“Meet you in the lobby in five,” Lucas said.
“Make it ten. I wanna brush my teeth and I gotta get my gear out of here... I’ll get Rae moving. She’s pretty quick.”
As Bob trotted off down the hallway, Lucas noticed that he seemed to be wearing nothing but a pair of thigh-length underpants and a T-shirt; no shoes. Lucas went back inside, cleaned up, and was out of the room twelve minutes after Bob trotted away.
Bob got to the lobby at the same time he did, carrying the oversized bag that he used for the ordnance, and Rae showed up two minutes later, trying to get on some lipstick as she walked. “This is fuckin’ crazy,” she said. “We all going together? We need to figure this out before we talk to the cops.”
“Your car’s the biggest,” Bob said to Lucas.
“The drug guys found Arnold,” Lucas said, as they walked out to the parking lot. The day before had been hot, but the predawn air had a sharpness to it: autumn coming to Texas. “They’ve got to have a source somewhere. It seems to me the only way they could go straight to Arnold is if they knewwewere talking to him.”
“Walk me through that,” Rae said.
“If you work through the sheets on Garvin Poole, you’ll come up with a lot of names of people who’ve been associated with him. Arnold is one of the more obscure—the only reason we went for him, the only reason we came here, is because Sturgill Darling made aphone call to Dallas. We weren’t even sure that Poole was here until we went to the gold stores. That’s when we decided to go to Arnold. How are a couple of thugs going to figure that out? Only one way—they have a source who told them what we’re doing.”
“Where’s the source?” Rae asked. “In the Marshals Service? How many people in the service knew we were going to see Arnold?”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” Lucas said. “I told my guy about the phone call by Darling, and he switched me over to a woman named Mary who takes care of travel.”
“I told my chief at SOG and asked him if he knew Arnold. He didn’t,” Bob said. “I’d trust him with my life. Hell, me and Rae bothhave.”
Rae: “Maybe... the Dallas cops?”
“Can’t be the cops—I didn’t talk to them until yesterday evening,” Bob said. “If these two were up in Nashville—I mean, how’d they get here so fast? How would anyone in Dallas even know to tell them?”
Rae said, “It’d have to be somebody in the service who’s not waiting for them to call. Somebody who’s looking at the same reports Lucas has, who could call them directly. Might even be runnin’ them.”
“That sucks,” Bob said.
—
THEY WERE DRIVINGacross town with the first dawn light, but the freeways were already getting stiff. The sun was up by the time they walked past the police lines around Arnold’s place.
Dallas crime scene people were already working in the two houses and the yard, and a cop wearing corporal’s stripes directed them toward a man in civilian clothes: “Lieutenant Hart, he’s in charge.”
Donald Hart was a tall, tough-looking black man who gave Rae a long look as they walked up. “You the feds?”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah. Anyone tell you what we’re doing?”
“Not entirely. I got jerked out of bed an hour ago. We don’t get that many triples, and when we do, they don’t look like this one. What the hell are we into here?”
Hart leaned back against the fender of a squad car as Lucas introduced Bob and Rae and then briefed him. When Lucas finished, Hart said, “The killers are professionals. No tie to anything local.”
“I don’t believe so,” Lucas said. “I can tell you for sure if I can take a look inside Arnold’s place.”
“That makes sense... that they’re professionals. I thought they might be. I’ll tell you about that in a minute. I’m not, uh, sure... how much do you guys deal with homicides?”
“I spent twenty-five years chasing homicides up in Minneapolis and all over Minnesota before I joined the Marshals Service,” Lucas said. “Altogether, probably worked three hundred of them, either as the lead investigator or assisting.”
Hart nodded. “Good. Sometimes we get federals down here who... get a little pukey when they see a dead one.”
“People we deal with, we get a little pukey with the live ones,” Bob said. “Dead ones don’t bother us much.”
“C’mon then,” Hart said.
—
HART SAIDthe couple in the front house were Mitch and Carla Bennett. They’d been made to lie down on the front room carpet, and each had been shot in the back of the head with a large-caliber weapon. Lucas told Hart that when they’d visited the night before, the windows had been open. They were closed now, and Lucas suggested that the crime scene crew print the window frames where somebody would have pushed them down.
