Faces of the Gone

CHAPTER 8

I must have yelled Red’s name twenty or thirty times, with each repetition a little louder, a little more desperate than the last. I yelled until my throat went raw and I lost the breath to yell anymore.

But he wasn’t there. Or perhaps he was, but only as a corpse buried under several tons of debris. I started walking toward Building Five to, I don’t know, say a prayer or something. Then somewhere off in the distance, I heard a faint voice.

“Who there?” it said.

“Red?” I shouted one final time.

“What you want?” the voice said, and this time I could trace it a little better. It was coming from Building Three. And it sounded like Red.

I ran toward Building Three, pushing my numb legs to move as fast as they could. As I got closer, I saw Red’s patchy-bald head sticking out of a second-story window. I never thought I would be so happy to see an old homeless man in Newark.

“Hey, Red!” I said, feeling some warmth returning to my body. “Remember me? Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner.”

“Yessir. I got Queen Mary right here,” he said, then lowered his voice for a moment. “I’m trying to get me a little some, you know what I mean?”

I was so happy to see him alive, it didn’t bother me that the image of two aging addicts in the throes of passion was now drifting through my mind.

“Why aren’t you dead right now?” I asked.

“Oh, you mean with the building and all that? Shoooot,” he said. Red was directly above me, one story up. I was still on ground level, which made me feel like the world’s weirdest Romeo looking up at the world’s ugliest Juliet.

“Yeah, you weren’t in Building Five this morning?”

“Oh, I was there,” Red said.

“Then how did you not get blown up?”

“Aw, hell, youngster, I got more lives than a kitty cat,” Red boasted. “Can’t nothing blow me up.”

“You mean you were inside?”

“Well, I was jus’ layin’ in there with Queen Mary”-more bad visuals-“when I heard this racket coming from the fire escape,” he began, and I imagined this was not his first time telling the story today. “An’ I was thinking, ‘Who’s comin’ visitin’ at this time of the mornin’?’ Our friends ain’t exactly early risers, you know?”

I nodded. Red sounded a little less drunk than the first time I spoke with him, which was to say he might have only been two sheets to the wind instead of the usual three.

“So I stole a peek around the corner, an’ I saw this guy with a bunch of dy-no-mite. An’ I thought he was from the city, come to blow the buildin’ up. They’s always talking about how they gonna blow it up. An’ I jus’ thought maybe today was the day, an’ they jus’ hadn’t told none of us street people, you know?”

“Right,” I said.

“So I watch him go ’bout his bidness, pickin’ out a wall and tapin’ his dy-no-mite and fussin’ with all his doodads. And then he musta gone and taped it to some other walls or something, I don’t know. But as soon as he was gone, I went an’ got Mary. An’ I said, ‘Mary, we best be gettin’ usselves outta here. It about to blow.’ An’ you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘Awww, there you go again,’ ” Red said, and then started howling with hee-haws, punctuating it with some woohoos, then finishing with some hoo-wees. I laughed to be polite, having no idea what he found so funny. Then again, I’m not sure it was fair to expect total clarity from a guy whose last sober day had probably been while I was in the first grade.

“So I said, ‘No, no, Mary, we got to go. I mean, we got to go now,’ ” Red said. “An’ she didn’t say nothin’. An’ I said, ‘Mary, we got to go.’ An’ I done picked her up and carried her out, jus’ like I was Superman.”

I was having a tough time believing Red could carry a well-mannered lapdog-much less an inert old woman-down a fire escape. And apparently so did Queen Mary.

“There you go again!” she hollered from somewhere inside the building. And Red, finding this every bit as inexplicably hysterical as last time, started with a fresh round of har-hars, tee-hees, and ho-hos. I let him finish and he continued.

“Now, we wasn’t out of the buildin’ mo’ than three minutes and, WHAMBO, the whole damn place done gone sky-high, and then it fell down, jus’ like it was a deck of cards fallin’ in on isself. It was a terrible noise like you ain’ never heard. And you know what?”

“What?”

“It wasn’t no man from the city after all. Folks here is sayin’ it was jus’ a man up to no good, jus’ wantin’ to blow up our buildin’ because he don’ wan’ it here no more. Can you believe that?”

“Actually, I can,” I said. “He blew up my house, too.”

Red couldn’t have looked more surprised if a bottle of Majorska vodka up and started talking to him.

“You don’ say!” he said. “Mary, you hear that? Remember that white boy who got us the food? That big feller with the dy-no-mite, he done blowed up the white boy’s house, too!”

“I heard him the first time,” Mary said tersely from inside the building.

“Well, don’ get all sore. I was jus’ sayin’,” Red said, then turned and gave me the universal male shrug that loosely translated to, Women, what can you do?

“Red, tell me something. The guy with the bunch of dynamite, how big was he?”

“Little bit taller than you an’ about twice as wide. He had hisself a neck like a bull.”

Red held his hands a fair distance apart to signify a substantial width. That sounded like Van Man to me.

“Did you get a good look at him?” I asked.

“Sho’ as I’m lookin’ at you right now, youngster.”

This was getting too good to be true. Not only was Red alive, he was possibly the only living witness who could ID a serial murdering arsonist. And, yes, there was the small problem of what, exactly, Red had managed to see through his Mad Dog 20/20 goggles. But it was still a hell of a lot better than nothing.

“What did he look like?”

“Well, like I said, he was a big feller an. .”

“Do you think you could describe him to a sketch artist?” I said, cutting to the chase.

With that, Red leaned back from the window for a moment, straightening himself.

“Well, now,” he said. “That all depend, don’t it?”

I caught his drift immediately.

“Another trip to the store on me,” I said.

Red flashed a smile that displayed his teeth-both of them-and said, “Make it three.”

With the issue of compensation settled, Red and I hopped into the Malibu, which I turned in the direction of police headquarters. I drove quickly, mostly because Red was stinking up my car so badly I was afraid the upholstery might need to be detoxed if he stayed in there too long. With my non-driving hand, I called Tina.

She answered the phone with all the warmth I expected.

“You’re a total ass,” she said.

“I know, I know.”

“No, you don’t know. I’m sitting here wondering if you’re dead or alive like I’m some kind of damn war bride. I am not a damn war bride!”

