Double Dealer

by Max Allan Collins

  “Even for an off time,” Warrick said, “that was grim.”

  With a twinkle, Sara said, “And Patrick—who was very open, you know, to young people like us—admitted they don't ever do a lot of business.”

  “Yet the four kids that work there,” Warrick said, “are pulling down decent money, and Barry Hyde doesn't seem to care about the lack of cash flow.”

  “Money laundry?” Brass asked.

  Grissom ignored that, saying to the two CSIs, “Okay, let's take Barry Hyde to the proctologist. Sara, I want you to look into his personal life.”

  “If he has one, I'll find it.”

  “Photocopy these,” Brass said, handing her his field notebook, indicating the pages, “and get that back to me. . . . This is what we do know about Hyde, from the phone calls I made around.”

  She scanned the notes quickly. “Not much, so far.”

  “It's a place to start,” Grissom said. “Find out more. Warrick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Try coming at this through the business door.”

  “You got it.”

  Then Warrick and Sara went off on their respective missions, and Brass departed as well, leaving Grissom lost in thought, trying to figure out what the hell Culpepper was up to. For someone supposedly sharing information because both groups were looking to bring the same animal to justice, Culpepper hadn't contributed a thing to their investigation—just a vague, unsubstantiated notion that the Deuce was no longer in the area.

  How long he'd been pondering this, Grissom didn't know; but he was pulled out of it by a knock on his open door. He looked up to see Sara standing there.

  “You look confused,” he said.

  “I am confused.” She came in, plopped down across from him. “This Barry Hyde thing just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

  “Weird how?”

  She shifted, tucked a foot under her. “Let's take his college years, for example.”

  “Let's.”

  She flashed a mischievous smile. “You can get a lot of stuff off the Internet these days, Grissom.”

  “So I hear. Some of it's even legal.”

  “Legal enough—lots of records and stuff you can go through.”

  “Less how, more what,” he said, sitting forward. “Did you find Barry Hyde's college records?”

  “Sort of,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Barry Hyde has a degree in English from the University of Idaho.”

  “Our Barry Hyde?”

  She nodded, going faster now, in her element. “Only thing is, I went to the University of Idaho website and they have no record of him.”

  “You mean they wouldn't give you his records?”

  “No. I mean they have no record of his ever having been a student there.”

  “Maybe he didn't graduate.”

  “You don't have to graduate to get into the records, Grissom. He didn't matriculate.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Oh yeah. Everything for the last five years is fine. Barry Hyde's a sterling citizen. Bank loans paid on time, credit cards paid up, member of the Rotary, the Henderson Chamber of Commerce, the guy even pays his traffic tickets.”

  “Good for him.”

  “But before that? Hyde's military record says he was stationed overseas, but I found a medical file where he claimed to have never been out of the country. The whole thing's nuts. Information either doesn't check out, or is contradicted somewhere else. This guy's past got dumped into a historical Cuisinart.”

  “Or maybe,” Grissom said, eyes tightening, “it came out of one.”

  14

  EXITING THE BREAK ROOM WITH A CUP OF COFFEE, CATHERINE almost bumped into O'Riley, who was bounding up to her, a file folder in hand.

  “Well, hello,” she said.

  Grinning, O'Riley said eagerly, “I've got a buddy in LAPD. Tavo Alverez.”

  “Good for you, Sergeant.”

  “Good for all of us—he tracked down Joy Petty.”

  “Great! Walk with me . . . I've got to catch up with Nick. . . .”

  O'Riley did. “Tavo stopped by the Petty woman's place in Lakewood—she's unemployed right now, but I guess she's mostly a waitress. Unmarried, lives with a guy, a truck driver.”

  “Okay, she's alive and well—but is she Joy Starr?”

  “Oh yeah, sure, she admitted that freely. Tavo said she seemed kinda proud of her days in ‘show business,’ once upon a time. Joy Starr, Monica Petty, Joy Petty—one gal.”

