The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  The children were at school but Michael found Rosetta hanging out the wash. Bruno was in the small kitchen, preparing to go off to his job at the fun fair. "What will you do with that ball of twine?" the man asked.

  "I'm trying to determine where the fatal shot might have come from. I ran a line from Mary Baxter's second floor over the top of the wall where Lyrik was standing. Now I want to try it from here."

  Bruno Lacko nodded. "I must go," he called to his wife. "I will return before five."

  Rosetta came in with her wash basket. "He doesn't want me alone if Captain Mulheim makes good on his threat."

  "He cares about you," Michael said.

  "He cares about all of us. Too much, I fear. If the police come as they threaten, Bruno will be standing in front of them, blocking their path. I worry about what will happen then."

  Upstairs, in the empty apartment, he opened the window next to the broken one and hurled his ball of twine again, aiming down the street toward the center of the wall. This time his aim was a bit short. It hit the wall and came down on their side. "I'll go get it and throw it over," Rosetta said. "Stay here and hold the end. You can tell me where to put it."

  He agreed and stood by the window with the end held firmly in hand. Out in the street, Rosetta hurried to pick up the end and then flipped it over the wall. He saw at once that she had not thrown it far enough along for a proper measurement and he sought out a way to help her. The end of the twine could be tied to something in the empty apartment and he could join her at the wall. But what?

  He opened a closet door, thinking that even a clothes hook might serve as an anchor, and that was when he found it. A rifle, standing in the corner.

  * * *

  Rosetta watched him approach her with a grim expression written on his face. "I tied the twine to a hook in the closet," he told her. "I found something there."

  "What do you mean."

  "A rifle. Is it your husband's?"

  She shook her head, confused. "Bruno never goes up there. Only the boys use it, for their practice."

  "Could one of them, Josef perhaps, have fired the rifle? Is that how the window was broken?"

  "That window was broken by a rock hurled by one of the boys across the street, before they put up the wall to protect them from us." She handed him the end of the twine. "Do your measurements. Tell me if a bullet from our rifle could have killed Lieutenant Lyrik."

  He strode further down the wall but he saw at once that in order to clear the top a bullet would still have passed well above Lyrik's head. "No," he told her. "The fatal shot couldn't have come from over the wall. But it also couldn't have come from any other direction. Are you sure one of your boys couldn't have—"

  "Come with me, Michael Vlado!" She walked quickly around the wall with long strides that he had difficulty matching. They climbed the stairs to the empty apartment. "Now show me this rifle."

  He went to the closet and lifted it gently from the corner. She took it from him, her concern vanishing, pointed it at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. "My boys would have difficulty shooting anyone with this. It's an air rifle from Bruno's fun-fair booth. He brought it home for them months ago because it was broken and not worth fixing."

  "I'm sorry," Michael told her. "I don't usually jump to conclusions like that."

  Her mood turned somber again. "We are only a few hours from the police deadline. What will happen then?"

  "Perhaps someone will come forward and confess."

  She shook her head. "How is that possible? No one is guilty."

  "That's true," he agreed, and left her standing alone in the empty apartment with a promise to return.

  The rain had started by the time he reached the street, not the hard, driving sort that autumn sometimes brought to his home in the foothills of the Carpathians but a misty, sweeping shower that warned of worse to come. He bundled his jacket around him and saw at the opposite end of the block the sudden appearance of a police armored vehicle. Go away, he wanted to yell as if confronting the angel of death. It's not yet time! But instead he hurried along in the opposite direction.

  It was the sight of Sergeant Cista parked in a police car across from his hotel that told Michael what he must do. The officer had obviously been assigned to keep track of him, and Michael made certain he was seen entering the place. Then he retrieved the raincoat from his luggage and left the hotel by a rear door. He came up to the police car from the rear and was into the front passenger seat before Cista knew what was happening.

  "What are you doing?"

  "You should keep your doors locked, Sergeant. I want to talk to you."

  Cista squirmed about, trying to reach his holstered weapon, but Michael laid a hand on it first, yanking it free. "You don't need this. I only want to talk."

  "I'm just following orders. I have nothing against the Gypsies."

  "I know what happened at the wall yesterday."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Lyrik was standing too close to the wall to have been hit by a bullet from one of the Gypsy apartments. I know because I took measurements of the angles today. The bullet couldn't have come from behind, where you stood, because there was no blood on the back of his head. The wound was over his right eye, yet I was standing on his right side, shielding him from that direction."

  The sergeant ran his tongue over dry lips. "What are you trying to say, that his murder was impossible?"

  "Exactly. It was impossible, and therefore it didn't happen. Lieutenant Lyrik is still alive and you're going to take me to him."

