Blood and Bone

by William Lashner

  "Whatever."

  "Okay, got it. Now just hold the light steady and stop breathing."

  "Breathing?"

  "You're breathing too loud. I need to hear the clicks."

  "The clicks of the wheels turning in your head?"

  "The pins, bro. Now, shut up and hold your breath."

  Skitch was squatting on his haunches. His eyes were scrunched closed as he manipulated the picks carefully in the lock of the rear door of the stone building that housed the offices of Byrne & Toth. This wasn't the most brilliant idea, Kyle knew, breaking into a crime scene in which a murder had occurred only a few nights before, especially with the way that cop had questioned Kyle at Laszlo Toth's funeral. But when he told Skitch how that little creep Malcolm with the hot wife had barred him from Kyle's own father's office, Skitch had turned righteously indignant, and no one did righteous indignation better than Skitch. "Bastards," he'd shouted, loud enough to draw stares from all over the bowling alley where they were drinking. And even though Kyle was ready to let the whole thing disappear, after a long bout of fortification with liquid courage and urging by Skitch, he found himself at the rear door of the office building, holding the flashlight as Skitch worked the picks.

  You would think it was a fool's errand, waiting on someone like Skitch, drunk no less, to open a locked door, but Skitch had some surprising skills. He could play the "Too Fat Polka" on the accordion. He could wipe out DiNardo's on all-you-can-eat crab night. He had once downed a pack of Mentos and half a quart of Diet Coke at the same time, the calamitous results of which showed up on YouTube and went viral. And—twist, click—he could pick a lock like nobody's business.

  "My uncle taught me well," said Skitch.

  "What was he, a locksmith?"

  "Hell no," said Skitch, still squatting as he slowly pushed the door open. "He's doing time now in West Virginia."

  "Isn't family a wonderful thing?" said Kyle. "Are we really going to do this?"

  "Hell yes," said Skitch. "This is your father's office. We're not going to let that bastard keep you out."

  Kyle stood on the outside of the now-open door, peering through the doorway, wondering at what kinds of feral creatures from his past might lurk there. With a push from Skitch, he stumbled through the doorway. Inside, he took a deep breath, tried to sense his father's ancient mélange of aromas, smelled only dust and cleaning fluid. Skitch, still squatting, waddled in after him and closed the door.

  "Keep the flashlight off for now," said Skitch. "Nothing looks more suspicious than the beam of a flashlight waving around. You said second floor, right?"

  "There are stairs next to the elevator. I think the lobby's this— Ow! Fricking box."

  "Go slow, bro. Be one with the hall and feel your way."

  "One with the hall," said Kyle. "I am the hall. Okay, follow me."

  Kyle put his arms in front of him and slowly felt his way along the corridor, moving as quietly as possible. Behind him, Skitch sounded like a drunken mariachi band, banging here, cursing there, tripping his way forward.

  The faintest hint of light slipped around the thin edges of a doorframe just ahead of Kyle. He reached out until he felt the wood, lowered his hand to the knob, opened the door, and stepped into the front lobby, where he had been so rudely rebuffed the morning before. Light brushed faintly through the gauze-covered windows, illuminating the space enough so that Kyle could get his bearings. The door there, the reception desk there, the elevator and stairs there.

  "Up this way," said Kyle, heading past the gleam from the ornate elevator door and toward the stairs.

  Slowly he creaked up the staircase, rising higher toward his father's old office. And as he did, he began to feel anxious and deprived, as though he were trespassing on his father's oh-so-important life. He felt like an afterthought, like a mistake. It was as if with each rising step the years were peeling away. Until finally, almost at the top of the steps, when he had devolved into the twelve-year-old he had been at his father's funeral, he stopped, dead.

  "Whoa," said Skitch. "What's going on?"

  "I don't know," said Kyle. "I feel weird."

  "Just don't hurl on the floor, bro. Bad form."

  Skitch climbed past him up the stairs, turned the corner into the office, and flicked on the light switch. A painful brightness poured down the stairs.

  "What the hell are you doing?" said Kyle.

  "I'm trying to see."

