Good, he thought, she's in place.
He stayed on the opposite side of the street, ten feet behind Annie who was working hard to keep up without showing herself. Eileen and the guy were walking very fast, up toward the traffic light on the corner, which changed now, throwing a green wash onto the roadway. The formation could have been a classic tailing triangle—one cop behind the quarry, another cop ahead of them on the same side of the street, a third cop on the opposite side of the street—except that it was lacking the third cop.
Or so Kling thought.
Shanahan was the third cop.
He had been tailing Kling from the moment he'd spotted him peering through the plate-glass window of the bar. Pacing the street impatiently, always circling back to the bar, checking out the front door from across the street, then drifting off again, and back again, behaving very much like a person waiting for somebody to come out of there. When Eileen finally came out of the bar with a second blond guy, Shanahan's blond took off after them. Annie was up ahead, she had Eileen and her blond covered and in sight. But this other blond guy was still showing too much interest. Shanahan gave him a lead, and then fell in behind him again.
Up ahead, Eileen and her blond turned left at the traffic light, and disappeared around the corner.
Shanahan's blond hesitated only a moment.
Seemed undecided whether to make his move or not.
Then he pulled a gun and started across the street.
Annie recognized Kling at once.
He had a gun in his hand.
She didn't know whether she was more surprised by his presence here or by the gun in his hand. Too many thoughts clicked through her mind in the next three seconds. She thought He's going to blow it, the guy hasn't made his move yet. She thought Does Eileen know he's here? She thought—
But Eileen and her man were already around the corner and out of sight.
"Bert!" she shouted.
And in that instant Shanahan came thundering up yelling, "Stop! Police!"
Kling turned to see a man pointing an arm in a plaster cast at him.
He turned the other way and saw Annie running across the street.
"Mike!" Annie shouted.
Shanahan stopped dead in his tracks. Annie was waving her arms at him like a traffic cop.
"He's on the job!" she shouted.
Shanahan had earlier told Eileen that he and Lou Alvarez were just full of tricks. He hadn't realized, however, that Alvarez had sent another man to the Zone without telling him about it. That tricky, he didn't think Alvarez was. Shanahan's own little trick was a .32 revolver in his right hand, his finger inside the trigger guard, the gun and the hand encased in the plaster cast. He felt like an asshole now, the plaster cast still pointed at a guy Annie had just identified as a cop.
The realization came to all three of them in the same instant.
The traffic light on the corner turned red again as though signaling the coming of their mutual dawn.
Without a word, they looked up the street.
It was empty.
Eileen and her man were gone.
A minute ago, she'd had three backups.
Now she didn't have any.
Dolores Eisenberg was Frank Sebastiani's older sister.
Five-feet ten-inches tall, black hair and blue eyes, thirty-eight, thirty-nine years old. Hugging Marie to her when Brown and Hawes came over from the garage. Tears in the eyes of both women.
Marie introduced her to the cops.
Dolores seemed surprised to see them there.
"How do you do?" she said, and glanced at Marie.
"We're sorry for your trouble," Brown said.
An old Irish expression. Hawes wondered where he'd picked it up.
Dolores said, "Thank you," and then turned to Marie again.
"I'm sorry it took me so long to get here," she said. "Max is in Cincinnati, and I had to find a sitter. God, wait'll he hears this. He's crazy about Frank."
"I know," Marie said.
"I'll have to call him again," Dolores said. "When Mom told me what happened, I tried to reach him at the hotel, but he was out. What time was that, when you called Mom?"
"It must've been around eleven-thirty," Marie said.
"Yeah, she called me right afterward. I felt like I'd been hit by a locomotive. I tried to get Max, I left a message for him to call me, but then I left the house around midnight, as soon as the sitter got there. I'll have to call him again."
She was still wearing her overcoat. She took it off now, revealing a trim black skirt and a crisp white blouse, and carried it familiarly to the coatrack. They were still standing in the entrance hall. The house seemed exceptionally still at this hour of the morning. The heater came on with a sudden whooosh.
"Would anyone like some coffee?" Dolores asked.
A take-charge lady, Hawes thought. Tragedy in the family, here she is at one in the morning, ready to make coffee.
"There's some on the stove," Marie said.
"Officers?" Dolores said.
"Thank you, no," Brown said.
"No, thanks," Hawes said.
"Marie? Honey, can I get a cup for you?"
"I'm all right, Dolores, thank you."
"Poor baby," Dolores said, and hugged her sister-in-law close again. Her arm still around her, she looked at Brown and said, "My mother told me you think Jimmy did it, is that right?"
"That's a strong possibility," Brown said, and looked at Marie.
"You haven't found him, though?"
"No, not yet."
"It's hard to believe," Dolores said, and shook her head. "My mother said you have to do an autopsy. I wish you wouldn't, really. That's really upsetting to her."
It occurred to Brown that she did not yet know her brother's body had been dismembered. Hadn't Marie told the family? He debated breaking the news, opted against it.
"Well, ma'am," he said, "an autopsy's mandatory in any trauma death."
"Still," Dolores said.
Brown was still looking at Marie. It had further occurred to him that on the phone with Dolores not an hour ago, she herself advised her sister-in-law about the autopsy. Yet now Dolores sounded as if the information had come from her mother. He tried to remember the exact content of the phone conversation. Marie's end of it, anyway.
Hello Dolores, no, not yet, I'm down in the kitchen.
Which meant her sister-in-law had asked her if she was in bed, or getting ready for bed, or whatever, and she'd told her No, I'm down here with two detectives. Which meant that Dolores knew there were two detectives here, so why had she looked so surprised to find them here?
They want to look at the garage room.
So you had to figure Dolores had asked her what two detectives were doing there. And she'd told her. And then the business about the autopsy. Which Dolores had just now talked about as if it had come from her mother. But if Dolores had called here just before leaving the house… well, wait a minute.
On the phone, Marie hadn't said anything about expecting her, nothing like "See you soon then," or "Hurry on over," or "Drive safely," just "I'll let you know," meaning about the autopsy, "Thanks for calling."
Brown decided to play it flat out.
He looked Dolores dead in the eye and said, "Did you call here about an hour ago?"
And the telephone rang.
Brown figured there had to be a god.
Because if the earlier ringing of the phone had visibly startled Marie, this time the ringing caused an immediate look of panic to flash in her eyes. She turned toward the kitchen as if it had suddenly burst into flames, made an abortive start out of the entrance hall, stopped, said, "I wonder…" and then looked blankly at the detectives.