‘Before you jump out of your skin, you mean? And Delaney must be about ready to question the survivor, isn’t he? The one Jason used the taser on. Had to get him de-toxed some to get any straight answers, I heard.’
‘Yeah, so far he’s acting more like a recovering boozer than a druggie, they say – just babbling. This case is very odd, Bobby – the harder we work at it the more confusing it gets.’ She told him about the money in the pocket of the jacket.
‘And the shooters chasing the van – our guys got after them right away, but they didn’t catch them that day, and even though they had a good description of the vehicle and a partial on the plate, nobody ever caught them. That car went to ground very fast and never surfaced.’
‘So a good organization, seems like.’
‘Right. Bigger than just one carful of shooters, anyway. And right there is where we have questions. Ollie brought it up and now it’s bothering the rest of us. If these guys are so tough and frightening – oh, and so well-organized – what are they doing with this little two-bit drug deal?’ She told him about the dead drop and the money Delaney had in his vault.
‘Yeah. See what you mean.’ He made a tidy sandwich of crackers and salami. ‘But look at it the other way around, Sarah. You think maybe your little two-bit drug deal could be having a growth spurt?’
‘Oohhh?’ She turned sideways in her chair and watched a hummingbird come to the feeder outside the bay window. Pratt waited. ‘You mean somebody like these international wise-guys maybe decided to muscle in—’
‘Something like that.’
‘Why would they?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything yet, except – these people are here, they’re raising hell, and I think you should keep them in mind.’
‘Well. OK, I’ll do that.’ She barked a short humorless laugh. ‘I might need a quick review course in big-time bad guys.’
‘Ah, you know enough. How much do you know about the guns?’
‘AR-15, Banjo thinks.’
‘Uh-huh. But now, just before I came over here, I was told Banjo thinks maybe they were M-16s, the early version of that rifle that was made for the military. You know all about that, do you?’
‘Not really. I haven’t encountered it in a crime scene before.’
‘Well, when the M-16 was first produced it could fire semi-auto or full auto, based on the position of a selector switch. Current production for the military is now semi-auto, one shot per pull, or a three-round burst. Again, based on the position of a selector switch. Sales to civilians now, though, are all semi-auto – one pull, one shot.
‘There’s a lot of buzz going around lately that says these bad guys that attacked the van at the old folks’ home were firing at least in bursts and maybe full auto – just bam-bam-bam-bam, I heard.
‘So if the ammo you’ve got matches one of these early guns, Sarah, you have a rare set of criminals here – there are very few of these old military guns in civilian hands these days.
‘By itself, that might not be so interesting, but together with the balisong, it begins to narrow the field.’
‘It’s been my experience,’ Sarah said, ‘that most law enforcement people talk about that knife as the favorite of the idiot fringe. Something for the silly set, Delaney called it.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Pratt showed all his teeth in a grin. ‘Except when it ain’t.’ He ate some salami rolled around a hunk of Vermont cheddar, and frowned at his napkin. ‘For instance … Guys on the robbery squads say lately they’re hearing from victims that they got robbed by people like nobody they’ve ever seen before, mixed squads of very mean guys, mostly from Russia and Ukraine, and they sometimes hook up with those Salvadorans that are causing so much grief in Mexico, preying on the caravans and all that mess at the border.’
‘Oy vey.’
‘Yeah. Global bad guys we’re getting now, ain’t that a hole in the boat? According to the poker game they robbed last week, these guys are not just after the money, they like to hurt people. Lately there’s a lot of lore out there, about bad guys who speak thuggish versions of four or five languages, cross over borders like they aren’t even there.’
‘Have you noticed,’ Sarah said, ‘that rumor is often exaggerated?’
‘Sure. I discount most of what I hear by about thirty percent. But I keep hearing stories about the guns, that these mean robbers have some old M-16 rifles. And the last liquor store they held up said one of them had one of those trick knives.’
‘Damn.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But’ – Sarah pulled her nose, shifted her feet around fretfully – ‘if your mean robbers are the guys chasing the Fairweather van I’ve got about a million questions. Because they don’t fit with anything else I’ve heard or seen, till this one thing that just happened to me at the hospital.’
