Rhymes With Prey Read online

  Instead: “Thank you.” He turned and walked off the stage.

  AMELIA MADE A FEW CALLS to the television stations, posing as an angry cop, and told them that Lily was at Lincoln’s town house. “She’s guilty, she’s the one who did it, you got to get on her,” she told the newsies.

  Within the hour, there were six news crews and fifty rubberneckers on the sidewalk outside of Lincoln’s town house. One of them finally came up and pounded on the door, and Amelia peeked out and asked what they wanted.

  They wanted Lily.

  After some back-and-forth, Lily went out on the stoop, told them that she would make one statement for the record, and that would be it.

  “I have some very clear ideas of how this may have happened,” she began.

  “Are you guilty?” somebody shouted.

  “Of course I’m not guilty,” Lily said. “I’m not guilty of anything except trying to track down a torture-killer. But the possibilities now are quite few: the logical possibilities. I’ll knock them down one at a time, and when I’m finished, we’ll have this madman. Within the next day or two. I’m confident of that.”

  The press conference lasted for another two or three minutes, then she said she would not talk anymore about it, and went back inside. The news crews dispersed, with the exception of a radio reporter. The rubberneckers went with them.

  An hour later, Lucas stuck his head out the door. “If you’re waiting for Lily, she went out the back a half hour ago.”

  At ten o’clock that night, Lucas and Lily headed over to the West Side, in the Thirties west of Ninth Avenue. They were tracked by two other cars, each with two cops in them, including Amelia.

  Lily took a call, and then said to Lucas, “He’s on the way. He’ll get off at Penn Station and then walk over, unless he’s going somewhere else.”

  “I’m worried,” Lucas said. “He’s nuts. If he goes off on you, I mean he could just—”

  “He works at a hospital. He’s unlikely to be carrying a gun. And the stuff I’m wearing is stab-resistant.”

  “Nothing is stab-proof, though,” Lucas said. “What we really need to do is slow down.”

  “I disagree,” Lily said. “This is hot, right now. He’s got to be feeling the street. If he has too much time to think about it, he can start covering it up. If he really thinks about it, he’d know that I’d never approach him alone. We can’t let him think.”

  Andy Pitt lived in a dark brownstone building that would take at least fifty yuppies and a couple of generations to gentrify, Lucas thought. They sat a block away, and the few people on the sidewalks either crossed the street or moved to the far edge of the sidewalk when they realized that there were people in the parked cars. A couple went by, and then a too-happy guy with a white dog.

  Lily took a call on a police handset. “He’s on the sidewalk. He’s coming this way.”

  “Wire is good,” Lucas said. Lily was wearing a wire over her vest, which made her look a little paunchy; but paunchy was okay, considering the alternative.

  They took a call from Amelia, who was with three other cops, concealed down some cellar steps at a building on the other side of the street. “We’re set here.”

  A minute later she took another call: “He’s across Ninth, still coming on. He’s got a grocery sack.”

  Another two minutes: “He’s two blocks out.”

  Lily said, “Let’s go.”

  Lily went to the stoop that led into the apartment building. The doors were locked, but the rake opened them in a moment, and Lucas stepped into the entry hall. There was a weak bare-bulb light inside, and he reached up and unscrewed it, a quarter inch at a time, because of the heat. When it went out, he unscrewed it another quarter inch, then pulled his gun, cocked it, and leaned against the wall. Lily was facing him through the glass, five inches away, and he could hear her radio. “He’ll turn the corner in ten seconds. Nine. Eight.”

  Lily opened the door, turned off the radio, and handed it to Lucas. They were both counting. Seven. Six. Five. Four.

  Andy turned the corner. Lucas was looking past Lily’s head, and he said, just loud enough for her to hear, “He’s seen you. Bang on the door.”

  She banged on the door.

  Lucas said, “He’s coming up. He’s a hundred feet out.”

  Lily turned away from the door, as if giving up, then saw Andy and his bag. Andy stopped under the only nearby streetlight, and Lily walked down the steps and called, “Police. Is that you, Andy? Wait there.”