  "We're breaking in, you idiot."

  "No, we've broken in, and we've entered. Those were the crimes. Now we're just here. If the lights are on, it looks like we're working late. If the lights are off, we'll be banging into things like the blind Barko sisters."

  "The blind Barko sisters?"

  "Don't ask, but trust me when I tell you they are loads of fun. Are you coming up?"

  Kyle took a deep breath and then climbed the rest of the stairs, until he was there, in his father's old law office, the suite of Byrne &

  Toth. Not much to see, actually, and quite the disappointment. He didn't know exactly what he'd expected, something closer to Kat's opulent offices, maybe, someplace where it made sense for Liam Byrne to want to spend his life rather than with his son. But it wasn't luxurious or grand, it didn't echo with great import. It was just a shabby set of offices with old furniture and dingy walls. A pile of white boxes with the name of a document-storage company leaned against one of the walls.

  "This is where that old Toth guy got it, right?" said Skitch.

  "That's right," said Kyle. "In one of these offices."

  "Yowza."

  "Probably that one over there," said Kyle. "My mother mentioned once that my dad had the corner office. She worked here as a secretary until they hooked up. Then, after my father died, Toth took it over until . . ."

  "Yeah, okay. Bang-bang. Now what?"

  "Now I guess we look around," said Kyle. "We're looking for an old file, the O'Malley file."

  "What's in it?"

  "I don't know, but this O'Malley guy is looking for it, and he promised if he got it, he had something to tell me about my father. Why don't you check the boxes, and I'll go through the offices checking out the desks and file cabinets."

  While Skitch rummaged through the boxes as noiselessly as a raccoon in a metal trash can, Kyle went office to office, opening small file cabinets, desk drawers, seeking something, anything, bearing the name O'Malley. Nothing. But with each drawer he looked in, each file name he skimmed past, he felt a strange deflation. As if some vault within him were being emptied out. This sad, dust-ridden office was so different from what he had imagined for so long, it was as if whole swaths of his childhood landscape were being altered.

  He stepped into the corner office, Toth's office, and stood there for a moment, trying to imagine what it might have been like fourteen years ago when his father had held court in that same space. He closed his eyes, spun around slowly, tried to feel his father's presence. The white hair, the rough voice, the cigarette smoke and spicy cologne that always enveloped him like a fog. Dad, where are you, Dad?

  "I finished with the boxes," said Skitch from the doorway to the office, "and look what I found."

  Kyle snapped open his eyes, saw Skitch holding a file. "O'Malley?"

  "Nah. Sorrentino."

  "Sorrentino?"

  "Anthony Sorrentino. 'Tiny Tony' Sorrentino? Bookmaker extraordinaire. Half the city has placed bets with Tiny Tony, me included. Every time the Eagles lose, he buys another Buick. And this, this here is his last will and testament."

  "So?"

  "So it's interesting, is all. The last will and testament of Tiny Tony Sorrentino. Probably leaves a load to Kotite. And look, in the file with the will is a bunch of betting slips. Old stuff."

  "Let me see." Kyle took hold of the file, looked through it. The will was dated just months before his father died, and it had his father's signature on it, along with the John Hancock of this Anthony Sorrentino. The betting slips were also old, old enough to be anyone'
s. So who was betting? His father? Toth? Did that have anything to do with what had happened to Toth? Or his father?

  "Anything else with Sorrentino's name on it?"

  "No, but the will was in the middle of a batch of files about some company."

  "What was the name?"

  "Double Eye, I think it was. Double Eye Investments."

  "Keep that file for me," said Kyle. "You find anything else?"

  "There's a storage room around the corner with some old metal file cabinets. I looked through what I could. No O'Malley."

  "What do you mean you looked through what you could?"

  "There was one file cabinet, and then a gap with some boxes, and then a couple more. From the case numbers on the drawers, it looks like one cabinet is missing."

  "Okay, I'll be there in a sec. Let me finish looking through here first."

