“Jack, wait up.” Detective Mason snagged Jack as he was coming out of the change room. Jack and Manny had just finished working out on their lunch hour and were getting ready to head back out on the road. “I need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Sure, Rick. What’s up?”
“Not here, upstairs in the office.”
Curious, Jack followed the plainclothes detective up to the second floor, asking Deb, the platoon’s civilian station operator, to let Manny know where he was.
On the way up the stairs, Mason commented, “I heard you rearranged Jesse Polan’s nose yesterday.”
“Little prick spit on me.”
Mason raised a quizzical eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound like Polan. He’s a little chickenshit unless he’s trying to prove something.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Hell, if he couldn’t be honest with Mason. . . . “He might have been upset at me for choking him out after he badmouthed Sy.”
“That sounds more like him. Good going, Jack. Too many guys would have let something like that slide these days. I hear you’re working with Armsman. Lot of conflicting opinions about him.”
“Manny’s solid. Just a little overeager at times, that’s all.” Jack felt he needed to add more, as if Mason’s approval of his new partner was somehow connected to Sy. “I feel lucky to be working with him.”
Mason nodded as if he understood. “Sy always thought he was a good copper.” Those were the words Jack needed to hear. He realized Mason was making small talk, stalling until they reached the office. What was going on?
Mason led the way into the cramped office and asked Jack to shut the door behind him. Taftmore and Tank were the only others in the room. Mason motioned for Jack to grab a seat, then sat behind his desk. The Major Crime boss scrubbed his face and heaved a huge sigh. Mason was exhausted; that much was clear to Jack. He saw the same weariness in the faces of the two detective constables.
In waters of unknown depth and current, Jack stayed quiet, waiting.
When Mason finally spoke, it was to swear Jack to silence. “What I’m about to tell you cannot go beyond this room. Period. Not to Manny, not to your wife. Can you live with that?”
“Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know. I guess it all depends on what you have to say.”
“Fair enough.” Mason leaned back in his chair and fixed Jack with a penetrating stare. “We think we know who murdered Sy.”
Jack was blasted by the sheer enormity of Mason’s words. “Who? Fucking tell me. Who?”
Restraining hands up, Mason urged Jack to be patient. “I said we think we know. We need your help to confirm it.” He yawned and scrubbed his face again.
What kind of hours had the unit been working since Sy’s death? Did Jack think he was the only one affected by the murder?
“Before we get started, I want to thank you for your efforts with Sy. I talked to the paramedics who were there and they told me how you fought to keep him alive. They also said with a wound that severe, Sy would have had to been cut inside an operating room to have survived. You did all you could. I hope you don’t blame yourself for anything.”
Jack had heard that before. It hadn’t really helped then and didn’t mean much today.
“I’ve gone over your statement to Homicide and your notes and I understand your frustration in not being able to give much of a description of the suspect. He hid himself well. Homicide is focusing on the victim he killed prior to Sy. If they solve that murder, they solve Sy’s. I’m interested in only one detail of your suspect description. If it pans out, we have our man.”
Mason rocked forward, nailing Jack to his chair with his eyes. Jack was aware of Taft and Tank leaning in, as well. The first question was simple enough.
“The suspect was wearing gloves?”
Jack nodded. “Yes.”
“Black latex gloves?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure they were latex?”
“Ye—” The fervour in Mason’s voice gave Jack pause. “Why?”
“Could they have been leather gloves?”
Jack went still. “You think he did it? The guy who killed Reynolds? But that guy used a razor, not a butterfly knife.”
“I know. It should have been a razor,” Mason mused quietly, almost to himself.
“What do you mean it should have been a razor? I don’t get it.”
“Nothing,” Mason said, waving it away. “I’m so fucking tired I don’t know what I’m saying half the time. What I meant was, if there was any fairness in the world, it would have been a razor so we could tie the two murders together.” He cocked his head at Jack. “But all we have are the gloves. You’re positive they couldn’t be leather?”
“No. They were too thin, too tight.”
“Bear with me for a minute, Jack. I’m not talking about gloves like the type you wear, with the Kevlar lining. Think about it, Jack. Thin, tight leather. Like racing gloves. Stretched tight over his hand, could it have looked like latex?”
Jack thought back to that night, still so fresh in his mind. He could see the suspect’s hand holding the knife to Sy’s throat, see the steel flashing in the shadowed light, Sy’s blood fanning through the air — Focus! Jack ripped himself away from those memories, pushed himself, fucking grabbed his own thoughts and forced them to concentrate on the glove. The glove and nothing else. Black? Yes, without a doubt. Latex . . . or leather?
“The glove had a bit of a shine to it. I thought — assumed — it was latex, but I guess it could have been leather,” he admitted slowly, convincing himself. He nodded. “New enough to have a shiny finish to it. Or maybe it was sweat from the suspect wiping his forehead or something.” He looked at Mason expectantly and the detective was grinning. “Yeah, it could have been leather.”
