Tal glanced at him and asked, “Okay, you want to know how I did it? There’s a trick.”
“What?” the big cop asked eagerly.
“Easy. Just calculate the correlation between gravity as a constant and the estimated mean velocity of the wind over the time it takes the bullet to travel from points A to B — that’s the muzzle to the target. The ‘MTT.’ Got that?”
“MTT. Yeah.”
“Then you multiply distance times that correlated factor divided by the mass of the bullet times its velocity squared.”
“You—” The big cop squinted again. “Wait, you—”
“It’s a joke, Greg.”
“You son of a bitch. You had me.”
“Haven’t you noticed it’s not that hard to do?”
The cop mouthed words that Mac couldn’t see but Tal had no trouble deciphering.
LaTour squinted one last time toward the knoll and exhaled a laugh. “Let’s get statements.” He nodded to Robert Covey and escorted him toward his car, calling back to Tal, “You get hers. That okay with you, Einstein?”
“Sure.”
Tal led Mac to a park bench out of sight of Margaret’s body and listened to what she had to say about the incident, jotting down the facts in his precise handwriting. An officer drove Covey home and Tal found himself alone with Mac. There was silence for a moment and he asked, “Say, one thing? Could you help me fill out this questionnaire?”
“I’d be happy to.”
He pulled one out of his briefcase, looked at it, then back to her. “How ’bout dinner tonight?”
“Is that one of the questions?”
“It’s one of my questions. Not a police question.”
“Well, the thing is I’ve got a date tonight. Sorry.”
He nodded. “Oh, sure.” Couldn’t think of anything to follow up with. He pulled out his pen and smoothed the questionnaire, thinking: Of course she had a date. Women like her, high-ranking members of the Four Percent Club, always had dates. He wondered if it’d been the Pascal-sex comment that had knocked him out of the running. Note for the future: Don’t bring that one up too soon.
Mac continued, “Yeah, tonight I’m going to help Mr. Covey find a health club with a pool. He likes to swim but he shouldn’t do it alone. So we’re going to find a place that’s got a lifeguard.”
“Really? Good for him.” He looked up from Question 1.
“But I’m free Saturday,” Mac said.
“Saturday? Well, I am, too.”
Silence. “Then how’s Saturday?” she asked.
“I think it’s great. Now how ’bout those questions?”
A week later the Lotus Foundation case was nearly tidied up — as was Tal’s office, much to his relief — and he was beginning to think about the other tasks awaiting him: the SEC investigation, the statistical analysis for next year’s personnel assignments and, of course, hounding fellow officers to get their questionnaires in on time.
The prosecutor still wanted some final statements for the Farley and Sheldon trials, though, and he’d asked Tal to interview the parents who’d adopted the three children born following the in vitro fertilization at the Foundation.
Two of the three couples lived nearby and he spent one afternoon taking their statements. The last couple was in Warwick, a small town outside of Albany, over an hour away. Tal made the drive on a Sunday afternoon, zipping down the picturesque roadway along the Hudson River, the landscape punctuated with blooming azaleas, forsythia and a billion spring flowers, the car filling with the scent of mulch and hot loam and sweet asphalt.
He found both Warwick and the couple’s bungalow with no difficulty. The husband and wife, in their late twenties, were identically pudgy and rosy skinned. Uneasy, too, until Tal explained that his mission there had nothing to do with any challenges to the adoption. It was merely a formality for a criminal case.
Like the other parents, they provided good information that would be helpful in prosecuting Farley and Sheldon. For a half hour Tal jotted careful notes and then thanked them for their time. As he was leaving he walked past a small, cheery room decorated in a circus motif.
A little girl, about four, stood in the doorway. It was the youngster the couple had adopted from the Foundation. She was adorable — blond, gray-eyed, with a heart-shaped face.
“This is Amy,” the mother said.
“Hello, Amy,” Tal offered.
She nodded shyly.
Amy was clutching a piece of paper and some crayons. “Did you draw that?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. I like to draw.”
“I can tell. You’ve got lots of pictures.” He nodded at the girl’s walls.
“Here,” she said, holding the sheet out. “You can have this. I just drew it.”
“For me?” Tal asked. He glanced at her mother, who nodded her approval. He studied the picture for a moment. “Thank you, Amy. I love it. I’ll put it up on my wall at work.” The girl’s face broke into a beaming smile.
Tal said good-bye to her parents and ten minutes later he was cruising south on the parkway. When he came to the turnoff that would take him to his house and his Sunday retreat into the world of mathematics, though, Tal continued past. He continued instead to his office at the County Building.
A half hour later he was on the road again. En route to an address in Chesterton, a few miles away.
He pulled up in front of a split-level house surrounded by a small but immaculately trimmed yard. Two plastic tricycles and other assorted toys sat in the driveway.
But this wasn’t the right place, he concluded with irritation. Damn. He must’ve written the address down wrong.
The house he was looking for had to be nearby and he decided to ask the owner here where it was. Walking to the door, Tal pushed the bell then stood back.
A pretty blonde in her thirties greeted him with a cheerful, “Hi. Help you?”
“I’m looking for Greg LaTour’s house.”
“Well, you found it. Hi, I’m his wife, Joan.”
“He lives here?” Tal asked, glancing past her into a suburban home right out of a Hollywood sitcom.
She laughed. “Hold on. I’ll get him.”
A moment later Greg LaTour came to the door, wearing shorts, sandals and a green Izod shirt. He blinked in surprise and looked back over his shoulder into the house. Then he stepped outside and pulled the door shut after him. “What’re you doing here?”
“Needed to tell you something about the case.” But Tal’s voice faded. He was staring at two adorable blond girls, twins, about eight years old, who’d come around the side of the house and were looking at Tal curiously.
One said, “Daddy, the ball’s in the bushes. We can’t get it.”
“Honey, I’ve got to talk to my friend here,” he said in a singsong, fatherly voice. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Okay.” They disappeared.
“You’ve got two kids?”
“Four kids.”
“How long you been married?”
“Eighteen years.”
“But I thought you were single. You never mentioned family. You don’t wear a ring. Your office, the guns, the biker posters.”
“That’s who I need to be to do my job,” LaTour said in a low voice. “That life”—he nodded vaguely in the direction of the Sheriff’s Department—“and this life I keep ’em separate. Completely.”
That’s something else…
Tal now understood the meaning of the phrase. It wasn’t about tragedies in his life, marital breakups, alienated children. And there was nothing LaTour kept exclusively from Tal. His was a life kept separate from everybody in the department.
“So you’re mad I’m here,” Tal said.
A shrug. “Just wish you’d called first.”