He picked up the phone for one last try, and his tardy detective responded with, “Yeah, boss, how’s it going?”
“Riker, where the hell are you?”
“In traffic. Didn’t you get my message?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m looking at it now. But it’s a little on the cryptic side.” He held up the note and read the three words aloud. “ ‘A family thing.’ Just a wild guess, Riker-does this mean your partner’s s t ill crazy? I know that’s a relative term with Mallory, but do the best you can.”
“She’s gonna be fine, boss, just fine.”
Gonna be? Oh, shit!
Was Riker in the dark or did he know what she was up to right now? Hardly expecting a straight answer, Coffey approached the problem sideways. “So you see a lot of your partner these days?”
“Well, boss, it’s funny you should ask. I’m on my way to see her right now.”
“No, Riker, I don’t t hink so. You’re just late for work. Mallory’s a thousand miles away in southwest Illinois.”
“Okay, you got me. I lied.” A surprised Riker negotiated the Illinois traffic. As he listened, he learned that even the police commissioner had a fix on Mallory’s location, and now his lieutenant was ordering him to take a plane to Chicago and do damage control. “Yeah, right, boss. I’ll get there as fast as I can… No, no problem. I can do the travel vouchers when I get back.” The Mercedes glided onto the exit ramp that would land him close to a Chicago gas station.
His lieutenant was still talking, and Riker only listened, never interrupting, as if this might be the first time he had heard the story of Gerald C. Linden’s d isembodied right hand. More details were added to what little Kronewald had already told him. According to Jack Coffey, civilians, a battalion of them, were on the road in downstate Illinois, all hunting for their missing children. Though this did not appear to work well with the Chicago murder of a grown man, Riker suspected that Mallory had tied them together. The late-breaking news was a turf war between Chicago Homicide and the FBI.
“They wanna snatch a body from Kronewald?… Okay, but I’m gonna need Charles Butler on this one.” Riker made a right turn as he listened to his lieutenant’s arguments against hiring an outsider: the strain on the budget and the overkill factor of using a psychologist with more than one Ph.D.; plus, Jack Coffey knew for a fact that Charles Butler flew only first class.
“I think I can get him to kick in the airfare.” Riker pulled up in front of the gas station where Mallory had used her credit card last night. And now he lost the threads to what his lieutenant was saying. The detective was focused on a tired soul in the greasy clothes of a mechanic. The man was unlocking a metal gate that protected the door of a garage bay. This was the way a workingman should look at the end of a shift, not at the beginning. And what kind of gas station blew off the commuter traffic to open this late in the day?
On the cell phone, Jack Coffey was saying that the Chicago Police Department was crawling with shrinks, and one of them would be just as useful-and free of charge to NYPD.
“Just a few problems,” said Riker. “One-department shrinks always suck, and two-Mallory knows that. The kid won’t w o rk with ’em. But she likes Charles Butler, and her old man liked him, too… No, I think Commissioner Beale’s gonna go for it.” He knew it would take a few minutes for his lieutenant to appreciate this scheme, but it was going to happen. The boss knew Charles Butler as a man who could keep his mouth shut if Mallory proved unfit for duty-and she was. Sending in his own psychologist would keep the Illinois shrinks at a safe distance from one very messed-up young cop.
“Boss? Think it over. Get back to me, okay?” Riker folded his cell phone into his pocket as he watched the mechanic raise the garage door to expose a large party of men inside. Their ties were undone, and suit jackets were slung over their arms as they shook hands all around. And now the suits came outside, wincing and blinking into the sunlight. Riker could see tools racked on the back wall, but no oil stains on the cement, just the debris of liquor bottles, cigarette and cigar butts, what any cop might expect to find after a marathon crap game. This was not a gas station, not a repair shop- it was a damn casino.
Oh, this was going to be way too easy.
Riker left the car at the curb and stood in the small parking lot in front of the open garage. Hands in his pockets, like he had all the time in the world, he watched the gamblers, and they watched him. Everything about Riker said cop. Though his nature was laid-back, his stance had the easy confidence of a man who carried a gun everywhere he went. He never even had to show the badge. The gamblers scattered in all directions. The only one with nowhere to go was their host in the greasy coveralls.
Mallory stared out the window on the diner’s parking lot, where State Tr ooper Hoffman sat on the fender of his car. He cradled a collection of cigarette butts and sundry trash that had probably blown in from the road during the night. Apparently his crime-scene training had been incomplete. Everything picked up off the ground had gone into a single garbage sack instead of separate evidence bags with helpful notes to say where he had found each object. What he had was next to useless, but at least he had collected his finds before the caravan’s arrival. They were indeed a neat crowd. They had cleaned up after themselves, and evidence might have been lost if Hoffman had not gotten to it first.
An hour had passed since her last phone call to Chicago, but she had not yet given this trooper the news that, up north, a war was being waged in Copland-and that the FBI was en route to this diner with a plan to take his garbage bag away from him.
Back in Chicago, Detective Kronewald was fighting to hold onto his case, and he had made it clear to Mallory that he was counting on her.
Tough luck, old man.
In her mind, the debt that NYPD owed to the Chicago detective had been paid in full.
She looked up to the ceiling, listening to the sound of aircraft hovering over the diner. Outside, the whirling rotors of the helicopter were creating a windstorm in the parking lot, and the garbage bag was blown from the trooper’s arms. He ran across the lot, chasing his precious evidence and his hat. Mallory looked up to see the FBI marking on the descending helicopter, surprised that any field agent would direct a landing so close to the green Ford. Why would they dust up a crime scene for a grand entrance to impress a lone state trooper? This told her that the war over the Chicago corpse was not yet won.
Detective Riker held out the wallet at the arm’s length of a man too vain to wear reading glasses in public. He handed it back to the garage mechanic, who was now identified as a former Chicago policeman with thirty-five years on the Job. All the leverage of illicit gambling was gone. Retired or not, there was etiquette to be observed, good manners learned at police cotillion: No cop wanted to know that another one was breaking the law.
Any conversation between them would be a waltz around the giant turd; you could smell it but never speak its name.
The two men had yet to exchange a single word when Riker said, “The pretty blonde with the green eyes and the silver Beetle-you filled up her gas tank.”
“Last night,” said the mechanic, who was even more economical with words. He pointed west. “She went thataway toward Adams and Michigan.”
Riker smiled. Cowboy directions, such as thataway, so seldom included cross streets. “So she told you where she was going?” Not likely. He watched the older man retreat to the garage and return with two cold cans of beer.