"The dead guy is an Arab?"
"Yes. Adnan Shaheen, from Lebanon," she said. "Decent rep, far as we can tell, but we've got some dope containers and other stuff, and it looks like it might have come out of the hospital pharmacy."
"This didn't happen because of Virgil," Lucas said. "He didn't kill anyone. We've got a stone killer who's cleaning up the mess left from the hospital holdup."
"Pretty goddamn far-out there, though…"
"Don't get on his case. He's coming by in a few minutes," Lucas said.
"Already been here and gone. And I did get on his case. He is the most uncooperative, insubordinate-"
"What'd you want him to do? Say he was looking for a swarthy doctor?" Lucas asked.
"Shut up," she said.
"So we got the doc…"
"And another problem," Marcy said.
Lucas nodded: "Who killed the doc?"
She said, "It's pretty clear to me that it's a gang thing. Somebody else in the Seed got wind of the robbery and hijacked it."
Lucas nodded and said, "Let me take a look." NOT MUCH TO SEE-a dead man with a broken head and a small puddle of blood beneath it, lying on his back, arms beside his body, palms up, in what Yoga people called "the corpse pose," for good enough reason. Lucas watched the processing for a few minutes, then asked, "Who found him?"
"Neighbor. Another guy who works downtown, they carpool into work. He knocked a couple times, and Shaheen didn't answer, and Shaheen's car was still in the parking lot. He peeked in at a corner of the blinds, and he could see him on the floor. Like we did with Lyle Mack."
"Gives me an ice cream headache," Lucas said. "Listen, I'm gonna go put a damp cloth on my eyeballs."
"You do that," she said. "If you think of anything, let me know."
"I already thought of one thing. The doc was friendly enough with the killer that he let the guy hit him from behind." LUCAS WENT OUT and sat in his truck for a while, then put it in gear and headed over to University Hospitals.
Virgil was lounging in the cafeteria, again, waiting. "Am I gonna get some shit?" he asked.
"Nah," Lucas said. "We were looking for an Arab. So what? Turned out we were right." LUCAS GOT a doughnut and a Diet Coke and came back to Virgil's table and said, "When I think about a gang holding up the pharmacy, I think of a tight group of people: Joe Mack, who was seen by Weather, and Chapman and Haines, with Haines confirmed through DNA. Lyle Mack was involved, probably as the brains behind the operation. Ike Mack was probably in charge of selling the drugs downstream. And the doc, who probably set up the robbery, including the theft of a key."
No one else would be needed for the job, he said, and there'd be no reason to tell anyone else about it. Telling somebody else would just be an unnecessary risk.
"First, I thought it was somebody in the group," Lucas said. "They'd committed a murder, inadvertently, and I thought the killer was probably wiping out anyone who could pin the murder on him. And I thought it had to be the doc. Everybody else we know about were friends, and knew each other forever, and now they're all dead. So the doc must be the killer.
"But then the doc was killed. And the doc… I don't see him as a longtime friend of this bunch. The Macks don't have medical friends."
"You're making a logical case for the existence of at least one more guy," Virgil said, "which we already know, unless the doc beat himself to death."
"But one more guy wouldn't have any function in the holdup. And that guy didn't know what happened to the drugs, because he had to torture Lyle Mack to get the information. So he's a total outsider. Then, the way Lyle Mack was tortured, I thought it had to be two guys, one guy sitting in the chair, pinning Mack to the floor, the other guy cutting on him. And that powder on him… I thought the other guy was the doc. The guy who did the cutting."
Virgil said, "Logically, if there could be one outsider, there could be ten outsiders. All the Macks had to do was tell one guy, and the outsider gets his gang together and hijacks the robbery. You don't need the doctor and…" Virgil paused, mid-screed, and then said, "No, that's not right, is it?"
"I don't think so," Lucas said. "Did the Macks tell everybody they knew what they were doing? Why would they do that? And why would the outsiders kill everybody in the gang, if they weren't involved in the pharmacy murder? If all they wanted was the drugs, if they were outsiders, they could have tortured Lyle Mack and killed Ike, and nobody would have known who they were. So why did they kill the doc? How'd they even know about the doc? Why did they make a run at Weather?"
"That could have been Joe Mack or Haines or Chapman, right?"
"No. Haines and Chapman were already dead. The autopsy suggests they were killed the day of the robbery. At least twenty-four hours before Weather was attacked. Weather says the biker was a small guy, and Joe Mack is notably large."
"So there's at least one other guy," Virgil said. "The guy who killed Jill MacBride. That's some outsider DNA, right?"
"If it doesn't belong to the doc." Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, "But it won't belong to the doc, because the guy who killed Jill MacBride is the guy who tortured Lyle Mack. Same cold killer. Same…"
He stopped and turned away from Virgil and said, "Oh, Jesus."
"What?"
"How did the guy who killed Jill MacBride get to the airport? And how did Joe get out? MacBride's car was still there… Somebody picked him up, and killed MacBride, right? The killer picked up Joe Mack. Joe either called him, or Lyle Mack called him and sent him over to pick up Joe. We know Joe Mack talked to Lyle, after he ran."
"They could have taken the train in and out," Virgil said. "But it's about nine hundred and ninety-nine to one that they drove."
Lucas stood up, suddenly excited: "You know what? You know what? The day Joe Mack ran, he was signing his van over to a skinhead. He signed the paper, but the guy never gave Joe any money. No check, nothing. Nothing we saw. I suppose the skinhead could have given Joe a wad of cash ahead of time, but that usually doesn't get done, you know, until the papers are signed. They were either friends, or Joe Mack owed him big. And this was a hard-looking guy."
Virgil's eyebrows went up. "The skinhead-what does he look like?"
"You know, a skinhead," Lucas said. "Probably twenty-five, wind-burned face, skinny, muscles in his face…"
Virgil leaned forward, intent. "Man, I've seen that guy, wandering around by the twins' team, doing nothing," Virgil said. "An orderly, or a whatever, a nurse. He's wearing a hospital uniform. I've seen him a couple times. I'm always catching his eyes-"
Lucas snapped his fingers: dug out his cell phone, called the duty officer: "I need the tag numbers of a van owned by a Joe Mack, M-A-C-K, sold in the last few days… I can wait."
They waited, no more than a minute, and the duty officer came back. "We've got a Joe Mack as the owner of a 2006 Dodge Grand Caravan cargo van, white in color, but there's no transfer come through."
"You got the tags?"
"Yeah. You want them?"
"No. Get onto the airport cops, find out if those tags came into the airport…"
Lucas gave him time and date and said he'd wait again. The duty officer came back after two minutes and said that it'd be another two minutes; and came back and said, "Well, you got it. The van came in at ten forty-two and was out at eleven-oheight."
"Thank you. Get all the numbers, tell the airport cops to be careful with the data, see if they've got a face in their van photo. Get back to me."
He clicked off and said to Virgiclass="underline" "Got him. It's our skinhead. Goddamnit, we should have scanned all the tags coming in and out around the time of the MacBride murder. It would have kicked out Joe Mack's van. I mean, I saw the guy."