  Catherine stopped, their footsteps on the hard hall-way floor like gunshots that trailed off. Her gaze locked with O'Riley's less-than-alert sagacious stare. “Now that we've confirmed that, we need to have Joy Petty interviewed in more depth.”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I can work this through Tavo—he's a good guy.”

  “Can you fly over there, or even drive?”

  “I think we're better off usin' Tavo. I mean, he's willing, and he's tops.”

  “Then get back in touch with him,” Catherine said, walking again, heading toward the lab where Nicky worked. “We need Joy Petty interviewed in detail about her relationship with Marge Kostichek.”

  “Okay, but Tavo phoned me from the site of a homicide, to give me that much. I mean, it is L.A.—they do have a crime of their own go down, sometimes.”

  “Stay on him, Sarge.”

  “Will do. Here.” He handed her the folder. “ Background check on Gerry Hoskins.”

  “Good!”

  Another shrug. “Seems to be a right guy, got his own contracting business—you know, remodeling and stuff.”

  “Thanks, O'Riley. Fine job.”

  He smiled and headed off. Catherine caught up with Nick in the lab where he was already poring over the fingerprints.

  “What do we know?” she asked as she came up next to him.

  “It's looking like Gerry Hoskins is in the clear.” Nick sat on a stool before a computer monitor whose screen displayed two fingerprints, one from Joy Starr's note to Fortunato, the other from Hoskins's fingerprint card. “This is not his print.”

  Catherine nodded and held up the file folder. “O'Riley just gave me this. Hoskins's background check.”

  “What's it say?”

  She opened the folder, gave its contents a quick scan, saying, “Carpenter, got his own business, lived in Scott's Bluff, Nebraska till, seven years ago. Got divorced, moved here, been relatively successful, moved in with Annie Fortunato . . .” She did the math. “. . . five and a half years ago.”

  “Okay,” Nick said, “one down.”

  Catherine filled him in on what O'Riley had told her about Joy Petty.

  “An in-depth interview with her could really fill in some blanks,” Nick said.

  “We won't know until O'Riley's guy gets back, and that could be hours. For now, we stay at it.”

  The next print he brought up belonged to Annie Fortunato.

  “The wife's prints don't match the forged note, either,” Nick said.

  Silently, Catherine gave thanks; she had hoped that Annie Fortunato was innocent. Grissom could preach science, science, science all he wanted: these were still human beings they were dealing with.

  And the CSIs were human, too—even Grissom. Probably.

  “This print, though,” Nick said, bringing up a third one, “is a very definite match. Textbook.”

  Catherine leaned in. “The former owner of the strip club?”

  “Yeah—Marge Kostichek.” Nick's smile was bittersweet; he shook his head. “I'm almost sorry—the salty old girl is a real character.”

  “Character or not,” Catherine said, studying the screen, “she wrote that note to Malachy Fortunato.”

  Nick's eyes narrowed. “I don't think it really was written for Malachy to read, do you?”

  “No. Our friend Mr. Fortunato was probably tucked away under that trailer, by then—a fresher corpse than when we found him, but a corpse.”

  “But why would Marge sign Joy Starr's name to a n
ote like that? What motive would the old girl have for killing Fortunato?”

  “Having him killed,” Catherine reminded him. “Working strip clubs in a mobbed-up town like Vegas used to be, Marge might well have access to somebody like the Deuce.”

  Nick just sat there, absorbing it all; finally he said, “I think we need a search warrant.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Hopping off his stool, Nick asked, “We better round up O'Riley—seen him lately?”

  “Just,” Catherine said. “He's probably back in the bullpen by now. . . . You get your field kit organized, and I'll go tell Grissom what we're up to—and see if he can't find a judge to get us that warrant.”

  Ten minutes later, Catherine and Nick were moving quickly into the detectives' bullpen. Two rows of desks lined the outer walls and another ran down the center, detectives in busted and battered swivel chairs behind gray metal desks about the color of Malachy Fortunato's desiccated flesh. The skells, miscreants, and marks that made up their clientele sat in hard straightback metal chairs bolted to the floor, to prevent their use as weapons.

