he got out.”
Kelsey didn’t say anything for a moment. She was eyeing the pistol in Riley’s holster.
“What weapon do you carry, dear?” she asked.
“A forty-caliber Glock,” Riley said.
“Nice!” Kelsey said. “May I have a look at it?”
Riley handed Kelsey her weapon. Kelsey took out the magazine and examined the gun. She handled it with the appreciation of a connoisseur.
“Glocks came along a little too late for me to use in the field,” she said. “I like them, though. The polymer frame has a good feel to it – very light, excellent balance. I love the sighting arrangement.”
She put the magazine back in and handed the gun back to Riley. Then she walked over to a desk. She took out a semiautomatic pistol of her own.
“I took Shane Hatcher down with this baby,” she said, smiling. She handed the gun to Riley, then sat back down. “Smith and Wesson Model 459. I wounded and disarmed him. My partner wanted to kill him on the spot – revenge for the cop he’d killed. Well, I wouldn’t have it. I told him if he did kill Hatcher, there’d be more than one corpse to bury.”
Kelsey blushed a little.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I’d rather that story didn’t get around. Please don’t tell anybody.”
Riley handed the weapon back to her.
“Anyway, I could tell that I met with Hatcher’s approval,” Kelsey said. “You know, he had a strict code, even as a gangbanger. He knew that I was just doing my job. I think he respected that. And he was grateful, too. Anyway, he’s never shown any interest in me. I even wrote him a few letters, but he never wrote back. He probably doesn’t even remember my name. No, I’m all but positive he doesn’t want to kill me.”
Kelsey peered at Riley with interest.
“But Riley – is it OK for me to call you Riley? – you told me on the phone that you’d actually visited him, that you’d gotten to know him. He must be quite fascinating.”
Riley thought she actually detected a note of envy in the woman’s voice.
Kelsey rose from her chair.
“But listen to me babble, while you’ve got a bad guy to catch! And who knows what he might be up to, even as we speak. I’ve got some information that might help. Come on, I’ll show you everything I’ve got.”
She led Riley and Bill through a hallway to a basement door. Riley’s nerves quickened.
Why does it have to be in a basement? she thought.
Riley had harbored a slight but irrational phobia about basements for some time now – vestiges of PTSD from having been held captive in Peterson’s damp crawlspace, and even more recently from having taken out a different killer in a pitch-dark basement.
But as they followed Kelsey down the stairs, Riley saw nothing sinister. The basement was finished as a comfortable rec room. In one corner was a well-lighted office area with a desk covered with manila folders, a bulletin board with old photographs and newspaper clippings, and a couple of filing drawers.
“Here it is – everything you could want to know about ‘Shane the Chain’ and his career and downfall,” Kelsey said. “Help yourself. Ask if you need help making sense out of it all.”
Riley and Bill started looking through folders. Riley was surprised and thrilled. It was a fascinating, even daunting body of information and a lot of it had never been scanned for the FBI database. The folder she was looking through was crammed with seemingly unimportant items, including restaurant napkins with handwritten notes and sketches pertaining to the case.
She opened another folder that held photocopied reports and other documents. Riley was a bit amused to realize that Kelsey surely wasn’t supposed to have copied or kept them. The originals had surely long since been shredded after being scanned.
As Bill and Riley pored over the material, Kelsey remarked, “I guess you’re wondering why I just won’t let this case go. Sometimes I wonder myself.”
She thought for a moment.
“Shane Hatcher was my one brush with real evil,” she said. “During my first fourteen years with the Bureau, I was pretty much window dressing here in the Syracuse office – the token woman. But I worked this case from the ground up, talking to gangbangers in the street, taking charge of the team. Nobody thought I could bring Hatcher down. In fact, nobody was sure that anybody could bring him down. But I did.”
Now Riley was looking through a folder of poor-quality photos that the Bureau probably hadn’t bothered to scan. Kelsey had obviously known better than to throw them away.
One showed a cop sitting in a café talking to a gangbanger. Riley immediately recognized the young man as Shane Hatcher. It took her a moment to recognize the cop.
“That’s the officer that Hatcher killed, isn’t it?” Riley said.
Kelsey nodded.
“Officer Lucien Wayles,” she said. “I took that photograph myself.”
“What’s he doing talking with Hatcher?”
Kelsey smiled knowingly.
“Well, now, that’s rather interesting,” she said. “I suppose you’ve heard that Officer Wayles was an upstanding, decorated policeman. That’s what the local cops still want everybody to think. Actually, he was corrupt to the very bone. In this picture, he was meeting with Hatcher hoping to make a deal with him – a cut of the drug profits for not interfering with Hatcher’s territory. Hatcher said no. That’s when Wayles decided to do Hatcher in.”
Kelsey pulled out a photograph of Wayles’s mangled body.
“As you probably know, that didn’t work out too well for Officer Wayles,” she said.
Riley felt a tingle of understanding. This was exactly the treasure trove of material she’d yearned for. It brought her much, much closer to the mind of the youthful Shane Hatcher.
As she looked at the photo of Hatcher and the cop, Riley probed the young man’s mind. She imagined Hatcher’s thoughts and feelings at the moment the picture was taken. She also remembered something that Kelsey had just said.
“You know, he had a strict code, even as a gangbanger.”
From her own conversations with Hatcher, Riley knew that it was still true today. And now, looking at the photo, Riley could feel Hatcher’s visceral disgust at Wayles’s proposal.
It offended him, Riley thought. It felt like an insult.
Small wonder that Hatcher had made such a gruesome example of Wayles. According to Hatcher’s twisted code, it was the moral thing to do.
Thumbing through more photos, Riley found a mugshot of another gangbanger.
“Who’s this?” Riley asked.
“Smokey Moran,” Kelsey said. “Shane the Chain’s most trusted lieutenant – until I busted him for selling drugs. He faced
