"Vinny West. Nothing there, either," he told her. "He lawyered up almost as soon as they took the gag off. What he did say was that he never saw who nailed him. He's got a similar background to the other dead man at the scene-Franco Silva-but nothing with either one of them seems to connect to our case."
"Actually," Jim Berhle interrupted in a surprised voice, "maybe we do have something." He hadn't been at the crime scene that morning, but now pulled a sheet of paper from one of the several files before him and studied its contents briefly before handing it over to his partner. "That's Mary Kunkle's luds and tolls. Look at the seventh number down. I wrote who it belongs to in penciclass="underline" Franco Silva. She called him twice in the past month and a half."
Ogden looked at the list with renewed interest. "No kidding? That's great. Any cross-reference to his address and her metro stops or receipts?"
Berhle immediately started pawing through the pile at his fingertips, eventually locating the map they'd all worked on earlier. "Right there," he said, tapping a marked spot with his fingertip. "Both a Metro stop and a receipt, not three blocks away. Sorry. I should have read your pink on the shootout. I would've caught Silva's name earlier."
Ogden waved that away and studied the map over his younger colleague's shoulder. Since Ogden had been working on other matters while the three of them had been collecting most of this, he was less familiar than they were with its particulars, which was one of the reasons for this meeting now. "Huh," he commented, "looks like we're getting a cluster in Brooklyn. Silva lived there, Cashman, Lenny Manotti… who's Michael Annunzio?"
"Right," Berhle said. "Hold it. That's another connection. I just remembered." He repeated his search and extracted a document, scanned it quickly, and smiled. "Known associates," he quoted, "Franco Silva. Small world."
Ogden tapped him on the shoulder with two fingers. "Nice catch, James." He straightened and peered down at them all. "What else? Did you run a picture of Bob Kunkle by Mary's girlfriend, what's her name?"
Sammie spoke up, although it wasn't really her place. She'd been feeling out on a limb ever since this morning, acutely aware that the one thing they'd studiously avoided so far was much mention of Willy. "Loui Obregon. She didn't know him."
"Right," Berhle added. "I went back and questioned her and several other Re-Coop workers on Mary's habits. Now that we've got our suspicions about her, I was able to lead the discussion a little. I can't say I got much, but there was definitely a private part to Mary's life that she didn't share with any of them."
Ogden was back to pacing, his eyes running along the ceiling. "Okay. What about the Re-Coop? There were questions earlier about how it could operate the way it does."
Gunther took this one. "I did some digging around in whatever incorporation records were publicly available. It's a little hard to tell, and this not being my patch, I probably missed some resources you would've known to hit, but it looks like the primary backer of what's called the Re-Coop Foundation is a nonprofit charitable outfit named the Seabee Group. There're other supporters, of course, but Seabee was by far the heavy hitter. I ran out of time before I could chase that down, though."
Ogden pointed at Berhle. "See what you can do about that, okay? Almost sounds like the name of a boat. What's the timing on the DNA from the overalls we recovered from Mary's building trash compactor and the blood from Nate Lee's head?"
Jim Berhle shook his head. "We're still weeks away from that, or the samples the ME collected from under her nails. She did confirm that the blood wasn't Lee's."
Ogden picked up Mary's phone record again and peered at it. "What about John Smith? That sounds bogus."
Berhle shrugged. "For all I could find, it could've been a wrong number. It's way out in Broad Channel, the call lasted less than a minute, only happened once, and the John Smith cross-indexed with that address is clean as a whistle. I even called it, but got no answer."
"Well," Ogden announced, "since the local Brooklyn precinct guys are working on the shooting scene, I think I'll go out and knock on John Smith's door. I gotta do something. This standing around is driving me nuts." He looked at Sammie and Joe. "You two can either stay with Jim and keep beating on the computer or grab some shuteye. I'll kidnap whoever's sitting around the squad room to keep me company."
"I'd like to ride along, if that's all right," Gunther said.
There was a momentary silence. They all knew Ogden's generosity was wearing thin, and that this could only further erode it, but the veteran detective finally smiled, if faintly, and granted the concession. "Okay."
Sammie quickly played the team card. "I'll stay here and help Jim."
Berhle looked happy with that, so Ogden said, "Whatever," and headed out into the larger room to recruit someone from his own department to ride shotgun with him. On the face of it, the trip to Broad Channel didn't make much sense. There was no probable cause to request a search warrant of the John Smith residence, Jim Berhle had gotten no answer when he'd called the number, and there was no reason to suspect that the number's appearance on Mary's phone record was anything other than an anomaly. But anomalies were what interested Ward Ogden most in cases like this, where he was being faced with an otherwise solid wall of nothing.
As things turned out, it was a fortunate impulse. As soon as he, Joe Gunther, and the junior detective Ogden had tapped to come along emerged from their car at the Smith address and began approaching the front stoop, a large, bearded, tattooed man with a bandage on his head and an ugly expression on his face appeared on the nextdoor porch and shouted at them, "Who the hell're you guys?"
Ogden displayed his badge. "Police."
"We didn't call for you. Take a hike."
Ogden's face broke into a smile. "Well, we're here anyway. The head feeling better?"
The man touched the bandage by reflex, his eyebrows knitting. "How'd you know about that?"
"Lucky guess," Ogden answered him. "How'd it happen?"
Whether confused by Ogden's affable response to his own hostility or simply wishing he could get things clarified in his own mind, the big man came off his porch and crossed the five feet of lawn to join them, his tone softening as he drew near.
"Damned if I know. I went in there to shoot the shit with John a little, and the next thing I knew, the son-of-abitch coldcocked me."
"You had a fight?"
He looked contemptuous. "No, we didn't have a fight. I would've killed him if we had. I told you: He snakebit me. Hit me from behind."
"Damn," Ogden commiserated. "That's pretty weird. The two of you been having problems? What's your name, by the way?"
"Budd Wilcox. And we're really good friends. I saw him drive up around dawn-he's got crazy hours-and I went in to talk, like we do sometimes before I go to work. I shouted for him a couple of times and he finally answered me from his office, so I went back there and that's when he hit me, first with the door, and then by smashing my head against the wall. Bastard turned my lights out, and I never did a damn thing to him. I had to call in sick because of this. Really pisses me off."
"I bet," Ogden said, eyeing the house with renewed interest. "So you never got a look at him. Did you actually see him walk from the car to the house?"
Wilcox stared at him dumbly. "What d'you…? It was his car. I looked out once, it wasn't there, then it was. He'd just gotten home."
"You didn't actually see him."
"You saying it wasn't him?" he asked incredulously.
Ogden looked surprised. "Me? How would I know?"
Budd scowled and whipped around to face his own house. "Judy," he yelled, "get out here."
His wife appeared moments later, her face flushed and her expression ready for battle. She stopped dead when she saw her husband had company.