Cuts Through Bone (15 page)

“Shut the fuck up,” Vasquez muttered. She rearranged eggs around a bite of bacon. “Be serious.”

“Okay, we got the drunk in the alley. He's been there two nights in a row. Maybe he sees our ghost going in and out, even though he don't stay all night. I don't like him. The Gaines brothers are a better chance.”

“Those two scruffy guys?”

“Sure. Lucky we saw them. They'd sell their sister for a dollar.”

“Lucky because you want to buy their sister?”

Guthrie grinned. “See, you never know,” he said. “And you're probably not going to believe this, but I first ran into them on a stakeout. I was tailing a guy I was trying to make smell bad, seeing what I could find on him.”

“What d'you mean?”

“Politics is dirty business in the city.” He tore off a big piece of bagel with his teeth and spoke around it. “My guy is going to the same place over in TriBeCa, night after night. I can't squeeze in, so I'm watching the entrance for each time he comes out—hoping there'll be a girl, or whatever. Then I can run him to ground.

“Along come two guys, these scruffy little nondescript mutts—the Gaines brothers, who I don't know at the time. They cut over from Hudson, on the far side of the street. Traffic's not moving much. I'm sitting there, so I can't miss them. They're shuffling along, maybe drunk, just two guys on a stroll, and all of a sudden they stop. They huddle up like the Giants trying to call a play. Then Ralph swings over to the door of the warehouse—a street door, not a roller door—and goes inside. A minute later, he pokes out; then Rodney goes in with him.

“This is so stupid.” He paused to drink some coffee. “After a little while, they come out, just the same as they went in, and walk down the street. A half hour later, they come back and stop again at the door. Then they both go inside. I'm watching the club door, with a steady line of peacocks going in and out, so the thing across the street is just happening. As the night goes along, it happens so much that I can set my watch by the Gaines brothers. They need forty-five minutes each time they go inside, leave, and come back. By the time my guy pops from the club, they've already quit. On the last trip, Ralph Gaines slaps a lock on the door—he's closing up shop.

“That's on Friday. Saturday night is the same thing all night. I watch them take the lock off, in and out, forty-five-minute trips, and they lock up again before I follow my guy away from the club. They do the same thing all night Sunday. By then, I'm pretty sure I had them wrong—maybe they actually work there. But Monday night, I'm trailing my guy again, and the NYPD knocks on my window while I'm sitting outside the club. ‘Hey buddy, whatcha doing?' I let him know, and they ask if I saw anybody break into the warehouse across the street and rob the loft upstairs.

“Ralph and Rodney emptied the poor bastard's refrigerator. They took his clothes, and a bunch of crap. They left his plasma, his computer, that stuff. I'm serious. They took the dirty clothes outta his hamper and all. Soap, toilet paper, everything—they cleaned out his domestic shit.”

“They're going to help us how?” Vasquez asked.

Guthrie laughed. “I know, right? That metro princess in TriBeCa was screaming. They didn't touch anything that was insured. That killed him. But they know things, and they're always hot. They're going underground, so they'll know what's down there.”

“Like Ghost Eddy.” She pushed eggs around on her plate.

“I can get in touch with them because they're predictable.”

Vasquez finished her toast after dropping a dollop of runny jelly on it. “Look, I can hear you explaining that stakeouts do the job—sometimes not even the job you're doing.” She frowned. “How about the guy you were watching?”

“Ah, I never got him. Maybe he was clean.”

The young Puerto Rican shook her head. “I don't like sitting still. I know, you don't have to say—I don't have to like it. I have to learn how to deal with it. Okay?”

“You could get somewhere with that attitude,” Guthrie said.

Henry Street was already awake when the old Ford cruised up to the front of her parents' tenement. Garbage was going out, and brooms were dusting sidewalks. A few suspicious youngsters watched them, then ran off. Vasquez climbed out of the car and hitched at her gun belt before she went up the steps. The morning was cool. She paused and looked up at the building. Her long ponytail looked like a black stripe down her jacket, just another vertical line on a slim young woman. Nothing went sideways except the brim of her cap and the bunched-up sleeves of her windbreaker. She wasn't out of the ordinary. She went inside. She was right at home.

