“Sea salt,” said Bernadette. “Coffee, too, please. Black.”
While she waited for her order, she felt something bumping into the back of her legs. Probably a stroller. She didn’t bother turning around. Then the stroller nipped her ankle. She swung around and looked down. “Oscar. Knock it off.”
“He likes you.”
She looked up. Augie was standing next to her, in the same outfit he’d had on in the hallway. The gladiator lawyer was definitely a slob—a character trait with which she totally empathized. She felt herself softening up. Being rich didn’t make him a bad guy. She didn’t know what to say to him—she’d never mastered the art of small talk—so she tried to thank him again for his help with the door. “Last night was…”
“Last night was amazing,” he said with a big grin. “I agree.”
A woman pushing a stroller up to the bagel line gave Bernadette a strange look. Bernadette felt her face redden. Smart-ass. She’d get back at him. “Actually, I’ve had better.”
The stroller lady gave an uncomfortable last glance at Bernadette and quickly steered the stroller out of the line.
Augie laughed and put his hand over his heart. “I’m hurt—and surprised.”
The bagel clerk handed Bernadette her bagel and coffee. Bernadette smiled at Augie. “I’ll bet you’re not that surprised.” She stepped away from the counter.
Augie was on her heels, dragging Oscar behind him. “I’m going to take that as a challenge.”
“Don’t,” said Bernadette without turning or stopping. “I was just giving you some grief.” She took a bite out of her bagel while weaving around a knot of shoppers. Realizing she didn’t have enough elbow room to wolf down her breakfast comfortably, she searched for a gap in the crowd. The sidewalks across the street from the market were empty.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“What?” She dashed across the street, eating as she went.
He followed her. “You seeing anyone? Dating anyone? I know you’re not living with anyone. Right?”
Stepping between two parked cars, she went onto the sidewalk. Oscar was the one following her now, pulling Augie up onto the pavement. The dog spotted Bernadette’s bagel. He stood on his back legs and did a dance in front of her, a sort of pirouette. “I didn’t know dachshunds could do that on those tiny little legs,” she said in between nibbles.
“Oscar’s almost as talented as his owner.”
Behind her sunglasses, she rolled her eyes. She took a big bite of her bagel. The dog stopped dancing and rested his front paws on her right shin. She lifted her right leg to push him off and he shifted to her left shin. She sipped her coffee. “Persistent little fella.”
“Same has been said about me.”
“You’re not so little.” Looking down at the little dog, she spitefully took a big chomp out of her sandwich. “None for you,” she said after swallowing. “Now go away.”
“Try ‘down,’” said Augie.
“Down!” she said to the dog. Oscar barked once and pulled his paws off her leg.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Now the dog was sitting politely. “Good boy.” As a reward, she tossed him the remainder of her sandwich. He hopped up and caught it in midair.
“My question,” Augie repeated.
She tossed the bagel wrapper and coffee cup into a trash can on the sidewalk.
“What was your question?”
“Seeing anyone?”
She brushed some crumbs off her sweatshirt. “You’re damn nosy, mister.”
He stepped closer, dragging the dachshund along with him. “Augie.”
“You’re damn nosy, Augie. You’re also loud.”
“What?”
“Turn down the Aerosmith, okay?”
“Didn’t realize I had it cranked up.”
“Well, you did.” She inventoried the row of vendors lined up across the street. She’d hit the egg and cheese stalls for lunch fixings. A jug of honey would be good, along with a loaf of bread. She remembered seeing a stall with range-raised poultry. She could throw a chicken in the oven for supper. She stepped off the curb and waited for the traffic to clear so she could cross.
The man and the dog were right behind her. “How about dinner at my place tonight?”
She spun around, ready to give a flat and final no—but she couldn’t do it. The gladiator lawyer was too handsome. She felt that craving bubbling up inside her—a hunger that couldn’t be satisfied with a bagel—and pressed it down. She didn’t need to be sleeping with her neighbor, not her first weekend in town. It was enough that she was already dreaming about him. Mustering a graceful refusal, she said: “That’s nice of you, but I’m swamped. Unpacking. Shopping.”
