Doing the Devil's Work (15 page)

“You know why that case was allowed to cool off,” Atkinson said, a hint of warning in her tone. “Marques is unreliable.”

“Marques is a fucking kid,” Maureen said. “A thirteen-year-old boy. We’re the adults. We’re the ones who are supposed to fix things. What the fuck kind of department is this that it can’t take a killer off the streets without the help of one teenage boy? We can’t find another way?”

“The other way is what I want to talk to you about,” Atkinson said, “before you get your back up any further. Marques is our only witness on the murder beef. We have no other good evidence he killed Mike-Mike or that he was even the shooter at Mother Mayor’s place. Whatever resources we shifted off another maybe stronger case now, over to Scales, would be wasted because Marques won’t testify, or even make a useful statement. You said it yourself, Marques is a thirteen-year-old kid. We can’t count on him. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but your way isn’t the best way.”

“The brass was too eager,” Maureen said, “to get a dead kid out of the headlines and off the evening news.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Atkinson said. “You’re just being contrary. You think we’d let Scales walk over bad publicity? At the rate kids are killing each other in this city, you really think I would let that happen?” She waited for an answer. “Maybe you forgot I was, I
am
, the lead on Mike-Mike’s murder.”

“No,” Maureen said. “I didn’t forget.” Her breathing had become quick and shallow. She felt sweat breaking out along her hairline, and it wasn’t from the hot sauce. It was time to dial it back. Nothing productive came of picking fights with Atkinson. They were on the same side. “Of course not.”

“You haven’t been a cop long enough to be
this
cynical,” Atkinson said. “I mentioned Marques for a reason. And it wasn’t to call you out over how you handled him tonight. While you’ve been out knocking heads in the Sixth District, have you heard anything about Scales going around? Has Marques? Rumors? Stories? What’s the word around the neighborhood?”

“Not a fucking sound,” Maureen said. “Not a sighting, not a rumor, not a whisper, nothing. No sign of his pal Shadow, either. I figure maybe they’re not running together anymore. Shadow’s not famous for his loyalty.”

“You asked Marques about it.”

“Of course I did,” Maureen said. “I got the snitches-are-bitches song and dance.” She waved for the check. “Maybe Scales is dead and we haven’t stumbled over the body yet. One can only hope.” She paid. “No change,” she said to the waitress.

“Okay, good,” Atkinson said, nodding. “So it sounds like there’s nothing on the streets about it. I ask because we have an address for Scales. I’m waiting for the warrant to come through.”

“A murder warrant?” Maureen asked. She felt the tension in her back and shoulders, in her neck and behind her eyes, release. She was elated and embarrassed at the same time. “I’m giving you grief for letting him skate and the whole time you know you’re gonna fucking nail him.”

“I tried to head you off,” Atkinson said. “You’re tough to reroute once you get worked up.”

“Tell me about it,” Maureen said. “I’m working on that.”

“Grab your coffee,” Atkinson said. “Let’s go outside and smoke.”

Maureen and Atkinson took a small sidewalk table set against the tavern’s front window. The sky was lightening, but not enough yet to switch off the streetlights. As they sat, a streetcar rumbled by on the neutral ground, headed toward Lee Circle and downtown, half full of sleepy-eyed riders in the various modest uniforms of the downtown cafés and hotels. Another day shift readied itself to get under way, Maureen thought. She checked the time. She had little more than an hour before the end of her night tour.

“This address you have on Bobby Scales,” Maureen said. “Where did you get it? I’ve heard nothing about this.”

“We’ve been keeping it very, very quiet,” Atkinson said. “I’m glad nothing has hit the streets about it, that’s a good sign.”

Again Maureen thought of Quinn and Ruiz. “You’re worried about a leak inside the department.”

“Not that,” Atkinson said. “I had some concerns because of how the lead came to us.”

“Which was how?”

“Hell indeed hath no fury like a woman who’s found out you’ve been fucking her cousin on the side. And knocked her up while you’re at it.”

