Free Blueblood by Matthew Iden Page A

And I’m going to have to tell the cops I talk to something.”
    He didn’t say anything, so I tried to push the point home.
    “How would you like it if some boob showed up at your office one day and told you he needed to talk to some of your officers because he happened to be running his own homicide case? All outside regular channels and with a very foggy mandate from a local law enforcement agency that he would rather not name.”
    “What are you going to tell them?”
    “I don’t have to lie. I’ll tell my contacts that I got called in to do a favor for a task force. Which is true.”
    “If they press it?”
    “I’ll tell them to call you. Which none of them will do, because it’s too much work and they trust me and they’ll have heard of HIDTA. Five will get you ten that they’ll just pick up the phone, call a lieutenant or sergeant they know, and ask them to play nice with me.”
    Tap, tap, tap. “What about the cops they get you in to see?”
    “Same thing, different angle. Their lieutenant or captain will have already told them I’m one of the good guys and they should cooperate. If they push it, I’ll tell them it’s related to a case from your department, but that I’m not going to get in their way or step on any toes or write any reports.”
    The tapping slowed down. “A grain of truth goes a long way.”
    “Exactly.”
    “All right. Sorry. It seemed okay to speculate and think about how to tackle this, but then when it actually happens, and you start calling people, I realized…”
    “That your job could be on the line?” I finished.
    “Yeah.”
    “Try not to think of it that way,” I said. “We’re doing a good thing, as you pointed out to me. If we’re careful not to piss anybody off along the way, and don’t give them cause to think we’re trying to upstage them, there’s no reason they won’t play ball. And let’s not forget, we’re working on someone else’s timeline. Anything we can do to head off the next killing, we’ve got to take.”
    He blew out a breath and, in that one sound, I could hear all of his pent-up anxiety and fear. “Do what you have to do, Singer. And thanks.”
    He hung up. I sympathized with him. It was one thing to vent to a former colleague, sharing fears and frustrations. It was an entirely different thing to authorize that colleague to start poking sticks in hornets’ nests. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be helped. If he wanted answers and we were going to stop whoever was killing cops, I’d have to introduce myself to the people who knew the victims best: family, friends, and other cops.
    I grabbed the cup of rapidly congealing primer and headed back up the ladder. After a few minutes, I caught on to the rhythm of the strokes, taking my time, perfecting the movements. Painting was a pleasantly empty activity that lent itself to a wandering mind and I found myself thinking about the murders. Considering how I would tell the cops I would be meeting that someone was out there, methodically killing anyone with a badge. Wondering if I was right about what was going on.
    Hoping that, for once, I wasn’t.

 
     
    Chapter Ten
     
     
     
    I put the car in park and stared out my windshield across a miserable field of cars, trucks, trailers, and Dumpsters. Blue Plains wasn’t the prettiest place in the world. Not far to the west, the Potomac flowed fresh and clean, but you’d never know it looking at the eight-foot cyclone fence and razor wire that guarded the city’s approximately eleven zillion impounded cars. Somewhere along the fence, I’d heard, was the site of one of the original District boundary stones, placed there two hundred years ago by L’Enfant himself. The stone was moved during construction in the fifties and stolen or lost. In typical DC fashion, there’d been a replacement, but it had been buried under eight feet of fill when Blue Plains was graded to create the impound lot. The only way you could see it now was by peering down