Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“Not unless he’s got the schoolteacher in the van with him,” Harris said, “with her life clearly in danger. Otherwise, you report it, that’s all. We’re dealing with a real sicko here, and there’s no telling what he’ll do if he figures he’s about to get grabbed.”

“Like what, for example, he hasn’t already done?” a sarcastic voice called.

Wohl looked quickly to spot the wiseass, but was not successful.

Harris’s face showed contempt, not anger, but Wohl suspected there was both, and Harris immediately proved it.

“Okay,” Harris said, “since you apparently can’t figure it out yourself. We bag this guy, a hairy guy who speaks as if he went past the eighth grade, and who has a van. We even get one or more of the victims to identify him. But we don’t have Miss Woodham, all right? So, if he doesn’t figure this out himself, and he’s smart, he gets a lawyer and the lawyer says, ‘Just keep denying it, Ace. Nobody saw you without your mask, and I’ll confuse them when I get them on the stand…make them pick you out of a line of naked hairy men wearing masks, or something!’ That’s how he would beat the first rapes, unless we can get what we professional detectives call ‘evidence.’”

The identity of the wiseass was now clear. At least four of the newcomers had turned around to glower contemptuously at him.

“And we seem to have forgotten Miss Woodham, haven’t we?” Harris went on. “Who is the reason we’re all out looking for this scumbag in the first place. Now just for the sake of argument, let’s say he’s got her tied up someplace, like a warehouse or something. Some place we can’t connect him to. So our cowboy says, “Where’s the dame?” and our guy says “What dame?” and our cowboy says, “You know what dame, Miss Woodham,” and our sicko says, “Not only did I not piss all over the one lady, I never heard of anybody named Woodham. You got a witness?” So the latest victim, the one we’re trying to find, cowboy, starves or suffocates or goes insane, wherever this scumbag has her tied up. Because once our sicko knows we’re on to him, he’s not going to go anywhere near the victim. Does that answer your question, smartass?”

Harris handled that perfectly, Wohl thought.

“You think she’s still alive?” another newcomer asked, softly.

“We won’t know that until we find her,” Harris said. “That’s all I’ve got, Captain.”

Sabara turned to Wohl.

“Have you got anything, Inspector?”

“Going along with what Harris said, Captain,” Wohl said. “About not making the man we’re looking for any more disturbed than he is, what would you think about putting as many of these officers as it takes in plainclothes? And in unmarked cars?”

“I’ll find out how many unmarked cars there are and set it up, sir,” Sabara said.

“If necessary, Mike, take unmarked cars from Highway.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?”

Wohl shook his head and turned to face Matt Payne, who was now standing beside him.

“Inspector, Chief Coughlin called,” Matt said, surprising Peter Wohl not at all. “He wants you to call him right away.”

“Okay,” Wohl said, and walked out of the Roll Call Room toward his office.

As he passed Sergeant Frizell’s desk, Wohl told him, “Call Chief Coughlin for me, please.”

“Inspector, the Commissioner just called, too, wanting you to get right back to him.”

“Get me Chief Coughlin first,” Wohl ordered. He walked into his office, sat down, and watched the telephones until one of the buttons began to flash. He picked it up.

“Inspector Wohl,” he said.

“Hold one for the Chief,” Sergeant Tom Lenihan’s voice replied.

“Have you seen the papers, Peter?” Coughlin began, without any preliminaries.

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s this about you refusing to talk to the press?”

“I wasn’t here,” Wohl said. “Somebody must have told him I was unavailable.”

“That’s not what it sounded like in the Ledger,” Coughlin said.

“It also said you and I are cronies,” Wohl said.