I called Fielding at home and told him what was going on.
“You want me to . . . ?” he started to say.
“No,” I cut him off. “I’m going right now. We’re getting goddamn screwed, Jack.”
I drove fast. Bruce Springsteen was singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and I thought of Bray. I had never really hated anyone before. Hate was poison. I had always resisted it. To hate was to lose, and it was all I could do right now to resist the heat of its flames.
The news came on, the homicide the lead story, covered live at the scene.
“. . . in what is the second convenience store murder in three weeks. Deputy Chief Bray, what can you tell us?”
“Details are sketchy at this time,” her voice sounded inside my car. “We do know that several hours earlier, an unknown suspect entered the Quik Cary here and robbed it and shot the clerk.”
My car phone rang.
“Where are you?” Marino said.
“Getting close to Libbie.°’
“I’m going to pull into the Cary Town parking lot. I need to tell you what’s going on because nobody’s gonna tell you the time of day when you get there.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Minutes later, I turned into the small shopping center and parked in front of Schwarzchild Jewelers, where Marino was sitting in his truck. Then he was inside my car, wearing jeans and boots, and a scuffed leather coat with a broken zipper and fleece lining as bald as his head. He had splashed on a lot of cologne, meaning he had been drinking beer. He tossed a cigarette butt and red ashes sailed through the night.
“Everything’s under control;” he sardonically said. “Anderson’s at the scene.”
“And Bray.”
“She’s holding a goddamn press conference outside the convenience store,” Marino said with disgust. “Let’s go.”
I drove back out to Cary Street.
“Start with this, Doc,” he began. “The asshole shoots her at the counter, in the head. Then it’s looking like he puts out the closed, sign, locks the door and drags her to the back, into the storeroom, and beats the holy shit out of her.”
“He shot her and then beat her up?’
:Yeah:”
‘How were the police notified?” I asked.
“At seven-sixteen the burglar alarm went off,” he replied. “The back door’s armed even when the joint’s open for business. Cops get there and find the front door locked, closed sign out, like I said. They go around back, find that door wide open. They go in, she’s on the floor, blood everywhere. Tentatively identified as Kim Luong, thirty-year-old Asian female.”
Bray continued to dominate the news.
“You said something earlier about a witness,” a reporter was asking her.
“Only that a citizen reported seeing a male in dark clothing in the area around the time we believe the homicide took place,” Bray replied. “He was ducking into an alleyway right down the block there. The person who reported this did not get a good look. We’re hoping if someone else did, he’ll call us. No detail is too small. It takes all of us to protect our community.”
“What’s she doing? Running for office?” Marino said.
“Is there a safe somewhere inside the store?” I asked him.
“In the back where her body was found. It hadn’t been opened. So I’ve been told.”
“Video camera?” I asked.
“Nope. Maybe he learned after whacking Gant and is hitting joints that aren’t doing the Candid Camera number on him.”
“Maybe.”
He and I both knew he was making assumptions, pushing hard because he wasn’t about to let go of his job.
“Carson tell you all this?” I asked.
“It ain’t the cops who’ve suspended me,” he answered. “And already I know you’re thinking the M.O.’s a little different. But it ain’t a science, Doc. You know that”
Benton used to toss that line at us with that wry smile of his. He was a profiler, an expert in modus operandi and patterns and predicting. But each crime had its own special choreography because every victim was different. Circumstances and moods were different, even the weather was different, and the killer often modified his routine. Benton used to complain about Hollywood renditions of what behavioral scientists could do. He wasn’t clairvoyant, and violent people weren’t driven by software.