“Looks like this is your lucky day,” Fish observed as he opened the passenger door. Tom followed his gaze to see the familiar three-wheeled meter maid truck, its white, bullet-shaped hood gleaming in the bright sunlight, a blue-uniformed woman aboard, rolling slowly along the row of parked vehicles toward them.
Tom moved a little faster, acting under the principle that it was better to avoid a ticket altogether than to try to talk his way out of one. As he rounded the front of the car with the rush of traffic in his ears, a gust of wind spiraling down the street caught him, its cool freshness at odds with the usual city scent of exhaust fumes and melting rubber and asphalt. The sudden blast of it ruffled his hair and set his jacket flapping. Automatically, he started to button the jacket in self-defense, only to have the damned top button pop off. It sailed through the air, hit the pavement with a barely audible click, and rolled.
Shit.
With a quick glance over his shoulder—the meter maid was still about a dozen cars away; the TV reporter was still busy—he risked life and limb to retrieve the button from beside the left-front wheel, got into the car, inserted the key into the ignition, and dropped the button into the cup holder between the seats.
“What’s that?” Fish asked as the engine turned over, following the movement with a frown.
“Damned button popped off.” Tom put the car into gear and pulled out into traffic. Typical of Center City, it was heavy but slow, which made pulling out more a matter of muscling your way in between vehicles than waiting for an opening.
“Your jacket?” As both of them ignored the indignant honk behind them, Fish looked down at the straggling threads that marked where the button had been and shook his head. “Hallelujah. Maybe now you’ll buy a new one.”
The corners of Tom’s mouth curved upward as, safe now in the flow of traffic, he passed the meter maid.
“That’s crazy talk. I think I can manage to sew a button back on.”
Fish groaned. Then he rolled down the window. Before Tom realized what he meant to do, he scooped the button out of the cup holder and flicked it out into the street.
“What’d you do that for?” Tom caught the arc of it out of the corner of his eye.
“To save you from yourself. Jeez, Tom, you need to go shopping. If that jacket was human, it’d have its driver’s license by now.”
Tom braked for a light. A crush of tourists complete with cameras and city guides, businesspeople, students from one of Philly’s four major universities, suburban shoppers in town for the afternoon, and street types hurried through the crosswalk two stopped cars ahead. He registered details about them without even being aware that he was doing so, courtesy of years on the job.
“So?”
“So it deserves to be retired. Get a new one. Hell, get a couple of new ones. Get a whole new wardrobe. Live a little.”
“Hey, Fish? Fuck you.” It was said without heat. They both knew where Fish was coming from. They’d been friends since they’d played football together at St. Aloysius High School in South Philly. Fish had joined the PPD the year after Tom had, and had been his partner for the last four years. Fish knew his history, knew it all, about the divorce and everything else, knew that since then he had done his best to allow nothing permanent in his life that wasn’t already there, renting an apartment rather than buying a house, seeing a perpetually changing string of women rather than having an exclusive girl-friend, not keeping any pets, using a department-issue car that was replaced every few years. Hell, when he was home he even ate off paper plates. Tom kept a low profile, did his job to the best of his ability, and saved his money rather than spent it. Why everyone, from his family to Fish was starting to have a problem with that he couldn’t begin to fathom.
Nor did he much care.
“Fine.” Fish was clearly exasperated. “Be that way, asshole. Wear your crummy old clothes. Work all the time. Don’t have any fun. See who gets all the women.”
Tom grinned. So did Fish, reluctantly. They both knew who was number one when it came to women, and who tried harder. Though Fish, having worked for it, usually did all right.
“You don’t think she planted the gun, do you?” Fish asked after a moment, referring back to their earlier subject.
“Kate White?” Tom had been there in that courtroom. He had seen first-hand her terror when Rodriguez grabbed her. If she’d been faking any of that, he would turn in his badge. “No.”
