“Jinky Harris won’t tell us where my son and his friends are,” Valentine said. “I want you to promise me that you’ll make this cop talk, no matter what.”
“You want me to hurt him?”
“Just do whatever you have to do. You don’t have to tell me how.”
Longo realized his hand was shaking. He had suspected there was a dirty cop in the department for over a year, and had lost many nights’ sleep over it.
“Give it to me from the top,” Longo said.
“Is that a promise?”
“You have my word,” the detective said.
Longo meticulously wrote down Valentine’s theory of how his son and friends had been abducted outside the station house. When Valentine was finished, Longo read it back to him, making sure the times corresponded to the correct events.
“That’s it,” Valentine said. “A pretty girl was waiting for my son at the station house. She was bait. She convinced him and his friends to drive her someplace, where Jinky’s boys were waiting. That’s my theory.”
Longo thought back to early that morning when he’d released Gerry and walked him to the reception area. He’d done a quick scan of the visitors, like he always did. There hadn’t been any pretty girls sitting on the plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Had she come from somewhere inside the station house? He put his pen down.
“Let me look into this,” Longo said. “Give me a number where I can get back to you.”
Longo wrote Valentine’s cell number on his blotter and hung up. Then he sat at his desk, deep in thought. He had to handle this right, and not make any accusations until he was certain he had the right cop. He pushed himself out of his chair, and walked to the front of the station house with the legal pad pressed to his chest.
The receptionist on duty was a no-nonsense female sergeant named Cobb. Cobb sat behind a three-inch piece of bulletproof Plexiglas, her eyes riveted to the reception area. No matter what time of day it was, the reception area was always filled with angry and sometimes desperate people. Longo came up behind her, and asked to see the logbook. Cobb pulled it off the desk.
“Don’t go too far with that,” she snapped.
Longo pointed at the chair behind her own. “Here okay?”
“Perfect,” she said.
He sat down, opened the logbook on his lap, and found the entries from early that morning. The station house had several hundred visitors a day, and it took him over a minute to find Gerry Valentine’s entry. Gerry had signed out at 3:04 A.M. According to Tony Valentine’s theory, the girl who’d baited Gerry had done so right after he’d been released, which meant she’d probably signed out around the same time. Longo checked the names of the visitors who’d signed out around the same time as Gerry, and found only one. A woman named Bonnie Vitucci.
Longo stared at the Person Here to See box next to Vitucci’s name. It was blank. Rising from his chair, he tapped Cobb on the arm.
“Who was working the graveyard shift last night?”
“Boy, your memory’s going,” the sergeant said.
“Why do you say that?”
“I was working the graveyard shift. Fannie got sick, so I took her shift.”
Longo pointed at Bonnie Vitucci’s name in the logbook. “Does this woman’s name ring any bells?”
Cobb had eyes like a lizard, and looked at the name in the log without shifting her head. She cracked her bubble gum and nodded at the same time.
“Who is she?”
“A stripper who also does tricks on the side,” Cobb said. “She got arrested for offering an undercover detective a BJ.”
“When was this?”
“About a year ago.”
“How can you remember that clearly?”
“It was her walk,” Cobb said.
“Her walk?”
“Yeah. The way she sashayed through here when she got arrested, you’d swear she was sleeping with somebody in the department. That’s what we thought.”
“We?”
“The other ladies on the staff. We.”
Longo realized he was nodding his head. Everything Cobb had said made perfect sense. Jinky Harris had gotten one of his strippers to start sleeping with a detective, and the stripper had pulled the detective over to the dark side. That was how those kinds of things worked. He knew that for a fact, because he’d fallen for a stripper himself once. Sex made you blind and it made you stupid. He put the log back in its place and thanked Cobb for her help.
Longo returned to his office and shut the door. He sat down in front of his ancient PC and pulled up Bonnie Vitucci’s rap sheet. The mug shot showed a pretty blonde in her late twenties with a faraway look in her eyes. He read the rap sheet, and saw that the charge had been reduced to a misdemeanor when the arresting officer had not shown up in court for her trial. Longo guessed that this was when the affair had started.
The arresting officer’s signature was at the bottom of the sheet, and he hesitated before scrolling down. He knew every detective on the force, and considered nearly all of them his friends. He found himself almost not wanting to know who it was.
Longo took a deep breath. His own affair had nearly cost him his career, and his marriage. But his buddies on the force had closed ranks, and so had his wife and two daughters. They had given him a second chance, and he’d sworn to them that he’d never screw up again.
But this situation was different. This dirty cop had fed information to Jinky Harris, who’d ruined the lives of more young girls than anyone in Las Vegas. Longo took out his wallet, and stared at the plastic-enclosed snapshot of his two teenage daughters. The girls Jinky had ruined were just like them, he reminded himself.
Longo put his finger on the mouse and scrolled down to the name of the arresting officer on the rap sheet. Detective Hector Frangos. He’d known Hector since they were both rookie cops, and had been to his house in Henderson a couple of times for backyard barbecues. Hector had a wife and three small children, and if he remembered correctly, the youngest was autistic. He’d considered him a friend, up until now.
He picked up his phone and started to dial Hector’s three-digit extension. He was about to ruin the life of a brother officer, as well as the life of his wife and three kids. It didn’t seem right, considering that he’d been given a second chance for committing the same crime. But then again, no one ever said life was fair.
He punched in Hector’s extension while his other hand removed the pair of handcuffs attached to his belt, and placed them on his desk.
49
Gerry Valentine had once read in Newsweek magazine that the biggest challenge for terrorists who made bombs was not to get blown up in the process. According to the article, over half the terrorists who made bombs either blew themselves up, or created a bomb that blew up prematurely and killed the wrong people.
The same thing appeared to be true of operating a flamethrower. Turning one on was relatively simple, provided you didn’t set yourself — or someone standing nearby — on fire. Once you got past that part, handling a flamethrower was easy.
Luckily, the four men who’d been beating them up in the warehouse had not read the article, and were taking turns setting one another’s clothing on fire while starting up the flamethrower Jinky had sent over. It was designed like a lawn blower, and spit out a terrifying, long, bright orange flame. Each time one of them caught on fire, Gerry prayed that the man handling the flamethrower would drop it on the ground and break the damn thing.
But it wasn’t meant to be. The guy who’d brought the flamethrower to the warehouse stepped out of the shadows, crushed his cigarette into the ground, and cursed the men in Italian. The man went by a single name. Mario. His English was broken, and he frequently reverted to speaking Italian. He was skinny, and had hair and eyebrows so black they looked painted on.