Millikan shook his head. “Once, fifteen years ago, he allowed me to comfort myself with the fantasy that I was hauling him in to face questioning and a possible murder charge. He knew that very little evidence would be found, and he knew that it all supported him. He had removed everything that didn’t.” He paused. “Otherwise, I suppose he would have killed me too.”
“If you know that, then why do him a favor?”
“It’s not a favor. It’s an act of calculation. I was in that restaurant in Louisville right after it happened. I think that the one who did it is one of the special cases. He’s somebody we can’t afford to have walking down a street where our families walk. I don’t like Prescott. It costs me something to know I put Prescott into play. Well, tough for me. What I feel is nothing compared to the damage this killer has already done. He’s not going to stop unless somebody stops him. We both know Prescott is the best bet for doing that.”
“But you were a police officer.”
“I was,” said Millikan. “And you were a D.A. We both followed all of the rules.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that maybe the reason we retired and went on to other things was so we could sell out for a good cause. You’re one of the best lawyers in the country. You know that even the half-assed gun control we already have is unconstitutional, but you argue for more as though it weren’t.”
Cameron glared at him, but then his shoulders slumped in a sad, tired way. He looked older. “What the hell am I supposed to do? Wait for the Second Amendment to be repealed while thirty thousand people a year get killed? You know goddamned well it’ll never happen.”
Millikan shook his head. “I voted for you. If I lived in your district, I’d vote for you again.”
Cameron nodded sadly. “I’ll see you, Danny.” He walked off toward the other end of the floor, where a driver was waiting for him in a Lincoln Town Car.
Millikan got into his rental car and picked up the road map from the passenger seat. This was the second time in thirty-six hours that someone had called him Danny—just like the old days.
Varney stopped walking at the phone booth, then took a last look around. There was nobody near enough to hear him, and there would not be anytime soon. The gas station had been closed for hours. He put in the first two quarters, dialed the number, and listened to hear how much more he needed to deposit to reach Los Angeles, then pushed those coins in too. He wanted to hear the voice. He knew he would probably only hear a recording, but it might be a recording of Prescott’s voice. The voice would help him judge things—the man’s size and weight and age, the regional accent. The phone rang once, twice. The click was wrong. A man answered, not a recording. “Yes?”
Varney felt annoyed. He had just wanted to hear the man’s voice.
“Yes?” the man repeated. “Hello?” Varney knew that the man wouldn’t talk unless he signified his presence. He needed to let the man know he was listening. He breathed loudly so he could hear the sound in the earpiece, and instantly felt foolish. It was what perverts did to scare women.
Prescott laughed, a deep, open-mouthed guffaw. “A breather?” he said. “You’re a breather? It’s you, isn’t it? What’s on your mind? Oh, I know. You’re calling because you heard they had hired me and you want to make a deal. I’m afraid I can’t do that on this one. I understand your feelings. You know you went too far this time, and you want to be forgiven and get out of it. I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”
Varney’s head was throbbing, and the tunnel vision was coming back. He could almost see this man—tall and thin, with long hands, and he had an accent like a big fucking cowboy. He whispered, “You stupid fucker. I called to tell you you’re dead.”
“Not very convincing,” said Prescott. The whispered voice sounded young, so Prescott made his tone patronizing. “But I understand. You want me to be scared, just like you are. I’m afraid it’s not possible. That’s just one of the differences between a boy and a man.”
“You forget, I know who you are.”
Prescott’s voice came back with a slight frustration. “Now, there’s an example of one of the other differences. You think you did a pretty good job back there in Louisville, don’t you? You stole a padlock and chain for the restaurant door. Don’t you know that, even at night, stores have surveillance cameras aimed at their front doors? I got you on tape, Slick. That’s more than you know about me. I can pick you out anytime, but you won’t see me coming.”
Prescott paused and listened to the silence. He hoped that the man on the other end was feeling a moment of pure terror: of course there were surveillance cameras. Every time some poor jerk broke into a liquor store they had him on tape. How could he have forgotten? Prescott waited patiently for the outburst.
The voice was sick with anger. “You’re full of shit.”
“Too bad you slipped up that way on your first try.”
Varney said, “There were no mistakes, and it wasn’t my first.”
“Oh? What else have you done? How many?”
“I don’t keep track,” said Varney. “Enough.”
“You’re not old enough to lose count,” said Prescott. “I know you’re scared to say what they were. I’m just asking a number.”
Varney said, “Columbus, Ohio, a year ago in November. Phoenix in January. Houston in April. Pittsburgh in May. Danville, Illinois, in May. Biloxi in July. L.A. in July.”
“What are those?”
“Look them up. You’ll see.”
The line went dead. Prescott hung up the telephone and sat in his office, looking down at the surface of his desk. He should have been up and pacing and feeling jubilant. He had succeeded. Having Millikan go on TV had worked. He’d had no right to expect the man would see Millikan so soon. But what had happened did not feel pleasant enough to be a victory.
When Prescott had been a boy, there had been a house down the street where he stopped on the way to school. He waited until a younger boy and his sister appeared, then walked with them. The younger boy was one of those whose only hope was to grow into an adult as quickly as he could: he was no good at being a child. He was skinny and unprepossessing and wore glasses. The worst thing about him was that he was smart, and he had so little sense of what other people were really thinking that he didn’t hide it, or make a joke out of it, as Prescott did.
So Prescott walked with them, made sure they got into their classrooms unmolested. He told other people he protected them because his mother made him. It wasn’t quite a lie, because if his mother had known, she would have. She would have stopped what she was doing in the kitchen and trained those big brown eyes on him for a second and said, “Too bad there’s nobody around with the guts to stand up for those two until they get a little older.” Then she would have gone back to what she was doing, pretending it had nothing to do with her. After a day or two, she would have asked, casually, “How are those Beeman kids getting on?”
The Beemans had an older brother, much older, maybe twenty-five. He lived three streets over, in a house that had two trucks parked in the driveway at night because he had an exterminator business. He was always gone too early in the morning to take the kids to school, and came home too late to pick them up. But one day after school, Prescott saw that one of the trucks was parked in the driveway at the house where the young boy and girl lived, and the older brother was there, sitting on the porch in his work clothes, drinking a Coke out of a can. He said, “Prescott. You’re a good man.” Prescott was twelve. “You want a summer job?”
Prescott said he did, without knowing what it was or what sort of pay to expect. He went home and asked his mother if that was okay, and she said it was just fine, as parents did in those days. Two weeks later, school ended and Prescott went to work. He had to get up at five and be outside Carl Beeman’s house to help him load his chemicals, traps, and tools. They worked until dark.