Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

Wohl nodded. “Payne was supposed to have Xeroxed some stuff for me. You know anything about it?”

“Yes, sir. I left it on your desk. I’d love to know where he found that Xerox machine. The copies are beautiful.”

“Knowing Payne, he probably waltzed into the Commissioner’s office and used his,” Wohl said. He put out his hand again. “It’s good to see you, Jack,” he said. “And especially behind that desk.”

“I’m glad to see you behind your desk, too, Inspector.”

He meant that, Wohl decided, flattered. It wasn’t just polishing the apple.

Wohl went into his office and examined the Xeroxed materials. Kelvin was right, he thought, the copies were beautiful, like those in the Xerox ads on television, not like those to be expected from machines in the Police Department.

He took the original file back out to Sergeant Kelvin and told him to have a Highway Patrol car run it back to Northwest Detectives, and to make sure that it wound up in Lieutenant Spanner’s hands, not just dumped on the desk man’s desk in the squad room.

Then he sat down and took one of the Xerox copies and started, very carefully, to read through it again.

Fifteen minutes later, he sensed movement and looked up. Jason Washington was at the office door, asking with a gesture of his hand and a raised eyebrow if it was all right for him to come in.

Wohl gestured that it was. Washington did so and then closed the door behind him.

“How was dinner?” Wohl asked.

“All I had was a salad,” Washington said. “I have to watch my weight.”

“What’s on your mind, Jason?”

“Is that the Xerox you said you would get me?”

Wohl nodded, and made a gesture toward it.

Washington took one of the files, then settled himself in an armchair.

“I saw the Flannery girl,” he said.

“How did that go?”

“Not very well, as a matter of fact,” Washington said. “She wasn’t what you could call anxious to talk about it again. Not to anyone, but especially not to a man, and maybe particularly to a black man.”

“But?”

“And,” Washington said, “I told you Hemmings was a good cop. It was a waste of time. I didn’t get anything out of her that he didn’t. And then I talked to him. He’s pissed, Peter, and I can’t say I blame him. Putting me on this job was the same as telling him either that you didn’t think he had done a good job, or that he was capable of doing one.”

“That’s not true, and I’m sorry he feels that way.”

“How would it look to you, if you were in his shoes?” Washington asked reasonably.

“When I was a new sergeant in Homicide, Jason,” Wohl replied, “Matt Lowenstein took me off a job because I wasn’t getting anywhere with it. The wife in Roxborough who ran herself over with her own car. He put the best man he had on the job, a guy named Washington.”

“I told Hemmings that story,” Washington said. “I don’t think it helped much.”

After a moment, Wohl said, “Thank you, Jason.”

Washington ignored that.

“You read that file?”

“I was just about finished reading it for the third time.”

“The one time I read it,” Washington said, “I thought I saw a pattern. Our doer is getting bolder and bolder. You see that, something like that, too?”