Down Here (9 page)

“I can drive this one back there,” I told her, trying to pinch off the burning fuse before it reached the dynamite. “Mole, you want to—?”

But he was already moving. Away from the firing line.

I
drove gingerly around the obstacle course of mortar-sized craters and rusted chunks of metal. The Plymouth was no off-roader, but its Viper-donated independent rear suspension and gas shocks handled the trip easily enough. Even the occasional
thunk
didn’t upset the rollbar-anchored chassis with its heavy subframe connectors.

I pulled up to the Mole’s lanai—a set of cut-down oil drums with haphazard cushions and a sisal mat big enough to play shuffleboard on.

The Mole was waiting for us, sitting down. He was awkwardly smacking a scarred old beast on top of its triangular head, in what the two of them had mutually decided constituted “patting the dog.”

“Simba!” I said.

The dog’s ears perked, a lot more trustworthy than his ancient eyes. A bull mastiff–shepherd cross, Simba was still the reigning king of the pack, despite being somewhere around twenty years old. “Hound’s so bad, probably even scares off Father Time’s ass,” the Prof said once.

Michelle pranced over on her four-inch ankle-strapped burnt-orange stilettos. She bent to give the Mole a kiss on his cheek, which turned him the same approximate color, and said, “Well?”

The Mole looked at her the way he always does—stunned and strangle-tongued.

“Mole! Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am always—”

“You like my new shoes,” Michelle said, torturing him unmercifully, making him pay. Asking the Mole if he liked a pair of shoes was like asking a cat if it liked algebra.

“They are . . . very nice,” he tried.

“Nice?
Nice!
They are absolutely
gorgeous,
you dunce! They are stunning. Magnificent.
Perfect.
Yes?”

“Yes. I—”

“Oh, never
mind.
” Michelle probed in her purse, handed the Mole her cell phone. “Call my boy, please,” she said. “Tell him we need to see him.”

The Mole didn’t move.

“You
do
know where he is, don’t you?”

“He has a cell phone, too,” the Mole said, defensively.

“Well, then?”

“He is still at school. Is this—?”

“Yeah, it kind of is, Mole,” I assured him.

While he was dialing, Michelle took out one of her extra-long, ultra-thin cigarettes. Pink was the color of the day, apparently. I lit it for her.

“He’s coming,” the Mole announced, handing back Michelle’s phone.

“What are you working on now?” she asked him.

“A new polymer,” the Mole said. “It is—”

“Well, I can’t understand all that,” Michelle cut him off. “While we’re waiting for Terry, you’ll just have to
show
me. Come on.”

The Mole followed obediently, his face flaming.

I sat down with Simba, and we told each other lies about when we’d been young.

I
t took Terry over an hour to show up. I took a tenth of that to tell him what I wanted.

“Sure!” he said. “I can do it, easy. The scanning’s pretty much mechanical. Take some time, though, even with the setup I’ve got. But you might want something better than a simple-sort.”

“Go slow, kid,” I cautioned him. “Remember who you’re talking to here.”

“I can
write
a program, but you’d have to spell out for me what fields—never mind, just the kind of things you want to
connect,
okay?”

“I’m not sure I’m . . .”

“Look,” he said, enthusiastically, “it would be nothing to sort by, say, time of day, or if he used a weapon, like that, see? But if you wanted to make an ANOVA . . . Never mind. If you wanted to know the extent to which different factors impacted on the model . . .”

“
Terry . . .”

“Okay, wait. I got it. Look, let’s say the ‘standard’ attack was between four and six in the afternoon, and the guy used a knife, all right?

“But in
some
of the attacks he was, I don’t know, dressed all in black. Does him dressing in black affect the time of day or the weapon? See? The more . . . factors I have, the more I can help you find the pattern.”

“Could you superimpose?” I asked him.

“Now you’ve got
me
confused,” he said, grinning.

“If you had all the addresses where the rapes occurred, could you put a map of the metro area
over
it, somehow?”

“Sure. But what would you want that for?”