Tina was clearly a little crazed (is there such a thing as mind-altering ovulation hormones?). And while in my younger days I’d tried reasoning with crazy women, I had reached the conclusion, sometime in the wisdom of my late twenties, that it was simply not possible. As long as she was immersed in crazy, it was better to just agree with whatever she said until she emerged from said state. I guess you could say I had become a conscientious nonobjecter.

“You’re right,” I said. “You’re not a war bride.”

“If you think you’re getting any tonight, you are so mistaken.”

“I never thought that for a moment,” I said.

“For a while, I was thinking about teasing you and leaving you with a crippling case of blue-balls. But the fact is, I am so repulsed by you right now, I’m not sure I even want to be in the same room with you.”

“Definitely separate rooms,” I concurred.

“Make that separate zip codes.”

“So should I find another place to spend the night?”

“Of course not,” she spat. “Don’t be an ass.”

“Sorry.”

“You have no idea how sorry you are!” she said, and then all I heard was the slamming of a phone.

I looked over at Red, who had this knowing smile on his face.

“I’m not sure I understand what just happened,” I said.

“Sounds like you got woman problems,” he observed.

“I suppose I do.”

“Ain’ nothing you can do ’bout it,” Red said with what was, for him, a philosophical air. “Sometimes those women, they jus’ love you so much they gotta yell at you to show it.”

“Is that so?”

“Trus’ me. I’ve had mo’ women love me like that than I can count.”

I nodded. Red started scratching himself. And we left it at that. I found a metered space not far from the Green Street entrance to police headquarters and herded Red inside.

After sliding my business card through a slot in the bullet-proof glass, I explained to the desk sergeant that the musty-looking gentleman with me had gotten a good look at the guy who blew up the Booker T building this morning.

The desk sergeant, an older guy with a white flattop who was probably just trying to hang on for another year or two until retirement, gave me this you-gotta-be-kiddin’-me look and picked up the phone. He talked for a few moments, then clicked on the microphone that allowed his voice to be heard in the lobby.

“One minute,” he said.

Red had already settled into the ancient couch in the lobby. He probably knew as well as anyone, when you were waiting for the Newark police, you might as well get comfortable.

“So, have you always lived around here?” I asked.

“Naw, I been all over,” he said. “North Carolina. Maryland. Georgia. Served in Germany when I was in the army.”

“You were in the army?”

“What? You think I been a bum all my life?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I began.

“Tha’s okay,” he said, laughing. “I’m jus’ messin’ witchya. I like bein’ a bum. Can’t nobody tell you what to do when you don’t got no boss to please and no landlord to pay.”

Tough to argue with that worldview. . y’know, as long as you don’t mind sleeping in abandoned buildings in Newark.

“So how long have you, uh. .”-been a bum-“lived in Newark?”

“I dunno. What year is it now?”

“Two thousand and-” I started.

But he was laughing again. “Come on, now, still messin’ witchya. I guess I been here, off an’ on, for ’bout twenty year. Used to go down South for the winter, jus’ thumb my way down then thumb my way back. But I’m getting’ too ol’ for that. Thumbin’ ain’ what it used to be. An’, besides, Mary’d miss me.”

“How long you and Mary been, uh. .”-knocking boots-“with each other?”

“Oh, I’d say fo’ or five year now. Off an’ on. Can’t tie me down to jus’ one woman, you know. But sometimes I wonder what woulda happen if we met when we was younger. Maybe things woulda been different. Maybe we woulda had a family. .” Red said, his voice trailing off.

How about that. Red Coles was not only homeless by choice, he was also a bit of a romantic. I was about to comment on it when Hakeem Rogers emerged from behind a door and motioned toward Red.

“Three shoppin’ trips, right?” Red said.

“Three trips,” I said with a nod, and Red bounced off the couch and through the door. I gave chase but was stopped by the lieutenant’s outstretched hand.

“You his daddy?” Rogers asked.

“Huh? No.”

“His mommy?

“No.”

“Then you can’t come with him,” Rogers said, pleased with himself.

“No fair outwiseassing a wiseass,” I said.

“They give me bonus pay for pissing you off,” Rogers replied. “Can’t wait to spend that check.”

“Yeah, now you’ll finally be able to get your mother that syphilis treatment she’s been needing,” I said. Then I called out to Red, “I’ll see you when you’re done.”

Figuring I had a little time to kill, I went to a nearby pizzeria for two much-needed slices and a much-more-needed Coke Zero. On the way back, I swung by my car and retrieved the envelope the Browns had taken off Rashan. I had only glanced at its contents earlier and wanted to give them more serious scrutiny.

I slid the photos out and shuffled through them one by one, trying to study each in a variety of different ways. It’s amazing the things you can glean from a photo simply by breaking it down a little-looking at it piece by piece, instead of as a whole; cutting it up into an imaginary grid and only staring at one quadrant at a time; or holding it at certain angles or distances.

So that’s what I did, poring over each picture detail by detail. It was gut-roiling work. The exit wounds had mangled the victims’ features to the point where you weren’t sure if you were looking at human beings or roadkill.

Still, you could (sort of) tell how beautiful Wanda Bass had once been. Tyrone Scott (kind of) looked like a guy who always grabbed a second helping at Sunday dinner. Shareef Thomas (maybe) had been a lady’s man, with a scraggly little beard and a soul patch. Devin Whitehead? His shoulder-length dreadlocks covered part of his face, so it was hard to get much of a read on him.

Ordinarily, if you dissect a photograph long enough, it will gradually yield its secrets. It can tell you things not only about the scene being captured but the person who did the capturing. Over time, I think you can even begin to understand the intent of the photographer, how he felt about his subject and what he really wanted to show you.

But for as much as I examined these pictures, they never became more than what they appeared to be at first glance: four horrific portraits of people whose petty crime had been deemed worthy of death by a pitiless judge. Four faces of people now gone.

The memo wasn’t much more useful. In its own way, it was every bit as cold and spare as the pictures, leaving almost no room for interpretation.

I leaned back in my seat and looked up, slightly bleary-eyed from having stared at the photos so long. I was getting tired of playing detective. And it was only when I slipped off my detective hat and started thinking like a journalist again that I remembered the materials in my lap would make for a fantastic story.

A deranged drug lord who sent corporate memos to his dealers like they were middle managers in cubicles? Yep, Brodie would get such a boner over that he wouldn’t be able to walk.

