A Witness Above Read Online Free PDF Page B

well, and I spoke with him briefly, explaining what had happened, before pointing him in the direction of Ferrier's car. A van from a Charlottesville TV station pulled up to the barricade. I checked on Armistead again and hopped into the truck.
    Rehashing the past with the state police detective had reminded me of a copy of a letter I'd left folded in my glove compartment several weeks before. I reached in among my pile of road maps and pulled out the envelope.
    It was from an old acquaintance in New York, a diminutive ballistics expert named Rashid Fuad, who had worked with Toronto and I on a few cases long ago. Addressed to Cat Cahill on NYPD stationary, it said Fuad was writing to inform Cat that the department, after all these years had managed to make a tentative link with what they thought might be the weapon used to gun down his old partner. Seems the boys in Fuad's department had been messing, on an experimental basis, with a kind of hot-shot, state-of-the-art imaging software, where the computer was supposed to analyze and compare digitized photos of gun barrels and evidence taken from crime scenes, looking for matches. They had been diligently going about the laborious task of archiving all their old black-and-white images into their computer when, lo and behold, in the years-old Singer/Balazar case, the machine had spit out a match.
    Not that it amounted to much. All the brilliant program told us was that a bullet fragment taken from Singer's body matched the barrel of a nine-millimeter Glock that had been test-fired in an unsuccessful attempt to match it with evidence from a completely unrelated case the year before Singer's death. The handgun in question was even legal. It had been registered to a now-deceased lackey who had worked for one of the major dope pushers in New York, a greasy slob named Boog Morelli. No one had a hard time speculating that the shooter who'd managed to disappear the night of Singer's killing, an eighteen-year-old pimp and sometime crack dealer from the Bronx, had links to one of Morelli's goons.
    Not too surprisingly either, the pimp himself had ended up dead a few months after offing Singer, the victim of an overdose. Bronx homicide had I.D'd him as the likely perp in the patrolman's murder, based on rumors from the street and a footprint of a rare Armani loafer, size 10, found in the frozen mud behind one of the Dumpsters in New Rochelle. They were the same shoes the pimp had been wearing in the cheap hotel room in Queens where'd he'd taken his last wild ride with Mr. Rock.
    Sometimes I wonder if, with all our technology, we acquire more information than is good for us. No one had even considered reopening the case.
    I folded the letter and put it back in among the maps. The TV crew was starting to roll film now. A deputy let me past the blockade and I pulled away from the scene as quickly and inconspicuously as I could.
    I cut down Route 231 through Banco, crossed the Robinson River, then on to the town of Madison. I veered through the village onto U.S. 29, its southbound lanes bending toward Charlottesville and home. Twenty-nine ran roughly parallel to the famous Skyline Drive twenty miles to the west and offered panoramic views. It had yet to deteriorate into one of those sleazy strips, lined with cheap hotels and flesh bars, that other highway corridors nearer bigger cities had become.
    I wasn't enjoying the views, however. Not today. I needed to talk to my daughter pronto, but I was afraid to use the car phone—call me paranoid. I turned on the radio and picked up Roy Orbison on the oldies station out of C'ville.
    Traffic was already picking up with weekend tourists. C'ville is an overgrown college town with roots to the founding of the republic, Thomas Jefferson, the Rotunda, Monticello, and all that. A city where old brick and old ways clash with hip thinking. Development had recently mushroomed from the central lawn of the university, where Edgar Allen Poe had his old room