So I told Mac my view of the day. He blinked a couple of timeswith sidelong looks at First Cop and Second Cop when I mentioned juicy bits. Hecalled Wes out from that side office and sniffed him.
“Yeah, that’s the same signature as the corpse the ME ranthrough autopsy. Al Kratz, you say? Hard to mistake. Cash showed me the files —we don’t need that kind of shit.” He clapped Wes on the shoulder. “You, sir,are a lucky man.”
The driver looked like he was trying to choose betweenfainting and puking.
Anyway, we filled out some paperwork regarding the call, Macsuggested that he’d like to see First Cop’s fullreport on his desk within a day, and we hauled our butts out of there before Ichanged my mind and filed charges on this and that.
Don’t get the idea that I just walked away from this andforgave and forgot, smiling like some plaster saint. First Cop and Second Copdon’t live and work in Podunk Hollow anymore. They’ll never carry badges again,either. I saw to that, and you don’t need to know how or where or when. I knowa lot of cops, and none of them want to see men like those on any police force,anywhere.
Mac drove me back to the crime scene. It was getting towardmidnight now, but we found one fire crew and pumper still poking around withinfrared viewers, checking for hot spots in the woods. We grabbed a couple offour-cell Mag-Lites out of his cruiser trunk and I led the state wizard around,setting the scene.
The fire and the fire crews had really messed up any traces,but Mac was able to sniff a couple of bits of Kratz stink out of the woods atthe top of the hill. The truck was just half-melted scrap, nothing left there.And I kept twitching every time one of those flashlight beams stirred up aspooky shadow in the night woods, thinking that Kratz had come back to finishhis job. One time I had the SIG out of its holster before my brain turnedAlbertus Magnus in full dark-wizard cape and cowl back into a rotting stub oftree-trunk.
Anyway, Mac talked to Ridge and got that part of the story while I stood around and stared at thesteaming remains of my Lincoln, nice car while it lasted, and wondered where I’dfind a replacement. And what my insurance agent was gonna do to my premiums.
Ridge hiked back to his house and drove out to meet us with another case of antique Jack Daniels toreplace the wasted whiskey, damned nice of him.
A full State forensic team showed up after an hour or so,doing the stuff they do. You know the drill. You’ve been there or at leastwatched it on TV. They’d bring along some heavy wreckers and transporters tohaul my car and the propane truck back for evidence impound. Not that the firehad left much to be gained from the trouble. But Mac signed off to hiscounterpart and we could beat feet outta there. Mac’s a nice guy. He drove meback to town, at least three hours out of his way.
Sandy was waiting in my apartment, worried as hell, hugged melike a gorilla when I came through the door. I should have been back at leastsix or ten hours earlier and there’d been a vague spot on the evening newsabout weird scenes in the backwoods. We burned up some calories and thenconsumed their replacements, and I briefed her on the whole shitty scene beforeshe went back to her own bed.
Like I told you, she’d been part of the Kratz strike team, wayback when. She needed to know — he could be after her ass, too.
VII
I sat at my desk and stared at the discouraging whiteemptiness of a computer screen, trying to organize my thoughts. Maybe I neededto substitute intravenous cocaine for copious doses of pipe tobacco, along thelines of Sherlock Holmes. It’s just that some drugs don’t have the same effecton wizards as on fictional detectives.
Of course, Holmes used coke when he was bored, not when a casebaffled him. Things didn’t fit together, and my drug of choice wasn’t helping.Liberal applications of Jack Daniels hadn’t worked, either, although MalcolmRidge’s antique booze had kept its savor. It hadn’t improved in the bottle, butit sure hadn’t gone bad. I’d been running quality checks on a regular basissince getting back to town.
Most detective work follows a linear sequence. First thing,you find out about a crime. That’s always been a problem in police work — wedon’t like to think about the number of crimes that go unreported. Depending onwho you ask and what species of crime, the fraction could be well over half.
This case, we’d had proof of a crime and of the perp’sidentity handed to us on a silver platter. We knew we were looking for AlKratz. We didn’t know why, didn’tknow the motive, and that threw a gap into my logical process that I couldn’tjump over. Special Agent Bycheck wouldn’t tell me what Kratz stole from JohnDoe.
Without that, we were looking at a random crime. You want todrive a cop nuts, give him a string of random murders — victims who never kneweach other, who lived in different areas, worked at different jobs, diedwithout any pattern you could see, any common motive, but with some distinctivefeature that made you know that one perp had killed them all. A connection likeone dead wizard’s signature.
Hell, even with common features, like all the victims wereprostitutes or street kids or transvestite stockbrokers who wore red dresses,you could take years to break a case. The first time, Kratz had strung us alongfor more than a decade.
We knew we were hunting for Al Kratz. We didn’t have a clue asto where or when he’d strike next, who his next target might be, where he mightbe living, what name and face he carried on his driver’s license these days.Whether he was still in the country,damn it all. Needle-in-the-haystack time. A couple hundred
