“Okay, yeah, okay. But I’m talking if…” Here his eyes brightened, his whole demeanor perked up, and he snapped his fingers. “Here it is! Here it is! Thinkin’ on the reward now, what I got last night!”
“Hit me.”
“Okay, I’m in that Battalion, right. Like the most I got to do is wash a car or pass out some pamphlets or answer some phones, some shit like that, basically nothing, you with me?”
“So far.”
“So say I fuck up a little, maybe go off the rehab, something small-maybe a doob or a beer one time. You know they test out there, not like here. Anyway, who knows why, I get on Como’s bad side and now he’s tellin’ me I’m done with the Battalion, I’m back in the shit, workin’ like I’m doin’ here. Or say, even better, I’m close to done with my time, and he says he’s gonna violate me back to jail, out of the program. See what I’m sayin’ now?”
“Still not completely, I’m afraid.”
“Hey, he kicks me out now, I am fucked. I can’t let that happen. I got to stop him before, you know?”
“So you kill him?”
Damien Jones threw his hands up in celebration, flashed Mickey his brightest smile. “Now you got it. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.” He kept nodding as though making sure that the strands of his argument, if that’s what it was, held together. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.” Now he looked straight at Mickey. “That’s where you look, at them Battalion people. It’s one of them, hallelujah, and you know where to find me.”
Suddenly and thoroughly deflated, Mickey all at once came to the full-blown realization that in spite of Damien’s enthusiastic narrative, he was in his own way another variant on the Blimp Lady. If not nuts, then certainly and fundamentally unhelpful.
By now just about completely baffled by trying to fathom the solution that Damien had apparently reached and was sharing with him, Mickey leaned in toward the young man. “And, just so I’m sure I understand, Damien, you’re saying you think Mr. Como’s killer is one of these Battalion people?”
“I’m saying you look there I bet you gonna be happy you did.”
“And if we do, after that, why exactly do we need to find you, then?”
Damien straightened his back, put on a look of surprised indignation. “What we been talkin’ ’bout all this time? First, I get his place in the Battalion out there, the killer’s, and second, ’cause then you got to give me that reward.”
Hunt had called Devin Juhle and Sarah Russo within minutes of his initial sighting of the tire iron, but they’d been in the field on another matter and hadn’t checked back in with him until lunchtime. Meanwhile, he’d taken down Cecil Rand’s vitals and promised to keep him anonymous at least until it was determined if the tire iron out in the mud was tied in any way to the death of Dominic Como.
After Rand had gone, Hunt then tried again to reach Nancy Neshek, but she hadn’t come in to her office at Sanctuary House this morning-evidently a regular occurrence, what with her fund-raising duties and/or women in crisis situations, and she still wasn’t answering at home.
He’d then checked in with Tamara to see about any new leads. He decided that talking to two more people who identified themselves as members of Canard’s Palace Duck group probably wasn’t even worth Mickey’s time, and he himself wasn’t inclined to call Belinda (no last name), a psychic who, if put in close contact with Como’s body, could re-create his last hours, and thus probably shed enormous light on the murder.
And reluctant to abandon his post lest someone come and remove his possible evidence while no one was guarding it, he put his back up against a tree and waited.
Now, finally, Juhle and Russo stood with Hunt at the concrete edge of the mud flat that had once been the lagoon. The cloud cover had mostly burned off and now the mud had a dull shine, making identification of anything somewhat problematic. “And even if I see it, which I don’t,” Juhle was saying, “how do you know it has anything to do with anything?”
“I don’t. But it’s there, all right,” Hunt said. “And since it might be evidence in a murder you’re investigating, I thought you’d call those fine upstanding people from Crime Scene Investigations to collect it for you.”
“I’m going to go look at it,” Russo said.
“Are you shitting me?” Juhle asked. “It’s knee-deep mud out there, Sarah. And you can’t touch it till CSI gets here anyway.”
“I’m not going to touch it. But we’re not calling CSI if it turns out it’s a pipe that’s been in this lagoon for a hundred years. You guys watch my shoes.” And she sat on the wall and started removing them.
“All right.” Juhle sat next to her. “God damn it. I’ll do it.”
“Aw, Dev. You’re so cute when you get all guy-protective.” She held out a hand to him. “But, I’m good, really. I’m a mom, after all. I’ve already waded through tons and tons of shit. And this is only mud. I’ll think of it as a spa treatment. But you, Wyatt,” she added, “you better point me straight at it or I’ll arrest your sorry ass on any charge I can think of or even one I make up.”
Hunt turned to Juhle. “She’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”
“You want to see harsh, point me even a little bit the wrong way.” And so saying, she finished tucking her socks into her shoes. Next she rolled up the bottoms of her pants and swung herself around, lowering herself into the mud, into which she sank as far as her ankles. “For the record,” she said, “this is not warm spa mud.” After a good shiver, she added, “Okay, Wyatt, point.”
Hunt stood at the charcoal X that Rand had drawn with his cigar the night before. He had a decent idea of the location of the tire iron and pointed out a tree on the opposite bank that Russo should head for. “It’s ten or twelve feet before you get to the water. You can’t miss it.”
She turned back to him. “I’d better not, ’cause I tell you right now I’m not going to spend a lot of time mucking around looking for it.”
It was, truly, one slippery step at a time, and she walked gingerly. When she was about halfway there, Hunt said, “I’d have thought you’d have dragged this lake already.”
“We did. We took out six Dumpsters of shit.”
“So how’d you miss this?”
“I don’t know. Murphy’s Law.” Juhle grunted. “Anyway, we’re here now, for all the good it’s going to do us.”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Because the water washes away the trace evidence. Except not all of it, not all the time. We’ll see.”
Just at this moment a black-and-white police car pulled to the curb above them and emitted a short one-note blast of his siren. Hunt and Juhle turned and saw two uniformed policemen coming out of the car and down the grass, looking stern and ready for action. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” the lead cop said, “would you mind telling me…?”
But Juhle already had stepped in front of Hunt with his ID out. Introducing himself, saying the magic word homicide, Juhle instantly transformed the cops into two nice guys who wanted to know if there was anything they could do to help.
“She’s got it,” Hunt said.
And sure enough, Russo was straightening up out in the middle of the mud, waving her arms.
Juhle turned back to the cops. “Actually, guys, you can help. One of you please call dispatch and have ’ em get CSI down here as fast as they can move. Tell them it’s the Como one eighty-seven.”
Lorraine Hess, associate director of the Sunset Youth Project, stood wringing her hands in her office doorway, facing the two police inspectors. “But you’re saying you don’t know if it’s from the limousine yet, is that right?”
“That’s right.” Sarah Russo, naturally taking point with the obviously distracted woman, nodded and spoke in her well-modulated, educated, nonthreatening voice. “All we’ve done so far is sent the tire iron itself directly down to the police laboratory for analysis. And all we know so far is that it’s the basic kind of tire iron that comes standard on a lot of cars, including the Lincoln Town Car. There’s a small chance, if it was the murder weapon, that it will still have at least traces of Mr. Como’s hair or blood or something recoverable through DNA, although maybe not. In any event, though, the thing’s a mess and it’s going to take some time, maybe a lot of time, to find out what we’re dealing with there for sure.” She trotted out her professional smile, which looked entirely genuine. “In the meanwhile, Inspector Juhle and I got to talking and realized that it would probably be worth our while to see if there was still a tire iron in Mr. Como’s limousine.”