  Kyle did a quick search of Toth's office, the drawers, the low wooden file cabinets. He glanced out the window, and a flash of dim light caught his gaze. But when he realized it was just a gleam of a streetlight on a metal sign, he was strangely disappointed. What had he expected to see on the Locust Street sidewalk, a mop of gray hair?

  In the storage room, it was the old file cabinets that drew Kyle's interest. They were metal and brown, with fake wood grain, and seemed designed solely to hold documents of great import. He walked up to one. The lock in the upper right corner was sticking out, with a key inside. He opened a drawer filled with old, tightly packed files. He thumbed through them rapidly. No O'Malley. He closed the drawer and stepped back and stared.

  "See," said Skitch, pointing to a gap.

  "Yeah, I see," said Kyle. "So one is missing."

  Kyle thought for a moment. Where would his father have put a file cabinet? He was trying to think it through when he heard something faint, and then not so faint.

  The push of a door opening, the patter of shoes across the floor below. Kyle quickly turned to Skitch. Skitch stared back, his eyes widening.

  "I guess turning on the lights wasn't the best idea," said Skitch softly, even as a shout rose like an explosion up the twisting stairs.

  "Police."

  CHAPTER 14

  DETECTIVES HENDERSON AND RAMIREZ stood side by side in front of the wide one-way mirror that allowed a clear view inside the green interrogation room. Kyle Byrne slumped in a chair across a table, facing them without being able to see them. The partners stood quietly for a moment, observing two very different scenes.

  Ramirez saw a man fighting to control his fear, someone aware that he was being stared at and trying a little too hard not to look concerned, a clever liar trying to fake his way out of a bad situation. But to Henderson, Kyle Byrne seemed neither nervous nor scared. He didn't look like someone who was racked with doubt after having been arrested for burglary and while being held at the Roundhouse on suspicion of murder. He just looked bored.

  "Doesn't seem too worried, does he?" said Henderson, pulling at the gray hairs growing out of his ear.

  "He's trying very hard not to."

  The man in the interrogation room stretched in his chair, yawned, lolled his head across the back of the chair.

  "And doing a damn good job of it," said Henderson.

  Byrne had given himself up as the uniforms climbed the stairs with guns drawn. His hands were raised, he was smiling weakly, he said, "Don't shoot. My name's Kyle Byrne. I'm not trespassing. This is my father's office." He was alone, the cops said, and they found nothing on him other than a wallet, which confirmed his identity, and a flashlight. No gun, no contraband, no lock-picking tools, nothing but a few bucks and some loose change. He was so amiable and so nonthreatening that the uniforms had only cuffed him in strict compliance with procedure.

  "I would have thought you'd be more excited, Henderson, seeing all your old saws come to fruition. First he attends the funeral of the victim, next he returns to the scene of the crime."

  "That makes him guilty of stupidity, not much more."

  "It's a start," said Ramirez. "I thought you said old saws still cut?"

  "I did, but then again, sometimes old saws are too rusty to be of much use. Has he asked for a lawyer?"

  "Not yet."

  "He call anyone?"

  "No."

  "Who notified us?"

  "Anonymous call from a pay phone."

  "Pay phone, huh? Those things still around?"

  "Apparently."

  "What did he say he was doing in there?"

  "Visiting his father's old office before they shut it down. Looking for something to remember his father by. A keepsake or such. Sounds a bit demented if you ask me."

  "You get along with your father, Ramirez?"

  "I did, at least when he wasn't drinking. He died when I was in high school."

  "How did it make you feel?"

  "It hurt, and then I got over it."

  "And now you don't feel abandoned, betrayed, bitter?"

  "I feel nothing," she said. "Let me do him alone. We started building a rapport at the funeral—until he figured I was a cop. Give me half an hour and I'll push him into coming clean."

  "That's the problem with your technique right there. Rapport is fine, but pushing's good for giving birth and not much else. Does he know we can't hold him for the burglary?"

  "Not yet, and I don't want to tell him before we have to."

  "I'm not surprised the landlord won't press charges. He's had enough bad publicity over the murder, and he's going to have to rent the place soon. But what was Mrs. Toth's excuse?"