‘Uh-huh. But that one thing has kind of stuck in your mind, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it has,’ Sarah said. ‘Stuck right there, day and night.’ She wasn’t going to tell Bobby Pratt about the dream. But she had a feeling he knew all about bad days’ nights.
He put his hands on his bare knees and powered his bulk out of the chair. ‘Good to see you so well situated here, you and your family on this nice quiet street. You got Will Dietz folded into your household now, huh? Very smart move.’
She smiled, surprised. ‘You know him?’
‘We go way back. High time he had a little luck.’ He put on his big canvas hat and peered down at her out of its shady folds. ‘You got lots of friends in the department, kid. You’ll get through the hearing just fine.’
‘Thanks for coming by, Bobby. It was good to talk.’
The house was very quiet after he left. Sarah spent five minutes wishing she had a recording of their conversation, so she could play it back when these days off got too long, as she knew they would.
I could make a memo now … and add a couple of things to the list. She opened her laptop and began typing her memory of the conversation.
Aggie came in quietly, saw how fast her daughter was typing, went back in the kitchen and started a salad for dinner. Denny came home from school, got an absent-minded hello from her intensely typing aunt, and said to Aggie in the kitchen, ‘This is supposed to be my night to cook, but I’ve got homework up the yazoo, is it OK if—’
She got another wave-off from her grandmother and disappeared upstairs. The house was soon reverberating with the screaming rock music that facilitated math homework for Denny. Even through a floor and a ceiling, it briefly distracted Sarah, but she was winding down anyway. In a few minutes she titled her entry, set up a new file for it, and signed off. In the kitchen, she said, ‘I never meant to stick you with all the cooking, but Pratt said some useful things.’
‘No problem.’ Aggie gave a short laugh. ‘I believe I just invented a new dish. I think I’ll call it Salade au Refrigerateur – doesn’t that sound elegant? I put in everything I could find that was at all appropriate for a salad. If we have this and a cheese omelet, that’ll be enough, won’t it?’
‘Sounds wonderful. Shall I do the omelet?’
‘No, that’s ready to go too, as soon as Will gets home. You can set the table and make toast.’
Feels like we’re back at the ranch, Sarah thought. Ma’s giving orders, and I’m doing as I’m told. This recovery from depression may not be an unmixed blessing.
Delaney called Tuesday morning and said, ‘The hearing hasn’t been scheduled yet. That means it’ll be another week, at least. But I’ve got a couple hours this afternoon and I’d like to spend them with you, going over the issues I think will come up in the hearing.’
‘You want me to come to the station?’
‘Well – yes, I’d like to do it here where we have all the recording equipment and could even make a video if we wanted to—’
‘That sounds good,’ Sarah said, thinking of yesterday, how much she had wanted her conversation with Pratt recorded.
‘But we can
’t have anybody saying we tweaked the evidence, so I want to make this clear before we start: we’re just going to confirm the times and distances we established there in the hall at St. Mary’s. That’s all we’re doing, making sure we’re all on the same page with that evidence. We’re not tweaking anything, do you understand that?’
‘I understand it,’ Sarah said. ‘Will everybody else? Because this meeting won’t stay private for a nanosecond.’
‘I don’t intend it to. I cleared it with the chief and I’m going to repeat it to everybody including the trainee who brings the chalk and erasers. This is just to be sure that we’re all on the same page about times and distances, so we don’t stir up some freaking come-to-Jesus investigation just because somebody forgot the details.’
‘Good,’ Sarah said, thinking, chalk and erasers? ‘Shall I bring my notes?’ She faked a cheery voice because this rehearsal for a hearing that everybody assured her was nothing to worry about was beginning to worry her quite a bit.
He cleared it with Moretti? The chief whose last words to her had been to caution against discussing this case with anyone in the department? Was it at all possible that these two superior officers were now primarily concerned with covering their own asses? Afraid they had a detective on staff who might be thought by some to have used excessive force?
