"What happened?"
"He beat the shit out of me."
"Yeah, well, Garth was always pretty good with his fists. Fast hands."
"He dogged me after the fight, stuck to me like flypaper when we were on duty to make sure I didn't take any more money from shopkeepers. I knew that if I tried to, Garth would kick my ass again." "And?"
"And it turns out your brother was working for Internal Affairs- mind you, he'd volunteered to work for IA, to help clean up the precinct. Who ever heard of such a thing?"
"It doesn't surprise me. Besides being good with his fists, Garth has always had a strong sense of justice. He took being a cop very seriously."
"Better than a third of the cops in that precinct got canned or transferred because of your brother, Frederickson. A few lost their pensions. I'd tried to go on the pad, but I got off scot-free because your brother decided that since I was his partner I was a problem he'd solve personally. He saved my career."
"And so you show your thanks by spending the rest of your career bad-mouthing him. I don't understand you, MacWhorter, and I don't understand why you dragged me down here in the middle of the night to tell me this."
He flushed, shifted in his chair, and looked away. "I'm trying to explain something to you, Frederickson, and it isn't easy for me. So cut me some slack. Garth had saved my ass, and I hated him for it; he'd shown himself to be a better man than I was, and I hated him for that. I felt ashamed, and I couldn't stand it. All I could allow myself to think about was the fact that your brother had ratted on his fellow officers. Most cops hate Internal Affairs, and Garth had volunteered to do their dirty work for them. He'd hurt people who were friends of mine, cops who'd thought Garth was their friend. He was a rat and a traitor, and just because he'd saved me from myself didn't alter that fact. That's the way I had to look at it in order to live with myself. Hell, I knew he resigned because the department screwed him over, betrayed him, and almost got both of you killed. But I still had my head up my ass. I couldn't forgive him for being a better man and cop than I was, for dropping the dime on my friends and saving me, and so I chose to keep trying to convince myself that he'd left and teamed up with you because he wanted to cash in on your fame. Then I started moving up in the ranks, and I started to see things differently-especially when I was given command of this precinct. I damn well wished I had a Garth Frederickson working for me. But I didn't behave differently. I'm a proud man, Frederickson, stubborn, and maybe even a little bit stupid at times. For a man like me, old attitudes die hard. Somewhere along the line all the mixed feelings I had about this thing turned into confusion. I'm not a man who enjoys spending much time looking into my own head, Frederickson, and the confusion I felt only made me more resentful of your brother. Somewhere along that same line I guess I started to take it out on you."
I paused with my cup of coffee halfway to my mouth, and I wondered if the astonishment I felt showed on my face. "My God, this is an apology."
The heavyset man smiled thinly. "Let's not get too carried away. I still think the two of you mess way more than you should in police business, just like I damn well know you're doing now. Let's say I'm calling for a truce. You know more about this Raymond Rogers than you're telling me. I want to catch a mass murderer, and I'm asking you to help me, if you can. You get no more threats and disrespect from me, and I want no more bullshit from you. Tell me what's going on. Deal?"
"Deal," I said, pulling the wooden chair I was sitting in closer to his desk. "The people who were working me over a little while earlier when Lou so conveniently showed are a fun couple by the name of Henry and Janice Sparsburg, nationality unknown but I believe American. They're professional assassins who go by the noms de mort of Punch and Judy. You can probably get more on them from Interpol, which is where I got my information. Their most distinguishing characteristic is that they've both had about a half dozen face lifts too many-plastic surgery is part of their thing. From a distance they look twenty years younger than they are, but the illusion fades rapidly the closer you get. Up close, they look grotesque. Think Dorian Gray. You could send out a call to post extra plainclothes cops at all the shelters in the city, because that's where Punch and Judy have been hunting up to now, but it's probably a waste of time. Now that I've made them and know what they're up to, they'll probably change their strategy. They're the people who killed the man you found in the Dumpster. They're working for the people who ran Rivercliff, and I have a hunch-only a hunch-that's the CIA. The good doctors at Rivercliff were conducting illegal experiments on human beings for years, and Rogers, who has to be our ice-pick killer, is only one of a dozen patients who escaped from the place after he went ballistic and started slicing and dicing his keepers. Besides Rogers, there are still eleven patients and a Rivercliff shrink by the name of Sharon Stephens out on the streets-that's assuming Punch and Judy haven't whacked any others. Stephens is probably one of the women who called you to identify Rogers, and 'the night owl' is Greta Wurlitzer. The stuff you found in the corpse's tissues is some kind of very powerful psychotropic drug that was used in the experiments at Rivercliff. Punch and Judy's job is to clean up the mess, kill Stephens and all the patients so that the truth about Rivercliff will never come out."
MacWhorter did amazed very well; he blinked rapidly while his mouth opened and closed a few times. Finally he said, "And just when were you thinking about getting around to telling me all this?"
"I was getting around to it when I walked in here, but then you launched into your True Confessions, and I didn't want to interrupt your soliloquy. Besides, I wasn't too happy about being busted, which is what I thought was happening. Your being so pleasant to me helped to jog my memory and organize my thoughts."
MacWhorter grunted and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, then rose from behind his desk and walked out of the office. I watched through the glass as he talked to the desk sergeant and two detectives he'd summoned. The detectives hurried away, and MacWhorter came back into the office, closing the door behind him.
"You're probably right about these creeps who worked you over changing their MO, but at least now there'll be cops all over the city looking for them. If we come up with any likely suspects, you'll be available to identify them?"
"Day or night."
"Like I said, you look like shit, and you've got that tic, but at least you're still walking around. What'd they do to you?"
"They gave me a massage with a stun gun. If you think my face is twitching, you should feel my insides. It'll pass."
MacWhorter winced. "Jesus."
"My thought at the time, exactly."
"What'd they want?"
"I approached them on the street because I thought they looked like they might fit the description I'd been given by Interpol. This turned out not to be one of my cleverest ploys, because, as it turns out, they knew who I was. I followed them, but they gave me the slip, turned the tables, and ambushed me when I got home. I presume they looked up my address in the phone book. They wanted to know how I'd made them, and how I'd gotten involved in their business in the first place."