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Aaron left that afternoon.

H
e was counting days now. Halloween was uneventful: the usual number of "treats" that turned out to be drug-soaked brownies, and "tricks" that turned out to be razor blades concealed in fruit. He pondered his cases. Was Caroline in real jeopardy? He wasn't sure and the possibility worried him; he carried it around.

He grew tired of waiting to hear from Aaron and began to drive aimlessly about the city. He revisited the crime scenes, asked himself if there could have been something important that he'd missed.

He found himself acting nervous in the squad room, irascible with Stanger and Howell.

"I need more Nelly
Delgados
," he shouted. "So find them,
dammit
, before this case turns to total shit."

Sal called: "The garage belongs to Sweeney.
Not
his brother-in-law like he says. They do a fairly decent job, maybe not the best in town, but you could pay more and do a lot worse without trying very hard. The guys who work there, they seem like competent mechanics. But a friend of mine says he's spotted hoods."

"What kind of hoods?"

"That's what I'm going to be checking out. And also into a sort of parallel operation that seems to be taking place around the back."

Indian summer: warm air, hazy skies, comfortable lazy days. The parks were filled with joggers, the museums with European tourists. Skaters on the rink at Rockefeller Center cut flowing figures in the ice.

Always, when he drove across the bridge,
Janek
would look back at the city and wonder at its beauty and its power. And then as he came off the ramp in Queens he would think of Caroline, how much he loved her, her vulnerability, her smile when she greeted him and how being with her and staring into her soft brown eyes would soon relieve his stress.

He kissed the side of her neck that pulsed after they made love, the place where she said she thought her skin was weak and a vein or an artery was perilously exposed.

"Think it's over?" she asked.

"All those things grouped together, and nothing more since then."

"Sometimes—"

He kissed her neck again. "You know no one can get in here now. This loft is like a vault."

She was quiet and after she fell asleep he slipped quietly out of bed and walked along the walls, pausing at each window, leaning forward and peering down through the blinds at the empty streets.

I
t was 2 A.M. There'd just been a terrific rainstorm.
Janek
pulled off the Major
Deegan
onto the East 134th Street exit ramp. As he approached the traffic light he locked his door. When he stopped, an elderly black man with desperate eyes approached with a bottle of Windex and a rag.

Kind of pointless since it had just rained,
Janek
thought. But the man started to clean the windshield anyway.
Janek
shrugged, waved him around to his side of the car, rolled down his window and handed him a buck.

He spotted Sal's Chevrolet a block short of the Third Avenue Bridge. He pulled ahead of it and parked. A few seconds later Sal slipped into his car.

"On time even with the rain. What do you want to do? Look, or talk it over first?"

"Let's look,"
Janek
said.

They got out.
Janek
followed Sal up the street past a closed tire-repair shop, a string of junk stores, through the debris of discarded rubber treads and bent-in hubcaps that cluttered the way. The ramp to the Third Avenue Bridge loomed before them in the night. The air was sticky. Manhattan glowed across the Harlem River, the tops of its towers shrouded in fog.

Sal led him across a yard of broken bottles and smashed bricks, then to the door at the back of an abandoned tenement. "Stay close," he whispered. Sal stopped, listened, then turned back to
Janek
. "Pushers operating here. Should be clear this late, but you never know. Better follow in my footsteps. They lay booby traps sometimes."

Janek
watched while Sal pried the door. A sliver of light caught the pry-bar and made it shine. Inside there was gloom. All the windows of the building had been covered with sheet aluminum. Sal switched on his flashlight, and
Janek
followed him closely to the stairs. There was rubble—broken doors, beat-in stoves, burned-out timbers—but the stairs, surprisingly, were intact and were clean as if someone had recently swept them with a broom.

They moved up, a flight at a time, pausing at each landing, listening. Once
Janek
thought he heard the rustling of rats. There was the sound of water dripping, residue of the rain still seeping in.

Sal led him out an open door onto the damp black asphalt roof. They had climbed four stories and now had a view of the surrounding territory—more abandoned residential buildings, ruins of still others which had burned, and access to the roof of a neighboring structure which Sal, crouching beside him, pointed out. "That's it."

"What?"

"Back shop," Sal whispered. "The legit setup faces the street and it's open all day. Then there's the alley—used for deliveries. Then this other structure where they only work at night."

"Men working in there now?"

Sal grinned.

"How'd you find it?"

"For starters had some work done on my car. Then I hung around. Local pushers clued me in. Could have made some collars if I hadn't traded back my evidence."

Sal was good: a
narc
detective who knew how to shake down pushers and trade for information.

"Frank, you ought to see the parade of cops coming around here with their fancy foreign jobs. Porsches. BMWs. Mercedes. Got to wonder where they get the dough."

They moved carefully to the side of the roof. There was a rickety ladder lying against the low roof wall. Sal pulled it up and lowered it over the side. "Only a seven-foot drop," he said. He held the ladder until
Janek
got off. The roofing over the back shop was slippery. Now that
Janek
was on it he understood the setup. There were two buildings, the one they were on and the front building, which had a slightly lower roof. There was a twenty-foot gap between the structures. To move a car from one garage to the other it would be necessary to open a set of sliding iron doors in each.

Sal led him to the skylight, a low walled hut with a pitched roof composed of safety glass. The panes had been painted black on the inside, but there was a patch that had escaped the brush, small, less than an inch in diameter, but large enough to peek through when they brought their faces close.

