Depraved Indifference. Joseph Teller

rabbit and a large mouse. There was a leather baseball glove, complete with five impossibly tiny fingers.

      The earth leading downhill from the torn-away guardrail was still scarred, and down the embankment there were a couple of trees with fresh damage visible. And then a large, circular charred area, where new grass was just beginning to sprout through the blackness. And there were boulders, big enough, jagged enough and numerous enough to insure that the tumbling van had never had a chance of finding a safe landing spot.

      There was a reason why they’d called it Rockland County.

      He’d brought a camera along, an old Nikon his daughter had given him years ago when she’d gone digital. As far as he knew, it was the last one left in the world that still took a roll of real film. He snapped a few photos of the scene. Not that there was much of a reason to do so. The police would have taken dozens, and the defense would get copies in due time. But Jaywalker was an investigator today, and it seemed like an investigator-like thing to do.

      Then he walked back to the Merc and headed south, to the city.

      

      That night Jaywalker went over his notes and took stock of his investigation. Over two days, he’d familiarized himself with the newspaper accounts of the case, conferred with both of the lawyers who’d represented Carter Drake so far, gotten hold of a few sheets of paper and visited the scene of the crime. Even if it was a good beginning, it had turned up nothing really useful. Still on his checklist were subpoenaing police reports, locating and interviewing witnesses, and researching the law on precisely what it took to elevate a motor vehicle accident into a murder case.

      But all of those things could wait a day or two. The next order of business would take Jaywalker back up to New City. Knowing that, and figuring he’d be using the Mercury on a more or less regular basis, he decided he might as well park it on the street. But that was a momentous decision, given that he lived in Manhattan. He spent the next forty-five minutes searching for a legal parking place. Every empty spot turned out to be a fire hydrant, a bus stop or the private driveway to some building. Twice he had to get out and squint at the fine print on the alternate-side-of-the-street parking signs, which were obviously intended to entrap the unwary motorist. Did NO PARKING 10AM TO 11:30 AM MON AND THURS mean you could park there at other times? Or was that sign subject to the one above it that said NO STANDING 4 PM TO 7 PM? And since both of them included the red-letter warning TOW-AWAY ZONE, it appeared to matter.

      Back up in his apartment, more or less legally parked, Jaywalker had made a dozen phone calls just to find out what credentials he’d need and what procedures he’d have to follow for what he was planning to do. Next, he’d gone onto his computer and, using a mix of type fonts, print sizes and images, and about two hours of unbillable trial-and-error labor, had managed to create a rather impressive-looking identification card.

      

      Private Investigator in the STATE OF NEW YORK…

      HARRISON J. WALKER

HEIGHT:	5’11”
WEIGHT:	175
EYES:	Blue
SEX:	Male

      In the lower right-hand corner, Jaywalker glued a photograph of himself. He looked younger in it, and a lot less gray. Then again, it had to be at least a dozen years old. He knew that because he’d clipped it out of a photograph of him and his wife, after silently begging her forgiveness. Now, as he admired the laminated and trimmed results of his handiwork, he thought of her again and decided she’d be understanding about it.

      Not that he believed in any of that afterlife stuff.

      He’d avoided the temptation to fill in the blank following “Sex” with “Yes” or “Hoping” or anything else stupid. He’d been equally careful to omit the modifier “licensed” right before “private investigator.” Other than the one that permitted him to drive, the only license Jaywalker had was currently suspended, so using the term could easily get him into trouble. Make that more trouble. Since he was already on probation of a sort, all he needed was to commit one more transgression. And this one would have been a whopper, a felony, in fact. Criminal Impersonation, they called it, and it carried four years. Not that they’d have given him all of that. But he certainly could have wound up in jail.

      Which struck him as just a bit ironic, since that was precisely where he intended to wind up next. Because tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock sharp, Jaywalker had an appointment at the Rockland County Jail to have a face-to-face with Carter Drake.

      Chapter Four

      Jimmy Chipmunk

      “What the fuck is this supposed to be?”

      For a moment there, it seemed that the corrections officer at the outer gate wasn’t nearly as impressed with Jaywalker’s identification card as Jaywalker himself had been the evening before. But after twenty minutes’ worth of calls to the man’s supervisor and his supervisor’s supervisor, as well as to Amanda Drake and Judah Mermelstein, Private Investigator Jaywalker was finally buzzed in, to begin another half hour of being searched, signing forms and waiting.

      When he was finally escorted through a long underground corridor and up a flight of steps to the visiting room, Jaywalker discovered that his meeting with Carter Drake would be a face-to-face one in only the most literal sense. In order to actually speak and be heard through the three-quarter-inch, wire-reinforced, bulletproof glass separating them, they’d have to use a pair of black phone receivers with frayed cords and exposed wires, things that had likely been around since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.

      “Hi,” said Jaywalker.

      “Hello,” said Drake over the static. He was an athletic-looking man with blond hair that was just beginning to turn gray. A good match for Amanda, thought Jaywalker. And he was seeing Drake outside his element. He tried picturing him propped up behind a big mahogany desk, or at the end of a long boardroom table, instead of inside a cubicle at the Rockland County Jail, but it wasn’t easy to do. Jail had a funny way of making you look like you belonged there.

      “My name is Jaywalker. I’m a private investigator at the moment. Seven or eight months from now I expect to be a lawyer again, and your wife would like me—”

      “My estranged wife,” said Drake.

      “Oh?”

      “We’ve been separated for five months now.”

      Jaywalker considered the implications of that for a moment. It might make Amanda a more credible witness if he were to put her on the stand. She could come off as hostile enough to Carter to have left him, but at the same time she could back him up on any factual or character matters. And for another thing—

      “So it’s okay if you’re sleeping with her.”

      “Who said I’m sleeping with her?” asked Jaywalker, doing his best to summon up an appropriate measure of righteous indignation at the idea.

      “Nobody,” said Drake. “All I said was, it’s okay if you are.”

      Jaywalker shifted his weight in his chair. “What I was about to tell you,” he said, “was that your wife, estranged or not, would like me to take over for Mr. Mermelstein at some point.”

      “So she told me.”

      “So how about we discuss your case?” Jaywalker suggested.

      “Here?”

      Jaywalker looked around. “I suppose we could reserve a table at the Oyster Bar,” he said.

      “That’s not what I meant,” said Drake. “Everyone says these phones are monitored.”