“Do what you want; I’ll give you a twenty when we get there.”
The driver drove with some enthusiasm, and Lucas was ringing Lincoln’s doorbell twenty minutes after Amelia called.
“What happened?” he asked, when she opened the door.
“Lily’s been detained by Internal Affairs. They could be coming for us next.”
“What?”
“I’ll let Lincoln tell you.”
Lincoln smiled when Lucas came in and said, “Now things are getting interesting.”
“Tell me.”
The evidence that Amelia had collected under Lincoln’s direction, which Lincoln conceded was “quite good, under typical circumstances,” had not been taken to Lincoln’s lab, but to the city laboratory.
First, they found some evidence that the dead women had been tortured and murdered in a small storage area in the basement of the sculptor’s studio. Not much evidence was visible, but the small stuff — tiny spatters of blood, flakes of skin, urine samples — proved that the dead women had been there.
The gun had also been examined — and that was where the problem arose.
“Last year, we had another psycho roaming around the city, but he was not particularly clever. He was a serial shooter. Guy named Levon Pitt. Owned a junkyard here in town. That’s where he had dumped the bodies. Lily ran the team that tracked him down. They had an entry team, and cracked his apartment but there was nobody home. So they set up outside the apartment to wait for him, and pretty soon, here he came, with his adult son. When the police approached him, he figured out what was about to happen, and pulled a gun, and actually tried to take his son hostage. In the scuffle, he fired the gun, once, and Lily shot him, firing three times, and he died on the way to the hospital.
“When the man had been shot, Lily froze the scene, and they brought in the crime scene crew. Among other things, they recovered seven different pistols in the man’s apartment. He’d used four different weapons in the murders that the police knew about, and after testing, they found that three of the guns they’d recovered were among the four used in the crime.”
Lincoln paused in his narration, and Lucas prompted, “So?”
“The gun we found yesterday, by Verlaine’s hand, was the fourth gun.”
“What?” Lucas was momentarily confused. “Verlaine was involved with Levon Pitt?”
“That’s not what they’re suggesting,” Lincoln said. “For one thing, there’s no apparent connection. For another, one of the shells in Verlaine’s gun had Lily’s fingerprint on it.”
It took Lucas a moment to get it. “So they’re saying, what? That she picked up a gun at the first site, and kept it as a throw-down? And then she went into Verlaine’s apartment sometime last night, killed him, and made it look like a suicide?”
“That’s what they’re suggesting.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lucas said.
“Internal Affairs doesn’t think so,” Amelia said. “The thing is, they can’t figure out any other mechanism for getting Lily’s fingerprint on that shell. She never touched the gun at Verlaine’s place.”
“But why would she do that? Why kill Verlaine? After I went in there, we knew we had him.”
“But we had no hard evidence, and that’s all Internal Affairs knows. That’s what Lily reported last night. We can’t tell them that we did have hard evidence, because then we’d have to tell them that you illegally entered. So their theory is she knew who the killer was, but couldn’t get at him, so she killed him. Got him off the street.”
“Aw, man, that’s not right,” Lucas said.
“There’s another aspect to it,” Amelia said. “Lily is an operator. She gets things done, but she steps on a lot of toes. That’s fine, when she’s got all that protection at the top. But now, with this, well, somebody leaked the lab results almost instantly. Probably some old bureaucratic enemy. It’s on every TV station in New York. They’re screaming for her head.”
“Don’t forget to tell him about what else is coming down the line,” Lincoln said.
“Oh, yeah.” Amelia pulled out her cell phone and looked at the time. “IA wonders if any of us had anything to do with it. We’ve got a couple of homicide cops on the way here. They want to talk to us. I know them. They’re hard-nosed guys.”
Lucas shrugged. “We leave out the burglary, leave out the evidence collection from last night, and tell them everything else. And we tell them that they’re being taken as chumps — that Lily couldn’t have done this, and that somebody is running a con on them.”
“That’ll piss them off,” Amelia said.
“Which is what we want to do,” Lucas said. “We want them on the defensive. We want them off our backs so we can figure out what actually happened. And we tell them that.”
“The question,” Lucas Davenport spat out, “is who’s setting her up?”
Lincoln agreed. That was the only question. There was no doubt in the minds of Lucas, Amelia, and Lincoln that Lily was innocent.
However much of a shit Jim Bob Verlaine had been, however guilty he was of sadistic murder — and however much of a tough number Lily Rothenburg was — there was no way she’d take him out like that.
The team was back in Lincoln’s town house — all of them except Lily, of course, who was still being detained.
And whose absence was glaringly obvious.
“So,” Lucas repeated. “Who’s behind it?”
“Somebody with a grudge?” Amelia offered.
“Could be,” Lucas said. “She’s made some enemies in her day. Or maybe some asshole wants to derail a case she’s running.”
“And what about Verlaine?” Amelia asked. “Did he kill those women? Or was he being set up, too? And what’s the reason behind that?”
Lincoln’s view, admittedly myopic at times, as to the questions why and who was generally best answered by how and what: that is, by the evidence. “Why waste fucking time speculating? Look at the facts.”
“You ever in a good mood, Lincoln?” Lucas asked.
A grunt suggested that the answer might be no.
But Lucas took his point. “What do we have to prove the suicide was faked?”
Looking over Amelia’s photos of the body, Mel Cooper said, “Powder burns and muzzle stamp’re consistent with a close-contact gunshot.”
Lucas regarded the pictures, too. “And the tissue, blood, and bone on the receiver of the piece confirm that. But it was a temple shot. That’s rare in self-inflicted wounds. Usually the poor bastard bites the muzzle.”
“Which means somebody could’ve pulled out the piece when Verlaine was turned away, come up behind or beside him, and shot. So, maybe he knew the shooter.”
Cooper said, “But there was gunshot residue on Verlaine’s hands.”
Firing any pistol, and most rifles, results in burnt gunpowder particles and gases contaminating the hand holding the weapon.
But Lucas muttered, “Fuck, that’s easy. He fired twice.”
“Yes!” Lincoln said enthusiastically. “Good. Verlaine lets the perp in. He — or she — stands beside him and blows his brains out. Then the perp puts the gun in Verlaine’s hand and pulls the trigger again. Bang… Verlaine’s fingerprints’re on the piece, and GSR’s on his hand. Perp collects the second shell and leaves the gun on the floor.”
“But where’s the other slug?” Cooper asked.
Lucas, clearly pissed his friend had been set up, snapped, “Christ, just look at the pictures of the scene! The whole goddamn studio’s like a gun-range bullet trap — a thousand hunks of metal. Half of his quote art looks like a monkey pounded on it with a hammer. Nobody’d spot a bullet ding.”