvenirs from his days walking a beat in North Philly. His manner was quiet and refined, but his eyes were cop’s eyes. Quick and hard.

“Not what I mean,” LaMastra said, shaking his head. “These killings, Frank…they bother me—and don’t give me that look. I’m not talking about how it makes me feel, ’cause I’m just like every other cop here. It makes me sick and angry and I would give my left nut to have five minutes in a locked room with Kenneth Boyd—if he’s actually the prick who did this. No, what I’m saying, Frank, is that I just don’t get why Boyd would have done this.”

“Maybe he hung around Ruger too long. Perhaps homicidal mania is contagious. I don’t know.”

“How sure are you that Boyd is the killer here? You yourself said this wasn’t like Boyd. A guy like Boyd shouldn’t even have been at that drug bust that went south. I think Ruger probably planned to screw the deal and then take the money so he could split. He must have found out somehow that Little Nicky suspected that Ruger’d killed his grandparents down in Cape May. The mob’s not big on due process, so Ruger figured that a suspicion alone is more than enough wind up on a meat hook somewhere. So since he had to get the hell out of Dodge anyway he set up the drug buy and then deliberately jacked it so that he and his crew could wipe out the Jamaicans and keep the money all for themselves. Main reason to support this is Boyd being there for that buy. He’s not a soldier, he’s a travel agent. The only reason on earth that Ruger would drag him along is to help him get out of the country afterward. Nothing else makes sense. Boyd’s a tool, not a killer. That’s one of the things that just doesn’t fit.” He got up and began stirring the soup.

Ferro shrugged and rolled his coffee cup between his palms, staring at the liquid as it agitated. “Apparently