“No. Cabbie and the girl were both killed with the same two
guns, one shot each time from each gun.”
“Hello,” Jesse said.
“Then it stopped. Cleveland can’t find any connection between
the cabbie and the girl. Neighborhoods are different. They never found the gun. No clues. Nothing.”
“You got someone you’re talking to at Case Western?”
“Yeah, broad in the administration office.”
“Call her back, find out where Tony
Lincoln’s first
post-residency position was, and when he took it.”
“Roger.”
“And while you’re at it,” Jesse
said, “see if you can find out
where Tony did his undergraduate work.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” Jesse said.
“Jeez,” Simpson said. “No wonder
you’re the chief and I’m just a
patrolman.”
“And get hold of the Ohio Bar
Association,” Jesse said. “Find
out whatever you can about Brianna Douglass Lincoln.”
Simpson wrote himself a note in a little yellow spiral-bound notepad that he took from his shirt pocket.
“When I go out,” he said, “and
the press asks me what’s up, does
this permit me to say we’re following up several leads?”
“It does,” Jesse said. “Call
them promising leads if you
want.”
“Yeah,” Simpson said. “Promising
leads. I like
it.”
After Simpson left, Jesse sat and looked out the window. The TV
trucks were still parked across the street. Anthony deAngelo and Eddie Cox were wasting important man-hours keeping the press at bay, and the traffic moving past the trucks. A young man with longish hair, a microphone, and a trench coat was standing in the snow on the lawn, doing a stand-up in front of the station. It seemed to Jesse that all day someone was doing a stand-up. He wondered how many people in the viewing audience were tired of seeing the front door of the Paradise Police Station.
Across the street a red Saab sedan pulled up and stopped in a space between two television trucks, with the passenger side facing the station house. The window slid silently down. Jesse got a pair of binoculars from a file drawer and focused in on the car. Brianna Lincoln was holding a camera, filming the scene. After several minutes, she put the camera down. The window slid silently up. And the Saab pulled away.
Nothing really incriminating. Half a dozen people had come
by since the circus had started, and taken pictures. Jesse rocked slowly against the spring in his swivel chair. Nobody had gone to his house and photographed him, though. Just the Lincolns. Formerly of Cleveland. Why had they taken pictures of where he lived?
The closet in Jesse’s office was located so that one had to
close the office door to open the closet. Jesse did so, and opened the closet door and took out a Kevlar vest. He hefted it, not so heavy. He slipped it on and fastened the Velcro. He put his jacket on over it and zipped up the front. It looked okay. It should work okay, too. Unless they changed their MO.
56
The three boys stood uneasily in front of Jesse’s desk.
“Miss Fiore said we was supposed to come here after school,” Bo
said.
None of the three was defiant. None of them met Jesse’s
gaze.
