Free Dead of Night by Barbara Nadel Page A

over to America, and there he finds a man ofTurkish ancestry who claims he has been waiting for İkmen to arrive to help him gain justice.’
    Ayşe frowned. ‘Sir?’
    ‘Something about this man’s son getting killed in a gang dispute.’ Ardıç shrugged. İkmen had told him about the crime over
     the telephone, but he couldn’t remember anything about it. All he could really recall was that the American in question had
     been a Melungeon. A deputation of those people had turned up once when he was in Ankara. They had met with council officials
     and had been greeted by them as long-lost brothers. An odd and at times almost incomprehensible artefact, the visit of the
     Melungeons had nevertheless been a touching affair. They all believed with a passion that they were Turks. The Turkish government,
     for their part, apparently concurred. Ardıç didn’t know.
    ‘I’ll get the cyber-crime boffins to monitor Kuban’s fan site,’ he told Ayşe after a pause. ‘See what they can find.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘I’m glad you brought it to my attention.’
    Ayşe left Ardıç’s office. Before the smoking ban, it had always smelled of rather sweet cigar tobacco. Now it just simply
     stank of the Commissioner’s feet. Mercifully out in the corridor once again, she breathed in deeply and began to make her
     way back to her own office. As she walked past Süleyman’s office, she looked in and saw İzzet Melik. They smiled at each other,
     but neither one of them spoke. They’d talked for hours the previous evening in the Kaktus. For the first time in a long time,
     Ayşe had actually enjoyed herself.
    Çetin İkmen was completely partisan, and he knew it.
    ‘I’m only interested in programmes and solutions that include the criminal or the criminalised addict,’ he told Süleyman as
     they both slipped out of the morning session. It was being led by another advocate of Zero Tolerance, this time from the UK.
     ‘I think we’ve both just about finished with Zero Tolerance for now, don’t you?’
    When they got outside the Cobo Center, they lit up cigarettes and only then considered what they might do for the rest of
     the morning. Or rather Süleyman did. İkmen knew exactly what he wanted to do.
    ‘I think we should get a taxi to that place that Mr Goins spoke about, Brush Park,’ he said.
    Süleyman frowned. ‘You can’t get involved, Çetin,’ he said.
    ‘I’m not. I just want to see the place. Now, are you coming or are you staying here?’
    Gerald Diaz had spotted the two Turkish officers leaving the auditorium and had followed them when they went outside. He had
     meant to just go out and have a cigarette with them. But when he heard İkmen use the words ‘Brush Park’, he changed his mind
     and decided to follow them.
    The small amount of snow that had melted the previous day had hardened into ice overnight. As it insinuated in around the
     frame of his bedroom window, Grant T. Miller was reminded of the thin, chilly fingers of Jack Frost. Another mythical being
     from his childhood who lived in the stories that his mother told him and in his subsequent dreams.
    His mother hadn’t even known who Jack Frost was until she moved to Detroit. In her home town there was never any snow, and
     people chilled to tales of voodoo queens and zombies and the ghosts that haunted Spanish Creeper-encrusted cemeteries. In
     her head, Rose Miller had never left the Deep South, and so all the stories she told with a northern theme were as new to
     her as they had been to him. Downtown, his illiterate father had sewed in his basement shop and had never come home until
     the early hours of the morning. To him, not to work was to be dead, and to be dead was something to be feared. Grant T. could
     understand that. Although why the old man had always had to do everything for himself, always play by the rules, always be
     the big man’s bitch was beyond him. Had he wanted, Gustav Miller could have really fleeced boss Henry