Cuts Through Bone (3 page)

They walked into Mako's, a working-class pub on the edge of the park. Inside was dark except for the televisions showing baseball games, and empty except for a few middle-aged men tipping mugs. They took an empty booth in the back. Guthrie ordered steak fries and a pitcher of draft. The dark-haired waitress brought two mugs. Vasquez grinned, and Guthrie shrugged. They weren't leaving for a while. Slow conversations and the occasional clink of silverware washed over them.

Vasquez watched him eat potatoes for a minute, then asked, “You think he did it? And don't say it don't matter.”

He grunted. “He's a soldier—that's a tough read.” He shrugged at her surprised look. “He's carrying the stamp of it. But I say no, or at least he didn't plan it. He talked about their relationship like it still is, not was. He wasn't rattled by the pictures, and he remembered what went on at the interview. He's been in some hot spots before. To me, that says clean on the rest of it.”

“You cover your ass like a council candidate,” she said.

“Nobody wants to be wrong.”

“But everyone wants to get paid,” Vasquez said. She poured herself a beer. “So what am I missing?”

“Nothing. You caught me there, so here's a real answer. He didn't do it. I don't know
how
he didn't do it, but he didn't do it. Is that better?” Guthrie grinned.

“No, because I still don't know why,” she said.

“Well, this's what we can do—we trade,” the little detective said. “You tell me what was wrong with Olsen, and I'll tell you why he didn't do it.”

She laughed. Guthrie eased the plate of fries toward her, then glanced at the beer she was drinking. She waved the food away. “
Viejo,
there is
nothing
wrong with Olsen. That's the best-looking man I've ever seen in my life—maybe not enough to kill for, but I can see why the muchacha is hot to prove him innocent.
Wrong
with him? Are you crazy?”

“Then you didn't notice he was crippled?”

She ate some steak fries. He let her wait for a while before he let her off the hook. “Olsen's left arm is crippled,” he said. “He never used it, not even once. He's been practicing that for a long time. Maybe it's disfigured, or maybe it's dysfunctional. That's something he brought back from overseas, I reckon.”

Vasquez put it together suddenly, why she'd been looking at pointless surveillance videos. She'd been practicing looking for things that she wasn't looking for. The little detective was willing to waste her time, and his money, seeing if she would learn something that she didn't even know he was teaching. She was glad Mako's was dark; maybe he wouldn't be able to see the look on her face. Three months, and it wasn't the first time she'd wished she was back in school, where everything was safe and expectations were carefully spelled out. She realized that Guthrie was waiting on her again.

“So he got wounded in the war,” she said thickly. “He was a soldier.” She paused. “He took it hard that somebody hit her. Maybe he's got some kind of history with that.”

“Sure,” Guthrie said. “And you're saying you believe he's clean.”

“I better believe it,” she muttered.

The little man laughed. “You like him.”

Vasquez shrugged. “You said you know why he didn't do it.”

He scanned the thickening crowd and frowned at the door. “I could be wrong.” They were waiting on someone, and the wait was stretching. “Anyway, he didn't try to blame anyone. He's been sitting in a cell for hours, knowing the police say he did it. If he shot her, he would have spent that time thinking up a lie. For him, she was Little Miss Perfect. Nobody could want to kill her—and that's that.”

A stream of people slowly filled the bar. Guthrie kept scanning the crowd. At the bar, men shouted indiscriminately at the televisions and one another in an incoherent roar that even music wouldn't have covered. Three waitresses rushed back and forth with pitchers and platters. Two men emerged from the crowd, snooping among the booths, and Guthrie relaxed. One was older, with a full belly and a haphazard stride, as if he couldn't decide which part of a sore foot to settle his weight on. Maybe he had walked too far in bad shoes. His hair was ginger and gray; his wire-frame glasses were taped together. An angry younger man trailed him, tall and imposing, with a Dodgers cap set square on his head like a battle flag. The older man spotted Guthrie in the booth and lumbered back to sit down.

“Evening, Guthrie,” he said. He gave Vasquez a puzzled glance. “Where's Wietz?”

