The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

“Try to trust me. Whatever’s wrong, whatever happened, we can deal with it.”

“Oh, shit,” Cynthia said. “I really don’t . . .”

“That bad, huh?” Amy said.

“Yeah, that bad.”

“Okay, we’ll talk about it. Now, after a word with the nurse, I’m going home.”

“What kind of a word with the nurse?”

“Orders. One, no more sedatives. Two, you have my medical permission to smoke. Not now, in the morning, after that sedative wears off.”

“You’ll be back in the morning?”

“After you’ve had your breakfast.”

“Okay,” Cynthia said, and then said, “What do I call you, ‘Doctor’?”

“If you can remember that I’m your doctor, you can call me ‘Amy.’ I’d like that.”

“I don’t think I understand that,” Cynthia said.

“I don’t know about you, Cynthia, but every time I’ve told one of my friends

something I really didn’t want anybody else to know, it was all over town by the next day. What you tell me as your doctor goes no further.”

“Not even to another doctor? Or my parents?”

“What you tell me goes no further, period.”

“I may not tell you anything.”

“That’s up to you, what you tell me or don’t. Okay?”

“Okay,” Cynthia said.

Dr. Payne touched Cynthia Longwood’s shoulder and walked to the door. She turned off the lights, smiled at Cynthia, and walked out of the room.

When Matt went into Personnel Records at the Roundhouse a few minutes before ten, Sergeant Sandow’s contact, a heavyset civilian, led him into a closet-size office where he had laid out the personnel jackets of the Narcotics Unit’s Five Squad.

“I’ll stick around until you’re finished,” the civilian told him, “in case somebody wonders what the lights are doing on in here. But make it quick, will you?”

“Right now, that is the guiding principle of my life,” Matt said, and took off his trench coat. He fished the pocket recorder out again, looked at it, shrugged, put batteries and a tape in it, and tested it.

It worked. The question was whether or not it would be quicker to use the machine and the transcribing device, or whether he should just use pencil and a notebook.

He decided in favor of modern technology, sat down at the desk, and started to work his way through the foot-high stack of records in front of him.

It took him more than two hours. Dictating names and addresses into the recorder proved, he thought, much quicker than writing them down would have been; the question remained how long it would take him to transcribe them in the morning.

None of the names and addresses of relatives and references rang any bells, except tangentially. Officer Timothy J. Calhoun of the Five Squad had uncles and aunts and cousins in both Harrisburg and Camp Hill, and was a graduate of Camp Hill High.

It was unlikely that they knew each other, but Miss Susan Reynolds, who had not been kidnapped at all, was from Camp Hill.

What was that bullshit she told Daffy all about, that she was in her room all the time? Her bed had not been slept in. Period. Wherever she was when everybody was looking for her, she wasn’t in the Bellvue-Stratford. At least not in her room.

When he left the tiny office, Sandow’s civilian was asleep in his chair, and when wakened, not in what could be called a charming frame of mind.