I heard my ring tone, grabbed the phone from my pocket. The call was from the front desk at headquarters.
“This is Jim Haskins, Carson. You and Harry are leads on that robbery-murder last night, right?”
“Ours. What’s up?”
“Got a woman here at the desk who brought in her elderly mother. Mama’s wrought up, mumbling about a purse, an ATM, and a longhair in her car. Thought you’d want to know.”
Harry and I arrived twelve minutes later, the wonder of a siren and flashing lights. The daughter was Gina Lovett, forty or thereabouts, plump and bespectacled. Her mother was Tessie Atkins, late sixties, nervous. She kept her arms tight to herself, as if cold.
“What happened, Ms. Atkins?” Harry asked as we sat.
She tugged at her sleeve. “I had been visiting a friend at the hospital and passed the bank on my way home. I needed to pay bills. Maybe it wasn’t smart at that hour…”
“What hour, ma’am?” I asked.
“Almost midnight. It was late, but there was a restaurant next door, a fast-food place. It made me feel safer. I pulled in and saw something white to the side of the lot. At first I thought it was a cat or some poor animal run down by a car. But then I saw it was a purse. I thought someone’s purse fell out by accident. It happened with my wallet once in the lot at Bruno’s. Some nice Samaritan took it inside the store. I thought…”
“You’d repay the favor,” Harry said.
“I pulled next to it and got out to pick it up. The next thing I knew a hand was across my mouth and I was back in the car. It was a man with all kinds of hair, bad smelling. He got down in the passenger’s side, on the floor, and said if I didn’t perform to expectations, he had a gun.”
“Perform to expectations?” I said.
She nodded, arms crossed, shaking fingers clasping her shoulders. “He made me take six hundred dollars from my account and three hundred from my two credit cards. It’s my limit. I was too shook up to drive. He drove south of Bienville Square a few blocks and jumped out. I just sat there and cried until my hands stopped shaking. I don’t know how I got home.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“He took my driver’s license. He said if I told the police, he was going to come to my house.”
Ms. Atkins looked away. The daughter spoke up.
“I stopped by Mama’s this morning to pick up some sewing. She wouldn’t look at me and I knew something was wrong. She finally told me.”
We spoke to Ms. Atkins for a few more minutes, honed in on details, what few had registered beyond her fear. She consented to have her car checked by Forensics. Though sure the perp had made his threats just to keep her quiet, we made a quick call to the uniform commander in her district, requested his troops keep a tight watch on Ms. Atkins’s house the next few days.
“Bait,” Harry said, setting his can of soda on the hood of the cruiser, leaning back against its fender. “He used a purse as bait.”
“It’s brilliant,” I said. “Who can resist a purse? The good want to help, the bad see money and credit cards.”
We were parked on the causeway connecting the eastern shore of Mobile Bay with the city. Twilight was an orange lantern hung below the horizon of an indigo sky. Fresh stars shimmered in the east. A hundred feet distant, three elderly black men fished from lawn chairs, frequently consulting the brown bags beside them.
“After pushing her back into the car, he didn’t touch Ms. Atkins,” I said. “Didn’t lay a hand on her.”
“He threatened her with death,” Harry reminded me.
“He said he had a gun. Two hours earlier he’d just butchered a woman with a five-inch knife. Why didn’t he threaten to stab her, slice her? Why didn’t he ransack the car? And what’s with that ‘perform to expectations’ line? It sounds like a damn stockbroker.”
Harry looked south at the dark horizon, the mouth of Mobile Bay thirty miles distant.
“He probably tried the purse bit with Taneesha but she heard him running up. She closed the door, locked it. Maybe that’s what pissed him off.”
“Something sure did. How many wounds did Ms. Franklin have?”
“Over thirty. But he broke her fingers first. I don’t get it. Why he’d kill one woman, then three hours later give another a break?”
I forced myself to revisit the Franklin crime scene: the Wookiee breaking the young woman’s fingers, getting off on her pain, then going wild with the knife, poke, slash, jab. Then, interrupted by the sudden appearance of the semi, the perp bails out, runs wildly into the truck’s headlights, veers away into the night.
“Did Forensics find any blood in Ms. Atkins’s vehicle?”
Harry said, “No blood, no hair, no trace of any evidence.”
“At least we got a knife.”
Harry finished his can of soda, crumpled the can like paper, bouncing it in his hand. “With nada on the prints. An uncharted whacko.”
“Is this going to turn weird, brother?” I asked.
“Going to?”
We heard a ship’s horn and turned to watch a freighter slipping from the mouth of the Mobile River. The ship’s bridge was at the stern and lighted. The only other light was at the bow. Somewhere between the two points were hundreds of feet of invisible ship. A minute later, its wake reached us, hissing against the shoreline with a sound like rain.
CHAPTER 5
Lucas stood in the piss-stinking service station restroom, door locked, and foamed restroom soap over his torso, patting dry with rough paper towels. Once more he counted his money, tight clean bills, over a thousand dollars’ worth. Seed money. The next step was to turn it into working capital. A quick way of doing that was to find and supply a product for which there was great demand.
He could get product. What he needed was a distributorship.
Lucas studied the face in the grimy mirror: nothing but black eyes and a round hole of a mouth deep in a sea of black hair. Scary, hideous even, like he’d escaped from hell. But then, how else was he supposed to look?
Lucas scowled into the mirror, bared his teeth like a rabid dog, growled. Snapped his teeth at his image.
“What’s that face mean, Lucas?”
Dr. Rudolnick’s voice suddenly in Lucas’s head.
“It’s how pissed off I am, Doctor.”
“You look angry enough to kill, Lucas. Are you really that angry?”
“I guess not, Doctor. Not today, at least.”
“Good, Lucas. Let’s do some deep breathing and visualizations, all right?”
Lucas laughed and tucked the shirt into his pants. He opened the restroom door. Lights in the distance, bars, clubs. Lowlife joints with lowlife people, the kind of folks attuned to nontraditional distribution networks. Something in the automotive segment of the market.
The nearest bar, a hundred feet distant, had a window blinking LUCKY ’ S in green neon script. Maybe it was an omen.
Lucas stepped out into the night, music playing loud in his head, snapping his fingers to an old funk piece by Bootsy Collins, “Psychoticbumpschool.” He angled toward Lucky’s.
CHAPTER 6