“The rapes went down in a lot of different counties. But no one was ever actually arrested, so the different offices probably didn’t share information. In fact, I can’t figure out where . . . Wolfe’s friend got them all. Anyway, maybe there’s some main highway that gets him in and out of
all
the areas, so, if you look at where he hits, you might get an idea where he’s striking
from,
where his home base is.”

“No problem,” the kid assured me. “If it’s in the data you’ve got, I’ll write a program that will tell you a lot more than what’s already on paper, I promise.”

“Isn’t he a genius?” Michelle said, beaming.

“Pop taught me all of it,” Terry quickly disclaimed.

“Well, you certainly didn’t get your fashion sense from him,” Michelle snapped back. “Or those good looks, either.”

“All from you, Mom,” Terry said, putting his arm around her. “And a ton more.”

The kid was a scientist in his soul. He understood that if a lab ran his DNA, they’d know he hadn’t come from the Mole and Michelle. But he knew something else, too. Something we all know down here—some of the truest truths never make the textbooks.

O
n the return trip—Michelle still glowing, humming to herself like a happy little girl—my cell phone buzzed.

“What?”

“She wants to talk to you.” Pepper, no-nonsense voice.

“Wherever she—”

“Do you remember the last place you met with her?”

“Yes.”

“There.”

“When?”

“Soon as you can make it. She’s waiting.”

As if it had been eavesdropping, the Plymouth’s engine answered.

T
he office building was on lower Broadway, a few blocks north of what outsiders keep calling “ground zero.” Since 9/11, you don’t want to be bringing a car into that area after dark. Too many eyes.

Last time I’d been there, Mick had been working the lobby desk. Wolfe’s crew had some kind of deal with the people who ran the building: they rented out little pieces of it for a few hours at a time.

I tried the front door. Locked. I buzzed for the night man. Not surprised to see Mick, wearing a pair of dark-green pants and matching Eisenhower jacket, with some company’s name stitched in gold on the front.

He let me in, relocked the door.

“Same place?” I asked him.

He turned his back on me without answering, walking toward the freight elevator. I followed, got in the car. Mick threw a lever, and the car dropped, slow and noisy.

He let me out in the basement. I heard the door close behind me, so I walked around the corner to where Wolfe had been the last time.

And there she was, sitting on a double-height set of lateral file cabinets. She was dressed in denim overalls and a red pullover, her long, dark hair tied behind her, no makeup.

“Behave!” she said to the Rottweiler, before he could even threaten me.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“You mean the lockup?” she said. “Sure. It’s been years since I was putting people away, and
those
ones wouldn’t be on Rikers, anyway.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. Rikers Island was a jail, not a prison. People were sent there to await trial, or to serve misdemeanor sentences. Wolfe hadn’t won all her bouts as a prosecutor, but when she landed her Sunday punch, the opponent always went down for the count.

“It doesn’t need to be personal,” I said. “It’s a bad joint. Things happen.”

“Something
did
happen,” she said, the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. “A very large woman came up to me while I was waiting on the chow line. In fact, she bulled her way in, right in front of me.

“I just ignored it—I wasn’t going to fight over a place in line. Then she turned around and spoke to me. Not shouting, exactly, but loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘don’t say a word to me. Not one word. I know you’re not about talking. Just wanted you to know you got friends here. So, if anyone gets stupid with you, all you got to do is point them out. Not even with your finger. Just nod your head, and it’ll be taken care of.’ Wasn’t that nice of her?”

“Hortense is a righteous woman,” I said. “Always has been.”

“I appreciate what you . . . I appreciate what
she
did,” Wolfe said. “But it wasn’t me who told Pepper to—”

“Pepper did the right thing, and you know it,” I said. “And Davidson’s the right man for the job.”

“The
job,
” she repeated, bitterly.

“Look, I know you didn’t—”

“Didn’t what? Didn’t shoot that maggot?
How
do you know?”

“It’s not you.”

“
What’s
not me?” she challenged. “Maybe I read that letter he sent me, and went over to his house to tell him to step off. Maybe he got aggressive, and I panicked. Pulled out a gun and shot him. And then ran.”

