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  LET US PREY

  Copyright © 2017 by Blake Banner

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  EPILOGUE

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  LAST CHANCE

  EXCERPT OF BOOK FIVE …

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  ONE

  Even the mad dogs were panting in the shade, and the Englishmen were mopping their brows and sipping G&Ts. There was a fly on my desk that I was sure had died of heat exhaustion a couple of hours earlier. Every now and then, the electric fan ruffled its wings, but that was all the movement it was capable of. The technicians who’d come in to fix the air-conditioning were too hot to work, so we were trapped in a negative spiral of heat and eventual death by dehydration.

  Dehan, who had her boots on the desk and her hair tied in a knot behind her head to keep her neck cool, said, “Edgar Gonzalez, known member of the Chupa Cabra gang, shot down in a drive-by outside his parents’ house on Irvine Street.”

  She tossed it in the “not now not ever” box. We had unofficially established the criteria for investigating a case as A) having some remote chance of being solved, and B) that the crime was not itself a positive benefit to humanity as a whole.

  I said, “Clive Henderson, on holiday from California, mugged and stabbed on Commonwealth Avenue.” I put it in the “maybe” pile. In this weather, a trip to California was appealing, even though the case hadn’t an ice cube’s chance in a supernova of ever being solved.

  “So, what’s the deal with you, Stone?”

  Dehan was leafing through another file. I reached for one and settled back to read it. I had no intention of answering a question like that, but she persisted.

  “You ever been married? You got a long string of exes? You gay? What gives? Why do I never see you with a woman?”

  I made my eyebrows climb my forehead. “Why do you want to know?”

  “C’mon. We’re partners. I told you all about me. It’s your turn.”

  I sighed. “Meth dealer shot outside the fish market on Food Center Drive.” I threw the file in the “not now not ever” pile. It satisfied both criteria. “I was married,” I said. “Seven years. It was enough.”

  She studied me a moment, then carried on reading. “How long ago?”

  “Five years.”

  “Do you date?”

  I sighed more loudly and said, “Yeah, I date this babe—she’s a lot younger than me, but she has a filthy attitude and she’s too nosy.”

  She chuckled, and the internal phone rang. I picked it up.

  “Stone.”

  “Good afternoon, Stone, it’s the captain. Will you and Detective Dehan please come to my office?”

  I hung up. “Come on, Nosy, get your butt out of that chair—the captain wants us.”

  We climbed the stairs mopping sweat from our brows and knocked on his door. He told us to go in, and we did. His window was open, letting all the warm air in.

  “It’s not the heat,” he said as we sat down. “It’s the humidity.” I’d never heard anybody say that before. As I drew breath to make a wisecrack, he said, “Have you ever heard of Karl Baxter?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  Dehan echoed my shake. “No, sir.”

  “He’s a private investigator, operates out of an office on Melrose Avenue.” He pulled a face and made a “so-so” gesture with his hand. “Moderately successful because he’s not too scrupulous about the kind of cases he takes. I’ve been looking into his background because he called me today to ask to have sight of a file on one of our cold cases.”

  I frowned. “Has he turned bounty hunter?”

  The captain shook his head. “No, there is no reward on this case.”

  Dehan went straight to the point. “What’s the case?”

  “Stephen Springfellow. Shot to death in his apartment on 155th Street. As usual, lack of forensic evidence and witnesses led to the case going cold.”

  “We’ll have a look at the file and have a chat with Baxter. I’d like to know why he’s interested in the case.”

  “Precisely. Whether it’s a personal interest, or a client’s interest, it could shed light on the murder.” He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk. I reached for it. It was Baxter’s address. “Normally does ‘wife watching’—” He made the quotation marks sign with his fingers. “—but he has been known to track down missing persons who were trying to keep a low profile. They have somehow tended to wind up in hospital or in the river after he finds them. Not that he does the hit; he’s just the finder. And gets a finder’s fee.”

  Dehan raised an eyebrow. “A rat.”

  He looked at her and smiled. “Yes, Detective Dehan, but try not to beat him up or terrorize him. We need his cooperation.”

  She smiled back. “Who, me?”

  He chuckled without much humor. “All right, Detectives, go and see what you can find out.”

  Back downstairs, Dehan found the file in the box. She dropped into her chair and started reading, while I stood in front of the fan.

