I stopped in front of the desk. "I'm not?"
"You're just here for a friendly chat. Sorry if Lou dragged you away from something you were doing."
"Actually, I was in the middle of being tortured, but it's all right. I was getting tired of it anyway."
He studied my face, blinked slowly. "If that's a joke, I don't get it."
"Didn't Lou call in a report?"
"He said you'd been mugged by a couple of guys in front of your house, and he was giving you time to clean up."
"That sounds about right. Before you bother to ask, I didn't get a good look at them."
"Two guys beat you up, and you didn't get a good look at them?"
"They were wearing ski masks."
MacWhorter grunted, then leaned back in his chair and smiled thinly. "Actually, I'm surprised they survived the encounter, much less got away. You're a pretty tough little bugger."
"Yeah, but I'm getting old. I can't mix it up like I used to."
"Now that you mention it, you look like shit, Frederickson."
"You don't look so hot yourself, Captain."
"How long have you had that twitch?"
"Not long. Why don't we both go home and get some sleep?"
MacWhorter sat up straight, pulled his chair closer to his desk. Color had risen in his cheeks, but his tone was even, and he seemed to be making some effort to control his temper. "I'll tell you why I can't go home, Frederickson, and why you're not going home either until I get some straight answers from you. Because more than two dozen people are dead, their hearts or spinal cords punctured, and eleven of those deaths occurred in my precinct. Guaranteed, there'll be more by morning. It's hard to nab somebody who has no apparent motive and who seems to have nothing better to do than wander around the city jabbing people with an ice pick. The reason I can't sleep is because I know more people will be dying while I do. I want to catch that crazy son of a bitch, and I just happen to have living in my precinct a civilian who seems to know more about what's going on than the whole NYPD put together. It's nothing short of amazing to me how this kind of weird shit always seems to stick to you and your brother; if there's something really bizarre going down, one or both of you are odds-on favorites to be somewhere right in the middle of it."
"I've often thought the same thing myself, Captain," I replied carefully.
"You were right about the stiff we found in the Dumpster. I kicked some ass and got an emergency autopsy performed. All of his tissues, and especially his brain, were saturated with some kind of drug."
"Will you tell me what it is?"
"Actually, there appear to be a number of drugs involved. There were traces of psychoactive drugs they use for nut cases, and don't ask me to try to pronounce the names. The bulk of the stuff they found can't be identified, at least not by our people. Forensics has sent tissue samples to the FBI labs in Quantico, and we're waiting for the results. As for that upstate mental hospital-"
"Rivercliff."
"Yeah, Rivercliff. The whole place burned to the ground better than two weeks ago. The Smokies suspect arson, but they aren't sure. Nobody who was inside survived-not patients, not staff. More than sixty people dead. And all of the hospital records were destroyed. The Smokies and the Feds are looking into it, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to tell me anything. In the meantime, I've got Dr. Death, identified by you and two anonymous sources as Raymond Rogers and who you say came from Rivercliff, running around the city stabbing people to death. It's the kind of thing that makes it hard for me to sleep, Frederickson. You know what I mean?"
"Jesus Christ," I breathed, thinking of the sixty people who had been murdered to cover up somebody else's crime.
"That's all you've got to say to me?"
"I have to be very careful what I say to you, Captain. Every time I open my mouth, it only makes you angrier."
"That's because every time you open your mouth you say too much, or not enough, or you give me bullshit. You want something?"
"What?"
"You want some coffee?"
"I want a drink."
He rubbed a hand across his grizzled chin, sniffed. "It smells to me like you've already had a drink."
"What are you, president of your local temperance union? I want another one."
"I don't drink."
"It's not for you, Captain, it's for me."
"There's no liquor on the premises. It's against regulations."
"What about that bottle you keep in your desk for emergency situations like this one? I know it's there, because I've seen it in all the cop movies."
"They've never shot any movie in here. I don't have any bottle in my desk."
"In that case, I guess I'll have coffee."
"You know where it is. Go help yourself."
MacWhorter was in a decidedly strange mood, I thought as I shuffled out of his office, down a grimy corridor, and through a swinging door into the squad room, where I poured myself a cup of coffee from a pot sitting on a hot plate. I exchanged a little friendly banter with some of the cops going off duty or coming on, then went back to MacWhorter's office. He was sitting in almost the same exact position as when I had left him, but he had pushed the desk lamp off to the corner of his desk, so that now his face was half hidden in shadow. I doubted that his sudden change in mood, the shift to good cop from bad, was due to lack of sleep, so I wondered just what he thought being civil to me was going to accomplish. His first question surprised me.
"Where's Garth? I don't often see one of you without the other, even since he moved to Cairn. It's like the two of you are joined at the hip."
"He's off with his wife on a skiing vacation in Switzerland."
"Garth skis?"
"He's taking lessons. As far as I've heard, he hasn't broken anything yet."
"He ever talk about me?"
I sipped at my coffee, said, "Nope."
"I'm a good cop, Frederickson."
"I've never heard anybody claim otherwise."
Now he leaned forward in his chair, so that his whole face was caught in the bright cone of light cast by the desk lamp. Something in his green eyes had changed, but I couldn't tell what I was seeing there. He somehow seemed more vulnerable to me. "I wouldn't be a cop at all if it wasn't for your brother, Frederickson," he said in a voice that had grown hoarse. "I owe him big-time."
"I see. That explains why you always have such nice things to say about the two of us."
Anger flashed in his eyes, but it was almost instantly gone, supplanted by something that looked very close to shame. It occurred to me that it was costing Felix MacWhorter something to say whatever it was he was trying to say to me, so I decided to keep my smart-ass remarks to myself, at least for a time, and listen.
He stared at me for a few moments, then said, "Your brother and I were partners a whole lot of years ago. It was right after he came on the force. We were the same age, but he had more experience in law enforcement than I did."
I nodded. "He was a county sheriff in Nebraska, where we come from. He did a hitch as an MP in Vietnam, then heard how much fun I was having in New York and decided to join me."
MacWhorter shrugged, then glanced over my head at the wall behind me-or something else, perhaps his past. "We worked out of Fort Apache up in the Bronx. At the time the precinct was … a little dirty. There were a lot of cops on the pad. Most of it was small-time stuff-free meals, a couple of drinks, maybe a Christmas turkey. That kind of thing. But there was also some serious shakedown action going down, money changing hands, a little cash in envelopes that eventually became more cash in envelopes offered to cops for 'extra services,' maybe keeping a closer eye on some store that had been robbed a few times. Anyway, I was having money problems, so I started taking some of the envelopes that were offered to me. One day Garth caught me at it, and he told me to stop. I told him to fuck off and mind his own business, because I needed the extra money, and because I was really earning it by keeping an eye on the stores when I was off duty. He said that was a protection racket, not police work, and that he'd have to fight me if I didn't stop. Hell, I had fifty pounds on him, and I'd won the division boxing championship the year before; no country hick was going to tell me what to do. So I fought him."