“I see it, but I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s initials, I think . . . Hey.”
“What?”
Now Black was scratching his head. “I was talking to the St. Paul guys. They’re looking for Rolando’s sister—she lives over by the university, but they haven’t been able to catch her at home. Her name is Marta Blanca. If you read the scratches backwards it could be an M instead of a W, and a B instead of a D . . .”
“Then what’s all that shit in the middle?” the ME asked, pointing at the scratches.
“I don’t know, this is just a theory,” Black said. “But his hands were chained up . . . how were his hands?”
“Like this,” Lucas said, demonstrating. “Over his head.” “Then he couldn’t see what he was doing, he was in all kinds of pain, he’s panicked because he knows what’s coming. I wonder if he was trying to get us to his sister?”
“Or that his sister had something to do with it,” Lucas said.
“Hey,” Black said. “It’s a clew, with an E-W. Let’s go knock on her door.”
A LITTLE GIRL was playing with a plastic dump truck in the hallway of Marta Blanca’s apartment house, in front of an open apartment door.
“Hello,” Lucas said. A mommy’s voice called, “Who’s that?”
Lucas leaned over the little girl and knocked once on the doorjamb: “Minneapolis police, ma’am. We’re looking for a Marta Blanca?”
“Down the hall. Apartment A.”
Black stepped down the hall and knocked on the Paris-green door at the end. A young woman appeared from the back of the open apartment, carrying a dish towel and a pan that she was in the process of drying. “Is there some kind of trouble?”
Lucas nodded: “Yes. Her brother was killed. We need to interview her; just a routine thing.”
The woman’s eyebrows were up: “I haven’t heard them out this morning—Heather usually has the door open so she can play in the hall, and Marta usually stops to talk to her.” She looked at Black and then back to Lucas and asked, “Do you have some kind of ID?”
“Yes, I do.” Lucas smiled, tried to look pleasant, took out his ID case, handed it over.
She looked at it, then back up at Lucas: “I’ve heard of you. You only do murders.”
“What’s that, Mom?” Heather asked.
“Talk to you later,” the mother said to the girl, handing Lucas’s ID case back. “This is a policeman. He catches bad men.”
“I didn’t see any men at Marta’s,” the girl said.
“Okay,” Lucas said.
Black, at the end of the hall, said, “Nobody home.”
“They were having a party last night,” Heather said. Her mother frowned: “I didn’t hear a party—I didn’t see anybody coming or going.”
“I heard them popping the balloons. Like at a birthday party,” the girl said.
LUCAS LOOKED down the hall at Black, whose face had gone tight. Black said, “That’s enough for an entry.”
“Right,” Lucas said. To the mother: “You better take Heather back inside.”
“What? Why?” She turned her eyes down to the other door. Black had slipped his pistol out of his holster and was holding it by his side, where the little girl couldn’t see it. The woman looked back at Lucas, suddenly understanding, and said, “Oh, no, no . . . Heather, c’mon. C’mon inside with Mom.”
When they’d gone inside, Lucas nodded at Black, who lined up on the Paris-green door, then kicked it below the knob. The old door punched open, and Lucas, .45 in his hand, stepped past Black. One step and he saw the Latino man on the floor. Another step, and he saw the woman just beyond. They were both facedown.
“Okay,” Black said from behind. “Watch me, man . . .” The two of them edged through the apartment, looking for anyone else; but the place was empty except for the bodies. Lucas walked back to the living room. No signs of a struggle, nor had the little girl apparently heard any—but she had heard the balloons popping. These were executions, then, with silencers. He’d seen enough bodies in his career that two more shouldn’t have affected him, but these did. The cool efficiency of the killer, swatting human beings as though they were so many gnats.
He shook his head and asked Black, “Got your phone?” “Yeah, I’ll call,” Black said. He was standing over the man: “Goddamn, look at this guy’s head. Same deal: half-dozen rounds.”
