There were plenty of other mysteries, of course. The Dale Watson who had been involved in the Evanston case was dead, but another one had appeared in Atlanta. Was this just a coincidence, or was there a generic “Dale Watson” of whom these two were simply examples? Above all, what was the purpose behind such senseless killings? With any luck, Kristine thought as she strolled back to the center of town, she would have the answers to all these questions by that evening. Her connecting flight left at one-thirty, getting into Atlanta three hours later. By five, or shortly after, she would be at the surviving gunman’s bedside.
Despite what Charlie Freeman had said, she didn’t think it would be too hard to make him cooperate. The detail of the Nike Air Jordan basketball shoes clinched it. She felt sure that the man in intensive care in Grady Memorial Hospital was one of the two who had taken part in the Kansas City shooting, where he had stepped in the pink paint hurled in a last act of desperation by Winston Jones, the handyman. And he had also been at the house in Renton, where Jamie had seen the shoes from his hiding place. But their owner didn’t know anything about this. He thought he was safely anonymous, supposedly the innocent victim of an unprovoked street attack. Best of all, he had no idea that Jamie Sullivan had survived.
Kristine had already put together her game plan. She wouldn’t ask questions, she would make statements. She’d start by describing the Renton and Kansas City killings in great detail. Then she’d confront him with a copy of her interviews with Jamie, carefully edited to exclude the fact that the boy hadn’t actually seen the killers. Finally, at the psychologically precise moment, she would drop in the detail of the Nike Air Jordans. That would be enough to make him talk, she calculated, particularly in his weakened condition. The case against him was airtight, and in a death-penalty state. The shock of discovering that his crimes were known, documented and witnessed, added to the prospect of enduring weeks of agony in the hospital only to end up dangling from the end of a rope, would surely be enough to break even the strongest and most stubborn spirit.
At exactly eight o’clock, Kristine Kjarstad presented herself at the front desk of the police station and asked for Eileen McCann. While she waited, she surveyed her reflection in a glass door across the room. With the image she had formed of Eileen McCann in mind, she had given some thought to her own. Finally she had settled for a gray cotton-blend suit, sober but expensive, with a stiff backbone of polyester to help resist the rigors of an overnight in cattle class. Add her executive-style briefcase, and she figured she was a match for anyone.
It turned out she needn’t have bothered with any of these elaborate preparations. In person, Eileen McCann was a sad frump, overweight and out of shape, a chain-smoking fashion victim for whom every day was a bad-hair day. She greeted Kristine coolly and invited her into a small, immaculately neat office. The walls were bare, the papers and books neatly stacked, the furniture modern and functional. Even the cigarette butts in the ashtray were aligned as precisely as they had been in the pack.
“Do you have an interesting life, Ms. Carstad?” McCann asked when they were seated. “Professionally, I mean.”
Kristine shrugged.
“King County is pretty big. It stretches from the ocean all the way up to the mountains, and surrounds Seattle on three sides. So we get our share of the action.”
McCann crushed out her cigarette and laid it beside the others in the ashtray.
“I envy you. Crimewise, Evanston is strictly bush league. The most interesting case I’ve had until this thing was an alleged date rape involving two students from the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. And the only interesting thing about that was trying to figure out which of the parties involved was lying most about what. So yesterday, instead of trying to break through to a new level in the video game which my partner thoughtfully downloaded into our computer, we worked the phones and the fax and contacted four hundred law enforcement agencies and state prosecutor’s offices across the country. Correction, three hundred ninety-two.”
Kristine looked suitably impressed.
“That must have taken hours.”
“Jeff went home at five, but then he has a home to go to. I stayed till eleven. I made a few more calls out west, where they were still at work, then collated the data we’d come up with. I didn’t even notice the time, to tell you the truth. I was too damn excited.”
“You found something?”
Eileen McCann wrinkled her unlovely nose.
“I would hardly have brought the matter to your attention otherwise, Detective Carstad.”
“Call me Kristine.”
The other woman appeared to consider this offer carefully.
“OK. And you can call me lies.”
“Iles?”
“That was my father’s name for me. My mother always referred to me as Miss Eileen. ‘Well, Miss Eileen, straight As again, huh? Looks like you must have brains, at least. Let’s hope so, child, because that face sure as hell won’t pay your freight.’ She was typical lace-curtain Irish, hypocritical with outsiders, ruthless with her family.”
She passed Kristine a sheaf of neatly typed pages.
“OK, here’s my homework from last night. As you’ll see, our makeshift poll elicited six matches to add to the two we already know about.”
“Make that three. After I called you, I found out about what looks like another one, in Atlanta.”
Eileen McCann lit another cigarette.
“I’d like to hear about that later, Kristine. As I was saying, we came up with six cases which fit the broad parameters you outlined on the phone. In reverse chronological order, they are St. Louis, Los Angeles, Oklahoma, Columbus, Salt Lake City and Houston.”
Kristine scanned the first sheet, which provided brief details of location and timing for each crime. The earliest was four years ago. The rest had occurred at irregular intervals since then, anywhere from a few weeks to several months.
“You sure got a quick response out of the LE As involved,” she said, partly to cover her embarrassment at not having done the same thing herself weeks before.
“They mostly didn’t even have to consult their files,” McCann replied crisply. “The kind of thing we’re talking about here is so unusual it tends to stick in the minds of the investigators however long ago it was. Most of them were able to tell me what I wanted to know then and there, over the phone.”
She consulted a copy of the document she had given Kristine.
“As you can see, Houston is chronologically the first of the presumed series. The victims were three males in their twenties and a prostitute they had brought back from a bar. The men were living in a trailer. They had a dog loose in the yard. A lump of raw steak was wedged in the chainlink. When the dog came to investigate, it was shot with a.22-caliber automatic silenced with the nipple from a baby bottle which was found discarded at the scene. One of the guys comes to the door and is shot between the eyes. One of the others tries to grab a rifle on the wall, doesn’t make it. The other and the hooker are both shot in the head at close range.”
Kristine had been following the typed report.
“They used regular CSA ammo, no handcuffs or gags, and an automatic, not a revolver. Apart from that, the MO fits.”
“You’d expect some variation. They’d refine the details as they gained more experience. For instance, realizing that the benefit of being able to suppress the noise from an automatic was outweighed by the disadvantages of leaving behind identifiable ejected cartridges or wasting time hunting around for them. On the other hand, the similarities may just be superficial. The Houston PD wrote it off as some kind of lowlife feud. The victims all had records going way back. Maybe they’d made one too many enemies.”