“Why you focused on that one? She’s the only one at risk?” I asked.
“There’re two other women on the list. The one in New York does advance work for the women’s tennis tour. But we think she’s in Australia at the moment setting up a tournament, so we’re not as concerned about her. The other woman has something to do with Daytona Beach, Florida-maybe the car race-but so far we don’t know enough to figure out who she is. So I’m here.”
“The South Bend woman, what’s her name?”
“Holly Malone. Good Irish girl.”
I asked the obvious. “Isn’t it likely the tipster’s a crank?”
“He got the others right, didn’t he? The other three homicides after the one in Laguna?”
“Still.”
“Let’s be real. You doing anything else for the holiday, Sam?”
It was the first time she’d called me by my first name.
“Not really,” I admitted.
“Me, neither,” she said.
“Why,” I asked, “doesn’t the South Bend PD take care of this?”
Reynoso was in the passenger seat of my Cherokee. We’d backtracked and dumped her rental car back at some no-name agency at the airport and had started driving north. Unless we got seriously distracted, we’d be in the hometown of the Fighting Irish just before we arrived at the Michigan state line.
Reynoso answered my question. “I called the local cops when I was still in Georgia, explained the situation real politely, and I requested some assistance. Hold on-let me try and get this next part exactly right.”
She took a moment to collect her thoughts, and then she adopted an accent that was part something and part something else. I wasn’t good with accents. It was one of my few liabilities as a peace officer.
“ ‘Ma’am,’ ” she said in character, then went back to her everyday voice and explained that “the detective I spoke with in South Bend called me ‘ma’am.’ I always find that improves my mood considerably, being called ‘ma’am.’ ” She resumed her soliloquy with “ ‘Ma’am, you want us to go out and protect a woman from a killer who’s already been declared dead by the Georgia authorities? You actually do that sort of thing regularly in southern California? Up here we don’t get a whole lot of spirit homicides. We actually haven’t had a good ghost killing in, dear Lord, aeons. And my memory is that the last one we did have got the death penalty. Well, we hanged him. Recall we had the darnedest time finding a good place for the rope. It got all tangled up in the sheets. But we managed.’ ”
“I bet he thought he was pretty funny,” I said.
“The man thought he was hilarious. One of his buddies was cracking up, too. I could hear him. I hope we get a chance to meet both of them when we get to South Bend. That would please me.”
While she was talking, she’d started fiddling with my radio, which wasn’t pleasing me too much at all. The fine country station with the clear signal that I’d found south of Indianapolis disappeared in a sharp crackle, and suddenly I found myself listening to late seventies pap. I couldn’t imagine a worse choice-I didn’t like to be reminded that I’d actually been in the prime of my life during disco. It was a source of long-term humiliation for me. I worried how I would explain it to Simon when the time came to discuss the music of my youth. If rap hung around long enough, that would help; rap was at least as hard to defend as disco. Maybe harder.
I asked, “Who do you think the tipster is, the guy who’s calling Crime Stoppers?”
“Don’t know.”
“Who’d know what he knows? Can’t be too many people.”
“It’s a fair question.”
“You’re not curious?” I asked.
“ ’Course I’m curious. I just don’t know. Do you?”
I was thinking that I had a pretty good idea, but I didn’t feel much like sharing right then. It was probably a side effect of the toxic music that was being forced into my ears like a watermelon suppository. So I said, “Sure don’t.”
We were skirting Kokomo when she asked me about my heart.
“You feeling okay? You want me to drive, I will.”
“I’m cool,” I said, trying to be cool.
“Hear you had a heart attack.”
“Just a little one.”
“Still,” she said.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
The tires hummed along on the highway.
Carmen Reynoso knew when conversations were over. I was already liking that about her.
Half a mile or so later I asked, “What have you been able to learn about Holly Malone?”
“Not much. She’s an assistant director in the Sports Information Office at Notre Dame. Started in the office as an intern when she was just out of school. She’s twenty-nine, attractive. People like her.”
“You said she’s single?”
“No, widowed. She has a four-year-old son.”
“How did her husband die?”
“Cancer.”
“Can’t blame that on Sterling, can we?” I said. “Have you spoken with her?”
“I called. She was relatively pleasant until I mentioned Sterling. That’s apparently a sore spot for her.”
“Sore?”
“She wanted to know how I knew about him. My take was that she knew he was married when she did whatever it was she did with him. I thought she was embarrassed that I’d found out about their… history.”
Kind of like having people know you lived through disco and didn’t do anything to stop it,I thought.Felonious stuff.
“Got a photo?”
She retrieved a folded eight-and-a-half-by-eleven from her purse. “Pulled this off the Web. That’s her on the left. First row.”
I put my glasses on the end of my nose. It was a crappy picture of a group of people standing in front of a building. Holly Malone stood out as though she were Technicolor and everybody else was black-and-white. “She’s cute. Has a nice smile.”
“Yeah.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of Brian Miles, would you?”
Carmen pulled another crappy picture out of her bag and handed it to me.
One glance, and I knew there were no man-boobs on Miles. Nope. I kept that thought to myself while I stuffed my glasses back in my pocket. “We going to find Holly in town for the holiday?”
“We are. She’s cooking for her two sisters and two brothers-in-law. They’re all coming down from Chicago with their kids.”
“Yeah?”
“She told me all that before I mentioned Sterling. Holly’s chatty. If you’re interested, she’s doing a traditional bird and is poaching some salmon for her sister, who doesn’t eat meat.”
“Given the circumstances, I bet the salmon would consider itself meat.”
Carmen chuckled. After her laughter quieted, I let the whine of the road fill my ears for a minute or two. I was thinking,This is okay.
I asked, “For argument’s sake, why would he risk it? I mean Sterling. Let’s say he survived the river. Why put himself in a position to be caught? Why not just run for it?”
“Odds are he’ll do just that, Sam. Odds are we’re wasting our time. Five years from now he’ll get picked up on a DUI in Idaho, and his prints will get flagged by AFIS. That’s the only way we’ll know where’s he’s been since he crawled out of the Ochlockonee.”
“I can tell you don’t really believe that.”
“Serial killers-and maybe especially serial killers who don’t choose strangers as their victims-they don’t think like you and me. They just don’t. Why would Sterling go back and kill Holly? I don’t know. Why did he kill the other four women? We don’t know that yet, either. But I don’t want the fact that I’m slow to the draw to cost some young widow in South Bend her life.”
Slow to the draw?I wondered what she meant. I felt regret hanging on to her words like an anchor.