I looked at the clock on my cell phone. 7:37 P.M. No point trying to squeeze it into tomorrow’s paper. We had plenty of news already, what with buildings blowing up across the circulation area. Besides, the Sunday editor would be cruising for something that would keep us in the lead on the Ludlow Street story. This would fit that need.

It occurred to me I also might want to make some copies of the Director’s gruesomely illustrated package and hand them over to the National Drug Bureau. But then I remembered my last interaction with L. Pete, which had left me hoping he contracted an incapacitating toe fungus. If he wasn’t going to be better at sharing, I would just keep my toys to myself. He could read about the photos in Sunday’s paper like everyone else; then maybe I would hand them over. If he promised to behave. Or if he subpoenaed me.

I looked at my phone again: 7:40. Red had been with the sketch artist for about an hour, and I couldn’t decipher whether that was a good sign (because Red gave them a lot of detail for an accurate portrait) or a bad one (because Red was so incoherent he was making the perp look like the Elephant Man).

He reemerged a few minutes later, triumphantly waving a sheet of paper above his head.

“This is him,” he said. “This is the guy.”

This was Van Man. I looked at the sketch, hoping it might spark some recognition. Red had described a doughy-cheeked, thick-necked, middle-aged white man with a receding hairline. The guy looked more like a candidate for erectile dysfunction medicine than a serial murderer. I don’t want to say the sketch was completely useless, inasmuch as I suppose it could rule out some people. But if you went by this picture alone, half the country club members in New Jersey had just become suspects.

“I tol’ the computer what he look like and the computer done made this picture,” Red said. “Tha’s one smart computer.”

“We just got the system,” Rogers told me. “It lets us tweak things until we get it just right. Cuts the time to get a sketch done in half.”

I looked down at the picture again, trying to imprint the face in my brain in case it should suddenly round a corner in my immediate future.

“So what will you guys do with this?” I asked.

“We’ll send it to our many friends in the media, of course,” Rogers said. “Then we’ll show it to the officers in the patrol division.”

“And then you give it to the National Drug Bureau?” I said.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What do you mean, you guess? You said they’ve taken over the case.”

“Oh, they’ve taken it, all right. The lead guy in the Newark office called our chief and made a big stink. Then when our detectives paid them the courtesy of going over there with a box full of evidence, they gave ’em the usual ‘we’re feds, we’re better than you’ act. Bunch of jerk-offs, if you ask me. But you can’t quote me on that.”

Red wasn’t any more eager to hang at police headquarters than I was. So we cleared out and I took us in the direction of the Pathmark on Bergen Street, the only major chain supermarket in Newark. A deal was, after all, a deal. I encouraged Red to buy whatever he wanted-after all, it was sort of my fault his last haul of groceries had blown up. But Red’s tab only came to $41.05.

“Can’t carry but so much anyway,” he told me.

I took him back to Booker T with misgivings about dropping him back into such a cold night. The wind had picked up again, and the forecast was calling for a low of seventeen degrees. Red didn’t seem concerned by it. He was shaking a bit, but I didn’t think it was from the cold.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to a shelter?” I asked.

“Naw, I gotta get me a little something to drink. An’ if you go to the shelter, they take it from you,” he said as another tremor racked his body. He was nearly sober and his nervous system was starting to go haywire without booze.

“Suit yourself,” I said as the car pulled to a stop outside Booker T.

“Say, you mind loanin’ me a few bucks?” he asked nervously.

I reached into my wallet and pulled out a ten. Perhaps it wasn’t the most responsible thing to do, enabling his disease. But it felt like the humane thing to do under the circumstances. “This do?” I asked.

“Oh, that’ll do fine,” he said, pocketing it quickly. “I sho’ do ’preciate it.”

“No problem. Is this where I can find you over the next couple days or will you be on the move?”

“Well, Mary ’n me got usselves set up in Building Three pretty good,” he said. “I s’pose we be staying there for a little while.”

“All right,” I said. “Stay warm.”

Then I added, “Thanks for your help, Red,” and stuck out my right hand.

He grasped it-which was like shaking hands with forty-grit sandpaper-and flashed me a two-tooth smile.

“You best watch out for yo’self, youngster,” he said. “This ain’ no place for a white boy after dark.” He thought for a moment and, still holding the handshake, said, “This ain’ no place for no one after dark.”

“I’ll be careful, promise,” I said. He let go of my hand, grabbed his groceries, and stumbled off into the night.

I watched him until he disappeared around the corner, then got moving. I had pushed my luck long enough.

Having nowhere else to go, I drove back to the office to make peace with my new roommate, Tina. On the way in, I passed Buster Hays, who was in the lobby, pulling on a trench coat.

“Have a nice one, Ivy,” Buster said.

“You, too, Hays,” I said, and was about to get in the elevator when something stopped me, something that had been tickling my brain for the last few hours and had now developed into a full-blown itch.

“Hey, you got a quick second?” I said.

Hays finished wrestling with his coat and glanced at his watch. “I’m officially thirty-seven minutes overdue for my first Scotch of the weekend. Make it fast.”

“It’s about Irving Wallace.”

“Ah, Irving. He help you out?”

“He did. Twice, actually. I’m just curious: how do you know him?”

“Aw, shoot, Irving?” Buster said. “When I met him, you weren’t even a stain on your mom’s sheets.”

“So, it’s been a while. .”

“Oh, it’s been a while,” Hays said, enjoying himself. This was Hays in his glory: seizing the chance to remind a young whippersnapper how much more he knew about the world, how many more sources he had, or how much longer he had been around the neighborhood. And I, being a young whippersnapper in need of the information, had no choice but to listen.

“Let’s see,” Hays continued. “I met Irving Wallace in roughly 1970? Or 1972? The first couple years I worked for this paper, I covered high school sports. You might not believe it, but back in the day, Irving Wallace, the mild-mannered chemist, was a beast of a center for the Summit High School boys’ basketball team.”

“Really?” I said, genuinely surprised.

“Oh, yeah. You see more kids like it now, just because kids are bigger these days. But they didn’t make ’em like Irving back then. He was big and mean. He couldn’t shoot a lick from the outside, but he was a ferocious rebounder-on offense and defense. He made all-conference on put-backs alone.”