“She moved on,” the little detective answered. “This's Rachel Vasquez.” He shrugged, then waved at one of the waitresses, pointing at the pitcher. “This's Mike Inglewood. He—”

“Don't listen to him, little girl,” Inglewood said. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I known this one since I was in MTS. He's no good. He'll lie to you every time.”

The younger man sat down and scowled generally at the table. Inglewood raised an eyebrow at him. “I told you she was pretty, and this ain't even the one I was talking about. But you gotta do better than that—” He turned back to Guthrie. “I told the boy to grow a mustache, and maybe it'd do something to cover that ugly-ass smile.”

The waitress brought a fresh pitcher and some more fries. Inglewood broke a few more rough jokes to settle himself. His partner, Eric Landry, was new to Major Case, the downtown squad of detectives that worked high-profile crimes in the city. Guthrie and Inglewood had known each other for several years. He and his partner weren't working the Bowman murder directly, but the older detective collected squad room gossip like a bathroom drain. A bit of everything stuck on him on its way down.

Inglewood knew Guthrie had called him wanting information. His trade-off was a pitcher and a burger, and finding out why a private D was interested. He quieted when the little man told him he was hired, not curious. He tore up fries and a burger while Landry sipped a beer and tried to avoid looking at Vasquez. Inglewood's shrewdness showed in how he listened without interrupting, and left off the banter when the conversation turned serious.

“So you don't mind if I give a heads-up to Barber?” Inglewood asked. “He caught the squeal, or got it pushed in his lap on account of being prettier than anybody but Landry here. Then he's our new prima donna, with gold in record time, and like that. So?”

“I don't see that it'll hurt,” the little old man said. “I signed in and out of the Tombs today. He's such a good D, he might catch on to that anyway.”

Inglewood grinned and pushed his glasses up his nose. He finished his mug and clapped it down on the tabletop like a punctuation mark. “You trust your new girl, Guthrie?” He studied Vasquez.

“I think that's a compliment—he can see you,” Guthrie said. “But yeah, I trust her. She's a straight shot. She hangs in there.”

“Just like Wietz,” he said, and chuckled. “You remember the time she got hauled in for bombing that pimp on Lexington with her cannon? That's a mean woman.” He stared at Vasquez again, his face serious. “All right. This gets out, the rest of your short life is a nightmare. Got it?”

“
Sí,
for sure,” she said.

The detective nodded. “Listen, Guthrie. You've talked to your guy. I ain't. I don't know what else is going on here. Maybe you do. I do got this much, in this particular case. Your pretty boy had a pretty girl. She was shot with a forty-four. What d'you know, pretty boy owns a forty-four.

“Barber, my prima donna, talks his way into a warrant, and goes and gets pretty boy's forty-four. The pistol is right where he says he keeps it, locked away safe and sound. The pistol smells like fresh powder. Barber carries it downtown and IRD runs a bullet.

“Guthrie, you know it's the gun, the same damn forty-four, under your pretty boy's lock and key. So you talked to him, and he don't sound guilty. Maybe he's got two, three more personalities, and one's the good talker you spent time with. Maybe one of the other ones is GI Ken. Get it? See, Ken and
Barbie,
and this guy is some military guy. GI Ken, I just made that up.… You don't like the ring it's got? Don't matter. This is him”—the ginger-haired detective's hand floated above the table, then dropped suddenly—“going down hard.”

*   *   *

Guthrie drove on the ride back to the office. Inglewood's information was a challenge. The little detective trusted his judgment of Olsen, but that wouldn't be enough to convince the NYPD. The switch caught Vasquez off guard. Guthrie was always relaxed. Even when they had scuffled with the Italians in SoHo over the camera, he didn't flare up. Now an edge of determination and purpose showed.

Once they were back in the office, with the building as quiet as a grave around them, Guthrie opened a bag of dirty tricks he had kept hidden. Vasquez thought it was fitting that they were doing it after hours. He had brand-new laptops and phones—not expensive, but good enough for digging. He turned the phones on with names from a Hemingway novel. Then he brought out electronic keys that opened database doors in some unlikely places. He called friends and set up appointments for the next day. She dredged in computer files. After he finished with the phone, he joined her.

