v

“You want that last piece of pizza?” Mitchell, propped up naked in bed, looked down at Sandy, whose head was cradled in her lap. The pizza box lay on the ß oor beside them where they’d placed it earlier so they could eat in bed. When Mitchell had indulged herself by licking off a few drops of sauce that had fallen on Sandy’s breast, they’d gotten sidetracked. They’d made love, fast and hard, and then consumed the rest of the pizza in postcoital indolence.

Sandy nuzzled Mitchell’s navel, then tugged at the skin around it with her teeth. “Nuh-uh.”

“Jeez, San, cut that out. I don’t have time to go again.” Mitchell squirmed as Sandy bit harder. “Ouch. Come on. I’ve got that doctor’s appointment, and Jason’s been waiting all day for me to Þ nish up some stuff.”

“Say please,” Sandy muttered, circling her tongue where her teeth had just been.

“Oh man,” Mitchell sighed, her stomach quivering as her body went molten. “Honey. ”

Sandy slid a hand beneath the sheet and up the inside of Mitchell’s leg. “What do you say?”

“Please,” Mitchell whispered.

v

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” Flanagan said when Rebecca rapped on her open ofÞ ce door. “I hope you’re not bringing your bulldog in here.”

“Watts?” Rebecca grinned. “No, he’s down at the docks following up on some paperwork with Port Authority.”

“Good, because even when he does keep his hands in his pockets,

• 182 •

Justice Served

I don’t trust him in my lab.” Flanagan capped her pen and shufß ed papers into a folder. “So, nice showing this morning.”

“I didn’t see you there,” Rebecca said, surprised. Flanagan was not one to appear at departmental gatherings, ofÞ cial or otherwise.

“Maggie make you go?”

Flanagan harrumphed as she stood. “Actually, no. I just put my head in for a minute. Saw you get the commendation. Congratulations.”

“Well, thanks.”

The two regarded one another from a few feet apart, then spoke at once.

“About the case…”

“So regarding the Þ ndings…”

With comfortable routine once more restored, they moved companionably into the laboratory where Flanagan led Rebecca to a workbench.

“Nothing new about COD. GSW at close range. From the trajectory, I put your shooter in the car with the victim, not just leaning in the door. That means considerable blowback—his, or her, clothes and body would have been grossly contaminated with the spray. No professional would get into another vehicle like that.”

“I’ve got uniforms checking every dumpster, sewer drain, and alley in a three-block radius. But down there, in the middle of the night, with no one around, the shooter would have had ample opportunity to discard the weapon and their clothing somewhere we’d never Þ nd it.”

Rebecca shrugged. “And by now, any evidence that might have been on his body is gone.”

“Probably dumped the clothes in the river.”

“Yeah,” Rebecca agreed. “The dive team is dragging in the immediate area, but with the currents…we’d have to get real lucky to Þ nd anything. How are we doing on time of death?”

“According to the surveillance team, Beecher dined at eight at a Thai place on Third.” Flanagan leafed through several pages clipped inside a Þ le folder that had been labeled with a case number, the initials GB, and the date. “Decomposition of the stomach contents puts TOD at three a.m., give or take an hour and a half.”

“Can you narrow it down any more than that?” Rebecca asked, thinking that Mitchell’s report had put Sloan squarely in front of her computers at 3:00 a.m. There was ample data to make a case that it

• 183 •

RADCLY fFE

couldn’t have been anyone else using the computers. Neither Sandy nor Michael had the expertise. Mitchell did, but Sandy had stated unequivocally that Mitchell was with her from 1:30 on. Tapes from the exterior cameras had shown Sandy’s arrival at 1:20, supporting that.

The tapes also veriÞ ed that no one else had entered the building until Rebecca’s arrival. The only occupant who could have been logged on to the system at 3:00 a.m. was Sloan.

But a time of death of 4:30 a.m. was going to be a problem, because Sloan had logged off at 3:52 a.m. The crime scene was only three blocks from her building. She could easily have walked there and killed Beecher a few minutes after 4:00 a.m.

“You want a window of less than ninety minutes?” Flanagan snorted.

“Less than sixty.”

Flanagan eyed her speculatively. “That critical?”

“Yes.”

“Get one of your detectives to question the wait staff at the restaurant. I’ll need as precise a time as possible for when he was actually served the meal. If you want a window that narrow, I need to know if we’re talking eight thirty or nine. Without that, what I gave you is as good as you’re going to get.”

“I’ll talk to them myself as soon as we’re done. What else do you have?”

