by Blake Banner
“At the hotel.”
“I’m coming over.”
“Suit yourself.”
I drove fast. The roads were empty and I made it in a few minutes. As I stepped through the door of the Soniat into the internal patio, Luis called to me, “Mr. Walker, Mr. Hirschfield, he is waiting for you in the bar.”
I found him at his usual table, behind the fern.
“Have a drink, talk to me.”
“No. Where’s the sample?”
He scowled, pulled a padded manila envelope from his hip pocket and handed it to me. “What are you going to do with it?”
I didn’t look at him. I opened the envelope and looked inside. There was a glass vial with blood-stained cloth in it. “I’m flying to Washington. I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after.”
“Flying? In this weather?”
“I’ll fly from Jackson, Mississippi.”
He sighed heavily through his nose. “This is getting complicated, Lacklan. We need to talk.”
I shook my head. “You need to talk. I don’t.”
“I just told you this is getting complicated. You know what that means?”
“Yeah, Hirschfield, I know what it means. It means people are getting involved that you didn’t expect to get involved. People you play golf with.”
“Don’t be a smartass.”
“You tell me what it means, then.”
“It means this is more than just a guy killing a woman out of sexual jealousy.”
“I know that. I’m glad you realize it now.” I hesitated. “Stay onside, Hirschfield. You don’t want me as an enemy.”
He looked mad. “Take a hike, Walker, and don’t be so damn fast to insult and threaten people. I’m scared of you!”
I nodded once, then left.
I stepped out into the wind and the dying light again, climbed in my car and hit the ignition. There was a short, staccato blast of a siren, and the inside of my car was flooded with red and blue light. I looked in my mirror and saw a patrol car behind me. I killed the engine and opened the window.
Jackson climbed out the passenger side of the car, and hugging his flapping jacket to his chest, leaning into the wind, he walked around to talk to me.
“Get out!”
“Why?”
“Because I’m telling you to! Come inside! We need to talk!”
I sighed and followed him into the shelter of the hotel entrance.
“What do you want, Jackson?”
“I want to know where you’re going.”
“What goddamn business is that of yours?”
“I can make it my business, Walker. If I look through your vehicle and find…”
“It’ll be the last thing you ever do as cop. You want to know where I’m going? I’m going to D.C., to talk to friends and have this sample analyzed.” I held up the manila envelope for him to see. “It’s the blood from the crime scene. You got any more questions for me, talk to my attorney. He’s in the bar. Now get out of my way, Jackson.”
I went to move and he put his hand on my chest.
“Wait a minute.” He jerked his head at the envelope and narrowed his eyes. “What the hell do you think you’re going to find?”
I held his eye for a count of three. Then, I shook my head.
“It’s too late for that, Jackson. You had your chance to be a cop and you blew it. Now you’re no more than paid muscle with a badge. I told you before, when I bring your masters down, I’m bringing you down with them. Next time you put a hand on me, I’m going to break your arm in three places. Now get out of my way.”
Jackson, Mississippi is north of Burgundy. I took Main Street to Route 61 and headed south toward Baton Rouge like I had all the hounds of hell snapping at my ass. It took me fifteen minutes to reach the outskirts of the city. The wind was crazy and getting crazier the further south I went. That meant the roads were deserted. At Southern University, I turned onto the I-110 and hit 120 MPH through the city. Nobody tried to pull me over. There was nobody there to try. It took me three minutes to reach the Horace Wilkinson Bridge, and less than thirty seconds to cross it.
Then I floored the pedal, heading west along the I-10. It was two hundred and fifty miles of straight road to Houston, and I aimed to do it in two hours.
FIFTEEN
On the way, I called a private lab I’d heard about in Houston. I knew that getting DNA results from forensic labs was not like the movies. Through official channels, it would take four weeks minimum. I didn’t have four weeks. I didn’t even have four days. I needed to cut corners, whether it meant pulling strings or bribing people, I didn’t give a damn. I could feel the hyenas closing in and I needed to act fast.
