The Zero Hour

“This is it, sir,” the tech said gamely, patting the Polilight as if it were a buddy.

“Oh, Ms. Cahill again. Can we help you with anything?” His tone professed sincerity, but his beefy red face betrayed no desire to help.

“I’m fine,” Sarah said.

“Hey, Carlos, what’s up?” Herlihy said bluffly. “Fuming tank explode on you again?”

The tech laughed and shook his head. “No, sir, but I was up all night charting prints, and then at six this morning the prick pled.”

Herlihy laughed gutturally, malevolently. “You know, Carlos, I’d be careful with that Polilight, there. Semen fluoresces, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t want the little lady here to see how much you jerk off.”

Carlos snorted, and Sarah excused herself, her attention suddenly distracted. She stood outside the bathroom and looked in. Her eyes narrowed. “The mirror,” she said, returning slowly to the bathroom.

“Huh?” asked Carlos.

“It’s that mirror,” she said. More to herself than to Herlihy or Carlos, she murmured: “It’s in a weird place, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re sitting on the toilet, you can see yourself in it. That’s odd. Why would you…”

“Thanks so much, Ms. Cahill,” the homicide captain said with a nasty inflection. “Any other observations I can pass on to the deceased’s interior decorator?”

She flashed the captain a contemptuous look and went on, aloud but to herself: “Most women wouldn’t want to look at themselves sitting on the toilet. Two medicine cabinets…” Sarah approached the mirror. Carefully grasping the mirror’s edges with her gloved fingers, she pulled at it. It popped off, as she expected it would. Behind it was a crude plywood compartment, in which sat a small, grimy Rolodex.

Sarah cast a glance at Captain Herlihy. “Well, now,” she announced. “The little black book. Could I get some help here, please?”

Astonished, Carlos from Latent Prints helped Sarah tug at the plywood compartment until it too came off, revealing a plaster-and-sheetrock grotto in which sat several neatly wrapped stacks of fifty-dollar bills, unremarkable except that each bill had been cut precisely in half.

***

“Anyway,” Sarah said to Peter, “she operated in a cash economy.” They emerged from the elevator into the lobby of the apartment building, lit with a garish, stuttering fluorescent light.

“That was almost five thousand dollars,” he said. “With the missing half-bills, I mean. Tells me drugs.”

“Or organized crime.”

“Maybe. Nice work on the mirror thing.”

“Damn, I’m good.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Actually, it wasn’t rocket science,” she said. “We busted a drug dealer in Providence last year who hid his telephone answering machine in a secret compartment built into the floor.”

“Take credit when it’s thrown your way, Cahill. Your friend sure did have an impressive clientele. You have any idea?”

“Yes,” Sarah admitted.

“What was it, five or six CEOs in Boston and New York. Two United States senators. One circuit court judge. How much you bet it had something to do with one of them?”

Someone entered the building, not a face either one recognized. They fell silent. Outside he added, “You liked her, didn’t you?” He nodded to the officer with the clipboard, clapped him on the shoulder.

They stepped into the dark street. “Kind of. Not my kind of person, really. But a good sort.”

“Whore with a heart of gold.”

Sarah looked around for her car, but couldn’t locate it, forgot where she’d parked it. “Bronze, maybe. She really took a liking to me. Practically lived for our meetings. Lonely girl-sometimes she’d call five times a day. It got so I had to duck her calls.”

“She tell you anything that might indicate, you know… a client she was afraid of, someone who knew she was ratting for the FBI, something like that?”

“No.”

“But you have theories.”

“Maybe,” Sarah said.

“Care to share?”

“Not yet. But I will, okay? I need a copy of the Rolodex.”

“Well, we own all that, you know.”

“Yeah, and without FBI cooperation you don’t have dog shit.”

Peter gave a strange half-smile. His face reddened. When he was angry, his face flushed like litmus paper. “If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have met her.”

“Probably not,” she conceded. “But that still doesn’t change-”

“I mean, I took a chance introducing you two, you know. Given your record with informants-”

“Fuck off, Peter,” she snapped.

He beamed as he turned away. “Give the little guy a hug for me, huh?”

She spotted her Honda Civic a moment later, being dragged by a tow truck. And she’d taken the standard precautions against towing: placed her FBI calling card on the dashboard, next to the blue bubble light.

“Shit,” she said, realizing there was no point in running; it was too far down the block already. But she was able to make out a small violet sticker on the tow truck’s bumper:

PRACTICE RANDOM KINDNESS & SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY

CHAPTER SEVEN