“Anyone in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you noticed the car and model and wheels,” Jesse
said.
“Sure, I like cars.”
Jesse smiled. “When did it leave?”
“I don’t know. After we seen the dead guy and run in the church
and told the minister, when we come out again it was gone.”
“Okay,” Jesse said. “Thanks for
your help. If you want to wait
around while I talk with Sid you can sit in my car with Officer Cox.”
“Okay.”
Sid came over and told Jesse essentially the same story. He pumped up his part in it a little, telling Jesse that “we found the
dead guy” but most witnesses aggrandize a little, Jesse knew.
When the boys were gone, Jesse stood in the rain with Peter Perkins while the EMTs bundled the body into the back of the ambulance.
“No flashers,” Jesse said to the EMTs.
“No sirens. There’s no
hurry.”
“You going to talk with his wife?” Perkins said.
“Soon,” Jesse said. “Give her a
little time.”
“Kids tell you anything?”
“There was a red Saab sedan, a ninety-five the kid told me, with
custom wheels, that was parked by the driveway and left after the kids discovered the body.”
“They didn’t get any kind of license number?”
“No one ever gets a license number,” Jesse said.
“I know.”
“But here’s what we’re going to
do,” Jesse said. “You remember
that we got a list of all the license numbers of cars parked around the woman shot in the mall parking lot.”
“Yeah,” Perkins said.
“Sixty-seven cars.”
“We’re going to go through that list and see how many, if any,
were red Saab sedans.”
“Half the yuppies in Massachusetts drive red Saabs,” Perkins
said.
“So right away we cut the suspect list in half.”
“Kid didn’t see who was in the
car,” Perkins
said.
“No.”
“Staties come up with a list of twenty-two gun owners
yet?”
“Not yet,” Jesse said.
“When they do we could cross-reference that with the car
list.”
“We could,” Jesse said.
“I can get on it after I do my shift tomorrow.”
“You can get on it first thing,” Jesse said. “I’ll have somebody
else pull your shift.”
