Eyes of the Innocent

CHAPTER 7

After turning onto Avenue P, I drove slowly past a sprawling auto body shop, an impound lot, a small fabricating plant-the industrial underbelly of America. About midway down, Nancy told me, “Turn right.”

“Anything you say, sweetheart,” I said.

I half expected Nancy to reply “Don’t patronize me, dear,” but she stayed quiet as a gate swung upward and I entered the green and white wonderland that was Enterprise’s off-airport facility.

Inside was a jumbled chaos of official vehicles, marked and unmarked, from Newark police to New Jersey State Police to FBI-a circus of men in dark-colored windbreakers. It was tough to tell if there was a ringmaster for all the madness. From an outsider’s perspective, it just looked like a lot of people with short haircuts running around trying to look important.

I couldn’t imagine what they were all doing there. Properly deployed, it was enough law enforcement manpower to tackle at least two dozen unsolved murders. Instead, they were all focused on one lousy councilman.

Following the lines that told me where to return my car, I pulled to a stop under an awning at the direction of a very distracted man in a puffy jacket that had CHECK-IN in block letters on the back. He kept looking at the vast parking lot to his left where, about two football fields away, all the short haircuts were focusing their attention. With his handheld computer, he scanned a bar code on the back driver’s side window. If it seemed odd to him someone would return a car a mere half hour into the rental, he didn’t say anything about it. Of course, that might be because he never actually looked at me.

“Shuttle to the airport is that way,” he said, tearing off a receipt and waving vaguely toward the main building.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the receipt and making a show of walking in the proper direction until I was out of his line of sight, when I began making my way back toward the parking lot.

Dressed in my black peacoat, dark pants, and rubber-soled dress shoes-and with my own short haircut-I looked coplike enough that no one was stopping me. That was the nice thing about so many different agencies being out here: everyone would just assume I belonged to someone else.

Plus, there was something about the news helicopters overhead-there were now three of them-that added to the general sense of mayhem. I could have been leading around a tiger tied to a piece of dental floss and I’m not sure anyone would have given me a second glance.

As I got closer, I saw most of the action was buzzing around a red Ford Taurus. The parking spots around it had been cleared out and an ambulance, lights still flashing, was parked nearby. That meant the councilman’s corpse was still on the premises, perhaps still in the car.

I kept walking toward it and got to within about twenty yards, where a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape had been erected. I thought about ducking under it-inasmuch as no one had stopped me so far-but didn’t want to risk it just yet. So I went over to a huddle of guys, all of them black or Latino, dressed in jackets that said either CHECK-IN or CLEANING on the back. There seemed to be one guy in the middle who was commanding the floor, so I went over to eavesdrop.

Except as soon as they became aware of my presence, they all turned and looked at me.

“Hey, fellas,” I said.

Several of them nodded, then one of the cleaning guys eyed me and asked, “You a cop or something?”

I could guess the typical car cleaner at the Newark Airport Enterprise facility was probably making about $8.85 an hour and might have had a run-in or two with the law that left him unfond of those sworn to protect it. So I smiled and said, “Not exactly. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m probably not supposed to be here. So keep it quiet, okay?”

The cleaners grinned, happy to keep my secret and eager to help.

“He’s in the red car over there, the senator or whatever,” one of the check-in guys said. “He’s still in there. They haven’t moved him yet.”

“Really,” I said.

“Eddie is the one here who found him,” another said, pointing to the guy who had been in the middle of the scrum when I came up-a short, weathered-looking Latino.

“No kidding,” I said. Eddie smiled proudly at me, showing off a mouth at least three teeth short of a full deck. I stuck out my hand: “Carter Ross.”

“Hey,” he said, not bothering to take his glove off as we shook.

“What’s your name?”

“Oh, Eddie … I mean Edgar … Perez … but they call me Eddie,” he said.

Eddie Perez grinned again. There hadn’t been a lot of visits to the dentist in his past, but he sure seemed friendly.

“So what time did you find him?” I asked.

“Man, I don’t know, it was like six … six-thirty … My shift start at six, you know? And it was at least an hour in, so like … seven … seven-thirty. I don’t know. Yeah, seven-thirty … eight.”

Well. That was precise.

“And what, he was just sitting in one of the cars?”

“Yeah, man, I was doing Row Q, you know, going through, making sure there wasn’t no trash, making sure they got the gas in them, you know? And I get to this one car and I can tell someone left something in the trunk because it’s riding low back there.”

“Tell him about the roast beef sandwich,” one of them prompted.

“Yeah, yeah, man,” Eddie said. “I went around to the trunk and it smelled a little bit, you know? Like you leave a roast beef sandwich in the car for a couple days and it starts to smell, you know? And people, they do this all the time. The check-in guys are supposed to inspect the trunks, but sometimes they get busy, you know?”

“Right, sure,” I said, like I had ample experience cleaning gamy roast beef sandwiches out of rental cars.

“And, man, I open up the trunk thinking I’m going to find someone’s suitcase and a sandwich or something. And there’s this guy all curled up in there, where the, uhh … you know, the thing…”

“The spare tire?” I asked.

“Yeah, man, where the spare tire is supposed to be. Except it wasn’t no spare tire in there, it was this guy.”

“Tell him about the nails,” another one said.

“Yeah, man, he had these nails sticking out his whole body, you know?” Eddie said.

“Nails?”

“Yeah, it was like someone took a nail gun or something and went bam, bam, bam, bam. There had to be like twenty, thirty, fifty nails in him, you know?”

I immediately got the image of Windy Byers, his corpse riddled with metal spikes, curled up in the wheel well.

What a way to go.

* * *

Eddie recounted the end of his story, calling me “man” at least seven more times and saying “you know” at least a dozen. But the gist of it was that he went to report the presence of an existentially deprived passenger to his boss, who called the authorities, who came streaming in ever more massive numbers. They interviewed Eddie at some length until they finally realized he was just the guy who cleaned the car and, man, he didn’t really know nothin’, you know?

In truth, Eddie had probably reached the end of his usefulness to me, as well. He had given me some great bits of what we in the business call “color”-those little details that make a story jump off the page. There was a big difference between a lede that read “Newark Councilman Wendell A. Byers was found dead yesterday at a car rental facility near Newark Airport” and “A cleaning man at a car rental facility near Newark Airport made a gruesome discovery in Row Q yesterday morning, when he found the nail-riddled corpse of Newark Councilman Wendell A. Byers rolled up in the trunk of a red Ford Taurus.”

I thanked Eddie for his help, but as the group broke apart, I sidled up to one of the check-in guys, a black guy with short-cropped hair.

“Hey, you mind helping me with something real quick?” I asked.

“Sure, boss, what’s up?” he said, in a perhaps Jamaican, perhaps Haitian, definitely Carribean accent.