  * * *

  The rain had let up by the time they reached the little farmhouse some distance from the city. With his raincoat bundled around his face, Michael was unrecognizable until Lyrik had already opened the door to admit Cista. Then he shoved his way inside, knocking the lieutenant to the floor. "Don't go for a gun," he warned. "We wouldn't want the report of your death to be proved correct after all."

  Lyrik rolled over on the floor, cursing his sergeant. "You told him! Mulheim will have our heads for this!"

  "No, no! He already knew!"

  "How could he know, unless someone told him?"

  "Someone told me today. Someone told me that no one could have killed you and they were right. Captain Mulheim said the fatal bullet passed through your head, yet there was no blood on the back of your head, only on the forehead. The bullet couldn't have passed through. I remembered too that I heard the shot a split-second before you grabbed your forehead and the blood appeared. A bullet from a high-powered rifle would travel faster than the sound. You had a capsule of blood hidden in your hand, and when one of Mulheim's men fired a shot in the air you squashed the capsule against your forehead and fell over. Sergeant Cista came running and the captain was summoned with an ambulance. I was kept away from the body, so I wouldn't discover that you were still alive. The whole thing was a plot on Mulheim's part. He wanted an excuse to rid that block of Gypsies."

  "And he'll do it," Lyrik said with a smile. "In less than two hours."

  Michael showed him the sergeant's 9 mm automatic pistol. "I have this now. And you're coming with us to Masarack Street."

  It was a wild ride back to the city, but they reached the street with ten minutes to spare. Every Rom was outside, facing the police, and Mary Baxter stood at their front with Bruno Lacko, not twenty feet away from Captain Mulheim. Cista had to blow his horn to cut a path through the waiting police and militiamen.

  Michael was the first out of the car, and Mulheim raised his pistol to face him.

  "You arrived just in time for the evacuation," he said, "unless you've come to confess to Lyrik's murder yourself."

  "Hardly that! I have Lieutenant Lyrik alive and well in this car, and you have a great deal of explaining to do."

  When they saw Lyrik, the residents of Masarak Street shouted and cheered, knowing the threat was ended. Captain Mulheim hesitated just an instant, perhaps contemplating the killing of them all. Then he tu
rned and waved his men back. "There'll be other days, Mr. Vlado," he promised.

  It was not a promise he was fated to keep. In the morning, as Michael prepared to return home, Mary Baxter brought him the good news. President Havel and the government had negotiated the removal of the walls in the Gypsy sections of their city and Ústí nad Labem to the north. The wall was already being torn down and the Czech government had promised to give both cities money to improve social conditions. Meantime, a formal investigation had been opened into the faking of Lieutenant Lyrik's murder and the plot against the Gypsies of Masarak Street.

  "If I'm ever in Ireland I'll visit you," Michael told her as he prepared to leave for home.

  Mary Baxter smiled. "So long as it's not in autumn."

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The Silence

  QUITE UNLIKE her other story, with which Kristine Kathryn Rusch led off this volume, "The Silence" is a quiet yet chillingly effective story. It first appeared in the June 2000 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

  The Silence

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  It was the city's fifteenth day without a homicide. The tabloids blared the news, almost daring the crazies to break the streak. I worried too, worried that there were deaths we weren't seeing, worried that something had turned, making the world into a strange and unrecognizable place.

  I missed the mayhem. I didn't want to admit it, to myself or anyone else, but I missed the uncertainty of walking into a murder scene and feeling that edge of violence still lingering in the air. Not that there wasn't violence. In New York, violence is as common as air, but during the last fifteen days, it hadn't led to anything. People got mugged, just like always, beaten, just like always, but no one seemed to have the urge to haul out a gun and fire it at someone else.

  And they should have. That's what got me. It was August— hot, stinking, humid August— and we'd just come off a full moon. The lunatics should have been out in force, and they weren't.

  For the first time in years, I wished I was a flatfoot and not a member of the mayor's special Homicide task force. I wanted to ride a car, have a partner, walk a beat. I wanted to bust up a few fights, threaten a few crackheads, rescue a kid from a tree.

  I wanted something, anything, except the old cases in front of me, the ones whose trails were so cold that the ice on the files was thick and blue. On day three of The Silence, as the Daily News was calling the strangeness, the chief called the entire Homicide task force into his office and gave us options: We could assist some of the other task forces— Narcotics or Robbery or, God forbid, Missing Persons— or we could close some cases we didn't normally have time to close. Me, I thought closing would be good. It would keep the task force together, and the task force was one of the few things from the mayor's anti-crime initiatives that was working. Closing would also prove what I had always said, that a good cop could solve any case given enough time.

  A man should carry a tape recorder around to know how fatuous he sounds when he makes pronouncements like that. Then he wouldn't have to eat his words twelve days later when not one cold case had turned hot, when not one file, iced open, warmed shut.