  “Stephen Springfellow, white male, thirty-two, found shot through the heart in his apartment on East 155th Street on June 14, 2015.” She pulled a happy face and glanced at me. “Recent. Makes a change. He was tied to a chair and had been badly beaten. He had his wallet in his back pocket with a hundred bucks in it, plus his credit card, ID, and driver’s license. Nothing appeared to be missing from his apartment. The lock had not been forced. The neighbors heard nothing, except that the one who called it in heard two gunshots close together and reported seeing a couple of members of the Sureños gang nearby. However, she then refused to make an official statement, and in any case, it was not enough to make an arrest.”

>   She pulled out some photographs of the crime scene and spread them on the desk. They showed a small, seedy apartment with an unmade bed, a table with three chairs around it, and a small, open-plan kitchen. Near the table, Stephen Springfellow was sprawled over the fourth chair. His ankles were tied to the chair legs, and his hands were tied behind the backrest. His face was badly bruised and swollen, and the front of his shirt was drenched and clotted with blood that was beginning to dry. You could see the dark circle of the entry wound to the right—his left—of his sternum.

  I sat, pulled one of the pictures over to me, and started to examine it. Dehan was leafing through the file.

  “He had previous. He was a small-time crook. Burglary, petty theft, brawls, but nothing major. Spent a couple of years in San Francisco, came back east 2014.”

  “Maybe he was trying for the next level, wanted to play with the big boys.” I said it absently because something in the picture had caught my eye.

  Dehan grunted. “Maybe. He obviously got the wrong people pissed. One slug was recovered. It was a .38.”

  “What does it say about the blood on the floor?”

  She looked at the photograph and frowned. “Huh!” She read for a bit, then said, “Blood on the floor, about two feet in front of the victim, possibly consistent with a second victim, though no other victim was found at the apartment or in the vicinity. So they looked.”

  I stared at her. “Possibly consistent with another victim? That’s what it says?”

  “Yup.” She tossed the file across to me and started examining the photographs.

  I read again. “Nobody heard anything, except the neighbor who called it in. Saw some Sureños… then heard two shots close together…” I looked up at her. “Two shots.”

  She sat back. “Okay. So he decides he wants to move into the big leagues. He partners up with some tough guy, does a job that steps on the Sureños’ toes. They get pissed, pay him a visit, and ice him…”

  “Ice him? You been reading Mickey Spillane?”

  “Of course. Questions: Who is this tough guy? Why did they leave Stephen but take away the second victim? Where is the second victim now?”

  I leaned back. “Speculation: did the second victim come up with the information that they were trying to beat out of Stephen?”

  “So Stephen was no longer of any use. They iced him and took away victim two.”

  I nodded. “It’s possible.”

  I picked up the phone and dialed. It rang twice and a voice on the other end said, “Baxter, private investigator. How may I help you?”

  “Mr. Baxter, this is Detective Stone of the NYPD. You wanted to have sight of one of our files.”

  “Ah, Detective Stone, yes indeed. Good of you to call back. The Stephen Springfellow case.”

  “We would like to talk to you about that. Are you available this afternoon?”

  There was a smile in his voice. “I rather imagined you would, Detective. Yes, come right on over. Six-eighty Melrose Avenue, over the African hair-braiding salon.”

  “We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  TWO

  Outside, a harsh glare was added to the relentless, humid heat. The streets were practically empty, and the plane trees across the road looked depressed. My Jag, a burgundy 1964 Mark II, was like an oven. The steering wheel was almost too hot to hold. I smiled—at least we had working air-conditioning.

  As we accelerated down the Bruckner Expressway, luxuriating in the cold air from the dash, I said, “The other question, Dehan, is what is the connection between Baxter’s client and the victim or victims?”

  “Yeah, I was making a mental list.” She held up her thumb. “Client is seeking revenge. Could be a husband, wife, son, daughter, sister, brother. So we should have a look at Stephen’s close relationships.”

  She held up her index finger. I glanced at it and was struck by the fact that it was long and slender, like a pianist’s finger. “Or it could be another kind of revenge…”

  “Professional, as of a gang, a mob… something of that sort.”

  “Yeah, or three—” She held up thumb, index, and middle finger. “—Baxter’s client is looking for whatever Stephen’s killers were looking for. Whether that is information or an actual, physical object, we don’t know. And of course, all of this applies to Stephen’s co-victim. It’s possible Baxter’s client has no interest whatsoever in Stephen.”

  “Mm-hm.” I nodded. “The fact that the second victim was removed from the apartment suggests that he, or she, was of interest to the killers. How do we feel about the Sureños?”

  She shrugged. “They were probably there, but then, they are everywhere. It’s a bit early to say.”

  I had pulled off onto East 163rd and was headed west toward Morrisiana.

  “He won’t want to tell us who his client is, and he doesn’t have to. But he’s ready to trade something, or he wouldn’t have invited us to go see him.”