“You got one of those little handheld computers?”

“Yeah, boss,” he said, pulling it out of the pocket of his puffy jacket.

“What can you tell me about this car,” I said, rattling off the license plate number to the red Ford that had become Windy Byers’s impromptu hearse.

He did some typing, working quickly on the small keyboard with his thumbs, the only flesh exposed on his otherwise gloved hands.

“It was rented from location oh-one-five-that’s here-Sunday at 7:42 P.M. by…” He stopped at the name. “Don … Donaa…”

“Spell it for me,” I said.

“First name D-O-N-A-T-O,” he said.

Donato. Got it.

“Last name S-E-M-E-D-O.”

Semedo. Donato Semedo. What kind of name was that? Italian? Spanish? I didn’t dare pull out my pad to write it down, so I did my best to burn it into my memory. Donato Semedo. Donato Semedo.

“Does that thing give you the renter’s address?”

“Yeah, boss,” he said, tilting the computer so I could see it.

It was on Hanover Street in Newark. I didn’t know the street but could guess it was in the Ironbound, which was a German enclave back when all the streets were being named.

“Thanks,” I said, thankful to have found such a helpful check-in guy. “That thing tell you anything else?”

“Rental insurance declined,” he said. “It doesn’t say nothing about the return. He must have just dumped it here.”

That explained why the cleaner was the first to find the body.

I might have pushed for more, but I sensed an attack was coming from lower middle management. A man with straight, mousy brown hair, too-big-for-his-face glasses, and a very unfortunate mustache was approaching fast from the direction of the main building. His jacket was embroidered with JEFF on it.

And Jeff looked very excited.

“Excuse me, sir, are you with the police?” he asked.

“No,” I said, and was not inclined to volunteer more than that.

“Well, this is not a public area,” Jeff said. “And I can’t have you walking around talking with employees. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“What’s wrong with talking? It’s a free country.”

Good comeback. For a fourth grader.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said, unmoved by my patriotism.

I briefly considered whether there were any legitimate grounds by which I could protest. But ultimately I was better off bringing as little attention to myself as possible. If the authorities became aware a reporter had been traipsing around their crime scene, they might get persnickety and hit me with trespassing or disturbing the peace or loitering or one of the other charges they typically reserve for young black men hanging out on street corners.

Better to escape relatively unnoticed.

“So you’re saying I have to leave?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, no big deal,” I said. “Which way to the airport?”

Jeff not only showed me the way to the shuttle but escorted me there, stood next to me with his arms crossed until it came, then made sure I was onboard with the door closed and the shuttle moving.

There were only two other passengers with me, a pair of airport-bound business travelers who had seen my prisoner of war treatment and were nervously clutching their luggage, like I was about to steal it. We passed the police barricade, and as we inched along through the narrow channel between the TV trucks, I decided it was time to join my people. I walked up to the driver and said, “You can drop me off here.”

“Here?” the guy said.

“Yeah, I just remembered I’m afraid of flying,” I said, quickly pulling a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet.

“Hey, whatever works for you, pal,” the guy said, taking the bill as he pulled the bus to a stop and opened the door.

I disembarked next to a cluster of print reporters, one of whom happened to be Tommy. He stared at me blankly for a second, like I was a strange new life-form crawling out of the sea, then broke himself off from the pack.

“Are you coming from where I think you’re coming from?” he asked. He had to shout a little bit to be heard over the thumping of nearby helicopter rotors.

“Yeah,” I said, with a perhaps-too-cocky smile.

“How did you get in there?”

“I happen to be a big fan of Enterprise rental car. They pick you up, you know. What’s going on out here in the media mosh pit?”

“Nothing. It’s just a lot of pretty boys worrying about their appearance too much. It’s like I never left the club from last night.”

“What have you been told so far?”

“Again, nothing. They haven’t even officially confirmed that it’s Windy Byers in there. You ask them why the road is closed and all the spokesman says is it’s a police investigation. For all we know at this point, this whole thing could be for some wino who died of exposure.”

“Oh, it’s Windy all right.”

“How do you know?”

“I talked to the guy who found him,” I told Tommy, then filled him in on all I learned on the inside.

When I was done, Tommy didn’t comment on my genius as a reporter, thank me for providing such great details for the next day’s story, or compliment me on my brilliant-albeit accidental-ingenuity.

Instead, he said, “Donato Semedo of thirteen Hanover Street, huh?”

* * *

Tommy took a few steps farther away from the other reporters. I got the hint and followed him over to the edge of the road, which bordered on a small, forlorn patch of marshland. A faint breeze stirred the dried stalks of pampas grass.

“There’s something weird going on,” he said.

“Speak, young Tommy.”

“Remember how I told you I was going over those ELEC documents?”

“Yeah, the Election Law stuff. I thought you were just punishing yourself.”

“I was. But then, I don’t know. Windy’s donor list was strange. I kept coming up with all these Portuguese names. I can’t be sure, I think one of them might have been Donato Semedo. It sure sounds Portuguese.”

“Portuguese? I thought maybe it was Italian or Spanish or something.”

“No, it’s definitely Portuguese,” Tommy said. “It seemed like all of his donors had these fresh-off-the-boat immigrant names. And they all had addresses in the Ironbound. And I just couldn’t figure it out. Why would the Central Ward councilman get all this money from people outside his district?”

“Beats me. Why?”

“I still don’t know,” Tommy said. “It was something I was going to look into a little more the next time I got the chance. Then this came up. But now you’re telling me Windy has been kidnapped and killed by someone named Donato Semedo and, well, fill in the blanks.”

“I suppose we could go pay a visit to Donato Semedo and find out.”

Tommy pointed to the line of news trucks.

“Well, you can,” he said. “I have to stay here and babysit.”

“Oh, right,” I said, and was about to bid him adieu and head in my own direction, except I realized I had no means by which to do so. Unless I felt like walking back to the office.

“Of course, I don’t have my car with me,” I said. “I’m going to need to hitch a ride somehow. Anyone else from our place here with you?”

“Just Tina,” he said.

“Tina?” I said, and the mere utterance of her name brought a surge of guilt, even though I had no cause. “What’s she doing here?”

“She was on her way to the office when she got the call about Windy and she knew she could get here before anyone else. Not that it mattered-the police had already plugged up the road.”

“Where is she now?”

Tommy signaled his ignorance by shrugging. So I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed her.

“Tina Thompson,” she semishouted over the sound of the helicopters.

“Hey, it’s your favorite reporter, where are you?” I asked.

“I’m about a hundred feet away from where you and your boyfriend are having your little chin wag,” she said. “I was going to come over, but I didn’t want to intrude. You two make a cute couple, by the way.”

I looked to my left, then to my right, then back to my left. With all the people and confusion, I didn’t see her. Then finally I spotted her walking toward me, waving.

