Dead Man s Hand Page 0,5

murdered his ex-lover. He couldn't forget that. And then the murderer had framed him for it. He couldn't forgive that. .

He stood up. "I'm not letting anything go. I can't." Jennifer just looked at him. After a moment he turned and went out to the back and unlocked the shed where he kept his bows and guns. He loaded the van and sat waiting in it for several minutes, wondering if Jennifer was going to join him.

After a while he started the engine and drove away, alone.

Noon

Maseryk played the good cop, Kant played the bad cop, and both of them deserved rave reviews. Jay Ackroyd had seen the act before, though. Maseryk was lean and dark, with intense violet eyes. Kant was a hairless scaled joker with nictitating membranes and pointed teeth. As Jay ran through his story for the seventh time, he found himself wondering whether they swapped roles when the suspect was a joker. He took one look at Kant and decided not to ask.

By lunchtime, even the two detectives had gotten tired of going round the mulberry bush. "If you're playing games with us, you're going to be real sorry," Kant said, showing his incisors.

Jay gave him a who, me? look. "I'm sure Mr. Ackroyd's told us everything he knows, Harv," Maseryk said. "If you do happen to remember anything else that might be of use, you'll give us a call." Maseryk gave him his card, Kant told him not to leave town, and they walked him to the squad room to sign a copy of his statement.

The precinct house was full of familiar faces. The doorman from the Crystal Palace was giving a statement to a uniformed cop while a waitress that Chrysalis has fired last month sobbed loudly in the corner. Other Palace employees waited on long wooden benches by the window. He recognized three waiters, a dishwasher, and the guy who played ragtime piano in the Green Room on Thursday nights. But the most important faces were the ones he didn't see.

Lupo, the relief bartender, sat alone by an unoccupied desk. After he'd dealt with the paperwork, Jay drifted over. "Can you believe it?" the joker asked. "What's going to happen to us?" Lupo had deep-set red eyes and a wolfs face. He'd been shedding; there were hairs all over the shoulders of his denim shirt. Jay brushed them off. Lupo hardly seemed to notice. "I hear it was you found the body," he said. "Was it really the ace-of-spades guy?"

"There was a card next to the body," Jay said. "Yeoman," Lupo muttered angrily. "Son of a bitch. I thought he was gone for good. He used to drink Tullamore Dew. I served him once or twice."

"Ever see him without the mask?"

Lupo shook his head. "No. I hope they catch the fucker." His long red tongue lolled from a corner of his mouth.

Jay looked around the room again. "Where's Elmo?"

"No one's seen him. I heard the cops got a whatchacallit, a APB, out on him."

Kant came up behind them. "Your turn, Lupo," he said, gesturing toward an interrogation room. He stared at Jay. "You still here."

"I'm going, I'm going," Jay said. "As soon as I use the little cops' room."

Kant told him where to find it. By the time Jay emerged, Kant and Maseryk and Lupo were off doing their thing. Jay went back to the captain's cubicle and walked in unannounced.

Captain Angela Ellis was behind the desk, chain-smoking as she scanned a file, flipping pages like a speed reader. She was a tiny Asian woman with green eyes, long black hair, and the toughest job in the NYPD. Her immediate predecessor had been found dead in this office, supposedly of a heart attack, but there were still people who didn't buy that. The captain before him had been murdered, too.

"So," he asked, "you have a lead on Elmo yet?"

Ellis took a drag on her cigarette and looked at him. It took her a moment to remember who he was. "Ackroyd," she finally said, with distaste. "I was just reading your statement."

"There are holes in your story I could drive a truck through." "I can't help that, it's the only story I've got. What kind of story did you get from Sascha?"

"A short one." Ellis stood and began to pace. "He woke up, sensed a strange mind in the building, and came downstairs to find you sneaking out of Chrysalis's office."

"I didn't sneak," Jay said. "I sneak very well, I majored in sneaking in