Timitz got up, making his way over to a row of three flowerpots on the ground next to the door to the house. They were more like dirt pots, really. That’s all they had in them.
Sure enough, there was the key under the middle one. Timitz grabbed it and walked over to Elizabeth, giving it to her. Glausen had a hand on his holster the entire time. Glock by my side, I was a bit twitchy myself.
Timitz returned to his chair as Elizabeth started orchestrating. Glausen and I were to come with her inside the house; the other officers were to stay outside and “keep Mr. Timitz company.”
Five minutes later, we returned to the patio.
“Would you still like your attorney, Mr. Timitz?” asked Elizabeth.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Okay, then,” she said, reaching for her phone. She held it out for him. “Give your attorney a call, and have him or her meet you at the Fiftieth Precinct in half an hour.”
“Are you arresting me?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “We’d like to ask you some further questions, and your cooperation would be appreciated. You would be coming with us voluntarily.”
Timitz thought for a few seconds. “Okay, but I’d like to make the call from my own phone,” he said. “It’s in a coat in my car.”
“The Honda out front,” said Elizabeth. “Right?”
“Yes. It’s also been running this entire time,” he said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Glausen announced, heading for the front of the house. No one objected, including Timitz.
“So how long have you worked for Judge Kingsman?” I asked, filling the silence that followed. I wasn’t sure Timitz would answer. He did.
“Almost ten years,” he said.
“So you were with the judge back when he was on the New York State Supreme Court?”
“Yes,” said Timitz.
“You’re not a clerk, though, right?”
“I research cases for him, but I have no law training,” he said. “Not in the traditional sense, at least.”
“What’s the nontraditional sense?” I asked.
“Being around a judge and his courtroom for ten straight years. Best law school there is.”
“You’re probably right about that,” I said. “At the very least, you’ve learned the importance of having an attorney. Is he good, by the way? Your attorney?”
“I don’t know,” said Timitz. “I’ve never needed the guy before.”
I wasn’t sure if Glausen heard that as he came back around the corner of Kingsman’s house. Either way, his timing was perfect.
In one hand was Timitz’s cell phone. All eyes, however, were on his other hand.
Glausen was clutching a large knife, his shirtsleeve pulled down over his fingers to prevent getting any prints on it. There was some added pep in his step, and as he crossed over into the shine of the floodlight, the top half of the steel blade toward the handle practically glistened. It was clean as a whistle. Not the bottom half, though.
It was as dirty as dried blood.
“I repeat,” said Glausen. “What kind of people ask for their lawyers?”
Chapter 86
“HE KNOWS we’re watching him,” I said.
“No; he thinks we’re watching him,” said Elizabeth. “He doesn’t know for sure. No one can—that’s the point.”
I looked again at Timitz through the one-way mirror into the interrogation room at the Fiftieth Precinct. He was sitting, his arms folded on the metal table, completely expressionless.
“No,” I said. “He knows.”
If there was any room smaller than the interrogation room, it was the viewing room where Elizabeth and I stood on the other side of that one-way mirror. At least, that’s the way it felt with the lights off.
The darkness also wasn’t helping with what had become an unintended experiment in sleep deprivation. That dull ache in the joints had settled in, the eyes beginning to sting.
Elizabeth checked the time on her phone. It was pushing 8:00 a.m. “Damn,” she muttered. “Where the hell is this guy?”
“Is there a statute of limitations on waiting for an attorney?” I asked.
If there was, the one representing Timitz was cutting it close. Granted, Timitz had probably woken him up when he called from Kingsman’s house, but that was more than an hour ago. Where was the guy coming from, Cleveland?
“We’ll give him another five minutes,” said Elizabeth.
“Then what?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Ask me in five minutes.”
Everything was falling into two categories now. What we knew and what we didn’t. What we knew since arriving at the precinct was that Elijah Timitz was licensed to carry a concealed weapon in the state of New York. His name was in the database.
What we didn’t know was the blood type on the knife found in his car.
The Fiftieth Precinct was hardly a forensics lab, but it could do your basic blood testing on the quick. Unfortunately, dried blood fell out of the realm of “basic” and required something called the absorption-elution technique. That took longer. Though maybe not as long as Timitz’s attorney was taking.
“You want a refill?” I asked. There was an old Mr. Coffee down the hall.
“I couldn’t even drink the first one,” said Elizabeth.
She was right—the coffee was horrible. Sludge. Whoever made it should’ve been charged with depraved indifference to human consumption. But it was the only thing keeping me going.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I made my way down the hallway, passing Glausen’s desk, where he was still working up his report on Timitz. His shift was almost over, and there were a few officers streaming in around him who looked decidedly fresher than anyone else. Not that Glausen was noticing. His head was down, his shoulders hunched. He was the body-language equivalent of a DO NOT DISTURB sign.
“Another victim, huh?” came a voice over my shoulder.
I turned to see one of those fresher-looking officers lining up behind me as I reached for the coffee. It took me a second. He was talking about the coffee.
“Yeah. I’m a glutton for punishment,” I said, offering to fill his mug first.
“Thanks,” he said. “Strangely enough, you get used to it.”
He sidestepped over to a small fridge and grabbed a large carton of half-and-half. To free up a hand to pour it, he put down the newspaper tucked under his arm. It was the early edition of the Gazette.
Holy shit.
I grabbed the paper, lifting the front page closer to my eyes, if only to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. I wasn’t.
“Hey!” said the officer. “Where are you going? That’s my paper!”
Chapter 87
ELIZABETH ALMOST killed us twice on the drive downtown, swerving in and out of traffic and blasting through intersections as if the streets of Manhattan were the backdrop to a video game.
“Nothing to it,” she assured me, shouting over the siren of our borrowed patrol car. That was almost as funny as her telling the precinct captain that he could keep my motorcycle as collateral.
This is all because of you, Grimes. You’re loving it, too, aren’t you?
The headline above the picture of Judge Kingsman on the Gazette’s cover blared it in capital letters.
THE DEALER!