It looked busy down there: a dozen men wearing safety masks, with wrenches, bolt clippers and acetylene torches, stripping and chopping cars. The vehicles were arranged in parallel rows like corpses in a morgue. The mechanics played the role of forensic pathologists methodically dismembering the vital parts.

They crept back to the ladder, climbed back onto the tenement roof, then Sal pulled the ladder up and placed it back against the wall.

"What do you think?"

"Begging for a raid."

"But you're not going to call a raid, are you, Frank?"

Sal led him back down, using his flashlight to point out debris. Regrouping by the exterior door, he paused to light a cigarette.

"Not bad, huh?"

"How long have you
known
?"

"Four days."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Had to link it to Sweeney first."

"
Did you?
"

Sal smiled. "Better than that, I think. The way I figure it the front shop, Sweeney's shop, makes an enormous profit. They got to, since they're billing customers for what are basically free parts. Knock off the special discount to cops and the profits still are huge, since their only real costs are overhead and labor. It's a classic. The stolen cars are trucked into the alley and the leftovers are trucked out at dawn. They move the good parts over to the front garage and for all I know they got a wholesale business to get rid of the surplus too. Okay, that back shop, that's a separate operation. Different ownership, different business name. Owned by a company owned by another company owned by still a third. We'd have to subpoena records to be sure, but funny thing—since I had that printout on Hart I knew his wife's holdings, and that third company was on the list." Sal's voice turned cocky; he knew he was onto something good. "Now, everyone knows Sweeney's Hart's man, that if you mess with Sweeney you mess with Hart. So it figures they're in this together, with maybe Hart acting as banker through his wife. Chances are they can both wriggle out of it in case the operation blows. Neither one is stupid. They'll have a story. Claim they didn't know there was work going on at night. Claim they didn't know anything, that the back shop was just for storage. You know: 'I think we got just the part you need, Sergeant Maloney, in the storage room on the shelf.' They only own the building, after all—they're not responsible for an illegal business some crook's set up in back. Doubt either one of
them's
even been in there with witnesses around. Still, if you ask me it's kind of stupid having the two operations so close."

"No, that figures," said
Janek
. "Just like Hart. So
arrogant
."

"Yeah." Sal looked at him, perhaps a little surprised by his intensity. "I know this is really important to you, Frank. That's why I've been busting myself."

"You've done a terrific job. Now what about those hoods?"

"Going to start on that tomorrow. I'll park opposite the end of the alley and see who comes out the door."

"Be careful. I'm looking for muscle, guys Sweeney could order to do very bad things."

"Going to burn them, aren't you?"

Janek
nodded. "Sweeney, probably."

"Not going to be easy."

"Don't worry." He clapped Sal on the shoulder. "I'll think of a way."

H
e told her, "It's always tough when you take a stance, because then there're lines you have to cross. It's a dangerous territory on the other side. Terry wanted to go in there and when he finally did he couldn't return. For years that was a lesson to me. Don't stray across, you might get caught. But now I know there are times when you have to go in no matter the fear of no return. The thing I fear most of all now, you see, is that I might blow out my brains one Sunday morning because I knew I'd been afraid."

"H
e's going to whores again, Lieutenant."

"What?
"

Stanger and Howell had entered the squad room with wild eyes.

"You didn't know?" Stanger asked.

"How the hell would I know that?"

"We thought
Marchetti
—" Stanger was glowing.

"Sal's been off Lane for weeks. He's been working another angle."

"Oh. We just kind of figured..."
Janek
understood: Stanger thought he'd found something that would show
Marchetti
up.

"Well, don't just stand there. Find out what the fuck he's doing with the whores."

A
aron finally called from Cleveland.

"Found the house. Ticky-tacky West Side neighborhood. Run-down. About what you'd expect."

"What would I expect?"
Janek
asked.

He could hear Aaron trying to control his breathing, getting ready to spring a surprise.

"About what you'd expect for a cop. Ohio state trooper, name of Jesse Dill."

Janek's
heartbeat quickened. "You're not—"

"No bullshit, Frank. So maybe you were right,
goddammit
. Maybe the films are connected to his early life. Tell me something—how do you come up with stuff like that?"

"I'm just a detective. Stop stalling. Tell me more."

"Give me a couple days. It's been years. Most of the neighbors are different. I only found one person so far who remembers them as a couple. But there's something here. I can smell it."

"What kind of smell?"

"Bad. Very bad." Aaron paused. "Detail you ought to know about. It's a normal house, one bath, working-class with add-on garage. And the people who own it now don't have any kids. But I see this rusty old basketball hoop set up on the garage, so I ask them why they put it in. Say they didn't, that it was there when they bought the place, and they bought direct from this guy Dill." Aaron paused again. "You hear what I'm saying, Frank. Our friend Peter—he had a normal childhood. The great devil, the whore-killer—he practiced layups in his driveway. Jesus...."

S
tanger and Howell reported back. Four prostitutes visited over the past two weeks. Normal sessions. Nothing unusual. Except afterward Lane had asked them about their friends. Said he was interested in locating a certain type. Actually showed them a photograph. Wanted someone who looked the same, five feet seven, slender, good legs, chiseled features, and he was very particular about the hair and eyes. Eyes had to be deep brown. Hair had to be lighter, layered and graduated longer toward the back. The hair, Lane had told them, was very important. Emphasized he was turned on by that kind of hair.