I became aware that my heart was pounding.

“How tall was he exactly?”

“Jesus, Ivy, it’s not like I’m still carrying the roster,” he said, sighing.

“You think he was maybe six four, six five?”

“Sure.”

“How much you think he weighs now?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years. We talk on the phone.”

“Any chance he might have ballooned up a little bit?”

“We all do,” Hays said, patting his stomach. “You doing an expose on old fat men now?”

“No, I just. . Who does he work for, anyway?”

“I really don’t know. He’s real secretive about that and I never bothered to ask because he’s always been good about helping me when I need his expertise. He must have been in the military for a while, because he went to West Point. Irving tells me I wrote a story about it when he got accepted and I take his word for it. Forty years’ worth of stories can tend to blend together,” Buster said, then got a faraway look for a moment.

He continued: “Anyway, I don’t know how long he was in the army-we weren’t pen pals or anything-and I think he was in the private sector for a while. Then he switched to the government and we got reconnected when he ended up helping some sources of mine on a case. He remembered me from the old days, I remembered him. I still don’t know what part of the government he’s with-he’s big on that ‘I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you’ crap. But I do know his title is ‘lab director.’ ”

“Lab director?” I said. “So the people who work for him, they would call him ‘Director.’ ”

The pounding in my chest had now spread. I could feel it in my head now, a tiny little jackhammer going at the base of my skull.

“I don’t know,” Hays said. “I guess so, yeah. Why is your face getting red?”

“It’s just getting hot in here,” I said, taking off my jacket.

“Well, I hear that Scotch calling my name. I better be going,” he said, pushing through the door into the cold.

So Irving Wallace was six four or six five, possibly three hundred pounds. He had been a ferocious rebounder back in the day, the kind of guy who might grow into someone who was ferocious at other things. He had no shortage of access to heroin. What had he told me? That his lab saw thousands of kilos of heroin a year? That would certainly be enough to fuel a major distribution ring.

Then there was the coincidence that Wallace had just so happened to call Buster Hays out of the blue a few days earlier. Hays had said something about not having talked to the guy in forever and then, bam, Wallace called to chat him up the moment Hays’s byline appeared on the Ludlow Street story.

Finally, there was that itchy spot in my brain: in the article, I had mentioned the Stop-In Go-Go, Miss B’s apartment, and Building Five at Booker T as places where I had found evidence of The Stuff, and they had all been torched.

I had never mentioned my house in the article. I had only mentioned it to one person.

Irving Wallace.

The elevator arrived, and as I rode up, I began to wonder if there was any other information I had gathered that might make Irving Wallace fit with the crime.

Of course. The gun. Rosa Bricker-the funeral director with the unexpectedly keen eye for forensics-had offered the professional opinion that the shooter had used a.40-caliber pistol. It had struck me as odd at the time, because.40 caliber is generally used by law enforcement. But I had dismissed it by assuming the perp had gotten his mitts on some pensioner’s gun-never thinking the perp was a pensioner.

What else? I began replaying each of my interactions with Irving Wallace. The first time he wasn’t even going to talk to me until I said the words “Ludlow Street,” and suddenly he was interested. He had seemed pretty paranoid, which I had chalked up to him being a fed. Really, it’s because he was a criminal.

Our next talk was after he did the testing for me. He freely told me the samples were more than 99 percent pure. Why tell me that? Wouldn’t that just lead me closer to the truth?

Then it dawned on me: free advertising. He told me I could write it was the purest heroin ever sold on the streets in America. He knew I would write it-newspaper reporters are suckers for superlatives like that. And once New Jersey’s largest newspaper reported The Stuff was 99-plus percent pure, junkies from Newark all the way out to the Delaware Water Gap would be trying to get their hands on it. If I had the dexterity to kick my own ass, I would have.

Then I thought about how he ended that conversation:

Is what you gave me the only samples you have?

I have one more bag of each-The Stuff and the generic.

And you’re keeping them in a safe place?

I’m going to tuck them away in my piggy bank at home.

Good. Wouldn’t want them getting out.

In my piggy bank at home. Lord. That one little throwaway line, which wasn’t even true, had nearly gotten me killed.

Then I thought about our latest conversation, when he tried to put me off the theory that La Cabra was responsible for Ludlow Street. What had he said? That someone like La Cabra wouldn’t reach down to the street level in Newark? That someone was “snowing” me?

I chortled. It might have been the only factual thing he told me-it just conveniently left out that he was the person doing the snowing. Of course he would steer me away from La Cabra: he wanted to protect his boss.

I wondered how Irving Wallace, high school basketball hero and proud graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, could have fallen so far as to get in with a scumbag like Jose de Jesus Encarceron. What a sad, fascinating tale-one I would no doubt flesh out in the coming days.

My legs had switched into autopilot and taken me to my desk, where I sat down and immediately went to our handy voter registration database. I typed in “Irving Wallace” and found three of them living in New Jersey.

One was in South Jersey, beyond commuting distance. One was in East Orange, which would have made him one of about three white people in the whole city. But one was in Summit, on New England Avenue. The one time pride of Summit High School had stuck around his hometown.

I typed the address from voter registration into our property-ownership database and found out that, indeed, Irving and Sharon Wallace owned a home on New England Avenue. And it was valued at $1.4 million. Not a bad little shack for a humble government scientist.

I turned next to Lexis-Nexis, which told me, among other things, that Irving Wallace did not have a mortgage on his shack. He owned it free and clear, no liens, no nothing.

“Must be very frugal,” I said to myself.

“What’s that?” a familiar voice said.

I looked up and Tina Thompson was sitting across from me.

“Oh, hi,” I said, a little startled.

“I’ve been here for ten minutes,” she said. “You’ve had your head buried in that screen the whole time. Another five minutes and I was going to start peeling off clothing and see if you would notice.”

“Well, in that case. .” I said, sticking my face three inches away from the screen and banging on the keys.

Tina giggled, then added an adorable smile/hair flip/eye bat combination. A little more than an hour ago, she had been breathing fire at me through the phone. And now she was. . flirting with me?

“I know it’s not unusual for me to be slow on something like this,” I said. “But I’m trying to keep up: weren’t you pissed at me?”

“Oh, very.”

“And now you’re. .”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry?”

The female of the species is, indeed, a most confounding creature.

“Yeah,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you. That’s why I came over here. You’ve had an awful day, the kind of day I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And as I was thinking about it, I realized I was probably only making matters worse being such a bitch. And I feel just terrible about that. So I want to apologize.”

“Oh, well, okay,” I said. As far as I could track, Tina had gone from nurturing consoler (last night), to worried friend (this morning), to overprotective bodyguard (this afternoon), to ranting quasi-girlfriend (earlier this evening), to remorseful supplicant (right now), to. . whatever she would be in five minutes.

“This is usually the point in the conversation when you should say something like, ‘apology accepted,’ ” Tina prompted.

“Oh, yeah, yeah. Definitely. Apology accepted. It’s been a long day.”

“So we’re okay now?”

“We’re great.”

She moved over to sit in an empty seat at the desk across from mine. My reward-the superspecial toe-curl smile-was followed by a more serious countenance.

“Are we good enough that I can give you a lecture?” she asked.

“I suppose I have one coming.”

“It’s real simple. Just be careful, okay? I care about you.”

“I thought you only cared about my reproductive capacity,” I said, fixing her with what I hoped was an endearing grin.

“Well, that, too. But I don’t want to have to tell my future child that his father got killed three days after conception.”

“Conception? Who says I’m going to sleep with you? Since when am I that easy?”

“Since puberty, I’m guessing.”

Couldn’t exactly counter that point, so I decided to lecture back for a moment.

“Okay, I know you’re just looking out for me. And it’s sweet, it really is. It shows your maternal side.”

She blushed a bit.

“But,” I continued, “this thing is, I don’t know, it’s like my responsibility now. I mean, there are four people in the morgue whose chances for justice are slipping away by the hour and it doesn’t look like anyone in an official capacity cares much whether they get it. Then there’s the matter of the woman in the hospital struggling for her life because of something I wrote.”

Tina reached out across the desk and grabbed my hand.

“That’s not true. You didn’t send that woman to the hospital. Some monster with a gasoline can and a lighter did that.”

“And the monster never would have known about Brenda Bass if it weren’t for me. It’s not like we have a Hippocratic oath in this business. But if we did, I think it’s pretty clear I violated it.”

“You’re being way too hard on yourself,” she said firmly.

“Look, I don’t kid myself into thinking I can fix this mess-it’s already too broken for that. But maybe I can make it a little better.

“Besides,” I said, with the requisite dramatic pause, “I think I may know who the bastard is.”

“Yeah?” she said, releasing my hand and sitting back, like she wanted to get a wide-angle look at me.

“Yeah. I was just about to visit him. Want to go for a ride?”

She drew back even farther.

“I’m not talking about a guns-blazing visit,” I continued. “Just an arm’s-length visit.”

She looked around at the copy desk, where the most pressing business seemed to be parceling out a group dinner order that had just come in.

“I don’t know if I can leave,” she said. “After I decided I wasn’t sleeping with you tonight I agreed to fill in as night assignment editor. Technically the paper is under my command right now.”

“Well, then I guess I just won’t tell you-”

“Oh, dammit, you’re impossible. Fine. First edition is pretty much done, anyway. It’s just a drive-by, right?”

Within five minutes, having bundled up against the cold, we were in my car, speeding toward the suburbs. I told Tina about the latest, ending with my brilliant deduction that Irving Wallace was “the Director” from the memo. Tina mostly just listened.

“So, basically, it’s that he’s tall, his title has ‘director’ in it, and he heard you make an offhand comment about your piggy bank,” she said when I finished.

“Yeah,” I said. “And the murder weapon was a forty-caliber gun like a fed would use. And he seems to have an overdeveloped curiosity for our coverage of the Ludlow Street murders. And he just seems like the kind of uptight guy who would write memos about things.”

“Uh-huh,” Tina said, but I could hear her uncertainty.

“And he’s got a fully paid-off house in Summit worth $1.4 million,” I added. “How does a government lab director swing that?”

“He could have inherited it,” she pointed out. “You said he grew up in town. Maybe that was the family manse?”

“He’s not old enough to have lost both his parents.”

“Mmm-hmm. And how did Irving Wallace find Hector Alvarez?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” I said. “But it stands to reason someone who does drug testing would have connections in the drug treatment community. The world isn’t that big.”

I turned off the interstate at the Summit exit, and not fifteen minutes after we departed Newark’s gritty streets we were driving along the tree-lined avenues of one of New Jersey’s nicest suburbs. This state could give you socioeconomic whip-lash that way.

“But you think Irving Wallace works for this La Cabra fellow?” Tina said.

“Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that one,” I admitted. “Call that a maybe. I mean, he did seem to go out of his way to try to throw me off that trail, like he was protecting someone. Why would he do that?”

“But, turn it around for a second, why would La Cabra want to work with Irving Wallace?” Tina asked as we climbed a hill, past rows of houses that got nicer as the elevation rose.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m saying, just imagine you’re a Colombian drug lord. You can probably convince just about any bad guy in America to work with you. Why would you want to collaborate with someone who works for the government?”

“Well, because. . because that way the government wouldn’t come after you,” I said. “Irving Wallace would be able to mislead them from the inside, push them in other directions.”

“No good,” Tina said. “I love conspiracy theories as much as the next girl. But there is just no way some bureaucrat with a chemistry set is going to convince the entire U.S. Department of Justice to call off the dogs on one of the world’s most notorious drug kingpins.”

“Good point,” I said. I should have thought of that myself. The La Cabra thing may have just been the National Drug Bureau’s ill-conceived way to explain four dead bodies, with no more credibility than the Newark police’s ill-considered barstickup theory. “I suppose it’s possible Irving Wallace is acting alone,” I conceded.

“Okay, so without the Colombian drug lord, how did Irving Wallace get the product he needed for his operation?” Tina asked.

“His lab tests thousands of kilos a year,” I said as we passed a sign for a hospital, then neared a train station. “He told me that himself.”

“And you think he got his drugs by skimming off a portion of whatever his lab got sent for testing.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“What about chain of custody?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” she said, “any drug seized by a law enforcement agency is eventually going to be used as evidence in a trial, right?”

“If all goes well, yeah.”