She looked terrific, as usual. She was not particularly dressed up-just black slacks and a plain black leather jacket-but Tina was one of those women who didn’t have to try too hard. Her hair was up in a ponytail. Her cheeks had a rosy glow from the cold, like she was just coming in from a jog. As she got closer, she even appeared happy to see me.

“Sorry I didn’t wait for you last night,” she said. “To be honest, I was still at the office when you texted me and I was looking for an excuse to cancel anyway. It was a long day and I was too tired for a night out.”

“Oh,” I said. “And here I thought you were pissed at me.”

“What made you think that?”

“The part where you texted me that I sucked.”

“I was just kidding,” she said, then added as an aside to Tommy, “He’s such a girl sometimes.”

“Not in bed, I hope,” Tommy said.

“I wouldn’t know,” she replied.

“Still?” Tommy inquired.

“He keeps wasting opportunities.”

“A tragedy.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

Tina crossed her arms and shook her head, her eyes rolling. Tommy consoled her with a pat on the shoulder.

“Are you two finished?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Tina said. “So what have you been up to this morning anyway?”

I gave her the same spiel I had given Tommy but this time finished with how I needed to mooch a ride off her.

“So, wait, where is your car again?” she asked when I was done.

“It’s at the office … I had Enterprise pick me up there,” I lied quickly, because I didn’t particularly feel like explaining why Sweet Thang had taken me home the night before. Tina has a dirty mind. She might jump to conclusions.

“Anyhow, let’s get going,” I continued before she sniffed out my untruth. “Come on. Time’s a-wasting. Chop-chop. Head ’em up and move ’em out.”

“Okay, okay, take it easy,” Tina said, then turned to Tommy. “I assume you’ve got this covered?”

“It’s pretty easy when nothing’s happening and nothing will,” he assured her.

And we were off. Tina drives a Volvo, making her perhaps the only childless woman in American who does. But she often reminded me it was only temporary-the lack of child, that is, not the Volvo. It was a wonder she hadn’t already installed the infant seat.

I typed “13 Hanover Street” into her nav system, which had a male voice-Nancy, wherefore art thou, Nancy-and the address turned out to be a short distance away. As we drove into the Ironbound and began snaking through its tight streets, I filled the time telling Tina about some of my previous day’s discoveries, from my chat with Detective Raines to my meeting with Rhonda Byers to the realization, thanks to Akilah’s sister, that Mrs. Byers probably wasn’t our black-hatted villain after all.

And then we pulled up to Donato Semedo’s residence-or what was supposed to be his residence, anyway. But it wasn’t. Not unless he lived on the third baseline: 13 Hanover Street was a small neighborhood softball field.

Not that it was any great surprise. If you were planning to dump a body in a rental car, you probably weren’t going to give your real information.

“Are you sure you remembered the address right?” Tina asked.

“Yeah, definitely. It was Dan Marino and Dartmouth College,” I said.

“Come again?”

“Dan Marino was a football player who wore number 13. Dartmouth College is located in Hanover, New Hampshire. That was my mnemonic.”

“Oh, of course,” she said sarcastically. “So what now, Dan Marino?”

I leaned on my palm and looked out at the empty softball field, then said, “I wish I knew.”

* * *

Tina declared she was needed back at the office, which seemed like a fine place for me to be, at least until I figured out something better.

As we drove toward the newsroom, we artfully avoided the conversation-or, rather, The Conversation-we needed to have about our future and plotted strategy on Windy Byers instead.

“Why don’t you type up the stuff you got this morning and we’ll put it online,” she concluded as we got off the elevator. “No sense in saving it for tomorrow’s paper-the whole world might have it by then.”

“No problem,” I said, and we went our separate ways.

As soon as I walked into the newsroom, I saw Sweet Thang and noticed she was putting great effort into not looking at me. It was a rather dismal performance. Her desk naturally pointed her in the direction of mine, so she had to turn her body away at a strange angle to avoid facing me.

I decided to spare her the agony. She had too many months left on her internship to sit that way the whole time. It would be bad ergonomics. So I went over to the chair next to her and noisily lowered myself into it. She started blushing the moment I sat down, even though she was still pretending to give all her concentration to the morning paper.

“Hello,” I said, finally.

“Oh, hi,” she said, lifting her face a little bit toward me but still not meeting my eye. “I didn’t even see you come in.”

Up close, she looked even more pathetic. Her hair was still a little wet, making her blond curls droop. Her shoulders were slumped and she wasn’t sticking out her chest like she normally did. She was wearing pants, which was unusual-Sweet Thang was more of a skirts and dresses kind of gal-and a bulky sweater. There may have even been a sports bra underneath.

More than anything, she came across as embarrassed, like she had been scolded. And I was a little surprised to discover my primary thought toward her, which used to involve things you only see late at night on Cinemax, was now something more like pity. Or maybe it was just concern. I wanted to protect her.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Ohimjustfinethankyou,” she said, a little too quickly.

“Come on, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Lauren,” I said, and when I used her real name, she made eye contact for the first time. “It’s okay. Whatever happened last night, it’s fine by me. It was maybe going to be something, but it wasn’t. It’s not a big deal.”

“You’re not … mad at me?” she asked, gazing up at me with what the romance writers would call imploring blue eyes.

“Mad at you? No.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Good!” she said buoyantly. “I have a present for you.”

“You do?”

“Two, actually!”

“I can’t wait.”

“The first is, I couldn’t sleep last night, and I felt bad you never got to taste the banana bread I made for Bertie. So I made you some. I used buttermilk. I hope that’s okay.”

She reached into her bag and extracted a Saran-wrapped loaf so large she needed two hands to grip it.

“Oh,” I said, surprised more than anything.

“Don’t worry. This isn’t bread with strings attached. It’s just friendship bread,” she added.

“Right. Friendship bread. Thank you.”

“The second gift,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a stapled document, “is this.”

She handed it to me. My eyes scanned the first page, which I immediately recognized as a mortgage-mostly because the word MORTGAGE was written at the top.

“Chuck called me this morning,” she said proudly. “He found it in a filing cabinet last night. I went over to the courthouse on my way in and got it from him.”

“Great work,” I said, glancing up at her to see a proud smile form on her lips.

I turned my attention back to the document. The mortgagee was, of course, Wendell A. Byers Jr. The mortgagor was a bank from Indianapolis. The mortgage amount was $324,000. But it was when I got to the part about the interest rate that things got, well, interesting.

The rate was a mere 3.15 percent. I went to an online mortgage calculator, which told me that made the monthly payment about $1,400. That, plus an escrow payment-call it $500 for property tax and $100 for homeowners insurance-brought the total payment to $2,000.

It was a sweetheart deal. And I would imagine Windy, who was paid $80,000 a year as a Newark councilman, plus whatever work he could boondoggle on the side, could swing $2,000 a month.