Were they in danger of forgetting that she was Sarah Burke, the careful drudge? The one who kept her desk in order, could always find everything in her files, never came late to the meeting? Didn’t she rest secure in her squad, knowing her colleagues relied on her for reminders, asked her for help with backup info they should have looked up for themselves, ironically called her Detective Do-Right?
‘I want to get Jason in on this too,’ he was going on, ‘and he’s got a deposition at three, so we’ll need to start at one sharp. Can you make that?’
‘Absolutely.’ She was talking on the kitchen phone. As she hung it up on the wall, she saw that her arms were covered with gooseflesh.
Delaney sounds anxious. Why is he anxious?
If her superiors thought she might have used excessive force why wouldn’t they say so and give her a chance to defend herself? In Delaney’s homicide squad, teamwork was everything. The unspoken compact was they gave him their best work and he defended them against any blame that might float in from a demanding world. Was that going to change now?
Seized by a sudden need to move, to use her muscles to work off the worry building inside her, she went out and stood in the middle of the patio, looking around for the likeliest place to start digging. Hadn’t Aggie said how pleasant it would be to have tulips coming up by the kitchen door next spring?
She walked across the brick patio area to the shed where Will kept his tools. It had been entirely his domain until now, a small wooden structure with shingled roof and ship-lapped siding, and a Dutch door like a barn that closed with a padlocked hatch. She’d forgotten where he said he kept the key – had to search, found it hanging from a nail under the eave. The way the nail was placed, with just enough haft to hang the key easily, its tenpenny head big enough to keep the keyring from falling off but not big enough to be an obstacle, spoke so eloquently of Will Dietz’s thoughtful nature that for a moment she held the key to her lips.
Inside, neatness reigned. The garden tools all hung together along an end wall. She chose a shovel and a spade, not knowing which would be better, and found some gloves that almost fit. After the first attempt to break ground through the gravel, she came back in the shed and took down the rake.
Aggie came out of her casita as Sarah was making her first try with the spade, having already given up on the shovel. She had raked a large pile of gravel out of the space between the house wall and the edge of the brick patio. It was heaped at the east corner of the south wall. She had already stumbled over it twice.
‘How’s it going?’ Aggie asked.
‘Not so good.’ Sarah said. ‘This dirt …’
She was trying to break up ground that had the consistency of gravel-infused granite. The result, so far, was hard to see on the designated flower bed, but woefully obvious everywhere else. A good deal of dust from the ground she could not move was clinging to her sweat-covered arms and legs. Insects, usually so scarce in Tucson, had come out of the bushes and were feasting on her body, loving her dank aroma. In a little more than an hour, she had transformed their usually serene back yard into a disordered heap of tools and gravel.
‘Maybe we need to water it a little,’ Aggie said. ‘Soften it up?’
‘Good idea,’ Sarah said. ‘Where does Will keep the hose, I wonder?’ Ever since they’d moved into this old house, she had used all of her spare time making small improvements to the interior – painting walls, hanging drapes, shopping yard sales for side tables and extra chairs. Will had done all the outside work, she realized now, trimmed the bushes, raked the gravel and swept the walks. He had never asked for any help and she, consequently, hardly knew how anything worked.
‘I’ll figure out where to hook this up and dampen down a section before I take a break,’ she said, wheeling the heavy roll of hose on its carrier around the corner from where she found it. ‘Why does he keep it under the bougainvillea, I wonder? Have we got a lot of hose thieves in the neighborhood?’ She showed Aggie her scratched arms as she stood holding the hose end, rubbing her tired back, and asked her mother, ‘Where’s the outlet back here?’
‘Um,’ Aggie said, ‘I’m not sure there is one. Come to think of it …’ She looked at her daughter sadly and asked, ‘You’re getting pretty sick of this tulip-and-crocus idea already, aren’t you? I should never have asked you—’
‘No! Jesus, Mom, why do you have to make every little setback into a tragedy?’ The words were out before she had control. The frustration of not being able to make any of her gardening ideas work had piled on top of the grievance she was already feeling about her layoff from work. Punishing the person nearest to hand, she had blurted out her impatience with her mother’s depression.