“So part of being used in evidence is having a clean chain of custody. Every person who handles it along the way has to sign something attesting that they didn’t tamper with it.”

“Uh-huh. And?” I asked, as we rolled past a YMCA, a library, a quaint little park, all the trappings of a well-tended, well-to-do town.

“I’m just saying that it’s not like John Q. Detective is going to fork over ten kilos of heroin to the lab and then not notice when only five kilos come back,” Tina said. “How did he get around that?”

“I don’t know. He’s a bright guy. He could have figured out something, I’m sure.”

“Oh, of course,” Tina said. “But then there’s the issue of purity.”

“What issue?” I asked, feeling increasingly worn down by Tina’s cross-examination. It was like being a rookie reporter again, and the editor was asking me all the questions I had been too feebleminded to think of myself.

“Well, Wallace told you-what was it you put in the paper? That it was the purest heroin ever sold?”

“Right.” I said, making a turn at a convenience store and passing several majestic Gothic churches.

“Okay, even assuming he was lying, everyone else has told you The Stuff was the best, that junkies adored it,” she said. “So we can assume it was pretty high purity.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So all Wallace has access to is heroin that has been seized off the street and comes into his lab. How is he possibly going to take that-a lot of which is garbage-and turn it into this product that drove all the junkies wild?”

“Christ, Tina,” I finally exploded. “He’s a chemist. Don’t you think he knows how to do something like that?”

“Okay, okay. Don’t get defensive. I’m just saying we have a few blanks to fill in, that’s all.”

“Editors,” I huffed. And she let me leave it at that.

Our destination, New England Avenue, was just on the other side of the downtown area, opposite the Grand Summit Hotel. We passed some apartments, then some town houses, then some smaller houses, then some larger ones. Then we came to the Irving Wallace residence. The place was completely dark, but I didn’t so much as tap the brakes as we rolled by.

“Hey, you passed it,” Tina said.

“I know,” I said, and drove two blocks farther down before turning around. On the way back, I turned off the headlights and we coasted to a stop. I didn’t know if the subterfuge was necessary, but it couldn’t hurt. Besides, with the lights off, it was less likely for a neighbor to notice a strange car and decide to call the cops. In Newark, my four-year-old Chevy Malibu was well camouflaged. In Summit, amid all the fancy imports and high-end domestics, it might as well have come with a neon sign that said JUST VISITING.

We took some time to stare at the house, looking for, I don’t know, signs of evil aura or something. But it was just your basic Tudor, slightly on the large side but not a mansion by any stretch. I was guessing five bedrooms, three baths, no more. Don’t get me wrong, it looked like it could keep the rain off your head. But it didn’t entirely fit what I was envisioning.

“I guess $1.4 million doesn’t buy that much anymore,” I said.

“Not in Summit, New Jersey, it doesn’t. Not even after a real estate slump.”

“Where do you think he buries his money?”

“Isn’t it always beneath the trapdoor that Scooby and Shaggy accidentally fall into?” Tina asked.

“Yeah, and he would have gotten away with it if not for us meddling kids,” I said.

I turned my attention back toward the house. There was a basketball hoop in the driveway. The hedges were neatly trimmed. There were two large trees in the front lawn, each of which looked to be a minimum of a hundred years old. There were no cars in the driveway, no sign of white vans anywhere-though I’m sure he would have been smart enough to stash his dirty-work vehicle elsewhere.

“I think I’ll go ring the doorbell,” I said.

Tina whirled to face me and voice her objections.

“Kidding,” I said, before she could get them out.

I shifted the Malibu out of park, turning the headlights back on when we had gotten under way. There was nothing to be gained by confronting Irving Wallace at this point. Fact was, as Tina had so effectively pointed out, I hadn’t even begun to figure out how his operation worked. And until I had a better idea, it was best that he not know I was closing in on him.

The newsroom was peaceful when we returned. By ten o’clock on a typical Friday night, there are usually more people working on the Sunday paper than are still fretting over Saturday’s edition, so no one is in too big a hurry. It’s not that we didn’t take Saturday seriously, but. . oh, hell, who am I kidding? We didn’t take Saturday seriously. It was our smallest paper of the week and the one day a week that didn’t count toward the numbers we gave to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. It was the closest a daily paper could come to taking a day off.

Tina had another two hours before she could abandon ship and focus her energies on entertaining me. I thought about borrowing her house key, crashing on her couch for a while, maybe rifling through her underwear drawer for fun. But-and maybe I just watch too many horror movies-I didn’t want to be the male equivalent of the dumb blonde at home alone when the axe murderer was on the loose.

Besides, if I went back to Tina’s place by myself, there would be nothing to do but mull things over, and there was no sense in letting my brain do too much catching up. I was afraid it would put me on the next flight to the Bahamas if it did.

So I ambled over to chat up Peterson, night rewrite man nonextraordinaire, to see what mayhem he was chronicling. Peterson started at the Eagle-Examiner as a clerk, when he was seventeen. As best I could tell, that had been 150 years ago-give or take. He moved into night work early in his career and had been doing it ever since.

Peterson’s job essentially consisted of waiting for people to die. If they died of natural causes, he wrote an obit. If the cause was unnatural, he wrote a news story. It would be impossible to put an exact number on how many thousands of New Jerseyans had their demises chronicled by Peterson. But when you figure he averaged two hundred bylines a year, the numbers added up.

Yet it never seemed to grow old to him. He attacked each death with relish, eagerly ferreting out the details that would allow him to write that the deceased was beloved by all (if it was an obit) or that a death had shocked an otherwise quiet community (if it was a murder) or that the deceased met his end amid the squeal of skidding tires and the shriek of breaking glass (if it was a car crash). His penchant for cliche was legendary.

But on this night, he looked bored.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.

“Pretty quiet tonight,” he said glumly. “Only one shooting.”

“Is it anything you can turn into a story?”

“I don’t think so. Just another Newark kid.”

He yawned out of boredom. I yawned because yawning is contagious and because I had been going nonstop for fourteen hours-and was starting to feel it.

“Police give you an ID?” I asked, just to keep the conversation going.

“Nope. He’s John Doe. They’re still looking for next of kin. We’ll be lucky if we get an ID in Monday’s paper.”

“Where’d it happen?”

“They won’t say.”

I cocked my head.

“What do you mean they won’t say?” I asked. If nothing else, we could always get a location.

