King of Swords

Joe sat back on the busted up couch and stretched out his long legs as he finished up reading through the NYPD witness reports on the Wong family murders. He was in the disused garage behind North West 9th Street in Overtown, which he and Max were using as their base. His cousin Deshaun had hooked them up with it for fifty bucks a month. Apart from the couch, a wall of empty metal shelves, a refrigerator, their three boxes of paperwork, a blackboard and a corkboard, the place was empty. Max and Joe went there once a day, sometimes together, but more often individually, before the beginning or at the end of their shifts.

They never talked about the case at MTF. Any calls they made were on outside payphones.

The place could have been much better — light came from a single bulb hanging off a flex, and the power supply was temperamental, going off for minutes at a time; plus there was no ventilation, so it was always stifling hot, and the stench of old oil made Joe's head hurt and his clothes stink like a mechanic's overalls. But it was on a deserted side road, and was one of a dozen identical-looking, brown metal-shuttered garages with rusted padlocks, completely anonymous.

Joe liked it here, doing real police work instead of framing patsies. He and Max had spent all of the past week putting together an imaginary case against Philip Frino, an Australian dope runner who brought Colombian cartel coke in on a small fleet of cigarette boats. Frino had a place in the Bahamas. The idea was to link Grossfeld to him and then him to Carlos Lehder's middle management. It was

something they could've done in ten minutes, but Sixdeep wanted the whole thing carefully documented, a paper trail that would stand up in court, so he'd pulled them both off their eight ongoing investigations and made them go at Moyez full time; so far they'd put Frino under surveillance and photographed him meeting numerous people. Joe was glad he was in on the joke.

This was his third time going through the Wong file, making sure he hadn't missed anything. The NYPD officers had been diligent and conscientious, interviewing damn near everyone who lived on the street. Several witnesses had reported a dark blue Ford transit van with New Jersey plates parked across the road from the Wong house, and three people had described the same man hanging around on the kerb by the Ford — tall, fat and wearing a black bowler hat.

The van hadn't been recovered. They'd run the plates, but they'd turned out to be fake.

The candy wrapper had been dusted for prints, but nothing had come up. It was the same with the one found at the Lacour house.

Joe put the file away and got himself a Coke from the fridge. He turned his attentions to the twelve-page computer printout of missing persons reported in Miami between June 1980 and May 1981. Forty-six names per page, 5 52 in total.

He scanned the printout for families living at the same address. Nada.

He scanned it again for matching family names. It was laborious, because the list wasn't in alphabetical order. Twice the light went out and he lost his place and had to start again.

He persevered. He sweated through his shirt.

He got to the twelfth page and swore he'd missed something.

He went back to the beginning.

Spanish names dominated, then English. The French and Jewish ones stood out.

Nothing matched.

He did it by address.

Nine pages in, he hit the jackpot.

Madeleine Cajuste, 3121 North East 56th Street, Lemon City; reported missing: 30 April.

Sauveur Kenscoff, 3121 North East 56th Street, Lemon City; reported missing: 30 April.

That was it. Two people living in the same house had disappeared just before the Moyez shooting. It was too late to check it out now; he'd go the next morning.

Joe wrote it down on the blackboard, which they'd divided in two, Joe on the right, Max on the left. That way they kept track of their current and upcoming tasks, as well as any leads they'd generated.

Max had written that he was currently talking to tarot card sellers and distributors. So far nothing. The de Villeneuve family in Switzerland had refused to divulge their list of buyers, saying they prided themselves on their secrecy and considered their clients an extension of the family. Some family, thought Joe, who'd heard all about their history from Max.

At the bottom of the board, in capitals, Max had written: 'DEVIL WORSHIPPERSBLACK MAGIC?'

Max had been to Bridget Reveaux's house in Gainesville and photographed her late sister's tarot card. He'd blown up his picture to A3 size and tacked it to the corkboard.

livery detail was visible, including the supposed mark of the Devil in the bottom left-hand corner — an inverted five-pointed star with an elongated tip, which, to Joe, looked more like a badly drawn plummeting eagle.

Joe didn't buy into any of that hocus-pocus bullshit, but the card sure freaked him out. The King of Sword's may have had a blank face, but it didn't feel that way. The thing had some kind of presence — and a human presence at that.