“It can be. What did she do?”
“Her thing was to approach someone in an encampment—male or female—and offer to trade money for sex. If she was refused, she’d pull down her pants and say let’s do it anyway. If the answer was still no, her reaction was unpredictable. Sometimes she’d walk away muttering but other times she’d turn aggressive—wheedling, insulting, even pushing and shoving. A few men called her ‘the grabber.’ As in reaching for what one guy called ‘my manly manhood.’ ”
“The pose with Gurnsey,” I said.
“Art imitating life, Alex. Until now, the two of them being paired seemed like a sick joke. Now we know they had something in common.”
“Behavior and maybe motive: payback for coming on too strong.”
“O great mystic mind reader.”
“That would mean Gurnsey and Huralnik hit on the same person.”
“Why not? With Gurnsey it coulda been a bona fide date, with Huralnik just some crazy thing that happened on the street.”
“She groped the wrong person,” I said. “So how does Benny figure in?”
“What, I’m supposed to know everything? My question to you is, would someone overreacting like that have a history of being abused?”
“It’s certainly possible.”
“Could you spring for ‘likely’?”
“You know what I’m going to say.”
“Yeah, yeah, insufficient data. But it’s notunlikely.”
I laughed.
He said, “I’ll choose to take that as an endorsement. You have a nice weekend planned?”
“Nothing on the calendar.”
“Enjoy. No reason to watch me toss Vollmann and McGann’s place. Probably won’t learn a damn thing, ’cause no one writes anything down anymore. I’m lucky, one of them will have a laptop they didn’t pack. I’m not, it’s back to the phone companies.”
“You need me, let me know.”
“You’re the top of my call list.”
—
Nothing from him until Sunday at six p.m.
“Finally got into Marcella and Steve’s apartment. No laptop but miracle of miracles, one of them did write down their flight info and magnet it to the refrigerator. Sunday morning, like Coolidge’s pathologist guessed. Called the airline and verified. No cancellation, just a no-show. So Coolidge is probably right: waylaid on the way to LAX.”
I said, “How early Sunday morning?”
“Seven forty-five.”
“They’d have to leave while it was still dark and the streets were relatively deserted. Perfect for running them off the road or some other type of blitz.”
He said, “The time frame also fits: Benny goes missing on Friday, McGann, by herself or with Vollmann, goes looking for him that day or Saturday, by early Sunday she’s history. But what bothers me is if she learned something, she didn’t report it.”
“Maybe she didn’t realize she’d learned anything, just had the bad luck to ask the wrong person the wrong question. Someone capable of the limo slaughter wouldn’t balk at taking out insurance. The question is, Where would McGann go searching? My guess is somewhere between the facility and the art gallery. Maybe the gallery, itself.”
“Benny did get to work,” he said. “He just never left alive…Jesus…hold on.”
A minute passed.