Where Soto got the gun he killed Judge Moran with was, in the detectives’ judgment, the key to unraveling the conspiracy that had culminated in the homicides. They were only one of several teams working on different angles of the crime, to which they had been assigned largely because of Charlie, which made it personal, and because Tom had been there in the courtroom at the beginning and thus had a perspective the others didn’t have. The thing was, though, all the known perps were dead, which was blunting the fury of the investigation to a certain degree. Rodriguez, Soto, Lonnie Pack, and Chili Newton—they were the ones who had physically committed the murders, and each of them had already paid the ultimate price. No arrest, no prosecution, no death penalties were possible, although the law-enforcement community was foaming at the mouth to exact retribution. But under the circumstances, retribution was going to require painstaking and therefore relatively slow detective work.
The bottom line was, the killers had to have had help, and that was where their investigation was presently focused. Tom was almost sure that the weapons had been planted either in courtroom 207 itself or in the holding cells or the secure corridor associated with that particular courtroom, or, as seemed most likely from the available evidence, both, because if the prisoners had gotten hold of weapons anyplace else, there would have been more areas of attempted egress. And there hadn’t been. The only escape attempt had happened in courtroom 207.
All of which meant that the weapons had to have been planted by someone with access to that area. Which pointed to an inside job.
The light changed, and Tom hung a left. He was, as they both knew, headed toward the police administration building at Eighth and Race, aka the Roundhouse, because of its distinctive shape.
“Something was off about her. She was nervous,” Fish said thoughtfully.
Tom was aware. She had tried hard to hide it, but there had been too many subtle signals to ignore. But something, perhaps the memory of terrified blue eyes clinging to his like he was the only hope she had in the world when Rodriguez took her captive, or maybe the shaken urgency of her voice over the phone when she had told him that she was a single mother, or maybe even the very feminine feel of her in his arms when he had carried her to the EMT, made him feel unexpectedly protective toward her. Whatever was making her nervous, he didn’t think she had planted any weapons, or helped with the escape attempt in any way. Although he was prepared to investigate the possibility, and even to be proved wrong if that was how it worked out.
“Maybe it was seeing me. Maybe I brought up bad memories from yesterday or something for her.”
“Possible,” Fish said.
“Maybe she fudged her résumé or something to get her job, and she’s afraid it’s all going to come out in the investigation.”
“Also possible,” Fish agreed.
Tom hung a right on Market, and the Roundhouse came into view. It was a large, multistory, oval-shaped building with a stubby rectangular tail. In Tom’s opinion, which he’d shared freely over the years, it looked like a giant stone sperm. Right now there were TV trucks out front, and the entrances and parking lot were being manned by uniforms controlling access. The flags over the central dome were at half-mast, flapping sadly against the soft, blue sky, reminding him of yesterday’s horror, of the men who had died.
He counted himself lucky that his brother wasn’t one of them.
“Hell, maybe she’s just a high-strung type and gets all tense and jumpy whenever anything goes wrong,” Tom said.
Fish made a noncommittal sound. “You buying what
she’s selling about finding Charlie’s gun just lying there on the hallway floor? Right smack-dab in the spot when she needed it?”
Forensics had already determined that Rodriguez had been shot with Charlie’s service revolver. Determining how it had gotten into Kate White’s hands had been one of the primary reasons for their visit to her office.
“I don’t see any reason not to believe it, for now.” Tom paused to pull into the parking lot, where a uniform, recognizing him and Fish, waved him on in. “The safety was off, she said, which means somebody was getting ready to fire it before she got her hands on it. Maybe there was a struggle, and Charlie dropped his weapon out there in that hallway. Maybe somebody took it off Charlie and dropped it.”
“And maybe she’s lying through her straight little white teeth.”
Tom’s lips tightened. So did his gut. Truth to tell, that was the suspicion that was worming through his thought processes, too. “Why would she?”
“Because she has something to hide?”
Tom didn’t reply.
Fish shifted in his seat, folded his arms over his chest, and gave him a long, appraising look as Tom slowly circled the lot, searching for an open spot.
“Turns you on, does she?”
