“Is it a rule you can’t relax while we do this?” Cindy asked, handing him a glass of wine. She had already placed one in front of Janet and held one for herself. When Hannibal shook his head, she turned to drop onto his lap.
Janet turned just enough to smile a thank you toward Cindy as she sipped her wine. “Here’s the site I was looking for,” she said. Hannibal saw the words “License Plates of the World” and checked the URL: http://danshiki.oit.gatech.edu/~iadt3mk/index.html. Way too complex to try to remember.
“Bookmark that, will you Janet?”
“Will do,” she said. “Now, we’re assuming the car you’re after is registered in the U.S., right?”
“Yeah,” Hannibal said, sipping his wine. Cindy had chosen a fruity white wine that he knew would lighten his spirits. “So let’s start looking. There’s only fifty of them.”
Janet tapped a few keys and a group of plates came into view. “I guess alphabetically is as good a way to approach it as any, eh?” she said. “Here’s Alabama.”
“Nope, way too light,” Hannibal said. “The plate we’re looking for is dark, maybe a real dark blue, with white letters.”
“And the first three characters are numbers, right?” Janet added, tapping more keys. “Alabama always has a letter in the first three. Alaska’s next.”
Cindy squirmed down into Hannibal’s lap, getting comfortable. “So did Doc Roberts say what got Dean into the hospital?”
“Oh yeah,” Hannibal said, kissing her forehead just because it was within reach. “Dean discovered his father’s mutilated body.”
“Oh God,” Cindy said, moaning as if she herself had seen something awful.
“He and his dad had been alone in the house. His mother came over but Dean didn’t go to greet her I guess. From another room he heard them arguing, apparently about finalizing their divorce.”
Janet skipped Alaska, which starts with three letters, and Arizona, which has a light blue plate. “Kids don’t go near when that’s going on,” she said.
“Roberts says he heard her leave,” Hannibal said, hugging Cindy to his chest. “Then the door opens again, in Dean’s words, like she forgot something.”
Janet skipped past Arkansas, California and Colorado for color or number combination mismatches. “Maybe she was just getting up her courage.”
Hannibal wondered if Janet was projecting her own feelings. “For whatever reasons, the next thing Dean heard was a grunt, then something heavy falling to the floor. Then the door slams again.”
Cindy emptied her wine glass while watching the monitor. “Hey what about Connecticut?”
Hannibal leaned forward. “Dark blue, light letters, three numbers a dot then three letters. That could be it!”
“I’ll bookmark this page too, and move on,” Janet said. “So then this kid walks out and finds his father dead, right?”
Hannibal gave a grim nod. “I’m afraid so. Terrible thing for a boy that age.”
“You lost your dad when you were even younger,” Cindy commented. She refilled glasses while Janet flipped past Delaware and the District of Columbia, plates they were all familiar with, and glanced at Florida and Georgia plates which were the wrong colors.
“That was different,” Hannibal said. “I lost my dad to a faceless enemy a thousand miles away. And I didn’t have to see him dead.”
Janet never turned from the monitor. Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa all failed to match Hannibal’s description. “That’s a terrible thing, but does it make him an eyewitness?”
“That’s kind of where the story gets muddy,” Hannibal said. “Bea told me he never actually saw his mother in the house. But he testified she was there to please his aunt. That probably explains some of his guilt.”
Cindy resumed her seat. “Sure. He thinks he’s the reason his mother’s in jail.”
Hannibal watched license plates flash across the computer screen over her hair: Kansas was a loser.
“What about Kentucky?” Janet asked. “The numbers. Fairly dark at the top.”
Hannibal leaned in close. “No, I don’t think so. I seem to remember a dot. A dot after the first three numbers. And Doctor Roberts admitted Dean thinks he’s responsible for a lot, including his father’s death and Oscar Peters’.
Cindy kissed his neck. “You think the two murders are connected somehow, don’t you?”
Louisiana, Maine, Maryland and Massachusetts were the wrong color. Michigan could have been it, but the plate started with three letters instead of numbers. “Connected? Well let’s see. Stabbings both times. In the victim’s living room at night both times. Knife gone both times. Men in Dean Edwards’ life both times. Dean finds the body both times. Yeah, I’d say they might be connected.”
Janet fanned past the next five states. Hannibal was momentarily distracted because Cindy pressed her mouth against his and he was enjoying the sweetness of the wine mingled with her kiss.
“Hey cut that out you two,” Janet said with a grin. “How about this one, Hannibal?”
Hannibal pulled himself free of Cindy’s embrace and stared hard at the monitor. The license plate was cobalt blue with three numbers and three letters separated by a dot. The raised characters were silver, with a reflective quality Hannibal recognized. That and a number of subtle visual cues he couldn’t name made his heart quicken beyond what the wine and Cindy’s kiss could do.
“That’s it,” he said softly. “Now we know what state the real killer drove in from.”
12
Wednesday
Silver Spring was a community in search of an identity. Like its sister communities
Bethesda and Chevy Chase, Hannibal thought of it as a growth on the northern skin of Washington, growing up into Maryland, technically independent but too close to call a suburb. Coming in off the capitol Beltway, a driver slid into these cities and could never know he had crossed over into The District if not for signs indicating a change.
Hannibal had a couple of errands to attend to in Silver Spring, which is tucked into that three or four mile space between the Beltway and the District. In that narrow space it graded rather quickly from affluent suburb to inner city business district as it merged with the narrow dirty streets of Washington. So almost as soon as he was off the highway Hannibal was turning right into an older neighborhood, older but still proud and, to the extent it could be, exclusive. In many ways the neighborhood reminded him of the woman he was here to see, Ursula Voss.
Janet Ingersoll had verified that this year’s Nevada license plates held three numbers followed by three letters, not counting vanity plates and special plates of course. She promised to check the Nevada motor vehicle database today and give him a printout showing which of the seventeen thousand possible combinations starting with 902 were currently issued in Nevada. In the meantime, he had little to go on to help solve Oscar’s murder. So he decided that he would try to find out more about the death of Dean’s father. Ursula was the most likely source of information there.
On the telephone, Ursula told him her office was in her home and that she could give him a few minutes if he came fairly early. Less than an hour after that call, Hannibal pulled up in front of Ursula’s house and set his parking brake. The large brick structure was probably forty years old. He’d bet Ursula bought it new at a time when the idea that it would one day be worth a quarter million dollars would have raised a laugh. And he was sure she had lived there ever since. Despite the bay window, the porch was reminiscent of the one on the front of Oscar’s house.
Hannibal tightened his gloves before he rang the bell. When Ursula opened the door she was wearing a blue flowered dress that could have come off the same rack as the one she had on the day before. A pair of reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck.