some so that Billy Maloney wouldn’t press charges, something that I’m sure wasn’t really on his mind, given her father’s alleged occupation of whacking people.
Sal didn’t fare as well as Billy Maloney. He was gone the next week and never seen again.
I hugged her again. “I have to go,” I said, knowing that this was probably the last time I would ever see her. I turned to walk away.
“Peter sends his regards,” she called after me, something in her tone causing me to stop.
I turned slowly. “What?” A chill crawled slowly from the base of my spine to my neck.
“Peter sends his regards,” she repeated, a small, cruel smile playing on her lips.
Her husband was a gangster, a murderer, and involved in more illicit activities than I could keep track of. I had more than a sneaking suspicion that he was responsible for Ray’s death, too. He had kidnapped me a few months earlier, threatening to kill Max and Ray if I didn’t provide him the details of Kathy’s murder investigation. He had lost interest in me once the murder had been solved but had professed to “owe” me for treating Kathy with kindness when she was alive. I hated and feared him and to hear Gianna speak of him in relation to me was frightening and a little nauseating. I continued looking at her, unable to fashion a reply.
“Just wanted to let you know,” she said coldly. She started to walk away and I resisted the urge to scream at her to tell Peter to leave me alone but I stood in the growing darkness in silence.
Fred Wyatt was the perfect partner in every way. He was the first guy in and the last guy out. He was the one Crawford wanted beside him when shots were fired. But his singing drove Crawford to the edge of insanity. He sang love songs, Motown songs, heavy metal songs, show tunes…anything to hear the sound of his own voice. And, Crawford expected, to drive him completely insane.
Fred’s MO was simple: if he sang to Crawford, he wouldn’t have to talk to him about anything more complicated or intense than what they were having for lunch. At that moment, he was in the middle of his homage to Def Leppard with a rendition of “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”
Crawford and Wyatt had been pulled out of Homicide temporarily and put in the Robbery Division to track a mugger who was preying on wealthy women in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The deputy mayor’s great-aunt had been mugged and taken for a thousand dollars, and therefore, every available cop in the Fiftieth Precinct was now looking for this asshole. Champy, because of his high clearing rates for homicides, had been left on the case of the hands and feet, as Crawford had dubbed it in an effort to distance himself from the troubling detail that the victim was Alison’s ex, something that put him in a foul mood.
Despite the fact that Crawford and Champy were only in possession of Ray’s hands and feet and Dobbs Ferry had most of the body, NYPD had taken on the case. It could have been a jurisdictional thing, but Dobbs Ferry had been more than gracious about giving up control.
“That’s because it’s a bag of shit,” Fred had said in his usual delicate manner. A “bag of shit” was a case nobody wanted, and Crawford supposed that Hardin and Madden had their own, Westchester version of the phrase to describe the Ray Stark case. Probably had something to do with old foie gras or something equally highfalutin.
For the past six hours, Fred and Crawford had been watching a female police officer in a borrowed diamond necklace walk up and down the avenue, checking her police-issue Rolex now and again and flashing wads of cash as she purchased items of a variety of name brands from the vendors on the avenue of a variety. They were across the street, idly examining newspapers, walking up and down the avenue, trying to remain as inconspicuous as two men over six feet three can remain on a fairly crowded street. Crawford and Wyatt were the “catch team”—the cops that watched decoys as they put themselves in harm’s way to catch the people who preyed upon the innocent.
Crawford was in a particularly bad mood because he hated a disruption in his routine and he hated being pulled away from the job he was good at—investigating murders. He missed another Saturday-night dinner