Lucas, slipping his gun away, squatted next to the woman’s body. Her face was older than its years, he thought: careworn, but with smile lines, too. The rims of her nostrils were slightly rough, reddened. Cocaine, he thought. “Same here,” he said. And he added: “This takes it away from Hale Allen. He might’ve been willing to kill his old lady for her money, but this isn’t that. This is something else.”
“Yeah,” Black said. “He was too fuckin’ dumb, anyway.”
He was holding the cell phone to his ear and said, “Marcy? This is me . . . Yeah, yeah, shut up for a minute, will you? Lucas and I are looking at a couple of more dead ones in an apartment in Dinkytown . . . No, I’m not. No, I’m not. I need you to get all the shit rolling over here, huh? Yeah . . .”
While he was telling her about it, Lucas moved quickly through the apartment. He was going through a scatter of paper on the kitchen counter when he heard a quiet, single knock on the door. He looked up just in time to see the mommy take two steps through the door. She said, “Did you . . .” and then saw the bodies. “Oh, God.”
Lucas stepped toward her: “Please don’t come in.” She stepped back into the doorway, her right hand at her mouth, the other hand feeling for the doorjamb. “Don’t touch anything, please, don’t touch the door,” Lucas said urgently. “Don’t touch.”
She backed into the hallway. Lucas followed and said, “We haven’t processed the room yet, we need to bring in crime-scene specialists.” She nodded, dumbly, and Lucas added, “I’d like to talk to you. I’ve got to wait here for a few minutes, until we get this going, but I’d like to see you and your daughter.”
“Heather?” Now she looked frightened.
“Just for a couple of minutes,” Lucas said. “Maybe your place would be better.”
“Why do you want to talk to Heather?”
“She said she heard balloons popping. Those were probably guns. Between the two of you, maybe we can figure out a time that this . . . happened.”
THE WOMAN’S NAME was Jan Davis. She was a small, slender woman with dishwater-blond hair and high cheekbones. Her apartment was pleasantly cluttered with books, scientific reprints and a few music CDs, all classical. She was scurrying around, picking up magazines, straightening chairs, making lemonade when Lucas went over. Heather bounced in a worn, oversized easy chair, watching Lucas, smiling when he looked at her. Outside, in the hallway, cops were setting up crime-scene lines.
“I have a daughter about your age,” Lucas told Heather. “Have you started school yet?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was promoted. I’m in first now. When school comes back.”
“So you won’t be the littlest kids anymore . . . there’ll be kindergartners who are smaller than you.”
“Yup.” But she hadn’t thought of that before, and she slipped off the chair and ran into the kitchen: “Hey, Mom, Mr. Davenport says there’ll be kids littler than me at school . . .”
A minute later, Davis came out of the kitchen with two glasses of lemonade: “There’s plenty more if the other gentleman wants some.”
Lucas nodded, and took the glass. “I noticed on your mailbox on the way in, your husband, Howard . . .”
“Howard’s not living here now,” she said firmly.
“Not for a while?” Lucas asked.
“About seven weeks. I just haven’t taken his name off the mailbox.”
“So . . . what? You’re going to get divorced?”
“Yes. I’m just finishing my thesis at the U,” she said. “I’ve got a postdoc offer from Johns Hopkins, and Heather and I’ll be moving to Baltimore in December. Howard won’t be coming.”
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“Well, I’m sorry,” Lucas said. And he was. After a moment’s silence, he turned to look at Heather and asked, “What were you doing last night when you heard the party at Marta’s? Were you in the hall?”
Heather looked guiltily at her mother and then said, “Just for a minute. I left my truck out there.”
“She’s not supposed to go out in the hall at night, after it gets dark,” Davis said. “But sometimes she does.”
“Do you know what time it was?”
“We were talking about that, before you came over,” Davis said. “She was out there with her blocks and her bulldozer when I told her to come in. But she left her truck, and a few minutes later I heard her messing around out there, and I went out and got her. It was between eight and nine.”
“Eight and nine. You wouldn’t have been watching television or anything, so you’d know what show was on?”
