Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
“We’ve found a body, sir.”
Suddenly focused, Paull could hear the thin line of anxiety that had crept into the commander’s voice. “Has Alli Carson been found?”
“It’s not a female body.”
Paull sat up straighter. “Then what?”
“Dick Bridges. Looks like a suicide.”
“Where are you?”
“His apartment.”
“What brought you there?”
“An anonymous 911 call.”
“Traceable?”
“Nah. It came from a pay phone couple of blocks from the apartment. No fingerprints, and we swept the area with negative results.”
Worse and worse. “I’ll be right over.”
Paull rose, grabbed his coat, and was on his way out of the office when his cell phone buzzed again. He listened to Fraine telling him about Leopard and his head began to throb painfully.
* * *
A
RTURO’S
P
IZZA
Parlor was getting ready to close when Fraine pressed his badge against the glass door. A gangly kid as pimply as Leopard unlocked the door and stared at him blankly, his mouth half open.
“Manager,” Fraine said, pushing past him.
“Mr. Sabatini!” the kid called from behind Fraine. “Cops!”
“Cops?” Sabatini, a rotund man with bandy legs and the dark skin of the southern Italian, emerged from the rear, wiping his hands on his smeared white apron. “What cops?”
Fraine gave him a look at his official ID. “You the manager?”
“Manager and owner.” Sabatini looked at the empty pizza box Fraine was holding. His eyes were like olive pits. “Wassamatta, you gotta complaint?”
“Who makes the pies, Mr. Sabatini?”
“I do. I’m a third-generation
pizzaiolo
. I don’t let no Hispanics near my dough.”
Sabatini said it with so much innate pride Fraine knew he couldn’t be culpable. He held out the box and gave the address of the Dupont North. “Order must’ve been placed no more than an hour ago. Can you tell me who delivered it?”
Sabatini looked Fraine up and down. “Sure thing. Mickey.”
“Where is he?”
“Right behind you.” He meant the pimply kid.
Fraine whirled to see Mickey racing out the door and down the street. He tore after him, Sabatini’s raised voice following him. “What’d that little prick do now?”
Up ahead, Mickey turned a corner to his left and, a moment later, Fraine followed. They were headed down a three-block decline, but a block later, Mickey darted left again, ducking left, through a chain-link fence. When Fraine reached the rubble-strewn area just inside the fence, he was confronted by a moldering brownstone too run-down even to be used as a crack house, though by the flux of human and chemical stink that assaulted him when he stepped through a front door hanging off its hinges, it must recently have been.
Just inside, he stood stock-still, listening. Hearing a floorboard creak above his head, he leapt up the stairs three treads at a time. At the top, a bullet whistling past his ear caused him to throw himself on his side. He drew his Glock and lay still, waiting.
A floorboard creaked again, and he rushed toward the sound, firing three shots in quick succession. No fire was returned, but he saw a blur of motion heading out the window of the room at the end of the hall. He sprinted into the room, fired again as Mickey grabbed the fire escape and disappeared upward.
As he cleared the window, he squeezed off a blind shot upward to prevent Mickey from firing his pistol while Fraine was vulnerable. Looking up as he climbed, he could see that the kid was as agile as a monkey. He’d never catch him in a footrace; time for Plan B.
Mickey hit the roof while Fraine was still a floor below. By the time Fraine came up over the low parapet onto the tar paper, the kid was on the other side of the roof. Fraine took the sharpshooter’s stance, braced his Glock with his left hand, aimed, and fired. Mickey cried out and went down, grabbing his right thigh.
Fraine took off after him, feeling winded but gritting his teeth and pushing his body on its forward trajectory by keeping his center of gravity around his pelvis and his legs pumping. Mickey, hearing him coming, squirmed around and brought his pistol up.
Fraine aimed the Glock. “Don’t be stupid, Mickey. Whatever you’re into isn’t worth dying for.”
“What would you know about it?” Mickey shouted.
Fraine kept advancing, the Glock aimed squarely at Mickey’s heart. “Don’t make me pull the trigger, son.”
“Fuck you!” Mickey screamed, but Fraine was now close enough, and he kicked the pistol out of the kid’s hand. It was a cheap Saturday night special that broke apart when it hit the rooftop.
