CHAPTER THREE

Early the next morning, Guthrie picked Vasquez up in front of her parents’ tenement apartment on Henry Street. The traffic on the Lower East Side was as thick as cool syrup on the streets and on the sidewalks as the workingmen walked to catch their trains. The tenements emerged from darkness as shades of gray, sparkling slowly in the sunshine. On the way downtown, the detectives drank coffee, and Vasquez finished waking. She aimed a few scowls at the little man while she searched for the bottom of her cup.

“Viejo, that was crazy to let the drunk get away,” she said.

“Maybe,” he replied. “But I need some convincing about him.” He parked in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, a few blocks from Police Plaza. “We heard enough details to check his story against the newspapers, and we could save getting excited by finding out first if the NYPD talked to him. Right? That works out, we’ll talk to him again.”

Vasquez grunted; the little detective had good reasons, but reasons wouldn’t catch a drunk. The Lower East sheltered plenty of drunks and crackheads. She knew enough of them. They could get low and dodge cops better than anybody but a priest. The detectives locked the old Ford and walked, pausing to wait on the south side of the plaza.

Downtown Manhattan filled with people while they waited. Trains and taxis poured forth rushing torrents of busy professionals. Women held purses clamped beneath their arms and phones to their ears. Men uniformed in dark suits and wing tips wielded briefcases and folios like shields. Offices and cubicles awaited them, each with an appointed place at the end of the scramble of rush hour.

The detectives waited, as invisible as lampposts, while the rush slowed to a trickle. A tall young man wearing a dark blue NYPD jogging suit leaped from a taxi on the south side of Police Plaza. He rushed the entrance like a linebacker chasing a ball carrier, but stopped suddenly when he saw Guthrie.

“Yo, Guth! I should’ve known you’d wait here. You need a pass—” He gawked at Vasquez, pulling off wraparound sunglasses. “Geez! How old are you? Twelve?”

The young Puerto Rican laughed, looking up. He towered over her, but he still didn’t have a beard.

“Tommy, I know you’re a blond, but seriously,” Guthrie said. “She’s Rachel Vasquez, and she’s, like, fourteen at least. Ask her if she wants to go roller-skating, why don’t you?”

“All right! Don’t get upset, Guth, come on.”

“This’s Tommy Johnson,” the little detective said. “I changed a few of his diapers when he wasn’t so big—his folks are from Ohio. Now he’s some hotshot engineer who plays with the chemistry sets they keep in there.”

“I’m just a tech,” he said with a shrug. “Guthrie kind of helped me find a job while I’m finishing school.”

The young man secured passes, then ushered them through the glowing marble lobby. The elevators opened into a different atmosphere—less impressive but more human, without any feel of their being watched. Glass walls in the work spaces allowed an illusion of depth, but the sight lines were cut by moving people, banks of tables and machinery, freezers, racks, and darkened spaces. The ISU processed evidence for the NYPD. Almost all of the investigative threads in the city passed through the ISU lab.

Tommy Johnson’s boss was Beth Whitcomb, a first-grade in her mid-forties. Locks of dark hair peeked from behind her ears, escaping from her paper cap. She sighed impatiently when she saw the young man and his visitors.

“You’re who wants a walk-through on Bowman?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Guthrie replied. “The papers haven’t had much, and now that you have a perp—”

“About a perp, I’d say maybe,” Whitcomb interjected. “Anyway, we’re off the record and we’re not talking about a perp, only a crime. Only this crime. What we do is about the crime, not the suspects. Right, Tommy?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the young man intoned dully.

She smiled. “Good. Now you’re having all the fun I’m having, and that makes us even.” She waved them all into her office. Tommy closed the door. Beyond the glass on the other side, a long table held a bank of microscopes. Two techs worked repetitively at sample cases. Faint chemical odors and ozone mixed, giving her office a spicy smell.

“We have a bullet and we have a gun,” Whitcomb said. “That’s the end result, but not the order they came to us.” She opened a laptop on her cluttered desk. “Here’s my time line. On the twenty-fourth, we receive a body, petite Caucasian female, blond/blue, a well-kept Jane Doe—probably not a runaway. Her face is marked up with undarkened contusions. Nice clothes but no other personal effects. Two bullet wounds. One wound is ragged. The other is entry only. We work the body up as a homicide. At the scene, we find a small amount of blood. The body may’ve been dumped.”