But as I read further, I saw it didn’t last. The initial rate was just for thirty-six months. For the remaining 324 months, I had to refer to something called the “adjustable rate rider,” which was attached hereto in Exhibit B.

Lawyers always make things so clear.

I turned to the back of the document, where Exhibit B told me that the rate was “LIBOR plus 8.99 percent.” Like I said, clear as mud.

“Do you know what LIBOR is?” I asked Sweet Thang, who did not attempt an answer.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Go over to Buster Hays and ask him. He’s the kind of guy who knows this sort of thing. But don’t tell him I’m the one who wants to know. He’ll give you a hard time.”

Sweet Thang went over to Buster who, as one of the legions of older men enamored of her youthful beauty, was all too happy to help. They had a brief conversation-Buster was lit up like Christmas Eve the entire time, the horny old goat-and Sweet Thang returned.

“It stands for London Interbank Offered Rate,” she said.

“That really doesn’t help me.”

“It’s an index,” she explained. “It has something to do with an average of a bunch of things and I guess it’s something bankers worry about a lot.”

“Okay. So LIBOR plus 8.99 means … what?”

“Well, he said the LIBOR fluctuates, but lately it’s been below two percent,” she said.

That meant once the introductory rate on Akilah’s house expired, the new interest rate would reset to somewhere around 11 percent. I turned to my mortgage calculator and typed in the new number. The monthly payment was now more than $3,000-more like $3,600 with the escrow factored in.

I went back to the beginning of the mortgage and looked at the dates. The reset, I realized, had happened December 1.

Windy Byers’s booty call had just gotten a lot more expensive.

* * *

It was the great Nora Ephron, penning lines for the Carrie Fisher character in When Harry Met Sally, who observed that everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor-and not everyone could possibly have good taste and a sense of humor.

The same could be said in the sad-but-familiar case of Wendell A. Byers. Everyone thinks they’re smart enough not to get swindled in real estate deals-and, clearly, not everyone is. Certainly not Windy Byers.

It turns out that the all-powerful councilman was not much different from so many other Americans at the peak of the subprime boom: he allowed himself to be sold an overpriced house with a bad loan, and then, when the financial feces hit the fan, he got stuck with it.

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Sweet Thang asked.

“Windy Byers,” I said. “Getting suckered by a teaser rate, then panicking when it runs out. I guess keeping a woman on the side suddenly wasn’t as fiscally sound, so he told her to take a hike.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“Well, only two people know for sure, and one of them is now a corpse stinking up a rental car,” I said.

“And the other…” Sweet Thang began.

“… is Akilah Harris,” I finished. “Think you can find her?”

Sweet Thang looked down at the desk.

“But where do I-” she began whining, and I cut her off.

“Let me rephrase: you have to find her. You’ve got her cell number. She slept in your apartment two nights ago. You’re best friends with her mom. You’re pretty tight with her sister, too. If anyone can locate this girl, it’s you. I know you can do it.”

“You really believe in me?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

She grabbed a notepad off her desk, stood up, stuck her chest out like the proud young woman she was, and walked out of the newsroom-leaving me alone with a massive loaf of banana bread.

I walked to the break room, grabbed a plastic knife and paper plate, and sawed off a nice slice of mid-morning snack. I took it back to my desk but had barely gotten the first bite in my mouth when Tina was standing in front of me, scowling at what remained of the loaf.

“What the hell is this?” she demanded.

“It’s … it’s friendship bread,” I said meekly.

“And what the hell is that?”

“I don’t know. That’s what Sweet Thang called it.”

“Friendship bread? That little sorority girl is giving you something called friendship bread?”

“I suppose some would call it banana bread. Would you like some?”

“All that refined sugar and bleached flour?” Tina mocked. “I think not.”

“Come on. Bananas have potassium. And there are nuts, too-think of all the protein.”

Tina narrowed her eyes at me further. I felt like she was reading the bottom line of an eye chart that was printed on the inside of my skull.

“You were with her last night, weren’t you?” she said at last. “That’s why you couldn’t make our dinner.”

“No,” I said, unconvincingly.

Lips pursed, Tina stared me down.

“I told you, I got caught in traffic,” I said. And strictly as a matter of fact, that was true: at the time our date was canceled, I was caught in traffic.

“I know when you’re lying,” she said, in a low, scary voice that suggested demonic possession had just occurred.

“I’m aware of that. And it terrifies me.”

“And you want to tell me you weren’t with Sweet Thang last night.”

“I never said that.”

“Aha!” she shouted, like the courtroom lawyer who had just scored a major point on cross-examination.

“I was with Sweet Thang at an interview, then got caught in traffic on the Garden State Parkway on my way to see you,” I said, which was all true. I just didn’t feel like it was the right moment to add: then I nearly deflowered the girl and only stopped short when I was tripped by my conscience while rounding third base.

“All I’m going to say is: beware of women who bake for you,” she said, and stalked off.

Nearby, Buster Hayes rose from his chair and made a whipping sound as he walked away.

“Oh, what?” I said, but he had already made his point.

I turned to my computer and began my search for the mysterious Donato Semedo. One bogus address aside, I didn’t expect finding him would be difficult. For a reporter who knows his way around public information databases, people with unusual names are a treat. The Robert Johnsons of the world can kill you, but give me a Donato Semedo and I’ll be able to tell you whether he wears boxers or briefs within a few keystrokes.

Except, as it turns out, for this particular Donato Semedo.

He didn’t vote. He didn’t get speeding tickets. He didn’t own property. He didn’t have a credit card. He didn’t have liens against him. He never declared bankruptcy. He wasn’t a registered sex offender. He didn’t have a criminal record. He never served time in a state or federal prison. He was not a public employee or retiree in the state of New Jersey. He was not licensed to provide medical care, dental care, massage therapy, or child care.

Half an hour in, I was starting to give up hope and run out of databases. Then I remembered one more, a database of last resort in more ways than one: the Social Security Death Index.

Sure enough, I found Donato Semedo. Born January 27, 1917. Died July 8, 1987. Last residence: Newark, New Jersey. Card issued: New Jersey. He was probably some nice old Portuguese man who doddered around the Ironbound without bothering a soul, then had his identity stolen once he departed this mortal coil.

The question-who was Donato Semedo? — ceased to matter. It was now: Who was pretending to be Donato Semedo?

* * *

As I leaned back to ponder that question, I became aware my friendship bread was under attack.

“I’m starving,” Tommy said as he hacked off a piece with my plastic knife. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I thought you were babysitting the New York press corps.”

“I was. Buster Hays took over for me,” Tommy said, carefully transferring a slender slice to his plate. “He said a scene like that was no place for a little girl like me.”

Tommy lifted the bread to his mouth, then paused. “I swear, one day I’m going to stick my foot up his ass so far he’s going to be able to taste my Tod’s.”

