women in two-piece suits with a full complement of matching accessories.
It all made Kristine feel dowdy and provincial. Seattle was a pleasant place to live, but it was not a sexy city. No one dressed to impress, there was little eye contact and street life was like her mother’s cooking: bland, wholesome and homogeneous. She was so used to being invisible that it was a shock to find all these people eyeing her, sizing her up, weighing and measuring her. A sense of anxiety came over her, a panicky suspicion that this whole trip was based on a delusion which would instantly collapse under the weight of scrutiny it would be exposed to out here in the real world.
Rather than go through another humiliating interview with Dick Rice, she had taken a couple of days off, parked Thomas with his father and bought the ticket herself. If she came up with the goods, she would bill the department. If not, she was stuck with the tab. But it wasn’t the money that worried her so much as the prospect of being revealed as an unsophisticated, self-important hick, like some small-town genius who keeps bugging the Patent Office with plans for inventions you can buy for twenty-nine cents at any drugstore.
Outside the terminal, she picked up a cab to Evanston. The vehicle was an old Dodge with spongy shocks, a high-pitched whine from the transmission and a tendency to pull to the right when they braked. The backseat was covered in a crocheted afghan, like a sofa in a blue-collar living room. The driver was a Pakistani who had been in the country for two months. He was courteous and voluble, but seemed to have only the vaguest grasp of the local geography.
“Evenstone, Evenstone, Evenstone,” he chanted softly. “Nice town, nice streets, nice people, but is not a good place to go from here. In the city, no problem. I am seeing signs, “Evenstone,” even though I do not myself go there at this time. But from here is very difficult, I think.”
Kristine finally went back inside and bought a street map from which she gave the driver directions. The route turned out to be very straightforward, north a ways on Highway 294 and then east along a street called Dempster running dead straight for eight miles to the shores of Lake Michigan.
The cab let her off in the wedge of shops and offices a few blocks wide which constituted the miniature city’s downtown area. She tipped overgenerously, got a receipt, and then spent about five minutes going over various possible routes back to Chicago. The driver listened with a look of increasing desperation, like a man who suspects that he may never see his family again. Eventually Kristine gave him the map as well, and the Dodge lurched off, leaving a smudge of black exhaust smoke on the still air.
Her appointment with Eileen McCann wasn’t until eight o’clock, and since nothing in Evanston was open yet, she decided to wander around and pick up the feel of the place. The broad, tree-lined streets leading to the lake were lined with brick apartment buildings fixed up like fake castles, with leaded windows, crenellated roofs and turrets with arrow slits, and huge mansions in Tudor or New England style, each standing on a lot big enough to accommodate six houses like her own.
She spent a while walking along the lake, then wandered back under a low iron railroad bridge into a neighborhood of slightly less grandiose properties a few blocks inland. This area may have been on the wrong side of the tracks, but it wasn’t exactly skid row. The houses were spacious and well proportioned, the yards deep and well tended with mature trees, the streets broad and quiet. It was only when she saw the sign reading MAPLE that she realized she had stumbled on the site of the crime that had brought her there.
The house itself was four blocks farther south. She spotted it at once by the FOR SALE sign. The name of the realtor had been changed from Bonnie Kowalski to Evan Krebb. It was a lugubrious half-timbered affair with a ground floor in brick, a fancy arch over the front door, and steeply angled roofs rising to Gothic peaks. After all the unwelcome publicity the property had received, moving this home was going to be a real test of Mr. Krebb’s salesmanship.
Kristine walked on, shaking her head slowly. Of the many questions to which she wanted answers from the wounded gunman in Atlanta, none obsessed her more than the choice of target. Between the Sullivans’ home in Renton and this Victorian pile lay a socioeconomic gulf as wide as the distance between the two towns themselves. What conceivable criterion could bridge such a gap?
