trade. This isn’t just a battle for territory within the underworld,
and we’d be making a big mistake if we tried to handle it the same way
we’d handle an honest-to-God gang war.”
“What else?” Gresham asked.
“Well,” she said. “I think we ought to dig into this Carver Hampton’s
background, see what we can turn up about him. Maybe he and Lavelle are
in this together.”
“No,” Jack said. “Hampton wasn’t faking when he told me he was
terrified of Lavelle.”
“How did Lavelle know precisely the right moment to call that pay
phone?” Rebecca asked. “How did he know exactly when you’d be passing
by it? One answer is that he was in Hampton’s shop the whole time you
were there, in the back room, and he knew when you left.”
“He wasn’t,” Jack said. “Hampton’s just not that good an actor.”
“He’s a clever fraud,” she said. “But even if he isn’t tied to Lavelle,
I think we ought to get men up to Harlem this evening and really scour
the block with the pay phone . . . and the block across the
intersection from it. If Lavelle wasn’t in Hampton’s shop, then he must
have been watching it from one of the other buildings along that street.
There’s no other explanation.”
Unless maybe his voodoo really works, Jack thought.
Rebecca continued: “Have detectives check the apartments along those two
blocks, see if Lavelle is holed up in one. Distribute copies of the
photograph of Lavelle.
Maybe someone up there’s seen him around.”
“Sounds good to me,” Gresham said. “We’ll do it.”
“And I believe the threat against Jack’s kids ought to be taken
seriously. Put a guard on them when Jack can’t be there.”
“I agree,” Gresham said. “We’ll assign a man right now.”
“Thanks, Captain,” Jack said. “But I think it can wait until morning.
The kids are with my sister-in-law right now, and I don’t think Lavelle
could find them. I told her to make sure she wasn’t being followed when
she picked them up at school. Besides, Lavelle said he’d give me the
rest of the day to make up my mind about backing off the voodoo angle,
and I assume he meant this evening as well.”
Gresham sat on the edge of his desk. “If you want, I can remove you
from the case. No sweat.”
“Absolutely not,” Jack said.
“You take his threat seriously?”
“Yes. But I also take my work seriously. I’m on this one to the bitter
end.”
Gresham lit another cigarette, drew deeply on it.
“Jack, do you actually think there could be anything to this voodoo
stuff?”
Aware of Rebecca’s penetrating stare, Jack said, “It’s pretty wild to
think maybe there could be something to it. But I just can’t rule it
out.”
“I can,” Rebecca said. “Lavelle might believe in it, but that doesn’t
make it real.”
“What about the condition of the bodies?” Jack asked.
“Obviously,” she said, “Lavelle’s using trained animals.”
“That’s almost as far-fetched as voodoo,” Gresham said.
“Anyway,” Jack said, “we went through all of that earlier today. About
the only small, vicious, trainable animal we could think of was the
ferret. And we’ve all seen Pathology’s report, the one that came in at
four-thirty. The teeth impressions don’t belong to ferrets.
According to Pathology, they don’t belong to any other animal Noah took
aboard the ark, either.”
Rebecca said, “Lavelle’s from the Caribbean. Isn’t it likely that he’s
using an animal indigenous to that part of the world, something our
forensic experts wouldn’t even think of, some species of exotic lizard
or something like that?”
“Now you’re grasping at straws,” Jack said.
“I agree,” Gresham said. “But it’s worth checking out, anyway. Okay.
Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Can you explain how I knew that call from Lavelle
was for me? Why was I drawn to that pay phone?”
Wind stroked the windows.
Behind Gresham’s desk, the ticking of the wall clock sudddenly seemed
much louder than it had been.
The captain shrugged. “I guess neither of us has an answer for you,
Jack.”
“Don’t feel bad. I don’t have an answer for me, either.”
Gresham got up from his desk. “All right, if that’s it, then I think