Fraine stood over the kid. “That pizza you delivered was poisoned, did you know that?”
Mickey looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t know shit.” He looked like he was about to burst into tears.
“Listen to me, Mickey. You’re already in the shitter. Accessory to murder at the very least, first degree at the worst.”
“What?” Now tears sprang out at the corners of his eyes. “What kinda trash you talking?”
“I don’t have time to talk trash,” Fraine said. “The young man you delivered that pizza to is dead, poisoned by whatever you put on the pizza.”
“Jesus.” Mickey ran the back of a shaking hand across his lips. “I didn’t know. How could I know?”
“Tell me what happened. That’s your only way out now. You talk to me and I’ll see what I can do.”
“They’ll kill me.”
“You’ll be dead if you don’t talk, trust me. I can protect you.” He knelt beside the kid. “I can make you disappear.”
Mickey hung his head. A dust devil whipped his hair into a brief frenzy. “I knew it, I knew it. I’m no fucking good at this.”
“Meaning?”
“Being a hard-ass.” His head came up, his expression bleak. “I don’t have it in me.”
“Then why go that route?”
His narrow shoulders lifted and fell. “Who the fuck wants to be in school, listening to gray-heads telling me what to think, when I can be pulling a grand a week?”
“And yet you do errands for a
pizzaiolo
.”
“Not for the money, that’s for fuck sure. But, shit, you’d be surprised the things you pick up in a joint like that. The people that come in, talk in front of you to each other or on their burners like you’re not there.” He rubbed his fingers together. “Secrets.”
“Makes you more valuable, huh?”
“Hey, I’ve gotta earn.” He produced a weak smile. “I want all the things the big boys have, y’know? Flat-screen TV, iPad, bling—plenty of bling or you can’t catch the bitches.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
His attempt at ambition was so sad it almost broke Fraine’s heart. Almost. “Okay, Mickey, you are what you are. Now you know. So give me what I want so I can help you.”
The kid sighed and looked away, over the rooftops to the part of the city he scarcely knew and which would not accept him. “Rats’re the only thing moving in this building now.”
“Mickey.”
“That’s what he calls me, see. The Rat. I take it ’cause he’s the one who pays me. He’s the one who gives the orders.”
“And he ordered you to—what?”
“Salt the pizza. Gave me a tiny packet.”
“Still have it?”
Mickey tossed his head. “You kidding? He told me to get rid of it after the salting.”
Fraine grew angry at the kid’s stupidity. “And you didn’t question this particular order? You didn’t wonder what the fuck you were doing?”
“I thought it was coke. Anyways, I don’t get paid to question or wonder. I did once, but he beat the crap outta me, so that was that.”
“Beautiful. This sonuvabitch have a name?”
The kid ducked his head like he was in the ring, bobbing and weaving away from punishing blows. “Yeah, but I…”
“You stop now, I can’t help you. You’re a dead man walking.”
Mickey held his head in his hands. “It all seemed so easy. All I wanted was for it to be easy.”
That’s what they all wanted, Fraine thought. These kids had no sense of work ethic, the value of money, or their own worth. How could they, when they were surrounded by gang lords and drug dealers raking in millions? It was a gangsta world; you lived and died by its code.
“So who is this guy, Mickey? This asshole who beats you, then gives you a grand a week for swallowing his shit?”
“His name’s Moses, but, honestly, I think that’s a moniker, not his real name.”
“Moses got a last name, or is he like Paladin?”
“Who?”
“Sorry.” Wrong cultural reference. “Madonna.”
“Oh, yeah. Moses Malliot.”
“You’re kidding.”
Mickey, so close to beating the rap, became panicky. “Fuck, no, I swear. Why?”
Moses Malliot was the name of the guy Andy Beemer, at Chesapeake BodyWerks, who serviced Leonard Bishop’s car, had told Fraine knew who had given the chief of detectives his initial launch up Metro’s ladder.
J
ACK ARRIVED
in D.C. having slept all the way across the Atlantic. He had dreamed of Alli and of Emma, as they had been before Emma’s death, two friends and roommates, inseparable and intertwined. He dreamed that he was the perfect dad, taking them to deafening rock concerts, then out for hot fudge sundaes, or on long weekends, walking the barrier islands, picking up seashells, and splashing in the surf. He dreamed he had gone with Emma to pick out a dog, a boxer she had longed for, that she named it Cleo, and he helped her train it, watching her laugh at the puppy’s antics. He dreamed that, finally exhausted, she fell asleep in his arms, that he carried her to bed, and tucked her in. He dreamed of watching her sleeping face, pale in the puddle of moonlight slanting in through her bedroom window.