There were plenty of other mysteries, of course. The Dale Watson who had been involved in the Evanston case was dead, but another one had appeared in Atlanta. Was this just a coincidence, or was there a generic “Dale Watson” of whom these two were simply examples? Above all, what was the purpose behind such senseless killings? With any luck, Kristine thought as she strolled back to the center of town, she would have the answers to all these questions by that evening. Her connecting flight left at one-thirty, getting into Atlanta three hours later. By five, or shortly after, she would be at the surviving gunman’s bedside.
Despite what Charlie Freeman had said, she didn’t think it would be too hard to make him cooperate. The detail of the Nike Air Jordan basketball shoes clinched it. She felt sure that the man in intensive care in Grady Memorial Hospital was one of the two who had taken part in the Kansas City shooting, where he had stepped in the pink paint hurled in a last act of desperation by Winston Jones, the handyman. And he had also been at the house in Renton, where Jamie had seen the shoes from his hiding place. But their owner didn’t know anything about this. He thought he was safely anonymous, supposedly the innocent victim of an unprovoked street attack. Best of all, he had no idea that Jamie Sullivan had survived.
Kristine had already put together her game plan. She wouldn’t ask questions, she would make statements. She’d start by describing the Renton and Kansas City killings in great detail. Then she’d confront him with a copy of her interviews with Jamie, carefully edited to exclude the fact that the boy hadn’t actually seen the killers. Finally, at the psychologically precise moment, she would drop in the detail of the Nike Air Jordans. That would be enough to make him talk, she calculated, particularly in his weakened condition. The case against him was airtight, and in a death-penalty state. The shock of discovering that his crimes were known, documented and witnessed, added to the prospect of enduring weeks of agony in the hospital only to end up dangling from the end of a rope, would surely be enough to break even the strongest and most stubborn spirit.
At exactly eight o’clock, Kristine Kjarstad presented herself at the front desk of the police station and asked for Eileen McCann. While she waited, she surveyed her reflection in a glass door across the room. With the image she had formed of Eileen McCann in mind, she had given some thought to her own. Finally she had settled for a gray cotton-blend suit, sober but expensive, with a stiff backbone of polyester to help resist the rigors of an overnight in cattle class. Add her executive-style briefcase, and she figured she was a match for anyone.
It turned out she needn’t have bothered with any of these elaborate preparations. In person, Eileen McCann was a sad frump, overweight and out of shape, a chain-smoking fashion victim for whom every day was a bad-hair day. She greeted Kristine coolly and invited her into a small, immaculately neat office. The walls were bare, the papers and books neatly stacked, the furniture modern and functional. Even the cigarette butts in the ashtray were aligned as precisely as they had been in the pack.
“Do you have an interesting life, Ms. Carstad?” McCann asked when they were seated. “Professionally, I mean.”
Kristine shrugged.
“King County is pretty big. It stretches from the ocean all the way up to the mountains, and surrounds Seattle on three sides. So we get our share of the action.”
McCann crushed out her cigarette and laid it beside the others in the ashtray.
“I envy you. Crimewise, Evanston is strictly bush league. The most interesting case I’ve had until this thing was an alleged date rape involving two students from the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. And the only interesting thing about that was trying to figure out which of the parties involved was lying most about what. So yesterday, instead of trying to break through to a new level in the video game which my partner thoughtfully downloaded into our computer, we worked the phones and the fax and contacted four hundred law enforcement agencies and state prosecutor’s offices across the country. Correction, three hundred ninety-two.”
Kristine looked suitably impressed.
“That must have taken hours.”
“Jeff went home at five, but then he has a home to go to. I stayed till eleven. I made a few more calls out west, where they were still at work, then collated the data we’d come up with. I didn’t even notice the time, to tell you the truth. I was too damn excited.”
“You found something?”
Eileen McCann wrinkled her unlovely nose.
“I would hardly have brought the matter to your attention otherwise, Detective Carstad.”
“Call me Kristine.”