Davis was shaking her head. “No, I’m rewriting my thesis, the final edit, and I’d just shut down . . .” She cocked her head to the side, then said, “Hey: I think the word processor has a time thing on it, that shows when the file was closed.” She hopped off the couch and headed for a back room. Lucas and Heather followed.
Davis’s study was a converted bedroom, with a single bed still in it. “Howard slept here the last few weeks he lived with us,” she said offhandedly. She was bringing the computer up, cycling through the Windows 98 display, then bringing up the word processor.
“Yup.” She tapped the screen, and bounced in her seat a little, the way her daughter had. “The file was stored at eight twenty-two. I stored it and got up and heard Heather in the hall, and told her to come back inside.”
“All right, that’s something,” Lucas said. “Eight twentytwo.” He looked at Heather. “Did you see anybody when you were in the hallway?”
She shook her head. “No.” Then she added, “I peeked when Mom was gone, and I saw two ladies.”
“Two ladies? This was after you heard the party balloons?”
She nodded, solemn in the face of Lucas’s interest.
“How did you see them?” Lucas asked.
“When I heard them, I opened the door just to peek,” she said. “I thought it was Marta.”
“But it wasn’t Marta?”
She shook her head again.
“Did you know the ladies?”
“No.”
“Never saw them before?”
She shook her head.
“Do you remember what they looked like?” Lucas asked.
She cocked her head in a perfect rendition of her mother’s thinking mannerism, and after two or three seconds said, “Maybe I do.”
NINE
Carmel Loan learned that the bodies had been found from TV3. She and Rinker were walking through the skyway toward Carmel’s office, eating frozen yogurt, when Carmel spotted a printed headline under a talking head in a deliwindow TV: Two Bodies Found Near University. She nudged Rinker with her elbow.
“That was quick,” Rinker said, looking up at the TV.
“So was the other one—we could have gotten a couple days on either of them, but we didn’t.”
“I wonder about that kid,” Rinker said. “I hope nothing comes out of that.”
Carmel nodded and said, “Let me find out when these bodies were found. If the cops have released any information, I can go over there and ask how it affects the case against Hale . . . and maybe find out what they’ve got.”
“Too much curiosity might be dangerous,” Rinker said.
“I can walk that line,” Carmel said confidently.
• • •
CARMEL WENT STRAIGHT to Lucas:
“I understand you found them,” she said. “I mean, you personally.”
“Yeah. Not one of the brighter moments in my day,” Lucas said. He was tipped back in his new office chair, his feet up, reading the Modality Report. He’d bought the chair himself, a gray steel-and-fabric contraption that felt so good that he was thinking of marrying it.
“I’ll tell you what,” Carmel said. “We got one upperclass woman and three spics dead, and I would suggest to you that there’s something going on besides some guy trying to kill his wife for her money. I’m reasonably sure that you’re smart enough to have figured it out.”
“I figured it out, all right,” Lucas said. “Your goddamn client’s a snake. He was financing the local cocaine cartel with his old lady’s money—and she found out. After he killed her, he rolled up the rest of the group before they could talk about it.”
“You can’t . . .” Carmel started. Then she stopped herself. She ticked her finger at Lucas and said, “You’re teasing me.”
“Maybe,” Lucas said. “I just don’t know why we haven’t slept together,” Carmel said. “Except that my heart belongs to another.”
“So does mine,” Lucas said. “I just wish I’d meet her.”
Carmel laughed. Let herself laugh a little too long, even indelicately. Then, “So I can tell my client that he can stop the heavy drugs, and try to get some normal sleep.”
“He’s had a problem?” Lucas asked. He yawned and looked at his watch.
“He sees himself involved in traumatic rectal enlargement, at the hands—well, not the hands—of biker gangs at Stillwater.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Lucas said dismissively. “Don’t tell him he’s clear, because we’re still looking at everybody. But between you and me . . .”
“Yeah?”
