I told him the move I planned for Trader.
You’ll go in hard, he said. Like I know you can.
Like you know I can, Colonel Tom.
Freestyle, Mike, he said. Flake him. I don’t care if he spills and walks. I just want to hear him say it.
To hear him say it, Colonel Tom?
I just want to hear him say it.
With Silvera or Overmars, you could always tell when a case was beating them down: They started shaving every other day. That, plus the usual symptoms of being wide awake for a month. Pretty soon they’re like the guys gathered around the braziers in the stockyards sidings—ghosts of a Depression section gang, lit by the flares… Colonel Tom’s cheeks were smooth. His cheeks were smooth. But he couldn’t take a razor to the brown smears of pain beneath his eyes which were deepening and hardening like scabs.
“Don’t buy all that Ivy League, Skull and Bones bullshit. The soft voice. The logic. Like even he thinks he’s too good to be true. There’s evil in him, Mike. He…”
Falling silent. His head vibrated, his head actually trembled to terrible imaginings. Imaginings he wanted and needed to be true. Because any outcome, yes, any at all, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, cannibalism, marathon tortures of Chinese ingenuity, of Afghan lav-ishness, any outcome was better than the other thing. Which was his daughter putting the .22 in her mouth and pulling the trigger three times.
Colonel Tom was now going to lay something on me. I could feel it coming. He roused himself. Briskly but also ditheringly, he leafed through a binder: Looked like a lab report out of the ME’s office. I wondered how Colonel Tom was monitoring and controlling the post-mortem findings as they came in piece by piece.
“Jennifer tested positive for ejaculate, vaginal and oral,” he said—and it was costing him to go on looking my way. “Oral, Mike. You see what I’m saying?”
I nodded. And of course I was thinking, Jesus, this really is fucked up.
Eight days on and Jennifer Rockwell is still laid out like a banquet dish in the walk-in freezer on Battery and Jeff.
March 13
Time for Trader.
My first thought was this: I’d send Oltan O’Boye and maybe Keith Booker up to Trader’s department at CSU, in a black-and-white, and have them jerk him out of a seminar. Yeah, with lights but no sirens. Have them yank him out of the lecture hall or wherever, and bring him downtown. The hitch was we’d be up against probable cause way too early. And whatever Colonel Tom thought we had, we didn’t have probable cause.
So I just called his room on campus. At six a.m.
“Professor Faulkner? Detective Hoolihan. Homicide. I want you downtown today at Criminal Investigations. As soon as you humanly can.”
He said what for?
“I’ll send the wagon. You like me to send the wagon?”
He said what for?
And I just said I wanted to straighten something out.
In truth it’s perfect for me.
Around eight in the morning, and we’re three hours into a blizzard that has upped and hurled itself down from Alaska. You got hail, sleet, snow, and spume skimmed off from the ocean, plus face-slapping gouts of iced rain. Trader will be trudging along from the subway stop or clambering out of a cab down there on Whitney. He’ll look up, for shelter, at the Lubianka of CID. Where he will find a succession of drenched and dirty linoleum corridors, a slow-climbing, heavy-breathing elevator, and, in Homicide, a forty-four-year-old police with coarse blonde hair, bruiser’s tits and broad shoulders, and pale blue eyes in her head that have seen everything.
And Trader will find hardly anybody else. It’s Tuesday. In Homicide the zoo contains only a smattering of witnesses, suspects, malefactors and perpetrators. The weekend, which for us is just a code word meaning a regular bender of citywide crime, has come and gone. And there is also the bad weather: Bad weather is the big police. For company, while he waits in the zoo, Trader will have only the husband, the father and the pimp of a bludgeoned prostitute, and a Machine executioner (presently top of the money list) called Jackie Zee who has been asked downtown to elaborate on an alibi.