“I know I am. And my daughters! Wow!”
“Mine too. Those damned girls couldn’t pick up sock one if their mom didn’t yell at them. Anyhow, what this means is you go into a lot of messy homes. Mr. Brown got popped, so you go to the Brown home, and it’s the way it was exactly at the moment Mrs. Brown heard Mr. Brown checked out. She’s in shock. It’s like the house is frozen in Jell-O. Newspapers on the floor, socks on the floor, garbage cans full to overflow, the litter in the cat’s box ain’t been changed, a coupla glasses from last night’s cocktail hour are still out, maybe there’s some plates in the sink, or someone forgot to put the cereal away. You know, that’s how life is lived. To do stuff you have to take stuff out; then you have to put it away. But between the taking out and the putting back, sometimes a lot of time passes, and after having gone into a thousand houses in the past ten years with the worst possible news to deliver and then asking the worst possible questions, I’m here to tell you that most lives are lived, minute by minute and hour by hour and day by day, at some weird place between taking stuff out and putting stuff back. Stuff is everywhere. Daily life is about stuff. You follow me?”
“Sure do. You’re saying-”
“If it had been tossed hard and fast, it would have been a mess. You ever see what IRS does to a house when they toss it? Looks like a cyclone hit it. Our guys ain’t much better, and I don’t bet the Bureau’s are much better than that.”
“Got it. So the Strong house didn’t appear to have been searched.”
“That’s what you might think. But I’m concentrating here on his office, and what I saw was a room that had been searched and then overcorrected. Do you get what I’m saying? It’s subtle. All the stacks were neat. People don’t stack neat. They just throw things on top of each other. The computer monitor had been dusted, even on that pedestal and on the casing in back of the screen. Nobody dusts the pedestal, but this pedestal was dusted. The books were all neatly shelved, the stacks of-I don’t know, he was a professor, right?-articles, books, whatever research stuff a professor would have, it was all neat on the big table and it was centered on the table. It didn’t have the spontaneity of real life. It looked like a museum display. I noted it, maybe didn’t think much of it, but it was especially weird in retrospect because I went out to his office in the Circle Campus the next day with one of the Bureau’s people, and his office, well, it wasn’t a mess, but it was an office. It was kind of messy, not wildly messy, not a shit hole, no, but it had the usual human mess in it. The rest of their house: usual human mess. Glasses in the sink, unmade beds, laundry on the floor, not in the basket. No pigsty, but just the random crap of life. But that one room, it had the look of having been freshly tidied, as if a) he knew he’d be murdered in his alley and wanted his investigators to think, ‘My, what a tidy fellow this man was,’ or b) someone tossed it, but tossed it very carefully, and tidied it up so that no one could tell it had been searched. They just overtidied by a tiny degree, and only a guy like me, Mr. Interrupter with Bad News, would pick up on it.”
“Does the time line work out that someone could have been in the house between the killing and the arrival of the first units? You seem to be implying someone tossed the house, then straightened it out. Was there time enough?”
“Yeah. I checked, and that’s maybe why I’m glad to hear from you, because my thoughts on this were kind of subversive to the general thrust and momentum of the investigation. But of course once our lab people arrived, the FBI people arrived, the media, that sort of condition of his office was destroyed. I didn’t think to have crime scene photo work it, because it wasn’t the crime scene, the car was the crime scene. My bad. But yeah, in terms of time, it was about ninety minutes as far as we can say.”
Bob thought, that’s why he took them in the alley. To give the team time to penetrate, search, tidy, and disappear. No one would notice the search team, because of course it wasn’t a crime scene yet, charged with that special energy of such a place, that charisma. He kills them, the team enters and finds and-
Or maybe it doesn’t find.
Or maybe it finds but it leaves traces of what it found.
“Is this of any help?”
“It’s a great help, Detective Washington. Listen, I see now I’m going to have to come to Chicago. Can I call you? Can you help me?”
“When will you get here?”
“I’m already late.”
18
Nick groaned. “What’s the policy on this?”
“You can meet him or not meet him. It’s up to you. I should be there to ride herd.”
“You’re sure it’s necessary?”
“You tell me. He said one word. He said if I said the one word to you,” Phil Price continued, “you would want to meet with him.”
“And the one word was ‘Tulsa’?”
“Yeah. I checked the records. I know what it means.”
Nick sat in Price’s office, nicely appointed, on the third floor. Price was Special Agent in Charge of Public Information, but unlike most “public information” hacks in fancy offices all through DC, Price was more agent than reporter suck-up. He’d done street time in New York, LA, and San Francisco, had taken a round in his hip on a raid (a friendly round, no less, from a poorly trained SWAT moron), and now finished out his time in Public Information, cordially hating the reporters who bedeviled him even as they cordially hated him. The subject was a proposed meeting with a New York Times reporter named David Banjax, who was the Times’s man on the still-hot sniper story.
“I hate these guys,” said Nick.
“I hate ’em too,” said Price. “But that’s neither here nor there. What’s here and now is this guy is levering for a meet, off the record. He’s angling for a scoop, and the Times always feels entitled to scoops, so he wants his so he can get sent to the London Bureau or something.”
“Agh,” Nick said again, his gorge full of bile.
“Nick, in case you’re wondering, let me tell you he didn’t get this out of Public Information. We do not release background on special agents, not ever, certainly not in the age of terror. So I don’t know how he got it.”
“I do,” said Nick. “It seems I’ve displeased Joan Flanders’s big-foot ex-hubbo Tom Constable, that is, ‘T. T.’ Constable. His guy tried to nudge me in a certain direction, and I wouldn’t play. So this is their first move, and this guy, this David Banjax, he’s just a rube, a pawn, being run by a guy named Bill Fedders. Banjax doesn’t know how he’s being used.”
“Don’t tell him that. He’s Harvard, Harvard Law; he thinks he’s important.”
“Ugh,” Nick said. “Now I really hate him.”
“But they do hold cards, Nick. I can’t tell him to fuck off. I’d love to, then raid his crib for the ’ludes and pot he probably has stored in a waterproof baggie in the toilet, convict him, and send him to some hard ugly federal hotel where he and his new fiancé LeRoy could live happily ever after in anal cowboy bliss, guess who’s the gal? But I can’t do that. I have to play nice. And you can see how it might look. It could look bad or at least questionable. It could reflect poorly on the Bureau. And that’s what they pay me to watch.”
Nick shook his head. “Tulsa,” he said again.
He remembered being in an office window in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1992, his second year on the street. He was crouched behind and held securely a then state-of-the-art Remington 700 sniper rifle in.308, on a Harris bipod. He watched reality through a ten-power Leupold scope as a crackhead skank bank robber named Nathan Bowie rode down an empty street in the back seat of a convertible. Unfortunately, surrounding him were three women, cashiers in the Tulsa State Bank and Trust Morgan Avenue branch, while the bank manager drove slowly. Nathan was tripping wilder and wilder, waving his pistol around, addressing God, the whole evil white race, the Martians who spoke to him through his dental fillings, the various bitches who’d left him before he was done kicking the shit out of them. He was going to go firecracker at any second and it was Nick’s duty to put a 168-grainer into his cranial vault before that happened.