Vasquez scowled at Guthrie, thinking, the drunk vagrant is three for three already.

“Something to share with the class?” Whitcomb asked. “No? Okay, on the twenty-fifth we have a provisional ID. Our Jane Doe may be Camille Bowman, a missing Columbia student. We confirm by one P.M. and move on to the ballistics. One bullet is battered; it entered the body and passed through, struck the ground, bounced, and reentered the body. That sequence explains the wound channel and the condition of the bullet. Trace from the scene entered the wound channel—she was shot in situ. Minor blood pooling under the body indicates the bullet was fired from above the prone body. That particular bullet pierced the heart twice, but it still wasn’t the fatal shot. The first shot killed her, and prevented bleeding. That bullet entered at the base of the neck on a plunging trajectory. The wound channel stopped at the diaphragm. We recovered a pristine bullet. Two bullets—one smashed and one clean, both forty-four caliber. This was a small woman. The forty-four was massive overkill. Her blood alcohol was point oh-two. No other chemicals.”

“What about the beating?” Guthrie asked.

“Some argument about that, but no disagreement that it was only a few blows shortly before TOD. Slapping or punching, no indication of a weapon. The contusions are too diffuse for a weapon—no edges or lines. This happened ten or twenty minutes before TOD.” She drew a long breath. “Negatives—no ligature marks, so she was never restrained. No sexual assault apparent. The only thing disturbed was her pockets—could be a robbery motive, that being speculation, but it was evident that something was removed from her possession.”

Whitcomb sighed and tapped keys on her laptop. “So, a few days, no significant trace, but we have a bullet. Early on the thirtieth, we receive a gun by warrant, a forty-four Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special five-shot, recently fired. We trace ballistics. The weapon is a perfect match for our clean bullet. We have the gun that fired the bullet—” She studied Vasquez. “You need some water? You look like you’re choking.”

The vagrant witness was four for four; the pistol was tiny. Vasquez knew because she carried the same pistol in .40 caliber. Guthrie glared at her, but it was too late.

“What the hell is going on?” Whitcomb demanded. “This is some sort of circus? Tommy?”

“Guth, what the hell?” the young man asked.

“Some people will be looking at this,” Guthrie said. “You already knew that when you pushed the first ballistics test up the list, right?”

Whitcomb slid Tommy Johnson a sharp glance. “I guess we’re done here,” she said. “Walk them out, Tommy; then come back up here.”

The elevator ride down was silent. Several times, Guthrie or Tommy Johnson started to speak but subsided before words broke out. Vasquez studied their reflections in the brushed stainless-steel elevator door. The two men were made from the same mold; even the way they held their heads when they brooded was similar. Vasquez kept quiet because she knew she’d screwed up. She had been excited. The NYPD didn’t need to know they had something to work from, because they weren’t on the same team. While the elevator was sinking, she realized the only worse thing she could’ve done was blurt out anything about the witness.

Outside, the morning was already warm. Traffic poured around Police Plaza. Guthrie and Tommy Johnson shook hands. “Don’t mind her,” the young man said. “She acts like my boss sometimes.” He glanced at Vasquez. “Maybe I’ll see you around, but it’ll probably be hot around here for a while.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Vasquez hurried after Guthrie before Tommy Johnson went inside. The little detective was marching fast toward Barclay Street, where he’d parked his old Ford. She brushed past a string of messengers to catch him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Guthrie shook his head. “That was on me, Rachel. I knew I might be putting him in a spot, having already talked with Inglewood, see? I just wanted more time. I wanted to get away with it. Now I gotta try to get in front of this mess with somebody else I know downtown.” He kept hurrying. The sidewalk crowds had a monotonous sameness. At the car, he tossed her the keys, then made a phone call.

