The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor 10)

Payne looked up at the main monitor and read it.

“A FedEx delivery there at nine-thirty on a Sunday night?”

Then he turned to Rapier: “Punch up that interview with the girl, the animal’s so-called niece.”

The main bank of screens then showed Homicide Detective Jeff Kauffman—a tall, dark-haired thirty-four-year-old who had a quick laugh when he wasn’t interviewing murder suspects—in Homicide Interview Room II with Takeeta Smith. She was sipping from a plastic bottle of grape-flavored soda. The empty wrapper of a Tastykake lay on the metal table.

They were almost exactly halfway through the interview when Takeeta’s scratchy voice coming through the speakers in the ECC ceiling said:

“It be a FedEx envelope. And dude had a FedEx uniform.”

“You’re positive?”

She looked at Kauffman like he was from another planet, then said:

/> “Yeah, fool. I be positive. I mean, he be standing in the headlight, clear as damn day. Can’t miss no FedEx sign. It be on every box my cousin’s black tar shit come in from Texas.”

Harris chuckled, then said, “Look at her Oh shit, what’d I just say? expression. Now who’s the fool, Takeeta?”

“What a brain trust,” Payne said. “They just don’t know better. Reminds me of that arrogant Hank Whatshisname, the U.S. congressman from somewhere near Atlanta, who was grilling an admiral on Capitol Hill about the Navy’s plans to station some eight thousand sailors and their families on Guam. He lectured the admiral that the island was only twenty-four miles long, seven ‘at its least widest’—that’s what he said, ‘least widest, shore to shore’—and that he was afraid that with all those extra people, the island would tip over and capsize.”

Harris laughed. “You’re kidding.”

Payne shook his head. “I shit you not, my friend. That’s the kind of brilliant example of the ‘geniuses’ in our government that kids like her get to look up to as role models.”

He looked over at Radcliffe. “Andy, who’ve been your role models in life?”

“Well, my momma, of course,” he said immediately, clearly without thought. “She taught me hard work, discipline, never to give up. And there’s Will Parkman, that really good cop who was a Marine and helps me go to school so I can eventually get a job here.” He paused and thought, then added, “And you, Marshal.”

Payne looked at Radcliffe, thinking that he now was being mocked. But when Matt saw Andy’s face, he knew Andy was sincere.

Payne said, “I’d be damned careful about that last guy. He’ll only lead you to trouble.” He sighed. “And damn sure not to catch any bad guys.”

“What’s up with the bad-guy pop-and-drops having histories of sex crimes,” Radcliffe said, “and STDs?”

“Where’d you get that?” Payne said, impressed.

He pointed at his laptop screen. “From the master file case notes.”

“You’ve gone all the way back to the beginning?”

“Sure. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when trying to turn over a rock under a rock?”

Payne nodded. “Yes, indeed it is. And, to answer your question, there’s not any single answer—with the exception of what Kerry recently suggested. None apparently knows what the hell a condom is.”

Radcliffe said, “I’ve been feeding key data into my skunk-works search engine.”

Radcliffe had managed to get his hands on an early version of a super-powerful software program developed at MIT, and Payne had seen him use it before.

“And?” Payne said.

“All the pop-and-drops who’d been shot had either been charged with or served time for a sex crime, all but the lawyer and his client.”

“Right.”

“Jay-Cee,” Harris put in, “had charges against him of involuntary deviant sexual intercourse and rape of an unconscious or unaware person in one case that Gartner got tossed.”

“Tossed on a technicality,” Radcliffe said. “The chain of evidence of the rape kit was broken. It was deemed inadmissible in the trial. But the results still are on file. They state that the blood test from the girl he raped showed that she had really early stages of the bacterial disease gonorrhea.”