After a long pause, he turned and asked Riley, "Ever hear of a dealer named Marcus? Works on 145th."
Riley made a face. "Along with a hundred others. You think he makes this Diablo?"
"Not according to my source. But he probably knows who does."
Riley knew what he was thinking. "So, the Great White Hope tracks the dude down and makes this a movie with a happy ending?"
"Up yours."
"Hey, I won't be the one paying the price. What you think you're going to accomplish finding this guy? What're you going to do then?"
"What do you care?"
"I don't, not about you. But Nate's my friend, and I'd like to find out where he is before you go shootin' up the neighborhood and maybe gettin' him killed."
Loner though he was, Willy was enough of a pragmatist to recognize the value of what Riley had just implied: He would be a local guide to the neighborhood and its residents, if only so far as determining Nathan Lee's whereabouts. On his own, Willy knew, a white, out-of-town, one-armed cop probably wasn't going to get far.
"You'll help me?" he asked.
"More like I'll keep an eye on you while I'm doin' what I need to do," Riley answered.
Willy looked at the man's size and steadiness, and remembered the way he'd handled that shotgun.
"Whatever," he agreed. Joe Gunther glanced down at his pager. "Damn." He looked up at Ward Ogden. "Could I use your phone?"
Ogden gave him a questioning glance but pointed to the phone on the desk.
Gunther dialed the number given him by the Legal Aid lawyer that morning. It was now nightfall.
"This is Joe Gunther. Did you try calling my pager today?"
He waited while Sammie Martens watched him, her expression revealing she'd already sensed what had happened.
After listening for a few minutes, he said, "Thanks. Sorry. I didn't mean to leave you in the lurch," and hung up.
He tapped the pager clipped to his belt. "Batteries died. I just noticed it. There was a schedule change and Willy's hearing was moved to today. He's back on the street. So much for keeping tabs on him." He gave them both a resigned smile. "I guess Murphy's lurking as usual."
They were back in the precinct house, back in the interview room, away from everyone else. Over the intervening hours, the initial bond between the two older men had solidified, and it was clear that Ward Ogden, given his elite status, was going to exploit it by keeping Joe and Sammie inside the loop, even though standard department protocol decreed otherwise. It was a development the two Vermont cops weren't about to tamper with. Whatever Ogden suggested at this point, they would do if they wanted to stick around.
Not that he'd been in any way domineering. In fact, up to now, while they'd been waiting for confirmations from CSU, Ogden had been putting his house in order, changing the status of this erstwhile "groundball investigation" to a homicide, reorganizing his schedule, clearing up or delegating some of his cases, and otherwise giving himself more room to move. Sammie and Joe had used the opportunity to study Mary's file more carefully and to take notes on what obvious avenues of investigation to pursue.
Now, however, there was a knock on the door and a uniformed officer stepped in to hand Ogden an envelope. After waiting for the young man to leave, Ogden opened the envelope and consulted its contents.
"Fax from CSU," he said. "They agree with our scenario. The fire escape was recently oiled, the grate over the basement window tampered with, and the heating control was cranked way up within the last few days, they say here, 'enough to have caused considerable discomfort within the apartment,' and then returned to normal. They also confirm the metal shavings you found, Joe, are consistent with what a key cutter produces, but that's as far as they'll stick their necks out. Oh," he added, rereading the document before handing it over. "They also checked the window sash and found a recently killed spider along the groove, complete with torn web, indicating the window had been raised."
Joe Gunther tapped the case file with his finger. "We were going over the responding officer's report," he said, "and noticed that the old lady next door who called 911 mentioned how hot she'd been two nights previous to that. If you're right about how thin the walls are in that place, it could be Mary's apartment heat bled through to the neighbor's. That and the dated birth control pill dispenser give us a pretty good fix on the time of death."
Ogden glanced at the calendar on the wall. "Which would make it Tuesday night. By the way, I also called the morgue and told them to run a few extra tests on the body-fingernail scrapings, vaginal swabs, whatever they don't do for routine overdoses. Lucky thing Willy appeared when he did, or I would have released the body."
The dinosaur stood up and began pacing the tiny room, obviously building up steam. "Okay," he announced, "we're behind the eight ball on this, so some things'll be too cold to pursue. That still leaves us a ton to do. Some you can help with, others you'll have to stay away from. Most of the latter involves using the computers here, dealing with people like DMV, Social Security, Welfare, and others, or getting subpoenas for things like Mary's luds."
"What're those?" Sammie asked.
His answer came rapid-fire: "Her local phone calls, the ones that don't appear in the bill. Stands for 'local usage detail.' " He went back to thinking out loud. "Basically, we have three major areas of concentration: the technical, like forensics, those phone records, and the Metro cards; the internal, which means talking to the drug unit and combing through every nook and cranny in our files for any and all past arrests and whether anyone in Mary's building is on parole or has a record or ever filed a complaint with us; and the external, which covers everything from talking to her neighbors, friends, and co-workers, to dropping by local pawnshops in case something stolen was sold, to checking with the Homeless Outreach project to see what bums, if any, might have seen someone coming or going from the building that night. And that's just to begin with, unless something falls into our laps."
He snapped his fingers suddenly. "And we need to check the building's trash compactor. I noticed a trash chute on her floor. It should still be full-there's been a garbage strike all week."
"What can we do?" Joe asked.
Ogden stopped pacing. "Honestly? One of my biggest concerns is Kunkle. You know him, you know his style and habits. You could help me by finding him as fast as possible. I seriously doubt he's taking Circle Line tours or visiting the museums."
He placed his hands on the back of his chair to emphasize what he said next. "If he knows what we know, he's going to want to set things right. I don't blame him, but it could cause us all a world of hurt, including getting himself killed or screwing up the case so much that we can't nail the guy responsible."
Neither Joe nor Sammie doubted the likelihood of either possibility. They knew what Willy was like when he got his teeth into something.
"Get him off the street," Ogden reemphasized.
Gunther nodded once. "You got it."
Chapter 14
Willy let Riley take the lead. They were in a high-rise- a cast-off, damaged monument to urban renewal, the likes of which dotted the city's landscape like smallpox. Cereal-box-shaped buildings with small windows often covered with plywood, overlooking abandoned concrete playgrounds that had only nestled children in the architect's imagination. The hard, open approaches to the building had been littered and devoid of life, with fragments of shattered glass that crunched underfoot. In the shadows beyond the harsh and sporadic lighting of the few still-functioning arc lamps, they'd heard people moving about, and the sounds of threatening murmurs. It had made Willy think of the jungle again, but not brought him back to it, for while this battlefield was just as ominous, it remained strange and remote-a wilderness cast in steel and brick, inhabited by warriors without hope or goal.