They went down to the Battery and waited for the lunch hour in a shallow-lot fry shack called Tony’s Fillets. Guthrie gave the waitress a sawbuck for holding up a booth. They watched ferries plow across the harbor, and scanned the news clippings on the Net to see if the vagrant might have picked up his details from someone else. Tony’s filled up with a lunch crowd, and Guthrie ordered three platters and an extra lemonade, no ice.

Before the fish could cool, a dark-haired woman appeared suddenly at their table. She paused to study Vasquez, then gave a dismissive shake of her head before she sat down. Her hair was cut bluntly across her forehead, and she slipped off dark glasses, revealing blue eyes. She was pale and thickly built, while still having a waist she could show off with a slender belt. Her dark pantsuit proclaimed office drone, but her smile when she looked at Guthrie said hungry shark. “Hello, Clay,” she said.

“Sorry about the rush,” he said. “Monica, this’s Rachel Vasquez, my new operative.” He pushed a platter of fish across to her, and the glass of lemonade.

Monica shrugged, glancing again at Vasquez. She ate with neat, quick bites while Guthrie watched her. They laughed back and forth, not saying anything. Vasquez studied news clippings on her palmtop and ignored them almost as well as they ignored her. When she was done eating, Monica handed Guthrie a disc and ran her gleaming fingernails down his arm.

“All right already,” he said. “What’s on it?”

“Just the files on Bowman,” she replied. “The rest of that stuff is radioactive.” She smiled. “Actually, I rubbed my trail off on the captain of the one-nine—he’s a shit—but it was still too risky to try for the other stuff.”

Guthrie grunted.

“Don’t be like that, Clay,” she said, then paused. “You think they have the wrong man?”

“That’s what I get paid for,” he said.

Monica stood up and slid on her dark glasses. The little detective smiled. “You like that, huh?” she asked.

“As much as you like fish.”

“Meow,” she said before gliding out.

Guthrie tucked the disc into his pocket. “NYPD has something big going on,” he said. “Monica’s on the inside. She usually gets everything. I know they’re looking at Olsen for the Barbie dolls—that just makes sense—but without some details to examine, we’re gonna end up focusing on the Bowman murder.”

“How’s that a problem?” Vasquez asked.

“Maybe it ain’t,” Guthrie replied as he chased some catsup around his plate with a french fry. “I reckon it’ll keep me honest.”

After lunch, Guthrie called for an appointment with Olsen’s lawyer, James Rondell. The law firm had Wall Street offices, tucked among other elderly buildings holding aristocratic chins high beneath the shadows of the downtown skyscrapers. Reed, Whitaker & Down had a street entrance, with a lobby cut from marble polished to a mirror sheen. Thick walls produced an awesome quiet. The city seemed miles away.

Rondell’s office featured a window looking directly down onto Wall Street. Even without a partnership, he had arrived. Leather chairs, old wood, and molded plasterwork made the office smell like a gun club. Books marched along the walls, but the desk was bare of paper. The lawyer was an electronic worker. A desktop computer shared the blotter with an open laptop. James Rondell was neat and dark-haired, about midway into his thirties. He had a cleft chin and square jaw, unremarkable features, and a lean build wrapped in a charcoal suit.

Without preamble, he said, “George Livingston recommended you.” He struck quickly at the keyboard of his laptop. “I have to admit I have some qualms about using an outsider, but Henry Dallen is mostly good for watching old apartments and driving people back and forth. I need a sharp knife for this one.” He frowned at Vasquez.

Guthrie sat down and gestured for her to join him. The lawyer wasn’t going to waste breath on an invitation.

“You spoke with Olsen,” Rondell said. “Did he give you an angle?”

“He’s stunned, Mr. Rondell,” Guthrie said. “He might not be any use until after he settles down. Right now, though, I’m looking for an eyewitness it seems the NYPD missed on canvass.”

The lawyer’s attention focused on him. “You’re kidding?”

“Not so fast,” Guthrie said. “I had part of an interview before he spooked. That was enough to establish his bona fides—the number of shots, small heavy-caliber pistol, and he robbed the body—but he bolted without describing the shooter. The witness is a vagrant—street type. I have to run him down.”

The lawyer eased back in his chair. “So how long will you need to find him?”