“Tod’s … those must be … shoes?”

“You are so straight it hurts,” he said as he chewed. “Oh, my God, this is so good! Who made it?”

“Sweet Thang.”

Tommy stopped mid-chew. “You know you have to be careful of women who bake for you,” he said. “They’re all crazy.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Cuv ith twue,” he said, through a full mouth.

“How would you know?”

He swallowed and smirked. “Actually, I don’t. But I bumped into Tina and she told me to come over here and say it.”

“Evil,” I said. “Anyhow, I ran down our friend Donato Semedo. It turns out he’s dead at the present time.”

“Let me get this straight: they let a dead guy take out a rental car, but they make me wait until I’m twenty-five?”

“I know. What a country.”

Tommy chewed some more. The refined sugar and all that other bad stuff didn’t give him pause. Then again, his metabolism hadn’t turned thirty yet. Just wait.

“So did you say Donato Semedo showed up in one of your ELEC reports?” I asked.

“I think so, let me check,” he said, and went to retrieve a notepad from his desk. “I started writing down all the names that didn’t look like they ought to be giving money to a Central Ward councilman. Yeah, here it is. Semedo comma Donato.”

He held up the pad, as if it was evidence.

“So here’s a thought,” I said. “If Donato Semedo is a dead guy, what’s the possibility some of the other names on that list are also dead guys?”

“I’d say it’s a good possibility,” Tommy said.

“You mind if your notebook comes over to my desk and plays for a little while?”

“Okay. But no unhealthy snacks and no scary movies.”

“Got it,” I said as he handed it over.

I started by running the names on Tommy’s list through the voter rolls. Anyone who was engaged enough in the political process to make a donation ought to be registered to vote, right? True, it wasn’t going to be perfect. Some names were too common-Jose Silva being the Portuguese equivalent of John Smith. And since some of these people would presumably be foreign born, they might not have earned the right to vote.

But that was where the death index again came in handy. And I started getting hits. Inacio Barbosa. Dead. Martinho Fortes. Dead. Cornelio Moniz. Dead. Desiderio Ronaldo. Dead.

Within half an hour, I had more than a dozen confirmed cases of daisy-pushing donors who had, in a fit of posthumous generosity, given roughly $50,000 to candidate Wendell A. Byers Jr. And, beyond those I could say with confidence were deceased, there were at least another two dozen whose mortality could be considered suspect. All told, the haul of potentially dirty money in Byers’s campaign coffers was over $100,000.

I went to Tommy’s desk to return his notebook.

“Your notebook played well with others,” I said. “But he has a lot of naughty names in him.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?”

“Well, this is just a guess, but most of the time when you have bogus campaign contributors, it means someone is trying to circumvent contribution limits. The classic way of doing it is, say I’m president of a company that really needs a road-paving contract and I want to throw fifty grand at the mayor. I can have my company give so much-the dollar amount always changes, but it’s around ten grand-and I can give my ten grand personally. But I’m stuck after that. So I enlist a bunch of my employees, hand them each ten grand, and instruct them to make a generous donation in their own name.”

“Okay. So if you can have living employees do that, why enlist the nonliving?”

“Because, matey,” I said, affecting a pirate brogue, “dead men tell no tales.”

“Ah, pirates,” Tommy said wistfully. “To be stuck aboard a ship full of men out at sea for months at a time.”

Before I could jog Tommy out of that little fantasy, my cell phone rang.

I recognized the number as belonging to Detective Sergeant Kevin Raines.

“Hello,” I said. “Is it me you’re looking for?”

“Yeah, hey,” he said quickly. “It’s Raines.”

“What, no props for the Lionel reference?”

“I’m a little busy. I just realized I never returned your call from yesterday. How did things go with Mrs. Byers?”

“I can give you the play-by-play if you want, but I’m pretty sure that’s a dead end. We paid a visit to Akilah’s sister last night, and she told us Mrs. Byers has known about the affair for a long time-and besides, the two lovebirds split up several weeks ago. At the moment, I’m more interested in Donato Semedo.”

“Hang on a sec,” he said. “How the hell do you know about Donato Semedo? We haven’t told anyone about that.”

“What do you think I do here, sit around playing with myself all day waiting for you guys to tell me what’s going on?”

“Well, no, but-”

“You know he’s dead, right?”

“You mean the original Donato Semedo? Yeah, we figured that out,” Raines said.

“Know anything about the guy pretending to be Donato Semedo?”

“Yeah, he’s short, broad, and favors hats that keep his face hidden from security cameras.”

“He also favors nail guns from what I hear,” I said.

“Goddammit. Now how the hell do you know that?”

“Sometimes a reporter just knows things,” I said. “Did you also know that he made a contribution to Windy Byers’s most recent reelection effort?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, isn’t that illegal, Officer?”

“I got a murder on my hands,” Raines said. “You think I care about a campaign finance law violation?”

“But don’t you think it’s interesting that there was a connection between Byers and the guy who killed him?”

“Maybe. I’m still trying to get basic forensics done at this point. I don’t have time for all that Oliver Stone stuff right now. But if that’s really flipping your skirt up, go talk to Denardo Webster.”

Denardo Webster. The name rang a very soft bell, then I placed it: Windy’s chief of staff, the no-neck guy who escorted Mrs. Byers at the press conference.

“He’ll probably play dumb at first, but don’t let him. He knows what’s up,” Raines continued. Then, before disconnecting, he added, “I can’t believe I’m saying this to a reporter. But if you learn anything, let me know.”

I thanked him and turned to Tommy.

“See if you can find anything that ties all these names together, other than a predilection for taking long dirt naps,” I said. “I’ve got an errand to run.”

* * *

The constituent services office for Central Ward Councilman Wendell A. Byers was located on Springfield Avenue, just a few doors down from African Flavah, my favorite breakfast spot. And while I was tempted to visit Khalid and spend some quality time with his pancakes, that would have to wait.

My last act before leaving the office was to type the name Denardo Webster into our public employee database. It told me he was being paid $72,253 a year for his services. This, of course, gave me questions to ponder as I drove. Did a Newark councilman actually have a staff that needed chiefing? And what, exactly, did he do all day that was worth $72,253?

I suspected the answer would be: not much.

The office was a small storefront with impressive decal work on the glass door. The crest of the Newark City Council and Windy’s name were outlined in gold. The view inside was blocked by metal shades, which were lowered and drawn. Underneath the decal, taped to the door, was a handwritten sign that said APPOINTMENT’S ONLY. NO DROP IN’S PLEASE.

I tried not to let the wanton apostrophe abuse grate at me as I pulled on the door. It was locked. I pressed the doorbell and, as I waited, fought the urge to rip the paper off the door and scrub out the offending punctuation. I hit the button a second time and, finally, heard it buzz open.