“What?” It took Tom a second, but then the truth of it hit him like a crowbar to the head, and he wondered why he hadn’t realized it before. Because he hadn’t wanted to, of course. It complicated things, and one thing he didn’t go in for anymore was complications. But truth was truth, and the truth here was that the instant he’d seen her, willowy, blond, and more than pretty, wide-eyed with fear and yet fiercely brave in Rodriguez’s murderous grip, he’d felt an intense reaction that went far beyond anything in the typical cop/victim-in-need-of-saving relationship. Why? Because as Fish had so tactfully pointed out, she turned him on. Shit. Not that he meant to admit it, ever. And not that it made any difference. “You’re nuts.”
Ah, there was a black-and-white pulling out of a spot. Tom gunned toward it and was just in time, barely beating out a dilapidated blue van that he had no trouble identifying as belonging to the narc squad. Officer Phil Wablonski, undercover and barely recognizable in a heavy beard and sunglasses, rolled down the van’s tinted window to shoot Tom the bird as the Taurus cut him off. Tom returned the favor.
“Stay objective, that’s all I’m saying.” Fish released his seat belt as Tom parked and cut the engine. “Just because she looks like an angel doesn’t mean she is one.”
Tom popped his seat belt, too.
“You’re projecting, is what you’re doing,” he said to Fish’s back as his partner got out of the car. “She turns you on.”
“Yeah, but the difference is, I freely admit it,” Fish replied when they were both heading toward the building. Reporters were camped out front, so they moved by unspoken agreement toward a side entrance. Neither one of them wanted to take the slightest chance of being the unfortunate cop captured on live TV in connection with the ongoing investigation. The commissioner had put a gag order on the entire PPD: no talking, no exceptions. Fish reached the unobtrusive metal door first and held it open. “You, on the other hand, are in denial, which is dangerous. Anyway, I may be looking, too, but I guarantee you it’s not me she’s looking back at with those big blue bedroom eyes.”
“Fuck you, Fish,” Tom said for the second time that day, and walked by him into the Roundhouse.
The Duty Room of the PPD homicide unit was located on the first floor. It was a big, untidy rectangle that provided work space for the unit’s sixty-four deputies, plus supervisors and support staff. Tom pushed through the glass doors first, with Fish behind him. There was always plenty going on in the Duty Room—Philly was third in the nation when it came to homicides, which had numerous bad points but at least provided an appreciable degree of job security for the harried detectives who worked them—no shortage of dead bodies here. Today, though, the chaos and activity level and noise were cranked up to a whole new level. Multiple murders were nothing new to Philly, but multiple murders by prisoners, of deputies and a judge in their own backyard—which the Criminal Justice Center was—well, that was new. It was also embarrassing. A black eye for the whole Philly law-enforcement community.
This case, in other words, was both extremely high-profile and personal. Way personal. The PPD was pulling out all the stops.
A chorus of voices greeted them as they entered and separated, each heading to his own desk. Tom waved by way of reply, and was just dropping into his own creaky desk chair when Sergeant Ike Stella, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the PPD and the shift supervisor, stopped by his desk. Stella was a big man, six-foot-three and a good three hundred pounds, most of which he carried in his gut. He was fifty-five years old, with walnut-colored skin, a strip of black hair stretching around the back of his head from ear to ear that left him bald on top, rugged features, and a gruff, no-nonsense demeanor. The thing about Stella was, he might not be universally loved, but he was universally respected. He might bawl you out to your face, but if you found trouble, he had your back.
“You got anything?” Stella asked, turning his habitual scowl on Tom.
“Nothing worth anything—yet.”
“Any inkling where they got the weapons?”
“Working on it.”
“Work faster,” Stella said, his lips thinning. “Inquiring minds want to know.”
He moved away, and Tom got to work, spending the next hour or so at his desk, writing up the interview with Kate White, answering phone calls, going through witness statements, trying to get a handle on all the paperwork that was piling up in connection with this case. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t have enough information. It was that they had too much, reams of it. And they were just getting started. He had little doubt that the truth was in there somewhere, buried in the mountains of paper that would just keep piling higher until the case was resolved. The problem was, finding it was going to be akin to finding a specific grain of sand on the beach.
