“No Wanted posters like the others?” Coughlin asked.
Tony thought, How did he know that?
Simple answer: Because he didn’t become the second most important white shirt in the building by being a lazy cop.
The uniform shirt for all ranks sergeant and above was white, thus the expression “white shirt”; those in ranks of corporal down to police recruit wore blue shirts, and were referred to accordingly.
Now, his well-honed investigative mind has been putting together the pieces, and one piece is that Gartner wasn’t wanted for any crime.
“No, sir,” Tony Harris said after a moment. “None of the three last night.”
“Tell them abo
ut the piss,” Payne said.
“What?” Hollaran blurted.
Everyone looked at Matt, then at Tony.
“When we got the search warrant for Gartner’s office—outside of which was parked Nguyen’s motorcycle—we found no obvious signs anybody’d been whacked inside. But we did find piss poured all over the place.”
“Tony said it had to be gallons,” Payne added lightly. “We’re guessing some animal’s. I mean, four-legged animal.”
Coughlin shook his head in wonder.
“Doesn’t matter if it turns out to be from a human,” Quaire said. “Urine is mostly worthless for our purposes.”
“Really?” Payne said.
“Uh-huh,” Quaire said. “I thought you knew it doesn’t have enough traceable DNA to make it useful. It’s just . . . well, piss.”
There were chuckles.
“At the risk of repeating myself, Matthew,” Jason Washington offered, “we do come across strange things in our business.”
Coughlin then said, “Okay, and what about the third guy?”
“One Reginald ‘Reggie’ Jones. Black male, age twenty. A great big boy, maybe goes two-forty, two-fifty. And with one of those round baby faces. Well, before he got beaten up. Someone kicked the living shit out of him. Brutal beating. He could have died from that, or from strangulation. Two of those plastic zip ties—two short ones put end to end to make one long one—were cinched tight around his throat.”
He paused as they considered that.
Then Harris said, “Jones was a small-time dealer. What he had was more of a consumption habit. But he did have a couple busts for selling coke. He was on probation for possession. Word is that . . . this is not exactly PC—”
“Oh, no,” Payne gasped dramatically, “we’ve never heard something that was politically incorrect uttered in the Roundhouse!”
There were grins, including Tony’s.
“Say it, Tony,” Coughlin said, his face serious. “We need to know e verything.”
“Reggie Jones was backward.”
“Backward?”
“More or less retarded,” Tony said.
“And now he’s deceased,” Payne said, “making him number eight.”
“No warrants?” Coughlin went on.