  O'Riley was nowhere to be seen; his desk—the third one from the back on the far wall—looked like an aircraft carrier. His in-out baskets served as the tower, his phone perched on the corner like a parked fighter, and the desk top was as clean as a deserted flight deck.

  Nick ran a finger over the surface and said, “I wonder if he does windows?”

  Catherine called to Sanchez, the detective at the desk behind O'Riley's. “Where's he hiding?”

  Without looking up from his one-finger typing, Sanchez said, “Do I look like his mother?”

  “Just around the eyes and when you smile.”

  The detective graced her with a sarcastic smirk and resumed his hunt-and-pecking.

  “Leave him a note,” Nick said to her. “And we'll page him from the car.”

  There wasn't so much as a Post-it on that spotless desk top. She turned to Sanchez. “You got a . . .”

  A small pad came flying at her and she caught it.

  “Thanks.” She wrote the Post-it, stuck in right on the phone, then, without looking, tossed the pad over Sanchez's way, heading out of the bullpen with Nick on her heels. When driven by a sense of urgency like this, Catherine felt frustrated by the minutiae of daily existence.

  They were halfway to the suspect's house when Catherine's cell phone rang. “Willows,” she said.

  “It's O'Riley. I got your page, and I got your note. I'm on my way. Somebody had to pick up the search warrant, y'know.”

  “Ah. You're leaving the courthouse?”

  “Yeah, what am I . . . maybe five minutes behind you?”

  “Yep. You want us to wait for you, Sarge?”

  Nick stopped for a red light. “O'Riley?”

  She nodded.

  “Has he got the warrant?”

  She nodded again.

  “Tell him he better hurry if he wants to be there when we question her.”

  O'Riley's voice said in her ear, “I heard that. You tell him to wait till I get there.”

  And O'Riley clicked off.

  Matter of factly, Catherine said to Nick, “He wants us to wait for him.”

  “Damn.”

  “It's procedure, Nick. His job—not ours.”

  “But it's our case. . . .”

  As the light turned green and Nick eased the Tahoe into the intersection, he shook his head. Ahead of them the sun was just dipping below the horizon leaving behind a trail of purple and orange that danced against fluffy cumulus.

  “He wants us to wait for him,” Catherine repeated, not liking it any better than Nick, but accepting it.

  Nick shrugged elaborately. “I don't see why. The old girl likes me. We'll just chat with her until O'Riley shows. Loosen her up.”

  Catherine said nothing.

  Five minutes later, Nick pulled the Tahoe up in front of Marge Kostichek's tiny paint-peeling bungalow. Darkness had all but consumed dusk, but no lights shone in the windows. For some nameless reason, Catherine felt a strange twinge in the pit of her stomach.

  Nick opened the door of the SUV and unbuckled his seatbelt.

  “Let's wait for O'Riley,” she said reasonably. “How long can it take him to get here?”

  “Why wait?”

  “We should wait for O'Riley. We don't have a warrant.”

  But then they were going up the walk, and were at the front door, where Nick knocked. He threw her one of those dazzlers. “It'll be fine.”

  This is wrong, Catherine thought; she was the senior investigator on the unit—she should put her foot down. But the truth was, she was as anxious as Nick to follow this lead; and she knew that once O'Riley got here, she herself would take the investigative lead, anyway.

  So why this apprehension, these butterflies?

  No answer to Nick's knock, so he tried again and called, “Ms. Kostichek? It's Nick from the crime lab!”

  Through the curtained window, Catherine saw a figure move in the gloomy grayness, someone with something in his or her hand—was that shape . . . a gun?

  She shoved Nick off the porch to the left, her momentum carrying her with him just as a bullet exploded through the door and sailed off into the night. Another round made its small awful thunder and a second shot drilled through the door, at a lower trajectory, and spanged off the sidewalk.

  Catherine and Nick lay sprawled in the dead brown bushes to the left of the front door.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  Shaken, startled, Nick managed, “I think so. How did you . . .”

