"Okay," Mayberry said, tapping the screen. "Here we have a parade of people going by… lots of women, going down to the meat rack. Half a dozen guys."
The tape was black-and-white, focused on a thin man with a mustache selling soda, cigarettes, bread, and gasoline over a small counter in a convenience store. In the background, through a window and past two pair of gas pumps, people occasionally walked by the store, most of them on the far side of the street.
"Okay," Mayberry said. "Here we come up to Arris… This woman goes by and there he is." He jabbed at the screen. Arris was wearing a light-colored shirt and what might have been tan slacks.
"Pretty blurry," Lucas said, his eyes less than a yard from the screen. "Can’t see his face."
"Not very well," Mayberry agreed. He stopped the tape, rewound it a few turns, and Arris rolled through the picture again, this time in slow motion. "We got the ID by having a bunch of his friends look at it, and they picked him out by, you know, general appearance, the flappy way he walked. And the dress was right. You can see his sleeves were rolled up, and that’s right."
"Nobody looks like McDonald," Lucas said, watching the people parade past the store.
"You sure he’s your guy?" Mayberry asked.
"He’s the guy we got a hard tip on," Lucas said.
"Most of these people were going down to the rack," Mayberry said. "But Arris was just out for a walk, and he went on beyond it. So he was just about alone when he was shot, a block and a half further on. So if you’re looking for the killer… he’s quite a bit further down."
"Jelly told me he didn’t think it was random."
"He’s usually right," Mayberry said.
"If it wasn’t random, the shooter’d almost have to be following him," Lucas said. "He couldn’t expect just to walk down the street and run into Arris at a convenient place to shoot. Especially not if Arris would recognize him. He’d want to come up behind him."
"Well, Arris walked every night. Nobody knows if he took the same route every night, but his neighbors say he usually started out the same way. You want to look at this again?"
"Nah, that’s okay. What about the print on the shell?"
"We know McDonald’s got a fingerprint file, we’ve got NCIC confirmation on that-he had a secret clearance with the National Guard," Mayberry said. "They’re supposed to be sending us something right away, but it wasn’t here five minutes ago. I had Chad Ogram pull up the print file on the shell. You know Ogram?"
"Think I met him," Lucas said.
Mayberry had been rewinding the tape, now popped it out of the VCR and handed it to Lucas. "This is for you. Let’s go see Ogram."
Ogram worked in a bathroom-sized office stuffed with filing cabinets. At least one clock sat on each flat surface in the office, and a half-dozen more hung on the walls. Ogram, a thin man with vanishing hair, bent over his green metal desk, his bald spot as pink as a newborn’s gums.
"Chad," said Mayberry, and Ogram sat up with a start. "You know Lucas."
"Yeah, hey," Ogram said vaguely, glancing at Lucas and then bending over his desk again. "I got the fax."
"What do you think?" Mayberry asked.
"Well, heck," Ogram said. "You know there’s not enough for a match."
"Yeah," Lucas said, "I was just wondering…"
"But McDonald’s right thumb matches what we’ve got," Ogram said. "We got a piece of a whorl and he’s got a whorl that looks just like our piece."
Mayberry and Lucas looked at each other. "Are you sure?" Lucas asked.
"Pretty sure: I have to rescale the fax to get an overlay, but yeah: it looks just like it."
"What are the chances it’s someone else?" Lucas asked.
Ogram scratched his bald spot with his right middle finger. "I don’t know. Ten to one against. Hundred to one. Not enough for court, but if you come to me and say we’ve got a partial and a suspect, and we get this much… I’d say we got him."
"Jesus," Lucas said to Mayberry. "This can’t be true."
"Why not?" Mayberry asked.
"It’s too easy," Lucas said. "It’s never this easy." And to Ogram: "I kind of need to pin down the odds."
"I know a guy at the FBI who could give you an idea. He fools around with that sort of math thing. Statistics and odds and chances."
"Call him," Lucas said. "And call me in Minneapolis when you find out. Wilson motherfuckin’ McDonald."
Lucas headed for the elevators with Mayberry two steps behind. Lucas pushed the call button, turned and jabbed a finger at Mayberry: "Hey: You’ve got a slug, right?"
"Piece of one, anyway."
"And the ME took a piece of one out of O’Dell-the banker woman who got shot. Let’s get them together and do an analysis and see if they match."
"Okay-you guys want to do it?"
"Sure. Send it over."
"It’ll be twenty minutes behind you," Mayberry said. "Hot dog, I love this. This case has been open forever."
Lucas called Sloan from his car, said, "We got a break in the Kresge case: get Sherrill and Del if they’re around, and meet me at my office in twenty minutes."
"Who done it?"
"Our pal, Wilson McDonald."
"You’re shittin’ me."
"I shit you not," Lucas said. "The problem is gonna be proving it."
He punched Sloan off, found his notebook, looked up the number for Bone’s office, and punched it in as he accelerated out onto I-94. Bone’s assistant took the calclass="underline" "Chief Davenport: Everybody’s up in the boardroom right now. I think they may be picking a new CEO. So unless it’s a major emergency…"
"Is Wilson McDonald in there?"
"Yes, of course. He’s one of the candidates."
"Thanks. I’ll call back." She’d told him what he wanted to know: that McDonald was there, at the bank.
Sherrill was skeptical.
More than skepticaclass="underline" she was absolutely nasty. "We got diddly, Lucas. I don’t care what the odds are, if it doesn’t work in court, it doesn’t work. And the goddamn killing is so old that there’s no chance of making a case."
"Helps to know who did it," Del said. Sherrill had come in wearing jeans, high-top Nikes, a suede jacket, and a slightly too tight fuzzy white sweater that showed her figure to exceptional advantage. Lucas, Sloan, and Del were resolutely meeting her eyes, though the pressure eventually got to Del and he slumped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling.
"C’mon, Del, look at the Cat case," Sherrill said. " Everybody in the office knows George Cat killed his old lady. It doesn’t do any good, because we can’t prove it. It’s gonna be even harder with McDonald, because McDonald has every lawyer in the world."
"Still helps to know," Del muttered.
"Because we think Wilson’s done about four of them," Lucas said. "If we can put together a pattern, argue it, and have semiconvincing evidence on one, a jury’ll pack him away."
"So what do you want?" Sloan asked.
"I want to tear him apart. I want to look him over with a microscope. I want to get a search warrant and pull his house down."
"Don’t think we’ve got enough for a warrant," Del said.
"So let’s fuckin’ get it," Lucas said. "Sloan, can you break away from the Ericson case for a couple of days?"
"For a while," he said.
"Ask Frank. And if he says okay, look at O’Dell again. See if there’s any way McDonald could have finessed it to get into the apartment. Del, you look at Arris again. See if there’s anything else. Marcy, you take Ingall. I’m going up north again, right away. I want to think about the Kresge thing again. See if I can figure out how he did it. Let’s meet again tomorrow at nine o’clock. And I’ve got my car phone if you need me before then."
"Why don’t you get a real walk-around phone?" Del asked. "Everybody else has one."
" ’Cause then people would call me up," Lucas said. "And I couldn’t say I must’ve been out."
Sloan nodded and he and Del left. Sherrill lingered. "You’re going up north?"