Page 103 of Fifty-Fifty

It took five minutes to deposit Alexandra in an Uber. Kate and Bloch couldn’t wait until they got back to Kate’s apartment so they found a quiet corner in the Corte Café on Lafayette and sat down with coffee. Bloch ordered a meatball sandwich. Kate, a chicken salad. With fries.

Since they were handed the toxicology report that morning, Bloch had been busy. She’d maintained a close relationship with several law enforcement agencies and various precincts in the New York area. The feelers went out ten minutes after she’d read the toxicology results. Word got around that Bloch needed help and all New York’s finest and available hands went to work. It didn’t matter that Bloch was now a private detective, working for a defense lawyer. She was a name, and her father had been too. NYPD look after their own. She asked them to look for any pharmacy or pharmaceutical wholesaler robberies in the last year.

The first Dropbox file revealed the results of the search.

There had been thirty-seven robberies of interest. Most of them on pharmacy premises, but two were wholesalers and there had been one hit on a transportation truck.

In none of them had Haloperidol featured or been part of the haul.

‘Zip on the robberies,’ said Bloch.

‘What about drug dealers?’ asked Kate.

‘Nah, Haloperidol is not a recreational drug. There’s no high. No buzz, either.

It’s not exactly a downer. More of a knock-out punch. It messes you up. Turns

people into a pile of paranoid jello.’

‘But I thought every kind of drug was on the black market, surely.’

‘Not when it’s so readily available with the right pharmacist. You hand over a fake prescription and five hundred bucks and you’re lit.’

Swiping the document away from her phone screen, Bloch then accessed the second file. Inside was an email and video.

‘There’s a ViCAP hit,’ said Bloch. ‘Looks like NYPD are investigating this as a hate crime. An Indian pharmacist and a cashier were taken out last month.

There’s video.’

Mercifully, the video had no sound. This was a public coffee shop, and there were customers all around. It looked like security camera footage from a large chain store of pharmacies. Kate recognized the branding on the counter.

Someone dressed in black leathers and a crash helmet entered the store, moved

away out of shot then walked casually up to the pharmacist at the counter and took an axe to his head. Flinching, Kate looked away and mouthed the word, ‘Jesus.’

When she opened her eyes, she found an old lady at the next table looking at her strangely.

‘Look at that,’ said Bloch, pointing to the screen.

Rewinding the video with a turn of her finger on the screen, Bloch played it again. The cashier saw what had happened to the pharmacist and made a wild run for the front doors. Only they didn’t open, not one inch, and the cashier slammed her head into the glass, cracking it. She bounced back off the doors and fell to the ground. The figure in black was upon her in seconds. Two blows to the back of the neck with the axe. Then the figure moved out of shot to the right-hand wall, the doors opened, and they left.

It was one thing seeing the aftermath of violence. It was quite another to see it happening, even if it was just on a large phone screen.

‘I don’t think this helps,’ said Kate, shaking her head. ‘It’s probably nothing to do with our case. I can’t see how it relates.’

Bloch went back to the email, read over the notes that accompanied the video.

‘This is important. I think this could be Frank’s killer,’ said Bloch.

‘How?’ Kate shook her head again, this time in disbelief. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘I need to do some more digging. But there’s something here. I can feel it. Did you see how she moved?’ asked Bloch.

‘She?’

‘She. That’s a woman. You can tell by the hips. A confident woman. This was no racially motivated crime. For a start there’s no graffiti, no message left.

Dumb racists who are violent and stupid enough to kill always have a message