“Good boy,” said Blodgett. “Good Knight. Your nuts back in place, Jim?”
“It might be a few minutes.”
“Had a guy faint one time. The chain only reaches ten feet, though; he’d have choked himself silly if you’d have stayed where you are.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“I’ve been broken into three times here on the peninsula. I think some of the locals know I’m a cop, make a game out of it. I’ve been broken into exactly zero times since Knight became my burglar alarm.” Blodgett smiled, a tight little smile that revealed large crooked teeth. The heavy left eye seemed to glitter, almost gaily.
Jim moved in a widish arc around Knight, who gazed up at him with subdued but very apparent interest. Something in Knight’s face admitted that friend or not, he’d have a nice time tearing Weir’s throat out. Jim had never been a huge fan of the Doberman.
Blodgett came forward and they shook hands. “I’m sorry about Ann. I didn’t know her very well, but I really did like her.”
“Thank you. She was a fine woman.”
Blodgett gave him a cop-to-cop look, a mixture of genuine sympathy with an undercurrent of disgust in it. These swine, it said, it’s them and us. “I’ve got some coffee in the thermos.”
“Sure.”
“What can I help you with?”
“I’m doing what I can on my own, following up. It might be as much for myself as it is for Ann, or Ray.”
Blodgett nodded and handed Weir the steaming plastic cup. “I’m not a friend of Ray Cruz’s, but my heart goes straight out to him. I understand what you mean.” Blodgett waited, looking at Weir appraisingly, his left eye recessed, unrevealing.
“Can we talk here?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“There’s some suspicion a cop might have done it.”
Blodgett nodded. “I read Ruff’s statement. Everybody did, even though the chief tried to sit on it. You can’t very well hide something like that from a whole police department.”
“No,” said Weir. “If it leaked as far as me, I’m sure you guys were on to it before. What do you think?”
Blodgett shook his head and leaned up against the boat. “I can’t put any faith in it. Mackie’s always given us a hard time. He’s always too drunk to see straight. We all got a laugh out of that ‘statement,’ to tell you the truth.”
“What if he was right?”
Blodgett looked at Knight, who looked at Weir. “Then it’s one helluva dark day for the Newport cops.”
“Not as dark as it was for Ann.”
“No, you’re right about that. Jim, I hope you didn’t come here expecting me to talk about the men I work with. That’s not something I’d do, not with you, not with anyone on the outside.” The heavy left eye seemed almost to be laughing.
“Maybe we could just stay hypothetical a minute.”
“We never left hypothetical, Mr. Weir.”
“Okay, try this: Say someone on the force was hired to kill Ann. She knew too much about something — toxic dumping in the bay. Big money passed hands; a bad cop took it. Say Mackie Ruff saw exactly what he says he did. Say you’re me. How would you smoke him out?”
Blodgett considered, staring at Jim. Then he shook his head, turned to the trailer hitch, and bent down to hook up the cable fittings. “You’d have to know who was on, first. Then you’d have to know who was solo. There’s no evidence of two perps, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So, you find the solos whose physicals match up with the Crime Lab evidence. If Robbins has anything good from the scene, you could make a move — if it matched up.”
“If there wasn’t enough?”
Blodgett completed the connection and straightened up. “Then you as hypothetical investigator ought to figure you don’t have a hypothetical case.”
“But remember, if it was a cop, he’d clean up the scene. He’d know what to do, how to sanitize it.”
Blodgett smiled again — big uneven teeth, left eye merrily inscrutable behind the heavy lid. He shook out a cigarette and lit it. “Nobody can clean up everything.”
“Say he left enough to limit the field. Two solos who might have done it — according to the evidence.”
“Then you get the Dispatch tape, check the Citation Books and Activity Logs — see who was where, when.”
“And you find that each one had, say, half an hour unaccounted for, when she was killed.”
Blodgett’s expression flattened. The left eye was nearly closed, and the other fastened a suspicious beam on Jim’s face. Breeze hissed through the fronds of the palm tree by the driveway. “There are a couple of things you’re saying here, Weir, that I don’t like the sound of very much. One is that Dennison, or maybe your friend Raymond, was stupid enough to let go of the Dispatch tape and the Crime Lab reports. The other is, you’ve done all your hypothetical detective work, and landed on me.”
“Maybe I landed on a couple of people that aren’t you. Maybe that’s why I came to you first.”
“You ready to name names?”
“I could.”
Blodgett approached Weir now, a wide-stepping, arms-at-the-side movement. He was smooth for being heavy. His battered face, this close under the utility light, was even more battle-hardened. The kind of man, thought Weir, who was far more menacing at fifty than he probably was at twenty. Jim relaxed himself and felt the adrenaline mounting inside. Blodgett’s thick forefinger tapped lightly against his chest. “Don’t do that. Don’t say a name to me. If you’ve really come that far, go straight to Dennison, or the DA, or the grand jury. I don’t want to know. I’ve worked with some of those guys for sixteen years, and nobody standing in my driveway is going to finger one of them to me. We stand together, Weir; it’s them and us. Right now, you’re them.” He stepped back. “Still hypothetical?”
“Always was.”
A strange smile crossed Blodgett’s face, neither mirthful nor unforgiving. He sighed heavily. “I’ll give you something straight now, because I like your mother and I liked Ann, and you seem all right yourself. The night that Ann was killed, I was having coffee on PCH, at the café just south of the bridge. The fog was thick and the night was slow. The two other north-end units were there, too — Sims and Lansing, Blakemore and Nolan. At midnight, a patrol car came off the bridge, heading south, toward the Back Bay. Whoever it was, was way out of beat, because we were the whole north end — Lansing, Sims, Blake, Noley, and me. I couldn’t see it very well because of the fog, but it looked like one of ours.”
“Midnight exactly?”
“Midnight exactly. It might have been a security unit, that’s possible. It could have been a car from another department, for that matter. But it was coming off the peninsula, where Ann worked, and heading for the bay, where she died. It wasn’t moving fast and it wasn’t moving slow; it just kept with the traffic. That isn’t make-believe, Weir — it’s fact. And it’s all I’m going to say to you. I already don’t feel good about it.”
“Thank you.” Jim set the coffee cup on the Ford’s bed.
“Don’t come around here anymore. It’s nothing personal.”
“I understand you and Mom and Annie cruised the bay a few times. Toxic Waste patrol.”
“That’s right.”
“Did she ever tell you she was being followed?”
Blodgett stared at Weir for a long moment. “No. I didn’t know her very well. Out on patrol, we’d talk about the tides and the fish and who’d be a big enough asshole to dump into the bay. Nothing about being followed.”
“Did you find something out there that would make someone need to shut Annie up?”
Blodgett looked at Weir, running a hand over the heavy muscles in his arm. “I don’t think so. We’ve gotten some trace solvent. But Ann wasn’t the only one who knew. There’s Virginia and me and Dennison.”