“That’s what we needed to hear.”
A tension that had been binding the three Major Crime coppers suddenly evaporated with an almost audible hiss.
“What difference does it make?”
Mason laughed. “All the fucking difference in the world, Jack. Tank?”
The Sumo-sized copper brought Mason a file and patted Jack on the shoulder. Mason opened the file and flipped a photo across the desk for Jack to view. In the mug shot, a light-complexioned black male stared unsmiling at the camera.
“That’s Gregory Johri, the first victim that night. He was a small-time dealer who suddenly disappeared from the local scene a few months ago. We all figured he had ended up dead somewhere. No big loss. But then we find out he was peddling Black to the university crowd over in 52 and, more recently, in the entertainment district. His car was parked in the same lot where he was killed. When Homicide searched the car, they found a whack of Black. Seems our man had been selling all night and was returning to his car for supplies when someone offed him.”
“A rip-off?” Jack suggested.
Mason shook his head, grinning. “Nope. He still had a wad of cash on him and his car hadn’t been touched. Granted, it could have been intended as a rip-off and the killer was interrupted by the witnesses who called 911.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“But we don’t think so,” Mason confirmed. “We believe Johri was the victim of . . . shall we say . . . severe disciplinary action.”
“He was skimming the profits?”
“Or working outside his assigned area, the university, on his own time. Either way, he was cutting into his boss’s profits and was terminated, so to speak. And by the boss himself, we believe. Enter Anthony Charles, the man we think is the head of the Black organization.”
Mason cracked open a bottle of water and took a long swig. “Charles is 51 Division born and bred. His mother was a local crack whore. Unlike other local shit rats, Charles never used crack, though he certainly sold it. His younger brother was a crack baby and is fucked up to this day. You’ve met him, by the way.”
That startled Jack. “The brother? I don’t — oh, fuck. The guy under the bed at the search warrant.”
“Exactly. Sean Jacobs. Different fathers,” he advised before Jack could ask. “Once we learned who Sean’s brother was, it all began fitting together.”
“So if Sean is the brother of the boss, that would explain why everyone in the apartment tried to hide him and wouldn’t give up anything on him.”
“Right again. Now, what did Sean like to wear in imitation of his older brother?”
“Black leather gloves. But that’s a pretty big leap to make.”
“Trust me, it isn’t a leap. We’ve been working our asses off trying to track down Charles. What we have been able to learn is that the Black boss is a very hands-on type of leader, the type who would prefer to carry out the execution of a disloyal employee personally, rather than delegating the task. And his trademark, his signature if you will, is black leather gloves.
“Charles is a very disgruntled young man. He sees what crack did to his brother through their mother and he blames society. White society. He’s more than happy to sell crack to white university students. He’ll also sell to poor black folks. In his eyes, if you’re weak enough to be a drug user, then you’re only useful to him as a customer.
“None of that is new information. It’s straight from court transcripts at his last trafficking trial. That was about three years ago. When he got out, he dropped out of sight and not long after, Black started showing up on the streets and Sean was suddenly sporting gloves out of admiration for his brother.”
Mason fell silent and looked expectantly at Jack.
“Okay, I can connect the dots and it sounds good, but . . .” Jack said.
“Exactly: but. As in, try to convince a judge or jury. What we have is a bunch of impressive-sounding ifs and maybes. What we need is a solid fact. What we need, Jack, is you.”
Jack knew what they wanted, what they needed, but he couldn’t give it to them, as much as he would like to. “I can’t ID Charles. I only saw a corner of his head and one eye and even less when he killed Reynolds. No one would believe an identification based on that.”
“IDs have been made on less and have held up in court. Some witnesses who only saw a partial face have been able to ID a suspect based on certain features of the face but not all of it. All we need to do is take our theory to Homicide. They’ll pooh-pooh it, of course, because we’re just divisional grunts, not big-time homicide investigators, but I’ll push for a photo lineup. What’s there to lose, after all? And they’ll agree, even if it’s to make us look stupid. They show you the lineup, you pick out Charles and, if we’re lucky, he decides he doesn’t want to be taken alive.”
“And if I can’t ID him?”
Mason studied Jack, then looked to his officers for confirmation. They both nodded.
“What if we could guarantee you’d be able to pick him out?” Mason slid another photo across the desk, face down. He kept it pinned down with one hand. “It’s your choice, Jack. If you don’t want to, I’ll understand and this conversation will have never taken place. If, on the other hand, you do decide to accept my help, there’s no turning back. Ever. We’re in this together. If one of us goes down, we all go down.” He slid his hand free of the photo. “It’s your choice.”
A warrant for the arrest of Anthony Tyrone Charles on three counts of first-degree murder was issued later that day. Jack heard it on the news as he drove home. And smiled.