“. . . he seems unlikely. And if we get him into court on a murder charge, and you ask me if I said that, I’ll perjure myself and say, ‘No, of course not.’ ”
“That’d be a big fuckin’ change, a cop committing perjury,” Carmel said. “All right. I’ll tell him you’ll be easing up.”
“That’d probably be right,” Lucas said.
Carmel turned as though to leave, then asked, ingenuously, “You got anything on the new killings? Like potential clients I can chase?”
“Well, we got this, out of a kid,” Lucas said. He dropped his feet off the new chair, pulled open a desk drawer and took out a computer-generated photo. “We’re putting it in the paper.”
He passed it to Carmel, who looked at it for a minute and then asked, “What is this?”
“What the kid saw.”
“This is shit,” Carmel said. “This is nothing.”
“I know. But it’s what we got.”
“It looks like two aliens, a tall one and a short one.”
“I thought they looked like grim reapers, the head things they have on.”
The silk scarves had helped. Carmel would’ve spent a moment giving thanks, if she’d had any idea whom she might give thanks to. In the picture, the scarves gave their heads a tall, slender profile. The kid must have seen them as silhouettes. The faces within the silhouettes were generic enough to be meaningless.
“What are the head things?” Carmel asked.
“The kid didn’t know. Maybe some kind of hat. Maybe they were nuns.”
“Good thought,” Carmel said.
“They’re women, anyway,” Lucas said. “At least the kid says they are.”
“The shooter in the stairwell was a woman,” Carmel said.
“The triumph of feminism,” Lucas said. “We got equal-opportunity hitters.”
“Well . . .” Carmel flipped the photo back on the desk. “On second thought, if you find her, call somebody else. She might be a little dangerous to know.”
“Especially if you lose the case.”
Carmel snorted as she went through the door. “As if that might happen,” she said.
WHEN CARMEL GOT BACK to the apartment, she found Rinker’s suitcase in the front hall, and Rinker just getting out of the bathroom, freshly showered, scrubbing her hair dry.
“So what happened?”
“We’re clear,” Carmel said. She gave Rinker a short account of her talk with Lucas.
Rinker was pleased with the outcome. “I’m outta here,” she
said. “I’ve got to get back to my business.”
“Do you have a reservation?”
“Yeah, for four o’clock,” Rinker said.
“I’ll drive you out to the airport,” Carmel said. “Listen, what do you do in the winter?”
“Mostly work,” Rinker said, fluffing her hair. “Where I live, there’s not a hell of a lot to do outside.”
“Same here . . . You ever go to Cancún? Or Cozumel?”
“Cozumel. Acapulco. A couple of times. Practice my Spanish.”
“I try to get out of here for at least three weeks after it gets cold—a week in November, a week in January and a week in March,” Carmel said. “We ought to go together. I’ve got connections, in the hotels and so on. It’s a good time.”
“Jeez,” Rinker said. She seemed oddly pleased, and Carmel got the impression she wasn’t often invited places. “That sounds nice.”
“So call me in October, and if you can get away, I’ll set up the hotels and everything, and you can set up your own plane reservations, and we’ll meet down there.”
“I’d like that,” Rinker said. “What do you do? Lay on the beach? Shop? I kinda like to boogie . . .”
“Listen, I know some guys there, and there are always guys around . . . we’d be going around.”
Rinker held up a finger: “Hold that thought, but this just popped into my mind, before I forget. The guns are in the closet. You gotta take them down and throw them in the river, or bury them somewhere. Also the box of shells— the shells are with the gun. They’re the only things left that can hang us.”
“I sorta like them,” Carmel said.
“Fine. Spend a few hundred bucks and get a nice clean gun of your own. I can make a call, and have one sent to you: brand-new, cold, no registration to worry about. If you want a silencer, I can handle that, too. But the guns in the closet have gotta go. I’m nervous having them here, even hidden. You gotta do it; I’ll call you every ten minutes until it’s done.”
“We can dump them in the river by the airport,” Carmel said. “I know a place—then you won’t have to worry.”