LITMIR.BIZ

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for cops barely out of their teens.

      So she went and he stayed. Both did, separately, what they needed to do, she thought. Neither did, together, what they wanted to do.

      Back in her room she felt half her age. Boneless from the working-over she’d had, she lay on the bed, pulling half the duvet up over herself, cocooning. She would, she decided, have to be careful about how she approached Ray Tate. If he was into something with someone, she’d have to determine if their time the year before was a transient situation or something that had a life of its own. Worst case, she decided with a lack of enthusiasm or belief, was she’d snag some hot young charger, bang him stupid, and head back up north to Indian country where she knew love would wither dry like one of the arid pods the grim elders rattled at the hopeful sky.

      The phone purred as she was nodding off.

      Chapter 7

      The task force brainiacs filed in in their power suits, carrying folders and briefing sheets and wearing masks as if they were real cops who actually went out among the public. In the array of chairs only one cop, a tall string-bean black guy from the duty desk, wore his mask on his face. The others, under their chins, on the backs of their heads, over their hair. One guy had it hanging over his crotch like a jockstrap, with a happy face on it.

      Ray Tate heard feet shuffling behind him. Chairs squeaked as bodies dropped into them with exhaustion. Someone snored. Someone groaned. He smelled medicated soap and cheap drugstore colognes used to mask, or at least thin out, the sweat of double shifts in closed cars on surveillance jobs and gun-and-runs. As plastic lids were popped or ripped behind him, he smelled coffee. There, too, were girlish scents: emollients, shampoo, cheap perfumes. He felt a stirring and wished he’d gone up to the Projects, mauled the files of the overnight homicides, and found the girl cop with a clothespin on her cute nose. The thought of another night painting and drinking and smoking and waiting for morning depressed him.

      As the brainiacs huddled at the front of the room, someone a few rows in front of him expounded on night-vision scopes as a tool to stop the migrants. “We anchor some barges out in the river, put some dead-eye musketeers on them with HKs and night scopes. A snakehead comes over the river with a load of Chinamen, pliinkkkk, we cooks his rices for him.”

      “Nice, Tim. Except we don’t got night scopes. We don’t got HKs. We don’t got barges. We don’t got anchors.”

      Someone else said, “The loony mayor got us nice new bicycle lanes up and down Martyrs’ Hill, though. The loony mayor got us bicycle racks on front of the new buses. The loony mayor got us ...”

      A breathtaking blonde clerk in a short skirt swayed across the front of the podium and opened a brown envelope. She tacked a photo of the latest victim to an easel and there was instant silence. The clerk stared at the photograph for a moment, made a choked sound, then quickly walked away with her head down. The victim’s face was misshapen, her lips were ballooned, one eye was gone in a purple explosion above her left cheek. Her nose lay sideways on her right cheekbone. Ray Tate thought of nothing so much as the fractured mirror of a Picasso painting. Tubes ran from her nostrils and a thick piece of plastic was taped to the corner of her mouth.

      Beside him, Brian Comartin muttered, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, that poor little girl. Ah, Jesus Fucking Christ.” He took a shaky breath and seemed near tears. “I’m gonna kill this guy.”

      Ray Tate put a hand on his shoulder and wondered if he was looking at his own near future, a fat globe in upper middle age, not sure if he could carry the water any longer, living out a ghost life in the cavernous headquarters with a slide rule in his ankle holster.

      The chief of detectives took to the podium. Reluctantly, he slipped his mask down. He gazed over the slumping, yawning troops in their rumpled clothes and couldn’t keep the disdain off his face. “Okay, everybody wake up, have ears. We’re keeping this one shrink-wrapped, nothing outside this room. We’ve got three dead women and we’ve got this one found unconscious today. All were beaten. No sex assault, no robbery that we can figure out. Today’s survivor and one of the other dead three were found by the riverbank. The other two were at various locations downtown.

      “The highlights are, as I said, all young female African-Americans, all beaten to pulp, no weapon used that we can tell, no apparent robbery, no molestation. So, no apparent motive. Which means we might be looking at the racial aspect as the connector. We like the Volunteers for this. They’re out all over town in their stupid red caps, and down by the river. They’re very, very viable.

      “The current victim might be our breakout. She was found this morning when some boaters were walking along the river. Her prints aren’t on file. She’s not a missing.

      “So, today’s vic remains unidentified. She had no ID, just some house keys, locks unknown. The good news is she’s alive. Bad news, she’s comatose, possible severe brain injury, so when she wakes up she might give us something to go on, or she might start reciting Willie Nelson lyrics in Swahili.” He smirked, shrugging in a boys-to-boys grin, and when he saw he was facing grim rows of iron faces staring at the victim and not at him, he cleared his throat. “Okay, anyway, we can’t wait to find out. We’re going to take this one apart.” The Chief of Ds looked around the room. “The folks who found her said it sounded like she was asking about her dog, Harris, or something. If she was walking her dog on the banks, probably she lived in the area. If she doesn’t live in the area, she drove, so a team of cadets from the academy will start doing licence tags on the surrounding streets, looking for something that hasn’t moved in two days. Maybe look for abandoned bicycles. They’ll also work the vets and clinics in the area, talk to dog walkers. Someone knows her, someone knows the dog, Harris. With a little police work we should be able to put a house around her.

      “That’s new, that’s the fresh stuff. A Homicide team is setting up. We’ve got forensics down at the latest crime stage. The Volunteers were out last night patrolling for migrant boats and they left some beer bottles and other printable debris along the riverbank. That’s at the lab. We’re doing canvassing. Intelligence is doing workups on the main players in the Volunteers and you’ll be given targets first thing tomorrow. It’ll mean double shifts, hard luck, kids, but there’s nothing I can do about it. We’re all maxing out, we’re all beat, we suck it up. You guys are the enforcement arm of this thing. Don’t worry about the investigative side. Concentrate the eyeballs on the Volunteers.” He looked pleased with himself, a man in command. His cheeks were closely shaven, his eyes were clear, and he wore the power authority suit of the brass, a deep blue three-piece over a snowy shirt and solid blue tie that wouldn’t strobe in television lights. “Questions, suggestions, obs, so far?”

      A woman called, “We putting out a public notice? People should know there’s a public danger. Especially black women.”

      “We’re working around to it, Marty. We don’t want to spook the Volunteers before we take them down.” He looked around. “Anyone else? Got obs, ideas, questions?”

      “No, Chief. No, man.” The same woman called, again, sounding distraught. “We have to notify. We didn’t do it back in ’04 and that guy got more women before we got him. City’s still paying the lawsuit by the families of those victims.”

      “I know, Marty, I know. We’re working something out. Anyone else?”

      “Yeah, Chief, I got some obs.” A bow-legged, red-headed gunslinger from the robbery squad stood up. His Montreal Canadiens jacket was slung over the back of his chair, he wore a double brace of semi-automatics in a worn shoulder rig, and the handle of a compact revolver jutted from the back of his blue jeans. He wore his mask backwards on the back of his neck with OH FUCK OFF scrawled on it in grease pen. “I observe I’m fucking whipped. We been going around the clock, some of us, for more than a week with this understaffing bullshit and doing gun-and-runs and I further observe, Chief, that except for sleeping in my car, I haven’t slept at all. I observe, Chief, also that with the plague out there we’re down about forty percent street manpower and I further observe, with respect, this whole fucking thing is a dog’s breakfast and we’re the fucking dog.” The gunslinger wasn’t

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