After the last call, I put on a pair of ripped jeans and a t-shirt and got to work re-painting my kitchen. I wasn’t wasting time, I was being realistic. If you asked any of the guys I’d called, I’m sure they’d remember me fondly, but my messages wouldn’t be a top priority. Things like extortions and robberies and Presidential motorcades were a bit more pressing than my out-of-the-blue request for help. And this wasn’t something I could rush. They’d call me when they could. And if I didn’t want to give myself an ulcer wondering where Bloch’s killer was while I waited, I needed to keep busy.
In my kitchen, I stared awhile at the pile of brushes, rollers, drop-cloths, and paint I’d picked up at the hardware store weeks ago and had successfully ignored since then. I’d never painted a wall in my life. And never would have, but while cleaning up a family-style Easter lunch, Amanda had suggested it would be good for me.
“You need a fresh perspective, Marty,” she’d said. “It’ll give you something constructive to do with your time. Instill a more positive outlook.”
“What it will instill in me is a backache and a profound lightness in my wallet,” I said.
She lifted a piece of peeling wallpaper—yellow with a pattern of quaint Amish buggies—with a fingernail. “This stuff is brown in the corners. And it’s peeling at every seam. How old is it, anyway?”
I thought about it. “It’s been here…a while.”
“How long?”
“Years.”
She gave me a look. “How
many
years?”
“Eighteen,” I said. I diverted my gaze to floor, ashamed. Hopefully she wouldn’t ask about the linoleum. It had been there twenty.
“Oh my God, it has to go,” she said, pinching a curling corner of the paper and pulling away a two-by-two swath without effort. I said, “hey!” in protest, but she balled it up and threw it in the trash. “Even if it were a week old, you’d have to get rid of it. It’s screaming seventies.”
“That’s because it
is
seventies.”
She put her hands on her hips and did a half pirouette, assessing the room. “Okay, we’ll need some buckets for hot water and some scrapers to get this crap off. Come on, chop-chop.”
Out with the old, in with the new. We managed to get the paper off by working the remainder of Easter Sunday. Not the day of rest I’d been hoping for. Scraping the glue off the wall ruined the next Saturday. The work left me exhausted, but that had been weeks ago and now I needed to make some progress or Amanda would stop talking to me. Patches of glue and wallpaper residue spotted the wall, giving the kitchen a glum, diseased look. Not the fresh, dynamic change Amanda had been looking for. But ripping stuff off a wall was easy. Painting was
hard
.
My cat Pierre set up camp at the doorway to the dining room and watched while I got ready. I moved the chairs and table, wrestled the drop-cloths into place, taped the edges of the ceiling, and opened the legs of a step ladder. I mixed the primer and poured it into a plastic cup to start what a DIY magazine had called “cutting in.” I climbed the ladder, dipped the brush in the cup, and the phone rang.
I closed my eyes briefly, came back down the ladder, and answered it. It was Bloch.
“Singer,” he said. “I got your message.”
“Good. I wanted to keep you up to speed. And warn you if you hear about me through the grapevine. I called in a few favors to help me run this thing down.”
There was a staccato tapping on the other end of the line. It took me a second, then I realized it was a sped-up rendition of the pencil-tapping habit a lot of people have when they're on the phone. Bloch’s version was sent into overdrive by his need for nicotine, apparently. “That’ll make it tough to keep the investigation quiet.”
“I need to get on the inside of these departments, Bloch. Which I can do if some of the people I called vouch for me. But I have to tell them something about why. And I’m going to have to tell the cops I talk to something.”
He didn’t say anything, so I tried to push the point home.
“How would you like it if some boob showed up at your office one day and told you he needed to talk to some of your officers because he happened to be running his own homicide case? All outside regular channels and with a very foggy mandate from a local law enforcement agency that he would rather not name.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“I don’t have to lie. I’ll tell my contacts that I got called in to do a favor for a task force. Which is true.”
“If they press it?”
“I’ll tell them to call you. Which none of them will do, because it’s too much work and they trust me and they’ll have heard of HIDTA. Five will get you ten that they’ll just pick up the phone, call a lieutenant or sergeant they know, and ask them to play nice with me.”
