Stella walked into the gym room Hooker had set up years ago. She watched the giant black man from the back. Bored, Danny had stripped to the waist and was absent-mindedly curling the largest stack of dumbbell weight he could make as he watched Hooker struggle with the small kettlebell with his right arm.
Something was wrong with the picture. It took Stella a minute. “Where is your cast?”
Danny froze.
Hooker jerked at being caught and looked up sheepishly. “It got wet last night. It was falling apart in the sheets.” He sat back up, resting the small weight on his knee. “I took it off before the sheets all turned to plaster concrete.”
She cocked her head slightly sideways and gave him the eye. He smiled. “I put them in the washer. They should be dry by now. I’ll put them back on the bed this afternoon before I take a nap.”
“Hmm.” She cocked her hip. Finished with him, she turned to Danny. She stepped over and rested her hand lightly on his massive shoulder. He twitched, unsure of what was coming. She bent over and kissed the top of his head. “Thank you for bringing your mama and Sweets out last night. I swear, I would have Tilly at my table any Saturday or Sunday you can spare her.”
He looked up and around at her. “You can have her. But then her two foundering children would starve.”
She leaned on him as she laughed. “I can see that.”
“Danny is going to start dropping Sweets off, and then come out and work me over until I can work again. We might get Manny down here and work his upper torso, too.”
Danny turned slightly toward Hooker. “You should have an upper torso like his. The man just needs to work on what he can’t move.” He turned back to Stella. “I’ve been reading some books about massage and stretching for better blood flow. I’ll work on him and show you what you can do for him in bed.”
Realizing what he had just said, he flushed. Stella felt the quick heat in his neck more than she could see any blush in his walnut skin. She hugged him. “I know what you meant. You don’t have to do anything for us, Danny, and you and your family are always family and welcome for any dinner that doesn’t have you two running off to work halfway through the evening.”
“Speaking of work,” she turned back to Hooker, “a deputy just dropped off four large boxes. I have to get Manny up and through the shower. Paul is coming over for breakfast. So, you two have about ten more minutes, and then get cleaned up for breakfast.”
She looked around the large unfinished room. The wall of windows looked out across the valley and the lower driveway. The door entered from the garage, but there was all the plumbing for an apartment with two modest-sized bedrooms. The high ceiling matched the garage area, which was built to accommodate a commercial car lift in one of the three bays. Across the garage was a large storage room which over the next few months, would become stuffed with tons of canned food. It was Stella’s personal food bank for law enforcement families in need. The access door from the outside had no lock. If there were a need, Stella damn sure wasn’t going to be monitoring the flow.
“Thinking about Candy and Squirt?”
“Of course,” she smiled softly. She would finally get the daughter she always wanted. “Thinking about them, starting work on the apartment in here, and I also need to get the tents delivered and set up. The vegetables are already rolling out of the fields so the gleaning will start soon. We need to have the canning kitchen set up and ready.”
She headed for the door and then turned, frowning. “Where are you going to put all of this equipment when the apartment is done, and there are two or three cars in the garage?”
Hooker laughed. “Manny always wanted a barn.” He pointed to the end of the driveway from where it wrapped down around the large sprawling hacienda with the huge concrete party deck. “We’re going to bury it partially into the hill so it doesn’t look so big.”
Looking out at the hill, her mind worked in overdrive. “It might be better to make a permanent outdoor kitchen over on the side, and a larger storage area in the barn. Then you could have easier access to the gym across the way.” She turned and walked across the two empty parking bays. She patted her pet Cadillac in the third bay. Her voice reverberated in the empty garage. “Ten minutes, then get cleaned up. Breakfast at nine o’clock....”
Hooker and Danny both softly echoed the rest of her spiel as she moved up the secret stairs. “If you are late, you starve.” The two men chortled. Their mothers were so very much alike.
Cleaned and well-fed, Danny had taken off to get some sleep before Sweets needed to go to work for the night. The other three men gathered in Manny’s office to go through the boxes of past cases of the killer secretly referred to as the Cowboy Picasso.
The boots had started it. At the third kill scene, someone had made the comment how the killer made his victims look like a Picasso painting, all torn apart. The name had stuck, but thankfully, had not made it into the papers, nor had much news of each killing. They were separated enough so the police had been able to present them as individual incidents, thus averting any public panic about a serial killer. The painted walls had never been seen by anyone from the news media. It had been one of the most closely guarded secrets of the case.
Hooker looked out the one window set mainly for light. The view through the narrow window was along the outside of the two-foot thick straw-bale and stucco wall. He could see out past the hacienda to the tan grassy hillside where the sun was pounding the South Bay Area. It was the twenty-seventh day with temperatures over the critical temperature for a crime: ninety-seven degrees, the true temperature of blood.
He knew from Manny that after six days of no relief from the heat, murders and other crimes of violence went up dramatically. He didn’t watch the news or read the paper like Manny. For the most part, he had suffered enough of it in his early years and didn’t need it vicariously now.
He rubbed his aching arm. Maybe it had been too early to take the cast off. And then there was the Danny factor. Hooker found it hard to be satisfied with working with a four-pound kettle weight when Danny was fanning himself with eighty-five pounds.
“I think Hooker would have a better take on... Hooker?”
