CHAPTER FIFTEEN #2
“Left!” Marcus yelled, because he’d seen the same thing she had: a gap where the nave roof met the transept, a place where the carpenters of whatever century had left a trap for idiots and police.
The figure didn’t take it. He took the riskier route—across the ridge, onto a jut of stone that had once been a gargoyle and was now a nub.
“Stop!” Kate’s voice sounded like someone else’s above the wind.
The man was slight, stringy with elbows.
A coat two sizes too big flapped around him, and for a flash, he looked back.
A face cut by street and cold. Eyes too pale, hair hidden.
Then he was gone again, over the lip, and Kate swore and followed.
They hit the next roof hard enough to rattle.
It didn’t belong to the church. It belonged to the tenement next door, built at a time when corners were made for pigeon roosts and laundry lines.
Someone had stretched blue tarps over holes.
A door at the roofline’s far side slammed open. The figure went through it.
“Stairs!” Marcus shouted, already angling for them.
The door was cheap metal with aspirations.
Marcus hit it with his shoulder and it considered, then caved.
The stairwell smelled like cooking oil. The walls were tagged with both politics and love.
They pounded down three flights, the echo making it sound like they were thirty men, all of them too late.
The figure was faster than a greased weasel.
He slipped through a dogleg in the hall, shoved through a door that led to nowhere, and vanished into a crawlspace that, by rights, should have held only dust. For a second Kate didn’t see him.
Then she saw the flick of that too-big coat vanish right toward a service ladder.
It led to the fire escape. The fire escape led to the alley. The alley led to—
“South team,” Torres’s voice cracked in their ears. “Alley covered. Take him to you.”
The figure hit the last flight like a body thrown away.
He bounced, recovered, bounded into the alley…
and ran into Torres, who was ready. She took his momentum and pointed it into the wall.
He hit with a sound that belonged in a butcher’s shop and slid, arms flailing for purchase that didn’t exist.
Marcus was on him first because Marcus always found a way to be first when it meant taking the worst of it. He pinned wrists that flailed like a bag of eels. The man bucked like a fish and hissed something in Spanish.
“Stop,” Kate said, almost wearily. “Stop, or you’re going to make me hurt you more.”
Something in that tone did what no badge ever could. The fight leaked out of him the way heat leaks out of a bad window. He sagged against the bricks, breath working hard. The coat smelled like rain and cigarettes.
Torres’s flashlight hit his face and stuck there. He squinted, shut one eye, opened the other. Thirty? Forty? The street makes guessing ages an insult. The scar at his temple looked like a map of a place nobody wanted to go. His teeth were too big for his mouth.
“Name,” Marcus said, efficient, calm. “Let’s start there.”
The man blinked. “Tommy.”
“Tommy what?” Torres said.
“Jutht Tommy.” He said it like he’d practiced until it became true.
“Big fan of church architecture, Tommy?” Marcus asked. “You picked a scenic spot.”
Tommy twitched a shoulder, almost a shrug. “It’s dry.”
“Not everywhere,” Torres said, glancing up at the roof line. “What were you doing up there?”
“Sleeping.”
“Your bed’s downstairs,” Kate pointed out.
The man shrugged.
Kate took a breath that had dust on it and asked the thing that mattered most. “Who else is here?”
“Nobody.” He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t blink.
“Then you won’t mind if we look through your things,” Kate said.
“What things?” Tommy said, and the ghost of a smile slipped over his mouth and was gone. The smile wasn’t for them. The smile was for the dodge.
Park and another uniform, Ruiz, materialised at Kate’s shoulder, breath fogging. The list was in an evidence bag in Park’s hand.
“I’m going to search you now,” Torres said. “Is there anything in your pockets that you shouldn’t have?”
The man called Tommy laughed at that, a laugh like a crack in the ice.
“Depends what you mean by shouldn’t.”
Torres patted him down, slipped a hand into the man’s outer coat pocket and came out with a wad that didn’t belong there. She flicked it with her thumb. “A hundred and… sixty-three.” She gave a small, appreciative whistle. “Church pays well for naps these days.”
Tommy stared at the money like he’d never seen green before. Then he shrugged, smaller this time. “Found it.”
“Where?” Torres asked.
“Thtreet.”
“Which one?” Marcus said, patient in the way he was when he was enjoying himself. “This street? That street? The very big one down there with the river in the middle?”
Tommy’s eyes slid to Kate, then back. “Street’s a street when you ain’t got money.”
“Try again,” Torres said. “Because right now, we’re looking for somebody who liked making lists. Lists of people who then died. We’re trying very hard not to assume you’re that somebody.”
