Westermann lay in bed, a deluge of thoughts keeping him awake. They had a name now, Lenore, and a potential second front in the investigation, an alternative to the Uhuru Community. But his thoughts strayed to his problems. Why hadn’t he told Frings about the second girl? It was a stupid play, childish, petulant, desperate. It was only a matter of time, maybe even just a few hours, before Frings found out anyway. What had he been thinking? Asserting some control over the situation? Spite? He wished he could have it back; make a different decision. But what was done was done.
He was puzzled by Art Deyna’s reappearance. What the hell did it mean? Did Deyna have any idea what was going on? Had he seen enough to draw any conclusions? Couldn’t Frings keep the Gazette off his back?
He worried about how the location of the second body confirmed Grip’s theory about Lenore’s original resting place. He wasn’t surprised that Grip had figured it out. Westermann wondered where Grip would be now if he had grown up as wealthy as Westermann had, gone to good schools and then to university. But Grip had been raised by a grandmother in a hard-scrabble block of Praeger’s Hill, and he had done what the boys who hadn’t already fallen into habitual criminality did, he joined the army, and when his time was up, he became a cop.
Westermann got out of bed, looked around his empty apartment, wiped the sleep from his eyes.
In the shower, trying to slow his thoughts, he flashed back a decade, when the City had practically vibrated with possibility. After the assassination of Mayor Henry and the end of his successor’s term, the people of the City had found the good judgment to elect an aging millionaire named McCree. In hindsight, the golden age that McCree seemed to auger never quite came to pass. His reforms—changing the City government to a council with a figurehead mayor, modernizing the police force—had since slowly eroded under the relentless stream of government corruption.
Six councilors proved no less corrupt than one mayor. The police chief’s progressive notions had been crushed by the sheer volume of crime in the City. The System was one of the few remnants of this brief period of reform, and Westermann had come to defend it with grim resolve rather than the pride of success he felt it deserved.
Westermann had been pitched by the mayor and the Chief, personally, in the mayor’s office. Westermann was what the new City was all about: innovating, taking advantage of the most original thinking. He would be a big part of the City’s renaissance.
How could he refuse the chance to see his theory, created in the halls of the Tech, tested in the real world? But he hadn’t wanted to sit at a desk studying stats, putting pins in maps. That was something that people hadn’t seen at first, his wanting to be a part of the action. The brass fast-tracked his training. He’d learned the craft during the day, and at night he’d worked with statisticians and cop brass to figure out how the System would work. They needed a couple years of stats to create a plan, so they’d started compiling.
Kraatjes had struggled to pull together a small squad of detectives who were willing to work for Westermann. Some refused the assignment. Others undermined the work or quietly boycotted, putting in empty hours. Eventually Westermann and Kraatjes sifted these people out, and the men that remained were willing to work with Westermann. Some did this because their pensions were coming up and they didn’t want to make waves; some because they really believed the innovation that the System represented. Morphy was willing because he didn’t give a shit about much and found a certain plea sure in being associated with the least popular man on the force. Grip liked working for one of the rare cops who he considered at least as smart as himself. And Grip was very smart, which was why Westermann lay awake, staring at the topography of his ceiling, worried that his deception would be undone by one of his own men.