Read Online Reliquary by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child - Free Book Online Page B

pale skin.
    “Lieutenant D’Agosta?” she asked.
    D’Agosta couldn’t believe such a deep contralto could come from such a small frame. “Take a seat,” he said, and watched as the Sergeant settled herself in a chair. She seemed to be unconscious of anything irregular, as if it was standard procedure for a sergeant to burst in on a superior anytime he--or she--felt like it.
    “I don’t recall asking for you, Sergeant,” D’Agosta finally said.
    “You didn’t,” Hayward answered. “But I knew you’d want to see me anyway.”
    D’Agosta sat back, drawing slowly on his cigar. He’d let the Sergeant say her piece, then chew her out. D’Agosta wasn’t a stickler for process, but approaching a senior officer like this was way out of line. He wondered if perhaps one of his men had come on to her in some filing room or something. Just what he needed, a sexual harassment suit on his hands.
    “Those corpses you found in the Cloaca,” Hayward began.
    “What about them?” D’Agosta snapped, suddenly suspicious. A security lid was supposed to be clamped down over the details of that business.
    “Before the merger, I used to be with the Transit Police.” Hayward nodded, as if that explained everything. “I still do the West Side duty, clearing the homeless out of Penn Station, Hell’s Kitchen, the railyards, under the--”
    “Wait a minute,” D’Agosta interrupted. “You? A rouster?”
    Immediately, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. Hayward tensed in the chair, her eyebrows contracting at the obvious disbelief in his voice. There was a moment of awkward silence.
    “We don’t like that term, Lieutenant,” she said at last.
    D’Agosta decided he had enough to worry about without humoring this uninvited guest. “It’s my office,” he said, shrugging.
    Hayward looked at him a moment, and in those brown eyes D’Agosta could almost see her good opinion of him falling away. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s how you want to play it.” She took a deep breath. “When I heard about these skeletons of yours, they rang a bell. Reminded me of some recent homicides among the moles.”
    “Moles?”
    “Tunnel people, of course,” she said with a condescending look D’Agosta found irritating. “Underground homeless. Anyway, then I read that article in today’s Post . The one about Mephisto.”
    D’Agosta grimaced. Trust that scandal-hound Bill Smithback to whip readers into a frenzy, make a bad situation worse. The two of them had been friends--after a fashion--but now that Smithback was a homicide reporter, he’d grown almost intolerable. And D’Agosta knew better than to give him the slightest speck of the inside information he was always demanding.
    “The life expectancy of a homeless person is very short,” Hayward said. “It’s even worse for the moles. But that journalist was right. Lately, some of the killings have been unusually nasty. Heads missing, bodies ripped up. I thought I’d better come to you about it.” She shifted in her seat and gazed at D’Agosta with her clear brown eyes. “Maybe I should have saved my breath.”
    D’Agosta let that pass. “So how many recent homicides we talking about, Hayward?” he asked. “Two? Three?”
    Hayward paused. “More like half a dozen,” she said at last.
    D’Agosta looked at her, cigar halfway to mouth. “Half a dozen ?”
    “That’s what I said. Before coming up here, I looked through the files. Seven murders among the moles in the last four months match this MO.”
    D’Agosta lowered the cigar. “Sergeant, let me get this straight. You got some kind of underground Jack the Ripper here, and nobody’s on top of it?”
    “Look, it was just a hunch on my part, okay?” Hayward said defensively. “Back off me. These aren’t my homicides.”
    “So why didn’t you go through channels and report this to your superior? Why are you coming to me?”
    “I did go to my boss. Captain Waxie. Know him?”
    Everyone knew Jack Waxie. The