  If he ran, they’d have to try something different.

  He didn’t run. He said, “You’re the cop who killed my father.”

  “That’s right. I have a few questions for you. We’re trying to find out how a piece of brass, a shell from a nine-millimeter cartridge, got into a gun that was used in another killing. You may have heard about it. After I thought about it, Andy, there’s only one way, isn’t there? You picked it up. We froze the crime scene, but you were right in the middle of it, with your father. What did you do, step on it? Kneel on it? You were kneeling right next to him.”

  Lucas, watching from the window, saw Andy do something with his left hand, his free hand; something in the pocket of his jacket. Couldn’t see what, but Lily didn’t seem worried; but then she might not have been able to see the move. She pushed him, still talking. “Found the kill room, and found some DNA that shouldn’t have been there. Not much, a few flakes of skin, but good enough for us. So, I have a warrant. We need a DNA sample from you. It won’t hurt. I have a kit, we need you to scrub a swab against your gums.”

  “I knelt on it,” Andy said.

  “What?”

  “I knelt on it. The shell. I didn’t try to do that, I just knelt on it by accident. When I saw what it was, I put it in my pocket.”

  “And you reloaded it.”

  “Of course. My pop and I reloaded everything. When you shoot a lot, you don’t want to waste all that brass. We saved more than half, except that we shot more.”

  “Who killed the women? You or Verlaine?”

  “Not Verlaine.” Andy laughed, and dropped his grocery sack by his ankle. “We had the same interests, but he never had the guts to do anything real. He just liked to get the women in there and pose them like slave girls and make his sculptures, and then he’d go around to the S&M clubs and brag about it. But he had that room down in the basement where he kept his finished work—he had that big steel door because the metal thieves will take that bronze shit and melt it right down—but that was perfect. I’d get the girls down there and do what I wanted. What he dreamed about. You ever had a slave? There’s nothing like it.”

  “Why’d you kill him?”

  “Because of you. I didn’t even know how close you were to finding him, even with all those clues I left for you. All those brass filings. But I had that shell, and a shell is a terrible thing to waste. You killed my pop. I thought they’d put you in prison, so you’d have all that time to think about it.”

  “Why those victims, Andy? Why those particular women?”

  But he didn’t answer, just stepped closer. Fist coming out of his pocket.

  Lucas stepped through the door with his gun and shouted, “He’s got something in his hand, Lily, he’s got something.”

  Lily jumped back, but Andy was right with her, grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back, looking around. “Stay away. Stay away,” he screamed. “I got a scalpel, I’ll cut her face off.”

  Amelia and the other cops emerged from the stairway across the street and spread out.

  “Get away. Get away or I’ll cut her throat, I swear to God, I’ll cut her fuckin’ throat.”

  He yanked Lily backward, and Lily called to Lucas, “I can’t reach my gun. It got stuck under the damn vest when he pulled me back.”

  Lucas: “Can you go down?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t try anything. I just want to go away. I walk her up the block and I—”

  Lily, using both hands,
grabbed his knife arm and pushed it away from her, just an inch, and at the same time kicked her feet out from under herself and dropped. Amelia and Lucas fired at the same time, and Andy’s head exploded.

  Lily landed on her ass and rolled away from the falling body; the scalpel tinkled to the ground six feet away. “That was not optimal,” she said, as she got back to her feet and turned to look down at the body.

  After that, it was mostly routine: checking the tape, calling crime scene. Andy Pitt had two bullet holes in his head, one right through the forehead and out the back, and the second in one temple and out the other.

  As the scene was taped off, Lucas stepped over to Amelia and asked, “You okay?”

  “I’m okay. How about you?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. He looked her over and said, “Do you know that you smile when you pull the trigger?”

  THEY SAT IN GOVERNMENT-ISSUE FURNITURE and wheelchair, across from the chief of detectives. His office.

  Lucas, Lily, Amelia, and Lincoln. They were here for what Lincoln joked was the post postmortem. Maybe in bad taste, but nobody was all that upset that Andy Pitt was lying in the morgue at the moment.

