whoever killed him took a real asshole off the streets for good. Maybe forty or fifty nasty crimes a year.'
'All the miscellaneous hits are like that?'
'Yup. I mean the techniques are different, but they're all cold, efficient, researched.'
Lucas nodded, studying her. 'All very enlightening-but where do I come in?'
She looked straight into him, fixing him. 'A couple of guys in intelligence spotted the pattern. They got nervous about it. All of the victims, or whatever you'd call them, were heavy in intelligence files. Like the files had been used to choose them. Once they made the report, a secret working group of six ranking officers was set up to monitor it. Petty was eventually brought in to do the dog work.'
Lucas interrupted. 'He was a shoofly, or whatever you guys call them?'
She shook her head. 'He was a crime-scene guy for most of his career, and later on a computer specialist. He was officially a detective second. In this case, he was reporting to the working group under the direct supervision of my boss, John O'Dell. John chairs the working group.'
'So there was no past internal-affairs work that might have left a grudge,' Lucas said.
'No. And just before he was shot, there was an odd break on the case…' Lily put a hand on top of her head as if she were patting herself, a gesture of thought. 'The black guy who was killed, the loudmouth, was named Waites. The file is still open, we still have people digging into it. As a matter of routine, Walt got all the reports coming out of the active cases. He found a report that said a supposed witness to the Waites killing had recognized one of the shooters as a cop. The witness was named Cornell, last name probably Reed. The trouble is, when Walt went looking for him, Cornell Reed had disappeared. Maybe left town. But Walt found him, somehow. He tried to get in touch with us that afternoon, he came by the offices, and when he couldn't, he left a note on voice mail. He said he knew where Reed went.'
'Where?'
'We don't know. And Walt was killed that night.'
'Jesus-somebody got the voice mail?'
'Unlikely; it's coded,' Lily said. 'And the shooting was too well set up. They'd planned it ahead of time. If finding the witness had anything to do with it, it was just the trigger that made them go ahead with the shooting.'
'Huh. How about Petty's records? Notes?'
'Nothing in his office, but he wasn't keeping anything there, anyway, because of the sensitivity,' she said. 'He was working out of his apartment, mostly. And that's another thing: somebody got to his apartment before we did. All of his computer disks were gone, and the internal drive-hard drive, is that it?-had been wiped somehow. I don't know how you do it, but there was nothing recoverable.'
'Another computer freak?'
'Not necessarily. Whatever they did wasn't fancy. A couple of short commands apparently took care of it. Something like a reformat with a write-over? Does that make sense?'
'Yeah, yeah. Petty must've talked to somebody. It's hard to believe he'd get a break and coincidentally be hit that same night… Who'd he tell about the witness?' Lucas asked.
'We don't know,' Lily said. 'We do know he came up to our office, after hours, looking for us. O'Dell and I spend a lot of time in a car, going around, putting out political brush fires. We were talking to some people in one of the projects that night. Walt didn't try the car-our driver was waiting in it, and nobody called. The thing is, when Walt came up to the office, he might've bumped into somebody from the working group, there in the hallway. He really wouldn't talk to anybody else, not on this topic.'
'So he accidentally bumps into another member of the working group and that guy leaks?'
Lily frowned. 'Well… the shooting was too quick for a careless leak. Whoever tipped the rogue group did it directly. A phone call. In other words, whoever leaked knows the killers. Maybe he even runs them.'
'Sonofabitch. But if you know it's one of the six working-group guys…'
Lily shook her head and smiled. 'Nothing's ever that easy. For one thing, every one of those six reports to somebody, and they did. And every one of the six has assistants, and some of the assistants know what the working group is doing.'
'Doesn't sound very secret,' Lucas said.
'Maybe fifteen people know details, and twenty-five know about the problem,' Lily said. 'That's pretty secret for the department… but you see where that leaves us. If one of the working group tipped the killers, he's in a position to know everything. So we're paralyzed. The working group appointed a new lead investigator, an unassigned captain, but he's not doing anything. He's just there to cover our asses, in case something leaks. You know, so we can say we've got an active case under investigation by a ranking officer.'
'And you want me to look into it,' Lucas said.
Lily nodded. 'My boss and I talked it over. We need the work done off the books. Nobody will know but the two of us. It's the only way. And because of Bekker, you're a perfect fit. The goddamn media's going nuts about Bekker, of course, the TV and the Post and News, Doctor Death and all that. You can't get in a cab without hearing a radio talk show about him. So we bring you in, the guy who caught him last time. A consultant. But while you're looking, we're going to put you close to a couple of people Walt was looking at.'
'Huh.' Lucas sat and thought for a long moment, then he looked up. 'This guy who got shot,' he said. 'You called him Walt, like… he wasn't just another guy. Is there something I should know?'
She looked at his face, but not into his eyes: her eyes seemed suddenly blank, as though she were seeing another face. 'Walt was my oldest friend,' she said.
And she told him about the dream…
The dream had started the night Petty was killed; it began not with a vision, but with an odor, the smell of ozone, as if electrical circuits were burning somewhere. Then she saw herself, through a haze, but with increasing clarity, seated on a simple marble bench, the kind found in cemeteries, with Petty's bleeding, shattered body stretched across her lap. Apieta. She did nothing at all, but simply sat there, looking into his face. In the dream, the point-of-view closed on the face, like a camera creeping forward, and at the last moment, focused not on an image of Christ-like peace, but on a face that had been shredded by high-velocity slugs, at yellow molars slick with drying blood…
A ludicrous image, but one that came, night after night.
But that wasn't the way it had been, the night Petty was killed.
Petty's seventy-one-year-old mother had called, confused, incoherent. Her only child had been killed, she said, her voice an ancient moan. Walt was dead, dead… Lily could see the old woman in her mind's eye, the narrow gray face bent over the black telephone, body shaking, twitching, the withered hand with the handkerchief, the doilies on the TV behind her, the Sacred Heart on the wall. Lily could even smell it, cabbage and bread dough…
The old woman said that Lily had to go to Bellevue to identify Walter. Was there a cop there, Lily asked? Yes, right here, and Father Gomez. And the mayor was coming.
Lily spoke to the cop. Take care of Gloria Petty, she said, the wife of a cop, the mother of a cop. The last one alive in this family. Then, trembling with fear and grief, she'd gone to Bellevue.
No pieta at Bellevue.
Just a body, waxlike, dead, sprawled on a blood-soaked gurney, raw from the pickup. The body was wrapped in layers of plastic, like beef being moved. She noted professionally that one of the slugs had ripped off Petty's cheek, exposing his molars; a preview of Petty as a naked skull, a reminder of Petty's naive, happy smile. The smile that flashed every time he saw her, delighted with her presence.
She recalled a day from their Brooklyn childhood, when the two of them were seven or eight. Late fall, blue skies, crisp weather, a hint of Halloween. There were maple trees on the block, turning red. She'd been sick and had been kept home from school, but her mother let her out in the afternoon to sit on the stoop.
And here was Walter, running down the street, a paper held overhead, flapping, joy in his eyes. Her spelling test from the day before. A perfect score. Common enough for Lily, but Walter, so generously pleased for her, that smile, that young blond hair slicked down with Vaseline…
Come to this, the bloody teeth.
'That's Walter Petty,' she told a tired assistant M.E.
At home again, changing clothes, preparing herself to see Petty's mother, she thought of her school yearbook.
