A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,8
urge to sit on them. “From what I can tell, the city does fuck-all. There is no way Jake killed himself.”
Lampo frowned a little at Sam’s words. Only a little. “I think Jake was dealing with some personal shit. That’s between you and me. Maybe he wasn’t dealing as well as I thought. Some folks wear a great mask.”
“Ah,” Sam said after a moment. “Fuck that. Jake knew how to handle his shit. All his shit. I didn’t come here for your Baruch-fucking-evening-class psycho-talk. I want to know what you have—I’m talking forensics—that says this was a suicide.”
Lampo was still staring at Sam. He leaned back, looking uncomfortable in the chair. “How long did you say you knew Jake?”
“Eight years,” Sam said. “Four deployments.” The tremor was worse now, and Sam slid one hand down to clutch the back of his thigh. “And I… knew about his personal shit, as you call it. Fuck. I was his personal shit.”
Lampo’s eyes, dark and unblinking, burrowed under Sam’s skin like some sort of beetle—made him want to scratch at an itch that wasn’t there. “I see,” he finally murmured, followed by blowing out a breath. “Jake was shot in the middle of his forehead.” Lampo raised a hand to indicate as such. “Not typical of suicides.”
“No,” Sam said. “Not fucking typical.”
“ME reported no gunshot residue on his hands.”
“I know I’m new here,” Sam said, “but how fucking typical is that?”
“Not,” Lampo said, with another twitch at the corner of his mouth. A smile that tried and gave up, maybe. “Pretty damn hard to shoot yourself and not have evidence on your hands.”
“And what are you doing about it?”
“Jake’s death is an open-and-shut case, Mr. Auden,” Lampo replied, but at some point, he’d begun gripping his hands together and now they were so tightly clasped that his fingertips blanched. “Did you plan on telling me how to do my job while you were here?”
“Not really, but apparently I need to. Jake Brower didn’t kill himself. I know it. You know it. Why doesn’t your ME know it? What’s going on here?”
Lampo opened his mouth, but a knock at the door interrupted. Before he could call a response, it swung open. A small woman—her mousy brown hair pulled back into a simple ponytail and wearing a pantsuit and a nude shade of lipstick that didn’t flatter her—poked her head inside.
“Lampo.”
“Ma’am,” he said, sitting as straight as a lightning rod.
“Something going on?” Her gaze met Sam’s, then returned to Lampo.
“No.” Lampo quickly stood and wiped his hair with one hand, despite it still being in place. “Having a chat, is all.”
She studied Lampo for another beat, looked at Sam again, and then said, holding that gaze, “Your phone’s been ringing off the hook.”
“Right. Sorry. We’re done,” Lampo answered with a quick, automatic smile. He waited until the woman retreated before looking down at Sam. “We’ll have to call it here, I’m afraid.”
Sam listened for voices from outside the interview room, the sounds of a squad room in a city that never slept; he would have settled for a coffee maker percolating. Instead, he got nothing, and he lined that up with this woman coming in here, the way she had known, somehow, the way she had asked, Something going on?
“I’ll be around for a few days,” Sam said, “if you want to trade war stories.”
Lampo just nodded. The woman, when Sam moved for the door, waited until the last minute to move, and then Sam had to squeeze past her or risk knocking a cop on her ass.
Once outside the station house, Sam consulted the mental map in his head, found the whole thing fucked to shit by the interview—shot in the center of the forehead, no fucking GSR, and they wanted to pretend it was a suicide when every cop everywhere knew the first rule was no cop died by suicide—and had to pull out his phone and open the Maps app.
After that, it was smooth sailing. Sam headed uptown, counting streets, navigating the same obstacle course he’d faced on the way to the station house, only now in reverse. Eventually, though, he spotted the apartment building across the street. It was brick with a patina of soot and dirt and dust, an iron fire escape with paint flaking away to expose rusted gouges, and it had the number stenciled on the door in gold letters, peeling now, that Sam was looking for.
He started to jog across the street and pulled up sharp at