They boarded Eddie’s boat and used their feet to push all the snow off the aft deck. Clumps and soggy clods splashed the dark water. Tony used the spare key from Eddie’s desk and searched the cabin; Ray checked the helm and all the storage wells.
After an hour of looking, they agreed.
Except for a personal stash—two or three grams of flake in a small ivory box, tucked up into the upholstery in the sleeping berth—there was nothing on board. No product, no ordnance, no emergency cash. No address books written in funky code. Nothing that would cause anybody to look past the scene they’d set at the furniture store.
Back on the landing, Tony took the sack of demolished VHS security cassettes and upended it over the railing. Shards of plastic and ribbons of tape floated down to the water.
The water swept the pieces downriver. The current was faster than it looked.
They stayed awhile, slowly getting cold, passing a pint of Bushmills back and forth between them. The river flowing past created the sensation that it was the platform that was moving, not the river itself.
Little by little, the sky began to lighten over the tops of the trees along the opposite bank. They should have been long gone by then, but Ray said nothing. He just took his share of the whiskey and hung.
Tony killed the last of it. When the booze was gone, he screwed on the cap, drew his arm back, and hurled the empty bottle as far out as he could. The bottle hit the water with a faint slap, disappeared, then buoyed back to the surface a few feet downstream.
They stood there in the twilight, watching the bottle bob and weave among chunks of ice, riding the floe. Pretty soon they couldn’t see it anymore.
Ray said, “Ready to roll?”
In another minute, Tony nodded.
They walked back to the car.
27
It was a five-minute drive from the safe apartment to Central Station on Howard Street.
Worth arrived a few minutes before 7 A.M. Traffic was still thin, and frost skimmed the streets. Downtown seemed to glow with early light.
He used his key chip to enter the parking facility, left his personal weapon with lockup on the way in. He felt an urge to explain himself: I don’t normally carry off-duty. But the clerk barely looked up.
Worth went on inside.
Mark Vargas waited for him at the elevators on the fourth floor. He had a stack of folders under one arm and a paper cup of coffee in the other hand. Badge on his belt.
“Come on back,” he said.
It seemed strangely quiet on the floor; no chirping phones, no squawking fax machines, no watercooler chatter. A momentary seam between night and day.
Worth unzipped his coat and fell in step. They passed cubes and offices, open desks, drawing occasional glances along the way. Across the bullpen, he saw one detective standing at a printer, tracking them.
The guy looked familiar, but Worth couldn’t remember his name. Mid-forties, balding. He wore an empty shoulder holster and half a grin. When Worth made eye contact, the guy put up his dukes.
Another guy at a nearby desk covered his mouth with his knuckles. He didn’t look up from whatever he was doing.
Vargas kept his eyes forward and walked on, ignoring everybody. Worth couldn’t decide which was worse: the asshole by the printer, or the fact that Mark Vargas kept turning out to be basically an okay guy.
It had been about this time of day, their now-famous exchange. Middle of July. The nights had been hot and sticky and it had been the end of a long bad shift; Worth had been hand-delivering an LD-512 he’d forgotten to write up on an agg burglary two weeks before.
Vargas had been walking to his desk, reading a printout and eating a Crane Curl.
Worth didn’t remember thinking about it. He still didn’t remember making a fist. But he’d seen Vargas coming a good three seconds before Vargas had looked up and seen him.
He’d never thrown a punch that came more naturally. It had been almost like watching somebody else do it. Pop.
He remembered the cinnamon twist flying. The bite of his knuckles hitting teeth. When he’d told the story to the Modells in the stockroom, Vargas had ended up on his ass, wondering what had hit him.
But that wasn’t quite the way it had happened. Vargas had stumbled back a step; that was about all. Worth never saw the counterpunch.
Later, somebody else had claimed they’d seen him touch leather after Vargas put him down. His service weapon had been locked up downstairs; his holster would have been an empty hole in his belt. But somebody had claimed the motion had been there.
It was bullshit. Worth remembered catching his own blood in his hands and not being able to see.
They’d recorded the comment at the review out of formality, but nobody else had been able to back up the claim. Not even Vargas, who’d been standing directly over him at the time.
Because it was bullshit. Even if his head had been screwed on crooked for a while there, Worth knew it in his heart: No way had he gone for his gun.
It just wasn’t like anything he’d do.
Vargas dropped the folders at his desk and they walked on, past a uni heading the other direction and a clump of detectives milling around another desk. The meeting room was tucked back in the northeast corner between the coffee station and the cold case library.
Quite a group waited for them inside.
Worth’s heart did a little back flip as he followed Vargas into the room. He saw familiar faces, all seated along the same side of the table, all of them facing the door:
His lieutenant. His union rep. Regina Torres, Vargas’s captain. Roger Sheppard from the South Unit. Briggs and Salcedo’s sergeant, Levon Williams from the Northeast.
At one end of the table sat the Deputy Chief of Criminal Investigations. The Deputy Chief of Uniform Patrol.
There were other faces he didn’t recognize.
Vargas pulled the door closed behind them. “Okay, I don’t know who knows who, so…”
“Let’s just get started,” Deputy Chief Riley said. He nodded to Vargas. “We’ll meet each other as we go.”
D.C. Pullman sat next to Riley. Pullman had headed the Uniform Patrol Bureau the past five years, and Worth hadn’t had much contact with him before now. Mid-forties, salt-and-pepper hair, a smoker’s voice. He motioned across the table to one of the empty chairs.
“Have a seat, Officer.”
Gina Torres had captain’s bars on her collar now.
She and Worth had graduated academy together. They’d always been able to crack each other up. They’d fallen out of touch, but he’d caught lots of good talk about her over the years. It always made him happy to hear.
Last year, she’d made the newspapers. Youngest captain in the department. He’d meant to send her a card, but he never did. Now didn’t seem like the appropriate time to offer his congratulations.
She said, “And when did you meet Miss Mullen?”
“In August,” Worth repeated. “When I started my provisional. We didn’t start…seeing each other until recently.”
Gina—Captain Torres—nodded along. “Five, six weeks ago, you said?”
“About three,” Worth said. “Early October.”
“What was your reason for omitting that information before now?”
The bearded guy in the denim shirt beside her was Narcotics. The guy wearing the necktie was Internal Affairs. Neither of them had said much yet.
“In retrospect, I wish I’d followed my first instinct and radioed the call to another unit,” Worth said. “I let my emotional involvement interfere with my judgment.”
“I didn’t ask what you wish you’d done in retrospect, Officer.” Torres raised her chin. You’re not going to get any breaks here, Matt. “I asked why you chose not to inform your shift commander of your personal involvement with Miss Mullen and the subject.”