Sunrise was still an hour away as they gathered at the clinic to await the onslaught of the most fanatic faction of the anti-abortion movement, a self-styled “rescue” group funded by reactionaries and led by a pair of Catholic priests who in the past several years had been jailed far more often than they’d offered the host. Their tactics had been explained to Teddy yesterday at the last of the training and orientation meetings. As she assembled with the others, she felt totally prepared for anything that might come today.
She was wrong.
“DID YOUR SON know anyone named Timothy O’Laughlin?” Parker asked.
That was the name of the dead writer the blues had found at three o’clock this morning, just about when Teddy’s alarm was starting to blink and shake her awake. It was now a little past eight, and Catalina Herrera was trying to get back to her typewriter. Her son had been buried yesterday, and it was time now to begin attacking the pile of manuscripts and correspondence that had accumulated on the small desk she’d set up near the kitchen window. Barefoot and wearing a black skirt and a white blouse recklessly unbuttoned some four buttons down from the top to expose the slopes of her generous breasts, she stood silhouetted in the window that now streamed early morning sunlight. It looked as if spring might actually have arrived at last. It was time to get on with her work. Time to try to get on with living her life again.
“No, I don’ know thees name,” she said.
“Timmo?” he said. “Does that ring a bell?”
“No, I don’t know thees, too,” she said.
The charming Spanish accent. Parker loved it. Listening to her voice, he smiled—though a third victim was certainly nothing to smile about.
He and Kling had been called at home at twenty minutes past three this morning because the guy lying on the sidewalk near the graffiti-covered wall of what used to be the Municipal Fish Market in the northeast corner of the precinct had been shot twice in the head and once through the hand and then spray-painted afterward. The bullet through the hand was probably the result of his having thrown it up in self-defense, thinking perhaps he was Superman and could stop speeding bullets. Whether or not three shots had been fired or merely two —with the same bullet going through the hand and then the upper lip—was a matter of conjecture. As had been the case with the previous two victims, there hadn’t been any spent cartridges or bullets recovered at the scene, so nobody knew what kind of gun had been used except that it definitely wasn’t an automatic, which would have spewed cartridge cases like cherry pits. Each of the victims had been shot at close range. The bullets had gone right on through, so either the techs weren’t doing their jobs right or else the shooter had picked up after himself, like a conscientious citizen scooping up dog doo. Gathering bullets and cartridge cases if the gun had been an auto, bullets alone if it had been a revolver. A hunter and gatherer was the Graffiti Killer, as the tabloids had begun calling him.
“Mrs. Herrera,” Parker said, “we now have…do you mind if I call you Catalina?” he said, pronouncing it “Cat-uh-leen-uh” and not the way she herself would have pronounced it, “Cah-tah-leen-ah.”
“Cathy,” she said, surprising Kling.
Parker blinked.
“My friends call me Cathy,” she said.
“Cathy, good,” Parker said, and nodded. “What I was saying, Cathy, is that we now have three victims of this person, including your son, which by the way I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the funeral yesterday.”
“De nada,”she said.
So damn cute, the way they talked, he thought. The women.
“But we were busy trying to get a line on the second one,” he said, “who doesn’t seem to fit the picture, although we found cans of spray paint in his house. I never heard of a closet graffiti writer, did you, Bert?” Parker asked, pulling him into it, showing with a grin what a jovial and well-meaning fellow he was, unlike other police detectives Cathy may have known. Kling did not enjoy being an accomplice. Parker wanted to hit on the woman, let him do it on his own time.
“We found the paint in his closet , you see,” Parker explained, though Kling guessed little Cathy here didn’t know what a closet anything was, no less a closet graffiti writer. Still, Parker had explained his little joke, which showed his heart was in the right place. “But the guy’s a lawyer, the second one,was a lawyer, thirty-eight years old, it turned out, with a wife thirty-five. You don’t expect a person like that to be writing graffiti, do you?”
“Of cours’ nah,” Cathy said.
Holmes to Watson, Kling thought. Watson agreeing with the master sleuth’s theory. In an accent you could slice with a machete.
“Your son never mentioned his name, did he happen to?”
“Wha’wass hees name?”
God, Parker loved the way she talked.
“Peter Wilkins,” he said.
“No. I never heard this name before.”
He was beginning to get bilingual, understanding every word she spoke. He wondered what she spoke in bed. He hoped she spoke Spanish. He wanted her to tell him all sorts of things in Spanish. Like how much she loved his cock in her Spanish mouth.
“So your son never mentioned either of them, is that right? What we’re looking for, Catalina,Cathy, is some kind of connection between the three of them, someplace we can hang our hats, is what we call it in police work,” he said, and smiled again.
Jee-sus! Kling thought.
“I don’t know anything to help,” she said.
It seemed clear to Kling that the woman had nothing further to contribute along these lines. The possibility was less than remote that her son had known either of the other two victims, one of them a lawyer, the other a veteran writer with a Criminal Mischief record. That’s what writing graffiti was called in the law books—Criminal Mischief. Three degrees of it.
Crim Mis One was defined as:With intent to do so and having no right to do so nor any reasonable ground to believe that one has such right, damaging property of another: 1. In an amount exceeding $1,500; OR 2. by means of an explosive. This was a Class-D felony punishable by sentences ranging from a one-year minimum in prison to a seven-year max, unless you happened to be a sixteen-to-twenty-one-year-old toddler, in which case you could be sent to a reformatory instead.
The other two degrees of Criminal Mischief were determined by the value of the property damaged, more than $250 in the case of Crim Mis Two , a Class-E felony, and less than $250 in the case of Crim Mis Three , a mere Class-A misdemeanor. A Class-E felony was punishable by a min of one and a max of four with the same reformatory provision for so-called minors. A Class-A misdemeanor was punishable by no more than a year in prison or a thousand-dollar fine.