Carlucci's Edge Page 4

  Mixer looked down the stairwell. It got darker again. No window, and access to the tenth floor was blocked by brick and concrete; he’d seen the barrier the one time he’d tried using the stairs in defiance of Chandler’s instructions. No choice, then. He had to see if there was a way out on this floor.

  The window at the end of the hall was probably his best shot. He took a few steps into the hall, then stopped, listening for voices or other sounds. Nothing. He continued slowly along the hall, trying to keep his footsteps silent.

  The door to the first room on his left was open, and light emerged through it. No sounds. Mixer stopped, then leaned forward and looked inside. Empty. The stench was worse; he could almost feel it wafting out of the room, but he couldn’t see anything that would cause it. What the fuck had Chandler been doing in here? Bare walls, bare floor, boarded windows, an overhead fluorescent light. Nothing else.

  Mixer moved on. The next room was on his right; it, too, was open. When he looked inside, he again saw bare walls, bare floor, a fluorescent light. Once more he felt and smelled the stench, heavy and warm and cloying.

  Bad, bad, bad. He hadn’t been afraid on the floor above, standing in that vast, empty room. But here? Something was wrong, seriously wrong, and Mixer was damn sure he didn’t want to be here.

  He moved quickly now, not quite jogging, a fast walk, still trying to stay quiet. No more looking into the rooms as he passed them; he hoped there wasn’t anyone or anything inside. Just get to the window, he told himself, and get out.

  Mixer reached the end of the hall and looked out the window. Good and bad luck. The next building was no more than eight feet away, but the roof was at least a full floor below, maybe more. The gap would be easy, the drop a bitch. At the far end of the roof was a rat-pack hut with a few soldiers moving in and out of the lights. Mixer knew the building, knew the head rat. He wouldn’t get free passage, but he’d be able to buy his way down.

  The window was old, counterweight and pulley. Mixer grabbed the bottom handle and pulled up. The window rose smoothly, surprising the hell out of him. He opened it all the way, put his head through and looked down. A cement ledge ran along the wall about two feet below the window. Narrow, but wide enough to use as a launch pad.

  Mixer pulled his head back in and was just about to put his leg through the open window when he sensed something approaching from behind. He spun and crouched, preparing himself, but the hall was empty. The sensation remained, however, the feel of some presence there in the hall with him. There were no sounds, no signs of movement, just the steadily increasing stench and the eerie, prickly feeling that flowed over him. Fuck me, Mixer thought. I’ve got to get the hell out of here.

  He worked his way backward through the window, feeling his way with his shoes to the ledge below, never taking his eyes off the hallway. When his footing was secure, he eased his chest and head through, keeping hold of the sill, watching the hall. Still nothing.

  He didn’t want to turn his back to the hall, not for more than a few seconds, anyway, so he geared himself up to turn and jump at the same time. He ran through it in his head, glancing back and forth from the hall to the roof below. He’d jump, land feet first, buckling his legs and doing a tuck and roll to absorb the impact. Okay. One last look down the hall, and go.

  Mixer turned, let go of the windowsill, and pushed off the ledge, leaping across the gap and down. Almost immediately he hit the roof hard, pain flaring in his ankles as he pitched forward and sprawled across the rough surface, scraping his arms and hands and face. Shit, so much for the tuck and roll theory.

  He pushed himself up to hands and knees, then slowly to his feet. Both ankles hurt, the left worse than the right, but he’d be able to walk. The exo had protected his right hand and arm, but the other was badly scraped and bleeding in several places.

  Mixer turned around and looked up at the eleventh-floor window. Nothing. He was about to turn away, when he thought he saw something, a shadow, a shimmer of movement. He stared hard, but didn’t see anything else. A minute passed. Nothing. Then the window slowly, steadily, slid down and closed.

  Fuck me, Mixer said to himself again.

  He kept watching the window, listening to the rat-pack soldiers coming toward him, but he saw nothing more. One hard, long shiver rolled through his body. Mixer turned away and limped across the roof to the rat-pack soldiers waiting for him.

