Necropolis (16 page)

I didn’t know how Maggie’s holo program worked, but it was good. She blanched in shock as the implication sunk in.
 

Cover-ups were for the movies. I had never encountered a real one in my entire career as a cop. Until now.

Arlene stood abruptly, her thighs hitting the table. Had she not drained her coffee, it would have spilled everywhere. “I have to go.” Before I could even choke out a thank you, she fled to the door. A bell tinkled as she exited.
 

“Come again,” said the counter man, eyes still glued to the race listings.

I would never see her again. Another woman I’d blindly hurt who’d gone running.

We listened to an angry fluorescent light for a minute.

“How can you erase a double homicide like it never existed? Especially of a cop?”

I didn’t know.

“Maybe the guy was some Senator’s druggie son or something,” Maggie said. “What name was he booked under?”

“John Doe.”

“Oh, excellent.”

“His prints aren’t in the file.”

“Removed, or never taken?”

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know!” I forced myself to uncurl my fists. “I need a drink.”

“How about a milkshake?”

The look I gave her was not kind.

“How about any one of three dozen pharmaceuticals that won’t leave you with a hangover tomorrow?”

“Do any of them taste like scotch?”

“Why would any of them
want
to?”
 

I grabbed my hat. We made the bell tinkle.

“Come again,” said the counter man.

Rain cast the street gray and diagonal. I slogged through puddles, searching for what I dare not find. A cab’s magnetic field threw up a furrow of water like a speedboat’s wake.

We walked a while. Maggie let me finish my smoke before she hit me with her own bombshell. “I wasn’t gonna tell you until tomorrow, but under the circumstances…”

I looked at her sideways. “Am I gonna need that milkshake?”
 

“Surazal sent the security discs you requested. They show Crandall leaving when they said he did, clear as day, by himself. Whistling.”

“Doesn’t sound like a scared man.”

“Donner, the discs were doctored.”

I stood there.

“Did you hear what I said? There’s a second layer of time code data embedded in DV files. Even most computer whizzes don’t know about it. Whoever altered it pasted an old security clip of Crandall leaving and modified the surface time code, but didn’t change the embedded one.”

I started walking again. Maggie watched me for a moment, then rushed to catch up. “Are you okay?”

I didn’t reply.

“I mean, if it was me, and I’d learned what you just learned, I wouldn’t be okay. Not by a long shot.”

I didn’t reply.

“So, are you okay?”

I stopped, dropped the smoke, and toed the butt dead with my shoe. “Two altered pieces of evidence. In two completely separate cases. Both requiring skill and access. What are the odds of one recently undeceased detective stumbling across a situation like this?”

“Improbable, but not impossible.”
 

“Am I a sap, Maggie?” I asked. “Everyone keeps shoveling bullshit at me and expecting me to think it’s Malt-O-Meal.”

She attempted a smile. “It’s that dead boy scout face.”

I looked at the sky with burning eyes. I was fed up. It was time to get some answers. “What’s Bart’s address?”

Maggie paled. “Going over to rehash the glory days?”

“There were no glory days,” I said.

21

GIORDI

T
he cement room in which Giordi awoke was featureless. For a moment, he thought he was back in prison. He was naked, strap-cuffed to a metal chair. An ancient rust stain ran to the floor drain. The place smelled of sewage, and something else… Rotting meat? There was pale, mucus-like goo ringing the drain. And small chunks of something else he couldn’t identify. Didn’t want to identify.

It had been a set-up. If that fucking whore was
mafiya
, he was dead. And it wouldn’t be fast. The Russian mob, having risen from the barbaric Soviet prison network, was the most brutal criminal group in the world. Cosa Nostra, the Triads, Yakuza—all were children in comparison.
 

What would they do to him? Hack through his testicles with a wheat sickle? Shove a soldering iron up his ass? It took all his strength not to scream in panic. A two-way mirror was mounted in the wall opposite him. Was he being watched? Hope fluttered. Could this be a CIA operation? FBI?

The door opened. A woman he didn’t recognize stepped in. If he’d thought Loretta beautiful, this one was a goddess. “Hi!” she said cheerily. She carried a tray with a syringe on it. A hospital? But what kind of hospital stank of sewage?

“My name’s Nicole. I’ll be your nurse today.” She checked his restraints. When she touched his head, he realized something had been attached to him. Wires.

“Electrodes,” she explained. She checked the adhesives keeping the disks attached to his head, neck and chest. “They’ll record your body functions.”

“W-where am I?” His mind spun. He’d never been so terrified.
 

“You’re in excellent health,” said Nicole, prepping the syringe. “A real bull. That’s one of the reasons we chose you. The other is that no one will miss you.”

She plunged its tip into his neck in a single gesture. There was a hiss as the ampoule pneumatically injected into his body. Nicole tossed the spent syringe on the floor. She pointed to the window.
 

“I’ll be in there, baby. If you need me, just scream.”

***

Nicole and the man watched through the window.

Things happened. Horrible things.

Through the monitor, liquid sounds burbled. A moan. A squelch like a beetle being stepped upon. Then silence.

It was over pretty quick. Nicole looked at her watch, unhappy. “Get somebody to clean that up,” she said.

22

DONNER

“N
o sudden moves, Bart.”

Bart froze in his doorway, one hand still on his keycard. His other arm held a six-pack of German beer. He’d gotten fancy in his old age.

“Come in and close the door.”
 

“Donner?” Bart shut the door.

I clicked on a Tensor lamp, letting him see me in the armchair. The pistol rested lightly on my knee.
 

Bart paled. “Are you nuts?”

“We’re going to have a heart to heart, Bart.”

Bart dropped the card, held onto the beer. He drew up his chest and tightened his mouth.
 

“Fuck you,” he said. “I don’t talk to people who point gats at me.”
 

