Carlucci

by Richard Paul Russo

  “Just get to it, Eric.”

  “Maybe fifty or sixty percent effective.”

  Jesus Christ. And that was probably high, because they’d want to put the best face on it they could.

  “It’ll get better, though. We’ve got people working on modifications right now. There’s been more mutation of the virus than anyone expected. And we’re stepping up production, going into full gear—”

  “Stepping up production for a vaccine that’s only fifty percent effective that you’re still trying to change.”

  “It’s something, for Christ’s sake! And once we’ve made changes, and have a new vaccine, we’ll give people who have had the first one the new one as well. Look, Cage, this is a logistical nightmare, can’t you realize that? We’re talking about trying to set up a vaccination program for three hundred and fifty million people. We’re doing the best we can…”

  He had heard that too many times from Eric. Cage hung up on him, got up from the bed, and sat down by the window again, looking outside. The people down there in the street had no idea what was happening to them right now, or what was very likely to come.

  46

  IT WAS RAINING, so there was no moonlight, and the light from the street lamps was dim, two distant amber glows obscured by sheets of warm rain. Carlucci approached the abandoned machine shop, pulling his slick-coat tighter—a wasted gesture; he was already soaked. He hurried around the corner of the building, into the alley, then ducked into the side doorway.

  Sheltered from the rain, he stood there a minute before going in. He was afraid to hope, but he could think of no other reason Amira would want to meet him tonight—she was going to go through with it. She wouldn’t need to meet him just to tell him she wouldn’t do it.

  He opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it. Darkness and silence. Without the moonlight he could hardly see a thing inside the machine shop, only vague shadows against darker shadows. He waited, listening. Nothing. Maybe they were late. After a couple of minutes, his eyes adjusted enough to make out the crates and cable spool where they’d sat before, but there was no one there.

  He took a flashlight from the slick-coat pocket and thumbed it on, sending a narrow beam of white light across the concrete floor.

  “Shut that damn thing off!” Istvan’s voice, a harsh whisper from somewhere above him.

  Carlucci complied. He remained where he was, unmoving. Several minutes passed. If Istvan and Amira were anywhere around him, he couldn’t hear them.

  Finally the narrow white beam of a flashlight appeared on the other side of the machine shop, up at the top of the stairs leading to an open, second-story work area. The light beam bobbed as someone carried it down the steps, and soon he could make out two forms behind it, moving toward the crates and spool. He joined them.

  Istvan and Amira sat on the crates, and Amira set a plastic folder on the spool. Inside were several sheets of paper.

  “Let’s do this right,” she said. “Istvan told me. No question of authenticity. I’ve written it out myself, and I’ll sign each page here in your presence.” She took the sheets out of the folder and handed them to Carlucci. “Maybe you want to read it first, see if there’s something I left out.”

  He sat on one of the other crates, used his own flashlight for light, and read through the statement. Everything was there, just as she’d told it to him when they’d been here ten days ago. Everything.

  “It’s fine,” he said. He handed the pages back to her, and she signed and dated each one, then put them back in the folder and handed the folder to him.

  “Will you testify?” he asked.

  “Tell them I will,” she said.

  “But will you?”

  “I don’t know. Just do everything you can to avoid a trial, and we won’t have to worry about it.”

  He had to be careful now. One move at a time, no missteps, cover his ass. And so, before he told Santos and Weathers, he went to the DA; he had to make sure he was going to get the support to go all the way.

  Angela Del Carlo had been the district attorney for three years. She’d had to be hard and brash and tough to get the job in the first place, and she’d had to be tough to keep it. And she called all the shots on any high-profile case. There was no point in going to any of the deputy DA’s with this; nothing would go forward without Del Carlo’s approval. So Carlucci insisted on meeting with her.

  It was late afternoon by the time he got in to see her, and she was in a foul mood. She was sitting behind her large, mahogany desk, which was covered with piles of papers and disks and a couple of different computer screens. She was wearing a dark brown suit, her hair tied back, and she was looking through a folder, turning the pages one after another.

  “Have a seat, Frank.” She looked up at him. “What the hell ever happened to the paperless office? We’ve been waiting for it since the beginning of this century, and I’d guess we’ll still be waiting for it at the end of the century.” She smiled. “That’ll be fine with me, actually. If I ever have to read very much off a screen, that’ll be the day I quit.”

  “Maybe something else will make you quit,” he said. He sat in one of the two chairs on the other side of her desk.

  Del Carlo frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that, Frank. Especially with all this mystery, you won’t tell me over the phone why you want to see me. Okay. Let’s have it.”

  He held out the plastic folder with Amira’s statement. Del Carlo took it from him, then sat back in her chair to read it. As he expected, she read it slowly and carefully, not glancing at him, not asking a question. When she was finished, she set it down on the desk and looked at him.

  “Holy shit, Frank. You trying to shorten my career?”

  “Not intentionally.”

  “That makes me feel much better.” She shook her head, glanced at the folder again, then back up at him. “This is the real thing? I see your signatures, but…you talked to her? This is really her statement?”

  He just nodded.

  “You believe her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’ll testify to this in court.”

