Page 25 of The 24th Hour

Alvarez beamed. She cleaned up, put the chips in a file drawer, and downed her coffee. I pulled my phone from my pocket, texted Conklin that I was at my desk and would be down the hall in a minute. Then I called Arthur Bevaqua. Bevaqua picked up but his voice cracked so much I could hardly understand him.

After six months of working Holly Fricke’s case, I’d logged in so many hours with Bevaqua, I almost felt we were related.

“I’m sorry this happened, Arthur. Stay in the house. I’ll be there as soon as possible,” I told him.

“Good,” he said. “Very good.”

Alvarez and I headed down the long corridor to the conference room that had once been Ted Swanson’s corner office. Swanson was now deceased but his activities as a sociopathic renegade, responsible for the estimated deaths of more than a dozen cops and crooks and innumerable drug users, had left a stain on Southern Station’s reputation. I didn’t know if solving the Fricke murders would redeem us, but it would certainly be good for morale.

As we walked, I told Alvarez, “We’ve inspected every one of the thirty rooms in the Fricke house, spoken with everyonewho worked there and is connected to Holly and Jamie. Cappy and Chi went farther afield.”

“I’m fresh, Lindsay. Expect the unexpected.”

She was right. We could use new eyes on the Fricke family tragedy and Alvarez was something of a lucky charm.

“Task force meeting first,” I said. “Then, chez Fricke.”

CHAPTER 28

TED SWANSON’S FORMER office was easily the gloomiest office in the Hall of Justice. That’s how he’d liked it. Dark. Cold. Out of the way. He hadn’t planned on dying in prison but it was what he deserved.

Post-Swanson’s-mortem, the walls of his office were used to display crime-scene evidence, and Holly Fricke’s morgue photos were still taped where I’d put them. The timeline was sketched in marker pen on the whiteboard. Soon we would fill in James Fricke’s movements as we knew them and tape up his morgue shots and pictures of the place where he had died.

Chief Clapper stood by the whiteboard, still speaking with Brady and Red Dog. He nodded a hello toward me and I pulled up a chair at the table. Charlie Clapper’s background was Homicide, then head of CSU, and now chief of police. Clapper is the ultimate pro, immaculate in his work and his person. He used to have a sense of humor but left it in the crime lab when he was promoted to the top cop job.

Now, he said to the task force, “I’ll make this brief. If wedon’t find the Frickes’ killer or killers, the FBI is taking over the case. Jamie was a white-collar criminal, fixing soccer games overseas. Now that frickin’ James Fricke is dead, the CIA is starting an investigation overseas where his soccer team is based and where he surely had enemies. We’ll take all the help that’s offered,” he said. “Northern Station is volunteering two of their three teams from the night shift. They’ll report to Lieutenant Brady, who will be keeping me advised.”

My old friend and current chief turned to me and said, “I’ll be waiting for you to tell me, ‘We got him.’”

Next, Parisi spoke to the half dozen of us. “What the chief said. I’ll assign an ADA to this case, TBD, PDQ.”

Then he spun his 350-pound girth around and left the room, creating a breeze in his wake.

Brady said, “Anyone have anything to add? Any questions? Beefs? Theories? Awright, then. Sergeant Boxer is primary. Cappy is chief firefighter. He and Chi go where needed. Conklin is point man, working from here. Lemke and Samuels as well as Michaels and Wang will pick up new cases that come in and will back us up on Fricke-related incidents. Northern Station cops will become available shortly.”

After Brady had scheduled everyone assigned to the Fricke nightmare, he welcomed Alvarez to our task force. Then he dismissed us.

I was determined not to let the Frickes’ killer—or killers—evade us, but that was my pride getting brassy. I couldn’t afford to either doubt myself or be overconfident. I had to lead.

The sky was overcast, and by the time we signed out an unmarked car, rain was coming down hard. Alvarez took the wheel. Thethwack-thwackrepetition of the windshield wipersand low visibility concentrated my mind, and I turned my thoughts back to Holly Fricke. I pictured her on the parallel bars, on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. I had stored an image of her in the audience with schoolkids taking in the Cirque du Soleil. And I saw her lying dead on Pacific Avenue, wearing gray gym wear, her body drilled with bullets, five lethal shots, all of the wounds still oozing red.

Now her husband had suffered precisely the same kind of death. I turned every fold in my brain inside out looking for what I, we, might have overlooked in Holly’s case to date. The woman had been admired and loved. She had no record. There had been no unanswered questions except why and whodunit.

I had a sick feeling that working Jamie’s murder was going to be just as fruitless as working Holly’s had been.

CHAPTER 29

ALVAREZ SPED UP the windshield wipers and was singing a song about rain. I didn’t know the song and she only knew some of the words, but it was upbeat and so was she, filling in with “dah dah dah dee dah dah RAIN” when she lost the lyrics.

But I knew why she was so happy. She was getting out of the “house,” and I had a feeling that, to her, working on this case was like being assigned to the Zodiac Killer task force.

I turned up the car radio, filling the front compartment with staticky calls from dispatch, and Alvarez didn’t seem to notice. A half hour after leaving the Hall, she pulled the unmarked Chevy up to the front gates of a house that looked like a cross between a castle and a wedding cake.

I checked my gear, unbuckled the seat belt, swung my legs out of the car, and bounded up to the intercom at the gates. I pressed the button and said my name. There was an answering buzz and the gates swung open wide.

I got back into the unmarked and Alvarez drove through,then around the circular drive, stopping at the broad steps that rose to the wide expanse of the portico. We walked together to the front door—which sprang open. Arthur Bevaqua stood in the doorway.

Bevaqua was forty and had been with Jamie Fricke for twenty years, working his way up from kitchen aide to right-hand man in charge of the staff at the Fricke house on Pacific Avenue. He was tall, fit, and well-groomed, but his face was swollen from crying, just as it had looked right after Holly was killed.

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