Lester compared the man in the distance to the mug shot in his hand. Usually, when people posed for these things, they weren’t at their best, making the end result look more like a morgue photo.
But not this guy. He was his own worst photograph’s spitting image, pale and dark-eyed with translucent, bloodless skin—a man death might actually improve.
He looked up and down the street, standing under a light on the stoop of his run-down apartment building, and lit a cigarette before crossing the sidewalk and getting in behind the wheel of a rusty, dilapidated Volkswagen Beetle of ancient vintage.
“Mr. Needham, I presume?” Les asked of his companions.
Ron Klesczewski was in the passenger seat; Sheila Murphy in back.
“The one and only,” Sheila confirmed from the darkness. The alleyway facing Canal Street had no lights and no windows overlooking it—the perfect black hole in which to sit and wait.
They’d been doing just that for three hours, pinning their hopes on information Murphy had gleaned about a rash of salvage metal thefts, now the sudden rage in a poor economy. Copper tubing had gone missing from a building supply store, half a dozen catalytic converters from parked cars, and one homeowner had returned from vacation to find strips of copper roofing missing from his home. All in the last month.
Indications pointed to Ray Needham, and a check on him in Spillman’s data bank revealed Wayne Castine as a frequent companion—until lately, according to Sheila’s source.
That possible falling out explained Lester’s presence here.
“There he goes,” Ron muttered as the Volkswagen lurched away from the curb before winding down the street, heading west.
It was almost two in the morning.
Lester eased out of the alleyway and slid in far behind Needham, his lights off.
“You get a sense from your snitch that Ray was pissed enough at Wayne to kill him?” Spinney asked Sheila.
“He’s pissed,” she confirmed. “But murder didn’t come up; just that Wayne had screwed him royally and Ray was looking for him. I can tell you Ray’s a bad boy when it comes to temper.”
“But you don’t know the details?”
“Those are the details.”
Lester smiled to himself. Sheila was old school—a Bratt detective for several years, comfortable within the community, with a teacher husband and two kids in local schools. She saw Lester as state police first, VBI second, and never a municipal cop. That made him suspect. And so it went, across the profession and throughout the state.
Ahead of them, the lopsided Beetle turned the corner without signaling and drove up Washington Street, its taillights looking like they were helping to push.
“What’s he going after tonight?” Les asked.
“We could pull him over for not signaling,” Ron suggested lightly.
“Keep that in mind,” Les agreed. “Might come in handy.”
The car, however, left Washington at the top of the rise, entered a quiet side street free of overhead lighting, and slowly rolled to a stop in the middle of the road, as if out of gas.
“What the hell?” Sheila murmured from the back.
Ron laughed softly. “I think I get it.”
“What?” Lester asked.
Ron pointed. He, too, had stopped, a hundred feet back, using a parked car as a shield, and they had a clear view ahead as Ray emerged from his vehicle holding a long, polelike object.
He stepped behind the Volkswagen and began poking at something in the middle of the road.
Lester put it together. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Using a VW bug as a getaway car? Is he nuts?”
Sheila eased her door open and began getting out. “He was never the sharpest blade in the shed.”
The two men followed her, spreading out to both sidewalks, and surreptitiously worked their way toward where Ray Needham was lost in his efforts. By now, he’d managed to pry up the manhole cover he was hoping to steal, and was trying to keep it balanced on edge and place the crowbar quietly on the road. Stealth, as the name implies, usually demands a certain amount of quiet, and this was clearly becoming a challenge. All around them, lining both sides of the street, were dark, quiet, sleeping houses, presumably filled with good citizens who would later resent losing an axle—or a small child—to an open manhole.
Noise wasn’t Ray’s only problem, though. As the three cops, now so close they could hear him muttering, paused and watched from the shadows, he struggled to roll his prize to the side of the car—before discovering his second major hurdle. How to lift the thing inside?
He managed to rest it against the car, making the latter lean even more, and to open the door. But then, he was stumped. He stood there, panting, hands on his hips, his face dripping with sweat, staring at the VW as if asking for help.
The cops by now surrounded him, and on a signal from Ron, they calmly closed in from three sides.
“Don’t know, Ray,” Ron said conversationally, emerging from the gloom. “That’s a real problem.”
Needham’s body stiffened, and for a moment, Les thought he might run for it, before Sheila added from a different direction, “Or maybe a couple.”
Ray whipped around, saw Lester as well, maintained a startled gazelle imitation for a second more, and then slumped in defeat.
“Fuck.”
They all circled Ray’s project for the evening, as if about to lend a hand. Ron asked Murphy, “You bring the camera?”
She held it up.
He reached out. “It’s your bust. You do the honors. I’ll take the pictures before we put this thing back. I doubt folks around here would appreciate our taking it into evidence.”
Spinney joined Ray Needham in the Municipal Center’s holding cells a couple of hours later. The thief had been processed, interviewed, and locked up, pending his appearance before a judge in the morning. He was lying on the plastic mattress of his cot, his fingers locked behind his head, staring at the ceiling, when Les rapped his knuckles against the bars of his door.
Ray slowly took his eyes off the ceiling, as if he’d been interrupted reading a good book, and fixed Lester with a stare. “Jesus. Don’t you ever sleep?”
Lester laughed. “You should talk.”
Needham shrugged. “I sleep days.”
“I can see why.” Les pulled up a chair and sat down on the other side of the bars. The rest of the cells were empty, so they had this part of the basement to themselves.
