“If a third family is murdered on November seventh, then the fourth will be on December tenth.”
Lionel shook his head. “There were two different killers. Billy Lucas, Andy Tane. They’re both dead.”
The glass top on the wrought-iron table reflected the faded sky, a hawk gliding in a narrowing gyre.
“And in the Sollenburg case,” Lionel continued, “in all those cases back then, a girl was raped and tortured.”
“Billy Lucas raped and tortured his sister, Celine.”
“But Davinia Woburn wasn’t.”
“Reese Salsetto was going to do the Woburn family. If Brenda hadn’t shot him, he would have shot her and the son. Then he would have done to the girl precisely what Alton Blackwood did to Sharon Sollenburg.”
“I’m still lost. You can’t seriously be saying Billy, Reese, and Andy conspired to re-create the Blackwood crimes?”
“No. They didn’t have to know one another if each of them had a secret partner and if that partner was the same in each instance.”
“But there’s no evidence of any perp but Billy in the Lucas house. And for sure, nobody but Andy Tane went out the window with that poor girl.”
“Nobody we could see,” John said.
Exasperated, Lionel leaned back in his chair. “Who are you, man, and what’ve you done with my plain-talking partner?”
Watching the circling hawk reflected in the table, John said, “I went up to the state hospital twice to see Billy Lucas.”
“Well, that’ll put a bee up Ken Sharp’s ass.”
“He knows. The first visit, Billy called me Johnny, though he’d been told only my last name.”
“We don’t need Sherlock to figure out that one.”
“That night he called me on an unlisted number he hadn’t been given. Using a phone they say he didn’t possess. He said something to me that was word for word something Blackwood said right before I killed him. Something I’ve never told anyone. Something only Alton Blackwood could know.”
For a long moment, Lionel was as silent as the pale sky and the white sun and the gliding hawk in the glass.
At last he said, “I don’t do
John looked up, met his eyes. “How do
“I don’t know yet, but I will eventually. I found a connection between Reese Salsetto and Andy. The answer is there. I just have to work it out.”
Surprised, John said, “What connection?”
“Salsetto was a comer, a pusher and booster and grifter and paper-hanger. You name a scam, he was working it. And he had a fixer list as long as King Kong’s dick—cops, all kinds of city officials. I found a ledger under the false bottom in his nightstand drawer. He recorded every bribe he paid—amount, date, time, place, to whom. In half the cases, when the payoff was made in a parking lot or a park or anywhere outside, Salsetto had someone on his team get a photo of the envelope being passed. If he ever needed to turn state’s evidence to save himself, he figured to have so much crap on so many people that a prosecutor wouldn’t just cut him a deal for no prison time, he’d adopt him and call him son. Andy Tane is on that list a lot, and so is his former partner, Vin Wasco. I think maybe somehow Salsetto’s sister Brenda and her husband were involved in something with Reese, and with Tane.”
“They weren’t like that.”
“Maybe they were. Maybe they were in something with Reese and Andy, and it went wrong in a big way. Reese lost his cool, which he had a habit of. Reese dead, Andy Tane sees his world falling apart, too, and he goes for revenge and a quick exit, something like that.”
John looked at the sky, and the hawk was gone. He had only seen it reflected in the table. He wondered if there had been a real hawk or only the reflection of one.
“I know it sounds good to you now,” John said, “but it won’t come together that way. The hinges aren’t where you think they are.”
“I’d rather spend my time looking for hinges than for a ghost or whatever it is you’re talking about.”
“If another family’s murdered on November seventh, what’ll we do then?”
“Keep looking for hinges. If your explanation is right, what could we do anyway?”
“Maybe nothing,” John acknowledged.
Lionel surveyed the big yard, lingered on the deodar cedar. He looked tired, not merely weary but worn down and prematurely aged by a life in Homicide.
When he looked at John again, he said, “Listen, man, that’s a hell of a thing you’ve been carrying with you all these years, your whole family killed. You shared it with anybody till now?”
“Nicky knows. She always has. Not the kids. Only Nicky until Burchard and you. But I didn’t go as far with Burchard as suggesting … that it’s Blackwood himself again. Do you have to tell him?”
Lionel shook his head. “No. But how much longer are you on leave?”
“About ten days.”
“Maybe you should extend it till you work this out for yourself. Till you get your head straight about it. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll ask for another thirty days.”
Lionel started to slide his chair back from the table, but then he pulled it in again and leaned once more with his arms on the thick glass top. “I feel like I let you down.”
“You never have. You didn’t now.”
“Couldn’t be easy for you to say what you’re really thinking when you’re thinking something as far out as this.”
“I had to take a deep breath and swallow hard,” John admitted.
“See, the problem is, I remember all those old movies, they were old even when I was a kid, where something goes bump in the night, and it’s not even something supernatural, but the black guy always says ‘Feets don’t fail me now,’ and does a fast shuffle for someplace safe. Used to embarrass the hell out of me when I saw that.”
“Me too.”
“So I won’t be what I can’t be.”
“Tell your mom I think she did an amazing job.”
“You mean, considering what she had to work with.”
John smiled. “It’s a flat-out miracle.”
As they rose from their chairs, a breeze sprang up. All across the yard, fallen leaves slid and tumbled over one another, adding to drifts of leaves against the rose arbor and against the fence between the yard and the wooded ravine. It was just a breeze.
41
AFTER THE MORNING LESSONS WITH THE KIDS, NICOLETTE retreated to her third-floor studio, intending to make significant progress on the painting in which Zach, Naomi, and Minette were prominently featured. She’d had an excellent night of dreamless sleep. She felt rested and buoyant. Yet when she returned to the unfinished canvas, she was as disturbed by it as she had been the previous evening. It still struck her as being about loss, despair, which was far from her intention.
She decided not to address the troubling canvas for a few days and instead to do some preliminary composition sketches for another picture. She moved the vase of yellow humility roses and the thermos of fortifying tea from the tall table by her easel to another tall table by the draftsman’s board.
More often than not, she worked in a silent studio. Art was not just images but also a kind of music in her mind, and sometimes real music could be a distraction from the inner melody.
That morning, however, she had watched the news while dressing for the day, had seen the terrible story