  "She said she felt sorry for him," said Ramirez. "Said her husband was such a skinflint he refused to give the kid a break even though he'd promised to financially support the mother."

  "I guess she got over her fit of weeping at the funeral."

  "Maybe we can change her mind by telling her the boy is a suspect in her husband's murder."

  "Is that what he is?"

  "What do you think?" said Ramirez.

  Henderson looked at Kyle as he sat slumped in a strange quiescence. There was something lost and yet full of serene acceptance in his expression, as if he had no idea of what was going on and found the situation both familiar and comforting.

  "I think he's a confused kid who misses his dad," said Henderson.

  "You've gotten soft over the years."

  "Maybe I have. But before you finger a man for murder, you ought at least to have some reasonable motive."

  "Like the widow said, this Toth had promised to make payments from the law firm to the kid and his mother after the father's death, then reneged. Maybe it was revenge. Or maybe he just broke in for that keepsake he was looking for and found the victim in the office working late and panicked."

  "And he looks like the panicky type to you."

  "No need to get wise. We still haven't gotten a straight answer about how this Liam Byrne died. Maybe Toth was somehow involved, maybe the Byrne boy found out how, maybe he decided on a little payback."

  "Why now?"

  "Why not? And if he did do the shooting, it could certainly explain why he was in the office last night. If he lost something accidentally during the shooting, something that could connect him to the murder, he'd have to come back to find it. Like that cuff link we found under Toth's desk."

  Henderson eyed Byrne's ragged T-shirt. "He look like a cuff-link kind of guy to you?"

  "He was wearing a suit at the funeral."

  "What kind of shirt?"

  Ramirez thought for a moment and then frowned. "Button-down oxford."

  "Good for you," said Henderson. "You might make a detective yet."

  "Screw off, old man. Whether you like it or not, I'm here already. And what the hell did you mean about a problem with my interrogation technique? My interrogation technique is spot-on, it's legendary, it's why the brass put me here."

  "To learn, maybe. You can't go in trying to bully a suspect, unless you want him to close like a clam. You have to care about him as a human being."


  She snorted. "I can pretend to care with the best of them."

  "No, see, that's just it. It's not a parlor trick, not a technique. You have to really care."

  "They're scumbags."

  "Most of them, yeah, but before they became scumbags, they were somebody's little boy, somebody's best friend. That's all still somewhere inside. This kid has been missing his father since he was twelve. That did something to him, and he's just looking for someone to tell it to. But he's not going to tell it unless he believes you care."

  "Oh, I care, all right."

  "About him? As a human being? Because what happened in that office wasn't just about a victim. You ever shoot that gun of yours, Ramirez? You ever kill anyone?"

  "Not yet."

  "You sound like you're looking forward to it."

  "I'm ready to do what I need to do."

  "I don't think anyone's ever ready for that."

  "What's the point, old man?"

  "Whoever pulled the trigger in that office, he didn't just kill Toth, he killed a part of himself, too. You can't forget that. The killer needs to pay a price, but he's hurting about what he did. You want answers, you got to be able to weep for them both."

  "I do my weeping at the movies," said Ramirez. "Can I get on with it?"

  Henderson stared at her for a long moment, wondering when the newbies got so young, thinking for the hundredth time about retirement, and then said, "Knock yourself out."

  CHAPTER 15

  RAMIREZ SAT DOWN across from Kyle Byrne. His eyes were sleepy. He smiled at her, like she was merely paying him a friendly visit.

  "Well, now," he said. "This is quite a coincidence. Here I was, thinking about you, and bam, just like that you show up."

  "Thinking about me?" said Ramirez.

  "Yeah, sure. Ramirez, right?"

  "That's right."

  "I'm sorry, I forgot your first name."

  "Detective."

  "Wow, your mother must have been psychic or something. But I was thinking about your smile."

  "My smile?"

  "And the way things ended a little awkward between us last time. When I got pulled in here, I was hoping that you'd show up so I could apologize for being kind of short with you at the end of our conversation. It was just the questions you were asking, like I was a murder suspect or something, and it all being done at a cemetery, somehow it seemed a little too strange."