“Right. As if you’d go to meet a freak like him without backup.”

“What if my backup helped me get away?”

“He was shot with a twenty-five.”

“Isn’t that a woman’s gun?” she said, unknowingly echoing Sands. “And three shots—
sounds
like panic, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t carry,” I said. “And if you did, it wouldn’t be a toy like that one.”

“You’re so sure?”

“Oh, I’m a lot surer than that,” I said. “A person can change their habits, but not their personality.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t walk around packing, although I suppose you
could,
if you thought you had to. But one thing I know you’d never do.”

“Shoot?”

“No. Panic.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling for real now.

“Besides, there’s one other thing that seals the deal,” I said, pointing at the Rottweiler. “Him. Maybe those little bullets didn’t have enough to get the job done, but no way Bruiser didn’t.”

“You’re right,” Wolfe said. “
If
I had sent him.”

“A situation like that, I don’t think he’d give a damn whether you sent him or not,” I told her. “He’s a dog, not a robot.”

“He’s also a big bully, aren’t you, Bruisey?” Wolfe said, scratching behind the dog’s ears. “He gained ten pounds in the few days Pepper had him.”

“Pepper probably stuffed him because she felt bad for him,” I said. “Besides, she’s an actress, so she appreciates a good performance, and he probably went around pretending he was starving.”

“Maybe . . .”

“I need to ask you some questions,” I said.

“And I need to ask you some,” she shot back.

“Go,” I told her.

“Why are you in this?
Still
in this, I mean. I know Pepper . . .”

“You want me to tell you a story about my religious conversion? How I’m going to devote the rest of my life to protecting the innocent? You know why. You’ve always known.

“If you
had
drilled the miserable little fuck, you think that would matter to me? If you didn’t have a dozen better ones, I’d be your alibi. And if I had known about him threatening you, this never would have happened at all.”

“You’re not my protector,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Self-appointed or otherwise.”

“I’m not anything to you,” I told her. “You think I don’t know that? But what I do, I’m good at, and you know that, too. Tell me you want me off this thing, and I’ll walk out of here right now, never say another word about it.”

Wolfe tapped a cigarette from her pack, lit it with a long-flamed butane lighter.

I just stood there, watching her.

The Rottweiler watched me.

Wolfe took a deep drag, blew a jet of smoke at the ceiling.

“You’re lying,” she said.

^“
S
ands, he’s for real?” I asked her, finally breaking the silence.

“Molly? He’s a piece of gold. When he first made detective, he was assigned to my squad. He
loved
the job. Loved making cases against the dirtbags that my bureau specialized in putting away.

“He didn’t come with any bullshit cop prejudices. Or, if he did, he left them at the door. He
got
it, right from the start. In my shop, we didn’t play the ‘good victim, bad victim’ game. If a hooker got raped, if a retarded girl got molested—same as if it were a nun, or a Mensa member. He was a real man on the DV stuff, too. And cold death on child molesters.”

Wolfe took a hit off her cigarette, gray gunfighter’s eyes watching me through the smoke. When I kept quiet, she picked up her own thread.

“Molly
worked
his cases. Double- and triple-checked everything. Turned over every rock. He never played TV detective on the stand, never tried to out-cute the defense. But there wasn’t one jury that didn’t
believe
him.

“And then the job broke his heart,” Wolfe said, her voice thick with sadness. “When they fired me, everything changed. All they wanted was stats.

“You know what that means. Some of the ‘shaky’ cases don’t get pursued, so you never get the chance to make them solid. The last thing they needed was a cop like Molly. He went from thinking he was a soldier in a holy war to feeling like a report-writing fake.”

“That’s when he started the heavy drinking?” I asked.

“When he went back to it, yeah,” she said, her eyes daring me to make judgments.

“You know he had copies of every single one of Wychek’s cases.
Possible
cases, I mean. Every case in which Wychek was a suspect.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I can’t even figure out where he
got
all that stuff from. There never was a ‘task force’ thing, right?”