  FOUR

  CARLUCCI WAS ALREADY exhausted by the time he got to his office and dropped into his chair. His morning coffee-hash at Spade’s had gone almost three hours, most of that time spent trying to organize the murder investigation of the mayor’s nephew with LaPlace and Hong, who were in charge of the case. They were getting almost as much heat as he was, and so far they were getting nowhere. They’d arranged to meet later that afternoon at the nephew’s penthouse for another look-through. Then, after dropping him off at the station, LaPlace and Hong had gone off to talk to people they knew weren’t going to tell them a damn thing.

  The air conditioning was still out, but the fans had been left on all night, and it was early, so the air wasn’t too bad yet. Carlucci cleared a spot on his desk, piling files and notepads on top of other piles, then turned on his computer terminal. To his surprise, the system was back up and running. He logged on, then called up his file on the nephew—William Kashen. There wasn’t much in it, and there wasn’t much to add—the official report would be done by LaPlace and Hong, since it was their case—but with all the political pressure on this thing he had to keep a kind of management file to show he was staying on top of it.

  Carlucci spent a half hour working on the file, most of that time staring at the screen and doing nothing, not even thinking about the case. When he thought he’d done enough, he printed out a hard copy, grabbed the sheets from the printer on the side of his desk, and stuffed them in the blue case folder. Then he sat staring at the monitor for a while longer, thinking about Paula Asgard and Chick Roberts.

  Gotta start sometime, he thought. Carlucci called up the case file for Chick Roberts. The cover sheet came up on the screen, which gave the most basic information: case number, date, first officers on the scene, investigating officers (Santos and Weathers, Santos senior-in-charge), and status (open, pending). When Carlucci tried to call up the rest of the case file, he got “the message.”

  FILE ACCESS RESTRICTED

  CAPTAIN MCCULLER/CHIEF VAUGHN FOR AUTHORIZATION

  Pretty much what he had expected. A temporary dead end. There was no way he could go to McCuller or Vaughn for authorization. At this point he didn’t want either of them to know he was at all interested in the case.

  Carlucci exited the case file and logged off, then picked up the phone and punched in Ruben Santos’s number. There was no answer, and after three rings Carlucci heard the click as he was transferred through to the front desk.

  “I’m looking for Ruben Santos,” he told the clerk.

  “Ah, let’s see... he’s out with Weathers, interviews, probably back this afternoon. Page or message?”

  “No.” Carlucci hung up.

  One step at a time, no hurry, Carlucci told himself. Chick Roberts wasn’t going anywhere, and he had to be careful. But it nagged at him, and he had a crappy feeling about the whole thing. He wanted to move on it, or forget about it completely. Forgetting about it, though, wasn’t something he could do.

  So... patience. There was nothing more he could do until he talked to Santos. For now, just muck around at the desk, grab a bite to eat, then go out to the nephew’s. Chick Roberts would have to wait.

  The nephew’s apartment was still a mess. The only thing missing was the body. Even the stink of death remained, if only a trace. Blood was spattered everywhere in the front room, dark and dry now. Deep, solid patches on the white carpet radiated from the vague outline of a body, interspersed with wide, fanning streaks. Everything in the room was white—carpet, walls, furniture, lampshades, even the entertainment system and picture phone—and in the br
ight lights the blood stood out like phosphor. There were even a few splatters on the white textured ceiling.

  “We should rip up the carpet,” LaPlace said. “Frame it, and put it up in a gallery. Post-neo-industrial-modem-slasher art, or something like that.”

  Peter LaPlace, a heavy, balding man, removed his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, then replaced them. Joseph Hong, who was taller and much thinner than LaPlace, also wore glasses, and a lot of the homicide cops called them the Spec Twins.

  LaPlace turned slowly, gazing around the room and through the doorways into the rest of the apartment. “Fuckin’ weird place to live,” he said.

  “Weird guy,” Hong said, shrugging.

