Black Water Transit Read Free Page B

mango.”
    “What did he say, exactly?” says Casey.
    “Hard to say,” says Two-Pack. “I was upside down. I had my face up against the door. A lot was going on at the time.”
    “These brothers got names?”
    Two-Pack has no idea.
    “Where do we find this Tony mutt?”
    “You guys know a place in the Village, no nameplate, a walk-down in an alleyway off Gansevoort? Kind of a water sports club? Private?”
    They had heard about it.
    “Could be, you go there tonight, you look around, maybe you’ll see this guy there. Like I said, short, wiry, really pale, almost an albino, but has long black hair, never in a ponytail, likes to let it hang way down his back. Shiny black hair, looks blue under a street lamp. He’ll be in the back. Way in the back there. You won’t miss him.”
    Levon sat in the DT car—a detective car—this one is an unmarked dark-blue Crown Victoria—he stays there with Two-Pack, waiting while Casey, whose cell phone battery was dead, went off to make a phone call to the assistant district attorney assigned to Harlem and the Uptown Sex Crimes Task Force. The ADA was a woman named Veronica Stein, mid-twenties, Upper East Side background, black hair in a tricky razor cut, always dressed in pinstripe suits and sneakers, and Casey loved her because she hated sex offenders very deeply and always made a project out of the ones she could get a net around. Casey laid out the state of the case so far. A confidential informant with corroborative information that supports a warrant for the suspect.
    “What would that corroborative information be?” she asks.
    “Pattern of behavior. Verbally expressed a pedophile kidnap fantasy to the informant.” Casey knew that was weak.
    “Under what circumstances?” she asks.
    “Ah, under … during a sexual contact.”
    “So your informant is a hooker?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay. What did you get out of NCIC?”
    They had run a search on the National Crime Information Computer database and got a hit on a Tony LoGascio—pronounced “lo-gashio”—DOB October 18, 1969, place called Agrigento, in Sicily. Naturalized in 1978. Got right into crime. Popped for Section 130 beefs, also a history of drugs and violence. Got a 120 for assault police too. His intake photo matched the witness ID eight points out of ten.
    “Not enough for an arrest warrant,” says the ADA.
    Casey thinks about case law.
    “How about something under Section 130 of the code?”
    “What have you got?”
    “Our CI says that this LoGascio guy had consensual sodomy with him last week.”
    “Your CI under seventeen?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You say LoGascio has a date of birth of October eighteenth, 1969? He’s thirty-one, then. So that’s a class E felony. Will your CI support the charge? Lay an information?”
    “Yes. If I tell him to.”
    “We’ll run it by a judge,” says Veronica Stein. “Where’ll you be?”
    Casey says she and Levon will go downtown and locate the place on Gansevoort, and they’ll get the snitch to lay the information in front of the duty desk at the Sixth and she’ll fax Stein the sheets. They’ll wait forStein’s call at the Sixth Precinct on West Tenth, phone number there is 741-4811. Okay? Okay.
    Then on the way downtown, the Sex Crimes Unit CO from the Two Five gets on the radio to say that Shawana Coryell has been found and would Casey or Levon call him on a land line. Casey pulled over at Third and Forty-ninth and made the call from a booth inside Smith and Wollensky. She listened to the CO as he described the condition of the victim. What had been done. The damage. Little Shawana Coryell would live, but her childhood was now officially over.
    Back in the cruiser, Levon gives her a look. She sends it back and he sighs. They go down to the Sixth Precinct and wait. Thirty-seven minutes later the phone rings at the desk sergeant’s post.
    It’s Stein. They have the warrant.
    ALBANY
NEW YORK STATE
1300 HOURS
    Earlier the same day, at around the same hour