Maureen clapped her hands. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“She came
straight
downtown to HQ,” Atkinson said. “Five years ago, her uncle got shot out in Hollygrove. I got the guy who did it. She remembered me. Hair up to here, makeup out to there, big gold earrings. She took some
time
getting ready for this. The girl was spitting fire. She was talking so fast I had to confirm the address three times. Took me twenty minutes to get her to get around to it, and she came in ready to give it.” Atkinson waved her hand, as if waving away a cloud of fluttering words in the air. “I know more about Castilla Roget’s love life than I would ever need to know. But she gave him up. She’s called me twice at HQ to see if we got him yet. She wants to make sure she gets to tell him it was her that gave him up. I was hoping she wasn’t out bragging on giving him up before we could nail him. She seemed pretty thrilled with herself.”

“So as soon as the paper comes through,” Maureen said, “you’re taking his door?”

“With my steel-toed boots on. Which brings me to my next question: You want in?”

Maureen nearly leaped across the table and planted a big, fat kiss on Atkinson’s lips. “Do I want in? Do I want in? Are you kidding me? Yes! Yes!”

Bobby Scales was a twenty-something Uptown thug, amoral and vicious. He was the prime suspect in the strangulation and burning death of one of his thirteen-year-old soldiers, Mike-Mike, and in the attempted murder of another one of his former soldiers, Marques Greer, in a drive-by that had put three bullets in Marques’s grandmother’s house, while she, Marques, Maureen, and Preacher were inside. Scales was the first hard-core criminal Maureen had come up against on the job. Scales was the first killer, the first deadly predator she’d found within her reach since her entanglement with a sociopath named Frank Sebastian on Staten Island. And Scales had eluded her. Vanished like smoke on the same day she’d first laid eyes on him. She couldn’t bear letting an evil like that slip away, not when she’d faced this one with her badge and her gun and the power and force of the law behind her. But after the drive-by the NOPD lost track of Scales. He vanished into the small city and the network of loyalties and connections he knew so much better than she did. And after a few weeks of halfhearted searching, interest in the fates of both Marques and Scales had faded from the NOPD’s collective imagination. Other crimes and killers and victims took their place. None of them were in short supply, unfortunately. This address Atkinson had was the first hard lead on Scales since the night he’d vanished.

Maureen realized that at some indistinct point in the recent past she had started doubting Atkinson’s assurances that Scales would surface, and that the cops would be ready for him when he did. She feared that another murder, Marques’s murder or that of his grandmother most likely, was the only way Scales would get back on the department’s radar. Maureen again saw why cops throughout the department called Atkinson “the Spider.” She saw designs and patterns invisible to everyone else. She believed in a good trap as well as a stealthy pursuit. Everything she wanted eventually came to her. Scales had tickled a strand in Atkinson’s web. Now the detective was prepping her pounce.

“You’re not worried,” Maureen said, “that Ms. Roget will regret coming to us, or lose faith, and tip him off before we get the warrant?”

“She was angry,” Atkinson said, “but she wasn’t stupid. She came down three days after she found out, so it wasn’t in the heat of passion, so to speak. And, yeah, she wants him to know that it was her that got him for stepping out on her, but she wants to tell him that when he’s safely on the other side of some thick plastic or some steel bars.” She shook her head. “I always knew Scales wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. He fucked with the wrong girl. This Castilla, she’s built like both Williams sisters rolled into one.”

“Scales has a habit,” Maureen said, “of fucking with the wrong women. I’m thrilled to see it finally bite him in the ass.”

“I’m only going to say this once,” Atkinson said, leaning across the table, making sure her eyes locked with Maureen’s, “but I have to say it, and you have to hear it. This isn’t getting a kid home after curfew, this is the deep-down serious, black-and-blue, bulletproof-vest dirty work of the job. We know Scales travels strapped. We know he isn’t afraid to pull the trigger. I need to know I can trust you to take orders, to do what you’re told. To keep your cool.”

“You have my word,” Maureen said. “I will be a good soldier.”

“Good. Now about that body from tonight,” Atkinson said, sitting back. She tapped her fingertip to her throat. “Let’s go over it. Tell me about the wound.”

“I left the scene thinking razor blade or something like it. Long and sharp. Box cutter is a possibility, but the wound was deep. Kitchen knife, if it was super sharp.”

“Drayton thinks like you do?”

“I would think so,” Maureen said, “though I can’t say for certain. I would hope so. It seemed pretty obvious.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, at first, in the dark, it looked like a thin red line and like maybe the assailant had gotten lucky and nicked an artery. But when we got light on it, we could see the wound was thin but it was deep, at least half an inch. And it was long. Not ear to ear, but close.”