He awoke to the scream of brakes, the blur of motion out the window, and a catch in his throat that brought him to the edge of weeping. As he unbuckled, he recognized today as one of the days when he missed his daughter with an unbearable intensity, that this feeling would be with him all day, and that there was nothing he could do about it except put one foot in front of the other until, as in all the times before, it would fade into background chatter, impatiently anticipating its next flare-up.
* * *
J
ACK, HAVING
been contacted by Dennis Paull while still at the airport, met him at the room in the Dupont North Paull had booked for Leopard and Fraine.
“What happened?” Jack said.
“Poisoned.” Paull stood with hands on hips. “By a fucking slice of pizza, of all things.”
Paull’s forensics team had finished and were now loading Leopard’s body onto a gurney. The room had been photographed and dusted for prints. There was little else to do but to pack up the two laptops, but Jack stopped the techs before they could do that.
“Take everything else back to the lab,” Paull told them. “We’ll join you later.”
When the room was cleared, Jack said, “Any news?”
Paull shook his head. “She’s off the radar, and so is her roommate, the Bard woman.”
“No one knows what happened to Vera after she gave her statement at Metro HQ?”
“Unfortunately, no. Fraine told me Detective Stoddart was too busy typing up his report and bringing it up to Bishop.”
“What the hell’s Bishop got to do with this?”
“That’s what I’m hoping Fraine or Nona will be able to tell me.” Paull had briefed Jack on the taxi ride in from the airport, but the situation seemed to be changing minute to minute.
“I want to see where, according to Vera, Alli was abducted.”
“Stoddart told me he already went over it himself—and I sent a team out there. They found nothing.”
“I know Alli better.”
“You think you’ll find something my people missed?” Paull held up his hands. “Strike that. Stupid question. All right, as soon as we’re finished here.”
Jack turned to Leopard’s laptop. “What was Leopard working on?”
“Trying to find out who provided the juice for Bishop’s rapid rise to the top of Metro, among other hacked goodies.”
“Well,” Jack said, sitting down at Leopard’s computer, “he must have hit a nerve.”
“He also must have set off an alarm somewhere.” Paull came and stood behind Jack. “Which worries me. Leopard was the best hacker I know.”
Jack checked out what Leopard had been working on, but he was so upset by Alli’s disappearance the letters swam away from him like frightened fish. His pulse rate went up and he felt the old, familiar anxiety grab hold of him again.
“Jack?”
“Give me a minute.” Jack slowed his breathing, remembering the lessons taught him by Reverend Taske, concentrating on a spot just to the right of his head, a place of utter peace and calm. He looked at the computer screen from that spot and ever so slowly the fish returned, forming into letters, which became words, the words flowing into sentences, the sentences lining up as paragraphs, and he began to read.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Bishop,” he said as his fingers worked the keys. “Who the hell is Milton P. Stirwith?”
Paull leaned over Jack’s shoulder. “Damned if I know.”
“This is interesting. According to what Leopard discovered, Stirwith doesn’t exist. He’s a legend—not just a legend, mind you, but a legend that bears all the hallmarks of those created by the Norns.”
Jack turned to look at Paull. “Do you know anything about the Norns? Is it true?”
Paull took a breath and nodded. “The group did exist, yes.”
“The point is, Dennis, according to what Leopard unearthed, the Norns still exist.”
All the blood had drained out of Paull’s face. “That’s not possible. The group was officially disbanded after the end of the Cold War.”
“Nevertheless, if we are to believe this, it still exists—unofficially.”
“Do you?” Paull said. “Believe it, I mean. Because I don’t see how this could be the case if the government shut it down.”
“I think it’s why Leopard was poisoned.” Jack rose and began to gather up the laptop to take with them. “Dennis, it seems likely that the Norns, rather than ceasing to exist, migrated into a black ops organ.”
Paull looked even more shaken. “The Norns require funding, which means they’re working for someone very high up inside the government.”