  Ten minutes later, I pulled up across the road from the African hair stylist. The hot air as we climbed out of the Jag was like a furnace blast. We dodged through the traffic and buzzed at the door. The door opened and we stepped into the relative cool of the lobby. An old-fashioned elevator with concertina doors carried us to the fourth floor. Baxter’s was the second door down. It had a frosted glass pane with his name on it in gold letters, like in the movies. We knocked and went in. There was no gorgeous secretary, but I guess you can’t have everything.

  He stood as we came in and approached us smiling, with his hand stuck out.

  “Karl Baxter. Thanks so much for taking the trouble to come and see me.”

  We shook and showed him our badges. He glanced at them as he ushered us toward two chairs across from his desk. He was no Philip Marlow or Sam Spade, more the Continental Op. He was short, maybe five five, with balding, black hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He was perspiring, his belly was becoming a paunch, and he hadn’t shaved that morning. He was nervous, too; of a nervous disposition.

  We sat and declined coffee. There was a fan in the corner blowing warm air around the room and occasionally ruffling the papers on his desk. When he’d finally sat down, I smiled at him and asked, “Mr. Baxter, what is your interest in the Stephen Springfellow case?”

  He hesitated a moment, like he had several lies lined up and hadn’t decided which one to use yet. In the end, he plumbed for, “As a matter of fact, I am writing a book on cold cases.”

  Dehan raised an eyebrow. “You reckon you can get a whole paragraph out of that case?”

  His cheeks colored. “It has some interesting features.”

  “Like?”

  He smiled nervously. He was obviously wishing he’d gone with one of his other lies. I offered him a tolerant smile.

  “How about we start again, and this time you tell us the truth? I am not opposed in principle to letting you see the file, Mr. Baxter, but please, don’t insult our intelligence.” I shrugged. “And play ball with us; we’ll play back.”

  He looked embarrassed. “I apologize. My client insists on the utmost discretion…”

  “I understand. Can you tell us who your client is?”

  “Out of the question.”

  “What can you tell us?”

  He sighed deeply and made a big show of looking reluctant. “You may not be aware of this, Detectives, but besides Springfellow and his killer, or killers, there was somebody else in the apartment.”

  I looked skeptical and glanced at Dehan. She made a ‘yeah, right’ face. “What makes you say so?”

  “If you examine the photographs—refer to the ones that were published in the press—you’ll see there is a patch of blood that does not belong to Springfellow.”

  I shrugged. “So Springfellow cut one of his attackers before they subdued him and tied him to the chair.”

  He smiled and blinked a few times. “No, Detective, there was somebody else in the room.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I am not at liberty
to tell you that.”

  Dehan sighed loudly and looked as though she was about to stand and leave. “You’re blowing smoke, Baxter. We’ve gone to the trouble of coming here, and we are willing to cooperate with you. But you’ve got to do better than, ‘there was somebody else in the room.’ That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  I gave him a bland smile and said, “I might express myself differently, Baxter, but my sentiments are the same. You are wasting our time and your own.”

  I made to stand.

  “Wait.”

  I paused and looked at him.

  “I can tell you who was there.”

  I sat. “You mean you know who the killer was?”

  “No. I don’t. I mean I can tell you who else was there.”

  “The other victim?”

  “The other person who was present, besides Stephen Springfellow and his killers, was a woman. Her name was Tamara Gunthersen—Tammy. She disappeared and has never been seen or heard of again.”

  “And this is who your client is looking for?”

  “I am not at liberty to tell you that, Detective.” He shrugged and smiled. “But if you draw that conclusion, I can’t stop you. Now… do I get to look at the file?”

  I’d brought it with me, and it was sitting on my lap. I dropped it on the desk in front of him. “I made a copy for you. There isn’t a lot in it. You understand that any information you uncover that is, or could be, relevant to a criminal investigation, you are obliged to share with us.”

  “I am aware of that, Detective.”

  Dehan said, “In that case, Baxter, can you tell us what Tammy was doing at Stephen’s house, and what interest his killers could have had in her? Why would they remove her body, or indeed kill her, in the first place?”

  He spread his hands. “I don’t know. That is what I have been hired to find out. That really is all I know.” He gestured with both hands at the file. “Why else would I be asking you for this file?”

  I nodded. He had a point. “What else can you tell me about Tamara Gunthersen? You must know something about her.”

  “I can tell you she was born in San Francisco on January 5, 1993. And that really is all I can tell you for now. You have my word that as soon as I unearth any more information, you will be the first—” He gave an ingratiating smile. “—perhaps the second, to know.”