“Like when you gut a fish,” Atkinson said. “Deep and straight.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Maureen said. “I’ve never been fishing.”

“Didn’t you grow up on an island?”

“It wasn’t that kind of island,” Maureen said. “Anyway, I can imagine what you mean, and yeah, that could be accurate. Maybe a razor-sharp filet knife could’ve been the weapon. A long and narrow blade. We didn’t find any kind of weapon.”

“The vic’s hands? Defensive wounds?”

“Nothing stood out,” Maureen said. “But I have to admit, I didn’t really look close. Maybe he was nicked, but I don’t think so.”

“Cooley wasn’t cut on his hands, either. So it didn’t look like Gage fought? Or that he saw it coming?”

“I don’t think he saw it coming,” Maureen said. “A wound like that would probably come from behind, right? Or face-to-face? You’d have to get close.” She extended her right arm across the table, as if reaching for Atkinson’s throat. “A slash, from arm’s distance, like in a fight, you couldn’t get a wound that deep or that long. Or that clean. If there was a struggle, the wound wouldn’t be so neat.”

“Could he have been unconscious when he was cut?”

Maureen shook her head. “The blood ran down his front. He was standing. And there are handprints on the van, like he tried to hold himself up. Blood everywhere on the ground.”

“You didn’t notice any kind of spray pattern?”

“Uh, no, can’t say that I did.”

“You want to look for those things,” Atkinson said. She put her finger on the table, moved it in a growing spiral. “Radiate out from the body”— she shrank the spiral—“then back in again.”

“Right.” Maureen shrugged. “I’m not Homicide quite yet.”

“True,” Atkinson said, “but never assume the next cop will find what you missed, never leave it for the next cop.” She sat back in her chair, her hands raised. “Because the next cop might be me—”

“But it might be Drayton,” Maureen said.

“Yup. Ugly truth. So did the killer leave any trace of his presence on the scene?”

“None that we found,” Maureen said. “Other than the body.”

She thought of her strong sense that Gage was a predator. Had she been wrong about him? Had he been more scavenger than hunter? Or had he left a wounded creature on the loose in the past, one that had slipped his grasp and had come back for revenge, either luring him to or stalking him at that bar? She thought of Sebastian having met his own end trying to bring about hers. Every now and then it happened that way, the balance of power fatally tipped in unexpected ways. What a revenge killing didn’t explain, though, was the resemblance between Gage and the other victim. She recalled the business cards and the Post-it she’d found in Gage’s wallet. She wanted to tell Atkinson about them, but hesitated. What was the risk, Maureen wondered, that something she missed in Gage’s wallet could somehow lead back to the meeting at Pat O’s, or back to the note that Quinn had destroyed, or even back to Preacher?

She shifted forward in her seat. “Is this normal?” Maureen asked. “One detective sitting down with a platoon officer and going over another detective’s case? Even as a weird, morbid, really cool tutorial?”

“I don’t know if can list five things that qualify as normal in this department,” Atkinson said. “If it makes you feel better, no, I’m not using you to check up on Drayton’s work. I’m going over the murder with you, not Drayton’s casework on that murder. If I had a problem with him, I’d go to the source. You’re the only one in the department who’s seen both bodies.”

“True,” Maureen said. “So why didn’t you come by the scene tonight, see it for yourself?”

“I show up and Drayton feels undermined,” Atkinson said. “You think he was ugly the way you saw him tonight, imagine what he’s like with a woman looking over his shoulder, which I can actually physically do, I don’t just mean that metaphorically.”

“I’m surprised, I guess,” Maureen said. “I wouldn’t think Drayton’s feelings mattered here. Catching the killer matters.”

“I couldn’t give a shit about Drayton’s feelings.” Atkinson sipped her coffee. “But why make an enemy when I don’t have to? Why make him want to get in my way? Look, we’re operating, in case you hadn’t noticed, in a pretty testosterone-heavy environment. Going around stomping the primitive macho egos under our boots may make us feel better, but in the long run it won’t get us what we want.

“If Drayton thinks I want the Gage case because I think I’m a better cop than him, he’ll never give it to me, which is not what we want, because he won’t catch the killer. And what we want, what we always want, is to catch the killer.”