  I didn't even have anything promising: not the Puerto Rican wife stabbed fifteen times in her apartment; not the street thug shot once through the heart and left inside a dumpster on 42nd; not even the bloated, naked, fish-belly-white corpse that had floated up the East River one July afternoon. On him, I couldn't even get an ID.

  So it didn't seem strange when Evelyn sauntered over to my desk wearing a light brown suit that made her look as if her mother had dressed her in her older sister's clothes. She slapped her hand on the gray Formica surface, and the sound echoed in the nearly empty House.

  Three other Homicide detectives looked up. They were surrounded by stacks of files, just like I was. Only the five of us remained. The others in our task force had scattered like the winds, knowing early that the need for action was much more important than the need for closure.

  "I say what we need is a wager." She leaned against my desk because I was best known as the task force's betting man. I'd wager on anything legal, and even some things that weren't, given Vice didn't hear about it.

  Because I was intrigued and because I didn't want to show it, I gave her a good old-fashioned up and down. "What do you need a wager for?" I asked. "You got court today. That's enough excitement for any person."

  She snorted through her nose, an unladylike habit that somehow made her more appealing. "Shows what you know," she said. "I got an interview on WPIX about The Silence."

  "What's the wager?" Bob asked. He was a skinny man with too much hair and a deceptively relaxed air about him. Beneath it was one of the best detectives I ever knew.

  "First one to close a case buys a round?" she said, although she sounded uncertain.

  "Hell," Weisburg said, tugging on his coffee-stained yellow jersey, "the way things've been going, the first one to close should get a medal."

  "Yeah." Hawkins slammed a hand on top of his files. "These things are colder than a witch's tit."

  I would have expected a cliché from him, just like I would expect him to lose the wager. Hawkins was a political appointment who rose in the ranks because he knew how to play the game— and how to take more credit than he was due. He'd done that to me once; he wasn't ever going to do it again.

  "Glad to hear I'm not the only one having trouble closing," Evelyn said.

  "Maybe this is part of The Silence," Bob said. We all stared at each other. Cops were just superstitious enough to worry about such things. This dry spell, this Silence, or whatever you wanted to call it, was making us nervous; to think our own inability to close was tied to it only made us even more nervous.

  Finally it was Hawkins who broke the mood. "Yeah," he said. "Tell that to the chief."

  And we all laughed, not because he was being funny— he wasn't— but because we needed to.

  "Whatcha working on, Spence?" Evelyn asked, leaning over my desk.

  "Nothing great. How 'bout you?"

  "Same," she said. "You guys?"

  The other three shrugged in unison. It almost looked as if they'd planned the gesture.

  "Narc arrests are up," Bob said.

  "Vice arrests are down," Hawkins said.

  "None of our people went to Vice," I said.

  "There you go," Evelyn said with a smile. "What we gotta worry about is when all them missing persons get found."

  This time we matched her smile, and meant it. "So what's going wrong here?" I asked. "Did only the incompetent ones vote to remain in Homicide?"

  "That's what the chief's gonna think," Hawkins said.

  Bob shook his head. "Chief knows these cases are cold."

  "You'd think at least one would break, though," Weisburg said.

  "You'd think," Evelyn agreed.

  I pushed my chair away from the desk. "Maybe we're going about this wrong."

  "You up for the wager?" Evelyn asked.

  "Maybe," I said. "How're you approaching cases?"

  "Traditionally. Newest to oldest."

  "Bob?"

  "Same."

  "Weisburg?"

  "Same."

  "Hawkins?"

  "Yeah, man, me too."

  I sighed. "And me too. Maybe that's what's wrong."

  "Go again?" Evelyn said.

  I leaned forward. "What's your favorite case?"

  "Favorite how?"

  "Weirdest, strangest, most intriguing. Most unsolvable. I don't give a damn. Whatever rings your bells."

  She didn't even have to think for a minute. "I got a shoe on Fifty-third, middle of the damn street. Some bike messenger picked it up, was gonna give it to his girlfriend, I don't know. But it's full of blood. He don't drop it. He carries it to the curb and uses his cell to call the cops. They show up, order a DNA on the blood, find it matches the interior of a bloody car found on Lex three days before. Car belongs to a young married over Central Park West. The wife's
been missing two weeks. She takes fifty grand in cash and disappears, and the husband don't think nothing of it."

  "You think the husband did it?" Hawkins asked.

  "I think we got strange breaks in the case. The DNA on the blood, for one. Who'da thought there'd be a match?"

  "Who thought to look?" Weisburg asked.

  "I did," she said. "I figure you got a blood-filled shoe, you gotta have other blood-filled items."