Criminal (Will Trent 6)

“Hodge called him by name. That’s what he said during roll call: ‘Mr. Treadwell, we can talk in my office.’ ”

“And then they went into the office, and Treadwell started ordering him around right off the bat.”

“Evelyn, you’re missing the point. Think about what you told me before. Andrew Treadwell, Sr., has friends in high places. He had his picture in the paper with Mayor Jackson. He worked on the campaign. Why would he reach out to a lowly sergeant with no pull who’s only been in charge for less than an hour?”

She nodded. “Okay. You’re right. Keep going.”

“Treadwell-Price specializes in construction law. Andrew Senior is negotiating all those contracts for the new subway system nobody wants.”

“How’d you hear that?”

“I went down to the newspaper and looked through some of the back issues.”

“They let you do that?”

Amanda shrugged. “My dad worked on that kidnapping case last year.” An editor from the paper had been held for a million-dollar ransom. One of Duke’s last official duties was transporting the money from the C&S vault to the drop location. “I told them who I was and they let me look through the archives.”

“Your father doesn’t know you were there?”

“Of course not.” Duke would’ve been livid that Amanda hadn’t cleared it with him first. “He’d ask me what I was up to. I didn’t want to open that can of worms.”

“Phew.” Evelyn leaned her head back against the seat. “What you found out is certainly interesting. Anything else?”

Amanda hesitated again.

“Come on, darlin’. You can’t be a little pregnant.”

Amanda sighed to make her reluctance known. She had a sneaking suspicion she was just stirring up trouble. “The man who was talking to Hodge isn’t Treadwell Junior. According to the newspaper, Treadwell Senior has one child, a daughter.”

Evelyn sat up again. “Named Kitty? Or Katherine? Kate?”

“Eugenia Louise, and she’s at some girls’ school in Switzerland.”

“So, not shooting up Boy at Techwood.”

“Boy?”

“It’s what Negroes call heroin. Thank you.” The carhop was back with their water. Amanda unscrewed the cap from the bottle of Alka-Seltzer and dropped two tablets into each cup. The fizzing was a welcome sound.

Evelyn said, “So, there’s no Treadwell Junior. I wonder who the man in the blue suit was? And why Hodge thought he was Treadwell?” Evelyn smiled. “I’m sure Hodge thinks we all look alike.”

Amanda smiled, too. “Blue Suit has to be a lawyer. Maybe he’s from the firm and Hodge just assumed his name was Treadwell. But that doesn’t make sense, either. We’ve already established Andrew Treadwell wouldn’t send his minion to talk to a brand-new zone captain. He’d go straight to the mayor. The more delicate the situation, the more likely he’d be to let as few people know as possible.”

Evelyn made the obvious connection. “Which means either Blue Suit was taking initiative to help the boss or he was looking to make trouble.”

Amanda wasn’t so sure about that, but she said, “Either way, Hodge wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear. Blue Suit was angry when he left. He yelled at Hodge, then stormed out of the building.”

Evelyn circled back to her earlier theory. “Blue Suit pressured Hodge to send us out to check on Kitty Treadwell. Treadwell isn’t a common name. She has to somehow be related to Andrew Treadwell.”

“I couldn’t find a connection in the newspapers, but they don’t keep all the back issues and they’re a bear to search through.”

“Treadwell-Price is in that new office building off Forsyth Street. We could sit outside during lunch. These guys don’t brown-bag it. Blue Suit will have to come out sooner or later.”

“And then what?”

“We show him our badges and ask him some questions.”

Amanda didn’t see that working. The man would probably laugh in their faces. “What if it gets back to Hodge that you’re snooping around?”

“I don’t think he cares so long as I stay out of his office and stop asking him questions. What about your new sergeant?”

“He’s one of the old guard, but he barely knows my name.”

“Probably drunk before lunchtime,” Evelyn said. She was likely correct. Once the older sergeants got past their morning duties, you were hard-pressed to find one behind his desk. There was a reason half the force could be found napping during shift. “We can get together Monday after roll call. They don’t care what we do so long as we’re on the streets. Nessa’s okay with Peterson.”

Amanda was slightly worried about how good Vanessa was being with Peterson, but she let it slide. “Jane wasn’t the only girl living in that apartment. There were at least two others.”

“How do you get that?”

“There were three toothbrushes in the bathroom. All of them well used.”

“Jane didn’t have that many teeth.”

Amanda stared into the fizzing seltzer. Her stomach was too full to laugh at Evelyn’s jokes. “Half of me thinks I’m crazy for wasting so much time tracking down a story off a junkie prostitute.”

Evelyn sounded apologetic. “You’re not the only one who’s been wasting time.”

Amanda narrowed her eyes at the other woman. “I knew it. What’ve you been up to?”

“I talked with a friend I know at the Five. Cindy Murray. She’s a good girl. I described Jane to her. Cindy says maybe she remembers her coming in last week. Lots of girls try to pick up vouchers that don’t belong to them. They have to show two forms of ID—a license, a blood donor card, electric bill, something with their picture and address on it. If Jane is the girl Cindy was thinking of, she tried to pass herself off with someone else’s license. When Jane saw the jig was up, she went bonkers. Started screaming and making threats. Security had to throw her out into the street.”

“What happened to the license?”

“They toss ’em into a box, wait to see if anyone tries to claim them. Cindy says there’s at least a hundred licenses already. They tear them in half and throw them away at the end of every year.”

“Are the welfare rolls organized by names or by addresses?”

“Numbers, unfortunately. Too many of them have the same last name or live at the same address, so they all get assigned an individual number.”

“Social security number?”

“No such luck.”

“It’s got to be on computers, right?”

“They’re in the process of changing over from punch cards to magnetic tape,” Evelyn answered. “Cindy says it’s a mess. She’s basically working with a hammer and chisel while the boys try to figure it out. Which means even if we had access to the information, which they probably won’t give us, we’d have to do it all by hand: get the welfare roll number first, then cross-reference the number to the name, then verify the name against the address, then match both against the benefits logs that verify whether the girls have collected their vouchers in the last six months, which we could then use to compare to the names on the licenses.” Evelyn stopped for a breath. “Cindy says we’ll need a staff of fifty and about twenty years.”