Neither Melissa nor Contreras said it as they left the hospital. As they parked in front of a gas pump and she filled up the tank while he ran in for coffee and packaged junk food. Nor when they perched on the heavy-duty brush guard on the front of the Charger and ate their pizza Combos in silence, washing them down with burnt-tasting mochas.
“Well,” he said at last. “The Post-It was pink this time, ‘stead of orange.”
She snorted. “Yeah. ‘Causethatmatters.”
He let out a long, loud breath as he crumpled his Combo package. “Captain’s gonna shit a brick.”
“And if he was as careful with Lynn as he was with Lana, Forensics won’t find anything of value besides the note.”
“But Lynn narrows the field.”
She shot him a questioning look over the lid of her cup.
“They’re both artists at NYU.”
“That doesn’t mean they know each other.”
“No.” He frowned like he thought she was being obtuse. “But they’ll have classes in the same department. They’ll go to the same professors and move in similar friend circles. It’s a connection.”
“A loose one.”
“I’ll take whatever we can get. We need to hit the school and start talking to profs, interviewing classmates. When the girls are up for it, they can walk us through their routines on campus, and maybe shed a little more light.”
“Yeah.” She had a headache coming on, and the coffee wasn’t helping, nor was the threat of rain: dark clouds were rolling in on a cold breeze, humidity building at street-level, thick and greasy against her face. “How long ‘til the press starts going nuts about it, you think?”
“Oh, I’d say within the hour. By the noon news cycle, there’ll be a serial rapist on the loose in Manhattan.”
The word. He’d said it.
Melissa hadn’t thought it would affect her personally, so was surprised to feel a hitch in her stomach. His mouth flattened grimly afterward, as if he’d felt something similar.
“It won’t matter,” he continued, “how far we try to stay away from TV and radio, that sort of label is pervasive. Gets people scared.”
She swallowed lousy mocha. “Maybe they should be scared.” Not enough people in this city were scared, was her personal opinion. If her hometown could be visited by evil, how could anyone hope to bumble along in a city like this without incident?
“Oh, they should be,” he agreed. “But media frenzy gets people scared in an unhelpful way. They come up with some kinda nickname for the guy, and then he’s a boogeyman. Calls flood the tip line. An old woman saw him poking around her garbage cans; a kid saw him outside a fourth-floor window, like the damn gremlin on the wing of the plane. It’s chaos, and that makes it hard to find and follow the worthwhile leads.”
She knew all of that, objectively. But this was her first time working a case like this on the inside, rather than as a uniformed floater on the fringes. Her first time hearing such tried-and-true wisdom from her partner, rather than a man briefing the whole precinct from behind a podium.
She wasn’t sure what it said about her that it gave her a little thrill. She was disgusted and stressed, yes…but that part of her that had wanted tomatter, todo somethingthat made a difference, was wagging its tail.
“Right,” she said.
Contreras drained off his coffee and executed a perfect three-point shot into the trash can five yards away. “We’ll head over to the school,” he said, “but before we do, I wanna talk to the captain and get him to call Sing-Sing. I think,” he said, slanting her a look that left her nails drumming on her cup, “it’s time we talked to Davey.”
~*~
The Dirty Dog was aptly named because it was dirty, and it smelled like a dog…among other things. Pongo secured a seat at the surprisingly crowded bar and surveyed the main room over the rim of his pilsner glass.
The bar ran the length of the back wall, which was mirrored, so anyone seated there had a view of the red-curtained front windows and anyone coming in through the front door. The carpet was flat and dark red with black patterns designed to disguise all manner of dirt and spills. The tables were round and scar-topped, with red-glass hurricane lamps at the center of each, candles inside flickering and swaying in the breeze of a lone ceiling fan that seemed only to stir the air, but not cool it. And it was warm in here; despite the crisp weather outside, there was no need for anyplace, least of all a bar, to be this hot. Pongo plucked at the front of his hoodie and realized the men seated around him had unbuttoned collars and shrugged out of jackets. That the “waitresses” who moved between the tables wore very little, sweat turning their cleavage shiny in an appealing way.
He clocked a stage on one of the short walls, where a woman in her forties was trying to look twenty, failing badly, and strumming a guitar, murmuring low, half-sung verses into a crackly mic.
He’d kept the stool next to him empty, his boot resting on one of its rungs, and a hand touched his arm on that side to draw his attention. The woman who slid onto the stool’s seat, straddled his leg, and flashed a bit of black thong from under her skirt had been pretty, once. Time, stress, drink, and drugs had aged her face so that even the thick coats of makeup she’d applied couldn’t disguise her age. Still, she had a good rack, and her hair extensions were convincing, and her smile was sly when she walked her painted fingernails up his arm and purred, “You know, despite our name, we don’t get many Dogs ‘round here. What’s your name? Fido?” Her grin widened at her own joke, each tooth edged with nicotine stains.
His personal, family connection to Queens and a desire to stay mostly local was one of the reasons Maverick kept him in the city; his charm and easiness were the others. Some of his brothers – Toly, for instance – would have given the woman a flat look, dredged up an insult, and watched indifferently as she stalked away in a huff. Others were too manic, too forward, too loud, too awkward. He, though…he wasslick.
He grinned back, sultry to match. “Heh. You’re gonna get a real kick outta this: it’s Pongo.”