Kage (27 page)

write algorithms and sift cascades of electronic data. Personnel

conduct threat analyses, but the bureau also has its ops people

to train public and private personnel in streetcraft. And at the

far, hard end of the unit’s spectrum, the black clad Hercules

rapid deployment teams wait to be unleashed.

The counter-terrorism bureau is an odd mix of ex-intelli-

gence types, seasoned detectives, and bright young cops with

competency in languages like Arabic, Pashto, and Urdu. But

because the organization is still young, many of its people are

as well. As Micky once noted, they’re smart, but not yet street

smart. Which is where he and Art come in. Reading documents

can be learned in a classroom; reading people takes years of

hard life experience. My brother and his partner have a knack

for observation, for sifting information to find just the right

points of leverage when dealing with suspects. The bureau val-

ues the skill and wants them to pass it on to the greener mem-

bers of the team.

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Kage

The bureau doesn’t like visitors. So Micky and I arranged to

meet at One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan. My brother

was waiting at the entrance: a thin, intense man with a cop

mustache and a stripe of white in his dark hair. Micky looked

at me without comment as I came in the door, his expression

one of weary annoyance. A silent uniformed officer stood next

to him.

“Nice suit,” I said and meant it. Micky had spent much

of his career in an unmarked car, a rolling trash bin of empty

coffee cups, old newspapers, and greasy, wadded-up sandwich

wrappers. His tired, rumpled clothing fit right in. But now he

was actually presentable.

My brother looked down at himself and seemed almost

amazed. “When you’re a consultant you gotta dress smart,” he

mumbled. Then he recovered his cynicism somewhat. “It gives

clients the illusion we’ve got all the answers.”

The uniformed cop moved us through the formalities of

signing in and getting the visitors’ passes we would need. Then,

without saying a word, he wheeled around and headed toward

the elevators. Micky and I followed.

We ended up on the eighth floor. “Where are we going?” I

said.The doors slid open and we stepped out into a hallway.

“RTCC,” Micky said.

“Which is?”

My brother sighed in annoyance. “Real Time Crime

Center.”

I put my hands on my hips and stood there in the middle of

the hallway. “Which is?”

He pulled me aside, his voice low. “Connor, stop being such

an asshole. Just shut up and come with me. The RTCC’s a

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John Donohue

networked data center for the PD. Lets you access all kinds of

stuff. For our purposes, it’s the next best thing to the bureau’s

center. And I go back a long way with the inspector in charge.

So he’s doing me a favor and letting us use one of his analysts.”

“But why?”

He poked me in the chest with a finger. “Look, technically,

your little incident is not of immediate interest to the bureau.

They got a mile of things that take priority over that. I have a

personal interest in the case, but they’re not gonna let me tie up

their resources. So I made some calls.”

“Why?”

Micky squinted at me and sighed. “Because you’re my

brother. And because you, you moron, have kicked over a full

bucket of shit.”

The RTCC looked like Mission Control. It had maybe a

dozen computer operators with headsets sitting behind paired

flat screens. The air was filled with the staccato plastic clicks

of people working computer keyboards. The operators’ pas-

sive faces flickered with light as images expanded, shrunk, or

were arranged in tiles in rapid succession. There was a constant,

muted hum of conversation as requests came in and data was

fed out to the laptops of detectives in the field. One entire wall

of the room was taken up by a screen that contained photos,

data, what looked like flowcharts, as well as streaming video.

“Wow,” I said.

Micky nudged me toward the giant wall screen. A small,

muscular looking cop with a shaved head was standing there,

arms crossed, and eyes focused on the huge display.

“What you got going, McHale?” my brother asked.

The man turned and smiled in recognition. “Burke. How’s

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Kage

life on the outside? I knew you said you needed some help, but

I didn’t think you were so desperate you’d be by today.”

Micky shrugged, “I’m between things…” Then gestured at

me. “My brother.”

McHale extended a hand. “The other Burke,” he said mock-

ingly. “I’ve read about you.”

“Hello Inspector,” I said as we shook hands. His grip could

crush stone. I tried not to let my voice waver as McHale tried

to see how much pressure I could take before my knees buckled

and my bones popped.

Micky came to my rescue. “What gives on the screen,

McHale?”

The Inspector, distracted, released his grip. He looked back

at the wall and squinted at the mug shot in the center of the

screen. “Liquor store robbery. Perp shot the clerk in the face,

but he’ll survive. Local surveillance camera caught him fleeing

in an ‘87 Civic. They streamed the video here, we enhanced it

for the plates and cross-reffed it to DMV. Registered to a kid

by the name of Kwame McPatrick. Ran him for priors, wants,

and warrants. Hence the mug shot. He’s gone to ground and

we’re running cross-checks for family and known associates…”

“In the old days, we’d have to pound the streets for this kind

of thing,” Micky told me.

“Now, we’re moving a bit smarter and a lot faster,” McHale

said. “We ran checks on income tax returns, credit reports,

parking tickets. Plus whatever we’ve got in our own database:

known associates, MO, identifying marks. He’s got a mother

living in Ithaca and a sister in Brooklyn. At least three old girl-

friends. We got addresses out to the field on all of them, and

prepped the responding units on the locale details.”

“On all the addresses?” I asked. “You did that from here?”

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John Donohue

“Sure,” he said simply. “We use Google Earth.”

The three of us were clustered around one of the analyst’s

stations. Her name was Park: high cheekbones with sleek dark

hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She asked the occasional ques-

tion, but her eyes rarely left the dual screens in front of her. Her

fingers flew across the computer keyboard as we talked McHale

through the problem.

