dead in her apartment this morning, shrouded in her bedsheets. Multiple stab wounds. Everything about the murder fits.”
“It had to be Mandle,” Bickerstaff said.
They watched him absorb the news, Paula with a concerned little frown.
Horn stood motionless and uttered one word: “Anne. . ”
In his pocket, his cell phone began chirping urgently, like a live thing trapped.
46
Patrolmen Lee Sanford and Amos Prince of the One-three precinct didn’t need lights or a siren as Sanford drove their radio car toward a Lower East Side address in response to a
Sanford, a fifteen-year veteran of the NYPD, was a tall, thin, taciturn man with the solemn demeanor of a grave digger. The much younger Prince was a stocky African-American who, as far as Sanford was concerned, smiled too much and too broadly and was maybe a little too hip to be a cop. They’d been partners in the patrol car for a little over a month. It had taken three weeks before Sanford decided Prince might be a good cop despite his runny mouth and devotion to rap music. Prince was beginning to suspect his partner Abe Lincoln might just do when it came crunch time. Might.
Sanford pulled the car to the curb in front of one of a row of almost identical brick six-story walk-ups.
“This is it,” Prince said, seeing the crudely painted address next to the building’s door. “Let’s do it.”
“Wanna make sure,” Sanford said, sitting motionless behind the steering wheel and studying the notes he’d scrawled when the call had come through.
Prince squirmed. “C’mon, Lee. Time to get outta Car Fifty-four.”
Sanford gave him a sideways morose look, then put down his notes and opened the car door. Relieved, Prince reached for the door handle on his side.
“Had to be on the sixth floor,” Prince said as they climbed rickety wooden steps that led from landing to landing. Barely enough light made it through the landings’ dirty windows for them to see where they were going.
They were both breathing a little raggedly when they reached the door with a painted-over brass 6-B on it. Prince knocked on the age-checked enameled wood.
The door opened almost immediately and a worried-looking stout woman wearing jeans and combing her long dark hair looked out at them. “It’s you,” she said simply.
“Us,” Sanford confirmed.
“You put in a call for the police,” Prince reminded the woman.
She looked agitated, dark eyes narrowing. “I hear this shit, I gotta come home early from work.”
“What kinda shit?” Prince asked.
“Teenage, is what. I got two sons, fourteen and fifteen. You got teenagers, Officer?”
“Git outta here!” Prince said.
“Rafe and Georgie, only four days since school let out and they already found trouble.”
“What kinda trouble?” Prince asked.
Sanford gave him a disapproving look. He knew they should let the woman run her mouth; she’d get around to it in her own time. What she had to say might be hard for her to get out.
“I get a call at work from Georgie-”
“The fifteen-year-old?”
“Fourteen. He tells me Rafe’s got a gun. I say is Rafe there and let me talk to him and Rafe comes to the phone. You got a gun? How’d you get it? Where’d you get it? Jesus! I tell Rafe to put down the gun and the two of them stay right where they fuckin’ are and stay away from the gun. Okay?”
“You did right,” Sanford said.
“Not that they listened to me one little bit. They came home with the gun.”
The woman suddenly realized Sanford and Prince were still standing in the hall. She stopped combing her hair and moved aside so they could enter her apartment. The messy living room was unoccupied except for a grungy 9mm handgun lying on the coffee table next to a soda can.
“That it?” Prince asked unnecessarily, pointing to the gun.
“Course that’s it.”
“Where are the boys?”
“In their rooms. I didn’t send them there. They don’t like cops.”
“At their age? They should still love us, the way we give them directions and help them get across the street and such.”
Sanford had crossed the magazine-and-newspaper-littered floor and was leaning down looking at the gun. Besides being grimy, it was just beginning to rust and its barrel was clogged with dirt. It was also exactly the same model as the 9mm semiautomatic in Sanford’s holster. A cop’s gun. “Where’d the boys say they got this?”
“Off a dead body.”
“Where?” Sanford asked.
An hour later Horn, Paula, and Bickerstaff were standing with Sanford and Prince in the basement of a condemned and boarded-up building off First Avenue in lower Manhattan. They were about ten feet away from the body, trying to avoid the smell that was made even worse by the usual musty and stale-urine stench of abandoned urban buildings. If the ancient basement had ever had anything other than a dirt floor, it was no longer evident. Lights had been carried down, the ME was in attendance, and techs were buzzing around the half-buried and badly decomposed body that had loose earth scooped over it. They weren’t the only things buzzing around it. The dead man was stripped to the waist and wearing what looked like the filthy remnants of work pants.
Paula saw that the ME was the little redheaded geek. Harry Potter.
“This guy’s been shot,” Harry Potter said to Horn.
“Fatal wound?”
“I haven’t checked his pulse yet.”
“Do I have to ask again?”
“Mighta killed him eventually. Gotta examine a stiff like this in the morgue to make sure of anything, what with all the decomposition, insects, and dirt. Guy shoulda known we were coming, used some underarm deodorant.”
Paula felt her stomach kick. She could do without the sick cop humor. It was difficult enough trying to breathe only out. The techs were wearing surgical masks. Paula wished she had one but didn’t want to ask. She got one of those looks from Bickerstaff, even though he was standing with his hand cupped loosely over his mouth and nose.
“What the hell were two teenage boys doing down here?” Paula asked. “The place looks ready to fall down around itself.”
“Their mom said they came here to look for antique bottles,” Sanford said. “They collect them. The basements of these old buildings are a good place to hunt for them. One of the kids noticed a hand sticking up outta the dirt, so they dug and right away found the gun, found some more of the dead body, and got out fast.”
“I’ll just bet,” Bickerstaff said. “You say they took the gun with them?”
“Would a boy leave behind a gun?”
“Wouldn’t be natural,” Paula said.
“Mom oughta whip their asses!” Prince said. “Least the dead guy’s not a cop.”
“Probably not,” Horn said. “We’ve got no missing cops, but we do have a few missing guns.”
“Fucker mighta stole one from a cop,” Prince said.