  Carlucci just nodded. They’d been through the apartment pretty thoroughly the day before while the coroner’s men worked on the body. Most of the rooms were monochrome, like this one, furnishings matching the wall paint and carpeting. The two enormous bedrooms were all black, an office room was blue, the bathrooms bright red, the kitchen white. The dining room was the exception, a combination of white and black and chrome.

  None of them were quite sure what they were looking for. The crime scene techs had already gone through it with all their sophisticated detection equipment, slicking up prints, hairs, fibers, skin flakes, and various other particles which they were now analyzing with a fortune in lab machinery. With the mayor on their asses, no expense would be spared. And plenty would be wasted. Additionally, the three detectives had already tagged and bagged several boxes of articles from the apartment, which were now back at the station and which they would go through again and again later on, along with the dozens of photographs that had been taken. They were here now hoping to see something they’d missed, or think of something, or get kicked off into a line of thought that none of them had come up with before. They were searching for intangibles and gut feelings. Anything.

  And Carlucci wanted to talk to Hong and LaPlace alone, where they wouldn’t be overheard by department squeakers, the way they might have been at Spade’s this morning. Carlucci hadn’t seen anybody suspicious, but he hardly trusted anyone these days.

  “Pete, Joseph,” Carlucci said. The two men looked at him. “I’ve got something I want to say. Didn’t want to talk about it at Spade’s.”

  “Squeakers?” LaPlace said.

  “Yeah, Pete, you just never know.”

  Hong slid a cigarette from his shirt pocket, stuck it in his mouth, dug out a lighter from his pants, and lit the cigarette, all his motions slow and deliberate. Hong thought they were about to get ragged on, Carlucci realized.

  “Look, this is your case,” Carlucci said. “You two are in charge, you make all the decisions, handle it the way you think best. The only reason I’m here is because of all the heat from the mayor and the chief. I’m not trying to butt in on the case, I’ve just got to do this for appearances. It’s all bullshit, but I’ve got no choice. As much as possible, we do this like we would any other case—it’s yours, and you report to me. I’ll be around more, I’ll be on the streets with you once in a while, but I’ll try to stay out of your way.” Carlucci shrugged. “I don’t like this arrangement any more than you do.”

  Hong and LaPlace looked at each other, Hong nodded, then LaPlace turned back to Carlucci. “Joseph and I have already talked about it,” LaPlace said. He half smiled. “We can see what’s going on. We just didn’t know how you were going to be about it. Hell, Frank, you might have decided to jump all over our asses. We didn’t think you would, but who the fuck knows? We figured if you did, we were going to be assholes about it. But hell, since you’re not, we’d just as soon you actually worked with us as much as you can. This is going to be a bitch investigation, for a lot of reasons.”

  “Yeah, it is.” Carlucci sighed and nodded. “All right, then. Everything’s clear between us?” Hong and LaPlace both nodded. “Good. Then let’s get to work, see if we can find anything in this freaking place.”

  They split up. Each man would go through the entire apartment separately, hoping somebody would spot something the others missed. Wasn’t much of a hope, Carlucci thought, but it was worth a shot.

  As he worked his way through the apartment, Carlucci had to struggle to keep from being distracted by all the extravagance and luxury, the fortune in high-tech gadgets and the incredible views, even though he’d seen it all the day before. Picture phones and internal video systems were built into the walls of every room, including the bathroom, along with control panels for the Bang and Olufsen entertainment system, which also had speakers and monitors in each room. The larger of the black bedrooms had a set of neural head-nets, and hanging in the closet was an assortment of exotic sexual electronics, some of which Carlucci didn’t even recognize. The other bedroom, aside from the friction bed, had a set of bunked bubble tubes, one of which was still half filled with a pink, gelatinous fluid.

  The blue room was filled with computers, data-scanners, and more electronic equipment that was only vaguely familiar to Carlucci. Most of the equipment had been damaged or destroyed, presumably by the nephew’s killer. The department’s electronic salvage crews had been in and removed what few disks and chips and bubbles were left behind, and were working to recover any data that remained. Carlucci didn’t hold out much hope for that line of investigation, either.