I came across the room. Wood split, pictures crashed off the scarred bureau, glass tinkled. Then the gun was under Bart’s chin, my hand around his throat. Beer spurted across our ankles.

“You’re screwing up here, Donner—”
 

I cracked him across the face. He sagged, but I didn’t let him collapse to the floor. I hoisted him back up to eye level, waited while he blinked away the pain.

“J-jesus, you’re crazy…”

“I finally studied my dickenjane, Bart. Extreme emotion can give me unexpected surges in strength. I might’ve already fractured your cheekbone. I really don’t want to accidentally snap your neck.”

Bart looked into my eyes for a bluff. When he didn’t find it, a deeper kind of fear suffused his expression. Words tumbled out in a panic. “I had nothing to do with it, you gotta believe me! When they brought that sorry fuck in, they had to hold me back!”

“Bullshit!” I roared, shaking him. Bart’s head cracked against the bureau again, and he moaned, spittle coating his lips. Our feet danced like prize fighters’, grinding glass into the wet carpet.

“I wanted my pound of flesh,” he croaked. “We all did! But then the suspect was gone. The booking file was closed like it never existed.”

“And you just accepted that?”
 

“Of course not! I went straight to the Captain. He said you’d been working undercover for the Feds!”

“What?” I blinked in shock. “Jansen said that?”
 

Bart nodded desperately. “He said that booking this shitbird would jeopardize an international drug sting—something that had been in the works for years. The operation was supposed to bring down an entire cartel, get millions of pounds of shit off the streets. He said we couldn’t wreck all that now—we’d pick your doer up again later. He said that’s what you would have wanted us to do.”

“You didn’t buy that.”

“No.” Bart sagged again, starting to cry. “I didn’t.”

I threw him into a chair and waited. When he spoke again, all he could look at was his own hands. “I was about to go higher up, to the Commish, to the Feds if I had to,” he said. “The next thing I know, somebody’s calling my wife.”

“Sarah?”

“Asking her if she would be one of those cop’s widows who liked getting reamed by a hunt-pack in the middle of the night. She almost lost her mind. And then some ‘uncle’ we never heard of picked Lizzie up from school—”

“Christ!”

“He got her some ice cream and drove her home. But the message was clear enough.” Bart looked at me, tears rolling freely. “You and Elise were dead. I couldn’t bring you back. And my family, Jesus, my family.”

I didn’t know what I’d expected to hear, but it hadn’t been this. If they’d threatened Elise, I might’ve done the same thing.
 

He smiled wanly at the soaked floor. “Gonna smell like a brewery in here.”

I pressed the cool chrome of the pistol against my forehead.
Think
, I told myself.
Where does this leave you?
“I take it there never was a drug bust,” I said.

Bart shook his head. “And they never re-arrested the perp. Jansen acted like the whole thing never happened. After that, the asshole couldn’t even meet my eyes. He transferred out to Staten Island a month later, the coward.” He stared hard at me. “Donner, what were you into?”

“Into? Nothing!”

“Something like this doesn’t happen over nothing! Whoever put the screws to the precinct— You don’t make something like this go away without serious weight.”

“If they didn’t want this guy caught, why arrest him in the first place?”

“I think it was a mistake. You know what it’s like when a cop gets killed. Things move fast. Every badge in the city was out for blood. And this guy was no John Dillinger. They had him in a couple hours.”

“Where?”

“Red Hook.”

Another shock. “Here in Brooklyn?”

“The Seven-six nailed him right in his crib. That’s all I know. I never got a name, never got a look at him. Stew Mahadavia said he was Latino, but I never saw for myself.”

“Why does a two-bitter go all the way to the Upper West Side to pull a job, when he lives in Brooklyn?”
 

“Maybe he’s smarter than he looks.”
 

“Most of these guys are short-term thinkers. They pick the nearest bodega.”

“We don’t know that he’s a two-bitter. If he was connected, that might explain… what happened.”

Say it
, I thought.
The cover-up
. I stood in frustration. “And now there’s no way to know.”

The words turned Bart into a marble statue.
 

“What, Bart?”

“I hard-copied the guy’s prints. After they were scanned. Before they waved me off. I wanted to be the one to nail the son-of-a-bitch.” He nodded to the bureau I had shoved him against. “Top drawer,” he said. “Taped up inside.”

I went to the bureau, opened the drawer and reached in. Sure enough, something was taped to the bottom of it. What I withdrew appeared to be a mini credit card.
 

Bart looked sick with remorse. “I take it out once in a while. To remind myself what a piece of shit I am.”

“What is it?”

“Deposit box key. First Union Federal, Alphabet City. Stuff you can use.”

He’d set up a survival cache, in case he had to run. He must have been truly terrified.
 

As I slid the card into my jacket, I knew I couldn’t hate him. My face must have softened the tiniest bit, because Bart looked more than grateful. He looked… released.

“Donner,” he whispered. “It was forty years ago. Can’t you let this thing go?”

I walked out the door. Halfway down the hall, I heard the racking sobs begin.

***

At the curb, I sucked in the cold night air, trying to clear my head. The expanse of sky through the Blister looked ersatz, heaven’s stars turned into cheesy accent lights on a designer firmament.
 

I was halfway across the street when the face of Bart’s building dissolved. Green energy swelled outward. Metric tons of matter were instantly vaporized. The blast wave picked me up and threw me through the air like a rag doll. I hit a Packard twenty feet away, the hood crumpling and the windshield imploding. Emerald debris fell like hailstones around me. I rolled behind the vehicle. The drop to the cement stole my breath. The air had become charged. Jade electricity danced down my sleeves. I batted at the St. Elmo’s fire until I realized it didn’t burn. The chrome hubcap by my face shimmered.