Free VC01 - Privileged Lives by Edward Stewart

P.P. screaming for results, The New York Times on his ass the one time in a blue moon one of his men shot in self-defense. Fear was getting to him, too, fear of looking like a dope or a coward, fear of opening his mouth and getting in shit with the brass.
    He pushed up from the desk and walked to the window.
    He gazed into the black night of the shaftway. His fingers drummed on the top of the file cabinet. Had there been something about the leg the killer wanted to hide: a birthmark, a tattoo, a deformity?
    Cardozo selected a photograph of the dead man’s face and took it out to the desk lieutenant. “Send this over to Missing Persons—John Doe. Have them show it around, check if he turned up missing.”
    It was a long shot: the victim might not have been reported missing, he might not have been missing long enough to be reported, he might be missing from Wichita. But you had to cover the bases.
    Cardozo went back to his office, lifted the phone, and dialed a number. He waited, jaw clenched, through eight rings. Finally a voice said, “Stein, Forensic.”
    “Lou, it’s Vince. Got anything yet on the Beaux Arts killing?”
    “Didn’t Tony tell you?”
    “Would I be calling if Tony was here?”
    “He’s gotta be there, he left an hour ago.”
    Cardozo came back into the squad room. “Was Tony Bandolero here asking for me?”
    Sweeney angled his chin toward a half-open door across the room. “In there.”
    There was an unused space off the squad room. One of the detectives had found a Sony Trinitron in the garbage on the street and brought it in, and detectives on a break sat around watching TV. People in two two threw out good garbage.
    Cardozo crossed the room. He could hear gunshots and screeching tires. Cop show. He wondered how detectives, grown men, could watch that stuff.
    He peered into the flickering darkness. “Tony, you there?”
    One of three forms heaved itself up from a chair. “Shiut. Policewoman was about to nail the arsonist.”
    Tony Bandolero came into the light, a heavyset man in his late twenties with limp black hair and a low, wrinkled forehead.
    “How can you watch that stuff?” Cardozo asked.
    “You want me to be improving myself, Vince, reading some great books? Divina Commedia, that’s how I should be spending my coffee break? Fangul.”
    Cardozo closed the cubicle door. “What have you got?”
    “Eight partial prints.”
    Cardozo took the sheet and frowned. “You can get a positive ID from this?”
    “If you can come up with a suspect, why not?”
    “Crap. We’re going to get a match, and it’ll be one of the building workers, someone who had nothing to do with it.”
    “You don’t know that, Vince.”
    “I know it. What else?”
    “We removed human blood from the rotary saw.”
    “Is it his?”
    “It may not be enough to type, Vince. We’re going to try. But all we can definitely say at this point in time is the victim is type O and the blood on the saw is human.”
    “That’s all?”
    “Not quite. The leather mask is standard s.m. gear—what they call a bondage mask down at the Pink Pussy Cat.”
    “Any prints on it?”
    “Leather is very tough to print.”
    “So where are we?”
    “You’re going to like this, Vince.”
    Tony Bandolero handed him a magazine. Cardozo leafed through.
    “What the hell’s this, gay porn?”
    “It’s a leather goods catalogue, Vince, from a Greenwich Village sex shop called the Pleasure Trove. It is the place for leather and bondage goods.”
    “This is part of the NYPD reference library?”
    “Will you hear me out, Vince? The mask is handmade, and it’s in the catalogue, item number 706.”

6
    T HE M.E.’S OFFICE WAS located at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue in one of a complex of cinderblock buildings near Bellevue. A dark-haired girl was in charge of the lower-level reception desk, talking to a cop who wanted a receipt for a drop-off.
    Cardozo gave her his name and asked to see the medical examiner.
    The girl smiled