The Big Fear by Andrew Case Page A

behind the blue line. The standoff was over. He nodded to Sparks.
    “Thanks for talking to me, Sergeant. I appreciate it. And Officer Del Rio, you think that over. I’m sure someone else will be talking to you soon enough.”
    “Goodbye, Detective.”
    Officer Joey Del Rio looked down at his computer. Mulino watched a single drop of sweat spill out onto his keyboard. He backed out of the precinct, his eyes locked on the sergeant’s the whole way.

    Standing at the lip of the curb overhanging the waterfront, Leonard watched the detective amble up the dock toward the stairs. Mulino had been in and out of the precinct in ten minutes. Still, that was plenty of time to cook up a story with Sparks. No one really got a rip for talking to another cop during a shooting investigation: you weren’t supposed to do it, but with the forty-eight hour rule and the tight bonds of blue, there was no way to stop them. And if you forwarded a case to the DA saying you couldn’t find evidence of a bad shooting but you could show that the guys had spoken to each other, it wasn’t as though they were going to bring charges for witness tampering.
    But on another level, it didn’t make that much sense. It wasn’t Mulino’s story that was a problem, and Sparks hadn’t shown up on the deck until after the shooting. Mulino’s problem was the evidence. Mulino’s problem was that he’d said that Brian Rowson had a gun, and as Leonard had learned when the full packet had come in just after lunch, no gun had been recovered. It had been enough to send Leonard into the field, and watching Mulino hail a car service on Gold Street had been enough for him to try an impromptu stakeout.
    Mulino stopped at the base of the rickety staircase. Leonard ducked back behind the railing. He could explain himself if he had to, but better just to leave. There was nothing more to see, just a middle-aged man struggling up a couple of flights of stairs. Whatever he had wanted to see had gone on inside the precinct. A search for the missing gun. A hunt for a suitable replacement. The dead cop was already dead. The living cop was still a brother. If the sergeant still had Mulino’s back, then the next day Leonard would get a fax with a statement about seeing the gun, how it slipped into the water. Or better yet the gun would appear itself.
    If nothing came from the precinct though, even after an in-person from the detective, then that meant that they didn’t have his back. That they didn’t see him as worth protecting. And that was its own kind of mystery. Leonard slipped into the car he had borrowed for the night from the city, lurched forward into the wicked heat, and turned toward home.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

    SHORTS
    The numbers streamed past on the terminal, blinking and changing faster than Veronica Dean could keep track of them. Mineral deposits in Asia, recycling plants in New Jersey, a reinsurance company in the City of London. Ten years ago she had kept a tight watch on a few sectors, but as things had gone to hell and back she needed to keep both eyes open. Once upon a time she’d actually gone out to see the companies. Visiting gold mines in Indonesia, impressing the hardened prospectors by not flinching when she was bitten by a bug the size of a sparrow. Standing shin-deep in mud and whipping out a flip phone to tell New York that the reported core samples were all a fraud, that the operation itself was one big swindle, and thereby getting out of the scandal before any of the big investors. Not to mention that she’d made it back to the airport alive after telling the man with a machete that she was on to him and that her investors would be pulling their funding that very day. She was remembering it wrong, maybe. The mud couldn’t have been much past her ankles. Still, nowadays she wouldn’t even float down to the sidewalks for lunch; the days were spent pacing the pristine carpet and looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows from Wall Street to the two