The Book of 21 (24 page)

John thought about it, the book was circumstantial evidence at best. It was easy enough to claim anyone could have used that name. It proved nothing about Shalby’s involvement, and John knew it.

“Look, John, these folks will hunt you down until you either give them what they want or they pull it off your dead body. You found something at Hallman’s yesterday. Just give it to me and disappear. Just walk away.”

John raised an eyebrow. He knew that Shalby was playing good-cop. John had played good-cop enough to know that the message, “Just give me what I need and you can walk away,” really meant, “Just give me what I need, and then I can fuck you in your ass.” He stared at Shalby, and then he knew, that Shalby knew he knew.

It was then that several things happened in sequence. The phone rang and caused John to turn slightly in surprise. The distraction gave Shalby the opportunity to grow a set of testicles, and he performed a classic football tackle.

John fell backward and felt his body pinched between the floor and Shalby. A sharp pain stabbed into his side. He recovered and looked up to see Shalby reaching for the old finger-crank phone.

Shalby raised the heavy old phone with both hands, ready to smash it into John’s head, while his wide-eyed, snarling face glared downward.

“No!” John roared. He jammed the gun in the man’s ribs and squeezed off a round.

The bullet ripped through Shalby and lifted him off John. He fell onto his back a few feet away.

A nauseating sucking sound emanated from Shalby’s chest, and his hands groped at the hole, feebly trying to plug it. He gave John a helpless and childlike look; they both knew he was bleeding out. Shalby then looked into the distance with a confused grimace.

“It’s all really bullshit in the end, John,” he burbled through a mouthful of blood. He looked like he was about to cry, and then, went limp. A pale blue hue washed over him, as a puddle of crimson formed on the floor around him.

For some reason, tears started to form in John’s eyes. Maybe it was watching Shalby die. Maybe it was just fatigue. Maybe it was the fact that he had been so close to learning
something
, but once again, learned nothing. Maybe it was the fact that John was worried he would go out the same way; not with a sucking chest wound, but with the realization that his entire life had been a miserable load of meaningless bullshit that he never took the time to change.

John sucked a deep breath and tried to gather himself. He knew the neighbors had to hear the shot. That meant he needed to get out of there. He made his way back to the kitchen, slipped out the back door, and hobbled down the steps to the alleyway.

Chapter 29:
On the Road Again

John made his way around the front of the house and found a crowd gathering at Shalby’s front door. They asked each other whether they heard a gunshot, even though they knew the answer. No one in the crowd, however, took notice of the tottering bum limping away.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a tall man in a business suit knocking on Shalby’s front door. A woman barked, “Be careful!” Another woman held her hand to her gaping mouth.

John pulled the lapel on his stinking coat around his neck and continued his slow hobble.

For two blocks, the sight of Shalby’s dying face kept creeping back into his mind. He knew he had to let it go; he told himself the bastard would have killed him without a second thought. The idea that the situation was “kill or be killed” did little to keep the vision from John’s mind.

John realized that Frank Peluno had the same look on his face when the heart attack hit him, and he wondered whether everyone died with the same look. He considered that it could just be a common trait of cops, but then he wondered if it was just people who wished they had done more with their lives. John realized that he fit both those categories.

Tears began to form in his eyes again, and he told himself that he did not have time to become a little girl right now. He tried to find a rationalization for the cause of his emotions. Finally, he decided to make himself believe that it was hard to watch someone he worked with, and thought was an ally, go down like that. He took a deep breath and let himself believe the lie.

Looking for some task to occupy his mind, he decided to take the risk of checking his voicemail and talking to Harry. There would be few repercussions from using the cell at this point; he was on the move and would only be on the grid a few seconds. In the end, he simply needed to hear something from Harry that might give him some hope.

John brought the cell phone out from underneath the stinking hobo-coat. As he stood at a crosswalk, waiting for the green light, he noticed a man in a business suit on his immediate left. The man was staring at John, or at least the odd picture of a bum with a cell phone.

