FaceOff

by Lee Child

She bagged his Dell laptop, along with the phone and iPad, noting that there’d been no hard copy or e-version suicide notes. She’d just run a case where a man’s farewell before leaping off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge had been tweeted.

  Amelia searched the way she always did, walking the grid. This involved pacing step by step in a straight line from one end of the scene to the other and then turning around, moving slightly to the side, and returning. And then, when she was done with that, she covered the same ground again, perpendicular to the first search.

  For an hour she walked the grid, taking samples of trace. She collected the necklaces and crosses in the alcove. Seeing them up close, Amelia realized that several of them looked familiar—and finally she knew why. In the pictures Verlaine had shown to her and Lily in the bar, the women he was playing his S&M games with had all been wearing necklaces like these. Yes, Lucas was right, they were trophies. Trophies not of the murder victims, but of his sexual conquests.

  Then she turned to the steel door Lucas had told them about, the one leading to the basement. It had been unlocked when the team entered and she and Lily had cleared it fast. Now she searched it from the point of view of a forensic cop. The small underground chamber was brick-lined and had a raw concrete floor. The smells were of heating oil, mold, standing water, and sweat. Maybe that last scent was her imagination but she thought not.

  She looked at the hooks protruding from the walls, the stains on the floor. Amelia walked down a set of rickety stairs into the thoroughly creepy place. She ran a fast fluorescein test on several of the dark patches; the results confirmed her initial hypothesis of blood. And there was no doubt about the bits of dark, elastic curls she popped into evidence bags. She knew dried flesh when she saw it.

  Her gloved finger hit TRANSMIT and a moment later she heard Lincoln’s impatient voice. “Sachs. Where the hell are you?”

  “On the other side of the steel door. In Verlaine’s basement.”

  “And?”

  “It’s almost a home run.”

  “That’s like being nearly pregnant. But I’ll forgive the sloppy metaphor just this once. Get the evidence back ASAP.”

  He disconnected without a good-bye.

  LUCAS WAS STAYING AT THE Four Seasons on Fifty-seventh Street. He was lying in bed with his toenails scratching the top sheet, thinking about clipping his nails and then walking over to Madison Avenue to do a little shopping for an autumn ensemble, when his cell phone rang.

  Amelia: “Get over here. Right now.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s not good. And better not to talk about it on a cell phone.”

  He needed to clean up: unless there was a shootout going on at Lincoln’s town house, he figured he had that much time. He was out of the hotel fifteen minutes after the call, and found a taxi outside the front door, dropping off a customer. Lucas got in the cab and gave the driver Lincoln’s address, and the driver said, “Not hardly worth turning on the meter for that.”

  “Do what you want; I’ll give you a twenty when we get there.”

  The driver drove with some enthusiasm, and Lucas was ringing Lincoln’s doorbell twenty minutes after Amelia called.

  “What happened?” he asked, when she opened the door.

  “Lily’s been detained by Internal Affairs. They could be coming for us next.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll let Lincoln tell you.”

  Lincoln smiled when Lucas came in and said, “Now things are getting interesting.”

  “Tell me.”

  The evidence that Amelia had collected under Lincoln’s direction, which Lincoln conceded was “quite good, under typical circumstances,” had not been taken to Lincoln’s lab, but to the city laboratory.

  First, they found some evidence that the dead women had been tortured and murdered in a small storage area in the basement of the sculptor’s studio. Not much evidence was visible, but the small stuff—tiny spatters of blood, flakes of skin, urine samples—proved that the dead women had been there.

  The gun had also been examined—and that was where the problem arose.

  “Last year, we had another psycho roaming around the city, but he was not particularly clever. He was a serial shooter. Guy named Levon Pitt. Owned a junkyard here in town. That’s where he had dumped the bodies. Lily ran the team that tracked him down. They had an entry team, and cracked his apartment but there was nobody home. So they set up outside the apartment to wait for him, and pretty soon, here he came, with his adult son. When the police approached him, he figured out what was about to happen, and pulled a gun, and actually tried to take his son hostage. In the scuffle, he fired the gun, once, and Lily shot him, firing three times, and he died on the way to the hospital.

