“Yeah, Vander’s going to see if we might have any luck with prints.”
“Prints?” Stanfield murmurs from his sickbed.
“Jesus, Stanfield,” Marino blurts out in exasperation. “They teach you anything in detective school? Or did you get sent ahead several grades because of your goddamn brother-in-law?”
“He is a goddamn brother-in-law, you want to know the truth.” He says this so pitifully and with such candor that everybody laughs. Stanfield perks up a little bit. He sits higher against the pillows. “And you’re right.” He meets my eyes. “I shouldn’t have told him one peep about this case. And 1 won’t tell him nothing else, not a word, because it’s all politicking to that one. It wasn’t me who dragged in this whole Jamestown thing, just so you know.”
Pruett frowns. “What Jamestown thing?”
“Oh, you know, the dig out there and the big celebration the state’s planning. Well, thing is, if the truth be known, Din-widdie got no more Indian blood in him than I do. All this horse crap about him being a descendent of Chief Powhatan. Pshaw!” Stanfield’s eyes dance with resentment that I doubt he rarely touches. He probably hates his brother-in-law.
“Mitch has Indian blood,” Mclntyre says somberly. “He’s half Native American.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake, let’s hope the newspapers don’t find that out,” Marino mutters to Stanfield, not buying for one second that Stanfield is going to keep his mouth shut. “We got a gay guy and now an Indian. Oh boy, oh boy.” Marino shakes his head. “We got to keep this out of politics, out of circulation and I mean it.” He stares right at Stanfield, then at Jay. “Because guess what? We can’t talk about what we think is really going on, now can we’? About the big undercover operation. About Mitch being undercover FBI. And that maybe in some fruitloop way, Chandonne is all wrapped around what- ever the shit’s going on out here. So if people get all caught up in this hate crime shit, how do we turn that around when we can’t tell the truth?”
“I don’t agree,” Jay says to him. “I’m not ready to say what these murders are about. I’m not prepared to accept, for example, that Mates and now Barbosa aren’t related to gun smuggling. I do think without a doubt their murders are connected.”
No one disagrees. The modi operandi are too similar for the deaths not to be related, and in fact, committed by the same person or persons.
“I’m also not prepared to totally ignore the idea that they’re hate crimes,” Jay goes on. “A gay male. A Native American.” He shrugs. “Torture’s pretty damn hateful. Any injuries to their genitalia?” He turns to me.
“No.” I hold his gaze. It is odd to think we were intimate, to look at his full lips and graceful hands and to remember their touch. When we walked the streets of Paris, people turned to stare at him.
“Hmmm,” he says. “I find that interesting and maybe important. I’m not a forensic psychiatrist, of course, but it does seem in hate crimes the perpetrators rarely injure the victims’ genitals.”
Marino gives him an incredible look, his mouth parting in blatant disdain.
“Because you get some redneck homophobic sort, and the last thing he’s going to go near is the guy’s genitals,” Jay adds.
“Well, if you really want to go around this mulberry bush,” Marino acidly says to him, “then let’s just connect it to Chan-donne. He never went near his victims’ genitals either. Shit, he didn’t even take their fucking pants off, just beat and bit the shit out of their faces and breasts. Only lower body thing he did at all was to take off their shoes and socks and bite their feet. And why? The guy’s afraid of female genitalia because his own’s as deformed as the rest of him.” Marino surveys the faces around him. “One good thing about the bastard being locked up is we got to find out what the rest of him looks like. Right? And guess what? He ain’t got a dick. Or let’s just say that what he’s got I wouldn’t call a dick.”
Stanfield is sitting straight up on the couch now, his eyes wide in amazement.