Free The Cross: An Eddie Flynn Novella by Steve Cavanagh Page A

is the key to blowing open the Morgue Squad investigation.”
    “What’s your first name?” I said.
    She was about to sit down at the table, but my question arrested her movement. Caused her to pause. Just half a second, but a pause no less. Her eyebrows rose, and her lips pursed together in a grimace that was there and gone in a moment, and as it left, she sat down. Crossing her legs, she looked at me again and spoke.
    “Lilly,” she said.
    In her boots, double denim, and with a gun in her waistband, she sure didn’t look like a Lilly. Not that she was unattractive—far from it.
    “Short for Lilith or Elizabeth?” I said.
    “Elizabeth,” she said, looking at the table and then at me.
    Subtle differences in her tone, the speed of her delivery and eye contact. She was definitely lying. Not about her name, though. That was a control question—one that gave me a truthful answer.
    I decided it was time to call her out.

 
    Chapter Sixteen
    I’d been a con artist for most of my life, and I could spot a lie, but the grifter life didn’t teach me how to read people. That was my mother. She was Italian and grew up in a household with eight brothers and four sisters. My father could con anyone apart from my mother. Growing up in that house, my mother had nurtured one of the world’s finest bullshit meters. The only thing my father successfully kept from her was the fact that he was teaching me his trade and letting me learn how to box. Even then, I suspected my mother knew all about it but was content to let her boys think they’d fooled her. Maybe she thought it brought me and my dad closer together and she didn’t want to break that pact.
    Watching my mom, I’d inherited that fine instinct for spotting a lie. And that’s all it can ever be. Lie detector tests can be beaten. You can’t take a course for lie detection. Either it’s in your blood and you grow up with it or you don’t.
    “Lilly . . .” I began.
    “I prefer McAllister,” she said.
    “Fine. You told us a lot. But you’ve glossed over a few things here and there, and lied a little, too,” I said.
    A slight tremble at the corner of her mouth. The muscle twitching to keep the face straight, to restrain the smile or the surprise of being exposed.
    “You didn’t join IAB to help you make lieutenant. You were drafted by Frost. In the first three months of IAB, you’d still be catching up on the caseload left behind by the cops who’d bowed out after their mandatory two years, you’d be learning how to conduct basic integrity tests and generally getting up to speed on the way things work in the rat house. No, Frost drafted you into IAB for a reason. I’m guessing it’s because you somehow made a possible connection between the top hit man in New York and Marzone. You went to Frost with it, as head of IAB, and he insisted you join him. Am I close?”
    She said nothing. Her dark eyes remained purposefully still, like the shadows of twin clouds on a sun-polished winter lake.
    “Whatever you had on Marzone and the hit man wasn’t enough for an arrest, but it was enough to get Frost and Jones moving. Come on, I’m not stupid.”
    “They didn’t get anywhere until I came to them. I’d been working on establishing a pattern of travel for a hit man. We had reliable intel from several snitches that this guy ran contracts on the East Coast. I began tracking his movements, working on his flight history, his credit card statements. All of it was clean, but at the same time, far too clean. The guy owned a chain of Laundromats, and he would regularly fly two thousand miles to check out how his businesses were doing. But he stayed in hotels that were too far away from the Laundromats, he paid in cash and didn’t submit receipts for travel expenses to the IRS, and he never brought a laptop or a cell phone with him. He was either the worst businessman in the United States, or a guy who liked to travel light and leave as little trace as possible.
    “I