On the good side, the murder scene had been dark, and the door-cam footage was of dreadful quality. There was no way to distinguish whether the person in the thick, dark hoodie was a man or a woman, let alone which specific person it might be. Unless there were other videos of a finer quality, this didn't portend to be much.

But fucking video cameras. The damned things were everywhere nowadays. And there was always the chance that someone from Upper Manhattan who had caught a glimpse of me walking the streets as the Bruja might help the police put two and two together.

On a happy note, only the craziest of fringe conspiracy websites thought the video was what it appeared to be. Most normal commentators and news sites took the position that whoever had murdered the off-duty officer—and it appeared that McConnell no longer numbered among the living—used some sort of wires and harness to drop to the ground, murder the poor fellow, and then again scamper to the rooftops and flee.

It made sense. The human mind is trained to see certain things. When something extraordinary comes along, most folk will try to wedge that extraordinary thing into comfortable and familiar categories. Someone with rappelling, climbing, and engineering skills had staged an elaborate murder. That was the story online.

The police were in the preliminary stages of the investigation and made no comment.

The peculiarity of McConnell's death did explain the hostility of the two detectives who had visited earlier. Two of their fellow NYPD officers, men from the same precinct, had been found dead in 72 hours, and every detective in the city no doubt wanted to be following serious leads, not chasing down nothing. It appeared I was the nothing. Good.

The long and the short of it, though, was that I'd gone to Queens to incapacitate a man, had seen a hasty opportunity to fake an accident, and then had bungled the whole thing. You heard me right; I bungled the whole thing and deserved to get caught for it. But I wasn't going to let that happen.

If I were smart, I would shut up and lay low until everything blew over. But I didn't have that in me. My compulsive streak would not allow me to watch things simply come to their natural conclusion. For better or worse, I was the kind of creature that needed to act, even if that meant just keeping tabs on what the police were doing. It was part of my makeup.

So what to do?

I needed information, and the Internet provided only so much. I knew where the local precinct was, and a quick search online told me that the FBI field office was in Lower Manhattan, in an area known as Civic Center. Surveillance on the precinct house would be easy, though the FBI offices might be more difficult.

Might I come up with a plausible excuse to contact Detective Moreland? No. As much as my annoyance toward him had softened, he would be in the middle of a manhunt. And as much as I now craved information, perhaps I should keep anyone from the NYPD at arm's length for a time.

Special Agent Gaudin was another matter. In a very informal way I had promised to keep my eyes open in the neighborhood and to share any information that came my way. She was smart, and being around her therefore was a risk, but she already had shown she liked to talk. I needed to find a few nuggets of information to justify contacting her. It might well be beneficial.

I would go out later that evening in my Bruja street garb and do some looking around. Before that though, I fully intended to spend some time near the local police precinct listening in on the chatter and the scuttlebutt. In the meantime, the Internet beckoned. I still was something of a novice when it came to online research, but the wealth of information was staggering, and I felt the need to be at work.

___

It took about an hour, but I found the perfect spot on the roof of the local precinct house and hunkered down. The day spent searching the Internet for stories related to McConnell had not been as productive as I had hoped, but neither was it a complete waste of time. There were no other videos of the fellow's death; of that I was passably certain. And the single witness, a retired NYPD officer named Gruber, was not the least bit certain of what he had seen.

What I discovered while listening above the police precinct was informative for what I didn't hear. The investigations of the deaths of both officers were being run through a central taskforce of local, state, and federal investigators that was headquartered in another precinct. Only the most basic grunt work had been assigned to the precinct where the two officers worked. It seemed appropriate in a way, but the men and women of the detective squad there were not the least bit happy. No, they were angry.

There were numerous rumors rattling around the detective squad offices, the most prominent of which was that Keebler had been killed because he somehow had unknowingly walked into something big. Otherwise, why would the feds be involved? Perhaps it somehow was related to the D-Train killer who still was at large. The D-Train killer had been targeting local criminals, so perhaps the killer was in some way connected with the Korean mafia?

Very possibly true, I silently agreed.

The hours I later spent walking the rooftops and the shabby alleyways of the rougher part of the neighborhood were more productive. After visiting the precinct, I ambled through various parts of Upper Manhattan, ranging farther north than was my usual.

The area north of the park was a mix of African and Hispanic communities along with new immigrants from eastern Europe. Prowling the park, the streets, and the rooftops, I heard patches of English, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Russian. There were even a few languages I didn't immediately recognize.

