Free Pariah by David Jackson Page A

sound – his way of letting the room know where his opinions lie.
    Holden’s comments are a little more lucid. ‘Maybe Cal and Tony were on to something without even knowing it. Too close . So close, Tony had to die.’
    Schneider decides he needs to be vocal again. ‘Yeah. You need to be careful, Doyle. You could be next.’
    Holden ignores him and presses on. ‘That stuff from Cavell about some heavy shit going down. If he really was about to toss something juicy to Tony, that could have been a good reason for
someone to whack both of them.’
    Franklin nods thoughtfully. ‘That’s assuming Cavell really did have something to deliver. If this went down the way the hit on Joe did, Cavell was probably just being used as bait.
Any other theories?’
    ‘A cop killer.’
    This from LeBlanc, an ambitious young cop who only recently traded in his white shield for a gold one. Always sporting the most fashionable spectacles, although Doyle suspects that he wears them
only to appear brainier than he is. Older, wiser heads might not have dared to voice LeBlanc’s idea, but Doyle is sure that it has entered the minds of all of them.
    ‘For some reason,’ LeBlanc says, ‘the killer just doesn’t like cops, period. He’s working his way through them, one by one.’ He looks across at Schneider.
‘In which case, maybe it doesn’t have to be Cal who’s next. Maybe it’s any one of us.’
    ‘Nice thought, kid,’ Schneider answers. ‘Cheer us all up, why don’t you?’
    ‘Even so,’ Franklin says, ‘we have to take it into consideration. Could just be we have a psycho cop killer on our hands.’ He raises a warning finger and wags it at each
man in the room. ‘I don’t want to lose any other members of my squad. From now on, you have to be on your guard at all times, you hear me?’
    He gets nods again, but more vigorous this time. Now and again, it’s nice to hear how much your boss loves you.
    And then there is another period of silence, while every detective here weighs up the implications of having to be aware of everything around them, at all times of the day. The killer has shown
himself to be a person of astounding ingenuity and resource. From now on, even taking a crap could be fraught with danger.
    Who says a cop’s life is dull?
    ‘There’s another possibility,’ Doyle says. He has been thinking about this ever since the wake-up call from Franklin. What the lieutenant said about the last words of Alvarez
lends it even more currency.
    ‘Maybe I really am the link in this. Maybe this is some warped way of trying to hurt me. Those words of Tony’s, using my name and then “got too close”. Maybe what he was
saying was that he got too close to me.’
    Franklin is staring at him, his expression grave. ‘You know anyone might want to get at you like that?’
    Doyle looks round at Schneider. ‘Outside this room, no.’
    This raises a couple of snickers, which tells Doyle that there are at least one or two people on his side.
    Franklin says, ‘That’d be one crazy way to hurt somebody, Cal. I hope to God you’re wrong about that.’
    Not as much as I do, Doyle thinks.

EIGHT
    Barely five minutes after the men in the squadroom finish trying to fathom what is happening to them, the lieutenant takes a phone call from the Chief of Detectives. The Chief
of Ds tells Franklin, amongst other things, that even though the death occurred within the confines of the Eleventh Precinct, the Alvarez case now officially belongs to the Eighth, being as it
seems to have a solid link to the Parlatti case, which was already theirs. In his turn, Franklin relays the word from above to the squad, and it’s all systems go.
    Doyle makes it his first task to learn what he can about the events of last night. It’s a job that takes longer than he hoped, mainly because the required information seems to be
distributed across about a dozen people from the Eleventh Precinct, the Manhattan South Homicide Task Force and