The Snow Angel (10 page)

“So what's your best theory?” yet another cop asked. Demarest started to answer, but the cop interrupted: “I'd like to hear it from Chief Slaughter.”

Slaughter took the mike, ignoring Mosely and Demarest, both angry. “We still believe it's a ransom job,” he said. “We're guessing the kidnappers think the family's rich, because the kid was a TV star.” He caught himself: “Is a TV star.”

”A local actor doesn't make as much as you might think,” Easterly added. “This isn't Hollywood.”

“Our guess is they're delaying to build up pressure,” Slaughter said, “so they'll get everything they're after.” He looked at Demarest pointedly. “Of course it's all speculation. No one in this room has a crystal ball.” The tension between them was apparent to everyone in the room.

Easterly took the mike again: “Our M.O. analysts have been working all night, running computer checks on everyone in the tri-state area who ever was even suspected of kidnapping. And we have the boy's picture in every radio car in the county.”

“So what do we do?” asked one exasperated Homicide cop.

“The same thing you've been doing.” On impulse, she picked up a blown-up crime-scene photograph of Darryl's snow angel. She held it high, so every cop in the room could see it. “Hit the streets and turn over every rock you find.”

K
ane drove out the Interstate to the headquarters of the White Brotherhood. It was a farm in the north end of the county, far from the city limits and out of radio range. Once more, as he preferred it, Kane was completely on his own. If he got in a jam, he'd have to rely on his cell phone.

Technically theAnti-Terrorism Squad—andthe FBI—hadjurisdiction over political extremists. But the White Brotherhood overlapped politics and organized crime. As a gang dedicated to eradicating the black race, the Whites qualified as “political.” But everyone in law enforcement knew they financed their operations with gun and methamphetamine trafficking. Thus they also qualified as a major organized crime ring.

The Brotherhood was born as a prison gang, a self-defense group for white convicts locked behind the walls with hate-filled blacks. The penal system was their only recruiting turf. The Whites wouldn't admit anyone who hadn't been in prison.

As a result, this tribe was far more dangerous even than the right-wing militia groups springing up all over the nation. Most of those people were pussies, in the view of the White Brothers, emotional weaklings
who needed assault rifles to prove their manhood and anti-government ideology to justify their own failures in life.

The Whites, on the other hand, didn't need to prove a thing. All they needed was an outlet for their racial hatred. A widely-publicized study recently claimed that most White Brothers had been abused children, needing a scapegoat, someone to justify their rage.

What crap,
Kane mused as he left the city behind.
Lots of people are abused as children and don't become thugs.

As he drove, Kane reflected on an animated argument he once had with Billy about that very subject, during one of his brother's paroles. Inside Statesville Prison, Billy had gotten chummy with the White Brotherhood's founder, a psychopath named Eric Klemmer.
Charismatic,
that had been Billy's description of Klemmer.

After his release, Billy had told Ralph that he himself was flirting with the idea of becoming a White Brother. Ralph had told him he was crazy. The Whites were neo-Nazi bullies. He and Billy had fought about it. A short time later, Billy violated his parole, and not long after that he was dead.

Kane again wondered about his dream last night. Except for the girl in Saigon, he rarely remembered details of his dreams. But now his brother seemed to be reaching out to him.
That's weird, fucking
weird
.
And Kane couldn't stop thinking about Eric Klemmer.

So, after this morning's briefing, he approached Roberta Easterly to tell her about a hunch he had. He did not disclose that it had come to him as the result of a dream.

“I'm thinking it's possible the kidnappers are prison pals,” he said. “A white guy and a black guy normally don't caper together, unless they have history with each other. Prison is a logical place for criminals to get that kind of history.”

Easterly considered that for a long moment. “Could be,” she said finally.

Then he told her about Klemmer. “This guy's wired into the entire penal system,” Kane said. “His people are so racist they just might keep track of convicts who cross color lines. And he was a friend of my brother's.”

“It's worth a shot,” she shrugged. “Nothing else is turning up. Play on his bigotry.”

Now, twenty miles out of the city, Kane started second-guessing
himself. This felt like a huge waste of time, chasing a lead that had come to him in his sleep. But he couldn't think of anything else to do in the cause of saving Darryl Childress.

He reached in the glove box and took out his flask. He belted down two huge gulps, finishing the bottle. Then he got off the freeway at the next exit, in search of a liquor store.

Kane's prison theory had triggered a new line of thinking for Easterly. The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. She asked Jablonski to locate Ike Bell.

In the meantime, she was summoned to yet another high-level meeting. This time it was in the Press Relations Office. The meeting was a background session for the city's “media,” preparing them for the end of the news embargo. Byron Slaughter was conspicuously absent.

As the news crews were assembling, Easterly stood watching the self-involved reporters smiling their phony smiles at each other. They all had been given photographs of Darryl. But, she suspected, there wasn't a “journalist” in the room who genuinely gave a damn about the kid.

Easterly despised these people. She remembered when the city was blessed with some really good police reporters, all of whom worked for newspapers, not television. When she was a brand-new detective, the city supported not one but three daily papers. In those days, there was arm's-length respect between the professionals of both trades. The cops even tolerated reporters digging into police wrongdoing, as long as they got their facts right.

But that was twenty years ago, before the word “media” had been invented, before real-life violence had become entertainment. It was before the sound-bite mentality of the illiterates who ran television news, whose credo was “if it bleeds it leads.” It was a time when a beat reporter actually knew the locations of the precinct stations, before hacks like these took to calling themselves “journalists.”

