Now the gasoline, mixed in the bottle with two fourounce cans of chain saw oil. A strip of old T-shirt for a wick.
The bottle was heavy; a little better than seven pounds.
But it wouldn’t have to be thrown far.
Just far enough.
SEVEN
"Now we’re getting some heat," said Rose Marie Roux. She was drinking coffee from a bone china cup; a matching saucer sat on her desk, and on the saucer, a wad of green chewing gum. "Harrison White called, and said if you need to interview Wilson McDonald, or if you would like to bring him before a grand jury, McDonald will come over anytime and testify. Without immunity. He will answer any questions, without reservation. Under oath."
"And if we don’t need him to do that?" Lucas asked. He was facing Roux’s window, the sun streaming in. Another good day. Cold.
"Then knock off the innuendos-the snooping around asking other people about him. White says the snooping could cost McDonald the top job at the bank, and if it does, he’ll see that the city picks up the difference in what he makes now, and what he would have made in twenty-some years as bank president. He thinks it might be forty or fifty million."
Lucas grinned. "Would we have to pay it all up front?" Roux smiled back: "He didn’t say. But he also talked to a couple of people on the city council, and McDonald’s father has been calling around… but fuck them. Do what you need with McDonald. I thought you should know that glaciers are starting to move."
"Thanks," Lucas said.
"And, of course, what White says is true. McDonald could be completely innocent, and we could be screwing him out of his lifetime job. In fact, we could even have been set up to do it, with the letter."
"Tell you what," Lucas said. "Let me talk to White. I wanted McDonald bumped, I wanted him nervous, but I don’t need to push much harder. We could back off a bit."
"Whatever you think," Roux said. She finished the coffee, peeled the gum off the saucer, and popped it back in her mouth. "Nicotine," she said. "Too expensive to throw away before I chew it out."
"So I’ll…" Lucas was getting to his feet.
"Sit down," Roux said. She probed her desk for a moment. "We have a couple of things to talk about. First, the opium ring…"
"Oh, shit," Lucas groaned.
"And then Capslock has put in for thirty hours accumulated overtime for investigating it."
"Rose Marie…"
"He’s your guy, goddamnit. Now, this thirty hours. He took the thirty hours when he was supposedly on disability leave after the pinking shears incident. Now what I’m trying to figure is how…"
"Aw, Rose Marie, c’mon…"
Roux was amusing, and he laughed with her, and convinced her to sign off on the thirty hours. But the laughter was like a water bug on a pond, skating across the surface of his mind. He was amused and he laughed, but nothing was deeply funny; life was simply stupid most of the time. Going downhill, again, he thought. He walked back to his office, tired, a little unnerved by the overnight rattling in his brain, and found Sherrill waiting for him.
Sherrill was lanky and dark-eyed, with short black hair and-Sloan’s words-the good headlights. Her estranged husband had been killed by a crazy outlaw, who was himself killed by Lucas in a close-quarters firefight in the middle of a freak blizzard. It all happened just minutes before the cold-eyed Iowa boy had blown up both Dick LaChaise and Lucas’s marriage prospects. Last winter had been a bad one.
"There you are," Sherrill said. "Want to come detect?"
"Detect what?"
"An anonymous caller phoned the Garfield sheriff’s office and said that a US West lineman saw the killer, or might have seen him. The lineman was working on an exchange box near Kresge’s place. Said that he was talking about it in a bar, thought about calling the cops but didn’t because he didn’t want to get involved. So the sheriff tracked him down, and guess what?"
"He confessed and threw himself on the mercy of the court."
"Nope. He’s down here. They sent him to an NSP warehouse to pick up a bunch of splicer things… The sheriff talked to him and called me. He’s the only eyewitness we have so far. I’m going over."
"How far?"
"Ten minutes?"
"Let’s go," Lucas said.
Sherrill had a city car parked at the curb. They took I-394 west, falling into routine cop chitchat that covered a vaguely uncomfortable tension between them. Sherrill was at least somewhat available, and, rumor had it, would not be averse to exploring possibilities with Lucas. At the same time, word was around that Lucas hadn’t quite recovered from the loss of Weather, and nobody wanted to be the first woman afterwards.
Lucas, on the other hand, with a small reputation as a womanizer, had been expected to make a run at Sherrill ever since her marriage began going bad. He’d never done that. There lingered about them the sense that somebody ought to make a move, almost as a matter of common politeness.
"Did you get anything good out of Kresge’s office?" Lucas asked after a while.
"Naw. But there are some newly humble secretaries and assistants around the place, I’ll tell you," Sherrill said cheerfully. "Especially around Bone and O’Dell and McDonald. Everybody thinks one of them will get the job."
"What about the merger?"
"That’s apparently on hold."
"Hmph. So if somebody shot Kresge to stop the merger, it worked."
"Yup. For the time being, anyway."
"And this telephone guy…"
"Harold Hanks."
"… saw the killer."
"Maybe. But there’s something odd about the whole thing. Whoever called the sheriff’s office said she heard him talking in a bar. Harold Hanks is a hard-shell Baptist. He told the sheriff he hadn’t been in a bar for fifteen years, since he was born again. But he did see somebody, just like the caller said. But he never connected whoever he saw with the killing."
"The caller was a woman?"
"Yeah."
"They knew where the call came from?"
"A pay phone off I-35. I wrote it down, it’s up north somewhere."
"Nothing there, then."
"Nope."
"Both letters to Rose Marie were probably written by women-one of them for sure, and the one pointing at McDonald has a female feeling to it…"
"Yeah, it does," Sherrill agreed. "So we’ve got somebody out there who knows a lot more than we do, and she’s leading us in."
"Which makes you wonder…" He looked out the window.
"What?"
"McDonald’s wife," Lucas suggested.
"Hmm."
"He beats her up," Lucas said.
"Yeah?" Old story.
"Something to look into," he said.
They rode in the slightly tense silence for another few minutes, then Sherrill blurted, "Seeing Weather at all?"
"No. The shrink thinks we ought to spend some time apart." Everybody in the department knew about the shrink.
"But eventually get back?" Sherrill asked.
"Maybe," Lucas said moodily. Three teenagers in reflective vests were peering through a surveying total station just off the interstate. All three wore their caps backward.
"You know," Sherrill said, plowing ahead, "you’ve really got your head up your ass in a lot of ways. You walk around with this cloud over you, mooning over her. Why don’t you do something to get her back?"
"I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that," Lucas started, a distinct chill in his voice.
"Oh, bullshit, Lucas. If you love her, get her back. Don’t wait for her to work it out-plot something. Suck her in. The thing is, if she gets a little freaky when she sees you, then you’ve got to hang around more. Screw the shrink: the thing is, life goes on, and if you’re around all the time, and life keeps going on… the freakiness will go away. It’ll get boring. Tiresome. And if she basically loves you, and you love her…"