"She wanted to stay with me but IAD thought it was a bad idea, like we would stay up all night and concoct a story," she said, sitting in a chair next to me and pulling her feet up beneath her.
"She have a place to go?"
"Her grandmother is up in Pompano Beach."
"You get here with everyone else?" I said.
"Right along with the rescue squad and about thirty other cops coming in from every damn patrol sector in the city."
"He dead when you got here?"
"Yeah. Right there on my front lawn. Bastard."
I let the quiet sit uninterrupted for a while. Richards had already been through the mill, and no doubt would have another session with IAD in the morning, when they would want her to take them through Harris's relationship with the deceased. After a time I tried to offer some solace.
"He deserved it," I said.
I had expected a quick agreement, but Richards was thinking, thinking in that way good detectives think, without letting emotion get in the way of seeing the scene.
"She said he stumbled back out of the door and fell after she shot him." Her tone was unconvincing. I let her think about it. If she wanted to share, she would.
"One shot. In the mouth," she said after a few seconds. "She would know enough to take a head shot. She'd know he was wearing a vest."
"He still deserved it," I said, and then shut up. If Richards wanted to work through her question of premeditation versus an act of fear and self-defense, she was entitled, but I wasn't going to join her there. I sat my cup down and reached out and put my warmed fingers on her wrist and listened to the night. She sighed and I thought I finally heard her give it up.
"Billy tell you that the Highlands County sheriff was asking after you?" she finally said.
"Yeah. What was that all about?"
"A sergeant friend of his with the office called me, knowing that I knew you. He said the sheriff had met you and wanted to verify some background. I gave him the basics. Hope you don't mind."
"I met the guy outside a cafe up in Placid City when I went up looking for the Reverend Jefferson. Seemed a bit inquisitive for a small-town sheriff."
"My friend says the guy is as thorough as any cop he knows but a little obsessed. He says Wilson's on the hook for four homicides in the last fifteen years. All similar. All unsolved."
We were talking shop again, but I let her go on, hoping it would keep her mind off the possibility that her friend Harris had committed a justified but illegal assassination in her own home.
"He says they were all killed by the same big round. A heavy caliber. Possibly all from the same gun."
I stopped drinking the coffee and the look in my face must have confused her.
"What?" she said. "Max? What?"
"He tell you the exact caliber?" I said while digging the cell phone out of my pocket.
"No. I'm not sure the sheriff told him, exactly."
I speed-dialed Billy's home number and got the machine. I tried his office. He picked up on the first ring.
"Hi, Max. Any luck getting Richards?"
"Yeah, I'm at her place now."
"Good. I've been able to contact the prosecutor in Collier I told you about. He's willing to get a forensics team together, but he'd like to get some interagency cooperation. Maybe Sherry can help us with that."
"That's great, Billy, but we might have a more urgent problem," I said, trying to hold back my speculation. "Did Lott get back to you with anything on that old rifle?"
"No. My guess is he just stored it away. We didn't put any priority on it. What's up?"
"We need him to check it, Billy. We need to find out how recently it's been fired. Now."
The attorney went quiet for a second while he did his logic thing.
"Max, what's up?"
I told him about my encounter with Sheriff O. J. Wilson up in Placid City. The way the little bulldog had charmed me into letting him look for a weapon in my truck. Then I filled him in on how Wilson had tried to check me out, through Richards's friend and the string of homicides that had made him so paranoid.
"All large caliber. That could be anything, Max," Billy said. But he was too good a lawyer to dismiss it as coincidence that easily. "Did you call this Wilson and let him know about the gun in Jefferson's barn and its history?"
"It's my next call, Billy. If I can get the guy this late at night."
"Try hard, Max," he said. "Earlier this evening I had a conversation with Mark Mayes. I filled him in on what we found and told him you'd discovered his great-grandfather's watch. He seemed quite dumbstruck by the whole thing."
"You told him about Jefferson?"
"I told him about the grandfather and the son. He was quite intrigued about the grandson having become a minister."
"He thinks its his destiny," I said, thinking out loud. "The letters with his grandfather's deep beliefs, the whole search for what happened and that thing about forgiveness."
Billy was reading me from the other end of the line.
"You think Mayes will try to contact Jefferson? To somehow bring the thing full circle?"
"Yeah, I do. But I'm not so sure that William Jefferson is so forgiving. You know where Mayes is now?"
"I'll try his number."
"Let me know," I said.
The next call I made was to information, looking for the number to the Highlands County Sheriff's Office. When I dialed it I got a computerized answering service giving me the office hours and instructions to call 911 if this was an emergency, or to press one for the county dispatcher.
"Highlands County dispatch," answered a woman with a tired and bored voice. When I asked for a way to speak to Sheriff Wilson, she repeated the office hours and asked me to call back in the morning. That's when I identified myself as Detective Richards of the Broward Sheriff's Office and told her it was a matter of importance. She was much more agreeable, asked for a callback number, and said she would page the sheriff. I did not like to lie often, but I was very good at it when I did. Richards was staring at me when I put the phone down. Her night had been bizarre enough. I started to explain when O. J. Wilson called me back.
"Detective Richards, please," he said when I answered.
"Sheriff Wilson, this is Max Freeman," I said. I gave him a couple of empty seconds, figuring if he didn't hang up right away, I might have a chance to hold him.
"I'm sorry to have deceived you, sir, but I really need to speak with you on a matter that I think may be of concern to you."
"Must be important, Mr. Freeman, for you to have misrepresented yourself as a working law enforcement officer."
"Yes, sir. I am told by sources, sir, that you have been trying to solve a number of homicides that you think are related. And my understanding is that the link you have is the use of a large-caliber rifle."
Again the line was silent, and I could picture the man's small eyes working beneath that furrowed brow.
"Four of them to be exact, Mr. Freeman," he said.
"Have you determined the caliber of the weapon used, sir?"
"We think so. The sheriff at the time of the first shooting found a shell casing in the area. It's pretty distinctive. But we haven't been so lucky in the other three, and in two cases we weren't even able to find bullets. The wounds were through and through and the rounds were never discovered."
"Was the shell casing an old.405?" I said.
This time I had turned the sheriff in a direction I had not meant him to go.
"Mr. Freeman, if there is something you would like to tell me, or talk to me about, I would much rather do this in person. I could come down and meet you first thing in the morning. Maybe you would like to arrange something at the Broward Sheriff's Office down there?"