Christ, I'm getting old. Remember what David says: “bend with the times, girl, or get left behind.”

One of the reporters spotted Easterly. She was a young white female named Nanci York, the newest pretty face at Channel 3, just arrived from
a station in Cincinnati. York approached Easterly privately. “Inspector, my sources tell me a lot of civil rights are being violated in this search for the boy.”

Easterly was taken aback by the question. She was in no mood for this, not now. She answered curtly, through clenched teeth: “That boy's civil rights were violated by being kidnapped.”

York started to write that down. Easterly held up her hand: “If you quote me I'm going to take that notebook and shove it up your ass, one page at a time.” While York stared in disbelief, Easterly walked away, afraid of her own further reactions.

She crossed the room and stood near Jefferson Mosely who was deep in conversation with a sycophantic young lieutenant named Dunsmore. Easterly knew Dunsmore's type well. He was a squint.

“Squint” was a derisive term for a career police bureaucrat, an “inside” officer who spends as little time as possible out on the dangerous streets. Squints work their way into administrative jobs, where they can make rank fast because they are in a position to play the right political cards. Real cops are thus disadvantaged in promotional competition. As a result, squints often wind up running police departments—Mosely himself being a prime example.

Easterly was close enough to hear Dunsmore inform the chief that last night's felony numbers were the lowest in years. “It must be the weather,” Dunsmore was saying.

“Don't say that to the press,” Mosely replied. “Find a way to get some mileage out of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Link it to our increased Christmas patrols at the shopping malls.”

“Sir, last night the malls closed at six.”

“Well, figure out something, Lieutenant,” Mosely said. “That's what we're paying you for.”

“Yes, sir,” said the squint.

Then Mosely noticed Easterly listening. He smiled self-consciously. “Crime seems to be going down, Inspector. That's good news, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir,” she said cynically, “that's good news.”

This asshole's an even bigger whore than I thought.

B
ell stood in front of Easterly's desk, awaiting her return. He idly scanned the pictures and awards on her wall. There were no staged, happy-faced photos with dignitaries or politicians. This woman was for real.

After several minutes, Easterly walked in hurriedly, her face furrowed. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she told Bell.

“Yes, ma'm.”

“Detective, do you have any informants inside the Black Liberation Family?”

“They're political,” Bell said. “That's outside my turf.”

“That's not what I asked you.”

Bell thought for a moment. “There's a couple of gangbangers who joined the BLF in prison. But they're not exactly friendlies. I'm the one who put them there.”

“Someone has a theory that our salt-and-pepper team might have hooked up with each other in prison. Do you think your customers could find out something about that?”

Bell rubbed the back of his neck. “One of them does owe me a favor.”

“Offer money if you need to, up to a thousand bucks from the confidential fund—if the information pans out.”

“I'll try, Inspector. But I wouldn't hold my breath. These people don't like us.”

“Do what you can,” she said.

“Yes, ma'm.” Bell saluted and walked out.

K
ane knew he was being photographed the moment he pulled up to the concertina-wire fence surrounding the sprawling White Brotherhood compound. The surveillance vehicle was a telephone company van, parked a hundred yards down the unpaved road. He assumed the watchers were feds—FBI, most likely, or maybe ATF or
DEA. Or maybe a joint task force. Their van sat right out in the open, where they could take clear pictures of anyone visiting the Whites. It also exposed them to any sunlight that might randomly pop through the clouds.

But there would be no sunshine this day. Huge black clouds were again gathering in the north. More heavy snow was on the way, of that there was no doubt. Kane knew well the discomfort of the agents inside that van. In the early days, before he had been made a pariah, Kane himself had sat on countless such “plants,” and been paired with innumerable partners from his own department as well as other agencies.

Kane regarded intelligence stakeouts as the most boring work in all of law enforcement, except for maybe paper-shuffling admin jobs. You freeze your ass off, improvise how to relieve yourself, and sometimes spend hours cooped up with insufferable pricks eating smelly sandwiches. If you're lucky enough to be teamed with righteous guys who won't rat you off, maybe you can drink a little beer. That helps with the cold and boredom.

And sometimes, like these guys, you do nothing to hide your presence. You make sure the dirtbags know they're being watched. Inducing paranoia—one of the few remaining joys of police work.

However, this poses an obvious problem. No one will caper if they know you're watching. To make a case, you need an undercover operative, or a snitch, or a flipped witness, or a wiretap. With an open surveillance, you'll never catch anyone committing a crime.
It's all just a big game, around and around, endlessly.

Kane was certain these particular watchers knew who he was. Cloak-and-dagger operations are a small, arcane sub-specialty within the police world. Everyone in it knows everyone else, at least by reputation.

Perversely, Kane enjoyed fucking with other cops. As he got out of the Pontiac, he waved to the faceless agents. They would go nuts speculating why Detective III Ralph Kane had shown up here. Who knows, they might even open a corruption case. By then, of course, he would be dead and buried.

Amused by that scenario, Kane lifted the telephone at the gate. He had called ahead, so Eric Klemmer knew he was coming. At first Klemmer had been hesitant about seeing him. But he couldn't overcome his curiosity about Billy Kane's big brother. Now one of Klemmer's disciples buzzed him in, instructing him to follow the left fork up the hill
to the farmhouse.