”
“John only stepped on the boat,” Will said. “After the murder took place. He voluntarily came forward as a witness.”
The lieutenant ignored him. “Do you know we have eleven open homicides this year besides Gruber and this kid in the graveyard with his cock cut off? Last year, we had seventy-two and half of them are unresolved.” He wheeled back around and continued pacing. “Skeen. You play nurse, starting Monday.”
“I hope it’s as much fun as playing doctor,” she said, but no one laughed.
That gave Will some piece of mind. So did arming Cheryl Beth. He had given her his old backup weapon, a snub-nose.38 Chief’s Special. It was small, lightweight, and lethal. When he handed it to her, butt-first, she immediately opened the cylinder to make sure it wasn’t loaded. Then she hefted it and did some dry-firing. Will had kept it clean and oiled for years, and the mechanism worked like new. She had been taught well by her father. He loaded the revolver and she gently slid it into her purse.
Fassbinder kept talking, “I’m bringing in narcotics and Central Vice to help tail Borders.” Everyone groaned and cursed. There was a long-standing feud between narcotics and homicide. Several years ago, a narc had tossed a firecracker into the homicide office. One of the old homicide detectives, now retired, had fashioned a bomb from a printer cartridge filled with shredded paper and set it off in narcotics as retaliation. It took them years to get the burned paper off the walls and desks. Unfortunately, Fassbinder had come over from narcotics four years before. So no one took it further than assorted “fucks” and “shits,” spoken in the tone of members of the police department’s most elite and seasoned unit.
“What do you want me to do?” Fassbinder said. “I need homicide detectives working this homicide case, not tailing Borders.”
“What if the killer is on the force?” Dodds said. “Whoever wrote that note knew Will was working the case. We need to keep this in-house, inside homicide.”
“No.” Fassbinder said. “What are you still doing on Gruber, Borders?”
“I’m going though her old arrests and I have a disk off her hard drive with twenty-one-hundred photos, give or take.”
“Hand off the arrest records to Kovach,” Fassbinder said. “He’s the new liaison with Covington, too. You’ve got a conflict of interest. Dodds, make sure you have the Gruber casebook from Borders. He can go through the pics while he’s sitting at home.” He wagged a finger at Will. “And that’s what you will do when you’re not on a PIO call. Now, people, listen up: I don’t want to get distracted with this Oxford homicide. Focus on Gruber. What do we know?”