I talked to three labs without success and finally, after half an hour, I found a place on South Voss Road, the CCD Lab, in the west of the city. They claimed they could produce results in one to two days. I told the girl I was willing to pay well over the odds for a fast result and she put me through to Dr. Glendinning, the head of the lab. I explained to her that my case was urgent, and that whatever the lab’s normal fee was, I was willing to pay double if they could get me results in twenty-four hours.
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “What is your name, sir?”
I hesitated less than a second, then told her, “Captain Lacklan Walker.”
She liked the rank and I heard the smile in her voice. “Just give them your name at reception and I’ll come and meet you myself.”
I hung up and took a deep breath. I was flying by the seat of my pants, but so far I hadn’t crashed.
I followed the I-10 onto the Katy Freeway, past the Memorial Park, and took exit 760 onto Voss Road. It was five PM and raining. I drove south for three miles and finally came to the building—an eight-story glass and concrete monolith set in its own parking lot.
The CCD Labs took up the whole of the eighth floor. I rode the elevator to the seventh floor and stepped out into a lobby that would have looked more at home in a Hollywood representation of a palace in Atlantis. The floor was dark green marble under a vaulted ceiling. The walls were white marble and there were Greco-Roman frames around all the doors. My boots were loud as I crossed the large, echoing space and leaned on the green and white marble reception desk. I smiled and told the pretty Texan girl behind the desk that I was Captain Lacklan Walker, there to see Dr. Glendinning.
She picked up the phone and smiled at me with very white teeth. While she waited for Dr. Glendinning to answer, she told me she hoped I was having a nice day. I told her not really and she creased her eyes, like I’d said I was.
“Dr. Glendinning? Captain Walker is here for you.”
She appeared after a few minutes through tall walnut doors. She was about five ten, with red hair and a nice body. She was wearing a white lab coat and an expensive blue suit underneath it. When she saw my jeans and my sweatshirt, the twitch of her eyebrows told me that in her world, captains don’t dress like tramps.
I raised an eyebrow to her twitch and we shook hands.
“Dr., can we talk somewhere in private? This is a very urgent matter.”
Again the frown, but she nodded and said, “Sure, let’s go to my office.”
I followed her among echoing footfalls, through the same walnut doors into a less glamorous world of beige carpets and functional furniture. She showed me into the cubicle she called her office and sat behind her desk. I sat opposite her and pulled out two samples: the one Hirschfield had given me, and the one I had taken myself from the bed where Sarah’s body had been found.
“Dr. Glendinning, I don’t care how much this costs. I need this done by tomorrow afternoon. I can’t tell you what it’s about, but I can tell you that a man’s life depends on getting the results immediately. If you need official confirmation, I can give you a number at the Pentagon that you can call.” I took Ben’s card from my wallet and put it in front of her. It was a bluff, but she had no way of knowing that. When she’d taken it in, I smiled and said, “But then the pr
ice will be capped.”
She smiled back for a moment without speaking, then she said, “The simplest way I can think of to do this, Captain Walker, is if I take you personally as a private client. I will still have access to the full range of forensic tools that we use here. Does that sound acceptable?”
“It sounds perfect.” I pushed the two samples across the desk to her. “I need to know if these samples match, and I need the DNA profile on each one of them.” I pointed at the one Hirschfield had gotten from the DA and said, “I’d like you to label that one ‘DA’, and this one,” I pointed at my own, “Walker. When will you have the results?”
“Tomorrow afternoon. About three. If you give me a number, I’ll call you.”
“Can you email me the preliminary results when you have them?”
She nodded. “I can do that.” Then, she smiled a little ruefully. “But I was kind of hoping you’d come and pick them up yourself.”
Obviously, she’d decided she liked the way captains dressed in my world. “I’ll remember that next time I’m in Houston.”
