"Cleanest crime scene I've ever seen," was what the crime lab's captain told him.
Bolinger had twenty men working under him on this one, and so far, no one had turned over anything concrete. He knew it was Lipton. But he needed something solid. A hunch never convicted anyone. That took hard evidence.
Ten minutes later, Farnhorst burst into his office with a mammoth grin.
"Got what you need, Bob!" he said, waving a paper triumphantly in the air. He slapped it down on Bolinger's desk and said, "Did a computer cross-check on the area and I came up with this!"
Bolinger followed the detective's thick finger to the spot on the page that chronicled a code ten-seventeen, a hit-and-run property damage. Apparently, the day before at two-thirty in the afternoon, a woman whose car was parked on the street opposite Marcia Sales's address had seen a maroon Lexus sedan back out of the driveway and into her car. The driver, whom she couldn't identify, sped off without stopping, but the woman had noted the license plate number as the car tore down the street. The car belonged to Lipton.
"Yes!" Bolinger said, slapping the paper. "Get me a warrant, Mo. I want the house and the car turned inside out, and I want him under a light before lunch."
Bolinger closed the door to his office, then opened the window before taking out a cigarette and lighting up. He rubbed his eyes and gulped down what was left of his coffee, taking time to crush a few grounds between his teeth. Sleep was something that would have to wait. This was how it was done, classic detective work. Most homicides were solved in the first forty-eight hours or they weren't solved at all. He'd known when he saw him that Lipton smelled, and now he had him.
Earlier in the morning, Alice Vreeland had confirmed for him that the girl hadn't died of asphyxiation but from having some of her insides cut out. She had bled to death. Alice told him he was looking for a pretty sharp knife.
"Sharp enough to shave," Vreeland had commented.
"By the way," she had continued, "I've got to go back to the house. I thought they had everything, but I can't find her gall bladder. No one picked one up, did they?"
Bolinger rubbed his eyes some more and wondered again at her macabre comment. Unsure of whether or not she was trying to be funny, he hadn't reacted. Now he wondered if, instead of an oversight, there was some reason the gall bladder was missing. He'd never heard of anything like it, but he'd never seen a body like that, either, half choked to death and split open like a butchered cow. Bolinger shuddered at the thought. An image came screaming into the forefront of his mind. It was the look on Don Sales's face and the sound of his horror when he walked into that room. How deep must that pain be?
Bolinger picked up the phone. He wanted to give the father something, an offering of condolence. The only way he knew to do that was to show how hard he was working to pin down the killer. He wanted to call Sales and tell him about the apparent hit-and-run. Then he thought better of it. He'd wait until they had Lipton in the bag. There was no reason to build the man's hopes on circumstantial evidence. Who knew? They might get lucky and find the knife with the girl's blood all over it, although from the cleanliness of the crime scene, he doubted it. Whoever killed the girl knew what they were doing. A crime scene that clean was almost unheard of.
Bolinger worked up some paper. It was nearly two hours before Farnhorst returned.
"We got him, Bob," he said triumphantly. "Guy was getting ready to take a little trip. He'd booked a ticket to Toronto and was already on his way north on Thirty-five towards the airport when I caught up with the surveillance team to bring him in. When we tried to pull him over, he made a run for it. Wrecked his car, then hopped out and ran into some woods. He didn't get very far. Had a couple bags packed, his passport, and about twenty thousand dollars in cash."
Bolinger stuck a pen in his mouth and started to chew on it. "Shit, good job."
"But this is what you're really gonna like," Farnhorst said, holding forth a plastic bag containing what looked like a woman's underwear.
Bolinger took the bag and looked at it quizzically.
"We found this stuffed into the bottom of his duffel bag…" Farnhorst said. "It's a woman's bra and panties…
"There's blood on them, Bob," he said quietly. "I wanted to show you before I send them to the lab… I think they might be hers."
CHAPTER 3
ONE YEAR LATER
"And he wants me to represent him!" Casey said.
She spoke in a tone just this side of obnoxious but still loud enough for everyone else at the table to hear. It was an elegant political fund-raiser for the governor at a thousand dollars a plate. Women in gowns and diamonds, men in tuxedos and gold Swiss watches turned their heads. Casey tossed back her titian hair and laughed frivolously. Her own diamond necklace danced in the candlelight.
With her long, pretty fingers draped loosely over his shoulder, she said to her husband, "Tony wants me to go up to Minnesota and represent a rock star. A rock star! What next?"
Polite chuckles filled the air, but everyone's interest was piqued. It wouldn't surprise a single one of them if Casey Jordan represented a rock star. They only wanted to know which one.
Tony looked up sullenly from the remains of a bloody prime rib and said, "Pierce Culpepper."
General murmurs of acknowledgment filled the air.
"He lives in Minnesota?" someone asked.
"That's where he's from originally," another person answered.
Dessert arrived: strawberry shortcake made with fresh berries and cream. Casey watched jealously as Tony dug into his own and took hers aside for himself as well. Her days of having both dessert and a real waistline were over. At thirty-seven, her body still demanded a second look, but it came only at a price.
"He was arrested for assault," Tony dutifully explained through a mouthful of calories, "and he wants Casey to represent him."
"Did he do it?" someone from the other end of the table asked.
Tony shrugged. His thick eyebrows, like his hair, were graying. He was a portly man with thick jowls anchoring his basset hound face. Its greatest distinction was a small, neat goatee. But his voice was deep and soothing, and his many years in front of judge and jury had left the indelible marks of confidence and wisdom on his brow. And what he lacked in looks he made up for in flamboyant dress. His clothes weren't only expensive, they were colorful. Some people would even say loud.
"Innocent until proven guilty," he said. "We all know that."
"Maybe we should talk to him," Casey said as if she were casually considering the move.
Tony knew her game, not that he minded. He was an outsider in this setting, just as much as she was, probably more. She, at least, had married into the upper crust of Texas society, the Vanderhorns and the Watts, the Gardeners, the Rienholfs, and, of course, her own husband's family, the Jordans. They were rich, every one of them, and most of them had earned their money the old-fashioned way: They had inherited it. The ones who could took great delight in drawing a direct line to some distant forefather who manufactured paint or firearms or had owned one particular county or another. A snobbish, worthless group in Tony Cronic's estimation, but he was almost used to them by now, and he knew how Casey loved to impress them.
He didn't fault her for it. He knew how deep she wanted to bury her modest beginnings, a small, dusty farm outside Odessa. The clear image of her family in attendance at her grand wedding came suddenly into his mind. They were a worn-out, sad-looking bunch, and their ill-fitting formal clothes were so far out of style that they might have been a troop of comics. But there hadn't been anything comical about them. They drank too much and grew louder as the evening wore on. Casey, everyone knew, had been mortified. A lesser woman would have been reduced to tears when her father stood on his chair in the midst of Texas society and flipped his middle finger to the band when they were unable to play a rendition of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."