It took no time at all to find the areas where criminal activity was thriving. I've always had a nose for such things. You might say sin was my business, and business was booming on the street that ran just north of the park. So conscientious were the local lowlifes that they had done me the service of extinguishing most of the lamps and lights throughout the northern part of the park.

There was a perfect saturation of darkness when I crept in through the trees and bushes before taking a leisurely walk along the grass fringe that paralleled where the trade in drugs and prostitution was taking place along the street. I recognized some of the youngsters from the area closer to home, so it seemed that a number had found a new stomping ground.

About halfway down the long stretch of sidewalk, I spied the fellow I was seeking. No one saw me, so I stole up to a dark spot on a low stone wall and made myself comfortable. There seemed to be a healthy trade in some type of narcotic the smell of which was unfamiliar to me. Farther east, down toward the nearest intersection, a number of gaudily dressed women, and a few pretty young men, attempted to drum up some interest in the earthly delights they had to sell.

I sat for a time in the darkness and soaked it all in. There was something simultaneously touching and squalid about the street scene before me. I liked it and was sickened by it at the same time.

Time for business.

"Hello, Pemberton," I said to the youngster standing not 10 feet in front of me.

My faux male voice caused the lad to jump in the air so high that his feet briefly left the sidewalk. He seemed embarrassed by his reaction, and when he turned to face me, it was with his usual squared shoulders and a serious look on his face.

"You come to run me off again?" was his defiant challenge.

The three young men with whom Pemberton had been chatting had begun to amble away by then, throwing furtive glances in my direction as they did. The young man with whom I was speaking didn't seem to notice that his friends suddenly wanted to be anywhere else than near me. Good for them.

"La samah allah!" I exclaimed. "How could you say such a thing? I've come to check up on you."

"Oh, right. ... 'Cause we're friends."

"I let you live in my city and make money here. And I don't even charge you a tax." I shouldn't have teased the lad in that way. "Of course we're friends."

A look of annoyance flashed across the young man's face. "These scary-ass Rusky motherfuckers like to killed me when I set up shop here. Now you coming to give me more grief. ... Get the fuck outa here!"

Pemberton's sudden snap of defiance tickled my funny bone, and it was all that I could do to keep from laughing. That would have been the worst thing to do. I very much wanted to earn the lad's trust.

"Why don't you come over here and tell me about it." I patted the stone wall next to me.

The lad hesitated. "I'm fine here."

"Suit yourself."

"Did you kill them two cops?" he asked from nowhere.

"Now why would I do that?"

"Why's a murdering-ass witch do anything?"

Fair enough. "Why don't you tell me about those Russians?" I said.

And he did. It was like pulling teeth at first, but over the next hour, Uthman Pemberton talked more and more, and began to open up like a young man who was under a great deal of stress and needed nothing more than to vent.

It all was very interesting. I'm no cop, certainly I'm no sort of criminologist, but I've lived long, and a great deal of that life was spent on the rough side of town. I knew much about the criminal life. These Russians were new players in the city and, apparently, were a different crew than the bratva goons that came over to the US in the early 1990s. The new crew that had set up shop in Upper Manhattan was violent and ruthless.

And they were into everything, from guns, to drugs, to robbery, extortion, smuggling, and confidence tricks. A great deal of their money was made trafficking in women. They were so out of control that they scared even good honest criminals like Pemberton, though the young man would never say that aloud.

The whole conversation was terribly informative. It gave me a great deal of information, the type that might prove profitable in many different ways.

By the end of it, Pemberton finally had relaxed somewhat and taken a seat on the low stone wall about five feet down from me. He looked terribly uncomfortable still, and there was something about the way he talked and his general posture toward me that set the gears in the wheelhouse of my mind racing.

It then dawned on me why people on the streets presumed correctly that I was a woman, despite my careful disguise. I smelled like a girl—there was just something in Pemberton's deportment that told me that. How silly and careless of me. Like so many things lately, that discovery both annoyed and amused me in equal measure.

After I discovered what I was able from my young informant, I wordlessly passed him another roll of hundreds, this one not quite so big as the first I had given him days before, but it was large enough to choke a pony, if not a small horse.

"You take care of yourself. And stay away from those Russians."

The moment Pemberton looked away, I slipped into the shadows and began to make my way home. The lad had provided a goodly amount of information, even the location of three buildings where I might find the local branch of the bratva. There were plans to make.