Sleight of Hand - By Phillip Margolin Page 0,70
is this?”
“Very serious.”
“Shit.”
“I’m sorry, Jake. I’d never have gotten involved if I had any idea I might put you in danger.”
“I know that.”
“I’m working with a homicide detective who told me to go out of town for a day or so. He’s working on something that he thinks will make the threat go away. Why don’t you come with me?”
“Where are you headed?”
“Kansas City. We’ll leave in the morning.”
Dana was packing when Frank Santoro called.
“There have been two developments,” the detective said. “Neither one is good, but one is interesting.”
“Tell me.”
“Tiffany Starr is dead.” Dana felt the air go out of her. “A jogger found her body in Rock Creek Park. Stabbed in the heart. It looks like a robbery—her purse is missing and she wasn’t wearing any jewelry.”
“But you don’t think robbery was the motive?” Dana asked as she shut down her emotions.
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” Santoro answered.
“You said there were two developments.”
“Last night, a man named Gregor Karpinski was admitted to Georgetown Medical Center. He’d been stabbed in the balls and had his head kicked in. The beating was pretty brutal.”
As soon as Santoro detailed Karpinski’s injuries Dana’s pulse shot up.
“There’s a connection between Karpinski and Barry Lester,” Santoro continued. “Lester was in general population in the jail. Then he was placed in isolation because he had a run-in with Karpinski. Karpinski is a beast, six five and solid muscle, and he works as an enforcer for Nikolai Orlansky. Barry Lester is a little shit with almost no muscle and no record of violence. The jail incident report states that Lester bumped into Karpinski, then called him an asshole.”
“You think the fight was staged to get Lester into isolation?”
“That’s precisely what I think. Karpinski doesn’t breathe unless he gets permission from Orlansky, so either Nikolai wanted Lester in isolation or he was doing a favor for someone.”
“Have you asked Karpinski if he was ordered to beat up Lester?”
“He isn’t in any condition to answer questions.”
“Will he pull through?”
“The doctors can’t say yet. There’s something else. Four years ago, Karpinski beat an assault charge. Do you want to guess who his lawyer was?”
Chapter Forty-Three
Kansas City, Missouri, was founded in 1838 at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers and had grown into a picturesque city of boulevards, parks, and fountains. Dana and Jake had checked into a hotel a few blocks from the Plaza, an upscale, outdoor shopping and entertainment district that was famous for being the first suburban shopping center in the United States specifically designed to accommodate shoppers arriving by automobile. The blighted urban area into which Dana was driving seemed as far from the condos, museums, upscale restaurants, and nightclubs of the Plaza as Earth was from the moon, but it was only a short distance by car from the heart of downtown.
Dana had dressed in a severe business suit but she wondered if she was overdressed. The neighborhood she was in was a strange mixture of lots filled with abandoned tires and rotting furniture that were patrolled by feral cats, well-tended single-family dwellings, and trashed, ruined, and looted homes with shattered windowpanes. Sullen young men stared at her as she drove by, and she spotted gang colors she’d learned to identify during her stint with the D.C. police. What she did not see were happy couples strolling behind baby carriages or neighbors talking over white picket fences. Why make yourself a target?
Just as she’d given up on the neighborhood, Dana suddenly found herself in an oasis of modern middle-class homes with newly mown lawns. Dana parked in front of a fifties ranch-style home with a peaked roof and stone-and-wood siding. The house was set back from the street, and a slate path led across a manicured lawn. A minute after she rang the bell the door was opened by a slender African-American man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirt and neatly pressed jeans.
Dana had seen Roger Felton’s name in the newspaper article detailing the execution murder of the two drug dealers. She had gone to police headquarters in Kansas City and learned that Felton was living with his elderly father in the neighborhood where Felton had grown up.
“Detective Felton?” Dana asked.
“I was,” Felton answered as he eyed Dana suspiciously. “I’m retired. How can I help you?”
“My name is Dana Cutler.” She held out her identification. “I was a police officer in Washington, D.C., but I’m private now. I’d like to ask you about a case you worked on