The Murderers (Badge of Honor 6)

She nodded.

“Would you be willing to give me that friend’s name?”

“I was with Wally Milham. I think you probably already knew that.”

“I hope you understand we have to ask these questions. What, exactly, is your relationship with Detective Milham?”

“Jerry and I were having trouble, serious trouble. Can we leave it at that?”

“Mrs. Kellog,” Weisbach said. “When we were in your house, where we found Officer Kellog, we noticed a tape recorder.”

D’Amata doesn’t like me putting my two cents in. But the last thing we want to do is make her angry. And she would have been angry if he had kept pressing her. And for what purpose? Milham told us they’re sleeping together.

“What about it?” Mrs. Kellog asked.

“I just wondered about it. It turned on whenever the phone was picked up, right?”

“He recorded every phone call,” she said. “It was his, not mine.”

“You mean, he used it in his work?”

“Yes. You know that he did.”

“Do you happen to know where he kept the tapes?”

“There was a box of them in the cabinet. They’re gone?”

“We’re trying to make sure we have all of them,” Weisbach said.

“All the ones I know about, he kept right there with the recorder.”

“Did your husband ever talk to you about what he did?” Weisbach asked. “I mean, can you think of anything he ever said that might help us find whoever did this to him?”

“He never brought the job home,” she said. “He didn’t want to tell me about what he was doing, and I didn’t want to know.”

“My wife’s the same way,” Weisbach said.

“And you don’t work Narcotics,” she said. “Listen, how long is this going to

last? I’ve got to go to the funeral home and pick out a casket.”

“I think we’re about finished,” Weisbach said. “Can we offer you a lift? Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“I’ve got a car, thank you.”

“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Kellog,” Weisbach said. “And again, we’re very sorry that this happened.”

“We had our problems,” she said. “But he didn’t deserve to have this happen to him.”

Detective Anthony C. “Tony” Harris, after thinking about it, decided that discretion dictated that he park the car in the parking garage at South Broad and Locust streets and walk to the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel, even though that meant he would have to get a receipt from the garage to get his money back, and that he would almost certainly lose the damned receipt, or forget to turn it in, and have to pay for parking the car himself.Things were getting pretty close to the end, and he didn’t want to blow the whole damned thing because one of the Vice scumbags—they were, after all, cops—spotted the unmarked Ford on the street, or in the alley behind the Bellvue-Stratford, where he had planned to leave it, and started wondering what it was doing around the hotel at that hour of the night.

Tony Harris was not a very impressive man physically. He was a slight and wiry man of thirty-six, already starting to bald, his face already starting to crease and line. His shirt collar and the cuffs of his sports jacket were frayed, his tie showed evidence of frequent trips to the dry cleaners, his trousers needed to be pressed, and his shoes needed both a shine and new heels.

He enjoyed, however, the reputation among his peers of being one of the best detectives in the Philadelphia Police Department, where for nine of his fifteen years on the job he had been assigned to the Homicide Unit. It had taken him five years on the job to make it to Homicide—an unusually short time—and he would have been perfectly satisfied to spend the rest of his time there. Eighteen months ago, over his angry objections, he had been transferred to the Special Operations Division.

He had mixed emotions about what he was doing now. Bad guys are supposed to be bad guys, not fellow cops, not guys you knew for a fact were—or at least had been—good cops.

On one hand, now that he had been forced to think about it, he was and always had been a straight arrow. And just about all of his friends were straight arrows. He personally had never taken a dime. Even when he was fresh out of the Academy, walking a beat in the Twenty-third District, he had been made uncomfortable when merchants had given him hams and turkeys and whiskey at Christmas.