“I ain’t a somebody, though, miss,” Tommy said softly, almost convincing. “I’m nobody. I think to myself. I don’t hurt nobody.” He looked up at the bell tower, and for a second, something like longing crossed his face. “I like it up there.”
“Who is the list for?” Kate asked.
Tommy’s silence was round and stubborn. It had a name—fear, usually. But sometimes loyalty.
“Listen,” Kate said, patiently. “The list we found—”
“Don’t know no list,” he interjected, almost politely, like someone saying ‘you’re welcome’.
“—has names on it,” she finished gently.
“Important names. If you know anything about it, Tommy, now’s the time to tell me.
Because if you don’t, you’re taking a ride with us, and you’re going to sit in a very cold room with very bright lights while we figure out if you’re the author or just the man who borrowed the pen. ”
“I can’t write proper,” Tommy said with sudden pride. “Not like that.” He tilted his chin at the bag in Park’s hand. “That’s… that’s real writing.”
“It’s not,” Park said, before she could stop herself. “It’s childlike. But those names? Those are very grown-up names.”
Torres shot her a look. Park subsided, cheeks hot.
“Let’s search him properly,” Marcus said. “Then decide if we want to have this heart-to-heart on the sidewalk.”
They turned him and did it by the book—arms, legs, belt, socks.
A second, much smaller wad of cash appeared from a pocket deeper inside the coat, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag to keep it dry.
A folded flyer for a soup kitchen on 138th.
Two bus tickets, never punched, glued together by old candy.
No phone. No knife. A dime bag with a smear of brown.
And a small metal cross on a cheap chain, the kind you win at a festival when you’re twelve.
“How long you been here, Tommy?” Marcus asked.
“I come and go.”
“Since when?”
He squinted at the sky as if the answer lived in the clouds. “Can’t recall.”
“You there last night?”
Tommy’s jaw tensed. “I told you I ain’t—”
“Save it,” Torres said. “We’ll sort timelines when my desk isn’t a sidewalk.”
A clatter above made them all look up. Pigeons again, or the building remembering a different winter. Park shifted, ready to catch a movement that didn’t come. The alley held its breath and then exhaled an old newspaper. A siren muttered far away and lost interest.
“Torres,” Kate said. “We need to get this site processed before the neighbors get curious. CSI for the nave and the sacristy. Bag every scrap and staple. Post two bodies on the tower access and one by the door. And I want any footage from buildings across the street—if anyone had a window open and a phone in their hand, we need to know what they saw run across their roof.”
“You got it,” Torres said. She was already talking to her radio as she said it.
Kate looked down at Tommy. He’d gone quiet again.
“Okay, Tommy,” she said. “Here’s what’s going to happen.
You’re coming with us to the Fifteenth. We’re going to ask you the same questions we just asked you, only slower, and you’re going to have more chances to lie and fewer chances to run.
If there’s something you want to say that might make your life easier, that will be an excellent time. ”
Tommy met her gaze and held it for a surprisingly long beat. Then he nodded as if to himself. “I didn’t do nothing,” he said. “I just thleep there. Sometimes I pick things up if they’re on the floor. You can’t leave things on the floor. It’s disrespect.”
“To who?” Marcus said.
“To the floor,” Tommy said, without irony. “And the church.”
Kate swallowed a sigh that tasted like soot. “Marcus, cuff him.”
He did, the clicks loud in the close air. Tommy almost flinched on the second one and then didn’t. The learned stillness of a man who had, at some point in some other life, been taught what resistance brought you.
“Watch your step,” Park said, not unkindly, as they turned him toward the mouth of the alley. “It’s slick.”
They walked him out between the broken dumpsters and the graffiti and the rusted fire escapes. The squad car idled at the curb, its breath white in the cooling evening. Marcus put a hand on Tommy’s head to guide him in without cracking it on the frame. Tommy ducked with well-practiced grace.
“Valentine,” Torres called, jogging up with a last look toward the church.
“We’ll hold the scene till your techs arrive.
Park’s coming with you—she made the IDs on the list, she should be in the room when we make the calls.
” She glanced up at the tower, then back.
“Guy knows the layout like he was born in it.”
“Or taught,” Kate said.
Kate pulled the car door open. Tommy stared at his knees like they had answers. As she slid in beside him, the bell tower’s shadow fell across the windshield. For a heartbeat, the silhouette looked like a hand raised in blessing. Or warning.
“Let’s go,” she said.
The car eased from the curb. The church receded in the mirror. The night gathered itself and got on with being night. Up ahead, the precinct’s lights would be too bright for the hour and not bright enough for what waited under them.
In the back seat, Tommy stared at his cuffed hands and said nothing at all.