Joe Martinez watched Lake leave, blinked, then came to his senses and hurried after him.
Ding!
Inside the elevator.
Lake frowned as Joe Martinez suddenly stuck his hand through the doors just before they closed, then walked in. "Detective Martinez, is something wrong?"
Joe Martinez took a deep breath and stood beside Lake. "Where are we going?"
We?
When did this become "we"?
A question mark appeared over Lake's head. He turned to Joe and said, "It's almost noon. Let's take a break and get ready to clock out for lunch. Want me to treat you?"
"What?"
Joe Martinez drew in a deep breath. "We have a case on our hands. Besides, it's only ten in the morning, Detective Edwin."
Lake shrugged.
What difference did ten o'clock and noon make? What could they do in two hours? It was practically time to get off work for lunch anyway.
Ding!
The elevator doors opened.
Lake headed toward his desk.
There was no other reason.
Lake had remembered where the body lying on the autopsy table had come from.
Wasn't this the senior member of the Textile Factory who had struck a cool pose for a minute at the beginning of the wanted notice before getting shot in the head and dying?
Had the plot of the wanted notice begun?
Lake, however, didn't care in the slightest.
Now that he knew who the body belonged to, things would be easy. He could simply wait for the rabbit to come out of its hole, organize the information when the time came, hand it over to the FBI, and be done with it.
The killer who had murdered the body downstairs was Cross. There was no doubt about it. Cross would die overseas, which would make this a cross-state case. That was the FBI's problem.
Case closed.
A perfect ending.
It was only a part-time job, so why take it so seriously? He could just muddle through it.
Joe knew none of this. She frowned at Lake. "So this is your way of solving cases? Waiting for the killer to come and surrender?"
Lake looked up and sighed. "Then, Detective Martinez, what do you suggest?"
Joe said, "We should go to the prison."
"Why?"
"Isn't it suspicious that an unidentified body appeared in a prison? How did the body get inside?"
"Hmm, you have a point."
Lake nodded, clearly agreeing with Joe's analysis. Then he said, "How about this, Detective Martinez? You go to the prison and investigate. What do you think?"
Joe froze slightly. "Me? Then what about you?"
Lake thought for a moment. "I didn't eat last night, so I'm going out to get breakfast first. If you're willing to wait, that works too."
Joe was silent for a while. She glanced at Lake, then turned and left.
Lake watched Joe walk away and couldn't help shaking his head.
This was why Lake liked handling cases alone.
With some cases, he didn't need to investigate like the other detectives did. He knew the result from the very beginning. All he had to do was follow that result and find the evidence.
But having a burden tagging along made things troublesome.
Fortunately, there was only one case.
Meanwhile, after leaving the building, Joe got into her car. She didn't believe a single punctuation mark of what Lake had just said about going out for breakfast.
The reason was simple.
Yesterday, after learning that Lake would be her partner, Joe had gone home and asked people from her old precinct to have the officers at the Thirteenth Precinct dig up some basic information about Lake.
To put it simply, ever since Lake joined the NYPD, he had never been extravagant enough to eat a decent breakfast outside. People had always thought Lake was simply stingy, but after the Internal Affairs Division's leak, his reputation had changed from stingy to being a genuinely good person.
This wasn't voluntary.
It was all the fault of the cheat that pinned this on me just to launder money.
Lake really wanted to tell them that.
He was so poor that all he had left was this year's property tax. He didn't even have money for the lottery, so where would he get spare cash to donate to charities?
The United States didn't have such a thing as an orphanage. All orphans had to be sent to families for adoption. If not for that, Lake wouldn't have bothered finding himself a foster father and foster mother.
What a hassle.
In short, Joe felt that Lake definitely wasn't going to eat breakfast.
But...
As Joe thought about Lake's appearance, as though he didn't care about the case in the slightest, she wanted to call him a useless detective. However, Lake's record of solving cases was extremely impressive.
Could this guy have some other channel of information?
Joe thought about it, shook her head, put the matter out of her mind, and drove to Rikers Island Prison, where the body had been discovered.
Around noon.
Lake was sitting in the conference room with his legs crossed, asleep. He opened his eyes, saw Joe returning from the prison in a fury, and smiled. "You ran into a wall?"
Joe rubbed her forehead and looked at Lake. "You knew?"
Lake sat up straight and stretched. "Rikers Island Prison is the largest prison in all of New York. It also has another name."
Joe asked, "What?"
Lake said, "The largest private prison."
Joe: "..."
An unidentified body had appeared in the prison's crematorium. How could that have happened without someone at the prison helping from the inside? If Lake's guess was correct, the prison crematorium was probably one of the many cleanup sites in the killer world that helped assassins destroy bodies.
The case had been reported by an intern at the prison crematorium. This was what had happened: the intern's supervisor had gone out to deal with something, and the intern had probably wanted to make a good impression, so he had volunteered to help.
The result...
He had caused a huge mess.
That poor intern had probably disappeared by now. No, judging from the expression on Joe's face, he had probably already disappeared.
Joe said, "They're obstructing law enforcement."
Lake said, "Then what can you do? The lawyers employed by the prison— even the lowest-ranking one earns more every month than our annual salaries."
Damn it. If only he had known, he should have studied law in college.
Why had he studied public administration?
He must have been out of his mind back then.
Lake felt bitter when he thought about those lawyers' annual salaries. But when he thought about how long it took to become a lawyer and how difficult graduation was, the bitterness faded.
After all, it had been a free university education. He couldn't demand too much.
He stood up.
Lake left the conference room and came to his desk, then handed a file to Joe.
Joe took it. "What's this?"
Lake said, "The identity of the unidentified body downstairs."
The fingerprint database might not have found a match, but that didn't mean they couldn't compare the identity through other means.
The dental database was far more powerful than the fingerprint database.
Unlike people from the Eastern Kingdom or other Asians, Westerners cared a great deal about their teeth. Dentists here could practically be considered to have a golden profession.
Obviously.
Even killers cared about having a good set of teeth.
The contract can arrive today. Anyone who wants to invest, hurry up!
Before you continue