Spinney pointed upstairs. “They tell you what you’re facing?”
“With my history? Years. Fuckin’ manhole cover. ’Nother five minutes, I woulda left it there. Fuckin’ weighed a ton.”
Les agreed. “I know. I helped roll it back, remember?”
“Yeah. Well, life’s a bitch. Least you were getting paid.”
“Yeah,” Spinney said. “And by the state, too. I don’t work for these guys.”
Needham’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t think I knew you.”
Lester showed him his badge. “VBI—we only do major crimes.”
Ray studied him, reading behind the comment, before slowly saying, “Yeah.”
“Like murder,” Les suggested.
Ray remained quiet, but his hands unlaced from behind his neck, and his body lost its nonchalance.
“You hear about Wayne Castine?” Lester asked.
For a moment, he could see Ray’s breathing stop.
“I heard he died,” he finally said.
“You could say that,” Lester said lightly. “He was butchered, more like it, by someone he really irritated.”
“You don’t say.”
“Oh, yeah.” Spinney raised his eyebrows, apparently thinking of something interesting. “Speaking of which, I heard you two had a falling out, just lately.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Ray said, an edge to his voice.
Les sat forward. “You thought about it, though. Not much of a gap between those two. Gotta do one to do the other.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Ray repeated, shifting to place his back against the wall.
“What made you so mad?” Spinney asked.
“Ripped me off, that’s all. It was a business deal. I didn’t like him, but I didn’t kill him.”
Lester smiled. “Yeah, so you say. Tell me about the business deal.”
“We got hold of some scrap metal, Wayne said he’d sell it, and he never split the profits.”
“Who’d he sell it to?”
“I don’t know. He said he didn’t, which is why he didn’t have the money to split, but I know he was lying. He just took it all and figured I could go fuck myself.”
“So, what did you do?”
“I went looking for him.” Ray also sat forward, eager to sell his message. “That part’s true. I was mad. I woulda torn him a new one, but I never found him. I’ll swear that on the Bible.”
He held up his hand. Lester nodded solemnly, if in fact unimpressed. The Bible usually came in too little, too late, in his experience.
“I read your rap sheet, Ray,” Lester explained. “You pound on people you don’t like.”
“Not this time.”
“You sent a couple to the hospital. Think you might’ve sent Wayne to his grave?”
Ray pressed his lips together before saying, “You prove it, then I did it, but you can’t do that. So, with all due respect, I gotta tell you to screw off.”
Lester nodded. “Respectfully noted. So, since you had nothing to do with his death, when did you last see Wayne?”
“What’s today?”
“Wednesday.”
Ray shut his eyes briefly. “Then it was . . . Friday . . . No, wait. Thursday. Thursday last. Out back of the bowling alley. That’s when he told me about the deal where he ripped me off after.”
“On Thursday, you met so he could tell you about the deal? You didn’t do it right then, too?”
Ray’s brow furrowed. “Sure we did. We met, we did the deal, he ripped me off, and I went lookin’ for him. That’s it.”
“When did you start looking?”
“Couple of days later. He said he had a fence.”
“How did you find out that fell through?”
“I called him.”
“At home?”
“Yeah.”
“And after he told you, you went over there and killed him.”
Ray’s mouth fell open. He dropped his hands into his lap and leaned his head against the cinder blocks behind him. “Fuck you,” he said tiredly.
Les laughed. “You telling me he stiffed you and you didn’t go over there? You really do take me for an asshole.”
Ray snapped forward and glared at him. “I don’t know where he lived,” he enunciated.
Lester pretended to think about that for a moment. “Really? Your business partner? I know where my fellow cops live.”
Ray became sullen. “Good for you. You think I whacked him, prove it.”
“You’re the one who was angry at the man, Ray. What were you doing Monday night?”
“Nuthin’.”
“That the best you can do?”
But Ray was done. He crossed his arms and stared up at the ceiling—a variation of his posture at the start of the conversation.
Lester got the hint. He stood up, waved, and said, “Get some sleep, Ray. It’s noisy in prison. I’ll see you later.”
“Whatever. You dumb fuck.”
Lester climbed the stairs, at last feeling his own fatigue. At the top, just outside dispatch, he met Ron Klesczewski.
“You get it all?” he asked.
Ron nodded. “Yup. Sound quality was good—everything. I already cut a CD for you.” He handed over a small envelope. “You think he did it?”
Les tilted his head to one side. “You think he didn’t?”
Ron smiled and crooked his finger. “Come in here.”
He led the way into dispatch, which had a standard array of radio consoles, TV monitors, tape and CD recorders. A woman was sitting at one of the two operator bays, talking to someone over her headset. Ron led the way to a CD player in the far corner.
“After Ray said he’d last seen Wayne on Thursday, I went back to some video footage we collected yesterday. Remember? Wayne had bought some fast food and thrown the receipts on the floor. To establish a timeline and see if he was with any kids, I had my guys pull the videos from all the stores on the receipts.”
He pushed a few buttons on a player. The small TV screen before them lit up and Lester saw the back of a clerk operating a cash register. The camera was mounted up against the ceiling and showed everyone from a giant’s viewpoint. Seconds later, they watched Wayne Castine step up to the counter, lay down a sandwich and a soda and a bag of chips, along with a twenty-dollar bill.
Next to him was Ray Needham.
“That,” Ron explained, “was this Monday.”
Lester grunted. “And he was dead Tuesday morning. Cool.”