Peterson yawned again. “They were being coy with me. Gave me the old ‘it’s an ongoing investigation’ and told me to call back later.”

“What time did you have that conversation?”

“I don’t know, an hour ago?”

“Well, it’s later now, isn’t it? What do you say you give our good friend Hakeem Rogers a call?”

“Good point,” he said, grabbing the phone and jabbing at the numbers. Peterson was from the manual-typewriter generation and therefore believed all buttons needed to be depressed with brute force, lest they fail to register.

“Rogers, it’s Peterson,” he said into the handset. “What’s going on with the kid who ate the bullet?” He waited. “I know you don’t have an ID. But you gotta have a location for me.” More pause. “Well, what gives, Rogers? How am I supposed to write a story that says someone got killed but we don’t know who and we don’t know where and we don’t know how? This is a newspaper, not a game of Clue.” Another pause. “Well, I don’t give a rat’s ass what your captain says. Tell your captain the law says the public has a right to know and I got a deadline.” Briefer pause. “Fine. Put him on.”

Peterson cupped the phone and looked at me. “I don’t know why they’re always playing these games with me. Every night, it’s like Professor Plum with the wrench in the study.”

Peterson returned the phone to his mouth. “Hi, Captain, it’s Peterson. Am I going to have to sic our lawyers on you guys or can we get a little cooperation here?”

The captain started speaking and Peterson’s hands suddenly came to life. He flipped his notebook to a blank page and began scribbling madly. Peterson was excitable by nature, so it was hard to tell if this was routine or if he was onto something big. I did my best to divine what was happening from Peterson’s half of the conversation:

“No kidding. . Unbelievable. . The exact same place?. . Against the back fence?. . How many?. . Where?. . Damn. And the call came in when?. . Any witnesses?. . You think it’s connected to the thing from before?. . Yeah, I’ll hang on.”

Peterson cupped the phone again. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “But they found another body in that vacant lot down on Ludlow Street.”

Ididn’t wait for Peterson to finish with the captain.

“I’m heading down there,” I told him. “Call me.”

Peterson nodded, returning his attention to his notepad. It occurred to me I should tell Tina where I was heading, partly as a courtesy and partly because she was in charge of the newspaper at the moment. But she was off in a far corner hovering over some page proofs with the copy desk chief, immersed in conversation. So I pit-stopped at her desk, grabbed a sticky note and scribbled, “Going to Ludlow St. Ask Peterson.-C.” Then I attached it to her computer screen and hurried toward the exact last place I wanted to be: back in the hood.

But there was no choice, really. I was the only one who could go. I don’t say that out of some overdeveloped hero complex. I mean I was literally the only one who could go. Between the hiring freezes, the layoffs, and the voluntary buyouts-all symptoms of the newspaper’s unceasing economic decline-our staff was half the size it once was. The days of keeping around spare bodies to throw at breaking news were long over. During off hours, we were down to one reporter, who stayed tied to the desk.

So I went back into the frosty night, barely tapping the Malibu’s brakes at red lights on the way down to Ludlow Street. I was most of the way there when my cell phone buzzed with Peterson’s number flashing on the screen.

“What do we know?” I said.

“At eight thirty-seven, a caller who identifies herself as a Ludlow Street resident hears five shots and immediately calls the cops.

“The police say they were down there in less than ten minutes to comb the neighborhood,” Peterson continued. “They were smart enough to start in the vacant lot next to the church, and they found a young black male against the fence in the back, exactly where they found the bodies earlier this week. And I mean exactly. There were fresh bloodstains on top of the old ones.”

“Hooo-lee smokes,” I interjected.

“The kid was apparently a real mess. Those five shots the caller heard? The cops think all five bullets went, bam, right in the coconut. The captain wouldn’t give much detail, but can you imagine five shots to the head? If you’re talking about a gun with any amount of punch at all, that kid probably doesn’t have much of a head left. They’ll be picking pieces of brain off that fence for hours.”

Peterson’s usual talent for embellishment wasn’t failing him in this critical moment. I just hoped that particular bit of creative writing didn’t make it into the next day’s paper.

“Anyway,” he went on, “they’re not going to bother taking the kid to the hospital. He was pronounced dead at the scene. It will be straight to the morgue for him.”

“Any ID?”

“No. Not that they’d tell us if there was. But the captain said half the reason he was giving us so much information so quickly was that they may need the public’s help in figuring out who the kid is. He wasn’t carrying a wallet and his face is so messed up they’re going to have to hope his prints are in the system. If not, it’s wait until his mama comes looking for him.”

I felt a momentary sadness for this kid’s mama, whoever she was.

“The captain say whether he thought it was the same killer from before or is it just some copycat?” I asked.

“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Peterson said. “The captain wouldn’t even discuss it with me. I’ll read you the quote: ‘At this point, we’re just sticking with what we know. We are not speculating as to motive or connection to other crimes.’ ”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I mean, the first thing got enough publicity that it could be a copycat. The first time it was one shot in the back of the head. This time it was five shots. .”

“Unless that signifies it’s the fifth victim,” I interrupted.

“Yeah, I thought about that,” Peterson said. “Look, I don’t know. But I got a story to write. Thompson says we can get this thing in second edition if I hurry.”

“No byline, remember?”

“Believe me, I remember. I don’t want anyone blowing up my house.”

The call ended just as I made the turn onto Ludlow Street. A few blocks down, I was stopped not by the police but by the size of the crowd that had gathered. A homicide provides this weird kind of live theater for people who grow accustomed to living around it. Once word gets out someone has gotten shot, it’s not unusual to get a decent-sized collection of gawkers, gossips, and busybodies trying to sneak a glance at the victim to see if it’s someone they know.

Plus, once all the flashing lights start whirring and the cops blanket the scene, there’s no safer place in the city.

You have to be careful what questions you pose to bystanders at a crime scene, because the power of suggestion can be strong.

For example, I would never ask, “Did anyone see a white van driving off?” Because maybe the first person you talked to wouldn’t have seen the van, nor the second. But eventually word gets around the Bird Man is asking about a white van and, lo and behold, someone who wants to get a little attention will say they’ve seen it.

So as I waded through the throng, I tried to stick to non-leading questions-simple stuff like if anyone knew who the victim was or had any ideas about what had gone down.