Quitting time, five o’clock, found Tom on the phone with the medical examiner, Dr. Mary Hardy, who confirmed that the shots that had wounded Charlie and killed Deputy Dino Russo had come from Russo’s department-issue weapon, which had been found near Chili Newton’s body. Newton’s fingerprints were on it, along with Russo’s.
Hanging up, Tom went back over his notes, pondering. It was fairly obvious that the weapon had been taken from Russo either pre- or postmortem, and thus the origin of one of the murder weapons was accounted for. The Sig that Soto had used, however, that had killed the judge and a deputy, was not department-issue, nor was it immediately traceable, as all identifying features had been filed off. The other two pistols—each had killed a deputy and a civilian—were a PSM and a non-department-issue Glock, likewise minus identifying features, almost certainly smuggled in from the street. The mystery was how, and by whom.
He meant to find out.
“You planning on pulling an all-nighter?” Fish asked.
Tom looked up from the notes he was cross-checking to find his partner standing beside his desk. Fish’s suit coat was on, which meant he was getting ready to leave. A glance at the digital clock on his desk told Tom that it was a couple minutes after six. He was, he realized, dead tired. The previous night he had stayed all night at the hospital with Charlie, alternating between spending fifteen minutes every couple of hours with his unconscious brother (all that the ICU would allow) and the rest of the time hanging out in the waiting room with various combinations of his mother, sisters, sister-in-law, and the flocks of other assorted relatives, friends, and fellow officers who had descended to comfort the afflicted family.
“Nah.” He put down his pencil, rolled his shoulders and neck in a mostly futile attempt to relieve some of the stiffness there, and stood up. His jacket hung on the back of his chair. He pulled it free and shrugged into it. “I’m out of here.”
“I checked with forensics. The distance checks out,” Fish said in a grudging t
one as they headed out of the building together. “And her prints are all over the murder weapon. It’s looking like your smokin’ little ADA could have shot Rodriguez the way she says she did.”
By calling Kate White his smokin’ little ADA, Fish was deliberately needling him. Tom knew it, and so ignored the effort.
“Good to know,” he said mildly.
They pushed out of the door, pausing on the sidewalk. Fish’s car was in the lot behind the building, so that was the point where their paths diverged. Dusk was deepening into full night, and a few aggressive stars had already breached the deep purple-gray of the sky. The soft, white glow of halogen security lights illuminated the outside of the building and the surrounding parking lots. A slight breeze carried the smell of car exhaust.
“You wanna get dinner?” Fish asked.
Tom shook his head. “I’m going on over to the hospital.”
“Want company?” Fish had come by the hospital last night, too, but the demands of the investigation had pulled him away. Just like the demands of the investigation had brought Tom to work today, leaving the rest of the family to hold down the fort with Charlie.
“Hell, my whole family’s there. Last night there were cousins I’ve never seen in my life. At the hospital, I got company.”
“Still, I’ll probably stop by later.”
Tom nodded, then lifted a hand in farewell as they both started walking toward their respective vehicles.
“Word of advice,” Fish called back over his shoulder, and Tom looked his way inquiringly. “Before you get there, lose the jacket.”
Tom looked down at himself, at the clump of threads where the button had been, and grimaced. Okay, so maybe—thanks to Fish—the jacket was a lost cause. He would have yelled, “Go to hell,” after Fish, but he was afraid the TV types in front of the building might hear, and the next thing he knew a story about discord in the homicide unit would be on the air.
That wouldn’t be good.
HALF AN hour later, still wearing the jacket because he needed it to cover his shoulder holster and he wasn’t about to go home to get another one just to please Fish’s GQ sensibilities, Tom walked into the crowded, brightly lit waiting room outside the ICU, and found himself, as he had known he would be, engulfed in relatives.
Guilty Page 14