  “She’d rather not have to,” he said carefully.

  “Yeah, no shit. But she will if necessary?”

  “If necessary, yes.”

  “I hope to shit you’ve got her under police protection.” Carlucci shrugged. “Not exactly.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t think she has much faith in police protection. She’s in hiding, and she won’t tell me where. That’s probably best.”

  Del Carlo nodded. “But you have a way to get in touch with her when you need to?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed and slowly shook her head. “Yoshi Katsuda. Shit.”

  “I need to know,” he told her. “If we go ahead and get an arrest warrant, will you prosecute? Will you put everything we’ve got into it and not roll over and drop the charges at the first hint of pressure from Katsuda and his attorneys?”

  Del Carlo laughed. “Jesus, you’re a bastard, Frank.”

  “I’m sorry I have to ask, Angela, but I need to know. This will be a monster if we go through with it. We’ll take some vicious heat, you know that. I’m not going to stick my ass out over the fire, and hers,” he said, pointing at the folder, “if I can’t be sure of every bit of support you can bring.”

  She nodded. “You’re right to ask, Frank. Has Vaughn seen this? I assume not, or I would have had him screaming at me already.”

  “No one’s seen it except you.”

  “So if I told you to forget this statement, and just drop the whole matter…?”

  Carlucci shrugged. “No one else knows. You wouldn’t have to worry about anyone making a stink about it.”

  “And this woman, Amira?”

  “I don’t think it would break her heart if we dropped the whole thing.”

  “But she came forward with her story. A little late, maybe, but she came forward.”r />
  “Not exactly.”

  “That phrase again,” Del Carlo said. “What do you mean by it this time?”

  “She didn’t come forward. We’ve been searching for her for two months.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “Santos and Weathers and I. Santos and Weathers are the investigating officers on the case.”

  She cocked her head. “But they don’t know about her statement?”

  “No. I found her, and I didn’t tell them. We didn’t know what, if anything, she’d be able to tell us if we found her.”

  Del Carlo didn’t say anything more for a while. He knew she was trying to decide what to do. But he also knew she wouldn’t take long, she wouldn’t sit on it for days like some people. She would probably make the decision right now, in the next few minutes, and once she’d made the decision, she would never look back.

  He was prepared for any decision she made. Certainly he wanted to go forward, he wanted to nail Yoshi Katsuda’s ass to the floor, he wanted the man to pay, and not just for what he had done to his own daughter. Carlucci was beginning to suspect that Katsuda was responsible for a lot more—more pain and grief, and probably more deaths. Maybe his own wounds from that day he was following Mouse. Maybe even Christina’s death.

  But he was also ready to accept Angela Del Carlo’s decision if she wanted to bury it right here and now. If they went forward, they would all be digging through shit and heat for weeks or months. He wouldn’t miss that.

  Del Carlo breathed in deeply once, then slowly let it out as she nodded. “All right, Frank. Let’s do it.”

  That night he drank several shots of whiskey during the evening, knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it. Andrea didn’t say a word probably she assumed he was drinking because of Christina. There was that, too, but he tried not to think about her too much right now.

  And then Cage called.

  “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

  Carlucci shook his head, then realized Cage couldn’t see it. Christ, he was about half smashed. “No,” he said. Then, “How’s Caroline?”

  “Caroline’s fine. She’s not why I’m calling.”

  “What is it then?” He wanted to just hang up and crawl into bed. He didn’t want to have to think about anything else right now except Yoshi Katsuda.

  “It’s about the Core Fever vaccine. I thought you might want to hear this.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’ve talked to someone in the CDC. They haven’t announced it publicly yet, and I’m not sure they ever will. But the vaccine is only about fifty percent effective.”

  That gave him a bit of a jolt, waking him up. “Fifty percent? What does that mean, exactly?”

  “About half of all people who have been vaccinated, if they are exposed to Core Fever, will come down with it despite the vaccination.”

  “Christ. That’s not good.”

  “No.”

  “So one hell of a lot of people who think they’re safe from Core Fever are going to get it anyway, and die.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’s depressing news. But why are you telling me? I can’t do anything about it.”

  “I just thought you would want to know. It’s one more thing in all this mess, and it stinks of New Hong Kong. It all stinks of New Hong Kong, and I thought you had some case with those fuckers involved.”

  “I do,” Carlucci said. “You think New Hong Kong deliberately came up with a half-assed vaccine?”

  “No, it’s not that. I can’t explain it, it’s just a gut feeling, but there’s responsibility, somehow. They’ve been involved in this shit from the beginning, every step of the way, and I think there’s something there that we don’t know about. We may never know what it is. But I thought you’d want to know.”

  Carlucci nodded to himself, thinking. “Yeah,” he said absently. “I do want to know. I think I know what you mean.” He paused, trying to hang on to the thoughts that were jumping around in his head. “Thanks for letting me know.” And then, before Cage could reply, Carlucci hung up.

  There was something. Too many connections, but no real explanations yet. He punched up the department, then asked to be transferred over to Info Services. Marx answered the phone, which was perfect.

  “Marx, this is Carlucci.”

