'So you're just what… the finger of God?'
'I wouldn't put it exactly that way. It sounds too… vain, I guess. Too important. But what I do is God's will.'
'Jesus,' Carmel said. Then quickly: 'Sorry, if that offends you, I'll…'
'No, no, jeez, I hang around with Italians, for Christ's sake. Catholics, man.
Nobody talks the talk like Catholics. I'm not exactly religious that way – I mean, I used to work in a nudie bar. It's just that I believe in
… some kind of God. Not in heaven or hell, just in God. We're all part of it.'
'What about stuff like guns? Where'd you learn about that?'
'We always had guns in our house when I was a kid, my step-dad was a hunter.
Poacher, really. So I knew about rifles and shotguns. Then the Mafia guys taught me the basic stuff about handguns, though most of them don't know a lot,' Rinker said. 'I figured that if I was gonna do this – be a hit man – I'd better learn about them. You can get most of what you need from books. There's an ocean of gun stuff out there.'
'So you know all about the bullets and how fast they go…'
'Pretty much. I don't reload – make my own ammunition – because that would be too much of a trademark,' Rinker said. 'Sooner or later they could get me on it.
But factory ammo is as good as anything I could make up for my kind of work, anyway.' 'Are the guns really special? I mean…' 'Nah. Most of them are stolen, and they get passed around. I got a friend who picks them up for me, cuts the threads for the silencers. He checks them mechanically, and I fire them a few times to double check, but basically, all my work is within ten feet or so. Up close. So I use fairly small calibers and fire several times.'
'You carry the silencers separately?'
'Yeah. A little plastic box with a couple of crescent wrenches and a couple pairs of pliers – if you saw them on an X-ray, it'd look like a tool kit.
There's no way to hide guns, though. Not conventional guns, anyway.'
They talked for a long time, nihilism and religion, guns and ammo, and that night, very late, as Carmel was dozing off, she smiled sleepily as she replayed the conversation. She'd gone to college with a lot of finance and law students.
They'd stayed up nights studying, not talking.
This night, she thought, was like what a lot of people did in college, a few beers with friends, talk about God and death.
She drifted peacefully away, and may have had a dream about a coil of videotape going up in smoke. And about guns.
Chapter Eight
Lucas and Black followed the Ramsey County medical examiner into the work room, where the body of Rolando D'Aquila was stretched out on a stainless-steel tray.
'They really fucked this boy over,' Black said, with a low whistle of disbelief.
He'd heard about it, but hadn't seen the body. 'Look at his kneecaps.'
'Look at his heels, if you want to see something that must've hurt,' the ME said. He was a dark, hairy man with a beard. A Rasputin, with a Boston accent.
'So what are these letters?' Lucas asked.
'I've got a photograph for you, but I thought you might want to see it in person,' the ME said. He picked up one of the dead man's hands, and turned it over. On the back of the hand were a series of bloody scrapes that looked like: dew
Lucas and Black squatted, got down close: 'What is it?' Black asked.
'I don't know,' the ME said. 'But he did it himself, because we found the skin under his fingernails. He did it not long before he died – he had blood on his fingertips, which would have been worn away if his hands had been free, and he used them for anything.
So: we think he might have known he was going to be killed, and tried to leave something behind.'
'Like the name of the killer,' Black said. 'Which is probably Dew.'
'Really?' The ME bent over the hand and said, 'I never saw Dew. I was looking at it the other way – I saw Mop.'
Black looked at Lucas: 'What do you think? M-o-p or D-e-w?'
'Beats the shit out of me,' Lucas said, standing up. 'Maybe we can actually see it better in a photo…'To the ME: 'What are the chances he cut himself up just thrashing around? I mean, they were drilling holes in his kneecaps…'
'Who knows, if a guy's being tortured? The scratches look deliberate – the skin looks almost ploughed off the back of his hands. And the shapes look deliberate, not like thrashing or involuntary contraction… I think he did it on purpose.'
'Yeah.' Lucas scratched his head. 'Took some balls.'
'You don't see d-e-w?' Black asked.
'Yeah, and I see m-o-p, and I see something else, too, and I don't know what they hell that might mean,' Lucas said.
'What?' Black and the ME turned their heads, trying the scratches at different angles.
'I can see c-l-e-w – like the British spelling of clue,'
Lucas said. 'But there's no clue. Unless it was something back at the house, near his hands.'
'Aw, man, that's too weird,' Black said. 'C-l-e-w equals clue?'
'Don't you see it?' Lucas asked.
'I see it, but I don't think that's it. I think it's initials, I think…
Hey.'
'What?'
Now Black was scratching his head. 'I was talking to the St. Paul guys. They're looking for Rolando's sister – she lives over by the University, but they haven't been able to catch her at home. Her name is Marta Blanca. If you read the scratches backwards it could be an M instead of a W, and a B instead of a D. ..'
'Then what's all that shit in the middle?' the ME asked, pointing at the scratches.
'I don't know, this is just a theory,' Black said. 'But his hands were chained up… how were his hands?'
'Like this,' Lucas said, demonstrating. 'Over his head.'
'Then he couldn't see what he was doing, he was in all kinds of pain, he's panicked because he knows what's coming. I wonder if he was trying to get us to his sister?'
'Or that his sister had something to do with it,' Lucas said.
'Hey,' Black said, 'It's a clew, with an e-w. Let's go knock on her door.'
A little girl was playing with a plastic dump truck in the hallway of Marta
Blanca's apartment house, in front of an open apartment door.
'Hello,' Lucas said. A mommy's voice called, 'Who's that?'
Lucas leaned over the little girl and knocked once on the door jamb:
'Minneapolis police, ma'am. We're looking for a Marta Blanca?'
'Down the hall. Apartment A.'
Black stepped down the hall and knocked on the Paris-green door at the end. A young woman appeared from the back of the open apartment, carrying a dish towel and a pan that she was in the process of drying. 'Is there some kind of trouble?'
Lucas nodded: 'Yes. Her brother was killed. We need to interview her; just a routine thing.'
The woman's eyebrows were up: 'I haven't heard them out this morning – Heather usually has the door open so she can play in the hall, and Marta usually stops to talk to her.' She looked at Black and then back to Lucas and asked, 'Do you have some kind of ID?'
'Yes, I do.' Lucas smiled, tried to look pleasant, took out his ID case, handed it over.
She looked at it, then back up at Lucas: 'I've heard of you. You only do murders.'
'What's that, mom?' Heather asked. 'Talk to you later,' the mother said to the girl, handing Lucas's ID case back. 'This is a policeman. He catches bad men.'
'I didn't see any men at Marta's,' the girl said.
'Okay,' Lucas said.
Black, at the end of the hall, said, 'Nobody home.'
'They were having a party last night,' Heather said.
Her mother frowned: 'I didn't hear a party – I didn't see anybody coming or going.'
'I heard them popping the balloons. Like at a birthday party,' the girl said.
Lucas looked down the hall at Black, whose face had gone tight. Black said,
'That's enough for an entry.'
'Right,' Lucas said. To the mother: 'You better take Heather back inside.'
'What? Why?' She turned her eyes down to the other door. Black had slipped his pistol out of his holster, and was holding it by his side, where the little girl couldn't see it. The woman looked back at Lucas, suddenly understanding, and said, 'Oh, no, no… Heather, c'mon. C'mon inside with mom.'