  Saunas and whirlpools and automated massagers in the bathrooms, auto-chef and espresso machine and ionizers in the kitchen. A heat scanner in the dining room, digitizing paintings on the hallway walls. And the entire penthouse wired with the most sophisticated alarm and shield system Carlucci had ever seen, which hadn’t prevented the mayor’s nephew from being gutted in his own living room.

  The nephew. He had a name, Carlucci reminded himself. William Kashen. Except no one referred to him by name. He was the mayor’s nephew, which was his most significant feature as far as the investigation was concerned.

  Carlucci didn’t spot anything in any of the rooms that seemed worthwhile, and an hour after they had begun, they met back in the living room, where they stood looking down at the largest of the bloodstains on the carpet. Hong was on his fourth or fifth cigarette, which actually helped cut the leftover stink in the apartment. Nobody had found a thing.

  “Bet we get the autopsy report pretty damn quick,” LaPlace said.

  Carlucci nodded. “Prelim’s due on my desk this afternoon. Maybe we can go over it later today, or first thing tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Hong said. “My grandmother-in-law is one hundred today. We’re having a dinner celebration in our flat tonight. Twenty people, and I’m the cook.”

  Carlucci smiled. “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Bet the report says he was still alive through most of the gutting,” LaPlace said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Carlucci ran his gaze over the wide scattering of blood once again.

  “I suppose they’re going to put the slugs on it, aren’t they?” Hong asked.

  “Yeah,” Carlucci said. “They’ve got one on it now, and they’ll put all of them on it once the autopsy report comes in and a good chunk of the lab work is done. Everything’s got a goddamn rush on it. Info-Services is already putting together the Prime Level Feed for them, and a few people are working on the sublevel feeds. They might start the rest of the slugs tomorrow or the next day.” Carlucci didn’t look forward to it. It had been years since he’d had a session with the slugs, and the thought of doing another made him queasy. The slugs were repulsive—bodies, limbs, and faces twisted and distended by the frequent injections of reason enhancers and metabolic boosters. He had a hard time even thinking of them as human.

  Hong put out his cigarette in an immaculate white porcelain ashtray atop a quartz table; then, as if reading Carlucci’s thoughts, he frowned and said, “The slugs aren’t people, not anymore. We don’t need them.”

  No one was going to argue with him. Most cops hated the slugs and felt they got a lot more credit than they deserved, felt they got in the way more than the
y helped. Carlucci knew they had been responsible for real breakthroughs in several major cases that had dead-ended before the slugs were put on them, but if he had a choice he would as soon do without.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  Hong and LaPlace both shook their heads, then LaPlace said, “I’d like to keep the apartment sealed off another couple days or so. I’d like to be able to come back and look around.”

  “Sure.” Carlucci understood. They were all afraid they had missed something important, and probably all three of them would come by here at least one more time, alone, most likely in the middle of the night. “We done here for now?” Both men nodded. “All right, then, let’s get out of here.”

  Back in his office, there was no preliminary autopsy report, which was just fine with Carlucci; it would shift some of the heat from him to the coroner, at least for today. He punched up Santos’s number on the phone, and a woman answered.

  “Weathers.”

  “Toni, this is Frank. Ruben around?”

  “Yeah, somewhere. I’ll go see if I can find him.”

  “Thanks.”

  “By the way,” Weathers said, “how’s progress on that paragon of virtue, the mayor’s nephew?”

  Carlucci snorted. “We’re pursuing several potentially fruitful lines of inquiry,” he said, imitating the PR hack who’d been on television the night before.

  Toni Weathers laughed. “You haven’t got jack shit.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “I’ll go see if I can find Ruben.”

  He heard the clunk of the receiver being dropped to the table, then a scattering of background noises as he waited, including what sounded like an incredibly long and loud belch.

  Toni Weathers, like Ruben, was a good homicide cop, and as straight as Ruben. They’d been partners for more than ten years. Carlucci wondered what she thought of the Chick Roberts case.