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

That afternoon, Guthrie ventured onto the Net, looking for Justin Peiper. Vasquez watched him fish out a SSN and a short list of credit cards with juggled balances. Peiper had trouble managing his finances—tossing debts from one card to another—but cleared all of his balances on the second of August. Most New Yorkers couldn't manage that. Guthrie searched dates, times, and places to cross-check with LMA, Washington Heights, Melrose, and the twenty-third of July. He reasoned that the districts near the crime scene might turn up a timely purchase, or give him proof whether the dark-haired man was at LMA the night Bowman was killed. He found nothing. Peiper was missing, so to speak, on the night of Bowman's murder. He registered credit-card bills for LMA and in places in the Heights infrequently, but credit-card charges didn't place him anywhere on the twenty-third.

“That would've been easy,” Guthrie muttered. He searched court documents in Utica to examine the assaults. Both were pled down to misdemeanors from ABHAN, a felony that had sent both of Vasquez's brothers to Rikers before. Peiper didn't mind waiting for someone to turn their head before he started trouble. Vasquez went back to her own desk with a shrug. While the hunt was on, she'd watched over Guthrie's shoulder.

After that, the little detective propped his feet up on his desk, moving only to refill his cup of coffee. A succession of frowns marched across his face. He opened his notebook and slowly turned the pages, but it didn't seem as if he was reading what was there. “We need another look at him,” he said finally.

“Justin Peiper?” Vasquez asked.

“Sure. We're going up to the university.”

*   *   *

On the drive up Broadway, Vasquez discovered that Guthrie didn't mean to stalk Peiper. He called Michelle Tompkins to make sure that she would be on campus. The traffic was moving quickly. Tompkins was in a class, so they would spend a little time on campus waiting for her. They had a long look at a barricade of clouds piled high in the eastern sky. Some invisible wall had the relief penned away from Manhattan, which glowed with ruddy, distorted heat. The dog days were barking along.

The auditoriums of McNamara Hall huddled drunkenly around an atrium roofed with glass. Clever workmanship joined the smaller buildings into a whole but couldn't quite unite the scattered arrangement. The mezzanine bent in irregular lengths and lolled staircases out like tongues into a disjointed lobby. Guthrie and Vasquez strolled for a quarter of an hour before locating the second-floor door to Tompkins's auditorium. They waited, watching students also wait and wander. The classrooms attracted fewer customers than the food court, but they seemed the same—a mix of the busy pouring around the slack.

Michelle Tompkins came from the auditorium with a satchel over her shoulder, near the front of a small group of students. She wore a pleated khaki skirt that clung to her hips and revealed muscular calves tapering down to slender ankles. Her chocolate brown hair bounced in unruly waves above the collar of her short-sleeved button-down shirt. When she saw the detectives, her eyebrows knitted into an annoyed frown, but she strode quickly over.

“
You
have been busy,” she said.

“We have,” Guthrie said. “I believe I found the mess you warned me about.”

Tompkins smiled bitterly. “Wasn't difficult, was it?” she asked quietly. “I suppose it's fortunate that most of it's gone—or unfortunate, since that was Cammie.” She looked at them impatiently and took a hesitant step along the mezzanine. “Perhaps we should go somewhere off campus?”

“We like the idea of an audience,” Vasquez said.

“Then you had a reason for the drama yesterday. I've already heard several versions, though, naturally”—she smiled again, but it looked like mockery—“only one call from Sigma. That was Amanda, in a panic.” She walked over to the mezzanine rail and lowered her satchel to the carpeted floor. “I won't disagree that the method makes sense. You might frighten someone into foolishness. How is it that I can help?”

“You have an insider's view of what they were doing at LMA,” Guthrie said. “So far, we have the story from witnesses standing too far away, or from witnesses who're busy trying to hide it.”