  “Hey, Lieutenant. What can I do for you?”

  “Put a trigger into the system for me,” he said. “For Monk.”

  “The slug?”

  “Yeah, the slug. I want to be notified immediately of anything that he does, any calls he makes or visitors or interview sessions, any calls that come in, anything to do with him. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you do it in such a way that he won’t know about it?”

  “Trickier,” Marx said, and Carlucci could almost see him grinning. “But yeah, I can do it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You got it, Lieutenant.”

  Carlucci hung up. He was tired. But tomorrow promised to be an interesting day.

  When Santos and Weathers came into his office the next morning, he handed them each a copy of the arrest warrant. The two of them sat down and started reading, but Santos almost immediately leaped up from the chair. He kissed the warrant and held it high above his head.

  “God bless the Virgin Mary!” he cried out. “We’re going to nail the bastard!”

  “Take it easy, Ruben,” Carlucci said. “Sit down. It’s not going to be that easy. We’re going to have hell ahead of us over the next few weeks.”

  Santos sat down, grinning, holding tightly to the warrant. “Yeah, but we’re going to arrest that arrogant prick. And if we do it late at night, he won’t be able to get a bail hearing, and he’ll have to spend at least one day in the clink.”

  “Just hold on there, Ruben. That’s exactly why I don’t want you to get out of control. We’re going to have to be very careful with all this. We have to think out every move. And arresting him at night is not what we want to do.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because with the powerful attorneys he’ll have, they’ll find a judge who will hold a bail hearing even at two o’clock in the morning. And a judge who would do that for him is not a judge we want to have—he’ll be out. And we’re going to try like hell to have him held without bail. We don’t want him to take off to New Hong Kong. We’d never see him again.”

  “You sound like you’ve talked with someone already about this,” Weathers said.

  Carlucci looked at her and nodded. “I have. Angela Del Carlo. Before I applied for the warrant, I wanted to make sure we’d have the DA’s office behind us.”

  “And if they hadn’t been?”

  He only hesitated a moment. They had to know. “I would have buried it. You’d never have seen a warrant. You’d never have heard a damn thing about it.”

  Weathers nodded. She understood. Santos understood as well, but he didn’t like it, and he scowled at Carlucci.

  “How the hell…?” Santos began. “How did you find out it was Katsuda? What the hell have we got for a case?”

  “The sketch artist image you two got from that guy in Naomi Katsuda’s condo.”

  “You found the woman?”

  “I found the woman.”

  “How?”

  Carlucci shook his head. “Sorry, Ruben. I can’t tell you.” But he did tell them about Amira’s story, and the statement she’d made.

  “Jesus Christ,” Santos said, and he got up from the chair again, pacing back and forth in the corner of the room. He couldn’t sit still. “But we’re going to arrest the bastard.”

  “Yes,” Carlucci said.

  “When? Who?”

  “The three of us,” he answered. He stood. “Now.”

  Yoshi Katsuda was expecting them—there was no way to get up to his office without letting him know—but Carlucci didn’t think he knew why they were coming. Carlucci had said there were some aspects to Naomi Katsuda’s murd
er that urgently needed to be discussed, and, after some back and forth, Katsuda had agreed to see him.

  There had been some confusion at the security post on the ground floor of the Mishima building. Carlucci had neglected to tell Katsuda that he wouldn’t be alone, that two other police officers would be with him. There had been a call up to Katsuda’s office, more discussion and negotiation; Carlucci had been insistent, stressing that Santos and Weathers were the investigating officers, and suggesting that they would not leave without seeing him. Finally Katsuda had cleared all three of them, and they had taken the elevator together up to the top floor.

  Now they stood in the reception area, waiting. Santos kept staring at the woman with the metal face until Weathers elbowed him a couple of times.

  “You should have warned me about her,” Santos whispered to Carlucci. Weathers elbowed him again, and he grinned.

  “Mr. Katsuda will see you now,” the woman said.

  “Ask him to come out here,” Carlucci said.

  The woman hesitated, then said, “Sorry?”

  “I said, ask him to come out here.”

  She hesitated again, then picked up the intercom and spoke. A few moments later, the wall opened up and Katsuda came through it. He was dressed much as he had been the last time Carlucci had been here, in a dark suit and tie. He glanced at Santos and Weathers, then turned his gaze to Carlucci.

  “There’s something odd about this visit,” he said. “I suspect you haven’t been completely forthcoming with me.”

  Carlucci shrugged.

  “You are under arrest for the murder of Naomi Katsuda,” Santos said. He paused, waiting for a response. But Katsuda didn’t say anything, he didn’t even glance at Santos; he kept his gaze on Carlucci. Santos went on. “I will be reading you a list of your rights,” he said. He took a card from his pocket to read from. There weren’t going to be any mistakes. “If you have any question about any of them, feel free to ask. First…”

  Katsuda waved at Santos, a gesture of dismissal, though he continued to look at Carlucci. “I waive the reading of those rights,” he said. “I know what my rights are.”

  “I’m sorry,” Santos replied. “I can’t do that. We must read them to you. First, you have the right to remain silent. Second…”