and, of course, the Dubois case.’
They found a table in the corner, and he bought them both some coffee. She declined his offer of a pastry. ‘I’m on Atkins, but thanks anyway.’
He handed her the coffee. ‘Alright,’ she asked, ‘what’s this all about? What’s Kane’s connection to your case?’ She flipped on her recorder.
He reached over and flipped it off. ‘Take notes,’ he said. ‘I’d just as soon not be on tape or quoted for attribution. Consider me an unnamed source. Plus I’d like you to hold off printing any of this.’
‘McCabe, you know better than that. I’m a reporter. You tell me something that’s news, expect it to be printed.’
‘Just hold off a couple of days. Say until Monday. You’ll have a better story if you do. If we clear it by then, I’ll make sure you get details nobody else will have.’
‘What if something happens in the meantime?’
‘In the meantime, print whatever you want as long as it doesn’t come from me.’
She thought about this. ‘Alright. Deal.’ She put the recorder back in her briefcase. ‘Now, why are you interested in Kane?’
McCabe showed Bollinger a postmortem photograph of the man Maggie had killed in Sophie Gauthier’s hospital room. ‘Do you know this man?’
She picked up the picture and examined it. ‘Sure. It’s Duane Pollard. Lucas Kane’s bullyboy. Who killed him?’
‘You’re sure it’s Pollard?’
‘I’m sure. Either him or his twin brother. Is this the guy the female cop shot in the hospital yesterday morning? The one identified as Darryl Pollock?’
‘You do your homework.’
‘Story came in from the AP last night. Is this Darryl Pollock?’
‘Yes. My partner shot him just in time to save my life. Saved a key witness’s life as well.’
‘Interesting. When did Duane turn up in Maine? And why?’ Bollinger started writing notes.
‘Let me ask some questions first. Do you think Pollock — let’s call him that, it’s his real name — do you think he killed Lucas Kane?’
She looked up. ‘No. His alibi was corroborated six ways to Sunday. He couldn’t have pulled the trigger.’
‘Could he have recruited someone else to do it?’
‘Unlikely. Kane was his meal ticket.’
‘Maybe they had a spat.’
‘Yeah, maybe, but I don’t think so. I don’t know what you’re looking for here.’
‘I’m trying to figure out exactly why this thug ended up in Maine trying to put a bullet through a key witness’s head. All I know so far is that Pollock’s ex-boyfriend, the late Lucas Kane, was buddies with a doctor in Maine who may be involved in the case.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘I’d like to know what you know about the murder of Lucas Kane.’
‘About all I can add to what you read in the Herald is a couple of things I’ve always thought of as weird. Or at least questionable.’
‘Yeah? Like what?’
‘Like whoever shot Kane shot him from an angle and chose a weapon guaranteed to blow away his dentures and turn his face into mincemeat. The only reason I can think of to do that is to make positive ID as hard as possible. Why?’
‘I don’t know. You wrote that the cops suspected a mob hit.’
‘Yeah, but that was bullshit. If in doubt, blame the mob. Any mob. Everybody just nods and accepts it. It’s a convenient out.’
‘You think this wasn’t their style.’
‘I know it’s not. So do you. If they wanted to kill Kane, they’d just go bang-bang-you’re-dead. No reason to hide his identity.’
McCabe chewed on that for a minute. ‘Okay. That’s weird number one. What’s weird number two?’
‘The fingerprints.’
‘What about the fingerprints?’
Bollinger took a breath. ‘McCabe, you’re an experienced homicide cop. You know better than I do that when you check somebody’s house for prints, you generally pick up a lot of extraneous prints from whoever’s been there. Not just the people who live there but others. Visitors, delivery people. Whoever. Well, in Kane’s apartment there was a lot of that. A lot of partials and smears, here, there, and everywhere, just like you’d expect.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘I have a good contact, a crime lab tech who examined the room where they found Kane’s body. He’s somebody I trust. According to my contact, none of those prints belonged to the victim.’
‘I thought the cops said there were a lot of Kane’s prints. That’s one of the ways they identified him.’
‘There were and it is. They found the victim’s prints all over the place. On the telephone. On the doorknobs. On tables. On the refrigerator. One on an empty beer bottle in the living room.’
‘But — ’
‘Let me finish. These prints were all perfect. Nice fat plump perfect prints. Not a smear or partial among them. It was like somebody walked the victim around the apartment and planted his prints on things just before they shot him. Or maybe pressed his fingers against things just after.’
‘The FBI didn’t have a record of Kane’s prints?’
‘No. Kane was never fingerprinted while he was alive. Never arrested. Never served in the military, et cetera, et cetera. All they had for a comp was the victim himself.’
‘How about the DNA? Sessions said they were sure because of the DNA.'
‘Same sort of thing. The DNA they got was from hairs on the bed right where the techs would look. Saliva in the sink. A complete set of fingernail clippings in the wastebasket in the bathroom. Just seemed to me, and my pal in the crime lab, that it was all too perfect.’
‘There was no previous record of Kane’s DNA?’
‘Nope.’
‘So you’re saying the body wasn’t Kane’s?’
‘I’m saying it’s a definite maybe.’
‘So if it wasn’t Lucas Kane, who was it?’
‘I haven’t a clue. In those days South Beach was full of good-looking boys on the prowl. Some selling their bodies. Some just looking for a sugar daddy. If one of them happened to disappear, nobody would even notice.’
‘He’d have to be the same height and weight as Kane. Same hair color.’
‘Easy enough.’
‘How about the car?’
‘What about the car?’
‘You wrote that Kane’s prints — the corpse’s prints — matched the prints found in the car.’
‘They did.’
‘Same problem of perfection they found in the condo?’
‘No. The prints in the car were about what you’d expect. Partials from the victim on the door, the wheel, the gearshift lever, the seat belt lock, and so on. I don’t know about DNA.’
‘Anybody else’s prints anywhere in or on the car?’
‘Not that I’m aware of. I think it was clean.’
‘So maybe they wiped it down and then let the victim drive it around?’
‘That could be.’
‘Did you ever ask Allard or Sessions about any of this?’
‘Yeah. At first they pooh-poohed the whole thing, told me my imagination was working overtime, but I’m a persistent kind of gal, and I kept asking. After a while they just stonewalled me.’
‘Kane’s father came to the funeral, right?’ McCabe asked.
