“Then none of them get in the car.”
“You see that guy over there—the one with the jeans and the gray sweatshirt?” I said, pointing across the street to a young Chinese man on a park bench, tapping on his cell phone. “You don’t know him, and he doesn’t know you. Now, how do you get him to jump in your car—no questions asked?”
Kylie shrugged. “He looks pretty straight, so I don’t know—take my top off?”
“Pretend I’m serious,” I said. “You. How do you get a total stranger into your car?”
“Come on, Zach, I’m a cop. I just flash my—”
And then the ton of bricks fell on Kylie’s head.
“Oh my God,” she said. “They’re posing as cops. Two guys in a black SUV. All they have to do is flash a phony ID or a fake piece of tin—who would even question it?”
“You think I’m right?”
“Detective Jordan, I not only think you’re right,” she said, “I’m going right back into this restaurant and find a fortune cookie that says ‘My partner is a fucking genius.’”
Part Two
The Choke Pear
Chapter 40
“Shut the door, cowgirl,” Cates said, glaring at us from her desk.
Apparently, our boss had heard about Kylie’s run-in with Damon Parker.
We entered Cates’s office, and Kylie closed the door.
“Are you under the impression, Detective MacDonald, that I don’t have enough bullshit on my plate, and that I need you to generate more?”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Kylie said. “It’s just that Damon Parker is such an asshole that I—”
“Damon Parker is a professional asshole,” Cates said. “You behaved like an amateur. He’s paid to get in people’s faces. You’re paid to avoid embarrassing the department on camera.”
“It won’t happen again,” Kylie said.
“Of course it will,” Cates snapped back. “Breaking the rules is in your DNA. But I’ll tell you what won’t happen again, and that’s me cleaning up after your mess and letting you off the hook. If there weren’t a serial killer on the loose, I’d chain you to your desk for a month.”
She turned to me. “Jordan, fill me in. Start with Horton LaFleur. Did he cough up anything?”
“The poor bastard has emphysema,” I said. “God knows what he coughed up, but none of it was information. He seems to be president of the Bernie Goetz Fan Club, so whatever he may know, he won’t use it against a vigilante.”
Then I took her through our visit to Chinatown. Her eyebrows arched slightly when I told her we had drawn our weapons at the gang headquarters.
Kylie jumped in. “Captain, they drew first. It was a clear-cut case of exigent—”
“They’re bangers,” Cates said, waving her off. “As long as you didn’t pull your gun on Parker, I don’t give a damn.”
What she did give a damn about was my theory that the two killers might be posing as cops.
“I’ve seen it before,” she said. “I was working Robbery out of the Three Two. One guy with a silver tongue and a fake piece of tin. He talked his way into sixteen apartments before we collared him.”
“It’s only a guess,” I said. “But it would help explain how the kidnappers got both Kang and Parker-Steele into a car without a struggle.”
“Talk to me about Hazmat victim number three—and no, I haven’t read his file yet. Give me the executive summary.”
“Antoine Tinsdale,” I said. “African American, age thirty, a.k.a. the Tin Man. Some say it’s a spin on his name, but most people think it was a Wizard of Oz thing—the Tin Man was the one who didn’t have a heart. He was a drug dealer who liked to start them young. And the best way to hook a ten-year-old is to use ten-year-old runners.”
Cates said nothing, but the anger in her eyes was palpable: she was an African American who grew up in Harlem.
“He had a network of underage kids working for him. The rival dealers warned them to back off, but the kids weren’t street smart enough to be scared. Dope slingers are not known for their negotiating skills, so they whacked four of Antoine’s baby-faced runners.”
“And there’s always a new crop just waiting to get in,” Cates said.
“Tin Man kept so distant from these kids that it would be impossible to make any of their deaths stick to him. Even in his video confession he said, ‘If these boys wound up dead because they got into a pissing contest over turf, it’s not on me. A real jury would never convict me.’”