“It’s happened before,” Beam said.

“Probably happened that time, too. But since the knife never turned up, it doesn’t officially exist. At base, Corey’s a solid cop, and a talented detective. Trouble is, without that knife, she’s permanently screwed. And knows it.”

Beam neatly swerved left and squeezed the Lincoln through a space between a van being unloaded and some trash piled at the curb. It was tight enough to make da Vinci wince.

“Andy,” Beam said, “is there somebody in the department who doesn’t want this endeavor to succeed?”

“Sure, lots of them. Because of me. They think I’m coming on too fast. You know how it is, I’m a young Turk. Look like and act like one, anyway.”

The last part was true, Beam thought. Though in his forties, da Vinci might pass for thirty. He was too young looking, good looking, and blatantly ambitious to be universally popular. It was as if a small-market TV anchorman had somehow gotten hold of an NYPD shield and was aggravating the piss out of his betters.

“Am I gonna get cooperation when I need it?” Beam asked.

“Oh, yeah. I got the push to make it happen. I’ve got allies, Beam.”

“You must.”

“You don’t wanna ask who they are. I will say this: they see you pretty much the way I do.”

“Which is how?”

“They know your reputation as a bad ass who can’t be bought or bumped off course, that nothing will stop you.”

Not even the law.

Beam remained stone faced as he shot through an intersection barely in time to avoid colliding with a cab that had run the light. Da Vinci flicked a glance out the windshield but showed no emotion. There was a toughness and drive beneath all that smooth banter, cologne, and ass kissing. In truth da Vinci was one of the main reasons why Beam had agreed to take on this assignment. Not only did he rather like the brash, manipulating bureaucracy climber, but he still owed da Vinci for being willing to put his ass on the line seven years ago in Florida. The way it worked out, he hadn’t had to, but it was the willingness that counted. A lot of life was favors owed, favors paid.

A bus hissed and paused in the traffic coming the other way, a billboard-size sign featuring a Mets star pitcher in full windup on its side. Beam hadn’t been to a ballgame in years. Looking at the sign, he felt his stomach tighten, a pressure behind his eyes. Florida…

The bus roared and moved on.

“Send me Corey and Looper,” Beam said, “along with copies of the murder books on the three killings. I don’t want to waste any more time.”

“I’ll arrange it,” da Vinci promised.

They’d circled the neighborhood and were approaching the diner. There was a break in traffic, so Beam took the big Lincoln up to sixty and abruptly spun and locked the steering wheel and brakes simultaneously. The car rocked and skidded to face the opposite direction, then sedately double parked so da Vinci had room to open the door and get out on the passenger’s side.

Throughout the maneuver, da Vinci had braced himself with his feet against the floor and his hands on the dashboard.

“Somebody oughta call a cop!” an elderly woman pushing a wire basket cart full of grocery bags yelled over at them from across the street.

“Somebody oughta tell her people call us things all the time,” da Vinci said, completely unrattled.

Bev overslept. That was okay; her and Floyd’s West Side apartment was only a few blocks from Light and Shade. Even if she couldn’t hail a cab, she could walk it in no time. Breakfast she could make up later, maybe send one of the employees out to pick up Danish and coffee at Starbucks.

She was alone in the king-size bed. Floyd was still in Connecticut on a golfing outing with his buddies. Bev had slept so soundly the covers were only slightly disheveled. She slid both bare legs out from beneath the sheets, then stood up and removed her nightgown, which had somehow bunched its way up around her hips.

In the morning light she examined herself briefly in the mirror. She and Lenny had played rough and she had a few bruises, but nothing Floyd was likely to notice. Not that she cared that much if he did notice; she just didn’t want a scene. She was tired of scenes.

The apartment was large by New York standards, furnished with a hodgepodge of furniture and decorated without much style. Except for the lamps. Lamps they had, and good ones. And ceiling fixtures. Bev was proud of the massive crystal chandelier dangling above the dining room table that they hardly used.

She padded nude into the bathroom and took a quick shower, managing not to get her hair wet. She’d dropped by Tina’s Beauty Shop and had it done yesterday afternoon after taking off work early. After the wreck Lenny had made of it.

The shower had fully awakened and refreshed her. Yesterday had been a hell of a day, and today she’d better concentrate on work. She knew her business and got the job done, but her attendance record was abysmal. No one from the company had said anything to her, but they might. You could push them only so far. Besides, her job was the one thing in her life she liked. Her job and Lenny.

Bev was fully dressed in her new mauve outfit, seated before a teakwood vanity she’d bought in Mexico and had shipped home, leaning forward and applying just the right shade of lipstick to complement the dress—red, but with the slightest touch of purple—when her heart almost stopped.

She managed to start breathing again and turned to gaze back and up at the figure she’d glimpsed in the mirror. At the hand that held the object that was indeed what she’d first feared. A gun, a small one with some kind of bulky cylinder fitted to its barrel. She’d seen enough TV and movies to know what the object was—a silencer.

Seated on the padded vanity chair, staring up at the intruder, she was aware of her insides melting away, heard a slight trickle, felt a warmth, and knew she’d wet herself. She began to cry, tightening her grip on the chair back with one hand, on the lipstick tube with the other. She begged with her eyes. It was unmistakable, her silent pleading. He did nothing, drawing out the moment. She managed to speak, but her voice caught in her throat and the words came out as a sob.

“What’d I do? For God’s sake, what’d I do?”

Then she knew. Floyd! Floyd must have hired someone to pretend—

The silencer spat and a bullet thunked! through the thinly padded wooden chair back and clipped her spine before smashing through her heart.

The way she dropped and her chin hit the edge of the vanity on the way down, it would have hurt like hell if she’d been alive.

The killer gently pried the lipstick tube from her dead right hand.

8

Beam silently watched the NYPD computer genius da Vinci had sent.

He looked about fourteen and seemed to know everything. It was obvious from the way the kid—actually in his twenties—had handled Beam’s five-year-old notebook computer that he knew his stuff. Soon there’d been talk of RAM and giga and mega and pixels while Beam looked on in gray mystification as his computer was upgraded and brought into the present world of tech.

By the time the kid was finished, Beam was patched into the NYPD system and had gone wireless so he could use his computer anywhere in the apartment, or—the computer kid had assured him—various places outdoors, or in certain restaurants and entire areas that were set up for wireless.

“That’s damned amazing,” Beam told the kid.

“I don’t understand why anybody’d ever use a typewriter,” the kid replied. “Or how they ever got that complicated machinery to work at all.”