She eyed Becker again with the same speculative look, as if sizing him up. 'I've never been with a panther,' she said. 'I don't know that much about them.'
Kom took Karen's hand and held it momentarily with both of his. 'And you move like a deer.'
'Doesn't one of those eat the other?' Tovah asked.
Kom ignored his wife. He fixed Karen with a meaningful look. 'Thank you. Thank you.'
'Anytime.'
'We'll have to do it again,' said Kom, beaming and waving.
As they drove away, Becker slumped down in his seat and sighed.
They sat together in Tee's living room and he unfolded his suspicions about McNeil. 'That's why I wanted to talk to you somewhere I know we won't be overheard. Certainly not at the station. I don't know that McNeil has any real friends there, but there are always people who'd love to spread the word. I have nothing really to go on, I know that.'
Tee's wife emerged from the kitchen and offered soft drinks, returned to the kitchen, came out again with the drinks, retreated once more. After fifteen minutes she reemerged and offered cookies.
'Marge, it's business,' said Tee. 'We don't have social dealings with them, apparently.' Karen glanced at Becker, lifting an eyebrow. To Marge, she said, 'I'd love something, Marge, thank you.'
'You look like you never eat cookies,' Marge said.
'I could eat a box at a time.'
'How do you keep that figure? Doesn't she have a lovely figure, Tee?'
'The woman is an associate deputy director of the FBI, I never look at her figure. She doesn't have a figure. To me she's a stick of wood, a shield, like any other cop.'
'Isn't he a jerk?' Marge said sweetly.
'It would be an insult to view her as a hot babe, isn't that right, Karen?' Tee asked. To Marge, Karen said, 'Yes, he is. But a very nice one.'
Marge stood behind her husband, leaned down and put her chin on his head, her hands on his chest. 'Oh, nice, sure. If you like that kind of thing in a man.'
'I am not a jerk. I am the chief of police. The chief mind you.'
'Chief jerk,' Marge said affectionately. 'How do you manage to keep looking that way, Karen?'
'Anxiety. It keeps the metabolism high.'
'Living with Becker will do that to you,' said Tee.
'At work I'm surrounded by men…'
'And they're all jerks. Got it. Still, there must be more to it. I have to live with Tee and I'm still putting on weight.'
'You look fine,' said Karen.
'Well, you won't find me running around in a tennis skirt. The chief here wouldn't allow it.' She patted Tee's head with a trace of asperity, just hard enough to make him blink, then returned to the kitchen. Tee pointed his thumb in the direction of her retreat. 'That must have been the wife,' he said.
Ginny passed through the room, pulling her long blond hair into a ponytail. 'You know Mr. and Mrs. Becker, Ginny. Say hello.'
Ginny stopped and flashed a dazzling smile. 'Hello,' she said, managing to infuse the single word with warmth and sincerity. She paused just long enough to hear their return greetings before continuing on her way.
'She's really beautiful, Tee,' Karen said.
'Yeah,' he replied, glowing with pride. 'And she's a good kid, too.'
'The only thing wrong with her is she's too old for Jack,' Becker said.
'You think you could retard her aging by a few years? Or maybe we could speed up Jack.'
'Hey, please,' said Karen. 'I'm in no hurry for Jack to grow up-'
' 'And become a jerk,' is the end of that sentence,' said Becker.
'I was going to say, 'and leave me.' But now that you mention it…'
'To return to safer ground,' Becker said, 'you were saying you've tried to find this Kiawa?'
'Kiwasee. Tyrone Abdul Kiwasee. He's out on bail and he's done a bunk.
The Bridgeport cops are looking for him, but meanwhile, he's gone.'
'You're fairly sure it was him on the telephone?' Karen asked.
'Not positive. But he was the last black I had anything to do with who also had dealings with McNeil.'
'We'll get you a caller-ID phone,' said Karen. 'He'll probably call back, he'll want to know if you found whatever it is he thought you ought to find in the garage.'
'You think he'll call back, then?'
'He'll call,' Becker said. 'He called to make trouble in the first place. If he wanted to be a crime buster, he would have told you what to look for and where. He wants to pull your chain a little bit before he's through.'
'You think it's all just bullshit? That there's nothing in McNeil's garage, and it's just my imagination about the knife?'
Becker looked to Karen, who shrugged. 'We could run tests on the knife, Tee, but it's a real long shot. I suppose it's still possible to match blood or tissue traces with DNA samples from the bone, if they can get any decent samples from the bone at this point-'
'If he hasn't cleaned the knife as thoroughly as you think he has.'
'It looked clean as a whistle to me..
'But it might look different under a microscope.'
'But right now it's inadmissible evidence,' said Karen. 'It was taken during an illegal search.'
'It wasn't taken,' said Tee. 'I was going to take it, but then I heard a noise and… I took off. I just got the hell out of there.'
'Not a bad idea.'
'For the wrong reason. I felt creepy. There was something strange in the air there. Maybe just because I don't approve of McNeil in the first place, I don't know. Probably the whole thing is my imagination-all of the little things can be explained away, they wouldn't amount to a pinch of shit if we were talking about somebody besides McNeil.'
'There are a couple of things that aren't your imagination, Tee,' Karen said. 'One is the phone call from Kiwasee, or whoever it was. The other is the skeletons of six young women. Those are far too real.'
'Something occurs to me,' said Becker. 'You were looking at this X-Acto knife that you think could have been used to cut up the bodies, then you heard a noise and decided-wisely, I think-to get the hell out of there.'
'Right.'
'Does that mean your fingerprints are on what could be the murder weapon?'
Tee stared at Becker for a moment. 'Oh, shit Chrice,' he said.
Late in the afternoon Metzger loaded his dog in the car and returned to the nature preserve. He started with Sandy on a long leash but within a few yards the dog was already tangled around a tree trunk, so he released it and the dog bolted happily into the woods. Metzger walked toward the place where he had fallen the previous night, Sandy roaming in a large, active circle around him. The dog found the hole before he did. Metzger came upon Sandy sniffing excitedly around the edges of the excavation. There was nothing eerie or otherworldly about it in daylight. A human being had been digging a hole. Footprints were pressed into the loose dirt piled beside the hole, the sharp marks of the shovel were still visible on the sheer sides. The digger had encountered a large rock-Metzger could see a slash of white through the dirt where the shovel had hit stone. He could see where the digger had squatted, his butt leaving an impression in the dirt, and where another weight, broader, lighter, and smoother, had flattened the soil but left no trace of its identity.
The dog continued to sniff excitedly, tracing a path around the hole.
Metzger snapped on a shorter hand leash, then said, 'Find, Sandy. Find.'
The dog circumnavigated the hole in a larger circle, and moved off through the trees, nose to the ground.
After several minutes and as many sidetracks, the dog stopped by the roadside, roaming round in a small circle, its nose always fixed by one point. The ground litter had been matted down and Metzger could see the distinct impression of heel prints where they had pressed through the litter and dug into the dirt. He stood there,