Tap, tap, tap.
“What about the cops they get you in to see?”
“Same thing, different angle. Their lieutenant or captain will have already told them I’m one of the good guys and they should cooperate. If they push it, I’ll tell them it’s related to a case from your department, but that I’m not going to get in their way or step on any toes or write any reports.”
The tapping slowed down. “A grain of truth goes a long way.”
“Exactly.”
“All right. Sorry. It seemed okay to speculate and think about how to tackle this, but then when it actually happens, and you start calling people, I realized…”
“That your job could be on the line?” I finished.
“Yeah.”
“Try not to think of it that way,” I said. “We’re doing a good thing, as you pointed out to me. If we’re careful not to piss anybody off along the way, and don’t give them cause to think we’re trying to upstage them, there’s no reason they won’t play ball. And let’s not forget, we’re working on someone else’s timeline. Anything we can do to head off the next killing, we’ve got to take.”
He blew out a breath and, in that one sound, I could hear all of his pent-up anxiety and fear. “Do what you have to do, Singer. And thanks.”
He hung up. I sympathized with him. It was one thing to vent to a former colleague, sharing fears and frustrations. It was an entirely different thing to authorize that colleague to start poking sticks in hornets’ nests. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be helped. If he wanted answers and we were going to stop whoever was killing cops, I’d have to introduce myself to the people who knew the victims best: family, friends, and other cops.
I grabbed the cup of rapidly congealing primer and headed back up the ladder. After a few minutes, I caught on to the rhythm of the strokes, taking my time, perfecting the movements. Painting was a pleasantly empty activity that lent itself to a wandering mind and I found myself thinking about the murders. Considering how I would tell the cops I would be meeting that someone was out there, methodically killing anyone with a badge. Wondering if I was right about what was going on.
Hoping that, for once, I wasn’t.
Chapter Ten
I put the car in park and stared out my windshield across a miserable field of cars, trucks, trailers, and Dumpsters. Blue Plains wasn’t the prettiest place in the world. Not far to the west, the Potomac flowed fresh and clean, but you’d never know it looking at the eight-foot cyclone fence and razor wire that guarded the city’s approximately eleven zillion impounded cars. Somewhere along the fence, I’d heard, was the site of one of the original District boundary stones, placed there two hundred years ago by L’Enfant himself. The stone was moved during construction in the fifties and stolen or lost. In typical DC fashion, there’d been a replacement, but it had been buried under eight feet of fill when Blue Plains was graded to create the impound lot. The only way you could see it now was by peering down a concrete pipe.
I was pondering our region’s on-again, off-again love of history when Bloch pulled up in a blue Elantra. I got out and walked over. He motioned for me to get in the passenger’s seat.
“This where you bring all your dates?” I asked.
“Only the ones that want to get their car back,” he said, grinning. Some of the weariness and worry seemed gone from his face. I perked up. Only a breakthrough would give Bloch a lift like that.
“What’s up?”
He reached into a jacket pocket and handed me a white business-sized envelope. It was addressed to Danny Garcia, but at HIDTA, not his home. It was from the DC Department of Motor Vehicles. I peered at Bloch, who just raised his eyebrows and motioned for me to open it. I scanned the contents quickly. It was an impound notice for a 1979 Toyota Camry. The reason for its impoundment, it said in the cryptic lettering reserved for government correspondence with the public, was two unpaid parking tickets over sixty days old.
“Oh, ho,” I said. “This come to your office?”
He nodded, then jerked a thumb towards the lot in front of us. “This starting to make sense?”
“You betcha,” I said. “You have the original dates of the tickets?”
“Took some running down. The DC DMV doesn’t exactly run like clockwork.”
“Unless you like your clocks to be broken,” I said. “Though even they’re right twice a day. What did they tell you?”
“The tickets were from three and five days after Danny’s body was found, respectively,” he said.
“You know my next question.”
“The registration address was the HIDTA office. Which is why the impound notice was sent there, of course.”
“He have other cars?”
“Two,” Bloch said. “A Corolla and a Bronco. Both registered to Danny and Libney Garcia.”
