But maybe there was something to all that slippery-slope mumbo jumbo. A stripper gets hurt a little—big deal, right? But maybe it is. Maybe it just snowballs from there.

And where does it end up?

Megan Pierce, wife and mother of two, who could now identify Del Flynn’s two psychopaths—that’s where. She needed to be silenced. That’s the problem with crossing the line. You step over it for a second, but then that line gets blurry and you don’t know where it is anymore and next thing you know, you’re supposed to help two maniacal Talbots-catalogue models kill a woman.

Goldberg’s cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID and saw it was the psycho chick.

“Goldberg,” he said.

“Is she still in your precinct, Deputy Chief Goldberg?”

Her upbeat voice reminded him of the hot cheerleader captain from his high school days. “Yes.”

The young woman sighed. “I can wait.”

And then Goldberg said something that surprised even him: “There’s no need.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m getting all the information on her, and then I’ll pass it on. There’s no need for you to, uh, discuss anything with her. You can just let her be.”

Silence.

“Hello?” Goldberg said.

“Don’t worry, I’m here,” she said in a singsong voice.

Where the hell had Flynn found these two? He decided to push it a bit.

“Plus there is a lot of heat,” Goldberg said.

“Heat?”

“People are watching her. Cops. You’d never have a chance to get her alone for more than a minute or two. Really, it’s best to leave this one to me.”

Silence.

Goldberg cleared his throat and tried to move her off this topic. “The blood by those ruins belongs to Carlton Flynn, just so you know. So what other angle are you two working on? Anything I can help with?”

“Deputy Chief Goldberg?”

“Yes.”

“When will Megan Pierce be leaving the precinct?”

“I don’t know, but I just told you—”

“She saw things, Deputy Chief Goldberg.”

He flashed onto Harry Sutton’s dead body—the poor guy’s pants down around his ankles, the burn marks, the incisions, the horrible things done to him. Beads of sweat popped up on Goldberg’s brow. He hadn’t signed on for this. It was one thing to sneak a little information to a worried father. But this?

“No, she didn’t.”

Again the young woman said, “Pardon?”

“I was just with her,” Goldberg said, realizing that he was talking too quickly. “She said she saw a black man at the scene, that’s all.”

Silence.

“Hello?”

“If you say so, Deputy Chief Goldberg.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But the call had already been disconnected.

28

WALKING TOWARD GOLDBERG’S OFFICE, Broome debated the pros and cons and quickly deduced that he had no choice. Goldberg was finishing a phone call. He gestured for Broome to sit.

Broome glanced at his boss’s face and then did a double take. Goldberg hadn’t been a beauty who radiated good health to begin with, but right now, sitting behind his cluttered desk, he looked like something pulled out of the bottom of the laundry hamper. Something that maybe the cat coughed up first. Something that was pale and pasty and shaky and maybe in need of an angioplasty.

Broome took a seat. He expected to be chewed out, but Goldberg seemed too exhausted. Goldberg hung up the phone. He looked at Broome through eyes with enough baggage to work a pole at La Crème and said in a gentle voice that surprised Broome, “Tell me what’s going on.”

The tone threw him. Broome tried to remember the last time Goldberg had been anything but piss-contest hostile. He couldn’t. It didn’t matter. Broome had already decided that he had to come clean and tell Goldberg his suspicions. It would be impossible to move ahead without his immediate superior’s okay. They probably had enough now to go to the feds—probably had enough yesterday but Broome didn’t want to rush it. He didn’t want to look like a fool if he was wrong, didn’t want to lose the case if he was right.

Broome started with the murder of Ross Gunther, then moved on to the missing Mardi Gras Men—Erin had so far come up with fourteen disappearances in seventeen years that fit—and then he segued into Carlton Flynn. He ended with his suspicion that last night’s murder of Harry Sutton was connected, but he had no idea how.

“Still,” Broome said, finishing up, “our witness gave us a good description of two people near Harry Sutton’s office at the time of his death. We’ll get the sketches out as soon as we can.”

Goldberg roused himself from whatever stupor he’d sunken into and said, “By witness, you mean the woman I just met downstairs?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re hiding her because… ?”

“She’s the Cassie I told you about before,” Broome said. “The one who came forward yesterday.”

“Stewart Green’s ex?”

“Not ex, but, yes, the girl Green stalked or whatever. Now this Cassie has a new identity—husband, kids, the works—and she asked me to protect it. I promised her I would try.”

Goldberg didn’t push it. He picked up a paper clip and began to bend it back and forth. “I don’t get something,” he said. “Every Mardi Gras, some guy goes missing?”

“Right.”

“And we haven’t found any bodies?”

“Not one,” Broome said. “Unless you include Ross Gunther.”

Goldberg twisted the paper clip until it broke. Then he picked up another. “So this Gunther guy gets murdered in this park eighteen years ago on Mardi Gras. And this other guy, what was his name?”

“Ricky Mannion.”

“Right, Mannion. He goes down for it. They had a solid case. Mannion still claims innocence. The next year on Mardi Gras, Stewart Green vanishes. We don’t know it at the time, but he was in that same remote part of the park and he was, what, bleeding?”

“That’s right.”

“But someone has seen him recently?”

“We think so, yes.”

Goldberg shook his head. “Now we skip ahead seventeen years. Another man, Carlton Flynn, vanishes on Mardi Gras—and the preliminary labs tell us that he too was bleeding up at the same spot?”