Forensic evidence would convict me. Because of the identity of the victim, first-rate police-lab technicians from both county and state offices would become involved, and when they processed the patrol car, they wouldn’t miss anything.
I could never tolerate imprisonment in some narrow candlelit cell. Though my life is limited by the presence of light, no walls must enclose me between the sunset and the dawn. None ever will. The darkness of closed spaces is profoundly different from the darkness of the night; the night has no boundaries, and it offers endless mysteries, discoveries, wonders, opportunities for joy. Night is the flag of freedom under which I live, and I will live free or die.
I was sickened by the prospect of getting back into the patrol car with the dead man long enough to wipe down everything on which I might have left a fingerprint. It would be a futile exercise, anyway, because I’d surely overlook one critical surface.
Besides, a fingerprint wasn’t likely to be the only evidence that I’d left behind. Hairs. A thread from my jeans. A few tiny fibers from my Mystery Train cap. Orson’s hairs in the backseat, the marks of his claws on the upholstery. And no doubt other things equally or more incriminating.
I’d been damn lucky. No one had heard the shots. But by their nature, both luck and time run out, and although my watch contained a microchip rather than a mainspring, I swore that I could hear it ticking.
Orson was nervous, too, vigorously sniffing the air for monkeys or another menace.
I hurried to the back of the patrol car and thumbed the button to release the trunk lid. It was locked, as I’d feared.
Steeling myself, I returned to the open front door. I inhaled deeply, held my breath, and leaned inside.
Stevenson sat twisted in his seat, head tipped back against the doorpost. His mouth shaped a silent gasp of ecstasy, and his teeth were bloody, as though he had fulfilled his dreams, had been biting young girls.
Drawn by a meager cross-draft, entering through the shattered window, a scrim of fog floated toward me, as if it were steam rising off the still-warm blood that stained the front of the dead man’s uniform.
I had to lean in farther than I hoped, one knee on the passenger seat, to switch off the engine.
Stevenson’s black-olive eyes were open. No life or unnatural light glimmered in them, yet I half expected to see them blink, swim into focus, and fix on me.
Before the chief’s clammy gray hand could reach out to clutch at me, I plucked the keys from the ignition, backed out of the car, and finally exhaled explosively.
In the trunk I found the large first-aid kit that I expected. From it, I extracted only a thick roll of gauze bandage and a pair of scissors.
While Orson patrolled the entire perimeter of the squad car, diligently sniffing the air, I unrolled the gauze, doubling it again and again into a collection of five-foot loops before snipping it with the scissors. I twisted the strands tightly together, then tied a knot at the upper end, another in the middle, and a third at the lower end. After repeating this exercise, I joined the two multiple-strand lengths together with a final knot — and had a fuse approximately ten feet long.
I coiled the fuse on the sidewalk, opened the fuel port on the side of the car, and removed the tank cap. Gasoline fumes wafted out of the neck of the tank.
At the trunk again, I replaced the scissors and what remained of the roll of gauze in the first-aid kit. I closed the kit and then the trunk.
The parking lot remained deserted. The only sounds were the drops of condensation plopping from the Indian laurel onto the squad car and the soft ceaseless padding of my worried dog’s paws.
Although it meant another visit with Lewis Stevenson’s corpse, I returned the keys to the ignition. I’d seen a few episodes from the most popular crime series on television, and I knew how easily even fiendishly clever criminals could be tripped up by an ingenious homicide detective. Or by a best-selling female mystery novelist who solves real murders as a hobby. Or a retired spinster schoolteacher. All this between the opening credits and the final commercial for a vaginal deodorant. I intended to give them — both the professionals and the meddlesome hobbyists — damned little with which to work.
The dead man croaked at me as a bubble of gas broke deep in his esophagus.
“Rolaids,” I advised him, trying unsuccessfully to cheer myself.
I didn’t see any of the four expended brass cartridges on the front seat. In spite of the platoons of amateur sleuths waiting to pounce, and regardless of whether having the brass might help them identify the murder weapon, I didn’t have the nerve to search the floor, especially under Stevenson’s legs.
Anyway, even if I found all the cartridges, there was still a bullet buried in his chest. If it wasn’t too grossly distorted, this wad of lead would feature score marks that could be matched to the singularities of the bore of my pistol, but even the prospect of prison wasn’t sufficient to make me take out my penknife and perform exploratory surgery to retrieve the incriminating slug.
If I’d been a different man than I am, with the stomach for such an impromptu autopsy, I wouldn’t have risked it, anyway. Assuming that Stevenson’s radical personality change — his newfound thirst for violence — was but one symptom of the weird disease he carried, and assuming that this illness could be spread by contact with infected tissues and bodily fluids, this type of grisly wet work was out of the question, which is also why I had been careful not to get any of his blood on me.
When the chief had been telling me about his dreams of rape and mutilation, I’d been sickened by the thought that I was breathing the same air that he’d used and exhaled. I doubted, however, that the microbe he carried was airborne. If it were that highly contagious, Moonlight Bay wouldn’t be on a roller-coaster ride to Hell, as he had claimed the town was: It would long ago have arrived in the sulfurous Pit.
According to the gauge on the instrument panel, the fuel tank was nearly full. Good. Perfect. Earlier in the night, at Angela’s, the troop had taught me how to destroy evidence and possibly conceal a murder.
The fire should be so intense that the four brass cartridges, the sheet-metal body of the car, and even portions of the heavier frame would melt. Of the late Lewis Stevenson, little more than charred bones would remain, and the soft lead slug would effectively vanish. Certainly, none of my fingerprints, hairs, or clothes fibers would survive.
Another slug had passed through the chief’s neck, pulverizing the window in the driver’s door. It was now lying somewhere out in the parking lot or, with luck, was at rest deep in the ivy-covered slope that rose from the far end of the lot to the higher-situated Embarcadero Way, where it would be all but impossible to find.
Incriminating powder burns marred my jacket. I should have destroyed it. I couldn’t. I loved that jacket. It was cool. The bullet hole in the pocket made it even cooler.
“Gotta give the spinster schoolteachers some
The brief laugh that escaped me was so humorless and bleak that it scared me almost as much as the possibility of imprisonment.
I ejected the magazine from the Glock, took one cartridge from it, which left six, and then slapped it back into the pistol.
Orson whined impatiently and picked up one end of the gauze fuse in his mouth.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said — and then gave him the double take that he deserved.
The mutt might have picked it up solely because he was curious about it, as dogs tend to be curious about everything.
Just because Orson picked up the fuse and whined impatiently didn’t necessarily mean that he understood the purpose of it or the nature of the entire scheme I’d concocted. His interest — and uncanny timing — might be purely coincidental.
Yeah. Sure. Like the purely coincidental eruption of fireworks every Independence Day.
Heart pounding, expecting to be discovered at any moment, I took the twisted gauze fuse from Orson and carefully knotted the cartridge to one end of it.
He watched intently.
