Having been evicted from the safe house by Director Douchebag, we regrouped at the precinct to form our action plan for finding and rescuing Leo.
Once again, we found ourselves sitting in Cap’s office, awaiting a monumental tongue lashing. Cap had told us to meet him there. But he was late, damn him. We couldn’t afford to waste time.
Rico, bursting at the seams with his own private agenda, didn’t bother to wait for Cap.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Nighthawk? How dare you attack Jade? And on air, yet! You’re like a fucking rabid dog when it comes to her. If you can’t contain yourself—”
“Contain myself?”
He shoved his finger in my face. “If you can’t contain yourself, I’m going to ask for a transfer. I’m not putting up with your psycho horseshit anymore. You’re out of control.”
My jaw dropped. “Jesus! Are you blind? She goes out of her way to insult me, and make me look like a fool on the goddam news, every chance she gets.”
“You do a good enough job of that on your own.”
I jerked as if he’d slapped me.
He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “For God’s sake. Like it or not, what you do—what we do—is news. She reports the news. Don’t forget, I’m not coming out of this situation smelling any better than you. Get over your sensitive self and grow a pair.”
He clammed up tighter than a nun in church, leaving me to think about his words. Of course, that’s when the stupid brain bitch decided to grace me with her two cents worth. And once she got started there was no shutting her up. God help me, she was enough to make me want to dig into my head with a spoon and perform my own bitch-ectomy.
Since Rico decided to be a passive-aggressive butthead and give me the silent treatment, I picked up Cap’s desk phone and called Nonnie. “Hey, yeah, listen. I may be late tonight.”
She cut me off, telling me about her day.
Knowing it wouldn’t get any easier, the longer she talked, I finally blurted out, “Nonnie, Leo’s been kidnapped.”
She took it hard. I could hear her sniffling.
Her voice sounded shaky. “Who do this?”
“We don’t know yet. But we’re going to find him. Okay? We won’t give up until we do. He’ll be back at the kitchen table, eating lasagna, in no time.”
Rico shot daggers at me and shook his head. I know. I shouldn’t have gotten her hopes up. But she sounded scared for the Leo—love him, hate him, screwball Leo.
She wasn’t the only one.
Nonnie’s gentle sobs drifted through the phone.
I don’t handle tears well. It was time to bounce. “Got to run now, Nonnie. I’ll be home when I can. Kiss the twins for me, huh?”
Cap appeared as I hung up the phone. We’d been waiting nearly a half-hour, and I was testier than a monkey on Red Bull.
When I jumped out of my chair, I forgot all about using my indoor voice. “Where the hell have you been? We need to be out there—looking for Leo, not sitting here, twiddling our thumbs.”
“Sit,” Cap said, sliding behind his desk. “I had something to do. Now—”
I stopped, halfway down to my seat, and stood back up. “Something to do? What could possibly be more important than finding Leo?”
“Sit!” Cap yelled, waiting for me to comply. After I plopped back into my chair, he said, “I was delivering the death notification to Powell’s wife of five years and their two babies. Any other questions?”
I closed my eyes, and wished for once that the stupid little brain bitch had done a better job of saving me from myself. She gets all high and mighty over stupid stuff, and leaves me hanging when I need her. Hell, in her defense, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance I’d have listened anyway.
Cap planted his elbows on the desk, and put his head in his hands. “Officer Weston was good enough to speak to Mrs. Ortega for me. How do you tell someone their spouse’s head’s been blown away?”
Cap looked up, his face pale and haggard, and got to the ass-whooping part.
“Now, I don’t know how the kidnapping happened, or how the responsible party got past Powell and Ortega, but you two...” His words hung in the air.
After a long, deep breath, he continued. “How in the hell did that Italian meatball sneak out of the safe house on your watch? The key word being watch. God help us, if Leo dies or comes back too far gone to testify. We’ll get crucified.”
I sat on the edge of my chair and leaned over the desk, into his face. “That’s why we need the court order to raise Powell, now.”
“I already called the D.A. He’s backing our play. He agreed that the FBI has proper jurisdiction over the kidnapping case, but the murders of Powell and Ortega are ours. We can proceed as needed. He’s getting a court order from the judge, even as we speak, just to have it in our hip pocket, if Director Horton feels the urge to get pissy…again.”
“And you,” he said, fixing me in a cold stare. “If you ever spout off to Jade Chen, or any other member of the press again, you’re gone. Finito. I won’t have it. Our jobs are hard enough without intentionally harassing the media. Look at me. Nod your head and tell me you understand.”
I stared at my shoes, trying to will my face from turning purple. Judging by the searing heat in my cheeks, I hadn’t succeeded.
“I’m talking to you, Nighthawk. Answer me. Tell me you heard me. Tell me it will never happen again.”
After fidgeting in my chair for a moment, I cleared my throat. “Yes, Cap. I understand. I won’t embarrass you or the department like that again.”
Why not? Throw him a bone. I hadn’t promised that I was finished jousting with Jade in private. That wasn’t splitting hairs. It was more of a white lie comb-over.
Someone rapped on Cap’s door. Whoever it was, I could have kissed. Anything to bring that bout of humiliation to an end.
Cap cast me one last withering glance, then turned and barked, “Yes?”
Weston opened the door slowly, like he was afraid of interrupting. He must have heard Cap’s every word. Bugger.
I slunk down in my chair, as he walked into the room and nodded at Rico and me.