Immediately contrite, she dropped the hose and walked toward her silent, white-faced mother. ‘I’m sorry, Mom. Nothing’s working and I got so hot and frustrated I just lost it.’
‘Please don’t hug me,’ Aggie said. ‘You’re soaking wet.’ She uttered a little hiccupping sound and then a chuckle.
Sarah began to laugh too, peering ruefully at her dirty legs and bleeding arms. ‘You enjoy watching your daughter screw up, do you?’ she said, and then something about that question triggered her memory of the mess she’d come out here to get away from. She cried out in distress, ‘Omigod, what time is it?’ She’d left her watch in the kitchen so she wouldn’t get it dirty.
‘Eleven-fifteen,’ Aggie said. ‘Why?’ She watched in amazement as Sarah turned and ran toward the tools by the kitchen door, shouting, ‘I have to get this mess cleaned up right now!’
She stopped, turned with her hands in the air and cried, ‘I can’t clean it up! I’m due downtown at one o’clock and I have to take a shower!’
‘Yes, you really do,’ Aggie said. ‘You go on and take care of yourself and leave this to me.’
‘You can’t move any of this. It’s all heavy stuff. Promise me you’ll leave it alone and I’ll clean it up when I get back.’
‘Yes, all right, I promise. Go on now or you’ll be late.’
Sarah did as she was told again, grumbling, ‘What was I thinking?’ as she hurried into the shower. She winced and complained when the soap and hot water hit her scratched arms. When she was clean and dry she dithered for two minutes about what to wear, wanting to cover her arms and still be cool. Finally, talking to herself, she put on her seersucker suit and mesh pumps. Hair and makeup she could always do in ten minutes flat, but today she needed five extra minutes to clean her fingernails. Then she used three more minutes to print a copy of her notes from Pratt’s visit.
Five blocks from home, her stomach rumbled and she remembered she had not had lunch. She found a power bar i
n the side pocket of the door and ate it, telling her body to pretend it was steak.
She made it to South Stone with five minutes to spare. By the time she walked into Delaney’s office, she was once again Detective Sarah Burke, dependable sidekick, reliable finder of lost files. Cool and collected. An officer of the law.
NINE
Tuesday
The small meeting room looked unusually elegant, freshly vacuumed and set up with ice water and glasses. Ah, but we’ll have it looking lived-in before long, Sarah thought, as she and Jason pulled out chairs and unloaded notes, dark glasses, two digital tablets, a purse and a stack of mail. An office tech was fussing with a projector and a laptop on a side table.
‘You look rested,’ Jason said. ‘Really getting into this paid leave business, huh?’
‘That’s right,’ Sarah lied, ‘just drifting in the hammock looking up at blue sky.’ Her arms were still throbbing from the bougainvillea cuts.
Then Delaney strode in, all business, and plopped down a folder at the head of the table.
‘Lot to go over,’ he said, ‘let’s get started.’ Jason’s eyebrows went up; his smooth face and handsome shaven head inclined one degree toward Delaney and seemed to ask, Who’s holding you back?
‘I want to begin where the incident began,’ Delaney said. ‘Alice, you ready?’ The steno touched a key, and a chart appeared on the screen across the room. It was a computer-drawn depiction of fifty feet of the ICU at St. Mary’s Hospital, on squared paper with distances indicated along the top and sides of the graph.
‘The first picture shows the dimensions of the north section of the Intensive Care Unit where the attack occurred,’ Delaney said, ‘and the positions of the three people who walked into it together on Friday.’ His laser pointer danced over the stick figures labelled a, b and c, and a legend at the bottom of the page that named them. ‘First, do you both agree that this is where you were, relative to each other, as you came through the doors? Jason, you were farthest left, like this? And you were in the middle, Sarah?’ He recited the distances he wanted established – between the stick figures, then from the figures to the third door in the hall, drawn in red. Nodding, the two detectives watched his red dot. ‘Both good with this? Next picture, Alice.’
Sarah's List Page 11
