Not Kratz anymore. A tan jacket, tan slacks, blond hair.Sandy. Sandy was sitting on the bench. And I had this sudden horror, he’d seenher, he’d snared her, he’d killed her, he’d posed her there for me to find.That’s what Kratz would do. He’d letus find him, somehow he’d followed us around all day and trolled himself rightunder our noses as bait in a trap.
I slid my hand inside my jacket, touching the cold hardreassurance of the SIG. I didn’t draw — civilians around. They walked right bySandy, city folks ignoring each other, not seeing any horror.
I swallowed sourness. I stepped forward, keeping that handinside my jacket. Sandy felt me behind her and turned and shook her head. Icould breathe again.
“He stood up and hailed a taxi and left. Just about as soon asI got into position. Bastard felt us, knew exactly where we were and what you’dtry to do. How the hell he got a taxithat fast, that’s real magic. I cameacross then, sniffed around. Kratz, for sure.”
And I could tastehim when I laid my hand on the bench, felt him in the air. Kratz. Fresh. Thatbuzzing irritating signature that I couldn’t mistake for any other wizard. Ithad been him.
Something out of place triggered memories, coming together tobreed another tangible clue. “A taxi? Saturday? No man wearing that outfitwould drive on the Sabbath.”
“He didn’t drive, he took a taxi.”
I’d met some Orthodox Jews when we’d been hunting Kratz thefirst time. They’d been anxious to help. Didn’t want people to tie him to them. I learned a few things about the way they followed the Law,learned how my father had been full of shit.
“Orthodox Jews don’t work on the Sabbath. That includes takingtaxis. Paying someone to do something youaren’t supposed to do is cheating. God knows the rules.”
It gave us more proof that the Hasidic dress was just acostume, a disguise. As if I needed that clue, after feeling Kratz pollutingthe air.
The bastard was taunting me, showing me that he could take usanytime he wanted. Typical Kratz. Like a cat, he liked to play with his mice.
XII
I checked back with my avian ally the next two afternoons,shows how desperate I was getting. She hadn’t seen a thing. That equalled theresult on all the routine boring police work going on in the background, thestuff I’m leaving out because it led us nowhere. I had a hard time mapping thered-tail’s city to mine, but I think she cruised over damn near half the town.I’d love to have wings. I slowed a couple of squirrels for her in payment.
On the third day, Kratz gifted us with another pair ofmurders. I think that November set an all-time record for murder in the city,if not the state.
This one turned out to be a classic, sex and drugs and moneyand religion and politics, all tossed into the pot to stew together. It shouldhave been Mardi Gras for the Media, but the money-politics-religion angleweighed in heavy enough that the lurid details somehow ended up on thecutting-room floor. Don’t ask me who called in favors, kicking ass all the wayup between the ears and twisting arms and mentioning known skeletons traceableto particular closets, but the public details differed markedly from the stuffI saw. And I ended up keeping mymouth shut, for my own reasons.
Cash got me on the phone and gave me an address, told me no lights and siren, silent run, didn’tpick me up, a change in her modusoperandi for these cases. I wondered if she thought she had me hooked now, didn’thave to drag me along by the ear. Or some other part of my anatomy. When I gotto the crime scene, I found out why.
Middling nowhere section of town, one-way street tucked offthe beaten track, this was the kind of place you had to want to find or you’d never end up there. I’ve worked the city fordecades now and I don’t think I’d ever been down that block before. Soot-stainedsandstone and brick row-houses three and four stories high, slate mansardroofs, they’d cost good solid money when they were built back at the end of the1800s but now mixed half genteel, half decayed. I didn’t know whether theneighborhood was headed up or headed down. This kind of place, the guy nextdoor could be a psychiatrist or a pusher or both at once. And you could blastaway on a shooting range in your cellar and nobody would hear the gunfirethrough two-foot-thick stone walls.
And nobody would ask, if they did. I know those neighborhoods,even if I didn’t know this one. You share walls with the people on either side,but don’t share much of anything else. You mightknow their names, might not. If five families in a block had kids, they’d sendthem to five different schools. Those would be private schools mostly —religious or not, fancy-preppy or not, tuition vouchers for the lower-classrabble, because the public schools in that area rated about one notch aboveouthouses. You tell me which was cause and which effect. But anyway, no “neighborhood”in any real sense. No neighbors.
Perfect place for “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Easing along the narrow street, parking along one side only, Ispotted a couple of hearses. Yes, hearses, not ambulances, not the ME wagonsand Crime Scene vans. A Mercedes sat in front of the actual address Cash hadgiven me, bright and new and shiny, not admitting any relationship to Sandy’s,and then another identical to it, sequential tags. Beyond those, a couple ofundercover cop cars had nosed into the curb. I knew them by the radio spikesand tag codes but not like mine, not the kind you could tell a hundred yardsoff. Then I spotted two civilian cars parked in front of a fire hydrant, with “Clergy”tags hanging from the windshield mirrors.
I pulled my cruiser up to the curb about five addresses