“It’ll save you time. You won’t have to cook. You gotta eat, right?”
He’s a pushy bugger, she thought. Probably a good lawyer. Probably good in the sack, too. “I appreciate it, but give me time to settle in first. How about I take a rain check?”
“I’m gonna hold you to it.” He bent over and scooped up his dog.
“You betcha. Well, I gotta get some shopping done.” She turned to run back across the road to the market.
“You need anything this weekend—hammer, nails, a beer, rock and roll, whatever—hike up to the penthouse and knock,” he said after her.
She cringed at the sound of that “p” word again. She’d have to give him a new label for it. Upstairs would be good. “Hike upstairs and knock. Got it,” she said over her shoulder, and dashed across the street.
It was nearly noon by the time she got home. She was unloading her Farmers’ Market groceries onto the kitchen counter when work called. She grabbed her cell phone off the counter. “Yeah?”
Garcia: “Any luck on your end?”
She leaned her back against the counter. She knew what he was asking: What did you see when you held the junk? She wasn’t sure what to tell him: That the suspect had been in the room of an ailing woman? That she’d been on his heels but was tossed out of the hospital? How much did Garcia really want to know? Experience told her the answer was not much. She opted to avoid talking about the chase itself and instead give him the end result—that’s what the bosses usually wanted. “I have some bare-bones stuff. Vague description of the guy. General idea of what he does for a living. Possibly where he works.”
“‘Vague description…general idea.’ You’re sounding like a profiler, Agent Saint Clare. I didn’t hire a profiler. I don’t buy into that nonsense. The profiles always sound like every other creep on the street. Never helps solve cases. I need something solid. What else you got?”
She opened her mouth to tell him more about the situation and defend herself, but she snapped her mouth closed and reconsidered. She’d keep her cards to herself, at least until she got together with him.
“Still there, or did you fall asleep on me?” he asked with irritation.
“Better if we talk in person.” She walked across the kitchen and into the living room. “Any news on your end? The cops turn up the woman’s body?”
“They’re still beating the bushes along the waterfront. Checking for missing-persons reports. Running her prints through the system.”
She went over to the couch. She plucked a sheet of bubble wrap off the cushions and sat down, kicked off her sneakers, and put her feet up on the coffee table. “What about that Olson guy up north? The ex-con. Got anything more on the MO on that case? Any shoe casts?”
“No casts, but you’re gonna love this.”
She heard him shuffling paper. “Don’t leave me hanging,” she said into the phone.
“Here it is. Had them e-mail me and fax me a pile of papers to the house to supplement what I pulled together from the office. You could be right about that business with the rope. Killer used a bunch of it on Olson. Overkill. Like with the judge. Whether the knots were anything fancy, I don’t know—doesn’t say in the paperwork here. Just that he was trussed up like a Christmas turkey.�
�� He added conciliatorily: “You called that rope thing right.”
The rope. She remembered she still had strands in her jacket pocket from the judge’s binds, along with the ring. The idea of searching for an empty church on a Sunday and trying to dredge up another vision didn’t excite her. She’d give it more time, wait until that night. Maybe she’d take the lazy route first and try the sight from home. She wanted to find out more about the knot-tying, though, and see what the other victim looked like when he was found. She asked Garcia: “They send you photos of the guy up north?”
“They sent me some in a JPEG file, but I’m having trouble with it.”
She wondered if her ASAC was computer-illiterate, like half the bosses she’d had. “What’re you using to open it up?”
“Huh?”
Computer-illiterate for sure, she decided. Too bad she didn’t have her home computer up and running. She didn’t want to hunker down in that creepy basement office of hers on a Sunday. Besides, if she really wanted to work the case, she’d have to dig out her Post-its—and they were buried in a box at the loft. “Never mind the photos. Got anything else for me?”
