The fire chief, Lucky Mulroney, headed their way ten minutes later. “Good news, Mrs. Ransom. We’ve got the fire under control. It looks like maybe half of your house may be structurally intact, but the inspectors won’t be certain until they’ve gone over it carefully.” He looked back. “A bomb—quite a thing. I hate to see one of our beautiful old houses burn.”
“Yes,” Julia said, not looking away from August’s house. “He was trying to kill me, Chief Mulroney, but he didn’t. This is the third time—” She was interrupted by a TV van screeching to a stop some ten feet away. A man shoved the side panel open and jumped out, a camera on his shoulder, panning until he saw Julia, then he shouted as he zeroed right in. There was probably a microphone as well, she thought. She smiled toward the camera, and waved her black fist in the air. “Did you hear that, you loser? You missed me!”
Then Mulroney threatened to turn one of the hoses on the van if they didn’t back off. Frank had some of his men form a perimeter.
Sherlock said, “I’m wondering how Makepeace knew Julia would come out the back of the house.”
Savich said. “He was playing the odds, though the fact is, he couldn’t be sure.”
Frank said, “Or it could mean there was someone with him— Makepeace was in the back and his partner in the front, but where? I had lots of guys spread out in front.”
Cheney said, “You might never find where Makepeace was hiding with so many people tramping around all over the place.”
“We’ll keep looking. Maybe the guy smoked, left a butt.”
Sherlock said, “We heard footsteps upstairs, Frank, not all that long before it blew. So Makepeace had to be in the house.”
She continued after a moment, “Maybe that’s why he didn’t go for a head shot on you, Cheney, he had to move too fast to get out of there and wanted to be sure he hit you. Then Julia would have been in the open.”
Cheney rubbed his chest. “He got me straight on in the chest and in the center of my back, both fine shots.”
Frank said, “Does anyone have a clue who this partner of his could be, if there was someone? The guy out here to watch the front?”
Savich shrugged. “Could be the person who hired Makepeace to kill Julia, or he could have hired some local talent. The thing is, though, we’ve never heard of Makepeace working with a partner.”
Savich’s cell rang. He listened, then punched off. He looked at them. “That was Dix. Kathryn Golden’s still heavily sedated. They don’t expect her to make much sense for a while yet. They’ve got her at Stanford, a cop on her door.”
A police officer came running up. “We found the motorcycle, Captain, but Makepeace was long gone. That’s the bad, here’s the good.” The officer grinned big. “We got us a witness, an old guy who was walking to the little park right across the street from his house on Brinkley with his seven-year-old great-granddaughter. He said a man plowed his motorcycle real fast right into a mess of thick bushes on the far side of the park, didn’t even try to stop. Then the guy jumped off. In the next minute this small blue car pulled up and he got inside. Car took off. The old guy said he doesn’t know about cars, so had no clue as to its make, didn’t see anything else. Our people are canvassing the neighborhood. Someone else had to see something.”
Savich said, “Officer, wait a moment. Cheney, you and Julia should go back to the Sherlocks’ house. Sherlock and I will go speak to this witness.”
Sherlock heard Julia say, “I’m so relieved Freddy went home on Sunday.”
Savich arched an eyebrow. “Freddy?”
Cheney was laughing. “The neighbor’s cat.”
As they walked away, they heard reporters yelling out questions to them from twenty yards away.
CHAPTER 51
About a half mile from Julia’s house, on Brinkley Street, Savich and Sherlock found the old man standing on his narrow front porch in front of a 1940s cottage, leaning on a cane. He told them first thing that he’d stashed his great-granddaughter safely inside the house. “A wild thing it was,” he said, shaking his head, “happened real fast. My name’s Tuck Wilson.”
Savich introduced himself and Sherlock, pulled out their shields. The old man stuck out his hand. Savich automatically started to shake it, then realized both he and Sherlock were black and filthy. He smiled at the old man. “I don’t want to dirty you up.”
“I appreciate that. So you both were in that fire in the big Ransom place,” Mr. Wilson said and motioned toward the door. “It’s all over the news. You want to come in and clean up?”
Sherlock smiled. “No thank you, Mr. Wilson. We need to ask you some more questions about the man on the motorcycle.”
“Call me Tuck, everybody does except for my little great-granddaughter. She calls me Friar, smart-mouthed little punk.”
Tuck Wilson waved them toward £ wooden swing, but they shook their heads.
“—after the man drove his motorcycle right into the bushes, what exactly did he do?”
“Like I told the other officer, the guy jumped right off—he seemed real familiar with a motorcycle, smooth—okay, he turned and looked up the street. Not more than a minute passed before this blue car drove up, he jumped in the passenger seat, and they took off.”
A whole minute, Savich thought, and smiled. “Please tell us what the motorcycle guy looked like, Mr. Wilson.”
Tuck waved his cane toward the bushes. “He was more tall than not, a black guy, and he moved real fast and he was strong and graceful-like. He had on an old banged-up black leather jacket, I could see the nicks in the leather even with my old eyes. He had on some boots, not cowboy boots, but black boots like a biker would wear. He was wearing a helmet. When he first jumped off the motorcycle, he pulled it off. He was wearing glasses, isn’t that a kick? He saw me, I know he must have, saw Alice too, but he didn’t make any sort of move on us. No, he just concentrated on the street, and watched for the car.”
“Excellent, Tuck,” Savich said. “Okay, think back now. You see the blue car drive up. You see the driver. Tell us about him.”
“Hmmm, now that’s a bit more difficult, it all happened real fast. It was a man, young like the first—” Tuck broke off, laughed. “You gotta understand, anyone who isn’t on the shady side of sixty-five looks young to me. Alice said they were both old, but she’s seven years old.”
“Middle-aged, maybe?”
“He just wasn’t getting on like me.”
“The driver, was he bald? Glasses? What was he wearing?”
“No, he wasn’t bald, I’m sure about that. I couldn’t tell you exactly how much hair he had on his head, only that I could see some. The color? I couldn’t tell, really couldn’t, sorry. I remember thinking it was weird how his fingers kept tapping on the steering wheel while the motorcycle guy climbed into the car. Then he started yelling.”
“Could you hear what he was yelling about?” Savich asked.
“‘Hurry’ that’s what he yelled, yelled it twice, and then he cussed and stomped on the gas. Now that I think about it, that car really took off fast. So it probably wasn’t an everyday sort of car, probably a fancy one, German, maybe, sounded real sweet and smooth.”
“Friar, you didn’t tell them the guy driving the car was mad, real mad.”
Savich and Sherlock looked down at a little girl who’d slipped out the front door and was peering around at them from behind her great-grandfather’s waist. “You’re Alice, right?”
Alice stared up at Sherlock. “I bet your hair’s real beautiful, ma’am, but not right now. It looks like you need to wash it. Oh, I’m Alice Douggan and this is one of my ancestors, Friar. That’s what he calls himself.”