I found Denardo Webster sitting in full recline, his feet propped on a desk. Up close, he was even bigger than he had seemed at the press conference: my height but probably twice my weight. Back in the day, he had been someone’s defensive tackle-or someone’s bouncer. And even now that he had allowed himself to go soft, I got the impression he’d be handy to have around if you needed someone to lift a piano.

Not that he was working all that hard at the moment. An extra-large Styrofoam container of fried chicken and French fries sat on his rather generous lap. And he was about halfway through demolishing every grease-soaked morsel. The boss was dead, but it apparently hadn’t spoiled this guy’s appetite.

“Can I help you?” he said in a deep, thick, syrupy voice.

“I’m Carter Ross with the Eagle-Examiner,” I said. “You must be Denardo Webster.”

He took a bite of chicken and sat there, stoically, staring at me as he chewed. He swallowed and wiped his mouth with a napkin before answering.

“You got an appointment?” he asked.

“No,” I said impatiently. “If I had known Councilman Byers was going to die today, I surely would have made one. But it kind of caught me by surprise.”

More staring. The feet were still on the desk.

“I can’t help you if you don’t have an appointment,” he said.

Without exerting too much effort, he leaned slightly forward and grabbed a toothpick, then began cleaning his right front tooth.

“Okay,” I said, trying to keep from losing my mind. “Could I please make an appointment for, say, right now.”

“Can’t,” he said. “I’m on my lunch break.”

He chomped down on the toothpick with his back molars and reclined further.

“As a matter of fact,” he continued. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m on my lunch break. The office is closed right now.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” I said, close to yelling.

He looked at me impassively. Even the toothpick, which he lazily shifted from side to side, was moving slowly.

I considered my options. Strangling the guy was one of them. But that wouldn’t ultimately get me the information I needed, and, besides, I’m not sure I could locate his neck, much less choke it.

Trying to intimidate him with a damning article about bureaucratic inefficiency-what did he do for his seventy-two clams a year anyhow? — didn’t feel like it would motivate this guy much, either.

Then, magically, wonderfully, I heard Tommy’s voice in my head: I just always heard stuff about Windy Byers doing it on the down low with one of his council staffers.

I glanced around the office. There didn’t appear to be any other council staff besides the chief. Then I looked at the massive man stretched out before me and wondered, was it really possible? This guy and Windy? You’d be talking about more than six hundred pounds of man love rolling around on each other. Could it be?

Only one way to find out.

“Look, I know you and Windy liked to do it, okay?” I said.

As soon as I said the words “do it,” the toothpick dropped out of his mouth. And I knew it was true. Congratulations, Denardo Webster. I now own you.

“His wife knew about it, too-Windy told her,” I lied. “She and I agreed that it was best kept out of the newspaper-no sense in dragging out something that would just hurt a dead man’s reputation. But if you don’t cooperate with me, you give me no choice…”

“Just take it easy, take it easy,” he said, the molasses suddenly gone from his vocal cords. “Let’s just be cool, okay?”

I looked at his desk and saw the picture of a middle-aged woman and a pair of chunky little boys who favored their daddy. Yeah, I definitely owned him.

“Oh, I can be cool,” I said. “But I need some answers, and I don’t plan on waiting for an appointment to get them.”

“Okay, okay, yeah, sorry about that. It’s just I get people coming in off the street all day long and-”

I held my hand up to stop what would otherwise be a stream of excuses. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, and pulled out my notebook. “Tell me about Donato Semedo, Inacio Barbosa, Martinho Fortes…”

I could have continued, but there was not the slightest bit of recognition on his face.

“I got no idea who those dudes are, I swear,” he said.

“They all made pretty sizable campaign contributions to your boss,” I said.

“Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” he said. “But, I swear, I never met them. I don’t know who those dudes are.”

“I’m sure you don’t. They’re all dead.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“Yeah?”

“Them and at least a dozen others. All dead people. All giving money to Windy Byers.”

“No foolin’,” he said.

I nodded.

“Look, all I know is, this dude came in all the time and gave me an envelope with cash in it,” Webster said. “Then he’d hand me a piece of paper with the name of the donor. I don’t know if it’s someone who’s dead or alive. I just write it down in the logbook, because Windy, he likes to put it in this computer file he has.”

“Computer file?” I asked, my interest piqued. “You mean, like an Excel spreadsheet?”

“Yeah. Whenever I got cash, Windy wanted to know so he could put it in his laptop.”

“Why in the world would he want to log illegal campaign contributions in a spreadsheet?”

“Maybe he didn’t know they were illegal,” Denardo said.

Even though Windy had never been the quickest draw in the saloon, I’m not sure even he could have been that willfully ignorant. He had to know the money was dirty. Then again, perhaps he hoped that if he logged it in his Excel file-then reported it for all the world to see on those ELEC reports-it would have the effect of cleaning it. It would at least give him some plausible deniability if he was ever investigated. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t as dumb as I thought.

“Do you have a copy of the file?” I asked.

“Naw, I didn’t do any of the computer stuff. I just did pen and paper. When the Spanish dude gave me cash, I wrote him a receipt. Then he’d leave. That’s all I know.”

“Tell me about the Spanish dude,” I said.

“I don’t know. He’s not the boss or nothing. He’s just a … a runner or something.”

“He got a name?” I asked.

“We never got real friendly.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Oh, man, he’s like … I don’t really look at him, you know?” Webster said. “He’s a Spanish dude. Kind of a little dude like those Spanish guys are. Sometimes he’s got tools on his belt. I think he’s like a construction worker or something.”

“What kind of car does he drive?”

“I don’t know.” Webster pointed to the drawn shades. “I can’t see the street from here.”

“How often does he come in?”

“Pretty regular. Every couple of weeks. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

“When was the last time he was here?” I asked.

Webster reached into his desk, pulled out an account book, and leafed to the last page in which there were entries.

“Last week,” he said. “On Tuesday. I remember it was around lunchtime.”

That narrowed it down at least a little. Though I suspected his definition of lunchtime was rather generous.

“How much did he give?”

“Ten grand.”

“Where does it come from?”

“I don’t know, I swear. Please.”

I concentrated on Denardo’s pudgy face, searching for any kind of twitch or eye shift that might suggest artifice. But all I saw was an earnest, bordering-on-desperate gaze in return.

“No clue who his boss is?”

Webster shook his head. “Look, man, I swear, I ain’t clownin’ you or nothing. If I knew, I’d tell you. I just don’t know. Windy, he did his own thing and I did my own thing, you know? It wasn’t like we told each other everything.”

“Okay,” I said, getting ready to leave. “I’m sure I’m going to have more questions. I’ll call you. What’s your cell number?”

He gave it to me and added, “We’re cool, right?”

“Well, that depends. You’re not going to give me a hard time again, are you?”