I closed my eyes, thinking, remembering. “The Corolla was at the house when I talked to her. The son could’ve had the other one. You didn’t call and ask her about the Camry?”
He shook his head. “Not until we have a chance to look at it.”
“What are we waiting for?”
Bloch got a crime scene kit out of his trunk, then we went to the gate where he flashed his badge. We were ushered through to a trailer where, behind the counter, a bored-looking black lady with five-inch fingernails stopped looking at her cell phone long enough to glance at Danny’s impoundment notice. Bloch told her it would be best if we went to the car rather than having it brought to us. She sighed and picked up an office phone. She said three or four syllables and hung up.
“Darnell pick you up outside,” she said and grabbed her cell phone again, ignoring us as if we’d just evaporated.
We went out the door and a few minutes later a golf cart pulled up, a stoic-looking black guy in a green windbreaker and a green and yellow John Deere cap behind the wheel. He had a clipboard in his lap and nodded to us as we approached. Bloch got in the passenger’s side, I climbed in the back, and Darnell took off, pushing the upper ten or twelve miles an hour that the cart could do. It made a dull whine that sounded like a large mosquito or a ripcord being unwound into infinity. Darnell drove with confidence, whizzing us past row upon row of cars.
I leaned forward. “What do you do with all of them?”
Darnell spoke over his shoulder. “Auction ’em off it they’re good enough. Junk ’em if not.”
“People don’t come and get their own cars?”
He shrugged. “They don’t care. Or they’re in jail. Or they can’t pay the bank and just skip town.”
A minute later we pulled up to the edge of one of the shorter rows. He slowed and glanced down at the clipboard, then pulled up behind a blue Camry spotted gray with body repairs.
“Here we are, officers,” Darnell said.
“We don’t exactly have a key,” Bloch said. “Can you help us out?”
Darnell grinned and shut the golf cart off. He clambered out, slipping something out of a back pocket as he walked up to the driver’s-side door of the Camry. I thought he was going to take at least a minute to fiddle with the lock, but then he stepped back and the door was open.
My eyebrows shot to my hairline. “You did that with a Slim Jim? Not a key?”
He grinned again. “I got it down to three seconds. You gentlemen have a good day.”
He got in the cart and headed back. As I watched Darnell zip down the row away from us, I realized I was watching our ride disappear. It was a half-mile walk back to the gate. I looked over at Bloch.
He realized it at about the same time I did. “Shit,” he said, watching Darnell’s green jacket recede.
“Did you get the number for the office?”
“I called from my desk at work,” he said. “I can buzz my guys and have them call me back.”
“Three calls to save us a fifteen-minute walk?”
“Hell, yes,” he said. He tossed me a pair of blue surgical gloves from the kit. “But let’s see how long this takes us, first.”
Bloch took the trunk so I started up front. The interior was a mess. There were stains on every inch of the gray fabric. Dents marred the dashboard and the cloth ceiling sagged where it had been ripped or cut. The backseat foot wells were full of fast-food bags and wrappers and the floor mats were covered in cinders, dirt, and the occasional leaf.
I put myself in each seat, taking on the role of someone sitting there. Where would I put my hands, how would I drop my trash, what would I be looking at? I searched the door pockets, the console, the glove compartment. I flipped the sun visors down, peeked under the seats, then took a deep breath and gingerly slid my hand between the cushions. I pulled out all the trash and carefully laid it on the ground next to the car. There were a few receipts, which I smoothed out and pocketed.
“Find anything?” Bloch called from the back.
“A buck sixty-five in change,” I said. “And hepatitis A. You?”
“A flat spare, a cheap jack, and something interesting.”
I climbed out of the backseat and went around to the trunk. “Oh, ho.”
“You said that already,” Bloch said. “But, yeah. Oh fucking ho.”
Bolted to the frame was an empty three-slot shotgun rack. It was a cradle with Velcro straps that could be wrapped around the guns to hold them in place for the gunslinger on the go. Mounted on the left-hand wall of the trunk was a handgun holster that was not empty. Bloch carefully pulled the gun out and showed me. The small revolver almost disappeared in his hand.