“You wanna hear or not?”
Michael bit back what he really wanted to say. “Go.”
Leo took his time, rubbing his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, taking a drag, then letting it out slow. Michael was two seconds from throttling him when Leo finally provided, “The news is that he’s a good cop. Doesn’t make a lot of friends-”
“No shit.”
“Yeah.” Leo chuckled, then coughed, then smacked his lips like he was swallowing it back down.
Michael looked at the cigarette in his hand, his stomach turning.
Leo paused, made sure he had Michael’s attention. “He’s got an eighty-nine percent clearance rate.”
Michael felt sick, but not because of the smoke. In its infinite wisdom, the Federal government had called for measuring the clearance rate-the number of solved cases-in each police agency so that some pencil pusher in Washington could track the progress on his little charts. They called it accountability, but to most cops it was just a shitload more paperwork. Any idiot could have predicted that this would cause a massive pissing contest among the detectives, and Greer fed into it by posting their numbers each month.
Trent had them all beat by about twenty points.
“Well,” Michael said, forcing himself to laugh. “It’s easy to solve a case when you take it over from some cop who’s already done all the work.”
“This SKIT thing is new to him.”
“SCAT,” Michael corrected, knowing Leo was trying to bait him but unable to stop playing.
“Whatever,” Leo mumbled. “What I’m saying is, Trent was working major crime before he was tapped.”
“Good for him.”
“He had a huge case a few years back with some gal over in kiddie crimes.”
“Gal got a name?”
Leo shrugged again. “Couple of guys were snatching kids down in Florida, swapping them back and forth with their buddies in Montana.
It was all going out of Hartsfield; they were moving them through there like cattle. Your buddy’s team cracked it open in a month. Gal gets a big promotion, Trent stays where he is.“
“He was head of the team?” Yep.
“”Why didn’t he get promoted?“
“Have to ask him that.”
“If I could ask him, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”
Leo’s eyes flashed, like his feelings had been hurt. “That’s all I got, man. Trent’s a straight arrow, knows his job. You want more, you need to call somebody downtown and find out yourself.”
Michael stared at his cigarette, watching it burn. Gina would kill him if she saw him smoking. She’d smell it on his hands as soon as he got home.
He dropped the butt onto the ground, grinding it in with his heel. “Is Angie still working Vice?”
“Polaski?” Leo asked, like he didn’t quite believe his ears. “You don’t wanna go fucking with that pollack.”
“Answer the fucking question.”
Leo took out another cigarette and lit it from the first. “Yeah. Last I heard.”
“If Trent comes looking for me, tell him I’ll meet him back down here in a few minutes.”
Michael didn’t give Leo time to answer. He ran back up the steps to the third floor, his lungs rattling in his chest by the time he opened the door. Vice was a mostly nighttime endeavor, so half the squad was in the room filling out paperwork from last night’s sweep. Angie had obviously worked catch. She was wearing a halter-top that stopped three inches above her belly button and a blonde wig was splayed on her desk like a dead Pomeranian.
He waited for her to look up, and when she did, she wasn’t exactly
Michael ran his fingers through his hair. He was sweating from the sprint up the stairs. The smoke was still in his lungs and he coughed something that sounded like a death rattle. Christ, he’d be joining Ken in a wheelchair if he kept this up.
He said, “I need to talk to you a minute.”
She looked wary. “About what?”
Michael leaned over her desk, trying to keep the conversation between them.
“Uh-uh,” she said, pushing him back as she stood up. “Let’s go out into the hall.”
He followed her, aware that the rest of the squad was watching. The truth was that Michael had liked working Vice. You watched the girls, you picked up the Johns, you seldom got shot at or had to tell a parent that their son or daughter had been found floating in the Chattahoochee. He hadn’t left because he wanted to. Angie had been a problem for him. They hadn’t exactly gotten along, and the fact that she was agreeing to talk to him now was up there with the world’s biggest surprises.
She tugged at her skirt as she stepped into a nook across from the elevators. Beside her, an ancient vending machine hummed, the lights flickering. She asked, “You here to talk about Aleesha Monroe?”
“The pross?” He hadn’t even thought to pull her record.
“You don’t remember her?” Angie asked. “We banged her up a couple of times until she hooked up with Baby G.”
Michael answered “Yeah,” though Angie shouldn’t really expect him to remember one hooker out of the thousands they had arrested on the weekend sweeps. Some Saturday nights, they called out a wagon just to transport all the girls to the station. Cabs lined up outside the precinct to take them right back out onto the street a couple of hours later.
Michael began, “I just-”
The elevator door dinged behind him. Michael looked over his shoulder and saw Will Trent.
“Shit,” Michael muttered.
“Kit Kat,” Trent said, and Michael’s brain took its sweet time figuring out what the fuck the guy was talking about. Trent stood in front of the vending machine, digging in his pocket for change.
Michael decided to make nice. “This is Angie Polaski,” he said. Then, as if it wasn’t obvious from the way she was dressed, he added, Vice.
Trent was sticking coins into the machine. He gave her a nod, but his eyes didn’t quite meet hers. “Good morning, Detective Polaski.”
“Trent’s with the GBI,” Michael said. “Greer called him in to give us a hand with the Monroe case.”
Michael was watching Trent, waiting for the guy to point out that Greer hadn’t actually called him, that he’d shown up at the lieutenant’s doorstep on his own. Trent, for his part, was tracing his finger along the glass front of the machine, trying to read the code under the Kit Kat bars so he could press it into the control panel. He was squinting; Michael figured the guy needed glasses.
“Oh, fer fucksakes,” Angie muttered. “It’s E-six.” She punched the code in herself, her garishly long fake fingernails clicking on the plastic keys. She told Michael, “I’ll get the file on Monroe.”
She was walking back toward her squad before Michael could think to say anything else. He saw Trent watching her walk, the way her ass moved in the high heels.
“I worked with her a while back,” Michael told him. “She’s all right.”
Trent peeled back the wrapper on the candy bar and took a bite.
Michael felt the need to explain. “She’s kind of got an attitude.”
“If I had to dress that way for work every day, I don’t imagine I’d be very cheerful.”
Michael watched Trent’s jaw work as he chewed. The scar on his cheek seemed more pronounced. “How’d you get the scar?”
Trent looked at his hand. “Nail gun,” he said, and Michael could see a pink scar cutting through the skin on the webbing between the man’s thumb and index finger.
That hadn’t been the scar Michael had meant, but he played along. “You into home repair or something?”
“Habitat for Humanity.” Trent shoved the last of the Kit Kat into his mouth and tossed the wrapper into the