“No way, man,” he said. “Anything you need. No appointment necessary.”

* * *

As I wandered back out to Springfield Avenue, I knew I needed to find the mysterious Spanish dude, who was probably either Portuguese or Brazilian, given the names he toted on those little pieces of paper.

I got back in my car and sat there hoping maybe, somehow, the Spanish dude would just drive up and park in front of me, with his envelope stuffed full of cash, and tell me everything-who he worked for, what the money was about, why it resulted in Windy needing to be dead. I could have the story written by five o’clock.

But that wasn’t going to happen. He was never coming back. And the chances that someone on a bustling avenue might have rememebered one random Hispanic guy who pulled up on the street every couple of weeks and went into Windy Byers’s constituent services office? Slim.

If only there was a camera in the office. But I’d looked. No camera. I stared out at the street some more, watching the traffic scoot along, looking at the buildings, reading their signs, waiting for inspiration.

And then I saw what I needed. High atop the three-story brick building that housed African Flavah, there was Khalid’s bulletproof camera, safe inside its little cage, bolted into the concrete.

I hurried into the restaurant to find Khalid in his normal spot: behind the counter, standing at the grill underneath an institutional-sized oven hood, cooking twenty lunches simultaneously, the orders for which he somehow kept in his head. Frankly, Khalid’s occupation was my idea of eternal damnation. But Khalid once told me he could do it happily, ten hours a day, every day of the week-which is what he pretty much did. He opened at five every morning, when the airport porters and construction guys started drifting in, and kept the grill roaring until three in the afternoon, when the lunch crowd finally died down and he closed up shop.

“What’s going on, Cousin Carter?” he boomed as soon as he saw me out of the corner of his eye.

He called me “Cousin Carter” because his grandmother was half white-German, I think. He figured that one-eighth Caucasian blood must mean we’re related somehow.

Then again, if you go back far enough, aren’t we all?

“Cousin Khalid,” I returned. “How you been?”

“Blessed. I’ve been blessed.”

I watched as he displayed his virtuosity on the grill, mesmerized by his ability to juggle eggs, sausage, hamburger, potatoes, French toast, fish, grilled cheese, pancakes, and bacon.

“So, trust me when I tell you I have a good reason for asking,” I said. “But tell me about that security camera outside.”

“Uh-oh,” he announced to the other customers sitting at the counter, none of whom looked like me, “the white man is here playing PO-lice. We all in trouble now.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, playing along. “You’re part white.”

“Yeah, but only a small part. That means when the PO-lice come, they gonna leave one-eighth of me alone, but the other seven-eighths is gonna be gettin’ its ass kicked.”

His audience cracked up. In truth, the frequency of police misconduct was exaggerated in the hood. A lot of it was just people telling stories, misrepeating versions of rumors that they themselves had greatly embellished. But it did happen on the rare occasion, and it only took one legitimate incident to lend credibility to all the loose talk for years to come.

“So with that camera, you keep tapes or anything?” I asked.

“Sort of, hang on,” he said. He said a few things in Spanish to one of the guys taking orders, who immediately assumed Khalid’s post behind the grill.

“Come on,” Khalid said, walking through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and into a small office. A newish computer sat on a cluttered table, and he parked himself in front of it.

“This is actually pretty cool,” he continued. “They got these companies that want to charge you a billion bucks a month for monitoring, and then a billion more to store your data. But I figured out how to do it on this computer for free. The stuff you can do with wireless now is incredible.”

How about that: Khalid, short-order chef and closeted computer nerd.

“How much does the outside camera see of the street?” I asked.

“It’s pretty high up, so it sees a lot. Here, let me show you,” he said as he started fiddling with the mouse.

A few clicks later, I was looking at a reasonably wide angle view of Springfield Avenue, including the sidewalk outside the entrance to Windy’s place a few doors down.

“How long do you keep the data?”

“Oh, I got like a month’s worth. I got a big-ass hard drive and the way I got the camera set, it only takes a picture every six seconds. That makes the file sizes smaller, so I can keep it for a while before I got to throw it out for space.”

“So if I wanted to see a week ago Tuesday, around lunchtime, could you do that?”

“Yeah. Hang on a sec,” he said, and clicked some more. He opened a file folder with the appropriate date, then started choosing among data files that were labeled by time: “00:01–03:00,” “03:01–06:00,” and so on. He selected “12:01–15:00” and clicked.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. But I’m hoping I’ll know when I see it.”

The full-color footage was relatively decent quality-several steps above the grainy black-and-white stuff you see on the news whenever there’s a convenience-store robbery-though the one-frame-per-six-second shutter speed made it like watching TV on jittery fast-forward.

After a few minutes of seeing nothing promising, I started feeling bad for Khalid, who had a restaurant to run. I assured him I could handle it by myself. He gave me a brief primer on how to work the controls before going back to his grill.

Over the next twenty minutes of footage-which covered about two hours’ worth of real time-there were one or two images that made me stop the tape and take a closer look. But nothing really seemed like what I was looking for.

Then I finally got a hit.

* * *

I watched it a few times all the way through, then started going frame by frame.

Frames 1–4: A small, white pickup truck-New Jersey license plate JNM 89V-pulls up outside Windy’s office.

Frames 5–7: The truck, now parked, sits still, with the driver inside. It’s impossible to tell what he’s doing-listening to a good song as it finishes up? — or whether he’s idling or has cut the ignition.

Frame 8: The driver, small statured and brown skinned, probably Hispanic, gets out of the truck. He’s wearing a black baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, a bulky sweatshirt with the hood off, and jeans. I don’t see any tools or tool belt. But he looks like a guy who might be a contractor of some sort.

Frames 9-11: The man walks to the front door of Windy’s place. It’s hard to tell for sure, but it looks like he’s moving with a certain amount of urgency.

Frames 12–15: I don’t actually see him ring the bell-that part must have happened in between six-second interludes-but he’s standing outside like he’s hit the button and is waiting for Denardo Webster to get off his plentiful rump and buzz him in.

Frames 16–31: The man disappears inside. Traffic continues moving up Springfield Avenue in that herky, jerky style.

Frames 32–33: The man reappears and walks back to his Datsun.

Frames 34–35: The truck pulls away.

Figuring six seconds per frame, the whole transaction lasted three and a half minutes. I briefly tried to figure out how to do a screen grab and e-mail myself some of the key images, but that was beyond my technical abilities. So I did the next best thing, printing out several of the frames on a nearby ink-jet.

I reemerged from the office to find Khalid in his favorite spot, in front of his grill.

“I think I found what I was looking for,” I said. “Thanks more than you know. I gotta run.”

“All right,” Khalid announced. “The PO-lice is gone, everyone can relax now.”

Most of them seemed to know Khalid was kidding. But a few of them gave me the stink-eye just in case.