“That’s pretty much it. How’s the unpacking going?”
She ran her eyes around the space. “Slow.”
“My offer to help still stands. Got nothing going on all day.”
Garcia needed to get a life, she thought. “Thanks, but I’ve got to get out of here this afternoon. Buy some things for the house.”
“What about tonight? I could come by with a pizza. Bring the pile they sent over on the case up north. Got a smaller stack from the St. Paul cops—they’re tighter with their files.”
He’d whetted her interest. “What did St. Paul give you?”
“Mostly copies of stuff related to Archer’s criminal case. That’s where they’re starting their search for suspects. Where we should be looking, too, of course.”
“Of course.” She ran a hand through her hair. She’d love to see if there was a downtown doctor or his family mentioned in those documents. She was tempted to open up to Garcia, but not over the phone. She needed to read his face. He was throwing her off balance with his displays of impatience one minute, and his offers of help the next. “You know what? I might take you up on that pizza offer. Give me a few hours and then swing by.”
Garcia: “Good deal.”
She hung up and dropped the phone down on the couch cushion. She couldn’t remember ever having a boss at the bureau who even sporadically acted like a regular human.
Eighteen
One last box, Bernadette told herself, and then time to run errands. The crate she opened sank her Sunday shopping trip, however. She found her home-office supplies—including her Post-its. “Good deal,” she said into the box. Though she was computer-savvy, she’d had great success with her primitive hands-on method of thinking through a case.
She lifted the stack of Post-its out of the box and dropped them on the table. She fished her notebook out of her jacket pocket, went back to the kitchen with it, and sat down to go to work. She huddled over the table, writing and clicking and peeling off Post-its and slapping them on the table. Reading the scribbles in her notebook. Writing on the Post-its again. A dozen times, she cursed and ripped a yellow square into pieces and started over on a fresh sheet.
On a few separate sheets, she listed what the sight told her about the suspect in the local murders. There was the physical description: Big man. White. Hairy hands. Dark long-sleeved shirt. Blue pants. Behavior: Reached out for sick woman? Woman’s lover? Read Numbers. Read another book.
She did another set of Post-its on the ropes: Sheer lashing. Clove hitch. Double fisherman’s knot. Overkill. Show-off.
Another set for the missing hands: Right hands hacked off. Thrown away. Victims all alive when cut off? Meaning?
Post-its for motives in Archer’s murder: Revenge? Robbery ruled out? Lovers’ triangle—something sexual? Taking the possible motives into account, additional squares of paper for possible suspects: Judge’s victims? Family of victims? A cop? A doctor or nurse—took care of victims? Con sentenced by Archer? Bad business deal? Jealous husband?
She couldn’t begin to guess why someone had killed the female. She could only assume it was related to the other two murders. Nevertheless, she gave the woman her own square. All she wrote was: Woman’s murder—motive?
Since she only knew what Garcia had told her about the case, a one-word list of motives in the northern-Minnesota killing of Hale Olson: Revenge? She paused, pen raised over the Post-it she was going to use to list suspects in Olson’s slaying. All she knew about the dead ex-con was that he’d been involved in a home invasion, and that it was years back. She wrote: Victims of home invasion? Doc/nurse who treated victims? She stopped writing, lifted the pen off the paper, and thought about it some more. Inmates made friends in prison—and enemies. Sometimes the friends were really enemies. Still, he’d been out of prison a long time. Nevertheless, she put the pen back down on the paper and also wrote on the square: Another ex-con? She peeled the note off the pad and slapped it on the table.
There were things to do notes: Get threads off rope used on Olson. Tox screens on both men? Tox screen on woman’s hand? Keep checking w/ cops—woman’s body and Archer’s hand turn up? Get hospital personnel files.
