“Marshal, that kind of speculation doesn’t do any good. Did you get home at your regular time?”
“Right around. Not much to marshaling in Placida, Mr. Harrow.”
“Nothing unusual that day?”
“No. On the way home, though, I did have a traffic stop. Not that that’s unusual.”
Sitting forward, Harrow asked, “Did you tell the detectives about it?”
“Oh yeah,” Ferguson said. “Perfectly routine. Guy was a salesman from Tampa, just passing through. Sheriff’s office and state patrol both did an extensive investigation into the guy. It was nothing.”
Live again, Harrow brought up his mic and said, “We interviewed Marshal Ferguson for an hour, and, thanks to his years as a trained investigator himself, he shared with us several puzzle pieces that for now we must withhold... because we know that our audience very likely includes the perpetrator of these crimes. Carmen, I understand you have more to share now, with our team...”
And as the image on the monitor showed Carmen back in the mobile crime lab, where she was introducing the rest of the superstar criminalists, Harrow lowered his mic. The show’s sign-off would follow Carmen’s last mini-segment, and would be handled by Moreno, back in LA.
But Harrow’s on-air claim of Ferguson providing puzzle pieces hadn’t been TV hype.
In the Ferguson living room, the marshal — late in the interview — had frowned and said, “You know, Mr. Harrow, there was this one thing.”
“Yes, Mr. Ferguson?”
“While I had that first guy pulled over, another vehicle, a pickup truck, was coming from the direction of my house... and it slowed way down, and the guy gave me, you know, the old hairy eyeball as he went by.”
“You made eye contact?”
“Oh, yeah. Impossible not to. He knew he’d caught my attention.”
“Did you tell the detectives about the guy eyeballing you in the pick-up?”
“No, sir, I don’t believe so. I forgot all about it till just now.”
“Did you get a plate?”
“No, damn it. Couldn’t even tell you the state. Don’t even know for sure what the make was. But it was blue — light blue.”
“Sounds like you got a look at the driver.”
“Yeah, I saw him, all right. That SOB was trying to tell me something with his eyes. Like he was sending a goddamn message. Sorry. Didn’t mean to curse on TV.”
“That’s okay. Could you recognize him?”
“You bet your ass I could. Sorry.” The marshal sighed. “You know, in my day, I wrote more than my share of traffic tickets, ran down kids for doin’ the kinda shit kids do, even investigated a burglary or two.”
“Yes, sir?”
“But this is the first homicide I was ever involved with — my own wife and kids.”
“It might have been him, your eyeball pick-up truck?”
Ferguson nodded, his mouth and chin tight. “You know, I can’t explain why I forgot about that truck till now. Goddamn it!”
“We’ll get you with an artist,” Harrow said.
“Why did he do that, Mr. Harrow?”
“These killers all have their own tortured—”
“No, not that. Why did he have to mutilate her? Why cut off her damn... her sweet... finger?”
Harrow had no answer.
The interview had wrapped, and crew were tearing down as Harrow and Ferguson sat in the kitchen where Mrs. Ferguson had been killed. The two men had coffee in Styrofoam cups provided by a production assistant.
“Everybody knows your story, Mr. Harrow. While your family got shot, you were off savin’ the life of the President of the United States.”
“Don’t tell the Secret Service,” Harrow said, “but I’d trade him for them in a heartbeat.”
The marshal smiled at this bleak humor. “You’re better off than me, amigo. I was writin’ a goddamn traffic ticket, busting the ass of some salesman for goin’ forty-two in a thirty-mile zone.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And the goddamn murderer slowed down to watch me do it.”
Chapter Thirteen
Laurene Chase liked to sit in the back of the bus.
It tweaked her sense of irony, as a black lesbian who’d managed to survive and even thrive in Waco, Texas. Right now she had the aisle seat next to Carmen Garcia by the window, with Jenny Blake and Nancy Hughes across the way, as they headed for a town in North Dakota (were there towns in North Dakota?) called Rolla.
She held in her hands hard copy of material Jenny Blake had downloaded about the burg of fourteen hundred or so, which covered a scant mile and a quarter. Median income was just a shade over thirty thousand, meaning nearly twenty percent of the population lived below poverty level. One statistic stood out to Laurene: seven-tenths of 1 percent of the population was African-American.
Across the aisle Jenny was pounding at the laptop keyboard as if sending repeated SOS messages from a sinking ship. The petite blonde, hair pony-tailed back, wore jeans and a white T-shirt, the letters OMG printed on the front (the back, Laurene had previously noted, read: WTF).
Laurene asked, “How’s your math, Jen?”
Jenny reacted with her usual caught-in-the-head-lights freeze, fingers poised over the keyboard like gripping claws. “Okay.”
“Good, ’cause mine sucks. What’s seven-tenths of a percent of fourteen-hundred-seventeen?”
“About ten.”
Jenny had given up three whole words in the exchange. What did that make, in the three days they’d spent together on the bus, twenty-six words out of the cute little nerd?
Laurene settled back in the bus seat. So they were headed for a town with ten black people. Two-thirds of the populace was white, with nearly 30 percent Native American. Totals for Asians and Latinos were higher than blacks, with those listing their race as “other” outnumbering African-Americans three times over.
Suddenly, Waco seemed pretty damned progressive.
Sure as hell wouldn’t be a police force in Rolla, which meant they’d be dealing with the Rolette County sheriff, a thought that in itself made Laurene uneasy. She kept thumbing through the information, and when she read about the last sheriff being removed from office for gross misconduct, she immediately pictured a big old redneck John Madden-looking motherhumper, sweat stains in the pits of his dirt-brown uniform shirt, nose a mass of red veins below mirrored sunglasses and a campaign hat.
Then she laughed to herself, thinking, That’s me, just another progressive from Waco.
Laurene remembered what her mother had once said to her: God made us each in His own image, darling child. That’s why we are all completely different. Still wasn’t sure she understood that, but it often floated through her mind.
“Something funny?” Jenny asked, with just a little attitude.
Laurene, who’d been laughing to herself, held up a hand, like one of Rolla’s Indians saying, How.
“Not laughing at you, Jen,” Laurene said. “Just amused by my own dumb ass.”
From her window seat, where she’d been half-napping, Carmen Garcia looked over and asked, “Did I miss something, girls?”
Jenny, naturally, said nothing.
Next to her, the ponytail blonde, Nancy Hughes — who’d also been napping — came slowly awake and stretched.
“So,” Carmen said, looking over at Laurene, “spill it. What’s so funny?”
Shaking her head, Laurene said, “I was wondering how the folks in Rolla, North Dakota, are gonna react to me and Jenny here — the world’s most beautiful black Amazon, and a nearly mute blond girl wearing a T-shirt sayin’ Oh My God, What The Eff?”