Four Walls

prison records, Malik Washburne was taking one hundred milligrams of Klonopin every day for almost a year. That violent an allergy doesn't develop overnight.'

Mac's Treo rang in his suit jacket. Pulling it out, he saw it was Flack. He put the call on speaker and said, 'Don, it's Mac-I've got you on speaker with Peyton, Sheldon, and Inspector Gerrard.'

Flack's tinny voice said, 'I just got off the phone with Ursitti. Seems somebody beat the crap out of Jorge Melendez.'

'What? Why?'

'Ursitti tells me that it's retribution for Washburne's death.'

Gerrard said, 'How the hell did anyone there know Melendez was a suspect?'

'That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Inspector. I'm headin' back there now,' Flack said.

'I'll meet you there,' Mac told him.

'I'm stuck in traffic on the BQE, so you'll probably beat me there.'

Mac looked at Gerrard, who said, 'You will-you can have the chopper again.'

'Thanks.' He looked down at the phone. 'I'll see you there, Don.'

After hanging up, he looked at Sheldon. 'You and Danny do a re-creation, see if you can figure out exactly how Washburne would've received his wound and gotten onto the ground.'

'On it,' Sheldon said, and left.

Before Mac could say anything else, Peyton said, 'I'll run some more blood tests, see if we can find something exotic that a standard tox screen wouldn't find.' He nodded in thanks, and Peyton also took her leave.

That left Mac and Gerrard in the room together, which wasn't particularly comfortable for either man. Though Mac found he didn't give a good goddamn what was comfortable for the deputy inspector.

'Can I help you with something else, Stan?'

'That's 'Inspector Gerrard,' Detective Taylor. You lost the right to use my first name when you stabbed me in the back.'

'I stabbed you in the back?' Mac was incredulous. 'I wasn't the one who sicced Internal on me after the DA had already cleared me!'

'Yeah, and neither was I-that was Sinclair. I was the one who did you the courtesy of meeting with you and informing you of the investigation. Sinclair didn't even want that much-he would've been happy for you to hear about it on New York 1 with the rest of the city, but I thought you deserved the consideration of a face-to-face. Your response to this courtesy was to insult me, and then, when you felt like the hearing wasn't going your way, you decided to dig up dirt on me.' Gerrard stepped forward and leaned over Mac's desk, his palms flat on the wood surface. 'If you think for a second that I'm going to forget what you did to me, Detective, you are sadly mistaken. From here on in, I'll be taking permanent residence up your rectum, and you'd better for damn sure walk straight and fly right. That goes for your usual gang of idiots out there, too. If Messer goes whacko again, if Monroe bolts a crime scene-yeah, I know about that-or if you decide to go vigilante again, I will be there with a giant hammer, and I will use it to nail your ass to the wall.'

Gerrard seemed to think that was a good exit line, because he chose that moment to walk toward the door. Then he stopped and turned around. 'Washburne was a member, Mac. Do right by him.'

'That was always my intention,' Mac said tightly. 'Is there anything in my history that suggests I'd do otherwise?'

'Six months ago, I'd have said no, but now? Now you're going around threatening the chief of detectives. That's a special kind of stupid, Mac. I don't want you to screw up, but if you do, you will pay for it. Oh, and one more thing-you said you were getting the hang of playing politics, but politics is like poker. You don't show your hand till all the betting's in.'

'The betting was in, Inspector,' Mac said angrily. 'You and Sinclair were railroading me.'

'How do you know? The investigation wasn't over yet. How did you know you wouldn't get the same get-out- of-jail-free card the DA gave you?'

Not buying the notion for a second, Mac said, 'Was that likely to happen?'

Gerrard smiled. 'Oh, I could tell you, Mac-but that would be doing you a favor. I'm not inclined to do favors for detectives who blackmail me. So I'll just let you stew on that one and remind you that I know what you have in your hand now.'

Then Gerrard finally left.

Mac turned his chair around and stared out the window. He looked at the cars moving slowly down Broadway. It was a long drop from Mac's office to the street.

Even longer than the drop Dobson took.

Unbidden, his mind turned back to Dobson's smirk as he jumped off the roof, preferring death to another prison term. He'd already tried to kill himself once rather than go to jail, a fact that Gerrard himself had covered up.

Mac was going to have to live with that smirk for the rest of his life.

Gerrard was right about one thing-Mac wasn't all that great at playing politics. He preferred the simplicity of the lab: you found out what happened through evidence, through facts. Politics was all about obfuscation.

He'd been lucky with the dirt he had on Gerrard. Mac had no faith that a politically motivated witch hunt would find him anything other than guilty, no matter what mind games Gerrard was playing now.

Shaking his head, he turned back toward his desk. Gerrard didn't matter. Sure, he'd be taking up residence in his rectum, as he so indelicately put it, but he'd been living there ever since Gerrard's promotion when the inspector decided to throw his weight around during the UN translator case. Gerrard being an irritant was already a given part of the equation, so Mac wasn't going to concern himself.

His job was to solve the variables.

Getting up from his desk, he called ahead to the copter pad, requesting a lift to Staten Island.

16

LINDSAY WOULD MUCH PREFER that Stella had done this.

Angell had called Stella, asking someone from the crime lab to meet her at the Rosengaus apartment on West 247th Street, a bit farther into Riverdale than Belluso's. But since Stella had her meeting with Cabrera, she fobbed it off on Lindsay, who was not looking forward to navigating through the steep hills and twisty-turny roads that characterized Riverdale.

Sure enough, after getting off the Henry Hudson Parkway (even with its toll-Stella's exact instructions: 'Screw the E-Z Pass memo, just get where you need to go') at 246th Street, she made several wrong turns. The numbering of the streets up here didn't seem to make any sense; they twisted every which way, and not for the first time, she found herself missing the straight, perpendicular roads of Bozeman.

Eventually, she found the place. It was a three-story house with a two-car garage of a type she'd seen often in the outer boroughs. Perpendicular to the garage was a screen door that led to a ground-floor apartment. Said door was set under a staircase that led to a porch overhanging the garage, where there were another two doors. One would lead to the second-floor apartment, with the other leading to another staircase that took you to the third floor.

Two cars were parked in front of the garage, preventing Lindsay from pulling in there. Instead, she found a parking spot halfway down the block and across the street, between two driveways, so she didn't have to parallel park. She'd never acquired the parallel parking skill-it was the only part of the driving test she'd failed back home-and she rarely had need to practice it. The only time she drove was on official business, and most of the time, she could park wherever she wanted.

She supposed she could have parked in the driveway, but that seemed like an abuse of privilege, somehow. If she put her NYPD ID on the dashboard, she wouldn't be hassled; it still felt wrong to Lindsay. If Danny were here, he'd probably tease her about her bumpkin ways, but there was more to it than that. After what Mac went through with Sinclair, Lindsay felt that even the perception of wrongdoing would hurt the crime lab right now, and any kind of bad press would just get in the way of the work. Even though she'd been with the crime lab for over a year, she