Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

She had spoken fast, the words gusted along on a tidal current of adrenaline and anger. Now she’d done, and sat tight, grasping the receiver tightly, probing the long silence at the other end.

“You are describing a crime which you currently have under investigation?” the Evanston detective inquired at last.

“Correct. And I know of at least one more.”

Another silence.

“Then I consider it expedient that we should meet up as soon as possible,” Eileen McCann pronounced at last.

Success went to Kristine’s head.

“Thursday any good for you?” she demanded. “Or I could do Tuesday next week. We’re talking lunch, right?”

“That’s logistically problematic,” was the unruffled reply.

“OK,” said Kristine, getting a grip on herself. “Fax me through details of your case, and if it looks like we’re on to something here I’ll get out there to see you within forty-eight hours. How’s that sound?”

“Let’s diarize.”

Whatever Eileen McCann lacked in charm, she made up for in efficiency. Twenty minutes later, Kristine had the entire dossier of the Maple Street shootings on her desk. She was still poring over it when Steve Warren appeared. He handed her a waxed cup filled with a creamy foam.

“Thought maybe you could use this,” he mumbled. “Double tail’s how you like it, right?”

Kristine barely looked up.

“Steve, you’re a fucking genius!”

Warren flinched. He didn’t deserve this! OK, so he’d screwed up earlier, but he’d tried to make it up to her, running over to the espresso stand and getting her a latte. There was no call for mockery.

“This thing has hair all over it!” Kristine exclaimed almost hysterically. “And if it hadn’t been for you, it would have passed us right by. No one else would have bothered to read those details about the MO that tie in with the Renton case.”

Steve Warren shrugged awkwardly.

“Hell, I’m just an average Joe …”

Kristine shook her head decisively.

“No, you’re not, Steve. You’re one of a kind.”

He looked at her as though she’d slapped his face, then turned without a word and walked out. Kristine shook her head and returned to her reading. She kind of liked Steve, but there was no getting away from the fact that the guy was a total fruitcake.

It took her another thirty minutes to get a clear fix on the Evanston case. As soon as she had, she called Atlanta. At first it seemed that she was in for another round of the old crapola with some dickette who’d flunked out of charm school, but the woman who answered the phone turned out to be merely a call catcher. Detective Wingate, she informed Kristine, wouldn’t be on duty for another three hours.

Kristine glanced at the clock. The idea of waiting seemed intolerable.

“Can you give me his home number?” she begged.

The steel magnolia replied that she was not authorized to give out such details, and offered instead to connect her to Wingate’s colleague, one Charlie Freeman. There was silence, then another ringing tone.

“Homicide,” said a male voice.

“Detective Freeman?”

“Yeah.”

“My name is Kristine Kjarstad, I’m a homicide detective working out of King County Headquarters in Seattle. You want to call me back, check my credentials?”

“That’s OK, ma’am, I know a cop when I hear one. Besides, this way it’s your nickel. What can we do for y’all?”

Freeman’s voice was deep, slow and sexy. Kristine found him easy to talk to. It remained to be seen whether the opposite was true.

“I’ve just seen a CRS from your Detective Wingate regarding an individual named Dale Watson. I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about that case.”

She braced herself for another bout of stonewalling, but Charlie Freeman apparently took a more relaxed view of his work than Eileen McCann.

“Sure. Not a whole lot to say, though. Two white guys go for a stroll in a black neighborhood, for some reason we don’t get. They meet up with three of the brothers and someone pulls a gun. One guy on either side gets dead and the white survivor is in IC. Half an inch to the left and he’s history too, the doc says.”

“And he’s Dale Watson?”

“No, Watson’s the one who got whacked. He was shacked up with a teenage runaway. We got the name from her, plus the idea he was maybe from Seattle, which is how come we faxed you guys. You got anything on him?”

“Not under that name. But we’ve got a case on the books which looks similar.”

Charlie Freeman sounded skeptical.

“You sure about this, ma’am? I have to say the incident here looks like one of those classic street things.”

“This guy in the hospital, have you got a name?”

“Booked himself in as John Flaxman at the hotel, but that don’t mean jackshit. He’s out of danger now, but he still won’t say a word about what they were doing that evening. Just lies there staring up at the ceiling.”

“Does he have any links to Seattle?”

“Not that we know of. I searched his hotel room, but he didn’t have no ID, no tickets, no nothing. These guys were stripped. All I found was a pile of clothes and some athletic shoes, could have been bought anywhere.”

“Athletic shoes?”

“That was his own stuff. They dressed up as holy rollers that night, see? Bought themselves the outfits right here in town.”

Kristine stared at the wall. It seemed to be moving, bulging in the center like a sail.

“What kind of athletic shoes were they?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t rightly recall, ma’am. Some kind basketball shoe. But this is a doozy whichever way you look at it. Take the hardware they went in with. You go looking for trouble in a neighborhood like that, you gotta pack enough gun. Now sure, a two-two can be a work of art, I got a couple at home, but out there on the streets you’re up against Uzis, Cobrays, you name it. The toddlers pack magnums in their diapers, even our guys are outgunned half the-”

“If we could just get back to the shoes for a moment …”

Freeman sighed.

“What can I tell you? They were standard basketball shoes, the kind all the kids wear.”

“What brand?”

Her tone was almost rudely abrupt. Charlie Freeman sounded taken aback.

“I don’t recollect, ma’am. What’s with the shoes, anyhow? They were black, far as I recall. Yeah, and there was some kind of logo, a little red outline. Some guy doing a slamdunk.”

“Was the brand Nike?”

“How’s that?” asked Freeman.

“N, I, K, E.”

“Is that how you say it? I always thought it rhymed with ‘Mike.’ Let me just look up my report here. Yeah, that’s right. Nike Air Jordan. You sure it’s spoke like that? Sounds kind of weird.”

Kristine Kjarstad let out a long, slow breath.

“That’s because it’s a Greek name, Mr. Freeman. Nike was the goddess of victory.”

“Well, hey, learn something new every day. Nike, huh? So who was she? Some kind of feminist?”

“Just a woman who hated to lose. You’re talking to another. One more thing. Were there traces of paint on the soles of the shoes?”

This time there was a lengthy silence.

“Now you come to mention it,” Freeman replied in a different tone, “I think there was something on them. I figured it was bubblegum or some-”

“Because it was pink, right?” Kristine interrupted.

Another long silence.

“Now how in hell did you know that?” asked Charlie Freeman quietly.

“I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“You’re coming down south?”

“Correct. I’ll call you back once I have my reservation. I’ll want you to set up an interview with this guy in the hospital. Make it as long as possible. I plan to go to work on him, and I don’t want the doctors getting in the way. This is our one chance to crack this case. It may be the last we ever get.”