“We could do all of this at the preliminary,” McCarthy said.
“That’s four days away,” Smithe said sharply. He turned to Lucas. “If my alibis are good, how soon do I get out?”
Lucas shrugged. “If they’re good and we can check them, we could have you out of here this afternoon.”
“All right,” Smithe said suddenly. “Mr. McCarthy brought my calendar in. On the day Lewis was attacked, that afternoon, I was doing in-service training. Started at nine o’clock in the morning and went straight through to five. There were ten people in the class. We all ate lunch together. That wasn’t long ago, so they’ll remember.
“And on the day Shirley Morris was killed, the housewife? I got on a plane for New York at seven o’clock that morning. I have the plane tickets and a friend took me out to the airport, saw me get on the plane. I’ve got hotel bills from New York, they have the check-in time on them. Morris was killed in the afternoon, and I checked in during the afternoon. I bet they’ll remember me, too, because when I went up to my room with the bellhop, he pulled back my sheet and there was a rat under it and the guy freaked out. I freaked out. This is supposed to be a nice hotel. I went down to the desk and they gave me a new room, but I bet they remember that rat. You can check it with phone calls. And Mr. McCarthy has the bills and plane tickets at his office.”
“You should have told us,” Lucas said.
“I was scared. Mr. McCarthy said . . .” They both turned and looked at McCarthy.
“It was too much all at once. You were grilling him, everybody was running around yelling, we had to cool out or we could make a mistake,” McCarthy said.
“Well, we sure made a mistake doing it this way,” Smithe said. “My family knew I was gay, my parents and my brothers and sisters and a few friends back home, but most people in my high school didn’t, most of the people around the home place . . .”
He suddenly sat down and started to sob. “Now they all know. You know how hard it’ll be to go back to the farm? My home?”
McCarthy stood up and kicked his chair.
In the lobby of the detention center, Lucas stopped at a phone and made a single call.
“Lucas Davenport,” he said. “Can you meet me someplace discreet? Quickly?”
“Sure,” she said. “Name the place.”
He named a used-book store on the north side of the loop. When she arrived, he thought how out-of-place she looked. With her perfect hair and faultless makeup, she wandered through the stacks like Alice in Wonderland, stunned by the presence of so many baffling artifacts. Annie McGowan. Pride of Channel Eight, the Now Report.
“Lucas,” she whispered when she saw him.
“Annie.” He stepped toward her and she reached out with both hands, as though she expected Lucas to take her in his arms. He instead took her hands and pulled her close to his chest.
“What I’m going to tell you now must be kept a secret. You must give me journalistic immunity or I can’t tell you,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder. Introduction to Method Acting 1043, two credits.
“Yes, of course,” she blurted. Her breath smelled like cinnamon and spice.
“This gay fellow arrested for the maddog murders? He didn’t do it,” Lucas whispered. “He has two excellent alibis that are being checked out even as we speak. He should be released late this afternoon. No one, but no one, knows this outside the police department, except you. If you wait until three-thirty or so, you can probably catch his attorney—you know McCarthy, the public defender?”
“Yes, I know him,” she said breathlessly.
“You can catch him outside the detention center, signing Smithe out. Better stake the place out around three o’clock. I don’t think it could happen earlier than that.”
“Oh, Lucas, this is enormous.”
“Yeah. If you can keep it exclusive. And I’ll give you another tip, but this also has to come from ‘an informed source.’ ”
“What?”
“These women were supposedly raped, but nobody ever found any semen. They think the killer may be using some kind of . . . foreign object because he’s impotent.”
“Oh, jeez. Poor guy.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“What kind of object?”
“Uh, well, we don’t know exactly.”
“You mean like one of those huge rubber cocks?” The words came tripping out of her perfect mouth so incongruously that Lucas felt his chin drop.
“Uh, well, we don’t know. Something. Anyway, if you handle this right and protect me, I’ll have more exclusive tips for you. But right now I’ve got to get out of here. We can’t be seen together.”
“Not yet, anyway,” she said. She turned to go, and then stepped back.
“Listen, when you call me at the station, they’ll know who my source is if you keep leaving your name. I mean, if you can’t get me.”
“Yeah?”
“So maybe we should use a code name.”
“Good idea,” Lucas said, dumbfounded. He took a card from his wallet, wrote his home phone number on the back of it. “You can call me at the office or at home. I’ll be one place or the other when I call you. When I call, I’ll say ‘Message for McGowan: Call Red Horse.’ ”
“Red Horse,” she whispered, her lips moving as she memorized the phrase. “Red Horse. Like the horse in chess?”
More like the fish, the red horse sucker, Lucas thought. McGowan stepped forward another step and kissed him on the lips, then with a flash of black eyes and fashionable wool coat was gone down the stacks.
The store owner, an unromantic fat man who collected early editions of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, appeared in the dim aisle and said, “Jesus, Lucas, what’re you doing back there, squeezin’ the weasel?”
Lucas stopped at Daniel’s office and outlined Smithe’s alibis. Together they went to the homicide division and outlined them to Lester and Anderson.
“I want everybody off everything else, I want this checked right now,” Daniel said. “You can start by going over to the welfare office, see about this in-service training. That’ll give us a quick read. Then look at these tickets, make a few calls. If it all checks, and I bet it will, we’ll set up a meeting with the prosecutor’s office. For like one o’clock, two o’clock. Decide what to do.”
“You mean drop the charges,” Lester said.
“Yeah. Probably.”
“The press’ll eat us alive,” Anderson said.
“Not if we play it right. We tell them that Davenport was the only guy Smithe would trust, told him the stories, Davenport came to us, and we realized our mistake.”
“Sounds like a lead balloon to me,” Lester said.
“It’s all we got,” Daniel said. “It’s better than having McCarthy shove it down our throats.”
“Christ.” Lester’s face was gray. “I made the call. They’re going to be all over me. The fuckin’ TV.”
“Could be worse,” Daniel said philosophically.
“How?”
“Could be me.”
Lucas and Anderson started laughing, then Daniel, and finally Lester smiled.
“Yeah, that’d be un-fuckin’-thinkable,” Lester said.
Lucas spent the rest of the morning in his office, talking to contacts around the Cities. Nothing much was moving. There were rumors that somebody had been killed at a high-stakes poker game on the northeast side, but he’d heard a similar rumor three weeks earlier and it was beginning to sound apocryphal. Several hundred Visa blanks had hit the Cities and were working through the discount stores and shopping centers; some heavy-hitting retailers were upset and were talking to the mayor. There was a rumor about guns, automatic weapons going out-country through landing strips in the Red River Valley. That was a weird one and needed checking. And a strip-joint owner complained that a neighboring bar was putting on young talent: “It ain’t fair, these girls ain’t old enough to have hair on their pussy. Nobody else is gettin’ any business, everybody’s down at Frankie’s.” Lucas told him he’d look into it.
• • •
“It all checks,” Daniel said. “We faxed a photo out to New York, had the cops run it over to the hotel, and the bellhop remembers him and remembers the rat. He couldn’t remember the exact date, but he remembers the week it was in. It’s the right week.”