  “When the man had been shot, Lily froze the scene, and they brought in the crime scene crew. Among other things, they recovered seven different pistols in the man’s apartment. He’d used four different weapons in the murders that the police knew about, and after testing, they found that three of the guns they’d recovered were among the four used in the crime.”

  Lincoln paused in his narration, and Lucas prompted, “So?”

  “The gun we found yesterday, by Verlaine’s hand, was the fourth gun.”

  “What?” Lucas was momentarily confused. “Verlaine was involved with Levon Pitt?”

  “That’s not what they’re suggesting,” Lincoln said. “For one thing, there’s no apparent connection. For another, one of the shells in Verlaine’s gun had Lily’s fingerprint on it.”

  It took Lucas a moment to get it. “So they’re saying, what? That she picked up a gun at the first site, and kept it as a throw-down? And then she went into Verlaine’s apartment sometime last night, killed him, and made it look like a suicide?”

  “That’s what they’re suggesting.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Lucas said.

  “Internal Affairs doesn’t think so,” Amelia said. “The thing is, they can’t figure out any other mechanism for getting Lily’s fingerprint on that shell. She never touched the gun at Verlaine’s place.”

  “But why would she do that? Why kill Verlaine? After I went in there, we knew we had him.”

  “But we had no hard evidence, and that’s all Internal Affairs knows. That’s what Lily reported last night. We can’t tell them that we did have hard evidence, because then we’d have to tell them that you illegally entered. So their theory is she knew who the killer was, but couldn’t get at him, so she killed him. Got him off the street.”

  “Aw, man, that’s not right,” Lucas said.

  “There’s another aspect to it,” Amelia said. “Lily is an operator. She gets things done, but she steps on a lot of toes. That’s fine, when she’s got all that protection at the top. But now, with this, well, somebody leaked the lab results almost instantly. Probably some old bureaucratic enemy. It’s on every TV station in New York. They’re screaming for her head.”

  “Don’t forget to tell him about what else is coming down the line,” Lincoln said.

  “Oh, yeah.” Amelia pulled out her cell phone and looked at the time. “IA wonders if any of us had anything to do with it. We’ve got a couple of homicide cops on the way here. They want to talk to us. I know them. They’re hard-nosed guys.”

  Lucas shrugged. “We leave out the burglary, leave out the evidence collection from last night, and tell them everything else. And we tell them that they’re being taken as chumps—that Lily couldn’t have done this, and that somebody is running a con on them.”

  “That’ll piss them off,” Amelia said.

  “Which is what we want to do,” Lucas said. “We want them on the defensive. We want them off our backs so we can figure out what actually happened. And we tell them that.”

  · · ·

  “The question,” Lucas Davenport spat out, “is who’s setting her up?”

  Lincoln agreed. That was the only question. There was no doubt in the minds of Lucas, Amelia, and Lincoln that Lily w
as innocent.

  However much of a shit Jim Bob Verlaine had been, however guilty he was of sadistic murder—and however much of a tough number Lily Rothenburg was—there was no way she’d take him out like that.

  The team was back in Lincoln’s town house—all of them except Lily, of course, who was still being detained.

  And whose absence was glaringly obvious.

  “So,” Lucas repeated. “Who’s behind it?”

  “Somebody with a grudge?” Amelia offered.

  “Could be,” Lucas said. “She’s made some enemies in her day. Or maybe some asshole wants to derail a case she’s running.”

  “And what about Verlaine?” Amelia asked. “Did he kill those women? Or was he being set up, too? And what’s the reason behind that?”

  Lincoln’s view, admittedly myopic at times, as to the questions why and who was generally best answered by how and what: that is, by the evidence. “Why waste fucking time speculating? Look at the facts.”

  “You ever in a good mood, Lincoln?” Lucas asked.

  A grunt suggested that the answer might be no.

  But Lucas took his point. “What do we have to prove the suicide was faked?”

  Looking over Amelia’s photos of the body, Mel Cooper said, “Powder burns and muzzle stamp’re consistent with a close-contact gunshot.”