Guthrie shrugged. The lawyer was disappointed, but a glance out the window seemed to encourage him. Like anyone else, he wanted things to be easy, but it didn’t get to him. He could look down on Wall Street. Rondell typed on his computer for a minute, nodded, and announced that a witness might not matter. For the moment, Olsen was charged only with Camille Bowman’s murder, but the media had their hearts set on an alignment with the other murders. If Olsen lacked alibis, he would probably be charged. Even without more charges, Rondell thought Olsen’s best chance at the moment was to angle for a deal. The lawyer didn’t see a bright outcome for Olsen on a plea of not guilty. If an eyewitness changed matters on the Bowman murder, they would still need to deal with the others afterward.

Guthrie asked for details on Olsen’s alibi, despite the fact that the NYPD had arrested him anyway. The lawyer tapped on his computer, then outlined his notes. Olsen was sitting with a drunk veteran named Philip Linney on the night of the murder. Linney was his alibi for several nights, but the NYPD tripped the vet up during an interview. The cell phones showed calls spanning days before and after the murder, but Linney admitted he’d been stinking drunk a lot of the time. The alibi was good until the NYPD zeroed in on the .44, and then it sank.

“Maybe it’s an angle,” Guthrie said after jotting in his notebook. “Along that same line, I want to see who gets Bowman’s trust fund. That’s motive, and maybe another suspect.”

Rondell’s mouth hardened into a grim line. “Camille was an only child,” he said. “Without checking, I’ll venture that her trust reverts to her parents, or someone higher up.” His fingers rapped out something on his laptop keyboard while he spoke.

The lawyer fell silent, but Guthrie outwaited the younger man without betraying impatience. Rondell’s annoyed glance didn’t deter him.

“I’ll put a number on it,” Rondell said finally. “I’m afraid the Bowmans left the city after the funeral. Dealing with the police was quite enough for them.” Unspoken, but implied by the lawyer’s tone, was a suggestion that someone owned a piece of the street they were on—including the buildings and everything in them.

“I got reasons,” Guthrie said.

“I’ll make the calls. It’ll be your business what you can do with it.”

After they were downstairs and had passed from the tomblike quiet of the marble lobby back into the city’s noise, Guthrie seemed to walk a bit taller. Some burden was gone. Around them, businesspeople rushed along on the sidewalk. Vasquez and the rumpled little detective didn’t match the surroundings. If they’d been raindrops, they wouldn’t have lasted long on Wall Street. They would’ve gone quickly to the darkness of the storm drains. Vasquez drove the old Ford back to the office.

*   *   *

They stopped working early that evening, and Guthrie drove Vasquez home. Henry Street was hot and crowded. Young people were in the street and on the sidewalks, listening to music that blared from parked cars, drinking, and throwing insults back and forth good-naturedly. The old people were on the fire escapes, and peeping from windows. Rachel’s middle brothers, Indio and Miguel, called the old ones “sky boxers,” like they were at Yankee Stadium, sitting above everyone and watching. The old people sat still, and the young people hustled back and forth below them in the street.

For Vasquez, that was the natural order of the universe, and so being still and quiet was the closest thing to being dead. Old people were still and quiet. That gave her trouble with the hours of watching, reading, and writing reports she did, working for Guthrie. Working on the new case made it seem not so pointless, suddenly, and Henry Street looked different. The young muchachos stared at her, like always, but didn’t say anything like always. She was singled out for silence, and that was because of her brothers. They were loco; nobody messed with them.

Vasquez paused on the stoop to enjoy the heat for a minute before she went inside. Papì had already swept the steps. He liked to come out and sit when the afternoon was nearly over. Inside, Mamì was cooking and talking on the phone in a hushed stream of Spanish. Some music was playing in the big bedroom; that was Papì.

When she came inside, the phone conversation paused in mid-phrase. That was an unmistakable signal. For good or ill, Mamì was talking about her. She set her palmtop down in the living room, atop the overloaded coffee table, then went into the kitchen. Mamì signaled her furiously when she came into sight, indicating the phone.

“Roberto has some good news,” she hissed, covering the mouthpiece with one small brown hand. “This is perfect, at just this time. You have to talk to him.”

