T. Parker: Cold Pursuit

McMichael suppressed an urge to flatten Garland.

"Pete have a will?" he asked.

"Sure. Talk to Hank Grothke."

"Junior or Senior?"

"I think Junior handles the will," said Patricia.

Garland sighed like he'd heard enough. "So, Detective. Someone ripped him off. Someone killed him. My money's on the nurse."

"Noted," said McMichael.

Patricia studied him with her steady dark eyes. "Grandpa was giving her things," she said.

"What things?"

"Paintings and jewelry, I think. I'm not sure, but he let us know- plenty of times- how great she was."

"Maybe he gave her the diamond earrings and the hummingbird," said McMichael.

"No," said Patricia. "He wouldn't give away those things. Those things were Anna."

"The nurse took him for a fucking ride, Detective," said Garland.

"Get out of here," said McMichael. "Sign the log on your way out."

He stood in the trophy room, behind the leather chairs in front of the fireplace, taking in details. Erik was dusting the handle of the sliding glass door for prints. There were yellow stick-ems posted everywhere, numbered to correspond to the lifts. And pink ones identifying the wineglasses, which would be emptied and bagged for the cyanoacrylate chamber back at the lab. Samples of the liquid would travel back to the lab, also, to be worked over by Flagler's forensics people.

Harley stooped over the club, which had been fished from the pool of blood and laid out on a sheet of opaque plastic.

"Superglue for this," he said. "I can feel the latents. Flagler will need the hair and brains and whatever else is stuck to it. Here's your firewood portrait."

He slipped the Polaroid from his pocket and handed it to the detective.

"Good," said McMichael, gazing at a potted plant hung near the far corner. Even from here it looked plastic. Its clay pot was supported by a cutesy wooden wall sconce. The top of the sconce flared into a heart shape with what looked like a homily printed on it in chipper, childlike handwriting. Gift from a child or grandchild, he thought- something that might not mean anything to anyone anymore.

"Yesss!" said Erik, standing back from the slider. "Whoppin' fingerprints on the handle here, and it looks like blood to me. This joker's toast."

McMichael stood in front of the trophy wall. He looked at the nail from which the club had possibly hung, noting the black fingerprint dust and the yellow tag. He counted twenty-two trophies, not including the missing fish, represented now by a blank space and a small hole. Who'd steal a mounted fish? Up close, he saw the red lip of a plastic screw seat, set in the drywall to keep the screw from pulling out. Something small hung here, he figured, from the size of the space and the single hole.

He looked over at the kitschy potted plant again, then went to one of the two huge aquariums. The tropical fish flitted and swirled through the blue, making their rounds amidst the clams and grass. There was a rock archway, bright yellow and red corals, even a decorative anchor. A tan and black wrasse with neon blue pinstriping glided past. Hermit crabs scurried, their shells impossibly beautiful, their antennae waving.

Lightning cracked through the sky outside and the fish flinched.

He loved his ocean, McMichael thought. And his baseball. And his Fords and his politics and his power. Clobbered dead by a thief for some paintings and baseball mitts and books? How much money is your common creep going to get for things like that? Two cents on the dollar? The guy would need Braga 's gate code to pull his car into the driveway, load the loot, get out before the nurse came back with the firewood. It didn't line up as that kind of robbery.

Which left the guy running from the trophy room. Or Sally Rainwater. Or maybe a team, with Sally conveniently out of the picture for the fatal forty minutes and the runner not a runner at all but a guy with a van. He went that way.

He looked over again at the potted plastic plant. It had become a brain thorn, which was McMichael's name for something that got into your mind on its own, bothered you, and you couldn't get it out. They were usually innocent and mildly annoying, like the names of actors whose shows you never watched, snippets of pop songs you've never really listened to, coaches whose sports you didn't follow. To imagine Joey Fatone humming the latest *NSYNC hit to Bobby Knight over and over again- that was a brain thorn.

So McMichael scratched his itch, walking over to see the plant up close. It was in fact a plastic creeping charlie. The pot was plastic, too; even the heart shape at the top was plastic, molded to look like painted wood. The childlike writing said:

A Happy Plant

Is a Smile

From

Heaven!

A grandchild's present, thought McMichael, touching the letters, which were raised and painted. Until his fingertip passed over the slick convex center of the O in From.

Odd. And no such thing as a brain thorn at a crime scene, he thought.

Gently, he pried at the sconce. It resisted, then clicked decisively, then swung out on two hinges. A video camera was fit into brackets on the back, allowing it to fit back into a rectangular hole in the wallboard. The lens was aligned with the cutout center of the letter O. The mike had a hole of its own, hidden behind the curve of the pot. A small motion detector was affixed beneath the camera and hard-wired into the "record" relay, its sensor partially concealed behind the leaves of the plastic plant. A 120 volt power cord twisted back into the hole and out of sight.

"Hey, guys."

The CSIs crowded in behind him. McMichael swung the hide-a-camera sconce open and shut then open again.

Harley couldn't believe he hadn't noticed it. Erik asked how you tell if a plant is truly happy.

McMichael's heart took a funny little dive when he pushed the eject button and found no cassette inside.

"So much for good luck, serendipity or the existence of God," said Erik.

McMichael concurred on two of the three, good Catholic that he was. He also wondered where the tapes were.

"This crime scene looks like that one two years ago," said Harley. "Applethorpe or something. You remember that, Tom, older guy up in Hillcrest?"

"It's still open. Team One."

"Unusual MO."

McMichael's phone vibrated.

"I'm down in Imperial Beach," said Hector. "Outside a pub called Ye Olde Plank. I really like these little binoculars. I can almost read the bartender's watch. It's about time for last call in there."

"Where's the nurse?"

"Third seat from the end of the bar, drinking at high speed. And yapping on her cell. She's made three calls in less than an hour, and downed five greyhounds. Least they look like greyhounds."

"She went straight there?"

"No, man. First home, then here."

"Did she take any loot out of her car?"

"Just her purse. But get this- I went around to her front porch, it's right there on the sand, you know? Had a look through the blinds to make sure she was okay. She was sitting on her couch. And over the couch is one of those paintings like Pete had. An old boat in a storm. Same kind of fancy gold frame. It looked like the last painting in the world a babe would hang in her apartment."

"There are five paintings missing from Pete's walls, according to Patricia," said McMichael. "She also said Pete was giving things to the nurse."

"Well, looks like Nurse Sally got at least one painting off the old man," said Hector.

"What did she do while she was home?"

"Cried."

"We'll knock on her door tomorrow morning," said McMichael. "Ask for a tour."

"She'll turn us down flat. But let's get her early, while she's still good and hungover."