"The laptop?" Donnie shouted it. He couldn't control himself. "What the fuck do you think?" The man winked slowly at him. His right eyelid was tattooed with the word
"Fuck." When he winked his left eye, Donnie read "You." He repeated the sequence proudly fuck YOU-just in case Donnie had missed it. Donnie could see this guy doing this into a mirror, reading the words backwards, smiling, chewing his gum. Probably chewed gum in his sleep. "You got the scratch?" he asked Donnie.
Donnie dug into his pocket and withdrew Tegg's money. He hated to see it go.
Bogs said, "I ain't promising you it's yours, you know. I got no way to know if it's yours."
Donnie realized he should have split the reward into two payments. He hated it when he did stupid things like that. He said, "If it's not mine, I'm coming back for the scratch."
"A Toshiba, right?"
Donnie answered this with a nod. "Young kid, dark hair?" Another nod. "It's yours." Bogs pocketed the money. "North side of Pine between First and Second, just up from the market.
You know the place?"
"I'll find it."
"You're never going to get it without the stub. You know the way it works. But that's your problem."
"You got a name for me? Someone I could grease?"
"Grease someone at a hock shop? What kind of dumb shit are you?"
Donnie was sick of taking insults from everyone. "Up yours!" he said ' losing his temper. "I'll get it back."
Bogs shook his head at him. That really pissed Donnie off.
"You'll see," Donnie said childishly.
Bogs offered only the same winking of the eyes, that same message flashing back from his darkened eye sockets: Fuck ... you.
Boldt was folding laundry when the car pulled up out front. The image of Connie Chi's murdered body still lingered in his mind's eye. Liz was on the couch reading a novel. Miles had fallen asleep in the Jonny JUMP-Up, effectively guarding the way into the kitchen and preventing anyone from attempting to clean up. Scott Hamilton played sensuous sax from the stereo. Boldt knew every note, every nuance. But tonight it all seemed so trivial. In his mind lingered another image as welclass="underline" Sharon Shaffer, her chest cut open, her heart removed. Were they too late to stop it?
The plates on the van had turned out to be stolen. No real surprise to Boldt but still a disappointment. They had alerted area pawn shops to notify them of any hocked laptop computers. It was pretty much wait-and-see at the moment. it was frustrating as hell, "That's a brown and a black-just in case you care," Liz said, pointing out the socks Boldt was in the process of rolling together. She was like that: She could split her attention among several things at once. Not Boldt-he tended toward obsessive. His mind, his emotions locked on and wouldn't let go. Despite the present activity of his hands, his attention was not on the socks. He was on autopilot, stuck with the rookie cop dilemma of reliving his mistakes. He broke the pair apart, said
"Thanks," and started again. She cared-that was the point about the socks, about him. She looked after him, and he was thankful for it. She didn't nag, she observed. She didn't force herself on him. She re THE
minded him to shave when he forgot. She threw his shirts into the wash--even though he did the wash. Right now she was probably worried sick about his skipping dinner.
They had a visitor. Boldt heard the feet trodding up the wooden steps of the front porch and announced, "It's Dixie," before the man even knocked. "I'll get it."
"You amaze me," she said.
Boldt stopped at the door. He felt tempted to turn the lock rather than the door knob, tempted to crawl up her skirt and make some trouble, or another baby. "He's going to want me to go with him somewhere," Boldt informed her when he saw the glare of the headlights and realized Dixie had left the car running. He opened the door. "Be with you in a second," he told Dixon before the man could utter a word.
Dixon managed to ask, "But how-?"
"He's psychic," Liz interrupted, helping Boldt to locate his gun and jacket. She asked Dixon, "How long will you be?"
"A couple hours maybe," the befuddled man replied.
She asked Boldt if he had his keys because she would be asleep by eleven. She hated the way policework robbed them of their private time. Tuesday was his night to put Miles down. Now she would have that chore as well. She whispered into his car, "Wake me," following it with a quick dart of the tongue. Boldt returned a kiss and heard the door close and lock behind them as he and Dixie descended the steps. "What's up?" Boldt asked across the roof of the car, after reaching the passenger door. "They've found the remains," Dixon told him. "Water level in the river is high, and rising. We excavate tonight, or we lose it. Monty's on his way-our forensic archaeologist-and I've asked an entomologist from the U-Dub to join us as well. We would rather do this by daylight, of course, but not if we risk losing the remains by waiting."
Boldt's depression vanished instantly, replaced by an elevated pulse and a tingling sense of curiosity. A dozen questions crowded his brain once again: When had the body been buried? Exactly what was the cause of death? What could it tell them about the harvester? Was this his first kill? They needed the rest of the remains and the identity of the victim before they could answer any of these questions. "You're certainly talkative," Dixon said, a few minutes into the ride. Another fifteen minutes later they were away from the lights and the traffic, the density of the darkness increasing around them. It rained lightly for a few minutes. Boldt felt hypnotized by the motion of the wipers. Dixon asked Boldt to pour him a cup of coffee from his thermos, knowing better than to offer any to Boldt. "The blood toxicology workup on Chapman c me in today," Dixon baited his friend. a "Am I interested?""Ever heard of a drug called Ketarnine? "No. Should I have?" ',You're about to."
Good."
"It's a drug used by veterinarians." For a moment, Boldt actually thought his heart had stopped. "Animal hairs," he said, recalling that a variety of such hairs had been found on both Chapman's clothing and Sharon Shaffer's furniture. "What?" asked Dixon.
I recalled Dr. Light Horse's comments about Bo the closure appearing unusual. A veterinarian when you looked at the evidence, it suddenly seemed so obvious. The road ahead of the car was clear, but there was plenty of traffic in his head to make up for it. "Talk to me."
"You ever watch 60 Minutes?" Dixon asked. "You know better than that." Boldt hadn't owned a television since Walter Cronkite went off the air. "It's a drug used in surgery by vets. It paralyzes the patient from the neck down. The dog, cat, whatever, remains semi-awake-that is, doesn't require ventilation or other life support during surgery-but can't feel or move. It's often used in conjunction with gas. It's a very serious drug to use on adult humans because of its psychological effects. Oddly enough, some pediatricians are now using it on children 60 Minutes did a thing on a guy who evaporated Ketamine down to a powder, slipped it into the drinks of women he met in bars, and then took them to motels and raped them." "I read about it," Boldt said. "I remember the case."
"Well, apparently you're not the only one.
The interesting thing about Ketamine, especially in large doses, is its devastating effect on short-term memory. None of the rapist's victims ever remembered what happened to them. And I mean, they remembered nothing. it was only because one of them escaped before the drug fully took effect that he was ever caught. He was lucky he didn't kill someone. In large doses it's lethaclass="underline" convulsion, asphyxiation, death."
"A vet?"
"He's using a knockout intravenous dosage of Ketamine combined with Valium. Throw in a dash of electroshock for good measure and there's no one-no one-who's ever going to identify him." Dixon turned off the darkened road onto a muddy dirt road and slowed down to where the rear end of the vehicle wouldn't fishtail. "A vet?" Boldt was stunned. Suddenly he was having to rethink his line of investigation-it was like starting all over. He couldn't manage any other words. "There's more. Once I discovered the Ketamine in the workup, I knew what to look for. I told you we saved some tissue samples from the ones we lost to hemorrhaging."