‘They were when I got here,’ I said.
Marino asked Evans, ‘If you saw him in a lineup, could you pick him out?’
He looked up, terrified. ‘What did he do?’
‘Could you pick him out?’ Marino said again.
‘I think I could. Yes, sir. I sure would try.’
I got up and quickly walked down the hall. At my office I stopped in the doorway and looked around the same way I had last night when I had walked inside my house. I tried to sense the slightest shift in the environment – a rug disturbed, an object out of place, a lamp on that shouldn’t be.
My desk was neatly stacked with paperwork waiting for my review, and the computer screen on the return told me I had mail waiting. The in basket was full, the out basket empty, and my microscope was shrouded in plastic because when I had last looked at slides I was about to fly to Miami for a week.
That seemed incredibly long ago, and it shocked me to think Sheriff Santa had been arrested Christmas Eve, and since then the world had changed. Gault had savaged a woman named Jane. He had murdered a young police officer. He had killed Sheriff Santa and broken into my morgue. In four days he had done all that. I moved closer to my desk, scanning, and as I got near my computer terminal I could almost smell a presence, or feel it, like an electrical field.
I did not have to touch my keyboard to know he had. I watched the mail-waiting message quietly flash green. I hit several keys to go into a menu that would show me my messages. But the menu did not come up, a screen saver did. It was a black background with CAIN in bright red letters that dripped as if they were bleeding. I walked back down the hall.
‘Marino,’ I said. ‘Please come here.’
He left Evans and followed me to my office. I pointed to my computer. Marino stared stonily at it. There were wet rings under the arms of his white uniform shirt, and I could smell his sweat. Stiff black leather creaked when he moved. He was constantly rearranging the fully loaded belt beneath his full belly as if everything he’d amounted to in life was in his way.
‘How hard would that be to do?’ he asked, mopping his face with a soiled handkerchief.
‘Not hard if you have a program ready to load.’
‘Where the hell did he get the program?’
‘That’s what worries me,’ I said, thinking of a question we didn’t ask.
We returned to the conference room. Evans was standing, numbly looking at photographs on the wall.
‘Mr. Evans,’ I said. ‘Did the man from the funeral home speak to you?’
He turned around, startled. ‘No, ma’am. Not much.’
‘Not much?’ I puzzled.
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Then how did he convey what he wanted?’
‘He said what he had to say.’ He paused. ‘He was a real quiet type. He spoke in a real quiet voice.’ Evans was rubbing his face. ‘The more I think about it, the stranger it is. He was wearing tinted glasses. And to tell you the truth’ – he stopped – ‘well, I had my impressions.’
‘What impressions?’ I asked.
Evans said, after a pause, ‘I thought he might be homosexual.’
‘Marino,’ I said. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
We escorted Evans out of the building and waited until he’d rounded a corner because I did not want him to see what we did next. Both vans were parked in their usual spaces not far from my Mercedes. Without touching door or glass, I looked through the driver’s window of the one nearest the bay and could plainly see the plastic on the steering column was gone, wires exposed.
‘It’s been hot-wired,’ I said.
Marino snapped up his portable radio and held it close to his mouth.
‘Unit eight hundred.’
‘Eight hundred,’ the dispatcher came back.
‘Ten-five 711.’
The radio called the detective inside my building whose unit number was 711, and then Marino was saying, ‘Ten-twenty-five me out back.’
‘Ten-four.’
Marino next radioed for a tow truck. The van was to be processed for prints on the door handles. It was to be impounded and carefully processed inside and out after that. Unit 711 had yet to walk out the back door fifteen minutes later.