Gof night. Bov
Below that was another message.
You got mail. Kay
He opened the inbox on his phone. There was an email from Kay Myers, sent an hour ago. With two attachments. He opened the one titledPerez 1995.It contained photos of a number of closely written pages, and he realized it must be the police report she had refused to let him have the previous day. Because the screen on Bob’s phone was small and the headache was impossible to ignore he got up, made coffee, opened the attachments on his computer and enlarged the images. He had no idea what had caused Myers to change her mind, but that wasn’t important. He sipped the scalding hot coffee as he read through the document.
According to the report the killing had taken place in aparking lot, not in West Phillips but in Hawthorne, a neighborhood that was at least as lawless as the Near North. The victims had been seated in a car and gotten hit in a drive-by shooting: Candice Perez, a single mother, and her two children, Emilio and Nathan. There was nothing about a father until the final page, where the report noted that the registered father of the children was Chuck Perez, a known drug dealer. But it was difficult to connect this as a motive for the killings because Chuck Perez had been shot and killed, probably in a gang-warfare-related incident, in 1992, three years previously.
Bob scanned the report. There was nothing there about a girl in a wheelchair. In short, this wasn’t the case Tomás Gomez had described to Mike Lunde. Bob swore. So where was the story about his family being killed? Was it just something Gomez had invented? Not unlikely. In Bob’s experience, criminals were notorious liars. Bob opened the second attachment. This was a list of murder cases involving multiple victims and it went back further than 1990, the cutoff he had chosen for his own search. He clicked them open one after the other. The way it looked, killings with more than one or two victims happened only once or twice a year. He raised his coffee cup, then jerked it, spilling hot coffee into his lap. He scarcely noticed. His gaze was riveted to a case from 1986. Three victims. Again, a mother and two children. The woman’s first name was Monica. But it was the surname he was staring at.
41
White, October 2016
He’d checked out the final lead, a tip-off from a long-distance truck driver who claimed to have met a strange man who looked like Tomás Gomez at a truck-stop café just the other side of the Iowa border. Joe had talked to the people who worked at the café and it turned out that guy was a well-known local character who just liked talking to truck drivers at the café.
Now it was time to get over to Arb where there was other work to do. The patrol who called it in said the corpse had no head and no ID, but there was a bullet hole in the chest, leaving little doubt that it was a matter for the Homicide Unit. Joe explained that he had a couple of other things to do before he could get out there but that a technical team was already on its way.
A phone rang somewhere out in the deserted office landscape. Joe shrugged on his jacket. He was actually pissed at Olav fornot making him part of his stadium team and leaving him with this shit job instead. The phone was still ringing. Usually it transferred to reception automatically after a certain number of rings, but since this was Saturday there was no one in reception. Joe Kjos had no intention of taking the call, but as he walked past Myers’s desk he realized it was her phone that was ringing. She’d only just left, so he picked up.
“MPD.”
“Good morning, my name is Jim Andersen. Kay Myers, is she…?”
“She just left. This is Detective Joe Kjos, how can I help you, sir?”
The caller hesitated, and Joe Kjos hoped the guy would say no so that he could get out of there, get this last job done and finally enjoy the weekend.
“I’m an instructor at the Mitro shooting range,” the guy said. “Your colleague who was here left her card and asked me to call the number if I remembered anything about the Latino she was looking for.”
“Okay?”
“I still don’t recall any Latino, but then something came to me. She traced us through a target you guys found inside some bubble wrap.”
Joe Kjos checked the time.
“There was a guy in here with a rifle wrapped in bubble wrap. But he wasn’t Latino. He was white.”
Joe Kjos sighed but located a pen on Myers’s desk and made a note. “White, sir?”
“White. I remember because he insisted that I work out the height adjustment for a shot from four hundred yards.”
“Was there anything unusual in his behavior? Did he seem aggressive? Drugged?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Did he give you a name or a phone number?”
“No.”
“Anything else you can tell us about him?”
“Not really.”
Joe Kjos breathed out in relief. “Okay. Let me take your number and we’ll be in touch if we have any more questions.”
—