“Something personal going on here?” Flanagan asked. “You’re pushing more than usual, even for you.”

Used to keeping the facts of a case to herself, often not even sharing everything with Watts, Rebecca hesitated. Flanagan, however, was one of the few people in the department she trusted implicitly. “Clark has a suspect in mind whom I’d like to clear.”

“Then the less I know, the better. I don’t trust the feds not to claim collusion.”

“No one in their right mind would believe that about this lab.”

“Thanks,” Flanagan said grufß y. “So, not much else to tell you.”

Then as if on an afterthought, she said, “Except about the bullet.”

“You’re kidding.” Rebecca whistled softly. “You got a bullet?

How? It was a through-and-through shot, the bullet went through the window of the driver’s door, and the car was parked in the middle of nowhere.”

• 184 •

Justice Served

“True. All true.”

Rebecca followed as Flanagan moved down the aisle to the far end of the bench and lifted a section of wood that, on closer inspection, proved to be a round cut from a tree. Rebecca raised a questioning eyebrow.

Unable to suppress a grin, Flanagan picked up a thin metal probe and pointed out a neat, round hole punched into the bark that led into the interior of the section of wood. A bullet track. “Voilà.”

“No way.”

“This morning, Maggie and I took a crash-test dummy, sat him behind the wheel of Beecher’s car in the position we assume he was in prior to death, and shot a hole through its head using the same trajectory as that found in the body.” Flanagan pointed to the section of tree. “Then we aimed a laser beam through the hole in the dummy’s cranium, out the open window of the car, and traced its path through the parking lot, across the street, and into this tree.”

“Beautiful,” Rebecca breathed in true awe.

Flanagan’s expression grew serious. “The bullet’s a match to a previous homicide, Rebecca.”

Alerted to the unusual use of her Þ rst name, Rebecca tensed.

“Okay.”

“It’s the same gun that killed Jeff and Jimmy.”

“Son of a bitch.” Rebecca’s jaw clenched.

“The shooter probably didn’t think we’d Þ nd the bullet, so he wasn’t worried about a match. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.” Flanagan shrugged. “Some professionals get very attached to their weapons.

Some just Þ gure they’re too clever to ever get caught. For whatever reason, he didn’t ditch the gun after the Þ rst murders.”

“Or he did, and someone else is using the gun this time,” Rebecca pointed out.

“And how likely do you Þ gure it is that Beecher, who is peripherally, at least, related to the Þ rst murders, was killed by a different shooter?”

“Not very likely,” Rebecca said grimly. “We always assumed that Jeff and Jimmy were done by some out-of-town hit man. Looks like we were wrong. This has got to be local.”

“Because of the timing?”

Rebecca nodded. “Whoever did this set it up very quickly. There wasn’t enough time to bring someone in to do that hit.”

• 185 •

RADCLY fFE

“Find me a gun, and I’ll tie these all together for you in a neat little package.”

“This guy just made a big mistake,” Rebecca said, almost to herself. “He just stuck his head out where we can see him.”

“Look, Frye,” Flanagan said carefully. “I know this guy shot Jeff, but…”

“There aren’t any buts about this.” Rebecca’s expression was completely unreadable, but her eyes were molten pits of fury. “He pays.”

v

Sloan absently reached for the phone on the desk beside her, still scrolling with the other hand. “Sloan.”

“Got a minute?” Rebecca asked.

Her voice decidedly cool, Sloan replied, “Do I have a choice?”

“I’ve called the team together for seven at your place. I’d like to meet with you alone Þ rst.”

“I was about to wrap things up here anyhow,” Sloan conceded.

She stretched her back and swiveled in the desk chair to survey the room. The two detectives assigned to the new unit had left for the day, and she found the solitude welcome. Boxes of computer equipment, tools, stacks of cartons Þ lled with Þ les—years of data to be sorted and input—surrounded her. Peaceful. “Where are you?”

“Downstairs. How about I buy you a drink at Barney’s?”

The cop hangout was a ten-minute walk away. Sloan had never been there. “Sure.”

It took Sloan less than that to get there, and when she did, she found Rebecca already seated at a booth in the back of a long, narrow, noisy, smoke-Þ lled bar. So much for the No Smoking signs. Of course, with the room Þ lled with cops, who was going to complain? She settled onto the cracked leather-covered bench across from Rebecca. “Frye.”

“Thanks for coming,” Rebecca said.

A waitress appeared, and Sloan ordered scotch on the rocks after Rebecca asked for a cup of coffee. Then Sloan waited.