  Markowitz was on a call (nodding subconsciously, from which Lincoln deduced he was speaking, well, most likely listening, to his boss, the commissioner). Lincoln looked around. He thought the office was pretty nice. Big, ordered, with nice views, though Lincoln had no use for views. His town house, for instance, offered a nice scene of Central Park. He invariably ordered Thom to close the curtains.

  Distracting.

  Finally, Markowitz hung up. His gaze incorporated them all. “Everybody upstairs’s happy. I was worried, they were worried, well, it was a little radical what you wanted to do. But it worked out.”

  Lincoln shrugged—one of the few gestures he was capable of—and turned his chair slightly to face Markowitz. “The plan was logical, the execution competent,” he said. Those were about his highest forms of praise.

  It was Lucas who’d initially come up with the theory of who’d killed Verlaine and set Lily up.

  Amelia, you know somebody in the NYPD evidence room?

  He had a possible source for the shell casing with Lily’s fingerprint on it: the crime scene where she’d tapped Levon Pitt. Sure enough, the evidence log from that crime reported three slugs recovered but only two spent casings. Somebody, possibly, had pocketed the third.

  “Okay, the gun at Verlaine’s belonged to Levon Pitt. The shell casing at Verlaine’s had been Lily’s, fired when Pitt was shot,” Lucas had pointed out when they’d learned this. “How could they be linked? Only through the one individual who had a connection to them both: Andy Pitt, Levon’s son, the kid who had—supposedly—been held hostage by his father.”

  But what, Lucas speculated, if he hadn’t been a hostage? What if he was his father’s accomplice in the serial shootings back then? And he was enraged that Lily had killed his father?

  It made sense, Lincoln had agreed, and he’d pointed out that Andy might’ve met Verlaine through his father’s junkyard, where, possibly, the sculptor bought metal for his art.

  They’d found where the young man lived and worked and set up surveillance.

  But no evidence implicated him. They needed more. They had to flush him, force him into making a move.

  And Lincoln had come up with a plan. Using Lily as bait. They’d proved to Markowitz she was innocent and asked him to make the initial press announcement to that effect. Then Amelia contacted more reporters. Lily, too, had made her statement.

  That virtually guaranteed that Andy knew Lily was getting close. He’d have to make his move.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” Markowitz said. “I mean, you, Lucas, coming all the way from Minneapolis. That was really above and beyond the call.”

  “Glad to help out.”

  “Better get back to it.” Markowitz’s attention was elsewhere now. He was glancing at the notepad on which he’d jotted notes during his conversation with the commissioner. There were a lot of notes.

  But nobody rose. Lincoln glanced at Lily, who was the senior law officer here. She said, “Stan, just one thing we were thinking about. One loose end, sort of.”

  Still distracted. “Loose end?” He was ticking off something on the paper in front of him.

  “You know what occurred to us? Remember we had the idea that somebody was using Verlaine to kill those women? Well, what if it wasn’t Verlaine they were using, but Andy Pitt?

  “Huh? I don’t get it.”

  Lily continued, “Sure, he had a motive to get even with me. But that doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t force him or hire him to kill those women, and Verlaine.”

  Amelia said, “Like maybe somebody from Narcotics Four, after all. Andy Pitt never got to tell us why he picked those women. Why? Maybe the women could provide good info on drug operations in the city. Maybe it was Andy who got recruited by somebody in Narc Four.”

  “And another thing that we were pondering,” Lincoln said. “Who exactly was it doing everything he could to protect the unit? The one who insisted that the killings had to be the work of a psycho, nothing to do with any cops?”

  Lily took over again. “That’d be you, Stan.”

  If the words didn’t have Markowitz’s full attention, the Glock that Lily drew and pointed more or less in his direction sealed the deal.

  THE CHIEF OF DETECTIVES SIGHED. “Goddamnit.”

  “What’s the story, Stan?” Amelia asked. Voice cold. She tossed her hair. Lucas was still looking.

  There was a pause.

  “All right,” Markowitz muttered. “I did pull some strings to get the drug side of the investigation downplayed.”

