King of Swords

'That's why it's just the two of us here, right?' Joe said, looking at Max quizzically, seeing an altogether new side to him. They'd seen far worse than this — a comparatively clean straight kill and relatively painless for the victims, no signs of torture, no dismemberment — and Max hadn't blinked

out of turn. He'd studied the bodies, read the scene, come to initial conclusions. The only thing that upset him was when they found children, but that got nearly all cops. They usually got angry, some cried, some couldn't do their jobs.

Max was in the first category. But how he was now was new to Joe. Max looked sad, as if he had known the victims. Joe wondered if this new girl Max had started meeting for lunch hadn't opened up his emotional side, if he wasn't a little bit in love with her. He'd been awful quiet about her, which was really unusual for him. He hadn't even told Joe her name.

There were half a dozen spent shells on the ground near the bodies. The shooter had reloaded. Joe bagged two of them and left the rest for forensics.

Up ahead of them was the bathroom, a mess of smashed tiles and blood stains everywhere. Madeleine Cajuste had been shot at least five times in the torso and once through her right hand. The bathroom door had been dead-bolted from the inside.

The window was unlocked and opened out from the side onto a view of the garden — a small strip of lawn, rose bushes and a palm tree at the end.

Max noticed small scraps of white fabric stuck to splinters at the edge of the sill. He plucked one and showed it to Joe.

'You said she had a baby? I think she dropped it out of the window. When the shooting started she ran in here, bolted the door and put the kid out of the way of the bullets.

Maybe she screamed for help too. Either way, they took the baby. Let's take a look at the other rooms.'

Joe went to the kitchen. Dry dishes and cudery on a rack by the sink, rotting and withered fruit in a large bowl on the counter. Everything in the refrigerator had gone off.

Max looked through the bedrooms. Ruth Cajuste's was nearest the bathroom. She'd slept in a double bed, with a liible and a wind-up alarm clock at her side. The curtains

were drawn. There were bars on the windows. Next door was where the teenage girl had slept. Her name was Farrah Carroll. She was fifteen. He found her Haitian passport and return-flight ticket for 5 June. In two days' time her parents would be expecting her home. By her bedside was a photograph of her, Ruth and Mickey Mouse taken at Disneyland.

She had kept her room neat and tidy.

Max made for the front door.

He went and stood where he'd been when they'd first come in and scanned the scene of slaughter one more time, first casually, then body by body, trying to find what he'd missed.

The bugs were crawling up Farrah's right leg but not her left.

He looked at her feet. There was a small pile of dead beedes by her shoe. He bent down and studied the sole.

There were white stains on it, absent from the other shoe.

She'd trodden in something, maybe slipped. He turned around and looked behind him.

There, that was it: a small circle a few feet away, clearly defined by the crust of dead black beedes all around it. It was a white splash with scraps of dark green matter in it, shredded leaves or herbs, and something small, shiny and dark brown, but unmistakeably part of a bean.

'I think the shooter puked here,' Max told Joe.

Joe went back to the kitchen, got a knife and spoon which Max used to scrape the dried mess into an evidence bag.

Then they left the house, turning off the light as they went.

'I'll call it in from a payphone,' Max said.

'Say you heard gunshots,' Joe suggested. 'Otherwise it'll be another year before they send someone round.'

34

'You're a piece a dogshit on wheels.' Carmine sighed as he drove his new ride — a white Crown Victoria — down North West 2nd Avenue. It was a cop car, an honest cop's car; only kind of ride pigs could afford on the minimum wage they made outta being' pigs. The pigs on the cocaine payola drove flashier autos: fresh-off-the-ramp sports cars and rides they'd seen in James Bond movies.

There was method to his downshifting in the style stakes, because today, and every day until he got a location on Risquee, he, Carmine Desamours, was playing at being a cop. He wasn't just driving this shitty ride, he'd changed his look too. He was wearing ugly straight-off-the-rack clothes from JCPenney — a grey sports coat, shitty black slacks that itched the inside of his thighs, a white shirt and scuffed black wing tips. He had himself an authentic-looking fake ID and a pearl-handled .38 snubnose on his hip. He was a regular Richard Rowntree motherfucker. OK, that wasn't strictly accurate - RR was a private dick not a cop, but he couldn't think of no black cops he wanted to be in the image f, so Shaft did him just fine.