an ice goddess. He frowned; the whole Pamela Wisher business felt like nitroglycerine to him.
His eye traveled from the stack of reports to the NO SMOKING sign outside his door, and the frown deepened. It and a dozen like it had gone up around the precinct station just the week before.
He slid the cigar out of his pocket and removed its plastic wrapping. No law against chewing on the thing, at any rate. He rolled it lovingly between thumb and index finger for a moment, examining the wrapper with a critical eye. Then he placed it in his mouth.
He sat for a moment, motionless. Then, with a curse, he jerked open the top drawer of his desk, hunted around until he located a kitchen match, and lit it on the sole of his shoe. He applied the flame to the end of the cigar and sat back with a sigh, listening to the faint crackle of tobacco as he drew in the smoke and bled it slowly out his nose.
The internal phone rang shrilly.
“Yes?” D’Agosta answered. Couldn’t be a complaint already. He’d just lit up.
“Lieutenant?” came the voice of the departmental secretary. “There’s a Sergeant Hayward here to see you.”
D’Agosta grunted and sat up in his chair. “Who?”
“Sergeant Hayward. Says it’s by your request.”
“I didn’t ask for any Sergeant Hayward—”
A uniformed woman appeared in the open doorway. Almost instinctively, D’Agosta took in the salient features: petite, thin, heavy breasts, jet black hair against pale skin.
“Lieutenant D’Agosta?” she asked.
D’Agosta couldn’t believe such a deep contralto could come from such a small frame. “Take a seat,” he said, and watched as the Sergeant settled herself in a chair. She seemed to be unconscious of anything irregular, as if it was standard procedure for a sergeant to burst in on a superior anytime he—or she—felt like it.
“I don’t recall asking for you, Sergeant,” D’Agosta finally said.
“You didn’t,” Hayward answered. “But I knew you’d want to see me anyway.”
D’Agosta sat back, drawing slowly on his cigar. He’d let the Sergeant say her piece, then chew her out. D’Agosta wasn’t a stickler for process, but approaching a senior officer like this was way out of line. He wondered if perhaps one of his men had come on to her in some filing room or something. Just what he needed, a sexual harassment suit on his hands.
“Those corpses you found in the Cloaca,” Hayward began.
“What about them?” D’Agosta snapped, suddenly suspicious. A security lid was supposed to be clamped down over the details of that business.
“Before the merger, I used to be with the Transit Police.” Hayward nodded, as if that explained everything. “I still do the West Side duty, clearing the homeless out of Penn Station, Hell’s Kitchen, the railyards, under the —”
“Wait a minute,” D’Agosta interrupted. “You? A rouster?”
Immediately, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. Hayward tensed in the chair, her eyebrows contracting at the obvious disbelief in his voice. There was a moment of awkward silence.
“We don’t like that term, Lieutenant,” she said at last.
D’Agosta decided he had enough to worry about without humoring this uninvited guest. “It’s my office,” he said, shrugging.
Hayward looked at him a moment, and in those brown eyes D’Agosta could almost see her good opinion of him falling away. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s how you want to play it.” She took a deep breath. “When I heard about these skeletons of yours, they rang a bell. Reminded me of some recent homicides among the moles.”
“Moles?”
“Tunnel people, of course,” she said with a condescending look D’Agosta found irritating. “Underground homeless. Anyway, then I read that article in today’s
D’Agosta grimaced. Trust that scandal-hound Bill Smithback to whip readers into a frenzy, make a bad situation worse. The two of them had been friends—after a fashion—but now that Smithback was a homicide reporter, he’d grown almost intolerable. And D’Agosta knew better than to give him the slightest speck of the inside information he was always demanding.
“The life expectancy of a homeless person is very short,” Hayward said. “It’s even worse for the moles. But that journalist was right. Lately, some of the killings have been unusually nasty. Heads missing, bodies ripped up. I thought I’d better come to you about it.” She shifted in her seat and gazed at D’Agosta with her clear brown eyes. “Maybe I should have saved my breath.”
D’Agosta let that pass. “So how many recent homicides we talking about, Hayward?” he asked. “Two? Three?”
Hayward paused. “More like half a dozen,” she said at last.
D’Agosta looked at her, cigar halfway to mouth. “Half a
“That’s what I said. Before coming up here, I looked through the files. Seven murders among the moles in the last four months match this MO.”
D’Agosta lowered the cigar. “Sergeant, let me get this straight. You got some kind of underground Jack the Ripper here, and nobody’s on top of it?”
“Look, it was just a hunch on my part, okay?” Hayward said defensively. “Back off me. These aren’t my homicides.”
