Free Apex Predator by J. A. Faura

bullshitting among cops.
    Over the past few weeks, he had been following leads on a couple of homicides, both of which turned out to be crimes of passion, nothing to get excited over, and some burglaries where there was actually the hint of a story since one of the burglaries had been a sophisticated cat burglar right out of Ocean’s Eleven who had made off with more than $300,000 in jewelry. He had made a mental note to follow up on that one.
    Then there was the usual smattering of domestic violence cases, nothing newsworthy, and last there were the missing persons reports. Again nothing out of the ordinary, although he had noticed that in each of the precincts he covered there was a report of a little girl missing. Nothing in common with any of them other than age and they were just three among twelve others from around the five boroughs.
    Still, Felix had also made a mental note to check with some of the other beat reporters about missing little girls of the same age range. Maybe there was something big there, but Felix had gotten egg on his face before for jumping to conclusions too soon. Too many options of what could have happened to them, a divorced parent simply taking their kid, getting lost, runaways, although at six he thought that unlikely, still too many possibilities to put anything on paper.
    He would wait until he had something to dig into, the cat burglar story was his main focus for the time being, but this one was definitely worth filing away to follow up on later. Besides, he had accumulated enough resources within each precinct to learn if there was something worth learning.
     

    Drew Willis was wrapping up his caseload and was thrilled about going to The Hound’s Tooth and having a stiff scotch.
    He couldn’t wait until the assistant district attorney normally assigned to this courtroom came back. Bart Logan was really starting to grate on him. The guy had a stick so far up his ass he would have trouble bending his neck to look down.
    The whole week had been a series of arguments and sidebars and meetings in the judge’s chambers for even the most simple of negotiations. Like Drew, Logan was just a few years out of law school and was really trying to establish a reputation as a hard-ass. What he had really achieved was to garner contempt from most of the public defenders he worked with, and not even the guys that were lighthearted and really flexible dealmakers were comfortable working with him. They just put up with his bullshit to try to get the best deal possible, if anything Logan threw on the table could really be called a deal.
    As he was putting his files into his briefcase, the door to the courtroom opened and in walked Max Zeidler, a high-profile defense attorney who didn’t step into a courtroom for less than $50,000. His clients were mostly Wall Street types caught on insider trading stuff, wives or husbands accused of murder with estates of billions on the line, or high-profile drug dealers. Not anything close to the street dealers, but the big fish, the guys that worked in tons.
    Zeidler was in his late 50s but was in great shape and looked to be in his late 40s. He still had a full head of silver-white hair, which he slicked back. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had not bowed to the temptations of the plastic surgery gods. His skin was wrinkled and tan and made the perfect combination with his blue, pinstriped Armani suit, his dark yellow paisley tie and his mane of silver hair.
    He had first gained notoriety back in the ’70s and early ’80s defending the old mafia dons and doing it pretty successfully, so much so that in a couple of cases the Federal court had moved to have him disqualified over some RICO technicality or another.
    Now he walked into the courtroom like he owned it, with his minions following and people getting out of his way. He actually looked like one of the dons he defended back in the day.
    Drew watched the little procession with some amusement. It was