The Bone Collector

week so stay clear. “It’s him, ” Dellray said. “Gotta be.”
    “NYPD’s got a task force together.”
    “Not Anti-Terror. I made calls. Nobody at A-T there knows zippo about it. To NYPD it’s ‘dead tourists equal bad public relations.’ I want this case, Billy.” And Fred Dellray said the one word he’d never uttered in his eight years of undercover work. “Please.”
    “What grounds’re you talking?”
    “Oh-oh, bullshit question,” Dellray said, stroking his index finger like a scolding teacher. “Lessee. We got ourselves that spiffy new anti-terrorism bill. But that’s not enough for you, you want jurisdiction? I’ll give you jurisdiction. A Port Authority felony. Kidnapping. I can fucking argue that this prick’s driving a taxi so he’s affecting interstate commerce. We don’t want to play those games, do we, Billy?”
    “You’re not listening, Dellray. I can recite the U.S. Code in my sleep, thank you. I want to know if we’re going to take over, what we tell people and make everybody happy. ’Cause remember, after this unsub’s bagged and tagged we’re going to have to keep working with NYPD. I’m not going to send my big brother to beat up their big brother even though I can. Anytime I want. Lon Sellitto’s running the case and he’s a good man.”
    “A lieutenant?” Dellray snorted. He tugged the cigarette out from behind his ear and held it under his nostrils for a moment.
    “Jim Polling’s in charge.”
    Dellray reared back with mock horror. “Polling? Little Adolph? The ‘You-have-the-right-to-remain-silent-’cause-I’ma-hit-you-upside-the-motherfuckin’-head’ Polling? Him? ”
    The ASAC had no response for that. He said, “Sellitto’s good. A real workhorse. I’ve been with him on two OC task forces.”
    “That unsub’s grabbing bodies right and left and this here boy’s betting he’s going to work his way up.”
    “Meaning?”
    “We got senators in town. We got congressmen, we got heads of state. I think these folk he’s grabbing now’re just for practice.”
    “ You been talking to Behavioral and not telling me?”
    “It’s what I smell.” Dellray couldn’t resist touching his lean nose.
    The ASAC blew air from his clean-shaven-federal-agent cheeks. “Who’s the CI?”
    Dellray had trouble thinking of the Scruff as a confidential informant, which sounded like something out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. Most CI s were skels, short for skeletons, meaning scrawny, disgusting little hustlers. Which fit the Scruff to a T.
    “He’s a tick,” Dellray admitted. “But Jackie, this guy he heard it from’s solid.”
    “I know you want it, Fred. I understand.” The ASAC said this with some sympathy. Because he knew exactly what was behind Dellray’s request.
    Even as a boy in Brooklyn, Dellray had wanted to be a cop. It hadn’t mattered much to him what kind of cop as long as he could spend twenty-four hours a day doing it. But soon after joining the Bureau he found his calling—undercover work.
    Teamed with his straight man and guardian angel Toby Dolittle, Dellray was responsible for sending a large number of perps away for a very long time—the sentences totaled close to a thousand years. (“They kin call us the Millennium Team, Toby-o,” he declared to his partner once.) The clue to Dellray’s success was his nickname: “the Chameleon.” Bestowed after—in the space of twenty-four hours—he played a brain-dead cluckhead in a Harlem crack house and a Haitian dignitary at a dinner in the Panamanian consulate, complete with diagonal red ribbon on his chest and impenetrable accent. The two of them were regularly loaned out to ATF or DEA and, occasionally, city police departments. Drugs and guns were their specialty though they had a minor in ’jacked merchandise.
    The irony of undercover work is that the better you are, the earlier the retirement. Word gets around and the big boys, the perps worth going after, become harder to fox. Dolittle and Dellray found themselves working less in the field and more as handlers of informants and other undercover agents. And while it wasn’t Dellray’s first choice—nothing excited him like the street—it still got him out of the office more often than most SAs in the Bureau. It had never occurred to him to request a transfer.
    Until two years ago—a warm April morning in New York. Dellray was just about to leave the office to catch a plane at La Guardia when he got a phone call from the