Kathy Reichs - Devil Bones

“Sure you don’t want some?” Garbled.

I shook my head. Swallowed. “What is it you want me to read?”

Wiping his hands on a napkin, Slidell pulled papers from a pocket and tossed them on the blotter.

“Eddie’s notes. That’s your copy.”

I unfolded and scanned the pages.

Like the man, the handwriting was neat and precise. So was the thinking.

Rinaldi had recorded the time, location, and content of every interview he’d conducted. It appeared that those he’d questioned either lacked or withheld contact information. Ditto for surnames.

“He got only first names or street names,” I said. “Cyrus. Vince. Dagger. Cool Breeze. And no addresses or phone numbers.”

“Probably didn’t want to spook the little freaks by pushing too hard.” Slidell’s jaw muscles bunched. As though suddenly devoid of appetite, he shoved a half-eaten chicken breast into the bag and sailed it into my wastebasket. “Probably figured he could find them later if needed.”

“He used some kind of shorthand system.”

“Eddie liked to get his thoughts down quick, but he worried some scumbag defense attorney might latch on to his first impressions and make a big deal of them in court if they later turned out to be off. So’s not to provide ammo, he kept his comments cryptic, that’s what he called it. Cryptic. I thought maybe you could make something of it.”

Rinaldi had questioned a chicken hawk named Vince on Saturday. I read the entry.

JK. 9/29. LSA with RN acc. to VG. RN-PIT. CTK. TV. 10/9-10/11? CFT. 10. 500.

“Vince must be the informant Rinaldi mentioned when you talked by phone as we were leaving Cuervo’s shop. Maybe he’s VG. JK could be Jimmy Klapec. RN could be the john Vince described as looking like Rick Nelson.”

Slidell nodded.

“The numbers are probably dates,” I went on. “LSA is standard code for ‘last seen alive.’ Maybe September twenty-ninth is the last day Vince remembered seeing Klapec with this Rick Nelson character.”

“So far we’re on the same page,” Slidell said. “But Funderburke first spotted Klapec’s body on October ninth, called it in on the eleventh. If that’s what this Vince is saying, where’s Klapec from late September until early October when he gets himself dead? Assuming Funderburke and his pooch ain’t totally wacko.”

I was too busy running possibilities to answer.

“CFT would be Cabo Fish Taco,” I said. “He was meeting Vince there at ten. Maybe Vince wanted five hundred dollars for his information.”

“TV?”

“Vince had seen Rick Nelson on television?”

“PIT? CTK?”

“PIT is the airport code for Pittsburgh. Maybe those are abbreviations for cities.”

I logged onto the computer and opened Google.

“CTK is the code for Akron, Ohio,” I said.

“What’s the significance of that?”

“I don’t know.”

Slidell laced his fingers on his belly, dropped his chin, and thrust out his legs. His socks were Halloween orange.

“Eddie did some digging while waiting to go back out to NoDa,” he said. “Read his last entry.”

RN = BLA = GYE. Greensboro. 10/9. 555-7038. CTK-TV-9/27. VG, solicitation 9/28-9/29.

GYE 9/27?

I Googled the two three-letter combos.

“BLA is the airport in Barcelona, Venezuela,” I said, somewhat deflated. “GYE is in Guayaquil, Ecuador.”

“If he’s referencing cities by code, why write out Greensboro?”

It was a good point.

“The seven-digit sequence looks like a phone number,” I said lamely.

“It is.”

“Whose?”

Slidell’s answer was a shocker.

“I PUNCH IT UP, A VOICE TELLS ME I’VE REACHED COMMISSIONER Lingo’s office.”

“Why would Rinaldi have Lingo’s number?”

“Good question.”

I reread Rinaldi’s last entry.

VG, solicitation 9/28-9/29.

“VG could be Vince. Maybe Rinaldi learned the kid’s last name, and the fact that he was busted for solicitation.”

“Right around the time we’re guessing Klapec disappeared.”

“Why did Rinaldi think that was worth noting?”

Slidell shrugged. “Can’t hurt to pull arrest records for those dates. If nothing else, it might give us Vince’s last name. Kid’s in the wind, by the way. No one’s seen him since Saturday.”

“Where does he live?”

“His buddies ain’t busting their balls to share, but they think he was mostly sleeping on the streets.”

“Do you plan to pay Lingo a visit?”

“Later. Right now I’m retracing Eddie’s steps, seeing what I can score on this dipshit Vince.”

“Strictly regarding Klapec,” I said.

“Strictly.”

“Anything new on Asa Finney?”

“Unless I find a smoking howitzer in the guy’s shorts, he sees a judge on the bones rap, posts bond, and they kick him tomorrow.”

“What’s your take on him?”

Slidell snorted. “Could have been a stud except for the head-on with zits.”

I ignored the unkind remark. Finney couldn’t help the condition of his skin. “But a killer?”

“Finney’s a witch. Witch camp’s a spit from the Klapec scene. Neighbors report a lot of drumming and rattling the night before the kid’s body turns up. One says he saw a Ford Focus leaving the area long after the party was over.”

I remembered the car in the Pineville driveway.

“Finney drives a Focus,” I said.

“Don’t take a genius to connect the dots.” Again, the tensing of the jaw. “I’m thinking Finney’s wizard pals maybe also capped Eddie.”

“Why?”

“He was learning too much.”

As I started to reply Slidell shot upright in his chair.

“Rick Nelson.” A beefy finger jabbed the air in my direction. “Except for the zits, Finney’s a dead ringer for Rick Nelson. Think about it. The hair. The come-fuck-me smile. Sonovabitch.”

“You’re suggesting Finney is the violent john described by Vince?”

Slidell stood and circled to my side of the desk. The finger flipped the pages of Rinaldi’s notes.

RN-PIT. CTK. TV.

“Eddie was saying Rick Nelson with pits. Zit pits. That’s just what he’d say. I’ll be goddamned.”

“Maybe.” I was unconvinced.

“What? It describes Finney to a T. Maybe that’ll give us enough to hold the little prick on Klapec.”

“I’d still run the Akron angle.” I truncated Slidell’s objection. “See if Finney booked a flight or has ties there.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

We fell silent, staring at Rinaldi’s enigmatic code.

After several seconds, I sensed a shift in Slidell’s attention, felt his eyes crawl my face. I didn’t look up. Didn’t want to pursue the conversation I suspected was coming.

Instead of commenting, Slidell yanked a spiral from his pocket, scribbled, then tore out and laid the page on my desk.

“My girlfriend used to catch a lot of these bugs. You feel like it, you call her.”

I heard footsteps. Then my office was still.

Again, shame scorched my face. Larabee knew. Slidell knew. Who else had seen through my pathetic flu story?

I was reading Slidell’s scrawl when the ME stuck his head in the door.

“Get in here quick-” Seeing my look, he stopped. “What?”

“Slidell has a girlfriend.”

“No way.”

“Verlene Something with a W.” The name was spelled Wryznyk.

“I’ll be damned.” Larabee remembered his purpose in coming. “Lingo’s foaming at the mouth again.”

“God almighty!”

I followed Larabee into the lounge. Every station was carrying coverage of the Rinaldi shooting. The TV was tuned to one of them.

Lingo was holding forth outside a cemetery. Police barricades were going up on the street around him.