Dale arrived. She stared at me.
“Mr. Angel?”
“Nope. Judd Perkins, tractor parts. Iowa.”
“Why are you…oh.”
“Yeah, oh.”
“It’s, uh, getting pretty bad, isn’t it?”
“Bad is relative. It’s been worse for Jonnie and Dave. How about opening up so I can get this pretty face out of the hallway.”
“Oh. Of course.”
“And maybe you could get me a key so I don’t have to do this again.”
“Yes, certainly.”
She unlocked the door. I darted in ahead of her. “When’s Greg usually get in?” I asked.
“Well…most days he’s here before me. This is unusual.”
“Kid’s a regular ball of fire, huh?”
“It’s all the paperwork. He likes it when it’s quiet. He’s usually in by seven thirty.” She looked around again, as if she might’ve missed him somehow on the first pass.
Greg was late. Very late.
I didn’t like that. For a creature of habit and very little else, his absence kindled a spark of worry in me.
I ambled over to his door, opened it, and stared at his head, perched on his desk on the blotter in a small black pool of blood, staring approximately over my left shoulder, tongue lolling.
Son…of…a…bitch.
* * *
Back at the station I thought they were going to hook me up to a transformer, plug it into an outlet, and announce my sudden demise right there—close all three cases and end the carnage with one-and-a-half cents’ worth of Sierra Pacific power. Like Ruby blowing away Oswald, it would be one of those wild, unexpected things that end up saving the taxpayers untold millions.
Dallas was in another interrogation room, Dale in another. A search warrant had been issued to go through my house, so I figured I’d at least get an ID on K out of it, if they didn’t indict me right here and run me straight up to the jail on Parr Boulevard. Finding out who she was wasn’t worth Gregory’s life, but at least it was something.
“Know what tiny little common denominator keeps popping up in all of this?” Russ asked me, puffing furiously on a Camel, fuck your lawyer glowing in his eyes.
“Tell me.”
“You, hotshot. You, coming across heads.”
“He was my nephew, Fairchild.”
“Guess who’s most likely to commit murder?”
I didn’t answer.
“Family member,” he said in a tough-guy voice. “Goddamn family. The people who know you best. Maybe there’s a message in that. What do you think?”
To Jonnie, Dallas was something like family. And his daughter, Rosalyn. Who else? His first wife, Jean, now living in Memphis? His second wife, Anne, up in Seattle? Both of them had been on the tube lately. Rosalyn was still AWOL.
I said, “Far as I know, I’m not related to either Jonnie Sjorgen or Dave Milliken, but you never know. You might want to swing up into my family tree and look into that.”
That slowed him down for a moment, invoking the tricky concept of a common motive to all three murders, but it didn’t take him long to build up another head of steam.
“You are squarely in the thick of this,” he said, billowing carcinogens.
“Lucky me.”
“Why do I get the feeling if I lock you up, lives will be saved?”
“I love rhetorical questions. You want a rhetorical answer?”
He glared daggers.
“If I’m hacking these guys up,” I said, “why am I calling them in?”
“Boy, you got me there, hotshot. Maybe we ought to get us a psychologist in here and track that down.”
“If you lock me up, you won’t find them as fast, that’s all. I’ve got a knack.” I returned the stare he was giving me. “You’ve got a hell of a problem in this town, like a serial killer. I’m not it.”
“Yeah? We’ll see.”
He got down to it. Maybe he’d got plenty of sleep the night before, because he came at me from every angle he could think of, some of which I’d never considered before. He was good. My respect for Reno’s finest went up a notch. Trouble was, he didn’t get a confession and he didn’t get one micron closer to solving the murders of Sjorgen, Milliken, and Rudd. But anger like his is the stuff of legend. I’ll bet he left contrails in the hallways, a smoking ring on the toilet seat.
I was feeling sorry for myself, too, doomed to stumble across one new head each morning, doomed to spend too much of every day in this ugly, airless cubicle, trapped with Fairchild, Day, half a dozen others drifting in and out, and Smokin’ Joe Camel. I had a vision: that this or something like it is what God has in store for agents and former agents of the IRS in the afterlife. Call it karma. Hope that brightens your day.
Russ put a foot up on a chair and stared down at me. “Who’s Kay?”
“I give up.”
Like a mountain shifting in an earthquake, Officer Day stirred, anticipating action. Russ’s eyes narrowed. “Now is not the time,” he warned me.
“I have no idea who she is. Ask her.”
“We would, but she’s not there, Mr. Angel. There is blond hair in the shower and in your bed, but Kay is not in, and I’m starting to wonder who she is and what she is in all of this.”
“She’s not anything in this.”
“Says the man who finds heads.”
“Trust me, it’s not that much fun.”
“One last time, hotshot. Who’s Kay? And if you don’t know, how is it you’re so sure she’s not anything in all of this, as you say?”
So, reluctantly, I told them the saga of K, as well as I could piece it together myself. It was a murky, unlikely tale, even to me, but I think the truth of it finally got through, after a fashion. Who could invent something like that? What kind of a PI would admit to it? Fairchild’s eyes grew fractionally less fierce, or so I imagined.
“K?” he said. “Just the letter?”
“Just the letter.”
He nodded. “We found the notes.” He took a drag, blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling that disappeared reluctantly into an air vent. “No idea who she is, huh?”
“None.”
“Or even
