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“Wait.” Garzo swings around on his chair and grabs my arm. “I have something else. Somethingwaybetter.”
“Something better than an eyewitness who can finger our killer?”
“I heard you’re looking for the vigilante, too.”
He preens when I stop. Smooths his shirt when I fold back and drop onto the stool. “Guess I heard right.”
“What’ve you got?” Why does my heart thunder whenever I get another step closer to the guy who killed a killer? Why do I care so much, except that it’s an unsolved case stinking up my desk? “What do you know?”
“Well… I don’tknow,” he starts. “But I heard something kinda juicy, and it’s pretty huge.” He leans closer…closer…until I taste his filthy breath on the air. “I heard he’s a cop.”
My stomach drops, and my eyes shoot to a pale Fletch.
“That’s…” Slowing my breath, I bring my gaze back to my rat and arrange my face back into a reasonable mask for poker. “That’s a serious thing to say, Anthony. Vigilantism and heroism aside, you’re saying our killer is a cop?”
He only shrugs. “I heard he’s a cop, or he’s close to the cops. He’s got information the cops have, he’s based near that district, and his killing methods are fucking eerie.”
“Eerie how?”
“Cold. Calculated.” His pleased expression says something entirely different than his words and tone. One says disapproval. The other, awe. “Clean,” he continues. “He’s killed a couple now, and still, the dude hasn’t been found. Kinda says he knows how to get around the cops. Could be because he is one.”
After ten more minutes, a dozen additional questions that get us nowhere but around and around in circles, and a pity-fifty set on the bar for Garzo’s time, Fletch and I wander outside into the bright sunlight and make our way to the cruiser.
“He’s wrong.” As soon as we’re in the car and he slams the door shut, Fletch turns on me. “He’s making shit up.”
“I mean…” I fix my seatbelt and drop my legs wide. “Maybe he is. Maybe he’s not.”
“You’re seriously pointing at a cop for this?” He starts the cruiser and shoves it into gear. “What the fuck, Malone?”
“I’m not pointing at anyone yet. But Garzo makes some solid points. Dowel’s murder was just two blocks from the police station. The store he was killed in front of has dummy cameras that don’t work—means our killer had to know somehow that those cameras were dummies. Either that, or he got lucky. There was another hit over Christmas. Not our case, not even our precinct, and no confirmation they’re connected, but the MO rings true. The kills are clean, they’re cold and fast, and up to this point, we still have no fucking clue who’s doing them. Makes him smart. And just maybe, he knows his way around a police investigation.”
“This is how you find your ass on the outs with the rest of the force,” Fletch growls. “Looking inward makesyoua rat. You know what happens to rats in law enforcement.”
With narrowed eyes, I glance across and meet his glare.
“Damn near the same thing that happens to rats in your family!” Tearing away from the curb, he turns the car and points us in the direction of the bay. We’re going fishing for an eyewitness. “If you’re not careful, you make yourself a target, Archer.”
“Why are you so defensive about this?”
I should be flipping through the Club Opulus murder file in my lap, but I close my eyes and remember Dowel’s instead. The clean kill, the placement of his body in contrast to the dummy cameras. The calculated stealth with which the killer walked up, ended a life, and walked away again without a single witness or trail of blood.
No note for recognition. No communication.
All the same as a mystery homicide investigation coming out of midtown.
The vigilante doesn’twantto be acknowledged as the killer—hero or otherwise. He simply tasks himself with removing an asshole from the streets after lengthy legal battles fail to put the guy in prison.
“Garzo might be on to something.” Opening my eyes, I look to Fletch and find his jaw clenching as he navigates Copeland City’s streets. “I’m not gonna go shout about it and make us anyone’s target. But there’s a chance he’s not wrong, Fletch. It’s our job to consider it.”
“I’m not hating on the vigilante, Arch. But I’m not interested in pointing at our own people, either. That’s how we make enemies. Garzo is nothing but a rat who almost got us killed last time we took his word.”
“Then I guess we’ll set this aside and see what comes down at the bay.”
* * *
The bay area of Copeland City, we already know, is where money once lived. But now, it’s where the vagrants come to be left alone.
Just a few miles along the river, the city landfill is heaped to bursting, and on the windy days—which are most—the stench trickles along the water and fills the area until you can hardly breathe unless you want the stench of rot scraping at your lungs.
