She smiled and drove on. Took the Green Valley ramp, going way too fast.
The Green Valley Police Department had a building north of town. It was a bigger place than I had expected, because Green Valley itself was bigger than I had expected. It encompassed the pretty town center we had already seen, but then it bulged north through some country that was mostly strip malls and light industrial units, almost all the way up to Sperryville. The police station looked big enough for twenty or thirty cops. It was built the way most places are where land is cheap. It was long and low and sprawling, with a one-story center core and two wings. The wings were built at right angles, so the place was U-shaped. The facades were concrete, molded to look like stone. There was a brown lawn in front and parking lots at both sides. There was a flagpole dead center on the lawn. Old Glory was up there, weather-beaten and limp in the windless air. The whole place looked a little grand, and a little bleached in the pale sunlight.
We parked in the right-hand lot in an empty slot between two white police cruisers. We got out into the brightness. Went in and asked the desk guy for Detective Clark. The desk guy made an internal call and then pointed us toward the left-hand wing. We walked through an untidy corridor and ended up in a room the size of a basketball court. Pretty much the whole thing was a detectives’ bullpen. There was a wooden fence that enclosed a line of four visitor’s chairs and then there was a gate with a receptionist’s desk next to it. Beyond the gate was a lieutenant’s office way off in one corner and then nothing else except three pairs of back-to-back desks covered with phones and paper. There were file cabinets against the walls. The windows were grimy and most of them had skewed and broken blinds.
There was no receptionist at the desk. There were two detectives in the room, both of them wearing tweed sport coats, both of them sitting with their backs to us. Clark was one of them. He was talking on the phone. I rattled the gate latch. Both guys turned around. Clark paused for a second, surprised, and then he waved us in. We pulled chairs around and sat at the ends of his desk, one on each side. He kept on talking into the phone. We waited. I spent the time looking around the room. The lieutenant’s office had glass walls from waist height upward. There was a big desk in there. Nobody behind it. But on it I could see two plaster casts, just like the ones our own pathologist had made. I didn’t get up and go look at them. Didn’t seem polite.
Clark hung up the phone and made a note on a yellow pad. Then he breathed out and pushed his chair way back so he could see both of us at the same time. He didn’t say anything. He knew we weren’t making a social call. But equally he didn’t want to come right out and ask if we had a name for him. Because he didn’t want to look foolish if we didn’t.
“Just passing through,” I said.
“OK,” he said.
“Looking for a little help,” I said.
“What kind of help?”
“Thought you might give us your crowbar notes. Now that you don’t need them anymore. Now that you’ve found yours.”
“Notes?”
“You listed all kinds of hardware stores. I figured it could save us some time if we picked up where you left off.”
“I could have faxed them,” he said.
“There’s probably a lot of them. We didn’t want to cause you the trouble.”
“I might not have been here.”
“We were passing by anyway.”
“OK,” he said again. “Crowbar notes.” He swiveled his chair and got up out of it and walked over to a file cabinet. Came back with a green folder about a half-inch thick. He dropped it on his desk. It made a decent thump.
“Good luck,” he said.
He sat down again and I nodded to Summer and she picked up the folder. Opened it. It was full of paper. She leafed through. Made a face. Passed it across to me. It was a long, long list of places that stretched from New Jersey to North Carolina. There were names and addresses and phone numbers. The first ninety or so had check marks against them. Then there were about four hundred that didn’t.
“You have to be careful,” Clark said. “Some places call them crowbars and some call them wrecking bars. You have to be sure they know what you’re talking about.”
“Do they have different sizes?”
“Lots of different sizes. Ours is pretty big.”
“Can I see it? Or is it in your evidence room?”
“It’s not evidence,” Clark said. “It’s not the actual weapon. It’s just an identical sample on loan from the Sperryville store. We can’t take it to court.”
“But it fits your plaster casts.”
“Like a glove,” he said. He got up again and walked into his lieutenant’s office and took the casts off the desk. Carried them back one in each hand and put them down on his own desk. They were very similar to ours. There was a positive and a negative, just like we had. Mrs. Kramer’s head had been a lot smaller than Carbone’s, in terms of diameter. Therefore the crowbar had caught less of its circumference. Therefore the impression of the fatal wound was a little shorter in length than ours. But it was just as deep and ugly. Clark picked it up and ran his fingertip through the trench.
“Very violent blow,” he said. “We’re looking for a tall guy, strong, right-handed. You seen anyone like that?”
“Every time I look in the mirror,” I said.
The cast of the weapon itself was a little shorter than ours too. But other than that, it looked very much the same. Same chalky section, pitted here and there with microscopic imperfections in the plaster, but basically straight and smooth and brutal.
“Can I see the actual crowbar?” I said.
“Sure,” Clark said. He leaned down and opened a drawer in his desk. Left it open like a display and moved his chair to get out of my way. I leaned forward and looked down and saw the same curved black thing I had seen the previous morning. Same shape, same contours, same color, same size, same claws, same octagonal section. Same gloss, same precision. It was exactly identical in every way to the one we had left behind in Fort Bird’s mortuary office.
We drove ten miles to Sperryville. I looked through Clark’s list to find the hardware store’s address. It was right there on the fifth line, because it was close to Green Valley. But there was no check mark against its phone number. There was a penciled note instead:
Sperryville wasn’t a big place, so we just cruised around looking for the address. We found a bunch of stores on a short strip and after driving it three times we found the right street name on a green sign. It pointed us down what was basically a narrow dead-end alley. We passed between the sides of two clapboard structures and then the alley widened into a small yard and we saw the hardware store facing us at the far end. It was like a small one-story barn, painted up to look more urban than rural. It was a real mom-and-pop place. It had a family name painted on an old sign. No indication that it was part of a franchise. It was just an American small business, standing alone, weathering the booms and busts from one generation to the next.
But it was an excellent place for a dead-of-night burglary. Quiet, isolated, invisible from passersby on the main street, no living accommodation on the second floor. In the front wall it had a display window on the left set next to an entrance door on the right, separated only by the width of the door frame. There was a moon-shaped hole in the window glass, temporarily backed by a sheet of unfinished plywood. The plywood had been neatly trimmed to the right size. I figured the hole had been punched through by the sole of a shoe. It was close to the door. I figured a tall guy could put his left arm through the hole up to the shoulder and get his hand around to the door latch easily enough. But he would have had to reach all the way in first and then bend his elbow slowly and deliberately, to avoid snagging his clothes. I pictured him with his left cheek against the cold glass, in the dark, breathing hard, groping blindly.