I walked through the drizzle down to Westheimer Road and found a small Italian restaurant. I found a table by the window and had a beer and a pizza. As I sat and ate, I tried to organize my thoughts. A voice in my head kept telling me that there were things that made no sense. But then I reminded myself, they made perfect sense to somebody, somewhere—they made perfect sense to Sarah’s killer. What didn’t make sense was the way I was looking at it. I had to look at it in a different way. I had to try and see it from the killer’s point of view.
I’d been focusing too hard on the question of whether Bat had killed Sarah. But that wasn’t the real question. Why? Because I already knew that he hadn’t. I was going over the same ground in different ways, trying to find new ways to prove what I already knew.
So what was the real question? Who killed Sarah?
I took a pull on my beer and stared out at the wet road and the steady flow of traffic. Somehow, that didn’t feel like the right question either. I asked myself why not? I leaned back and stretched out my legs. Because.
Because…
I circled around it for a while and finally settled on it. Because in my gut I could feel that she was not the intended victim. I had felt it almost from the start.
Then something clicked.
Simone. Simone had said that Carmichael and Sarah were sleeping in separate rooms. But the body was in the master bedroom. Carmichael was in denial about the break up of his marriage. He wanted everybody to believe they were fine. So he had made no mention of the fact that she was not in her own room, to do so would have been to admit they had problems. Maybe the poor sap wanted to believe she had finally returned to their conjugal room that night for a reconciliation. Who knows? Maybe she had. But the fact remained, she should not have been in that bed. He should.
Had the killer known that? According to Simone, all of Burgundy knew it. My head was reeling. It meant something, but I couldn’t see what. I tried to consider it from all angles.
I had called him a poor sap, but Simone had insisted that Sarah loved her husband, even if she’d stopped being in love with him. Had she then, after all, after her crisis with Simone, after the shock of discovering that her stepsister—the woman and friend on whom she relied emotionally—was in love with her, had she decided to attempt a reconciliation with Carmichael? Had she gone willingly to his bed, to wait for him to return? Was that the reason she had gone home early and not gone to the jazz club?
If that was right, then those four shots were almost certainly not intended for Sarah, but for Carmichael.
So far that made perfect sense, and if it was right, the question became not who wanted Sarah dead, but who wanted Carmichael dead? For a moment, my mind strayed to the Full Moon, and Ivory. Did Carmichael have associates there who had reason to want him eliminated? Had he upset people there? Had Ivory heard about Bat’s past from Harry and decided, if he could not employ him, to frame him for the murder he intended to commit? Had he then entered Carmichael’s house and, thinking he was shooting him, shot his own lover instead?
It was possible, but it left unexplained what had happened at Solitude, at the studio. Who had been shot at the studio? Who had changed the mattress, the bedding and the mat, but left the glasses and the ashtray? And how did they come to use the same gun that had killed Sarah?
It was not synchronicity, Jungian or otherwise. This had to be the same killer’s hand at work. Whoever had killed Sarah, wittingly or not, was responsible for cleaning up a similar crime scene at Solitude.
Two crime scenes, only one body that I knew of. One crime scene incompetently cleaned up, the other incompetently attempting to frame Bat, with excessive amounts of blood, and displaying shots both highly accurate and incompetently wild.
I looked down at the pepperoni pizza growing cold on the plate in front of me, picked up a piece, and took a bite. What was the real question? What was the question—what were the questions—I should be asking? Not did Bat kill Sarah. Not who killed Sarah. But, was Sarah the intended victim? Was Charles Carmichael the intended victim? And, what happened at Solitude?
I looked at my watch. It was after six PM and already getting dark outside. I paid my check and stepped out into the evening rain. As I walked up South Voss, my mind went back to the Full Moon. Maybe I was clearer on the questions I should be asking, but there were still two big, glaring coincidences that did not fit into any explanation I had come up with yet.
One was the second, apparent murder scene at Solitude. The other was that on the day I had tailed Carmichael, he had wound up, late that night, secluded in a private bar at the very club where Ivory sold coke. Ivory, who had tried to recruit Bat Hayes, Ivory whom Bat had refused to implicate, Ivory who had been Sarah’s lover just before she died—Ivory who was rapidly climbing the scales as my number one suspect.