  She rolled off the shrubbery, pistol in her hand—she didn't even remember drawing it—and she said to Nick, “Head for the truck—I got your back . . . stay low.” She lay on the lawn, gun trained on the front door.

  Nick, shaken, was clearly afraid, but concerned for her. “I'll cover you. Never mind the Tahoe—just get the hell out of here.”

  “Damnit, Nick—we don't leave, we contain the scene. Get behind the truck, and call this in. Now, move!”

  This time Nick didn't argue—he rolled out of the bushes, got to his knees, then blasted off like a sprinter coming out of the blocks, keeping low as he raced across the front yard.

  Another shot splintered through the door and Catherine wanted to return fire, but who would she be shooting at? She couldn't blindly shoot at the house.

  “Put your weapon down!” she yelled, remaining on her stomach, on the grass, handgun aimed at the doorway. “Come out with your hands high, and empty!”

  Nothing.

  Nick was already behind the Tahoe, his own pistol in hand. A distant siren wailed and Catherine knew help was on the way. Some neighbor had called 911.

  “Come on, Cath,” Nick yelled. “I've got you . . .”

  But a bullet cracked the night and shattered its way through the window and smashed the driver's side window of the Tahoe.

  Nick ducked and Catherine took the opportunity to roll left, come up running, and plaster herself against the side of the house. Her heart pounding, gunshots echoing in her ringing ears, she glanced out front to make sure Nick was all right. She couldn't see him.

  “Nicky—you okay?” she yelled.

  “Peachy!”

  The siren grew. Sliding along the clapboard side of the bungalow, she made her way toward the back. Only two windows were on this side of the house, the living room picture window, and one in what might be a back bedroom. She tried to see in the edge of the shattered picture window, around the border of the curtain, but it was just too damn dark. She was moving along the side of the house when she heard a car squeal to a halt in front—O'Riley.

  “What the hell!” O'Riley was saying, and Nicky's voice, softer, the words not making their way to her. Then another three shots cracked from out front—O'Riley drawing fire now.

  She took a hesitant step around the corner. If she could slip in through the back door, maybe she could get the drop on the old woman—if that was who'd been fi
ring on them. Ducking down below a window, Catherine took a second step, then the back door flew open and she froze as a tall figure—male figure—in head-to-toe black bolted out the door and sprinted across the yard. Her pistol came up automatically, but she saw no weapon in the man's hands and did not fire.

  She took off after him.

  The perp ran with the easy grace of an athlete, but Catherine managed to keep pace with him for half a block before he vaulted a chain link fence, stopping for a split second on the other side, then speeding across the yard, jumping the fence on the other side before disappearing into the night.

  “Damnit,” she said, stopped at the first fence. She holstered the weapon, and walked back to the house, still trying to catch her breath.

  When she got back out front, she found O'Riley pacing in the yard, talking to two uniformed officers, whose black-and-white at the curb, with its longbar, painted the night blue and red.

  “Where's Nick?” she asked him.

  O'Riley pointed. “Inside. . . . The woman's dead.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “It's ugly in there, Catherine—double-tapped, just like Fortunato and Dingelmann.”

  She filled him in quickly, about the perp's escape, and he turned to the uniformed men, to start the search, and she went inside to help Nick process the scene.

  Marge Kostichek lay facedown on the shabby living room rug, a large purple welt on her left cheek, her eyes mercifully closed. A gag made from a scarf encircled her head, blocking her mouth. A large crimson stain stood out where her mouth was. So much blood was on the floor, it was hard to find a place to stand without compromising the evidence.

  “It's him,” Nick said, his complexion a sickly white. “He got to Kostichek before we could. He even cut off her fingertips, like Fortunato. Two of them anyway—we must have interrupted him.” He swallowed thickly. “Judging from the gag, I think she bit through her tongue.”

  They heard another vehicle squeal to a halt outside. Within seconds, Grissom—his black attire not unlike the perp's—stood in the doorway.

  “What were you doing here without O'Riley?” he demanded.

  “O'Riley was on his way with the search warrant,” Catherine said, covering. “We had no way of knowing the Deuce would be here.”