Silent Prey

enlightening—but where do I come in?”
    She looked straight into him, fixing him. “A couple of guys in intelligence spotted the pattern. They got nervous about it. All of the victims, or whatever you’d call them, were heavy in intelligence files. Like the files had been used to choose them. Once they made the report, a secret working group of six ranking officers was set up to monitor it. Petty was eventually brought in to do the dog work.”
    Lucas interrupted. “He was a shoofly, or whatever you guys call them?”
    She shook her head. “He was a crime-scene guy for most of his career, and later on a computer specialist. He was officially a detective second. In this case, he was reporting to the working group under the direct supervision of my boss, John O’Dell. John chairs the working group.”
    “So there was no past internal-affairs work that might have left a grudge,” Lucas said.
    “No. And just before he was shot, there was an odd break on the case . . . .” Lily put a hand on top of her head as if she were patting herself, a gesture of thought. “The black guy who was killed, the loudmouth, was named Waites. The file is still open, we still have people digging into it. As a matter of routine, Walt got all the reports coming out of the active cases. He found a report that said a supposed witness to the Waites killing had recognized one of the shooters as a cop. The witness was named Cornell, last name probably Reed. The trouble is, when Walt went looking for him, Cornell Reed had disappeared. Maybe left town. But Walt found him, somehow. He tried to get in touch with us that afternoon, he came by the offices, and when he couldn’t, he left a note on voice mail. He said he knew where Reed went.”
    “Where?”
    “We don’t know. And Walt was killed that night.”
    “Jesus—somebody got the voice mail?”
    “Unlikely; it’s coded,” Lily said. “And the shooting was too well set up. They’d planned it ahead of time. If finding the witness had anything to do with it, it was just the trigger that made them go ahead with the shooting.”
    “Huh. How about Petty’s records? Notes?”
    “Nothing in his office, but he wasn’t keeping anything there, anyway, because of the sensitivity,” she said. “He was working out of his apartment, mostly. And that’s another thing: somebody got to his apartment before we did. All of his computer disks were gone, and the internal drive—hard drive, is that it?—had been wiped somehow. I don’t know how you do it, but there was nothing recoverable.”
    “Another computer freak?”
    “Not necessarily. Whatever they did wasn’t fancy. A couple of short commands apparently took care of it. Something like a reformat with a write-over? Does that make sense?”
    “Yeah, yeah. Petty must’ve talked to somebody. It’s hard to believe he’d get a break and coincidentally be hit that same night . . . . Who’d he tell about the witness?” Lucas asked.
    “We don’t know,” Lily said. “We do know he came up to our office, after hours, looking for us. O’Dell and I spend a lot of time in a car, going around, putting out political brush fires. We were talking to some people in one of the projects that night. Walt didn’t try the car—our driver was waiting in it, and nobody called. The thing is, when Walt came up to the office, he might’ve bumped into somebody from the working group, there in thehallway. He really wouldn’t talk to anybody else, not on this topic.”
    “So he accidentally bumps into another member of the working group and that guy leaks?”
    Lily frowned. “Well . . . the shooting was too quick for a careless leak. Whoever tipped the rogue group did it directly. A phone call. In other words, whoever leaked knows the killers. Maybe he even runs them.”
    “Sonofabitch. But if you know it’s one of the six working-group guys . . .”
    Lily shook her head and smiled. “Nothing’s ever that easy. For one thing, every one of those six reports to somebody, and they did. And every one of the six has assistants, and some of the assistants know what the working group is doing.”
    “Doesn’t sound very secret,” Lucas said.
    “Maybe fifteen people know details, and twenty-five know about the problem,” Lily said. “That’s pretty secret for the department . . . but you see where that leaves us. If one of the working group tipped the killers, he’s in a position to know everything. So we’re paralyzed.