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and then tucked it securely away. She could hear his sub-vocalization, a confused murmur with cop? cop?
interspersed through it.
"Get me someone who can do the passport, and you get three more like that. Fuck me around and I
pull your arm out of your shoulder."
She gave a single heavy tug, not quite enough to dislocate the joint, proud of her quick mastery of
the local dialect. The man's scent turned heavier with fear, a salty odor, faintly appealing.
Why me? the human was thinking to himself. And: Easy money.
"Easy money," she said soothingly. She wanted him to be afraid, but not so panic-stricken he forgot
greed.
It wasn't hard to identify petty criminals; not when you could pick up their speech from many times
the distance a human could, and automatically sort multiple conversations for keywords. Scenting the drugs
and weapons helped, as well.
"Sure, I take you to Jojo," he said.
He was half lying. Ah. He probably knows of such an individual, but doesn't plan to deliver.
"Of course you will," she said. "Right now, and if you try to run away, the arm goes."
***
"Bingo," Carmaggio said softly, and spat the gum in his mouth toward a manhole cover.
The back courtyard was cold and slick with the last rain; which kept the smell down, at least. He
walked over to the body. Damn, that's unusual. You got used to corpses in all sorts of positions; upside
down, hanging from things, in beds, in cars. Once he'd had a killing where the girlfriend's body got stuffed
into a large sealed crate and mailed by the ex-wife to the husband. Who'd fainted, fallen over backward,
and killed himself when he opened the crate—and that presented some interesting evidentiary problems.
This one was lying on his stomach, with the forward third of his body propped up against the brick
wall of the building. As if he'd run right into it and poured down, like Wile E. Coyote in one of the old Road
Runner cartoons.
Carmaggio took his hands out of his pockets and pulled on a pair of gloves. "Another fun night in
the Busiest Precinct in the World," he said. A couple of the uniforms and technical people laughed as they
went about their business.
They were about a block from Times Square; he could see the reflected lights of the Embassy in a
puddle out on the street, beyond the cars and the cordon. At least now the press had had a month to forget
the warehouse killings, so he didn't have a flock of black-winged cameramen following him around, flapping
and squawking and waiting for something to die. There was a Sbarro's next to the Embassy, which
reminded him he hadn't eaten. I'll get a meatball sandwich afterward, he decided.
"Ai, me muero," Jesus Rodriguez said, gloving up as well. "You know, there was a time when I
thought I'd be catching murderers, not spending my days with the bodies."
"Hmmm."
Carmaggio crouched behind the body for a second. Hands were down, resting on the ground palms
up. There was a smear of blood on the wet brick, starting about face height for someone the victim's height.
He touched a gloved finger to it and rubbed the result with the ball of his thumb; unscientific, he supposed,
but it often worked as a rough-and-ready timecheck. Hard to tell, though, with this temperature and all the
water oozing out of the brick—God damn all midwinter thaws, anyway, they screwed things up worse than
snow. Maybe there was something to this global warming thing; winters had frozen harder when he was a
kid.
The initial blood spatter was huge, like an inkblot in one of those old psychologist's tests. More
blood in a pool around the base of the wall. Head injuries bled out fast, as bad as a major wound to the
chest cavity.
"What do I see in this?" he wondered, stepping back and looking at the blot. "I see someone who
had their head shot out of a cannon at a wall, is what I see."
There was nothing around the body but garbage. He crouched again and used a pencil in his left
hand to move the ponytail of greasy black hair that covered the victim's neck. Aha.
Livid bruises on either side of the spinal column, right above the shoulders. "Look at this," he said.
Jesus joined him. Henry spread his hand as if he were about to take the back of the dead man's
neck in it, a straightforward grab with the thumb on the left side. It fit exactly, thumb-mark and four fingers,
although from the spacing the hand had been slightly smaller than Carmaggio's.
"What does that say to you?" he asked his partner.
"Perp is right-handed," Jesus said helpfully.
"Oh, funny man."
"Geraldo has nothing to me, patrón. I'd say someone put his face to that brick with an extreme
quickness."
Henry grunted. "How long?"
Jesus picked up one of the hands by a thumb. There was a purplish sheen to the waxy skin, and a
whitish spot appeared when the younger policeman stuck a finger in the livid patch that had lain nearest the
ground. The joints of the hand moved freely.
"Hour, maybe two, no more than three."
"Right."
There was a bulletin out with the extremely incomplete description they'd gotten from the
restaurant where Fischer had been seen last, but the chances of it doing any good were . . . Somewhere
between nada, zip, and fucking zero, he thought resignedly. You couldn't pull in every tall redheaded
woman within a mile of Times Square.
"All right, let's move him."
Two of the uniforms came forward, and Jesus got out his minicam, speaking softly into the throat
mike. Henry whistled.
Teeth dropped out of the shattered mouth as the slack body was lifted free of the bricks. One of
the patrol officers swallowed and wobbled a bit, until her partner hissed sharply at her. Broken jaw,
mandible pushed right back. All the upper teeth snapped off. Frontal bones pushed in until there was nothing
but a glistening mass of pulp, and the forehead had a dished look.
Carmaggio felt a little off himself. Nothing I could take to court, but it's the same MO, he
thought. The skin along the nape of his neck roughened. Angel dust? he mused.
Something unnatural was behind this combination of speed and strength and utter savagery. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]