“Sure, you can talk to me. Have a seat.”
“There’s a criminal I know. You know him too. He’s hurt a lot of people.”
Her large blue eyes stared at Monteleone. There was a kind of nonnegotiable determination in them, and he realized the kid wasn’t just on speed, she was on major speed.
“Let’s get him,” she whispered huskily.
54
“SOMEBODY BROKE INTO MY apartment and attacked Mother,” Cordelia said. “But it was me they were after.”
“Who do you think it was?” the voice on the phone asked.
“My dealer. He had to have sent one of his goons. I’m a little behind on my coke payments.”
“Naughty, naughty.”
“It’s not my fault. The U.S. Trust won’t let me sell my Connecticut Light and Power and my IBM doesn’t pay dividends till next month.”
“But you can’t let a debt to your dealer ride. Not if he’s sending his collectors.”
A slight pause. “I thought maybe if you could lend me three thousand till Monday …”
He sighed. “You only phone me when you need rescuing.”
“It’s the last time I’ll ever ask.”
“Well … Maybe just this one last time …”
“Cash?”
“Why don’t you come to my new place on Franklin Street?” He gave her the address. “Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. We can enjoy ourselves.”
It was ten after ten and Cardozo’s head ached and for two hours he’d been wanting to go back to bed. He’d had no sleep at all the night before and he’d come in this morning to find Monteleone’s latest fives even worse spelled than Greg’s usual atrocities.
A call came in on three. “Cordelia’s been gone since last night.” Babe had the voice of a mother doing a very poor job of not sounding frantic.
“She hasn’t phoned?”
“Not a word.”
“She say where she was going?”
“I think she was lying.”
“What was the lie?”
“A flutist called Wilson, Ransom Wilson she said, a concert at Alice Tully Hall. I found a pad of paper by her phone—the writing went through to the next sheet. I think she was copying down some times.”
“What are the times?”
“If I can read her writing—six to six thirty, it says, fifteen-dash-thirty-four-dash-twelve.”
“Twelve?”
“Excuse me, twelfth.”
“Anything else? Does it say E or F?”
“No.”
“There’s no subway stop? Does it say Woodside?”
“No, just fifteen thirty-four twelfth.”
“Okay.”
“Vince—there’s a bottle in her bathroom.”
“What’s the label?”
“No label. Little black pills.”
“Like BB gun pellets, about an eighth of an inch across, a tiny line down the middle?”
“What are they?”
“Look, if they’re in the bottle they’re not in her. Stay by the phone. I’ll take care of it.”
Cardozo hung up and shouted for Greg Monteleone.
“Called in sick,” Sergeant Goldberg shouted back.
“What’s Monteleone’s house number—fifteen thirty-four sound right?”
“Fifteen thirty-four on unforgettable Twelfth Street, the Avenue Foch of Woodside.”
“What the fuck’s an Avenue Foch?” someone shouted.
Cardozo picked up the phone and dialed Monteleone’s home number. He asked Gina to put her husband on.
She sounded surprised. “Monte’s on assignment.” Cardozo sensed a cold current around him as he sank back in his swivel chair. “What assignment is that, Gina?”
“That kiddie porn thing you put him on. Cordelia Koenig.” Cardozo slammed a fist into the desk and his knuckles instantly regretted the gesture. “Right. That kiddie porn thing.” He hung up and sat looking at his hand. “Son of a fuckin’ bitch!” he shouted.
Eight minutes later Cardozo was running along Franklin Street.
Across from 432, he saw the Con Ed truck. He beat his fists on the rear door and when Monteleone opened it an inch he yanked it wide and stormed in. He had come to kick ass.
“Congratulations, Greg, you just fucking blew it.”
“She volunteered, for Christ’s sake.”
“We can’t use it.”
“We can’t use this tape, but there are two tapes—he’s making his own up there and we’re tapping into the signal. Pete here is an electronic genius, it was a piece of cake.”
The technician turned to acknowledge the compliment. He had plain features, a little slope to his nose. He was a quiet man, competent-looking.
Cardozo’s gaze moved slowly from one face to the other and then to the monitor with its shadowy play of shapes. “All you’ve got is a lousy TV hookup. You’ve got no control over what happens.”
“You haven’t seen this girl in action. Sit down, Vince. Watch. She’s amazing.”
Cardozo didn’t sit, but he watched.
The sound was crackling and the middle third of the picture rippled. The technician fine-tuned. The image on the monitor resolved into lights and darks, the curve of a woman’s shoulder, her arm touching the lower part of her face. Cordelia.
“She’s too close,” the technician said.
“He knows,” Monteleone said. “He’ll back her off. He wants this film to turn out as good as we do.”
He wants to kill her, Cardozo thought. He sent a man to kill her the other night. He hasn’t changed his mind.
“Come here,” a man’s voice said.
She moved back, and now the camera saw a man sitting on a sofa, wearing a half mask over his eyes and a striped dressing gown. His arms went around her. He folded his hands on her breast. He drew her down. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her throat, and then lightly brushed his lips against hers.
“I’ve missed you.” She unbuttoned her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
He couldn’t kill her, the thought came back. Not on camera.
“Why have you been staying away?” the masked man asked.
But the man’s a necro. He wants jack-off films of people dying. What could be hotter than this, a home movie of yours truly killing one of the country’s top models?
“A lot’s been happening.” Cordelia let her skirt drop, then peeled her panties off. They slid silkenly down her.
The man put his face close to Cordelia’s. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
“Do you forgive me for the other night?” the man asked. “Tina’s party went on forever. I tried to phone you but there was something wrong with your machine.”
“That’s okay, I went out.”
He sniffed at her mouth, her eyes, her hairline. He sniffed at the tops of her breasts. His hand moved along her leg.
As Cardozo watched, something crawled through him.
The man’s dressing gown fell open.
“I have a confession to make.” Cordelia began stroking his penis. “I ran out of coke Memorial Day weekend. I went to your old place to borrow some. You had a party going on. A dude was tied up.”
Memorial Day weekend, Cardozo thought. His mind had been working on it but it wasn’t till now that it came together.
“You were torturing him,” Cordelia said. “It freaked me. Because it turned me on. I’ve never been turned on like that.”
Cordelia had seen them torturing Downs. And Cordelia must have told her mother while Babe was still in coma. The time sequence fit. That was Babe’s telepathy, her dream. The puzzle dissolved into the simple image of a panicked child telling her mommy the terrible thing that had happened, pleading with mommy to make the world right again.
On the screen, the man took Cordelia’s hand away from his hard cock. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s make it better.”
He got up and disappeared from the frame. A moment later he returned and laid out his banquet on the coffee table: four glassine envelopes, horn-handled scissors, four red-capped vials, a soup spoon, a chafing dish heater, a silver caviar cup, red rubber tubing, an eyedropper, a cigarette lighter, a bottle of mineral water, a syringe.