He told them about all the equipment the Feebs had set up, told them about the perps leading him and Loomis out to The Wasteland, told them about the dead Golden Retriever…
“Sons of bitches,” Parker said.
“So we’d know they’re ready to kill the girl,” Carella said.
“Could’ve made their point another way.”
“That’s what Loomis thought. He still thinks these guys arehonorable, you know. That they’ll make a deal and stick to it. They asked for two-fifty large the first time around, and when we delivered it, they came back asking for a mil. But he still seems to think…”
“A milmore? ” Kling asked.
“No, altogether.”
“The girl’s worth it,” Hawes said. “Did you see that tape of the kidnapping? I saw it on a large screen down at Channel Four,” he said, and grinned sort of goofily.
“We got the MCU report, by the way,” Carella said. “The guy was limping.”
“What guy?”
“One of the perps. The lefthanded one.”
“Well,there’s something,” Parker said.
“We already put out a medical alert,” Hawes said.
“Anything?” Eileen asked.
“Not so far.”
“I mean, how many limping lefthanded guysare there in this city?” Parker asked reasonably.
“Who’s an experienced thief,” Carella said, nodding.
“How so?” Genero asked.
“Stole the Explorer he used on the night of the snatch. Also has a barrel full of stolen cell phones. So at least one of them’s a thief.”
“Means a record, maybe,” Hawes said.
“Maybe for the lefthanded one.”
“Who limps, don’t forget.”
“Any of you guys remember a movie calledThe Fallen Sparrow? ” Byrnes asked.
They all looked at him.
“The bad guy limps. Drags his foot. Scariest scene in the movie is John Garfield waiting for him, his face all covered with sweat, and all we hear is that foot dragging down the hall, coming closer and closer.”
“Who’s John Garfield?” Genero asked.
“That wassuspense, ” Byrnes said. “Nowadays, they put a lot of bullshit technology on the screen, the directors think that’s suspense.”
“Think we should put out a second med alert?” Eileen asked.
“Couldn’t hurt,” Brown said. “All these doctors are too busy to pay attention the first time around.”
“Too busy making money,” Hawes said.
“Too busy robbing Medicare,” Kling said.
“Come on, my uncle’s a doctor,” Genero said.
“Am I the only one going to have a second bagel?” Parker asked, and pulled himself out of the only easy chair in the room and went over to the table near the windows.
“So is this ours or is it theirs, or what?” Carella asked.
“My guess?” Byrnes said.
“Good as mine, that’s for sure.”
“My guess is it’s oursand theirs.”
“A fuckin horse race,” Parker said, pouring himself another cup of coffee.
“So let’s win it,” Byrnes said.
BACK IN THEgood old days, every Monday through Thursday morning at nine o’clock, detectives from all over this fair city pulled what was known as “Lineup Duty.” This meant that instead of reporting to work at their respective offices, two detectives from each of the city’s squads trotted downtown or uptown or crosstown or across the rivers to the Headquarters building on High Street, where the Chief of Detectives presided over a parade of all the felony offenders who’d been arrested in the city the day before.
The purpose of these lineups was identification.
The Chief brought out the perps one by one, named the crimes for which they’d been arrested, recited a brief pedigree on each, and then conducted an interrogation for the next ten minutes or so. Most of these people were experienced thieves; the Chief didn’t expect to get from them any information that would convict them in later trials. What he was doing was simply familiarizing his detectives with the people who were making mischief in this city. On a rotating basis, every Monday through Thursday, his detectives were able to get a good long look at troublemakers past and present, with the idea that they’d be able to recognize them in the future and prevent them from making yet more trouble.
Once a thief, always a thief.
Today, the police still had lineups (or “showups” as they were sometimes called) but their purpose was identification of another sort. Nowadays, in a room at your own precinct, you placed a suspect on a stage in a row of detectives or officers in street clothes, and you asked the vic to pick out which one of them had raped her or stabbed her or poked out her eye on the night of January fifth. Back in the old days, the headquarters gym was packed with maybe a hundred detectives from all over the city. Today, sitting behind a protective one-way glass, you had the vic, and the arresting detectives, and the lieutenant, and maybe somebody from the D.A.’s Office if you were that close to making a case. Small potatoes when you thought back to the grand old days, eh, Gertie?
But nowadays, you had computers to tell you who the bad guys were. You didn’t have to eyeball all those evil-doers from a hard bench in an austere gym. You sat in your own comfy swivel chair at your own cluttered desk, and you popped the question to the computer, and hoped it came up with something good.
By that Tuesday morning, not a single one of the myriad doctors in this city had responded to the precinct’s medical alert for a man who might have sustained a recent injury to the right leg. While Eileen sent out a second alert, sounding a bit more urgent this time, Carella turned to the second supposition in Detective Oswald Hooper’s report on the footprints the MCU had recovered aboard theRiver Princess; he considered the possibility that the injury to the right leg had occurred sometime in thepast.
The men and sole woman on the squad were now working on the premise that the men who’d kidnapped Tamar Valparaiso were no amateurs. In many respects, this assumption was a throwback to the days of the old Monday-to-Thursday lineups. See those guys on the stage there? Yesterday they committed murder, armed robbery, burglary, rape, auto theft, whatever, and it seems like they all have records of felony convictions as long as my arm here, so look at their faces and remember them well because tomorrow these same people will be committing the same felonies or different felonies all over again.
Once a thief, always a thief, right?
In America, kidnapping was rarely a crime anyone committed more than once. It was fashionable among certain criminal types in remoter parts of the world to capture businessmen and hold them for ransom, but that was there and this was here. It was fashionable in some countries to eat raw crocodile eyes, too. Nobody on the Eight-Seven had ever heard of a serial kidnapper. You either kidnapped somebody and got away with it, in which case you flew to Rio and danced the samba till dawn, or you got caught and spent the rest of your life behind bars. Either way, it was usually a one-shot crime.
So when Carella went to the computer that Tuesday morning, he accessed the state’s prison records by typing in first his name and then his password, but once he was cleared, he did not type in the key word KIDNAP because he didn’t think that would bear any fruit. In fact, he didn’t specify any crime at all. What he was looking for was a left-handed con who limped. In fact, what he was looking for was a left-handed con who’d limped his way out of jail and straight onto the deck of theRiver Princess this past Saturday night.
He called for a statewide search, but he limited it to just the past five years, otherwise he’d be here for thenext five years. He went straight for the jugular. As his key word, he typed INJURY.