Free Chasing the Dragon by Domenic Stansberry Page B

the word, his eyes met Ying’s. It was the kind of naked moment you looked for while cross-examining a suspect, when the two of you looked into one another’s eyes, and you tried to see if the grief, the surprise, was a lie, and what was hidden underneath. It was the tiniest of instants, but sometimes it was all you had to go on, and you had to make up your mind whether there was something to pursue.
    In this case, Ying didn’t know. His gut pulled him two ways. Given the circumstance, though, he had little doubt about what to do next.
    “We’re going to need to take you downtown. We need a statement.”
    “It’s routine,” said Toliveri. “As you know.”
    But it wasn’t routine, of course. Just as it wasn’t routine to have a couple of cops knock on your door in the middle of the night to tell you your uncle had just been murdered.
    “You want to change your clothes?” asked Ying. “Toliveri here, he will accompany you back into the house.”
    Toliveri bristled. Ying realized he didn’t like being told what to do in front of Mancuso. Sensitive about his rank. Didn’t want Dante to see that it was Ying leading the investigation, a Chinese dragging an Italian around by the nose.
    “No,” said Dante. “Just let me grab my jacket, and I’ll come the way I am.”
    A smile crossed Dante’s lips, a smirk, as if there were part of him that thought it was a joke, going down to Columbus Station in his imported pajamas.
Before this is over
, Ying thought,
we’ll be back with a warrant
. But if Dante was as smart as he suspected, they wouldn’t find a damned thing.

TWELVE
    Columbus Station was an anonymous building composed of steel and glass. Despite its name, the station was not on Columbus Avenue at all but squatted on the edge of Chinatown a couple blocks up Vallejo, between the old Italia Café and the Wung Family Vegetable Emporium. The police station was remarkable only in its anonymity, resembling from the outside nothing so much as the back office processing center for an insurance company.
    Dante had worked at Columbus Station for close to a decade, and he knew it well enough. The overcrowded garage underneath. The elevator up. The interrogation room at the end of the hall. One floor above was the Homicide pen, and above that was the chief’s office.
    Inside the interrogation room, Toliveri gave him a cordite test—to see if there was gunpowder residue on his hand.
    Toliveri was not near as chatty as he had been earlier.
    “Where’s our buddy Mr. Ying?” said Dante.
    “He’ll be back shortly.”
    “Used to be with SI?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why did he leave?”
    “I don’t know. Lost his nerve.”
    “He doesn’t seem like the type to lose his nerve.”
    “People say what people say. You know how things are around here. It isn’t always fair.”
    “No, it isn’t,” said Dante, but he remembered how it was to work with Toli. He had his insights, but he spent a lot of time grousing. He worked in fits and starts. In the beginning he was affable, but when the case got hard, he resisted—and sometimes bulled off in the wrong direction.
    Now Toliveri went away. It had been almost three A.M . when Ying and Toliveri woke him from his slumber, and it was getting close to dawn now. Likely he would still be sitting here after the sun went up. Dante knew the routine. Let you sit. Then let you sit some more. It was a hackneyed technique but it had its uses.
    When Ying came back, he came back alone.
    “Coffee?” Ying asked. His manner was matter-of-fact, neither cordial nor otherwise.
    Dante shook his head. “I’m fine.”
    “Are you sure? I’m going to get myself a refill. We’ve got a new brewing system. You know how it is these days—people and their coffee. Everybody’s a connoisseur.”
    Dante knew what was going on—and he knew Ying knew he knew—but he decided to play along.
    “All right,” said Dante. “Get me some coffee.”
    Ying went away again. He was a long time away. Much