"You got to find somebody who saw something. All these homicides and not one damn witness. Why? Get out there and find that person who'll tell us what they saw. The biker-gang thing must have looked like World War Three out in the street—find one of your informants and shake some info out of 'em. Every hour goes by we get colder on these victims. Remember that the first order of business here is containment. Don't let this son of a bitch get out on the street. Boyles, the case itself, does not exist. There is nothing so far in the papers or on TV where anybody has linked the two biker scenes to the others. Anybody gets fancy about witness reports, you sit on it. Anybody says—okay that 'mysterious fatality' where the fifth-grade teacher and that other guy had their heads blown off—is the perpetrator's firearm matched up to the heads that were blown off here?" He pointed to the Mount Ely crosses. "Stonewall. You can categorically state there are no such findings. The lab work is verboten territory. Stress that the biker thing was internecine warfare with a rival gang—or whatever. These thirteen and these three were horrible, violent homicides. The mutilation and crucifixion stuff—which God knows how all this information leaks out—but just take the position this was the rival gang trying to cover their tracks and make the crime scene appear to be a ritual deal. No. Don't even say that. Just admit that the two incidents were connected to each other but are not connected to any other recent homicides. If you have to, you can point to the increased national statistics in homicides—Kansas City is just part of the national picture—blah, blah. You know how to do all that. All right?" Everyone nodded.
"Informants. That's your key. They could solve this one for us. Freaks. We want to know about freaks, maybe some guy really into pain. Kind of a joker who would seek out Ms. Hildebrande or the sort of working girl who frequents Connelys. Concentrate especially on Indiana Avenue, east of downtown, Thirty-first to Thirty-sixth and Main, 'chickenhawk alley.'" He meant the area around Tenth and Cherry. "Let's go nail this asshole."
"Hi, stranger," Trask said, when Julie Hilliard strode up to him in the downtown beanery.
"Hi, Vic," she said, and they had that awkward moment when two persons meet in public and can't quite decide whether to hug or kiss. They touched each other in tentative embracing handshakes, and pecked in the air like California society matrons'at a fund-raising gala.
She didn't think Trask had aged a day, but was mildly surprised to see him in such sloppy attire. He wore faded jeans and an open shirt. She supposed people dressed in a more businesslike fashion working for a radio station. His lined face with the pitted, acne-scarred cheeks appeared the same. He had a craggy look that—combined with his go-to-hell air—gave him the appearance of someone much younger than his thirty-six years.
"You haven't changed a bit," he said. She was fairly tall—five feet six or seven, he guessed—slim and trim at a muscular 130, tops. She had wiry brunette hair and fair skin. He knew she'd spent her entire working life, at age thirty-two or thereabouts, as a homicide cop. Her profile would never adorn the cover of a woman's magazine. Her mouth was overly wide, the upper lip not as full as the lower one, and her fashionably mannish hair, curve-concealing outfit, and "dyke boots"—as he thought of them—made an immediate statement. To Trask, sexist pig that he was, the statement was somewhere between an advertisement for the lesbian lifestyle and a defiant "don't worry about my appearance, bozo" kind of proclamation. Either way, she always managed to goad him.
"I was about to say the same thing about you." You still dress like a loser, she thought. His shoes were scuffed and there was a little hayseed scoop in back of his shirt collar when they slid into a booth. Everything she recalled about him was negative. But at least in her memory he dressed like an adult. She thought he looked like he'd been doing yard work.
"What's it been—five years?"
"Every bit of that," she said. She wanted to ask about Jasmine and Kitty, but she swallowed the thought.
"I'm sure you wonder why I got you down here. First, it's nothing to do with the past. Nothing about Kit—or Jazz—I, uh, haven't heard from them in a long time. Kit's left home and living with a guy, but that's neither here nor there." She was staring a couple of holes through him, and not making the meeting any easier. He plunged on. "I'm still researching for KCM; I'm senior researcher for 'Inside America.' And I have been working on some recent homicides."
Christ almighty, she thought, I believed this was something serious and this asshole wants to interview me. "I don't mean to cut you short, but I don't do press interviews at all, Vic. I have a firm policy on that. We have a press—"
"No. I understand. This isn't about an interview. Hear me out a second." Already she'd pissed him off. "I think I may have inadvertently stumbled on some information the police may not have. It may be bullshit, but I want you to take a look at some of my findings. Also, I'm trying to put together news material for the show that ties all this together, and if I help the police I want to feel like my material will be treated in confidence. I don't want to be scooped because I'm coming forward with information I've uncovered, you know?" He was smiling as if he thought he'd told a joke. She just raised her eyebrows and continued to stare holes in him. She had steady, wide-set, piercing eyes, and she made him uncomfortable as hell.
"What is it you think you've found?"
"Okay," he said, bringing out some large, folded pieces of twelve-by-eighteen-inch Strathmore artist paper. There were photos of homicide victims, which she saw that he'd cut from newspapers mostly. Crime-scene shots. Polaroids. Faces and places linked together with arrows. Charts. Trask's neatly typed summaries and bios of the decedents. He'd been a busy boy, she'd give him that. "See?" he said, showing her more.
"So what is it you think you've discovered?"
"The connecting motive behind all this violence. Do you see anything unusual about all these faces?"
"Nope. Not really."
"There aren't any blacks."
"Yeah. So?"
"I think…I know I've hit on something here. You've got a gang of drug dealers who've been killing mostly whites, people encroaching on their territory probably. It ties the killings of the motorcycle gang into all these people. You've got all these mysterious deaths and shootings and drive-by murders…it's obvious, when you study it, that the one thing that links all these homicides together is drugs. And the M.O. is usually the same—right? So my conclusion is this: a black drug cartel has hired an assassin to begin executing non-African-Americans who are dealing drugs. And—"
"Can I be straight with you—I mean, without you taking offense? You've seen too much television. It's that simple." She couldn't help it. She laughed in his face.
"No, I know what I'm saying. I'm not talking TV fantasies here—there are too many killings in a short period of time." He shook his head. Fuck her and her tough diesel dyke attitude. "And you didn't let me finish what I'd found."
"Sorry. Go ahead."
"Thanks." Patronizing bitch. "If it isn't an assassin hired by a drug gang, then the alternative is that we've got one of the worst serial murderers of all time killing people right and left. Am I right?"