“Yes,” Mike said with a quiet sigh of resignation.
“Great. Great, Mike! I’m on my way over to you now to hear the recording.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your address?”
“It’s quite a ways, Bob. Know what, I’ll meet you halfway. There’s a McDonald’s on 2nd Avenue and East Lake Street. See you there in thirty minutes?”
35
Target, October 2016
Kay Myers’s desk was located almost exactly in the middle of the open office landscape of the Homicide Unit. Maybe that’s why she sometimes felt herself surrounded on all sides. And longed for her own office. She looked at the paper target they had found in the bubble wrap left behind in the shopping mall. Studied the bullet holes.
She felt Hanson’s presence before she heard him.
“We’ve had over two hundred calls from people who think they saw Gomez.”
“Oh yeah?” she said.
“Springer acts cool, but JTTF has called up half the police in the city for the opening tomorrow.”
Kay read the text on the target.
Hanson coughed. “Hope you’re not pissed that Springer put me in charge at this end?”
“Not at all,” said Kay. “You have seniority.”
“Good. Because here’s a list I want you to check.” He handed her a sheet of paper. “I want you to check out first the ones I’ve ticked. Here…”
Kay looked at the sheet of paper. Skimmed through it. “It says here the caller thinks they saw Gomezthreeweeks ago?”
“Yes, but if you keep reading, you’ll see she thinks she saw him again yesterday. If that’s true, then she’s the only person we know of—apart from the neighbors in Jordan—who’s seen Gomez more than once in the same place. If there’s anything to it, then it means we have a place we know he visits regularly.”
Kay glanced through the notes. Aged eighty-three, address Cedar Creek. North of the city center, more or less wilderness country. There was a separate column for the person taking the call to assess the caller’s credibility.
“Credibility rating under half, it says here.”
“Yes, he wasn’t sure if the old lady was all there.”
Kay looked up at Hanson. “Even among calls we get thatsoundserious, eighty percent turn out to be fantasies. And this is from a senile old lady living somewhere out in the sticks, in wolf country?”
“I hear you, Myers, but I think it’s worth following up.”
“If I say I don’t agree?”
Hanson smiled and lifted his coffee cup as though to make a toast. “I recall someone telling me to shut up and call Walker because he’d put her in charge of the case. Well, Myers, you can call Springer. Okay?”
Hanson turned and walked off whistling. Kay closed her eyes. Hoped the slight twinges of pain in her lower back weren’t going to be the start of something.
“Excuse me.”
Kay opened her eyes and looked up. Her heart gave a little jump. It was the dark-eyed painter. He hadn’t taken off his mask, not even the protective white cap and gloves.
“I promised you an invitation,” he said. He put a card down on her desk, turned and walked away. She watched him go. The nerve of it. He must have been warned he couldn’t just wander inside the Homicide Unit where there was so much sensitive information lying around. But he’d taken the chance anyway, risked getting a reprimand just to deliver this card to her. She looked at it. It was the kind of invitation you buy in a store and fill out your own details on it. Here it said that the invite was to Minnehaha Park, in front of the waterfalls. Sunday at one o’clock. There was no indication of what would happen there, nor was the card signed. She slipped it into a drawer. If they’d got Gomez by then, well, maybe. If not, then she’d still be sitting here.
She picked up the paper target again. Ran her fingertips over the bullet holes.
