Vince stood there long after the sheriff had gone, looking out over the scrap yard, watching the smoke rise.

Contrary to the vigorous recommendations of his union rep, Worth had no plans to bring in a lawyer. Not yet.

It hadn’t gone unnoticed. Vargas poked his head into the room just a few minutes after Worth’s rep had left to bring back lunch.

“Hey,” Vargas said. “Can you stand in a lineup?”

“That’s funny,” Worth said.

“Seriously.”

“You want me in a lineup?”

“Not like that,” Vargas said. “We just need bodies. Shouldn’t take long.”

Worth looked at him.

They didn’t just need bodies.

He’d be an idiot to say yes. If his rep had been here, he would have laughed in Vargas’s face for even trying.

Worth wondered who they’d pulled in. A neighbor in Gwen’s building? Somebody from the house next door? The thought came like a kick in the groin, certain and sickening. It was the most basic point of weakness in the whole house of cards. Somebody had seen something.

“Come on,” Vargas said. “It’s not like you have anything better to do.”

He’d be an idiot to say yes.

If he declined, he’d look like he didn’t want to fill in some routine lineup.

If he told Vargas to wait for his rep to get back, he might as well have called in a lawyer hours ago. More than anything else, now of all times, he needed his fellow cops to see him as one of their own. He was the one who’d come inside. Not Tony Briggs and Ray Salcedo. His was the honest position. Not theirs.

The minute he held up a right and attempted to shield himself with it, everything he’d done so far today was lost.

Worth took a breath, shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

Twenty minutes later, Mark Vargas took him to a different room, closed the door, and said, “Sorry about that.”

Worth kept his face neutral. “Sorry about what?”

They were in an audit room now. Small, no windows. A table and a few chairs. There was a multimedia cart with a color monitor, a VHS deck, and a snarl of cords hanging behind.

Vargas walked over and turned on the monitor. A video image of one of the interview rooms wobbled onto the screen.

While they watched the monitor, another detective escorted a bony kid to the table, sat him down, winked up at the camera, and disappeared from the frame.

“Derek Price,” Vargas said. “Southwest patrol picked him up this morning at Bergen Mercy ER. Public defender’s office is sending somebody over.”

Worth put the kid somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two. He had a stud in one nostril. Both arms were covered in tattoo ink from his T-shirt sleeves down to his wrists. He had straight black hair cut short in back, longer in front, a greasy curtain hanging over his eyes.

“Did you say Price?”

“That’s right. Know him?”

“No,” Worth said. “But I recognize the name.”

“How’s that?”

“Gwen said he came to see her in the hospital,” Worth said. “Price and another guy. Both friends of Russell James. Detective Kenna talked to them.”

“Happen to remember the other guy’s name?”

“Mather,” Worth said. “First name Troy, I think.”

“Dead on arrival at Mercy,” Vargas said. “Arrived at oh-five-thirty with a bullet hole in his chest and about eight pints of blood in the passenger side of Price’s Le Mans.” Vargas looked at Worth. “You’re sure you’ve never seen the kid before?”

“I’d remember the tattoos.”

“Yeah.” Vargas nodded. “He didn’t pick you out, either.”

Worth began to grasp the situation.

The lineup had been for Derek Price. Price had been the person on the other side of the glass. Vargas had tried for a connection and hadn’t gotten one; Worth had clipped another wire and still hadn’t detonated himself.

How much grace had it bought him?

“Price isn’t the shooter,” he said, testing.

“According to Price, Mather called him after the fact.” Vargas reached into a folder and handed Worth a sheet of paper. It was a printout of a digital photo, tagged with an evidence number. A blood-covered cell phone lying on a sidewalk. “Price initially claimed he drove from his apartment to Mather’s location and took him to the ER from there.”

“Initially,” Worth said.

“Something didn’t track,” Vargas said. “Based on the amount of blood at the location, the amount of blood in the car, the time stamp on the call, the attending doc’s assessment of the wound…Price either picked Mather up earlier than he stated, or drove him farther. One way or another, his time frame doesn’t work.”

Worth said, “Huh.”

Price had picked Mather up at the corner of 72nd and Q, Vargas said. The blood trail led six blocks in the opposite direction, all the way back to the warehouse/retailer where Price and Mather had been employed: Tice Is Nice Quality Used and Discount Furniture.

“That’s where Russell James worked,” Worth said. “The voice mails on his phone? Almost all of them came from Eddie Tice.”

Vargas nodded. “Also dead. Along with a third employee, Darla Mackler.”

“Jesus.” Three bodies. “You’re kidding.”

No wonder the place had gone hot. Three bodies constituted nearly ten percent of the citywide homicide rate for the entire year to date. All in one night.

All around Russell James.

“Eddie Tice had a nephew in the department,” Vargas said. “Kind of coincidental.”

“Who?”

“Tony Briggs.”

It wasn’t possible.

Vargas said, “There’s one other thing.”

Worth didn’t know what to say. He actually felt light-headed.

“Detective Kenna and Gwen Mullen are here.”

“Here at Central?”

Vargas nodded and said, “Briggs called the safe unit with instructions for the money drop thirty minutes ago.”

30

Within a few months after returning to a regular patrol rotation, Tony Briggs and Ray Salcedo had established one of the highest collar rates in the Northeast District. They led the precinct in drug arrests—presumably utilizing the knowledge of markets and players they’d developed over the course of their two-year stint with the Narcotics unit.

But irregularities in their undercover operations—including discrepancies in the amounts of cash and drugs seized during a joint OPD/DEA raid on the Orlando Heights housing projects last year—had attracted internal notice even before they went back into uniform.

“Based on their pattern of arrests, we suspected Ray and Tony were manipulating the street trade in certain areas,” Detective Neil Granger said.

He pushed up his sleeves and repositioned the condenser mike he’d taped along Worth’s sternum. Worth winced as the tape pulled hair.

“Ten months ago,” Granger said, “after ICE hit the Latinos, we started seeing new product filter in.”

Operation Community Shield. Last January, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the department antigang unit, and uniformed officers from the Southeast District—including Worth himself—had arrested and/or deported more than fifty key members of Mara Salvatrucha, Sureños, Lomas, and other South O Street gangs that had come to dominate the distribution of cocaine and methamphetamine in recent years.

The operation had disrupted the Latino traffic for the short term. But in the years since Kelly had been gunned down, the black sets in the Northeast had mostly fallen into disorganiziation, turf warfare, and pointless homicide. A perfect time for a new crew to set up shop.

“In twenty years, I’ve never seen a serious heroin market,” Granger said. “Not in this town. But all of a sudden, we start seeing the crack and amp slingers carrying around dime bags of China White. And it’s not coming through the Salvadorans or the Mexicans.”