After two hours of thinking and flipping through her notebook and writing and peeling paper off the pad and slapping squares onto the kitchen table, she stopped and looked at the collection of Post-its stuck to the wooden surface in front of her. They were in no particular order; some were positioned sideways, others upside down. A few of them overlapped—not because they were related in some way, but because she hadn’t been paying attention when she put them down. She counted them just to count them and came up with eighty-four squares.
She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, ready for part two of her exercise: organizing the squares. She surveyed the loft, searching for the right canvas. The exposed brick that made up most of the loft’s walls wouldn’t work. The walls on either side of her front door were Sheetrock, however, and those would do nicely. To the right of the door, she picked out a spread of white in the middle of the wall.
She peeled the notes off the table and carried them over, a few at a time, to the blank wall—a vertical desktop of sorts. She lined them up on the Sheetrock, going from left to right, leaving an inch or so of blank space between the squares. She started at eye level and worked her way down to knee level. After they were all stuck to the wall, she moved them around and grouped them together into categories. The eighty-four squares came together in different groupings to form a handful of larger blocks. Suspect blocks. Victim blocks. Other blocks that came to her. The sum, Bernadette hoped, would become larger than the parts.
She backed away from the wall and stared at it. “Wait. That’s not right,” she muttered. She went back to the wall and switched two Post-its. She stepped back again. Planting her hands on her hips, she ordered the paper: “Talk to me.” She looked for holes in the case and searched for patterns. As with any case, some words jumped off the sheets and begged for attention. She’d learned over the years to take notice of annoying words—they were clues. Sometimes it helped to work it through with another agent, or just a person with whom she felt comfortable and talkative. She had no one like that in Minnesota. Not yet.
Still, someone she’d just met had offered to bend an ear. She folded her arms in front of her and tried to imagine how the conversation would go.
Bless me, Father, for I have a tough homicide case. It’s been two months since my last…
She laughed dryly, took a step toward the wall, and raised her arms to shuffle some more squares around. That’s when she noticed what she’d done. How she’d arranged the yellow slips of paper so there was a vertical white space of wall slicing down the middle of the yellow, and another bar of white cutting horizontally through the top third of the Post-its.
The intersecting li
nes formed a cross.
Smack in the middle of the cross, where the white lines intersected, was one yellow square of paper. She didn’t remember slapping that particular note on the wall, and in fact, couldn’t recall writing the three words themselves. She didn’t know their meaning relative to her investigation. Still, there they were, penned by her hand: Life for life.
Nineteen
A knock diverted Bernadette’s attention from the Sheetrock cross. She knew who was at the door. Before she moved away from the wall, she quickly rearranged a few notes to hide the religious symbol. She didn’t need her boss shipping her off to the loony bin.
She yanked open the door and found Garcia standing in the hallway, a glass casserole pan in his hands and a stack of file folders tucked in his armpit. Weaving around her, he went inside. “Hot, hot, hot.” He spotted the kitchen and made a beeline for it.
“There’s a trivet on the counter,” she said after him.
He set down the pan, dropped the files next to it, turned on the faucet, and put his hands under the water. “Didn’t think it was still that hot. Left the oven mitts in the car. Halfway down the hall, my fingers started frying.”
Bernadette went over to the pan and peered inside, seeing something swimming in a sauce and topped with melted cheese. “Smells fantastic.”
He shut off the faucet and wiped his hands on the thighs of his jeans. “Decided to whip up something homemade instead of doing the take-out thing. Enchilada hot dish.”
One side of Bernadette’s mouth turned up. Hot dish, the Minnesota staple. She was definitely home. Her eyes traveled to the stack of folders. She told herself they’d better eat first, because once she started digging into the files, she wouldn’t want to take time for anything else. Bernadette opened a set of cupboards over the counter, took down a pair of dinner plates, and set them on the counter. She pulled open a drawer under the counter and dug out a couple of forks and a serving spoon.
Garcia ran his eyes around her loft. “Looks like a tornado touched down in here.”
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