  Lucas regarded the pictures, too. “And the tissue, blood, and bone on the receiver of the piece confirm that. But it was a temple shot. That’s rare in self-inflicted wounds. Usually the poor bastard bites the muzzle.”

  “Which means somebody could’ve pulled out the piece when Verlaine was turned away, come up behind or beside him, and shot. So, maybe he knew the shooter.”

  Cooper said, “But there was gunshot residue on Verlaine’s hands.”

  Firing any pistol, and most rifles, results in burnt gunpowder particles and gases contaminating the hand holding the weapon.

  But Lucas muttered, “Fuck, that’s easy. He fired twice.”

  “Yes!” Lincoln said enthusiastically. “Good. Verlaine lets the perp in. He—or she—stands beside him and blows his brains out. Then the perp puts the gun in Verlaine’s hand and pulls the trigger again. Bang . . . Verlaine’s fingerprints’re on the piece, and GSR’s on his hand. Perp collects the second shell and leaves the gun on the floor.”

  “But where’s the other slug?” Cooper asked.

  Lucas, clearly pissed his friend had been set up, snapped, “Christ, just look at the pictures of the scene! The whole goddamn studio’s like a gun-range bullet trap—a thousand hunks of metal. Half of his quote art looks like a monkey pounded on it with a hammer. Nobody’d spot a bullet ding.”

  Amelia said, “Okay, that could work. But the big issue: what about Lily’s fingerprint on the shell casing fired from the murder weapon? How the hell did the perp finesse that?” She tossed her long red hair over a shoulder. Lincoln was amused to see Lucas following the sweep closely. He reflected: Just ’cause you’re a faithful husband doesn’t mean you are blind.

  Lincoln said, “Internal Affairs is claiming that Lily picked the gun up at the scene where she shot Levon Pitt—rescuing his son. What was the name again?”

  “The boy?” Mel Cooper asked, flipping through a file. “Andy.”

  Lucas then snapped his fingers. “Hold on. Something’s wrong here. It’s Levon Pitt’s gun—and presumably it was loaded with Pitt’s ammo. Why would Lily reload the mag with her rounds? That makes no sense. I’m not saying she’d take somebody out like that, but if she did, she wouldn’t be stupid about it.”

  Amelia said, “Somebody stole one of her cartridges and popped it in the mag.”

  “Wore gloves.”

  “Or knuckled it,” Lucas said, referring to loading a weapon by holding the bullets between your fingers, never letting the tips come in contact with the brass or slug.

  Lucas nodded. “Our friend Markowitz ain’t real crazy about the boys and girls from Narcotics being involved. But it’s leaning that way to me.”

  “Well, IA’s not going to take our word for it,” Cooper pointed out. “How do we prove somebody copped a spent shell from Lily?”

  An idea occurred to Lincoln. “Call Ballistics. Have them test fire a round from the bottom of the mag of the gun at Verlaine’s suicide. I want three-D images of that shell compared with the one with Lily’s prints on it. And I fucking want them now.”

  “Will do.”

  Not that fast, but it wasn’t bad. A half hour later the images were on the big monitor in front of them.

  Lincoln glanced toward Lucas then Amelia. “You two are the shoot-em-up mavens. What do you think?”

  It took no more than a fast glance. They nodded at each other. Lucas said, “The shell with Lily’s prints was machined to fit the receiver of Pitt’s gun. The real perp got one of her cartridges and altered it.”

  “Yep,” Amelia agreed. “So whoever did it knows weapons and metalwork. It’s real high quality, close tolerances.”

  “Okay, that proves she was set up. But it doesn’t get us any closer to who’s setting Lily up,” Cooper said.

  Breaking a lengthy silence, Lucas said, “Maybe it does. Amelia, you know somebody in the NYPD evidence room?”

  “Know somebody?” she asked, laughing. “It’s my home away from home.”

  STAN MARKOWITZ STOOD AT THE podium beside the police commissioner, along with some minion from the mayor’s office and a Public Affairs officer or two. They were in the Press Room in One Police Plaza.