Then, he turned to Cap. “Hey, sir. I spoke to Elena, Ortega’s wife. She’s a mess,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his hand. “I called her sister. She’s coming to stay with Elena and the kids tonight. When I left, the department psychologist was there with her. I told her anything we can do, you know?”
Weston looked tired. Beyond tired. Shell-shocked. Weren’t we all?
He leaned back against the door and changed topics. “The forensics guys were able to get some samples before the Director ran them off. I figured you’d want to know. Like we anticipated, they got a lot of prints. They’re running them, but it’s going to take a while. Same with the trace evidence they collected. They asked me to collect prints and DNA samples from Rico and Nighthawk, you know, for exclusionary purposes.”
He pulled a couple of print kits and some swabs in plastic bags from his jacket pocket.
Rico nodded, inked his fingers, and let Weston roll them across the print card. Then, Rico opened his mouth while Weston swabbed the inside of his cheek and bagged it.
Weston peered at me from the corner of his eye.
I sighed and gave him my hand.
“Does this mean we’re engaged?” I asked, just because, well, just because I’m me.
Weston rolled my fingers across the card. When I opened my mouth with no further objection, he came at me slowly, like he was about to do a cheek swab on a pit bull.
“Just do it already,” I said. “If I wanted to bite you, I’d have done it a long time ago.” As his hand neared my mouth I said, “But it’s way past lunch time and I haven’t eaten, so—”
He jerked away with a frown. When I laughed, he jammed the swab into my mouth, yanked back his hand, and bagged the sample.
Weston got up to leave but Cap motioned for him to stay put. “You need to hear this, too. Before we were ordered off the scene, I sent some officers to canvass the neighborhood, hoping we’d turn up some information. One of our guys spoke to a local man, who was out walking his dog around seven-thirty this morning. He heard what he thought were firecrackers in the distance and continued on his way. About fifteen minutes later, he came across a scene that struck him as odd. He said a black Lexus and a white Crown Vic, with city plates, were pulled to the side of the road. The driver of the Vic had exited his vehicle and was leaning into the driver’s side window of the Lexus. As dog walker got closer, dude from the Vic turned his head and glared at him. Dog walker got a hinky feeling and pretended he hadn’t been paying attention. He went on home and didn’t think anything more about it, until we knocked on his door.”
Weston sat on the edge of Cap’s desk and bit his lip. “Did he get a plate number on the city car?”
“Only a partial. CCE3 something. Said he got scared and turned his eyes to the ground. But here’s the thing. He mentioned that he’d seen the black Lexus around there before.”
Rico’s head snapped up. “Did the dog walker give a description of the drivers, Cap?”
“Not much. He only saw their faces for a second. He said the driver of the Crown Vic was tall and had light hair. But he saw the dude in the Lexus handing the guy in the Vic a brown paper bag.”
We all exchanged glances, no doubt sharing the same suspicion: money.
Cap sat a little taller and laid down the law. “I know you all want to be out there looking for Leo. And you will be. But first, we’re going to figure out where we stand with the pending investigations. Obviously, the biter attack at the range, the deaths of Miriam and Fingerello, the mob boss, and BOLO Guy must be connected to Leo. Any theories, people? And that freaking black Lexus. What’s the story on that?”
I threw a side glance at Rico, whose fingers had dug into the arms of his chair.
His words came out with an edge. “We got a tip from…an informant…who said he’d seen it parked up the street from the safe house all day. He even gave us a plate number. We traced it, Cap. It’s registered to some outfit called Stanous Electric. There’s construction going on up the block from the safe house. The Lexus was parked along there, with twenty other contractor’s cars. It seemed legit, so we gave it a pass.”
Cap rubbed his eyes. “Jesus. Put another BOLO out on the damn Lexus, with the plate number this time. And find out everything you can about Stanous Electric. Any more on the biter attack at Brasshole’s?”
I figured I’d field this one since Rico looked ready to implode.
“It’s like we said last time, Cap. It could have been anyone with access to the Perptown schedule, to know when I was going to be there. Someone who knew where the security cameras were. Someone with a key. That narrows it down to most anybody on the force. To be honest, with Leo and everything else that’s been going on, Rico and I haven’t been able to take it further.”
It was time for a little game of hot potato. “Weston, if I recall, you were digging into that. What’d you come up with?”
Weston looked like I’d drilled him in the face with a tuna. “I… I… Well, what Nighthawk said, Cap. Short of investigating every single cop in the district, we may never find that out.”
“And BOLO Guy,” Cap said. “Did we ever figure out who he works for?”
“Actually, no,” Weston said.
“Did we at least figure out who he was, based on his prints, DNA, or facial recognition?”
You could have heard a pin drop.
Cap’s face puffed up like a big red blowfish. “Did I, or did I not, give you an order? And I’m including you in this rant, Weston. What the fuck have you people been doing?”
“Babysitting Leo,” I yelled.
The flaw in that response was obvious the minute it came out of my mouth. But damn it, Cap had us by the cojones and it wasn’t sitting right.
“How about we move on to new business,” Cap said, ignoring my outburst. “We now have a white Vic with a partial city plate to find. Rather than ask you…overworked…folks to chase that lead, I’ve requested the daily logs from the various city departments to find out who had that car. That’s one less lead for you princesses to follow.”
His mouth opened like he was about to go for round two, but his phone rang.
Thank you, Jesus.
Cap picked up the line, grunted several times and hung up. “That was the morgue. Powell’s body is back and the D.A. got his court order. Time for you to do your thing, Nighthawk. That is, if you aren’t too busy.”