Free Immoral Certainty by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page B

person in the apartment besides himself.
    “Hey, Stevie,” he said, “get out the mats. We’ll do a little karate.”
    Lutz dropped his barbell and looked up, an expression of nervous concern wrinkling his low brow. “What, you mean gohon ?”
    “Nah, fuck that shit. I feel like some freestyle.”
    Lutz whined, “Ah, crap, Felix, you’re gonna whip my ass again.”
    Felix grinned unpleasantly. “I don’t know, Stevie. You might get lucky. Meanwhile it’s good training. You don’t spar, you’ll never make black belt, hey? So stop being a pussy and get the mats out.”
    Marlene was in the bullpen of the Criminal Courts Bureau, perched on the corner of a clerk’s battered desk, making the calls necessary to get the Segura case started up again. It was a place of business she often preferred to her own isolated office. She was trying to get a homicide lieutenant in Manhattan South to assign people to a case he thought he had wrapped up weeks ago. Since he had about sixty working homicides that were nowhere near wrapped up, he was less than excited at the prospect.
    “Let me get this straight, Ms. Ciampi,” said Lieutenant Shaughnessy, his voice on the phone suspiciously calm. “You’re throwing out this case because you just found out the kid’s finger got cut off after she was dead and not before.”
    “Yeah. You understand what that means, don’t you?”
    “Um …”
    “Lieutenant, the mother beats up the kid. We know that. She’s an abuser. So the theory was that she went too far, killed the kid in a rage, and then tried to get rid of the body. But the fact that the finger was amputated after death doesn’t jibe with a typical domestic child murder.”
    “It don’t, huh? What does it jibe with, then?”
    “A maniac.”
    “What are you talking about, lady?”
    “A maniac, Lieutenant. Who else kills kids and cuts off their fingers? Jaywalkers? And he did it once, he could do it again.”
    “Maybe the mother did it and cut off the finger to make us think it was a maniac,” said the lieutenant, grasping.
    “Right. Good idea. You want to take the chance that there won’t ever be a repeat?”
    There was silence on the line for a long moment. Of all the things that could derail Lieutenant Shaughnessy’s stately progress toward thirty-and-out with a captain’s pension, a serial child murderer was close to the top of the list. There would be reporters. There would be outraged editorials. There would be parents with placards.
    The brass would be watching his every move and they would set up a special task force that would take half his men, and naturally, he wouldn’t get any relief from his normal clearance quota in the meantime. Of course, if he told this crazy bitch to get stuffed, which was his first impulse, and it turned out there really was a loony cutting up kids, he would spend the rest of his career running a motor pool in the South Bronx. An idea flickered across his mind.
    “Uh, well, you sound like you could have a real problem there, Miss Ciampo. Tell you what I’ll do. How would it be if I transferred a couple of good detectives over to the D.A. squad?”
    “That would be great,” replied Marlene cautiously. “But what’s the catch, Lieutenant? They stop killing people in your end of the city?”
    “Yeah, we stopped crime around here. The thing of it is, Miss Ciampo …”
    “Ciampi, Lieutenant. Ms.”
    “Yeah, right, the thing of it is, we’d naturally expect them to carry over their cases for the duration of the detail.”
    “Naturally,” Marlene agreed. She vaguely suspected she was being shafted in some subtle bureaucratic way, but didn’t have time to figure it out. And the offer was too good to turn down.
    “So, if that’s OK with you … ah, Ms.?”
    “Yeah, deal. What do I have to do?”
    “Not a thing. I’ll call Fred Spicer and put together the detail papers,” said Shaughnessy smoothly, and broke the connection before she could change her mind.
    An hour