The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

When he came back downstairs, shaved, showered, and ready both to go to work and apologize, sincerely, to Patty for his lapse, she wasn’t in the house.

So there had been nothing to do but go to work, and he had done so.

It turned out to be a slow night, and there had been a chance for him about ten o’clock to go into a drugstore and buy Patty a large box of assorted Whitman’s chocolates as sort of a let’s-be-friends-again peace offering.

Patty was always pleased when he bought her a box of Whitman’s. She might forgive him. On the other hand, for the next two weeks or whatever, until the chocolates were gone, whenever she ate one, she would be reminded of why he had given them to her.

What the hell, he decided. She has a right to be pissed. Buy the chocolates anyway.

Later, he was pleased with his decision. There was no place he could have conveniently bought flowers—which would last only a couple of days—and flowers would have been a confession he had really fucked up, not only had a couple more drinks than he should have had.

At five minutes after midnight, he got into his four-year-old Chevrolet full of resolve not to go to the Red Rooster, but home, where he would fix things up with Patty.

His route took him past a deserted NIKE site.

He slowed and took a good long look. There was nothing. No lights. No sign of activity. Zilch.

But Harry Cronin knew that something was going on in that goddamn NIKE site.

He had absolutely nothing to support this belief except the intuition that comes to intelligent men with nineteen years on the job, thirteen of them as a detective.

He had had this feeling about the NIKE site from the time the Army had moved out, although at that point it was more a logical suspicion that—deserted buildings attract illegal activity—some kind of illegal activity would take place in the future.

But the feeling Harry had then was not the feeling he had now. Now he knew something wrong was going on at the NIKE site, and he knew that it was something more than somebody talking his girl into going into one of the buildings with mutual criminal intent to violate the still-on-the-books statutes prohibiting fornication.

And Cronin didn’t think it was dope. Dope dealers need a reasonably discreet location to serve their clientele. A string of people making their way through the hurricane fence from the street to the buildings and then back out would attract unwanted attention.

Philadelphia police officers had no authority inside the fence, but the moment someone walked back out through the gate in the fence, with that day’s supply of joints, or whatever, they would again fall under Philadelphia police authority.

What went on inside the hurricane fence with the now-getting-a-little-rusty “U.S. Government Property. Trespassing Forbidden Under Penalty of Law” warning signs attached at twenty-five-foot intervals to the fence was absolutely none of Detective Harry Cronin’s business, and he knew it.

Having reminded himself of all this, he decided to go with his gut feeling, even if that meant he would be a little late getting home and Patty would sniff his breath the minute he walked in the door.

He slowed even further, and made a U-turn and drove back to the gate in the hurricane fence.

When he got out of the car and opened the gate, it occurred to him that, in the eyes of the feds, he was probably an illegal trespasser. And with his luck, some overpaid federal bureaucrat, to make a little overtime, would make one of his twice-a-year four-hour detailed inspections of the property right about now.

That meant he would drive past the place probably faster than Harry had, without stopping. That would be four hours on his overtime time sheet.

Harry almost had second thoughts.

But there was a place scraped free of rust on the gate hinges.

Somebody’s been in here, and recently. Fuck it. If I don’t go in, I’ll be up all night wishing I had.

He drove slowly around the compound, flashing his flashlight into dark corners, wishing that he had with him the six-cell flashlight he carried in his unmarked car, rather than the little two-celler he kept in the glove compartment of the Chevrolet.

Zilch.

But then the headlights, not the flashlight, picked up tire tracks in the mud. The mud hadn’t had a chance to dry completely.

Harry deduced, Some son of a bitch has been in here, and in the last couple of days.

Probably the bureaucrat.

But maybe not.

He stopped the Chevrolet and got out and examined the tire tracks sufficiently to determine they were truck tires, light truck tires. From a pickup truck, not passenger tires.