  Microphones and cameras and cell phones in video mode bristled like RPGs and machine guns, aimed the officials’ way—though Markowitz, it seemed, was the preferred prey in the crosshairs, to judge from the tight shots.

  “I don’t think your boss’s having a good day,” Lincoln said to Amelia. They sat beside each other, watching on the big-screen TV in the corner of his parlor.

  Lucas was elsewhere, preparing.

  “Doesn’t look it. And what do you think?” she mused. “Half the city’s watching?”

  “Half the country,” Lincoln countered. “No good serial killers in the news lately. All the sharks want a piece of this one.”

  Every media outlet except CSPAN and Telemundo, it seemed, was represented.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Markowitz began reasonably, though with a tone that suggested he actually viewed them as sharks.

  He was drowned out by their shouted questions.

  “What was the motive for the torture?”

  “Is it significant that the victims were minorities?”

  “Is there a connection between this case and the Bekker case a few years ago, involving Lucas Davenport?”

  “Could you fill us in about Verlaine’s sex life?”

  Frenzy.

  Markowitz had obviously done this before and he began speaking very softly—an old trick. Suddenly the sharks realized that they weren’t going to hear anything if they kept yammering away and they spontaneously, to a fish, fell silent.

  The COD gave it a beat and then continued. “As you are probably aware, a thorough examination and analysis of evidence and behavioral profiling led investigators to believe that a resident of Manhattan, James Robert Verlaine, was the perpetrator in the spate of recent killings of women in the city. Mr. Verlaine appeared to take his own life as a result of said investigation. And evidence supported that supposition.”

  Lincoln muttered, “Ah, sooo pleased to see that they still teach courses at the academy in using ten words when one will do.”

  Amelia laughed and kissed his neck.

  “You are probably also aware that it was believed that an NYPD detective shot and killed Mr. Verlaine and attempted to cover up the murder by making it appear that the death was a suicide.

  “Further investigation has determined that the detective, Lily Rothenburg, was not, in fact, involved in the death of Mr. Verlaine. A person or persons intentionally planted evidence in an attempt to implicate the detective. This officer has been exone
rated. It now appears, too, that Mr. Verlaine was not the perpetrator behind the murder of the women. Detective Rothenburg is once again in charge of the task force investigating the killings. We expect to have a suspect in custody soon. I have no further comments at this time.”

  “Does that mean, Chief of Detectives, that Verlaine was murdered by this suspect as well? . . .”

  A new microphone logo popped into sight. Telemundo had arrived.

  “Can you tell us what leads Detective Rothenburg is working on? . . . Can you reassure the people of New York that no one else is at risk?”

  Markowitz studied the sharks for a moment and Lincoln thought he was actually going to say, “How fucking stupid do you have to be not to understand ‘I have no further comments’?”

  Instead: “Thank you.” He turned and walked off the stage.

  AMELIA MADE A FEW CALLS to the television stations, posing as an angry cop, and told them that Lily was at Lincoln’s town house. “She’s guilty, she’s the one who did it, you got to get on her,” she told the newsies.

  Within the hour, there were six news crews and fifty rubberneckers on the sidewalk outside of Lincoln’s town house. One of them finally came up and pounded on the door, and Amelia peeked out and asked what they wanted.

  They wanted Lily.

  After some back-and-forth, Lily went out on the stoop, told them that she would make one statement for the record, and that would be it.

  “I have some very clear ideas of how this may have happened,” she began.

  “Are you guilty?” somebody shouted.

  “Of course I’m not guilty,” Lily said. “I’m not guilty of anything except trying to track down a torture-killer. But the possibilities now are quite few: the logical possibilities. I’ll knock them down one at a time, and when I’m finished, we’ll have this madman. Within the next day or two. I’m confident of that.”

  The press conference lasted for another two or three minutes, then she said she would not talk anymore about it, and went back inside. The news crews dispersed, with the exception of a radio reporter. The rubberneckers went with them.

  An hour later, Lucas stuck his head out the door. “If you’re waiting for Lily, she went out the back a half hour ago.”