The Cold Blue Blood by David Handler Read Free Book Online Page B

cat.
    The hand-lettered sign that one of them had stuck on the wall of her cubicle said it all: CAT GIRL FROM HELL.
    By eight Cat Girl was parked at her desk, hard at work. At age twenty-eight, Desiree Mitry was one of the youngest Major Crime Squad lieutenants in the state of Connecticut. And one of only three who were women. Of those three women, Des was the only one who also happened to be black. This made her the state police’s prized poster girl, its great non-white hope. Des also had pull. She had major pull.
    Des had the Deacon behind her.
    This made her a magnet for resentment from some white officers. Up to and including her district commander, Capt. Carl Polito, who belonged to the so-called Waterbury Mafia—a tightly knit network of Italian American officers who’d been born and raised in the Brass City and who were, in many cases, related to each other. Capt. Polito’s deputy commander, Lt. Angelo Tedone, was his brother-in-law as well as an academy classmate. And the muscle-bound little preener of a sergeant with whom Des had been saddled, Rico “Soave” Tedone, was Angelo’s kid brother.
    Soave was infinitely more loyal to the Mafia than he was to Des. There was no doubt in her mind that he believed she’d been handed her lieutenancy strictly because of her color and gender and pull. That he felt he’d deserved it more than she did. And that he would seize any opportunity he could to cut her long, fine legs out from under her. Anything negative about her that came along, Soave passed directly on to his big brother Angelo. Any slip. Any stumble. Anything. She could not trust the little twerp. But she could not get him reassigned either—not without just cause. Otherwise, it would go down on her record that she couldn’t get along with male subordinates. So she put up with him.
    She put up with all of them. In many ways, they were just like a gang of little boys who had their own secret club, their own secret handshake and their own fort. And she, Des, was a g-i-r-l. But she could handle it. She did handle it—by routinely outperforming them. She’d cut her teeth on rape cases and bombings when she first joined the squad, but now her caseload consisted mostly of homicides. Homicides were her bread and butter. Captain Polito may not have been in her corner, but he was not an idiot. Every district commander was under constant pressure from Hartford to produce. And that’s what Des did. She produced.
    Besides, she did not want to go running to the Deacon. Not unless she absolutely had to.
    From the moment she sat down at her desk, she was totally focused on her caseload. Nothing interrupted her concentration.
    On this morning, Des was zoned in on the Torry Mordarski file. The shooting had attracted considerable media attention. When a young, attractive white woman was found shot to death in the woods, it inevitably did. And, just as inevitably, there was considerable pressure to find her shooter. It had been Des’s top priority for several weeks. She, Soave and up to a dozen uniformed troopers had expended hundreds of man-hours on the search. But it had grown cold. And Des could not accept that.
    So she pored over the ongoing investigative report one more time, sifting carefully through the details from beginning to end. The autopsy findings continued to puzzle her. In Des’s experience, when a pretty girl died violently it was about sex. Always. But Torry was clean. No traces of semen. No vaginal secretions. No bruises or abrasions. No bites. No saliva. No scratches. No tissue or blood under her nails. No hairs not her own. No one else’s fingerprints were found on her skin. There was no evidence of human contact whatsoever. When toxicology had come through a few days later, it showed no trace of drugs or alcohol in the dead girl’s system.
    A botched robbery attempt? Not a possibility. The first troopers on the scene had found her purse on the front seat of her 1987 Isuzu sedan, which had been