John extended his hand and grunted, “Any spare change? The roaming charges are killing me.”

The man stopped waiting for the light and headed toward a bagel shop.

John had a hunch that the man did not really want a bagel. He grunted loudly after the man, “Really, who expects to see roaming charges in this day and age? Help me out, man.”

The man disappeared into the shop as if he had not heard anything.

After snickering a bit, John waited for the voicemail cue to play on the cell phone. The first message, from Harry, said, “John, call me. It’s all gone; everything I collected is gone.” John’s heart sank. Harry was his only hope; he knew now, that he was screwed.

The second voicemail was from Kim. It said, simply, “John, call me.” She sounded annoyed at having to talk to voicemail, as usual. John surmised that probably meant she was fine, and perhaps came home to find her apartment slightly disturbed from his visit. He hung up and headed back toward the diner. Based on his read of Kim’s terse message, he would wait to deal with her anger when things settled down.

As he limped along, the phone rang in his hand. He looked at the caller ID to see it held the name Amy Ritter. He grimaced, and pressed the button to answer the call. He then put the phone to his ear, and said, “Damn it, Amy, I told you to use the diner phone.”

“
Sorry
. I didn’t see any reason to bother anyone, since I had my cell phone here. I was worried about you,
OK
?”

John rolled his eyes. He knew that her desire to not bother Effie for the phone could get her killed. “No, it’s not OK. We don’t know who we’re dealing with here. If they have the right connections, they can locate you. Right now, they can pinpoint you. Turn the cell phone off.”

“Should I get rid of it?”

“No! We may need it, just turn it off. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“OK, bye.”

The words “get rid of it” resonated in his mind. John looked down at his new cell phone, and then to a blue pickup at the stoplight. The bed of the truck was loaded with furniture. The driver stared at the red light. Leaving the cell phone on, he limped up to the stoplight and dropped the phone into the pickup’s bed.

John thought this was sheer genius.
If
these people
could
track him, a live cell phone in the back of a random pickup might lead them on a goose chase and buy him a little time. Even if not, it was no loss, since they still had Amy’s cell.

He turned the corner, and through the window of the diner, he saw Amy paying the bill.

He considered what he should tell her: Kim had very little from the autopsy, Harry had
nothing
left to help them with, and Shalby took what he knew to the grave.

John stopped and thought about that phrase a second. He had heard it somewhere else recently. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out Hallman’s papers and flipped to Trumbull’s letter.

John mumbled to himself, “Trumbull said he arranged it so Evan Fields took the secret of the lock to his grave. It was literal; he wanted to convey the fact that Fields
took
it to his
grave
.”

John flipped through the stack. It had been in front of him all along. The exhumation request told him that Hallman had made the connection.

John knew where he had to go next.

Chapter 30:
Harry Goes to Work

“I have the letter,” Fanelli bellowed as he slapped a manila envelope onto Harry’s desk. “It was in her out box—in an interdepartmental mail envelope.”

Harry thought about that fact. If someone could drop a letter in her outbox, that person either worked in the building or could get into the building with limited risk.

“Is there any way you can trace this to a printer?” Fanelli panted.

“Yes, but that will take time. Moreover, we don’t even know if it was printed in the building.” After a few seconds of silence, Harry continued, “I have a better idea. George, I want you to run a string search on some computers in the city government; check the temp files.”

“Harry, um… we’d need a warrant to do that, legally,” George stammered as his eyes darted between Fanelli and Harry.

“As far as I’m aware,” Fanelli growled, “this is a case of hot pursuit.” He eyed George over, and he knew what would work on the little technician. “Now, do you know enough to do it, or do I need to get someone in here that understands computers?”

“Well,” George sneered, “since the government was stupid enough to buy the operating system it did, I suppose I could break into any machine on the network in a matter of minutes.” He walked over and plopped down at the terminal. “It may take some time to search through all of them, though.”