Guthrie wanted background. His process resembled picking apart a résumé and looking for what had been deliberately omitted. This time, though, they had to supply everything. They had only names. The real information had to be pulled from the air with only a few starting points. In a few short hours, Vasquez saw a dirtier side of what he did.

“Some of this shit ain't legal, is it?” she asked while she scrolled through a list of ATM withdrawals.

The little man shrugged. “It's fast. I want to know where they were at, when, all that. Copy anything with one of the names on it. That dumps to a disc and holds in a file. That file gets searched for what leads elsewhere, like SSNs.”

While they gathered data, they quietly announced back and forth when they found something. Guthrie was beginning at the beginning. The victim was Camille Bowman. The suspect in her murder was Greg Olsen. Michelle Tompkins was the only other person they knew with a possible motive. All three attended Columbia University. That was the beginning.

Bowman was simplest, partly because she was the youngest. Young people haven't had years to leave fingerprints on the world around them. She'd been a sophomore without a declared major, had gotten mediocre grades, and came from a society background. The world mostly noticed her after she was dead, and then she provided a sensational arc of pictures and thoroughly chewed information. Death was her moment in the spotlight, as if twenty years was the exact time required to groom her to be a victim.

Tompkins was older—easier—and in a social register far higher.
Who's Who
listed her birth. Her grades at Columbia were impressive, even as a graduate student. She had studied overseas. Both of the young women had unblemished records, but Guthrie was quick to point out that no amount of superficial scanning would reveal anything that had been deliberately hidden. Some things became obvious only after thinking and back-checking.

Greg Olsen was the mutt of the group, only partly from being the eldest. The slow voice came from Wisconsin, and his military service was long and distinguished. He was discharged as a lieutenant colonel, then resumed his interrupted education. Guthrie was puzzled by the rank, because Olsen was only twenty-eight. The big man had played hockey for the Wisconsin Badgers, and Uncle Sam was paying his way at Columbia.

Until the murder, and then the arrest, all three had led ordinary lives. They did the things everyone else did—bought CDs and books, had traffic tickets, and went unnoticed by the people around them. Bowman and Olsen had the distinction of having faces that caught attention. Tompkins was invisible, protected by a machine that would keep her overlooked forever, if that was what she wanted. The night had grown old and died into morning before Guthrie was satisfied and called a stop.

By then, Vasquez was sober and frustrated. “What's this going to do for us?” she demanded.

“Maybe nothing. But suppose I wanted to ask one of Olsen's old girlfriends if he's a jealous type. How do I find her?”

She drummed a pencil on the desktop for a moment. “We go to Wisconsin?”

“That's right. Or we could make some calls, or I could hire someone out there. But eventually we knock on a door, ask a question, and decide if we believe what we hear. But anyway, how do you know about Wisconsin?”

“Okay, you win that one,” she said. “It's quitting time?”

“Not yet. Now we take a little ride. I think it's finally late enough.”

“Late enough? We going to work all night?”

Guthrie grunted. Sometimes, late nights or all nights were part of the job. “You're driving. We're going to Washington Heights.”

Once they reached Highbridge Park, the night seemed eerily quiet. The Harlem River was hard by them, lapping away slowly. Vasquez needed two passes to find the scene, hidden behind a hairpin turn around a hurricane fence that was a magnet for trash. The old Ford's headlights lit up some strands of crime-scene tape, waving idly where they had been broken, but still long and bright. Guthrie had her douse the lights before they climbed out, and then they stood for a minute, allowing their eyes to adjust to the gloom. Bowman had been murdered in a quiet, dark corner of the city.

The river added a tangy smell to the garbage. Cars buzzed and whirred distantly on the bridge. In the darkness, the lined columns could have been the arched nave of a church, with the insects quietly whispering prayers. Fragments of tape formed a communion rail around the altar of a green Dumpster. Graffiti made a resplendent iconostasis along the columns and abutment. Guthrie used a small flashlight. They searched the ground around the Dumpster. Amid the broken glass and litter, a few evidence flags remained pinned around a dark stain in the thirsty dust.