Free Seven Ways to Die by William Diehl Page A

She took a sleeping pill and was dead to the world when I left.”
    “She and her friend understand to keep mum.”
    “Of course. I’m approaching the garage as we speak.”
    “Do me a favor. Call Rick McKeown. Tell him we have a hot one. We need him to send two men to the address. One downstairs inside the front door. Tell him not to tape the outside of the apartment. We don’t want to advertise what’s going on. The other man will stand outside the apartment door. They don’t need to know anything except that nobody goes in or out until Wolf finishes. He’ll tape the crime scene only when I give the word, and the upstairs man stays until we release him.”
    “Gotcha. We need a couple of Rick’s boys to canvass the neighborhood?”
    Cody thought about that for a moment.
    “Not yet, let’s keep it in the family until we brief the crew. Also the woman across the hall is Amelie Cluett. She’ll be going to work and that’s okay. I’ve already debriefed her.”
    “Usual procedure?”
    “Yup. We’re on our way back. Ring the church bell and tell everyone mass will begin when we get there.”
    “Uh huh.”
    “And see there’s plenty of doughnuts and coffee—good coffee, not that Starbucks shit—for all the parishioners.”
    “Done.”
    He hung up and turned to Bergman, eyeing the evidence bags.
    “Okay, tell me about the stuff you’ve got there.”
    “There are more names in the book than there are in War and Peace. Phone numbers, addresses, coded references, indexed and divided by friends, acquaintances, business associates, adversaries, favorite restaurants and hotels all over the world, you name it. Not a word about family. But, I mean, some of these names are kids he knew in grammar school.”
    “Brothels?” Cody asked.
    “Probably. I haven’t gotten that far into it yet. Why do you ask?”
    “Our Mister Handley had a sex jones just as compulsive as his need for order.”
    “That what Ms. Cluett told you?”
    “Among other things.”
    Bergman grinned. “Sounds like an interesting interrogation.”
    “Yup.”
    Cody thought for a moment, then added, “She’ll be calling back.”
    “You think so?”
    “She was very stressed. When she calms down she’ll remember other things. Some of them will be important. A lot of them will be just wind.”
    Bergman whipped through the clogged streets, concentrating on traffic. Then he returned to the subject at hand. “The back half of the book is an hour-by-hour list of all his business appointments for the last month with tabbed reminders,” Bergman said. “And then there are the receipts.”
    Cody held up the baggie containing the receipts and looked at them. “Thorough, neat, orderly.”
    “Those are receipts for everything he spent for the last week, including his plane tickets to and from Cincinnati yesterday, where he had breakfast, lunch and dinner. And taxis—he didn’t hire a limo there.”
    “How about the limo that picked him up when he got back.”
    “No. Nor the taxi he took home from wherever he went after the limo dropped him off. Those cards are missing from the deck.”
    Δ
    Bergman was the newest member of the TAZ crew, or at least half-member. He still had one foot in regular NYPD, and served as the group’s liaison with the hoi polloi of the force . He had an astronomical I.Q., had graduated from high school at sixteen and was top man in his class when he graduated, at twenty, from Harvard.
    Halfway through his second year he quickly focused on two subjects that challenged and excited him: forensic pathology and criminology.
    One afternoon, almost whimsically, he quit pre-med. His parents, enraged and embittered by what they considered their son’s defiance and betrayal, demanded he come to his senses.
    When he refused, his father disowned him.
    To Cal Bergman, experiencing the sudden rush of freedom from their stifling influence was like an aphrodisiac. He sold his car and headed for New York where he applied for and was