Salarco put his bottle down and stared out through the curtains.

Hardy pressed him. "The reason it's so important, Juan… the reason that this particular identification is so important…," he brought Anna into it with his eyes, "is that there's little doubt that the person that both of you saw out the window was the person who had killed Mr. Mooney and the girl. Very little doubt."

Salarco pouted, his visage frankly dark now. "It was Andrew," he said.

"I'm not arguing with you. It may have been Andrew. Certainly it looked like Andrew, with the same cowled sweatshirt he was wearing that night. But listen to what you said in your own words. You said Anna went to the window, and you were behind her."

"Sí."

"So you weren't at the window exactly, were you? Could you have been maybe a couple of feet behind it?"

No answer.

"Then the boy runs down the walkway," Hardy kept up his pace, measured yet urgent. "He stops for a second under the light, and turns. This is the moment that you see him. He's under the light, he turns, the cowl over his head…"

Hardy looked to Anna, who stood transfixed.

"This is when Anna goes to put the window up, to yell at him. She's angry, you're angry, and just at this second, your baby starts crying again. You're behind your wife, who is standing at the window, trying to pry it open, and suddenly your baby screams, and you turn, cursing and swearing, and go back to her."

"Yes," Salarco said softly. "Yes. That's how it was."

"Well, then," Hardy said. "If you were behind your wife, a few feet back from the window, and she was standing in front of it, trying to get it open, and the boy with the cowl sweatshirt over his head was thirty feet away, in only the dim light from one of the street lamps, please tell me how you could possibly have seen his face?"

Salarco stared at a spot in the middle of the table, not meeting Hardy's eyes. Finally, he looked up. "I'm sorry, señor, but it was Andrew," he said.

26

Monday afternoon, Lanier told Glitsky that this would be a good time to come down and talk to the troops. With the rash of killings lately, Lanier felt overwhelmed. It was bad enough when it was the usual gangbanger mayhem and carnage, but when regular citizens got killed, it felt to him like another matter entirely. And regular citizens were taking an especially serious hit over these past two or three weeks, first with Elizabeth Cary, then Boscacci, and now this Executioner and his two victims last Friday.

Hanging up with Glitsky, Lanier stood, stretched and walked out into the inspectors' area. The desks of his twelve people were placed back to back, in team pairs, and over the years a line of metal filing cabinets had slowly grown like a vine out from one of the walls so that it now nearly bisected the space, isolating the inspectors area from the lieutenant's office. Even so, over the past half hour, Lanier had been aware of inspectors drifting back in for their paperwork, or simply to get the decks clear for tomorrow.

Now, he got himself a cup of coffee in the main room. He hadn't yet taken his first sip when Glitsky showed up. In another minute, eight homicide cops stood or sat casually around the partnered desks of Dan Cuneo and Glen Taylor.

Lanier wasted no time. "I know all of you are busy with your own cases, and a couple of you are on the Boscacci force, but in light of these Executioner killings, Deputy Chief Glitsky thought it might be helpful to do some brainstorming. Abe?"

Glitsky looked over the inspectors' faces, realizing with some surprise that most of them had never worked personally under him. Of the assembled group, only Sarah Evans and Darrel Bracco had been homicide inspectors while he'd run the detail. Of the other four- Belou, Russell, Glen Taylor and Dan Cuneo- two were almost complete unknowns. The other two, Cuneo and Russell, had actually investigated Glitsky in the weeks before last year's shoot-out. It was common knowledge that they still weren't among his fans. So it was not as congenial a group as Glitsky might have hoped.

Still, he needed their cooperation. "First, I'm only here because Marcel asked me to come down. I've been working with a small team on the Boscacci killing, and frankly, we haven't made much progress. Marcel tells me it's basically the same situation with these Executioner hits, although we've got the ballistics match, that connection between the victims. My question is whether there's another one."

Sarah Evans spoke up. "Nothing's leaping out at us, sir. The elderly woman, Edith Montrose, lived alone, and has no local survivors, although a son and a daughter have both flown in from out of state for the burial. Neither of them had ever heard of the other victim, Philip Wong. And Mr. Wong's wife, Mai Li, didn't know Montrose."

Evans's partner, Darrel Bracco, added his voice. "We're close to eliminating robbery, too. We wouldn't know for sure with the Montrose woman, but Mai Li hasn't found anything missing. Both of them look like, pardon the phrase, executions."

"Am I missing something?" This was Dan Cuneo, sitting at his desk, playing some imaginary bongo drums between his legs.

"What's that, Dan?" Lanier asked.

The inspector stopped drumming. "Well, you've got this Boscacci thing on the one hand, and the two executions on the other." He turned to Glitsky. "Aside from the fact that we've got very little on any of them, I don't see any connection at all."

"I don't either," Glitsky said. "But along with no connection, I see total evidence of two slugs. No witnesses, no prints, no forensics, no motives, no nothing. Am I wrong?"

"No, sir," Evans admitted, speaking for the rest of them.

"This spark any ideas for anybody?" Glitsky asked.

"Does what spark any ideas?" Cuneo asked. "Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'."

"Wait a minute," Belou stepped out from behind her partner, Russell. "We do have another open case with that profile."

"Hell, Pat," Cuneo said, "I've got about a dozen myself if you want one."

"Yeah," Lanier interjected, "but are any of them citizens?"

"Elizabeth Cary was," Belou said.

"Yes, she was." Glitsky filled in for those who didn't know. "Couple of weeks ago now, Elizabeth Cary, a middle-aged, white housewife, was gunned down at her front door, one bullet in the heart. The shooter left no sign except a nine-millimeter casing."

"Was there a slug?" Cuneo asked.

Belou shook her head. "No. Through and through, then through the drywall and stucco out the back of the house. We had CSI look for a whole day. They couldn't find it."

"So we don't know if it was this Executioner or not?" Russell asked.

"Right," Glitsky said. "He left us nothing. Now my question to all of you is: why does this sound familiar?"

"Excuse me, sir." Cuneo had straightened up in his chair. "So you're saying you think because we got nothing on these separate cases, that they're related. With respect, that seems like a stretch." He got agreeing nods from at least Russell and Taylor, and went on. "It's like saying beer isn't water, and milk isn't water, therefore beer is milk."

"I realize that." Glitsky, knowing what he'd come down here to propose, was prepared to remain unruffled. "And of course it's a good point. But on the other hand, since we've got nothing on these four homicides in this past fortnight, maybe the only way we'll catch a break is to go outside the box. We can expect this Executioner to hit again, and until he's kind enough to leave us a clue, maybe we ought to work with what we've got."

"Which," Evans said, "I thought was nothing."

"No, Sarah, not quite," Glitsky said. "We've got only the ballistics connection if we're looking at the Twin Peaks killings. But if we go on the assumption, first, that Boscacci may have been an Executioner victim…"