A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,82

in my hand?”

Ophelia put both hands up. “Hold up for half a second. First, who lives here?”

“Take a wild guess.”

Ophelia puffed out her cheeks while letting out an exasperated little sigh. “Detective Brower? Rufus is tied to him, isn’t he? That’s why Lampo let him slide yesterday.” She frowned and put her hands on her hips. “How do you know Rufus didn’t… I mean, he does that, sometimes. For as long as I’ve known him, anyway—up and vanishes whenever he wants.”

“And he leaves a pair of lockpicks on the ground like fucking breadcrumbs? He’s been gone, Christ, I don’t know. Three hours? I didn’t even realize something was wrong until he’d been gone half an hour. Minimum. And then you took your sweet time getting here. We need to find him. They want something, and they think he has it, and they’re not playing patty-cake while they wait for him to cough it up.”

“Hey, first off, buddy, you need to chill out. I can’t just drop my duties because a petty thief went out for a pack of smokes on his new boy toy, got it?”

“Take a look at this,” Sam said, holding up the phone in its evidence bag, turning it so Jake’s scrawl faced her. “And tell me to chill again.”

Ophelia narrowed her eyes, snatched the bag, and studied the scrawl. “Where’d you get this?” she finally asked, voice dropping low.

“Jake left it for Rufus. Because he couldn’t trust anybody else with it. You know what that is? That’s your arrest. That’s your conviction. That’s Heckler and the Wall Street assholes who are paying big bucks for the kids getting trafficked through here. That’s Jake’s fucking blood, right there in your hands, and if you don’t get on board real fucking fast, you’re going to be up to your elbows in Rufus’s blood too.” He was panting when he finished.

Ophelia looked at Sam, her expression like stone. “Rufus is a CI?”

“Yes.”

She shook the bag a little. “Yesterday… was this… what Detective Lampo wanted me to find on you two?”

“I think so. This is what Jake wanted to give Rufus. I found it stashed in the mailbox. Hidden in a place only Rufus would look, because he’s got a goddamn fetish for those things, at an apartment only Jake and Rufus knew about. You know what? What a fucking waste of time. I’m going to find him myself.”

But Ophelia immediately sidestepped and blocked the door. “No, you won’t. If Detective Brower trusted Rufus to help him with these exploited children, that’s good enough for me. Let’s find the little punk together.”

“Great,” Sam said. “How?”

Ophelia lowered her arm, letting the evidence bag dangle. “Their safe house was Flushing, and Juliana didn’t say anything about other locations. I’m thinking they panicked, the evidence in the basement spoke pretty loud and clear.” She tapped her chin with her free hand. “They could have left the city completely, but I’m not sure if they’d chance that with so many kids. Toll roads have speed cameras. A routine pull-over on the highway is how creeps like this end up getting busted. If I was tits-deep in this shit, I’d stick to Queens.”

After a moment, Sam nodded. “They brought them in easily enough, and normally, I’d say they’d take them out the same way. But they’re running scared. They’re scrambling. They don’t have the time or the flexibility to do it the way they want. So let’s say they stayed in Queens.” Sam paused. “How big is Queens?”

“Something like two million residents. But if they’re considering going back where they originated, somewhere north to regroup maybe, I’d imagine they’d be lying low near parkways. If they took the Grand Central Parkway, that’d be an easy route out.”

“They used a residence before,” Sam said. “A single-family structure. That might be what they’re comfortable with. Are there houses near the Parkway? Would they try to throw us off with a false start? Maybe they follow the Parkway a little bit out of the city to get some breathing room?”

Ophelia’s hand moved from her chin to her mouth, chewing absently on her thumbnail. She winced after a moment, studied the torn-up nail, then said, “It’s tough to say.”

Tapping on his phone, Sam pulled up a map of Queens and began zooming in. “The house they were in, that was over here. Right? Flushing? And this—this is the Parkway you’re talking about? And they want privacy. They want a single-family residence. They’re pulling back to get their necks out