  “Let me guess,” Lily snapped. “Because the women were tortured and killed to get information on the drug player in town so Narc Four could become the shining star of the department.”

  “Guess again, Detective.” Markowitz gave a guttural laugh. “Do you think there might’ve been some other reason why Narc Four has such a great conviction record—other than hiring a psycho to torture and kill users?”

  No one replied.

  “How ’bout because the fucking head of Narc Four was on the take.”

  “Marty Glover?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. We’ve suspected it for six months. Sure, the team was collaring suppliers and importers and meth cookers all over the city—except for one location. A big heroin distribution operation based in Red Hook, Brooklyn.” He tapped a file on his desk. “Glover was on their payroll and using Narc Four to take down their competition. The others on the team weren’t in on it. All they knew was that Glover had good sources.”

  Markowitz waved at Lily’s weapon as if it were an irritating wasp. “Could you? Do you mind?”

  She holstered the Glock, but kept her hand near the grip.

  The COD continued. “But the Internal Affairs Red Hook operation against Glover had nothing to do with Verlaine or Pitt, or the torture-murders. It was just a coincidence the women were druggies, the victims. But then you started looking for connections. Glover freaked out. I thought he was gonna rabbit, go underground and burn the evidence. So I told you to back off. That’s all there was to it.”

  Lucas asked, “What happened with Glover?”

  “I didn’t want to move so fast but there was no choice. I called Candy Preston—from Narc Four—and we set up a sting to nail Glover. I had her use one of her snitches to offer him a payoff. Fifty thousand. I didn’t think he’d go for it, but he couldn’t resist. We got him on camera taking the bribe. It’s not as righteous a collar as we’d like—I wanted some of the Red Hook scum, too. But the prosecutor’ll work him over. He’ll give up names if we play with the sentencing.”

  Lincoln gave him points for credibility. But he remained skeptical.

  Lucas, too, apparently. He said, “Good story, Stan. But I think we’d all like confirmation. Who can we talk to who’ll vouch for you?”

  “Well, there’s somebody
who’s been in the loop from the beginning of the Red Hook op.”

  “Who?”

  “The mayor.”

  Lincoln glanced toward Lucas and said, “Works for me.”

  · · ·

  Outside, they headed toward the accessible van, where Thom sat in the driver’s seat. He saw the entourage and hit the button that opened the door and lowered the ramp. Then he climbed out.

  Lincoln wheeled up to the van then braked to a stop, spun around. “Anyone care to come back to the town house for an aperitivo? It’s approaching cocktail hour.”

  “Bit early,” the aide pointed out. Such a mother hen.

  “Thom, our guests have had an extremely traumatic time. Kidnapping was involved, knives were involved, gunplay was involved. If anybody deserves a bit of refreshment, it’s them.”

  “Love to,” Lucas offered. “But I’m heading back to the family. Got a flight in an hour.”

  “I’m going to make sure he gets to the airport,” Lily said. “Without getting into any trouble.”

  They shook hands. Lincoln wheeled onto the ramp and his aide fixed the chair to it with canvas straps. The criminalist said, “We should think about doing this again, Davenport.”

  Thom lifted his eyebrow. “Last name. Means he likes you. And he doesn’t like many people.”

  Lincoln grumbled. “I’m not saying I like anyone. Where did that subtext come from? I’m simply saying this case didn’t turn out to be the disaster it might have.”

  “I may not be back here soon,” Lucas said, and cocked his head. “But you ever get to Minnesota?”

  “Used to go quite a bit.”

  “You’ve been?” Amelia asked.

  “Of course. I grew up in the Midwest, remember,” Lincoln said impatiently. “I’d go fishing for muskie and pike in Swan Lake and Minnetonka.”

  “You fished?” Thom asked. He seemed astonished.

  “And I’ve been to Hibbing. A Bob Dylan pilgrimage.”

  “Site of the largest open-pit iron mine in the world,” Lucas said.

  Lincoln nodded. “My first impression was that it’d be a great place to dispose of bodies.”