Over the next five or ten minutes, as I worked my way closer to the crime scene, I heard the usual assortment of theories. Half the people were absolutely certain it had something to do with the earlier Ludlow Street murders. An equal number were just as convinced it was unrelated. The shooter was believed to be a local drug dealer named Antoine, a rogue Newark cop who went by the street name “Radar,” or a jealous boyfriend who found another guy making time with his girl.

The shooting was everything from five shots (the supposedly correct version), to one shot (always popular), to a massive gun battle that nearly clipped an innocent bystander (according to the man who claimed to be the innocent victim and wanted my opinion as to whether he could sue someone and recoup damages on account of the trauma he suffered).

But no one had much of an idea who the victim was. That was a constant.

Finally-after receiving enough double takes from people who couldn’t believe a white guy was in their neighborhood at such a late hour-I made it to where the yellow police tape separated the civilians from the professionals.

The cops had put up some portable lights, allowing me to see into the back of the vacant lot. Sure enough, the body appeared to be exactly where I had seen the bloodstains earlier in the week. The corpse was covered with a white sheet, with only the sneaker-clad feet sticking out. I was beginning to think we were just going to have to wait on the police for an ID.

And then I saw it, lying no more than three feet from the body: a backpack adorned with soda can tabs. Rashan Reeves’s backpack.

I dropped to one knee. It was either take a knee or topple over. A few hours earlier, Rashan Reeves had been riding in my car, asking me about what it was like to be a newspaper reporter, alive and inquisitive, possibly beginning to consider a world with alternatives beyond pushing drugs. And now he was just one more dead drug dealer, his life-and whatever potential he had-oozing out of him onto the dried weeds in some frozen vacant lot.

I felt like crying. And screaming. And ripping out every damn last one of those weeds so that maybe, come springtime, I could plant flowers there instead.

But none of that was going to do any good. So I just did my job. I pulled out my cell phone and called Peterson, informing him the victim was Rashan Reeves of Newark.

“How do you know?” Peterson barked.

“Because I interviewed him earlier this evening. He copped to being a drug dealer in the network that sold ‘The Stuff.’ He even told me how he got recruited.”

“Uh-huh,” Peterson said, and I knew he was writing as fast as he could.

“Here, let me just dictate. You ready?”

“Shoot.”

The words came racing out of me.

“Another dealer connected to the brand of heroin known as ‘The Stuff’ was killed in Newark late last night,” I began.

“Rashan Reeves, twenty-two, appears to be the fifth victim in a lengthening chain of violence that continues to unsettle New Jersey’s largest city. His body was discovered in the same Ludlow Street vacant lot where four of his fellow dealers were found dead earlier this week.

“Newark police have not yet confirmed that this most recent victim is Reeves, identifying him only as a young black man who was shot five times in the head. Police also would not speculate whether the two Ludlow Street crimes were connected.

“But shortly before his death, Reeves told an Eagle-Examiner reporter he had been dealing ‘The Stuff’ for four months, ever since his release from East Jersey State Prison.

“Reeves was carrying four gruesome postmortem photographs of the Ludlow Street victims and a memo penned by a person who claimed to have killed them. In the memo, the killer-identified only as ‘the Director’-writes that he eliminated the four dealers as punishment for selling a weakened version of ‘The Stuff’ to their customers.

“Reeves was killed less than three hours after the interview ended, possibly in retribution for having spoken to a reporter.”

“Slow down, slow down,” Peterson said. “This is great. Are you sure it’s all true?”

“Never been more sure,” I said, then helped Peterson with the details and background he needed to finish off the story.

“Tell Tina to stick this on A1 next to the story about the fires,” I said.

“Oh, and Peterson?” I added. “Screw the new policy. Put my byline on it. I want this guy to know I’m coming for him.”

The Director had little trouble deciding what approach to take with Rashan Reeves. It was partly based on the psychological profile in Reeves’s Department of Corrections dossier, which Alvarez had been nice enough to provide. But it was also based on the Director’s instincts on where Reeves could be most easily exploited.

Greed. It was Reeves’s weakness. It was many people’s weakness.

The Director made the phone call himself, telling the young dealer he was aware of the visit he had just made to Hector Alvarez’s house with the Eagle-Examiner reporter. The Director did not hide his disappointment and told Reeves he had considered terminating their contract. But, the Director explained, that would scarcely solve the publicity problem if the reporter were to publish Reeves’s story.

So the Director made Reeves an offer he was sure the reporter could not match: in exchange for retracting his story and ending all contact with the reporter, Reeves would be given a leased Lexus. He would be allowed to use the car as long as he continued his loyal service. Did that sound fair? the Director asked.

Reeves had practically jumped out of his skin to accept. Sure he wanted a new Lexus. Didn’t everyone?

Having thrown out the bait and set the hook, the Director needed only reel in his catch. It was easy enough. The Director told Reeves that, since he was to be the primary driver of the new Lexus, he would need to be a cosigner on the lease. Could he meet with the Director at eight o’clock with his blindfold on, like it was their normal weekly product delivery?

Of course he could. The young man was remarkably guileless. Reeves had asked only one question: “What kind of Lexus will it be?”

They settled on an LS 430 and the conversation ended.

The Director had the “lease” ready by the time he picked up Reeves. It was really just a sample lease Monty had downloaded off a car dealer’s Web site and then hastily altered. The Director insisted Reeves read the entire thing before signing it. The young man anxiously pored over the document, skimming maybe a quarter of the paragraphs and understanding even less. Then he signed it, scarcely able to believe how his dung pile of a life had suddenly turned into a hill of diamonds.

The Director told Reeves they were going to pick up the car at the dealership, with a quick stop at Ludlow Street on the way. The Director spun a tale about wanting to clean up the four dealers’ shrine just a bit, and asked if the young man might help. The Director could only chuckle later: Rashan Reeves didn’t have the slightest inkling what was happening, not until nanoseconds before the first bullet entered his skull.

It had all been so easy. Then again, the Director reminded Monty as they drove off, the situation was only partly contained. There was still the matter of the reporter. Carter Ross was clearly a more sophisticated enemy.

But killing him would be just as easy. Because the Director had a plan, one that involved exploiting Ross’s greatest weakness.

His curiosity.