I was fairly certain I had found my Spanish dude-or, more important, his license plate. But there was one man who could confirm it for me, and he was just a few doors down, still working through his chicken and fries.

“What’s going on, my friend?” Denardo Webster asked as soon as I had been buzzed in. Yeah, we were friends. Sure. Blackmail makes everyone fast pals.

“I think I found your Spanish dude on some surveillance camera footage,” I said, laying my printouts on his desk. “This him?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s the guy. Damn, that’s definitely him. He’s always wearing that hoodie, too. I forgot about that. Don’t matter how cold it is, he just wears that blue hoodie.”

“This picture jog anything else in your memory about him?”

“You know, I don’t think I ever heard that little dude say more than like two words all the times he came in here,” Webster said. “I don’t know if he spoke much English.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

He thought for a second, then shook his head. “Here’s my card,” I said. “If anything else comes to you, call me.”

“You bet.”

By the time I walked out the door and got in my car, I had already dialed Rodney Pritchard’s number.

“Pritchard,” he answered.

“I need a quick favor,” I said.

“It’d better be quick,” he said. “I got a date with a ham sandwich.”

“Can you run a plate for me? New Jersey JNM 89V.”

“Yeah, hang on,” he said, and I heard him typing. “It’s a 1991 Datsun. You must be hanging out with the rich and famous again.”

“Yeah, I saw Paris Hilton driving it.”

“Well, it’s registered to Hector Gomes. DOB 1/16/74.”

He gave me an address on Van Buren Street in Newark.

“Thanks Pritch,” I said. “I-”

“I’ll say it for you: you owe me.”

“I do, indeed,” I said. “Enjoy that sandwich.”

“Mmphhll,” he said, then hung up.

I started the Malibu and did a quick illegal U-turn back in the direction of Van Buren, which was in the Ironbound. I was about halfway there when my cell phone rang and “Thang, Sweet” flashed up on the screen.

“Hello, darling, how have you been?”

“I’ve been great,” she whispered. “I found Akilah. I’m with her right now, but she doesn’t know I’m calling you. So shhh.”

“Good news,” I whispered back, even though I probably didn’t need to. “Where did you find her?”

“I texted her and told her I forgave her for stealing my jewelry and if she needed anything she could always call me and I would still be her friend. She called me like thirty seconds later.”

“Awesome,” I said. “So, what’d she have to say about her ex-boyfriend?”

“Oh, she confirmed everything. She said she and Windy dated for a long time and that he bought her the house, but then a little while ago he came and told her he had to sell it because he couldn’t afford it anymore. She said she got that second job because she was going to try to work out a deal with him where she paid the mortgage herself.”

“Why didn’t she just tell us that the first time we talked to her?” I asked.

“She said she still loves Windy, even though they broke up, and she knew if it got out he had an affair it could hurt him politically and she didn’t want to get him in any trouble.”

“That’s nice of her,” I said. The loyal, loving ex-girlfriend. How come I always got the vindictive ones who mailed back my favorite sweatshirt in ribbons?

“I think she knows who killed Windy,” Sweet Thang whispered with extra fierceness.

“Really? Who?”

“She’s hinted at it a couple times, but she won’t tell me. She says she doesn’t want to put me at risk, whatever that means. I can’t get her to … Hang on, she’s coming, call me right back.”

Sweet Thang hung up. I dialed her number.

“Hello!” she said in a chipper, much louder voice. Obviously, our phone call was now with Akilah’s full awareness.

“Hey, Lauren, it’s Carter,” I said.

“Oh, hi, Carter!” Sweet Thang said, as if we hadn’t spoken in years. She put the phone down for a moment and announced to Akilah, “It’s Carter. Remember my colleague Carter?

“How are you?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m just ducky,” I said. “Where are you guys right now?”

I could hear Sweet Thang cup the phone.

“He wants to know where I am. Is it okay if I tell him?” she asked Akilah, who must have signaled her assent because Sweet Thang brought the phone back to her mouth and said: “We’re back at Akilah’s house, just getting a few things. I’m helping her move into a Red Cross shelter.”

I was about to tell her that sounded like a fine idea. But before I could get the words out, I was interrupted by Sweet Thang’s loud, piercing scream.

Then the line went dead.

The abduction of Wendell Byers went as smoothly as Primo could have hoped, aided in no small part by Byers’s own lack of guard. The fool was convinced being a councilman made him invincible, as if elected officials didn’t bleed like everyone else.

Byers was so unsuspecting, Primo probably could have done the job himself. But Primo brought two men along, just in case. They were pros from New York, rented thugs. They went through the front door-unlocked-and found him in the study, typing on his laptop. He was, naturally, outraged at the intrusion. But his blather only lasted so long. One of the thugs clunked him on the head with a paperweight, opening a small gash in his scalp. The other bound him with an electrical cord. Together, they dragged him out of his house while Primo, having nothing else to do, grabbed the laptop.

It had been an afterthought, taking the computer. Later, when a broken Byers started whispering secrets, Primo realized it had been a brilliant bit of criminal intuition.

But first Primo had to do the breaking. They tossed Byers in the trunk of Primo’s sedan, then brought him back to the warehouse. When Byers came to and found himself tied to a chair, he was indignant at first, filling the room with his how-dare-yous and you’ll-pay-for-thises. It was typical Byers bluster, and Primo wanted to silence it.

So he took his nail gun, grabbed Byers by the wrist, and shot a nail into Byers’s right hand, actually pinning it to the wall behind him. The man yelped with pain, cursing Primo loudly and profanely-as if it would do any good.

There was still too much fight in Byers. So, slowly, Primo took it out of him. He positioned a clock in front of Byers’s eyes and informed the councilman that he would be leaving the room for ten minutes. Then he returned and punched a nail in Byers’s forearm.

Primo knew the anticipation of pain was almost as excruciating as the pain itself. So he kept returning every ten minutes, wordlessly shooting a nail into another part of Byers’s body, then departing. After forty minutes, Byers stopped cursing him. After an hour and a half, Byers was more than ready to talk. After three hours, Byers was begging to talk. But Primo waited until four hours passed before he chose to listen.

That’s when it came pouring out of Byers-all the answers to Primo’s questions, everything Primo needed to bring this messy arrangement to a neat conclusion. Whenever Primo decided Byers was being something slightly less than a hundred percent forthcoming, he left the room, announcing he would return in ten minutes. Sometimes he left the room even when Byers was cooperating. It kept Byers’s fear at the appropriate level.

Eventually, the councilman began growing weak, slipping in and out of consciousness. So Primo finally finished him off with a few nails to the head. By that point, Primo had already learned everything he needed to know.

Other than the laptop-which Primo already possessed-Byers had left behind just one piece of evidence that could prove troublesome for Primo. But Primo could take care of that quickly enough.