Dead of Night by Barbara Nadel Page A

crack-dealers. He knew them all, and to the extent that they could, they all trusted him.
     Had Diaz had his mind fully on the case, Addison knew that he would already have picked up at least a whisper about who might
     have hit the young boy. But he was the key speaker down at the Cobo that morning.
    ‘He’s talking about managing drug-addicted informants,’ Rita told Officer Mark Zevets as they continued to search the grounds
     of the old Royden Holmes place for the bullet that had killed Aaron Spencer.
    ‘Well he should know,’ Zevets replied as he sifted through a pile of earth with one plastic-gloved hand. ‘Diaz is the only
     person I know can communicate with a junkie on a comedown without getting a knife at his throat.’
    ‘Trick is, I think, he likes them,’ Addison replied. Then she straightened her back and said, ‘You ever know a slug so difficult
     to find asthis one? Went clean through that boy’s head and into another dimension!’
    Zevets shrugged.
    The search for the bullet that had killed Aaron Spencer had taken on a strange, almost mythical quality. Usually bullets that
     had passed through people’s bodies were found within hours. But not this one. The search for this bullet was stretching out
     into days and, according to John Shalhoub, for a very good reason. Although they were still mounting searches of the garden
     and the waste ground surrounding the house, the most logical possibility was that the bullet had actually entered the property
     after it went through Aaron Spencer’s skull. The problem was that the Royden Holmes House was filled with rubble, old furniture
     and any number of dumped auto parts and cans of used sump oil, and clearing that had to be a job for the forensics people.
     In a house that had been left derelict for so long, they could find anything, even dead bodies. Junkies died in such places;
     gangs dumped their victims in them. The bullet, as far as the ballistic scientists were concerned, could very easily have
     passed into the body of the house. The boy had fallen with his head just leaning against the half-open front door.
    ‘You know, I heard that the subject of that old bigot Grant T. Miller came up when Diaz was out at Antoine Cadillac with his
     foreign guests,’ Addison said as she pushed a small bush to one side and looked at the soil around the plant.
    ‘The old fuck who lives in that house with the ruined tower?’ Zevets asked.
    ‘That’s him,’ Rita Addison replied. ‘Only resident left in this part of north Brush Park. Anyway, over at Cadillac, Crazy
     Zeke Goins was making a commotion about how he still believes that Miller killed his son back in the seventies.’
    Zevets straightened up and breathed deeply for a moment. It was tough work rooting through rough garden, bent over double.
     ‘Diaz worked that case, I heard.’
    ‘When he was a rookie, yeah,’ Rita said. He had told her all about it some years back. She was, she suspected, one of the
     very few people he did communicate with. Somewhere deep inside, she suspected, Diaz believed that Miller had killed Elvis
     Goins. ‘Old Zeke Goins got himself all excited about a couple of Turkish cops Diaz took out to Antoine Cadillac. Reckoned
     his “kin” could prove Miller’s guilt.’
    Zevets shook his head and laughed. ‘Some of those hillbillies, man, they are nuts.’
    ‘We all know that we can’t actually do anything to change the behaviour of our drug-addicted informants,’ Süleyman said to
     İkmen as they stood outside the conference centre, smoking in the snow.
    ‘Yes, but what I think Lieutenant Diaz is saying,’ İkmen replied, ‘is that if you want to build a proper working relationship
     with an addict, you must make him feel safe. You must avoid judging his behaviour or threatening him with prosecution because
     of his habit.’
    The bad feeling between them over Ezekiel Goins had evaporated, as Süleyman had known it would. Now, apparently, İkmen was
     focused