“You got a incident file number on this case?” Park asked.

Micky fished a rumpled slip of paper from his pocket, handed

it to her and the report appeared on screen. Park dragged it to a

corner with her mouse, then popped up mug shots of the three

men who had tried to kill me.

“
Los Gemenos
,” McHale whistled in recognition. “Bad news

comes in twos.”

Park moved one of the pictures to her left-hand screen.

“Xavier Soledad. Dead on the scene.”

McHale looked at Micky. “What happened?”

My brother jerked his chin at me. “Him.”

McHale seemed incredulous. “
He
took out one of the

Twins?”

Micky nodded. “Stuck a knife in his eye.” For a split sec-

ond, Park looked up at me.

McHale shook his head. “Burke, is everyone in your family

a complete maniac?” But it was a rhetorical question, and he

returned to scanning the data on the screen before him. “Seems

we got another dead guy, but Martín got away?” We nodded.

“Whoa boy,” McHale continued, “I would not want Martín on

the loose and after me.”

“You begin to see the dimension of our problem here,” Micky

said. The remaining Twin’s mug shot stared out at us from the

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Kage

center of the screen. He had a thick neck and pitted skin. People

rarely look their best in arraignment photos, but Martín’s picture

did him justice. He looked like a homicidal toad.

Micky continued. “I need whatever you can pull on Sole-

dad and Martín: known associates, places where Martín might

go to ground.”

“Sure. Who’s the other stiff?” McHale asked.

“That one took a while,” Micky said. “He’s not local. The

bureau ran a search, and the guy’s name is Ruiz, a gangbanger.

In and out of trouble. Bad rep on the street. Moved from LA

to Phoenix two years ago. On the surface, nothing really out of

the ordinary.”

Except he almost killed me
. I remembered this man, the smell

of him as we fought that day, the odd horn-like designs inked

on his head, the cruel look of satisfaction on his face as he

watched me start to bleed out.

“So why do you need us?” McHale asked.

“I was describing Ruiz to an operative I know,” Micky said.

“I mentioned his tats and he said that we might want to do a

bit more research on that angle.”

McHale nodded. “Tattoos can tell us all kinds of things:

where someone did time, gang membership. We’ve been amass-

ing quite a series of data sets on these things.”

Park spoke again. Her ancestry was probably Korean, but

her accent was pure Queens. “We’ll need more detailed descrip-

tions of his tattoos. Did the coroner get some shots?”

Micky gave her another file reference number and a series

of digital photos stacked up on the screen. Park’s fingers flew

and windows began flashing open and closed. “I’m running an

image recognition program against a series of files we’ve devel-

oped on tattoos,” she explained.

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John Donohue

“It may take a few minutes,” McHale commented. “In the

meantime, we’ll dump a file for you on what we’ve got on
Los

Gemenos
.”

He looked at Micky and then at me. “Basically, the info on

Ruiz is not the problem here.”

“No shit,” Micky said. “The real mystery is why he showed

up in Brooklyn with the Twins to off my brother.”

McHale nodded. “It does seem like overkill. The Twins

were usually more than enough to get a job done.” He looked

shrewdly at Micky. “More than one reason for the visit?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” my brother said. “The Twins

were experienced local talent. Ruiz didn’t need to be there.

Unless something else needed to be done…”

“Like what?” I said.

“From what I picked up from that operative, I’m start-

ing to get a pretty good sense,” Micky said. “But I need it

corroborated.”

Park’s program was spitting out information. She was

watching as line after line of information began flowing across

the screen. She sat back in satisfaction. “Ah,” she said.

“Ah?” I couldn’t help myself.

“Ruiz had a lot of tattoos,” Park said. “Any stick out?”

“He had horn tattoos,” I said. “Devil’s horns.”

Park nodded at the screen and highlighted a line for

McHale. McHale seemed suddenly tired. “Nice job, Sue,” he

told Park. “Dump this stuff in a folder and keep trolling on

known associates of Ruiz.”

“Whatta we got?” Micky prompted.

“Your visitor from Phoenix wasn’t just involved with any

gang,” McHale said. “He was a member of TM-7,
Todos

Muertos.
”

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Kage

Micky looked at me. “Oh. Shit. I was hoping I was wrong.”

“About what?” I asked.

“TM-7 is one of the fastest growing and most violent gangs

out there,” McHale said.

“Worse than that,” Micky said. “There are plenty of TM-7

members in the New York area. The fact that the gang sent one

of their own all the way from Phoenix to visit you does not

bode well, Connor.”

“If it was just a hit, they could have handled it locally,”

McHale chimed in. “It’s bad enough to have pissed these guys

off, but this…”

“What?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

“If they sent Ruiz, it was because they wanted something

from you, Connor,” Micky explained. “Something important.

Something they didn’t want to have to reveal to anyone local…”

“But I don’t have anything like that,” I protested.

“You may not know you have it, but you do,” McHale

said. “And if I were you, I’d wrack my brains to figure that out.

Because these guys are not going away.”

187

16

Fading Things

“It gets better with time,” I told her. I would have liked to

say that the dreams go away, but they never do. At least not

entirely. Yamashita’s worked hard with me, but even still the

images return, unbidden.

Sarah’s voice sounded shaky over the phone, even as she

tried to be upbeat. “That’s good to know,” she said. But she

didn’t sound convinced.

“The cops say that Martín is gone.”

“Gone where?” Her voice rose slightly in concern.

“Gone, Sarah,” I said, trying to be soothing. “Away. Out

of our lives.” I wasn’t sure that this was entirely true, but she

needed some safe space and a sense that normalcy was return-