“What about their crimes? Any similarity there?” I asked.
“With the exception of Mr. Tompkins, they’re all multiple offenders,” Ross replied. “Their crimes run the gamut of your regular felonies—grand theft auto, armed robbery, bank robbery. You name it, they did it.”
“What about gang affiliations?” Mel asked.
Connors shrugged. “They all had some, of course. If they didn’t have them when they went into prison, they sure as hell did when they came out. That’s one of the things Todd assures me he’s great at, data mining—once he has it. That’s where you come in, Mel. You’ll need to gather up all the information we have on these offenders from all applicable jurisdictions so Todd will be able to organize the information for us. Once we look at all the cases together, we may find there are common denominators, details no one has noticed.”
Ross Connors reached for the bottle and emptied it into his own glass without offering any to Mel. I knew he was drinking way too much way too fast. I was glad he had a driver.
“I count ten victims so far,” Mel said. “It seems to me that’s worthy of a task-force approach. If it comes to light that you’ve only put three investigators on this and one of them is an economist instead of a cop, it’s not going to sound like you’re taking this seriously.”
“Oh, I’m serious, all right,” Ross said. “Very serious. What I’m hoping is that the two of you will point me in the right direction. If it turns out our prime suspect is a cop, let me know.”
“There’s more than one state involved,” Mel pointed out.
“I know all that,” Ross said impatiently. “As I said, I’ll call in the feds when it’s time—once I understand the full extent of the problem.”
I had always respected Ross Connors. Politics had always been one of his considerations, but never the top one. This time things were different and I wondered why.
“I still think we need a task force,” Mel insisted.
“We’re already dealing with a task force,” Ross returned. “A task force of killers—a syndicate, if you like. If they’re plugged into in the law enforcement community, as soon as we start putting together a large-scale investigation, they’ll know what we’re doing and when we’re doing it. At that point they’ll go to ground, and we’ll never find them.”
With that, Ross rose unsteadily to his feet. “I’ll call Harry in the morning,” he said. “Tell him that you two are working a special project for me for the foreseeable future. And, considering the situation, it might be better if you worked from home instead of the office.”
Control freak Harry I. Ball was going to love that.
Mel escorted Ross downstairs in the elevator and hooked him back up with his car and driver. When she returned, just as I expected, she took me to the woodshed over the Tompkins situation.
“Maybe you’d better tell me about your friend LaShawn,” she said. “This time don’t leave anything out.”
I have no idea how she knew I had left something out, but she did. And so I told her the whole story, including the parts about working sub rosa with Detective Kendall Jackson. I expected all hell would break loose, but it didn’t. When I finished, Mel stood up and stretched. “Time to go night-night,” she said. “This turned into a hell of a day, and tomorrow isn’t going to be any better.”
A little while later we were lying in bed. I was almost asleep when Mel said, “So how do you feel about all this?”
Even half asleep and without having any idea of the actual topic of discussion, I was smart enough to recognize this as a trick question—almost as volatile as the age-old “Do I look fat in this?”
“Feel?” I asked dimly.
“About our being partners,” she said. “That was the first thing Barbara Galvin told me about you when I showed up at SHIT. She said, ‘Beau doesn’t work with partners.’ Of course, we already did that once—unofficially, yes. But it sounds to me as though this time Ross is making it official—in an under-the-table kind of way.”