Tompkins's eyebrows lifted in surprise, then drifted back downward into an annoyed twist. “I'm not sure what you think I can tell you. I didn't even know she was kidnapped outside LMA, until you told me—”

“Quit kidding me, Michelle. You've been trying to stay clear since the beginning, but you must've thought it was something sexual all along. You were running with her before she met Olsen. You met Olsen after she brought him in, but that's when your knowing the ropes at Columbia became important. You knew she was up to absolutely nothing before she met Olsen—and I bet she didn't go outside the Sigma set to bring in an alumna. You had to go to her. You knew what she was doing, because she was some use to you—”

“Okay,
I get it
! You're a detective!” Tompkins said. Some passing students slowed to listen when she raised her voice, but then hurried on when Guthrie gave them a hard look. Vasquez propped herself against the railing after peering over; a few faces in the lobby were turned their way.

“It's true. I went to Cammie. I saw how easily she moved around, and I sold her the idea that I would be useful to her.” She smiled, but with a thoughtful look that tinged it with sadness. For a flashing moment, she was beautiful, but even when her expression changed, the image wouldn't go away. “That turned out to be true.”

“What was the point of it?”

“Cammie was my way into LMA.” She shrugged, leaned back against the railing, and stretched out a hand on either side of it. The relaxed pose plushed her curves to Hellenic proportions. “If it comes out, it comes out. I suppose it's too late to worry about exposure—there were too many pictures anyway to keep all of them from escaping.” She laughed. “When I first came to Columbia, I didn't look like this. I could say that more clearly. I was undeveloped—I suppose I looked like you,” she continued, glancing at Vasquez. “But I didn't have your face. I was introverted, an outcast forced upon the socially more adept; a plain, unattractive girl with no advantage but money. Despite what everyone might say, money doesn't make pain go away. When I was an undergrad, I dealt with it by focusing on school, and trying not to get trampled. By the time I realized I did want to be included, my role was already set in stone. I was the outsider.

“Then Cammie came to Columbia. The initial connection was a family one—I was supposed to look out for my cousin—and she was a Sigma legacy, too.” She smiled bitterly. “But imagine anyone asking me to help watch out for Camille Bowman. There was nothing I could do for her.”

“Maybe you're selling yourself short,” Guthrie said. “She needed you for school.”

“Not really,” Tompkins said, and shook her head. “Cammie was smart, even if it wasn't easy to see past the face. She only had to apply herself. That wasn't how it unfolded, though. In the game the houses played, she could decide who played with whom. She could put me with the people I wanted, and that's where we started. It wasn't until after she met Greg that I saw she could be something more than that.”

“Like what?”

“An adult.”

“Olsen is your problem here,” Vasquez said. “I think you have a thing for him, and that's why we're here. I know you said you didn't kill your cousin. You sold me on that. But everything we uncover points at you or Olsen. Do you—”

“That's crap,” Tompkins said. “I didn't do it. Neither did Greg. Whether I like him really isn't an issue. The games might have made him look bad, maybe, but they were over before Cammie started with him—but not before they met. At first, they were classmates, like I told you. Once she realized she wanted to be with him, she left the games, but even then she had been following him around for weeks. He knew she was doing crazy things, and he knew that she stopped. He thought it was childish, he told her so, and left it at that. Greg is just cut from a different cloth.”

Vasquez smirked. “That could convince his mother.”

“Does it really sound that stupid?” Tompkins asked with a pained expression. “Then okay, he makes me stupid. I can't say I have a lot of sympathy for lucky people, like you”—she nodded at Vasquez—“or myself. You're looks-lucky and I'm money-lucky. I know I helped make this mess, but now I need a way out. Maybe lucky people need help sometimes, too.”

“What's important is that you were rolling with Bowman before Olsen came along,” Guthrie said. “We're not interested in the rest of it. Your eyes were on the inside. Who was she with before Olsen? Not hookups. I need to know who spent time at her apartment. Who felt territorial?”

“That could've been anyone from the G unit, but I think you already started with the top of the list—Justin Peiper.”

Guthrie shook his head. “Who had a key?”

“I had one, and then there was ‘the key.' It was passed around.” She shook her head at their frowns. “This time, it isn't what you think. Cammie's Greenwich Village apartment was the spot, but not always for her. My apartment on the West Side was our safe house. Grove Street was for playing around. A lot of sisters used it.”