“Go,” says McDermott. “Meet back here at five. Get me some answers.”
The group gets up, eager to move forward. The one detective, Kinzler, approaches McDermott, but he waves him off, pats him on the arm. Something about the “whack job” comment but I have no idea what.
When the place empties, McDermott touches my arm. “Where would you start? Just on a gut call.”
I think about that, and the answer comes surprisingly quickly.
“The nutty professor,” I say. “Frankfort Albany. Cassie and Ellie’s teacher, the class about violence and women. Burgos’s employer back then, too.”
“I’ll do it,” says Stoletti.
“Let me go, too,” I say.
Stoletti looks at McDermott, who has the ultimate call. By the look on her face, I think she would rather share a car ride with a flatulent child molester.
“It’s not a bad idea,” he says. Seems like he enjoys his decision, too.
“What are you going to do?” I ask him.
He tugs at his ear, the corner of his mouth turned up. “I want to see your file on Terry Burgos,” he says.
25
Head DOWN. Baseball cap, sunglasses. Mustache, beard, eyebrows are fakes, easy to tell it’s a getup, but it’s okay, point is, he won’t see your face, he’ll only see the money.
Not the way to do it, but no time, have to hurry, there he is, parking his bike by the building, fluorescent vest, removing the biker’s helmet, locking up the bike, now, now-
Leo approaches the messenger, a bag of parcels over his shoulder, Leo clears his throat, holds out the package, look at the package, pay no attention to the face-
He does his best, shows the man the package, bearing the name Shaker, Riley & Flemming. Shows him a fifty-dollar bill, too.
“Yeah-they’re up there. You want me-you want me to deliver this?” His eyes focus less on the package, more on the fifty.
Leo nods.
“This”-the kid shakes it-“this is a letter?”
Leo nods. Yeah, a letter.
“Why don’t you deliver it? Is this like a joke or something?”
A joke. He likes that. He tries to smile. He tries to smile a lot but he can’t.
The kid looks at the fifty and shrugs. “Okay, bud.”
Leo watches the boy burst through the revolving doors.
“EVERYTHING,” I say into the phone to my assistant, Betty. “Witness lists and profiles, summaries of evidence, transcripts-whatever we have. I need a couple of copies of everything. Yes, everything. And Betty, if anyone asks, I’m just doing a speech or something. This stays between us. Call Detective McDermott when you’re ready.”
I click off the cell phone. I’m riding shotgun with Ricki Stoletti, with whom I have the privilege of paying a visit to Professor Frankfort Albany. Stoletti looks tired, probably as tired as me. She’s wearing a blouse, under a plaid jacket, and blue jeans. Not clothes recently purchased.
She tells me she’s been McDermott’s partner for over two years. She joined the city police four years ago, after spending fifteen years working the Major Crimes Unit in the suburbs. Major Crimes was a consolidation of several police departments in the northern suburbs, a multijurisdictional detective’s squad. I know of them well, because I had a homicide case that came from there. That might explain her hostility. I walked a guy on a first-degree and made the cops look pretty bad in the process.
“Why this guy Albany first?” she asks, maneuvering her Taurus toward the expressway to take us down to Mansbury College. “Because he knows this song so well?”
“Because if Evelyn was looking into this, she would have talked to him. And because he knows the principals involved. He taught Ellie Danzinger and Cassie Bentley. He was Burgos’s boss. And he was the one who showed these song lyrics to all three of them.”
“And because he’s a creep?” She looks at me.
“You’re about to rear-end that Lexus,” I tell her. She hits the brakes. “Yeah, I was never high on that guy.”
“Why?” she asks. “Anything specific?”
Nothing specific. Just a vibe I always got from the professor. Something about him that always made me wonder.
“He was a big witness for you, right?”
“You could say that,” I agree. “He established Burgos’s attempt at an alibi. Burgos was fudging his time sheets, to make it look like he was at work when he was off abducting the women. His time sheets said he worked from six to midnight, but we know he abducted the girls all around nine or ten o‘clock. His time sheets were a lie.”
I look over at Stoletti, who seems like she doesn’t get it.
“By creating an alibi,” I explain, “he showed that he appreciated that what he was doing was criminal. He was trying to avoid being caught-”
“Yeah, yeah, I get the idea.” She turns toward me for a moment, then seems to think better of whatever it was she was going to say.
“Burgos was given flexible hours,” I say. “He could work as much, or as little, as he wanted, up to six hours. He very deliberately wrote down six to midnight. What about this doesn’t make sense?”
“Well-no, it makes sense.” She makes a noise, an uncomfortable chuckle. “I mean, one way of looking at that is, Burgos did have an alibi for the murders.” She glances back over at me. “Right? He was at work, so he couldn’t have killed the girls.”
Now I laugh, with more gusto than she. “But it was a fake alibi. Stoletti, if you admit you killed those girls-which he did-and you then claim you were insane-which he did-then the alibi goes from proving you innocent to proving you guilty.”
She raises her hand in surrender.
“Anyway, that’s why we needed the professor. Burgos didn’t testify, so we had no way to pin him to the time sheets without Albany’s testimony.”
Stoletti gets us on the ramp and we’re on our way down south. It turns out that she drives faster than I do, which is probably easier when you carry a badge. We avoid near-certain death maneuvering around a truck and finding ourselves up close and personal with one of those tiny Saabs. I could learn to like this lady.
“So Albany was your star witness,” she gathers.
“One of them, sure. The alibi put a serious dent in their case. They had a decent argument on mental defect, but on appreciation of criminality, they had no chance. Not after that. I was hoping to get down there alive,” I add, after she pulls another stunt, slicing our car between a Camry and a Porsche.
“Don’t be such a wuss. You, either,” she says into the rearview mirror as the Porsche driver works his horn behind her. I’ll be really impressed if she flips him the bird.
“We’re not partners,” she says. “You know Albany, and you can probably put some ice in his pants, so you’re tagging along.”
“Fine by me. Unless I need something. You’re supposed to be cooperative.”
Stoletti knows the rules. I get full access. But all rules are meant to be twisted and tortured. And she doesn’t seem to like the way I framed them.
“I do the talking when we get down there,” she informs me.
“Ask him whatever you want to ask him,” I say. “I’ll do the same.”
“I take the lead. Understood?”
“No,” I say. “Not understood. Get off here. I know a shortcut.”
She veers off onto a ramp and points to her bag, which is between my feet.
“There’s a manila file in there,” she says. “Your copy.”
I open it, however much I hate reading in a car. Gives me a headache. But I don’t have to read so much as look, because the file is full of photographs from the Ciancio crime scene. Pictures of the man himself, spread across the bedroom carpet, peppered with knife wounds, primarily in the legs and torso, the fatal one going through his eye.