Vasquez’s stomach churned. Her appetite disappeared, and she wished she was back at work. Even so, she took the phone. “Sí?” she said, unable to disguise her weariness.

“¿Cómo estás, Rachel?” Roberto asked. Her eldest brother always spoke Spanish to the family. Language was one of the few things he ever argued about with Papì.

“Ay, nothing. I just came home,” she replied.

“From work?”

“Yes.”

A pause stretched before snapping. Roberto was measuring his next sentence to see if it would come up short. He was the perfect one, Mamì’s white boy. He could spit English like a professor, but not to the family. Probably he needed a reminder that he was Puerto Rican, because he looked so much like Papì. He had golden-brown hair and eyes flecked with green and gold, just like Papì, and he shined even next to Rachel, who was next lightest, a splash of coffee in a cup of cream.

“I know you still haven’t signed up for school yet,” he said, “but I know from a friend at Fordham that they could waive preregistration. You could still get in for the fall semester.”

Vasquez turned so that she wouldn’t be facing her mother. She didn’t want to show how angry she was about needing to repeat what she had said since school ended. She was not going to college. The conversation had layers of stupid repetition, like an archaeological excavation. “I got a job, Roberto,” she said. “I’m not sitting at home being bad, you know.”

“I didn’t say that,” he insisted. “No one is saying that.”

Insinuations don’t count, Vasquez thought bitterly. Her family meant her to do what was expected, exactly the opposite of her other two brothers. Some jokes they made about that. Years before, they had dressed her up with a crown and called her “Princess,” and she was fine with that until she realized the crown was a ratty old pair of rolled-up underwear.

“Fordham has a satellite campus right in the city,” Roberto said. “You don’t have to ride up to the Bronx. You don’t even need to choose a major right away—mostly, freshman year is for mandatory courses.”

Vasquez wanted to scream. She had been hearing all of this from Papì since the beginning. He’d pushed her to take the tests. That was where she should have said no. Once she got the scores that would earn her a scholarship, a golden ticket that she didn’t want, her life started breaking apart under the jabs of insistence. “I have a job!” She darted a glance over her shoulder at Mamì, and repeated more softly, “I have a job.”

“Forget medicine, okay?” Roberto said soothingly. “I wouldn’t want to be a doctor, either. But that job, come on, Rachel, that’s not a job. What are you doing, typing? You’re wasting yourself. Being lazy is one thing, but hurting Mamì like this—”

“You don’t hear what I’m saying, Roberto. You don’t get it.” Vasquez was furious; she wanted to say ugly things, but she was neatly trapped. Roberto could provoke her however he wanted, because Mamì couldn’t hear him. She wasn’t so lucky. Angrily, she fired a bullet she had saved from the beginning. “You don’t even know what I’m getting paid, Roberto, for this job where maybe I do nothing.”

“It’s not worth your future,” he said, but more weakly, because she had hit him solidly. He turned it around quickly. “So? How much? How much is your life worth?”

She shrugged, biting back insults. How good would it feel to ask him what his dignity was worth? “Twelve hundred a week,” she said. “I’m not doing nothing, Roberto. It’s serious stuff, even if I don’t have it all figured out yet.”

“Twelve hundred? You could get that in an hour, Rachel.”

After twenty years of school, she thought, and laughed. “What hour you ever make twelve hundred, Roberto?”

“When did we start talking about me?” A barrio edge chilled his voice; the resemblance to Papì was uncanny. “What are you doing, then, that’s so important? That’s pushing you to the top of your profession? Typing? Polishing shoes?”

Vasquez flushed. “It’s confidential,” she said. She wasn’t allowed to talk about the cases, especially now that they had a case to talk about. Guthrie had made sure to drive that point home while he was driving her home.

The mess at the ISU lab that morning was fresh in her mind. They had a client to think about. Part of the pay was for confidentiality, especially for this client.

“You’re dropping down to lies now?” Roberto asked. “That’s where you’re at? A half-grown girl living at home, pretending she’s doing something—”

Vasquez handed the phone to her mother. “Tell him to shut up, Mamì,” she said. In her mother’s dark eyes she could see doubts warring with doubts.