So why kill him?
The plate he’d seen simply did not exist.
But the killer couldn’t have known this because the newspapers hadn’t revealed the numbers and letters on the plate; Patricia Dem-ming had at least kept back that much.
So the killer did not know Trinh had made a mistaken identification.
The killer knew only that Trinh had seen the license plate, Trinh had identified the car, and if the State Attorney knew this then the police also knew this, and the ball game was over.
But then why kill Trinh?
Why not get the hell out of Calusa as fast as his feet could carry him, run to China, run to the North Pole, get out of town before they traced the license plate directly to his front door?
Something was wrong here.
Because…
If the killer thought the State Attorney and the police were in possession of his correct license plate number, then the cat was already out of the bag, and he would have run for his life. Or given himself up, one or the other. What he would not have done was go after Trinh Mang Due to shut him up after he’d already revealed what he’d seen. There was no sense to that.
So maybe Bloom and Patricia were both right, maybe this was a copycat murder.
Or maybe the killer knew — but how could he? — that Trinh had given them the wrong numbers and letters, and maybe he figured he had to get rid of Trinh before he remembered the right ones.
Damn it, that had to be it.
The killer had to have known—
The collision came suddenly and unexpectedly.
One moment Matthew was running along at a steady pace, lost in thought, losing weight and minding his own business, and the next minute the sweat-stained man ahead of him stopped dead, and before Matthew could stop his own forward momentum, he crashed into him. They went tumbling down together in an awkward embrace, Matthew pushing out with his arms in a vain attempt to prevent the crash, the other man partially turning when he realized he’d been hit from behind, meeting the full force of the blow with his hip, the track coming up fast to meet them both. “Oh shit!” the other man said, and Matthew recognized the voice and realized that the tangle of arms and legs in the grey sweatshirt and sweatpants was none other than Assistant State Attorney Patricia (“Do Not Call Me Pat or Even Trish”) Demming, even before she rolled over into a sitting position and yanked the blue woolen watchcap from her head to reveal a mass of sodden blond hair.
“You,” she said.
“We keep colliding,” Matthew said.
They were sitting in the center of the track now, both of them out of breath, facing each other, knees up, sneakered feet almost touching. Her sweatshirt was drenched.
“This time it was your fault,” Patricia said.
“No, you stopped dead.”
“My shoelace was untied.”
“You should have signaled.”
“I didn’t know anyone was behind me,” she said, and got to her feet. Matthew got up, too. The other runner had already circled the track again and was bearing down on them. He was red-faced and puffing hard, wearing headphones and flapping his arms at them like a swimmer doing a frantic breaststroke, urging them to clear the track before there was yet another collision. He went by like a locomotive on the way to Albuquerque, New Mexico, wherever that was, sweat flying from his face and his neck, feet pounding the track, while Patricia and Matthew crowded the rail for dear life.
“You’re soaking wet,” she said.
“So are you.”
“Seems like old times,” she said, and grinned.
He was remembering her in the red silk dress. Her nipples threatening the red silk. Both of them standing in the rain.
“I think I know why Trinh was killed,” he said.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she said.
“Want to discuss it over a drink?”
“No, Counselor,” she said, “it was nice seeing you again,” and slapped the woolen watchcap against her thigh and walked swiftly toward the door leading off the track, shaking her head.
The 6:01 express was coming around again.
Matthew got out of its way.
Policemen standing in the rain look the same all over the world. Especially when they’re standing there looking down at a corpse. You won’t see an umbrella anywhere in evidence. The uniformed cops may be wearing rainslickers, and the plainclothesmen may be wearing trenchcoats, but blues or suits, it doesn’t matter, you’ll never see an umbrella. There were eight policemen, some of them suits, most of them blues, standing around the corpse in the drainage ditch.
This was still only nine o’clock that Friday night, the weekend hadn’t yet begun in earnest. None of the cops had been expecting a corpse quite this early. Anyway, in this city, the corpses were few and far between. Oh yes, several more per month now that crack was on the scene, but crack was on the scene everywhere in America, crack was the shame of the nation, a thousand points of light shining down on cocaine you could inhale from a pipe, this was some shining city on a hill, this nation.
Detective Morris Bloom was one of the cops standing around the corpse. He was wearing a blue suit and a white shirt, dark-blue tie with a mustard stain on it. The rain had tapered off to a slow, lazy drizzle. He stood hatless and coatless in the light rain, looking down at the corpse. An assistant Medical Examiner was kneeling beside the corpse. The drainage ditch had a curved bottom. The corpse was lying on its side facing the rear of the ditch, away from the road. No one had touched the body yet. No one wanted to. The skull was all crushed in. There was blood all over the ditch, blood on the shiny black road where the body had been dragged before it was dumped.
The assistant M.E. was having trouble with the curving sides of the ditch. The ditch was slippery, and he kept losing his footing as he tried to examine the body. No one had yet looked for any identification of any kind. They were all waiting for the M.E. to finish here. Or better yet, to get started here.
Cooper Rawles walked over from where he’d been talking to the officer who’d first responded. Like Bloom, he was hatless and coatless. But he’d just come off a plant at a homosexual bar where crack was allegedly being sold over the counter Hke jelly beans, and he was wearing tan tailored slacks, tasseled brown loafers, a pink V-necked cotton sweater over a bare chest, and a gold earring in his right ear.
“You look stunning,” Bloom said.
“Thanks,” Rawles said drily. “The man in George car says the motorist was gone when he got here.”
“What motorist?”
“The one who called it in. Gave the location and then split.”
“Small wonder,” Bloom said. “It’s the earring that does it, you know.”
“I thought the earring was a nice touch, too,” Rawles said.
The captain in command of Calusa’s detective bureau — a new man called Rush, for Rushville, Decker — came walking over from the Criminalistic Unit’s mobile van. He’d only recently replaced the bureau’s Captain Hopper, whom Bloom used to call His Royal Shmuck. Behind his back. Decker seemed like a good man. So far.