Harry shook his head and countered, “Not if we guess right. A new lieutenant replaced Murphy and then suspended John; who is he?”

George began typing, and asked, “Is he in the Roundhouse?”

“Yes.”

“Homicide division,” George murmured to himself. “Ah, it looks like Murphy is still in the address list, but there is a Lieutenant Sanford on the duty roster with the same phone number as Murphy’s.” He clicked a few buttons. “I have his workstation ID.” With a few keystrokes, George brought up a box on the computer screen, and said, “OK, I’m in.”

Harry handed George the letter and directed him toward a string that would be the perfect search phrase. It was long enough, and unique enough, that it would bring up few other documents that contained the same series of words. “Use line four, it looks like there is a double-space—”

“I’ve got it,” George interrupted.

Fanelli leaned in, and asked, “Wait, what if he never saved it, or he deleted it?”

“You need to understand how things work,” George laughed. “The word processor that we use creates a file on the disk every time the person types something. It’s a temporary file that the computer uses to compensate for its
constant
crashing. That way, it can pull the document back up so you can recover your work. The file gets deleted when you are done, but deletion only really removes the first character. It’s just enough for the system not to recognize it as a file. The rest of the document sits on the drive in full—like a little seed waiting for water to bring it back to life. So you just run a scan for files that can be undeleted and then scan those for a string that is unique.” A beep erupted from the terminal, and George said, “Nothing—the thing’s clean.”

“Now what?” Fanelli probed, rubbing his forehead. “We scan the whole network?”

Harry shook his head. “Not yet. John got to the scene late because he wasn’t supposed to take the call. Who was the detective on call? Who should have shown up for the call last night?”

Fanelli looked at George, and directed, “See if you can access the duty roster and—”

George cut Fanelli off by raising one hand, while he continued to type with the other. “Already there—it was a Benjamin Shalby.” After a few more strokes on the keys, George chuckled, “He’s not on his system. This should be easy.” George sent the computer looping through files on the machine, leaned back in the chair, and crossed his arms.

After a few seconds, the computer beeped once.

“Bingo,” George uttered. He leaned forward in his chair and smiled. “We have a match. There’s the temp file, and the saved file too; it’s not even deleted. What a moron.”

“Does the duty roster show Shalby on duty today?” asked Fanelli.

George tapped a few commands into the terminal. “No, looks like this is his day off.”

“Pull up his address. I’ll make a call and get a warrant to pick him up.”

While George offered Fanelli an unwanted map to Shalby’s place, Harry dialed John again, just as he had done three times since Kim’s call. After four rings, Harry heard the click that indicated a redirect of the call to John’s voicemail. To Harry, who was trained to notice small things, this was significant; he knew that if the phone was off, or if John had no signal, he would have been sent to voice mail without hearing more than one ring.

“Hey,” Harry beckoned to the two other men. “McDonough’s on the grid. George, can you tap into E911 from here to find him?”

George proudly grinned, and sighed, “Yeah, but it will take a few minutes.”

Chapter 31:
A Shopping Trip

John limped across the street toward DiFlore’s Diner. Upon reaching the curb, he tossed the foul-smelling coat into a green wastebasket and hobbled into the eatery.

The girl behind the register handed over Amy’s change with a smile, and said, “I hope you two have a nice day.”

“Thanks, you too,” Amy returned with a bright smile. Turning to John, she winked and looked him over, “Hey! Is everything…” Amy’s gaze fixed on his shoes and her happy expression suddenly went blank.

John looked down to see tiny droplets of blood sprayed on his shins and shoes—the only thing that stuck out from under the bum’s clothing. Apparently, John had caught some of the flying debris when the bullet blew through Shalby. He reached out to Amy and gently pushed upward on her chin, so that her eyes met his. After smiling widely, he shook his head once, and with a cheerful voice, he asked, “So, are you ready?”