Chapter 57
Brady’s car braked with a squeal only yards from the barrier tape. Lieutenants Brady and Meile boiled out of the vehicle, both of them agitated and demanding to be briefed.
Brady said, “What have we got?”
“Raoul Fernandez,” I said, pointing to the deceased. “Meth dealer, former convict. He was dead before he hit the ground.”
“Witnesses?”
“One so far. He maybe saw our shooter, a generic white male driving a black SUV. Our witness asked the driver to call nine-one-one, and he apparently did it. Dispatch is pulling the tape now.”
I went on to say that uniforms were taking down the name and number of everyone who’d been in the lot when the police showed up. Other uniforms were canvassing the shops.
“Plate readers have been down the rows,” I said, “and it was a decent sweep. Two stolen cars, two other drivers with outstanding warrants, but none stand out as our shooter.
“I asked the ME to give us an hour with the scene. Meanwhile, we’ve got surveillance tapes on the way from the security chief.”
“Let’s hope we got that black SUV on tape…”
Brady let his words trail off but I knew where he was going. Digital forensics was getting so refined that even a partial shot of the vehicle’s fender could yield enough information to identify the make and type of car.
I stood with Brady and Conklin and watched the light trucks come in. CSU was working fast and well, photographing scrapes on car doors, marking blood spatter, bagging found objects on the asphalt.
Soon the ME would remove the body, and CSU would take the car back to the lab on a flatbed truck. By tomorrow morning, the shopping center would be open again, like the shooting had never even happened.
But it had happened.
A spree killer was running the table.
I told Conklin I’d be back in a couple of minutes. I ducked under the tape, turned my back to the crime scene, and called Jacobi.
His voice sounded so real to me that I actually said, “Jacobi, it’s me, Lindsay.”
The voice kept talking, said, “Leave me a message.”
I told my old partner’s voicemail that I missed him, wanted to get together with him, asked him to call me.
I really did miss him.
I wanted to tell him about this spree killer, hear what he had to say. Maybe he had an idea we hadn’t thought of and maybe in the course of the conversation, he’d tell me something that would establish his innocence. I was sure that Brady was delusional. My old friend wasn’t the killer.
It just couldn’t be Jacobi.
Chapter 58
Cindy wasn’t the only person working after close of business, not even close. A dozen offices in her line of sight had the lights on; loud laughter came in bursts from the corner office; and down the hall, the copy machine in the hallway chugged out copies.
These days, no one left work early.
Everyone wanted to be sure of a chair if the music stopped.
Cindy turned on her desk lamp and read Richie’s text message again. Caught a homicide. Cya later. XXX. She texted back: Copy that. Ttys.
She put her phone down and asked herself why she’d let Richie’s message go unanswered for so many minutes, why she’d withheld returning the XXXs, wondered again if she was becoming like her parents.
Her mom was a shrink, her dad was a math teacher, and when she was a kid, she had called them Robo- Mom and Robo-Pop because they both overanalyzed absolutely everything. Every. Little. Thing.
This was what she was doing with her relationship with Richie: Yes, no, maybe. Repeat.
She was also obsessed with her story, treating the numbers found with the Ellsworth heads as if they were the da Vinci code.
She justified her obsession like this: If she didn’t decode those numbers, someone else would. Jason Blayney would. And so, partially because of him, partially because she would have done it anyway, Cindy had been flipping the flipping numbers every which way, forward, backward, inside out.
First she’d tried to connect the numbers to Harry Chandler. He’d notched his bedpost innumerable times during his long life as a star. He’d been named People magazine’s sexiest man in the world three times and had been the tabloids’ favorite cover boy for decades because of the many famous girlfriends he had squired to black-tie events.
Had Harry Chandler had 613 lovers? Was that what the number meant? If so, how did the 104 figure in? Not his address, not his birth date, not his license-plate number.
So Cindy had abandoned that line of inquiry and moved on. She had plugged the numbers into her search engine and found that if she put a colon between the 6 and the 13, Google kicked out an interesting passage from the Bible.
Romans 6:13: “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death.”
It was interesting and, in the context of the buried heads, very creepy. “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin…”
Was the person who dug up the heads at the Ellsworth compound saying the dead had been guilty of sin? Adding the colon to the other number didn’t help — biblically speaking, 1:04 meant nothing.
Moving on, there was 1:04; 6:13. Time of day, time of death, day of the year?
Cindy reviewed the lists she’d cut and pasted from Wikipedia into her research file, the tens of dozens of names of people who had been born on January 4 and died on June 13, and absolutely none of them rang bells when it came to the skulls at the house of heads.
Cindy grabbed her phone and texted Lindsay: Any IDs yet on skulls?
Still waiting, Lindsay texted back.
Thx.
Crap. Cindy got up from her desk, walked down the hall, and found three people who would share a pizza with her. She ordered out, and while she waited, she ran the numbers again.
Chapter 59
It was Groundhog Day all over again.
I came home at 11:00 p.m. with swollen feet and a growling stomach; was greeted at the door by my manic border collie and her tranquil nanny. I walked Karen out to the street, watched the taillights of her old Volvo disappear into the distance. Then I returned to an apartment that was devoid of Joe.
I had spoken to Joe twice a day since he’d left town, but swapping conversational tidbits by phone was way short of being in my husband’s real live presence.
I nuked a he-man-style TV dinner of Salisbury steak and green beans and brought it into the living room. I got into Joe’s big chair, put my feet up on a footstool, and rested my tray on my bambino’s rump.
“You don’t mind, do you, darling?” I asked him or her.
