Free So Long As You Both Shall Live (87th Precinct) by Ed McBain

With me. Now you are going to be mine,” he said, and she suddenly realized he was insane.

Alexander Pike thought he had seen enough cops yesterday to last him an entire lifetime. But another cop was here in his studio now, and he wasn’t even one of the cops who’d been at the wedding and the reception, and he was asking Pike for the photographs he’d taken. Pike did not like his looks and he did not like his manner. He had been photographing beautiful people for more than four decades now, and Oliver Weeks was definitely not beautiful. Nor was he exactly what Pike might have called couth.
    “We need the pictures you took yesterday, and that’s it,” Ollie said. “Now, Mr. Pike, I been here a half-hour already, arguing with you, and I’m trying to tell you this is important to us, and I would like to have the pictures now without further ado.”
    “And I’m telling you , Mr. Weeks, that all I’ve got printed so far are contact sheets—”
    “That’s fine, I’ll take the contact sheets.”
    “I’d planned to look them over this afternoon,” Pike said. “Decide where to crop them…”
    “Mr. Pike, you have the negatives, don’t you?”
    “Yes, but—”
    “So make yourself another batch of contacts.”
    “Do you know how many rolls of film I shot yesterday?” Pike asked.
    “How many?”
    “Thirty rolls of film. That’s more than a thousand photographs, Mr. Weeks. That’s exactly one thousand and eighty photographs, in fact. It was my plan to look over those pictures this afternoon…”
    “Yeah, I know,” Ollie said, “and decide where to crop them.”
    “That’s right.”
    “That can wait, Mr. Pike. This is more important.”
    “Why? You still haven’t told me what’s so important about these pictures.”
    “Mr. Pike, I am not at liberty to divulge this information,” Ollie said. Carella had told him that they were trying to keep this whole case hush-hush, at least until they’d heard something from the kidnapper. He had instructed Ollie to get the photographs from Pike without telling Pike what this was all about, a mission Ollie was finding difficult to accomplish. Moreover, Carella’s instructions did not make much sense to Ollie. Pike was one of the men he hoped would help match the guest list against the photos. If he couldn’t tell Pike what this was all about, then how could he enlist Pike’s aid? Besides, Ollie was a detective 1st/grade and Carella was only a detective 2nd/grade, and that meant Ollie outranked him. Still, he didn’t like to fly in the face of Carella’s instructions, especially since the case was the Eight-Seven’s, and also the guys up there were personally involved in it—which was, in fact, a good enough reason for somebody with a clear head to step in here, somebody who didn’t know Kling from a hole in the wall, and couldn’t care less about anything but the puzzle of the thing. That was what made police work exciting to Ollie—the puzzle of it. He didn’t give a damn about people, dead or alive. All he cared about was the puzzle. He had just told Pike he was not at liberty to discuss why the police felt those photographs were important. He waited now for Pike’s answer.
    “In that case,” Pike said, “I am not at liberty to give you these pictures.”
    “Then I’ll just have to go downtown and get a search warrant, I suppose,” Ollie said, and sighed. He had no intention of going downtown to get a search warrant. He was, in fact, trying to figure how he could tell Pike that Augusta had been kidnapped without coming right out and telling him. He would like to be able to say, later, that he had never once mentioned the abduction, that Pike had simply deduced it all by himself. Toward that end, he said, “You want me to go downtown for a warrant, Mr. Pike?”
    “Yes, go downtown for one.”
    “Mr. Pike, I can get one, believe me. I’ve got pretty good reasonable cause to believe the pictures will constitute evidence of a