One thing at least was clear. Maybe I didn’t know what to ask, or what the likely answer would be, but I sure as hell knew who to ask.
If the road leading out of Baton Rouge had been practically empty, the road leading in was totally deserted. Ninety percent of the traffic out was headed north. But there was literally zero traffic in, from any direction. Except me.
The I-10 from Houston to Baton Rouge is pretty much a straight line all the way. So, as I came out of the city, past Hog Island, I floored the pedal, delivering one thousand eight-hundred foot-pounds of torque to the back wheels, and felt the surge of power crush me back into the seat as I watched the needle rise from 70 MPH to 170, in little more than a second. She wanted to do more, but I wanted to arrive alive.
The Zombie hurtled through the night, its powerful beams punching two amber cones through the darkness. What started out as light rain in Texas, grew heavier as we approached the Mississippi. After an hour, I could feel the wind, screaming in off the Gulf, battering the car, threatening to drive me off the road. Eventually, I had to slow, or risk being overturned by the gale. Even so, I made it in two hours.
I slowed to 100 MPH over the Wilkinson Bridge and sped through the desolate city, north toward St. Francisville. There, the tires screamed as I slowed to 60 MPH and turned sharp right at the crossroads onto Jackson Road, and covered the six miles to the Full Moon in less than five minutes.
I pulled into the lot with my heart pounding. There were trucks and cars there, but not many. The wind was easily gale force and mounting, and though the rain was less than it had been down by the Gulf, it was enough to wet my face and soak my shirt as soon as I climbed out of the car. The sky was black, but shaded with orange in the west, and through the darkness, lights winked across the fields where the trees and hedgerows were bowed across them by the wind. I pulled up my collar and headed for the bar.
That was when the door opened and four guys stepped out.
SIXTEEN
They were big, and not the kind of guys you’d want your sister to bring home. They came down the steps and spread out with the rain
glistening on their faces. I glanced at each one in turn and calibrated them.
When guys surround you planning to give you a beating, you can always be sure that the one who stays in front of you is Alpha. Take him down and you have a psychological advantage over the others. This Alpha was six-three with a chest like a beer barrel and arms that were grotesquely deformed from working out in a gym. If he got you in a bear hug he’d crush your ribs. His hips were narrow and his legs were thin compared with the rest of his body. He probably had no staying power, but he wasn’t going to need it, not where I was sending him. He stood in front of me in the drizzle, bending his little knees.
Two of the other guys peeled off to my left. They were big, too, but not as big. The one who headed behind me liked his beer. He had a gut and I knew he would be slow. The other one, the one who stayed on my left flank, was slim, but muscular. Athletic. He had a black goatee and you could tell by his eyes and the way he moved that he liked to use a knife.
That left the guy on my right. He wasn’t black, he was Latino, shorter than the others, aggressive and wanting to prove himself. He was going down second, then the Gut. Goatee would be last.
I said, “What’s this about, guys? Is there a problem?”
Alpha answered, wiping trickles of rain from his eyes, “You the problem, man. We gonna put an end to that problem. Got a message for you. Go home. Get outta here.”
I smiled. “Oh, you’re not going to kill me? That’s a mistake. Who’s the message from?”
He telegraphed it long before he did it. It was in the expression of contempt on his face, it was in the small step he took with his left foot, and the way he dropped his hand to his right pocket. By the time he’d said, “I ain’t got time for this shit…” I had already run two steps toward him.
I guess they’d expected me to run away after he’d taken the blade from his pocket. Instead, I ran toward him before he’d had the chance to pull it. He was frowning in surprise as I made the scissor kick and smashed the heel of my boot into his jaw. He went straight over backward, with a big whoomph! in the mud. I turned as I landed. I knew Latino and Goatee would react first. Goatee was more athletic, but Latino was more dangerous, because he had the attitude. They came at me from both sides while the Gut lumbered forward through the puddles.