Stephen White - Blinded

I shrugged. “Doesn’t happen too often, but sometimes people are right.” That, by the way, was a classic move two on my part, which meant that Reynoso was firmly in control of this conversation.

It was okay with me for the moment. I was confident I could take back the wheel whenever I felt like it.

She said, “We’re the only two people I know who believe that Sterling Storey is actually still alive.”

“How do you know what I believe?”

“I’m a detective.”

She didn’t yield an inch of territory. I smelled Lucy. “My partner told you I was here?”

She smiled for the first time. Her lips were sealed during the entire grin. I was thinking she didn’t like her teeth. Yellow or crooked? I guessed crooked, then instantly reconsidered my conclusion. Maybe she was a smoker. I sniffed at the air, didn’t detect anything foul that wasn’t coming from the kitchen. Still, she struck me as someone who’d maybe once smoked.

She said, “I’m picky about revealing my sources.”

“You mean your snitches? What do you want with me, Detective Reynoso?”

“You Catholic?”

“I thought you were a detective. You should already know the answer to that.” I wasn’t sure whether my response had been a move one or a move two. But I thought it was pretty clever.

“I am. I’m Catholic. My father considers St. Peter’s-you know, in Rome-the holiest place in the world. Notre Dame-the university, not the cathedral in Paris-comes in a close second. In my family Saturday afternoons in the fall are just as holy as Sunday mornings. Fighting Irish football? Anyway, this is a roundabout way of wondering if you’ll accompany me up to South Bend.”

I’m not Catholic. To the contrary, I hate Notre Dame University with the same kind of passion that heretics despised the Inquisition. Why? Lots of reasons. But mostly because Notre Dame stole Lou Holtz from the University of Minnesota.

Some things aren’t forgivable. But I’d learned over the years that it wasn’t a safe area of discourse with Notre Dame fanatics, who tend to be about as rational about their beloved Fighting Irish as the real fighting Irish are about the British, so I kept my enmity to myself.

“Why?” I asked. My resolve about not revisiting the Coach Lou hijacking was weakening already; I was sorely tempted to go into my well-practiced Notre Dame harangue.

“If Sterling’s alive, I think that’s where we’ll find him.”

I left half my beer on the table. She left slightly less of hers. I never got a chance to taste the minestrone, but I suspected that it wouldn’t have satisfied like my mom’s bratwurst and cheese soup with ale. As Reynoso and I were walking out of the Marriott, I said, “There are three, by the way.”

“Three what?”

“People who think Sterling’s alive. His wife does, too.”

I had to hustle to keep up with her long strides. “Actually,” she said, “that would make four.”

“Four?”

“I’m thinking Brian Miles.”

Sterling’s pal in Georgia. Smart lady. I said, “Gotcha.”

Two more steps. “Gibbs is a piece of work,” she added.

To that, I thought, Amen.

I was going to South Bend. That was the bad news. The good news? Carmen Reynoso had rescued me from my impulse to drive even farther north to Minnesota. Every objective part of my brain was telling me that the trip to see my family would have been a bad thing to do.

How did Reynoso convince me that going to Notre Dame with her on Thanksgiving was the right thing to do?

The Crime Stoppers tipster in Colorado had called again. People who listened to both tapes thought it was the same guy as the first call. This time he’d told the volunteer who’d answered the phone that if Sterling Storey had happened to survive his swim in the swollen Ochlockonee River, he might be going after another victim, a woman he may have been planning to kill all along. The tipster suggested that the next victim would be found in one of three towns: South Bend, Indiana, Flushing Meadows, New York, or Daytona Beach, Florida. The tip also revealed that the South Bend woman worked in the Sports Information Office at Notre Dame. Reynoso had already done the footwork necessary to identify her. There was only one woman on the Sports Information Office staff who fit the correct profile: twenty-five to thirty-five, pretty enough to turn heads, a widow.

“Why you focused on that one? She’s the only one at risk?” I asked.

“There’re two other women on the list. The one in New York does advance work for the women’s tennis tour. But we think she’s in Australia at the moment setting up a tournament, so we’re not as concerned about her. The other woman has something to do with Daytona Beach, Florida-maybe the car race-but so far we don’t know enough to figure out who she is. So I’m here.”

“The South Bend woman, what’s her name?”

“Holly Malone. Good Irish girl.”

I asked the obvious. “Isn’t it likely the tipster’s a crank?”

“He got the others right, didn’t he? The other three homicides after the one in Laguna?”

“Still.”

“Let’s be real. You doing anything else for the holiday, Sam?”

It was the first time she’d called me by my first name.

“Not really,” I admitted.

“Me, neither,” she said.

“Why,” I asked, “doesn’t the South Bend PD take care of this?”

Reynoso was in the passenger seat of my Cherokee. We’d backtracked and dumped her rental car back at some no-name agency at the airport and had started driving north. Unless we got seriously distracted, we’d be in the hometown of the Fighting Irish just before we arrived at the Michigan state line.

Reynoso answered my question. “I called the local cops when I was still in Georgia, explained the situation real politely, and I requested some assistance. Hold on-let me try and get this next part exactly right.”

She took a moment to collect her thoughts, and then she adopted an accent that was part something and part something else. I wasn’t good with accents. It was one of my few liabilities as a peace officer.

“ ‘Ma’am,’ ” she said in character, then went back to her everyday voice and explained that “the detective I spoke with in South Bend called me ‘ma’am.’ I always find that improves my mood considerably, being called ‘ma’am.’ ” She resumed her soliloquy with “ ‘Ma’am, you want us to go out and protect a woman from a killer who’s already been declared dead by the Georgia authorities? You actually do that sort of thing regularly in southern California? Up here we don’t get a whole lot of spirit homicides. We actually haven’t had a good ghost killing in, dear Lord, aeons. And my memory is that the last one we did have got the death penalty. Well, we hanged him. Recall we had the darnedest time finding a good place for the rope. It got all tangled up in the sheets. But we managed.’ ”

“I bet he thought he was pretty funny,” I said.

“The man thought he was hilarious. One of his buddies was cracking up, too. I could hear him. I hope we get a chance to meet both of them when we get to South Bend. That would please me.”

While she was talking, she’d started fiddling with my radio, which wasn’t pleasing me too much at all. The fine country station with the clear signal that I’d found south of Indianapolis disappeared in a sharp crackle, and suddenly I found myself listening to late seventies pap. I couldn’t imagine a worse choice-I didn’t like to be reminded that I’d actually been in the prime of my life during disco. It was a source of long-term humiliation for me. I worried how I would explain it to Simon when the time came to discuss the music of my youth. If rap hung around long enough, that would help; rap was at least as hard to defend as disco. Maybe harder.