Hooker swam back to the present. “Hmm?” he turned his head and raised his eyebrows.
Manny frowned with concern and then laughed. “Did Danny wear you out today?”
Hooker made a growling face and muttered something unintelligible.
“Paul was wondering if we might be looking at the kind of person who is technically untraceable, members of your sister’s community or of that ilk.”
Hooker scratched behind his right ear, and suddenly realized he was doing something he had not been able to do for the last few months. He continued scratching blissfully, then looked up, and answered. “It’s possible. But then, they don’t usually have any access to a car. In fact, they seem to disdain any contact with any kind of machinery. I’m not even sure they use knives, much less a small-caliber handgun.”
“Hmm,” Manny turned back to Paul. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Also, there is the boot issue. The lookout fits the type with bare feet, but not the cowboy with the boots. Even the Mouse doesn’t wear shoes—and as a girl, she had tender feet. She at least wore sandals outside.”
Paul filed the information away in his mind for later. “Okay, next in the boxes is our little friend, the raven. In going over the boxes, I found another. In kill number two, a raven bone was picked up but never cataloged. So now, we have three raven wing bones, and all of them are the leading long bone from the right shoulder to the first bend or the start of the finger bone. This makes it the…” He dug in his pocket. “Just a minute, I had it right here.” Drawing out a small scrap of paper, he opened it and read, “It’s the radius or the second bone. The ulna is the first.”
Hooker smiled. “Just like us.” He pointed to two points on his forearm. “Radius moves and the ulna is the structural bone. It could be there’s something there about it being the moving bone,” he pointed at the photos, “being a paintbrush and all.”
Paul and Manny just stared at him. They weren’t used to being taught things by a much younger man. They looked at each other and raised an eyebrow.
“Hey, I was paying attention when they were trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again.”
They laughed as Paul took a set of photos from each box. “Now, what we have here is very interesting. Or, in the words of Charlie Chan, most very interesting.”
He laid out seven photos of shoeprints and castings. “I had the lab reverse the casting photos so we would be looking at all of the same impression. I also had them adjust everything to real-life measurements.”
Manny looked at all the photos. “Which kill are these from?”
Paul looked at him. “All of them.”
“Can’t be.”
“Is.”
“No boot or sole would remain the same over... what... twelve years?”
“Not if you wore them every day. No, they wouldn’t. But this is 1961, here is 1964, this one is 1966, this is yours, and here is the railcar.”
Manny pointed to an artifact on the prints. “This notch is the same. On a regular shoe, it would get larger until it wasn’t recognizable as a cut mark.”
Paul pointed along the edge of the cast print. “Notice these three little V-notches. That is from what we call kill number two. Now, look here. There are four more. This is from yours. We only know of one killing between this one and yours.”
Hooker gave a low whistle. “But there are four more. Somewhere, if this guy really is putting notches on his boot, somewhere, there are three more bodies.”
Paul sat down and leaned back. “Exactly. Also, there are radical separations between his kills. Either this guy is hiding some we haven’t found, or he’s traveling.”
Manny leaned back. “A serial killer usually starts with separations of long periods, but then, as he kills, the periods between become shorter and shorter as he searches for the same high, he got from the first successful kill. That is why they also become obsessive and compulsive about their kill routine. They are always trying to duplicate the feeling they got the first time. But with this guy, we had seen a huge gap between when he attacked me and the railcar.”
“And if we understand The Mouse, he has accelerated even more.” Hooker pulled at his pursed lips, a mirror image of Manny’s habit. “So where has he been for the last six years?”
Paul looked at Manny. “So, how do you want to cut up California?”
Manny rolled his head toward his old partner. “I’ll take straight over to Tulare and up into the gold rush country and work north. I know a few of these guys from Masons, so they’ll talk to me without having to pull a badge. You take the south. I don’t think you would have to call any further than Riverside or San Berdoo unless you hit pay-dirt down there.”
Paul nodded. “I don’t know if we need to figure out where he’s getting the raven wing bones, but it is curious they are all from the right-wing.”
Manny looked at Hooker. “Why don’t you go visit your girlfriend tonight? She knows a lot of strange people. She might know someone in the Native American mystic community who could shed some light on the bone.”
“I don’t know about driving the Cadillac...”
“Whimper a bit. Stella will kvetch, but she will be happy to see her sister. And you better take the mange bucket, or Dolly will just clam up.”
Hooker laughed as the phone rang. They all jumped.
Manny scooped it out of the cradle. “Manny.”
The conversation was short. “Where?” He rolled his eyes up into his head as the person on the other end relayed the information. “Is a car on the way?”
He swung around and looked at Hooker. “Okay, we’ll be ready. And Dolly? I’m sending Hooker and the mange bucket over to see you tonight. He’s bringing a chaperone, so you two can coordinate about the canning. Paul said Gwen and Peter down in Gilroy have already put up five hundred gallons of stuff. And I think the plant is kicking in a ton or something of commercially canned goods.” He listened. “Okay. Love ya, sis.” He placed the phone back in the cradle.
“Where?”
“Northside. The old rail docks.”
Paul spat air.
Manny looked at Paul and then at the boxes of information. “They don’t know this is all here, do they?”
“Hell, these new kids can barely find their asses with their hands and sniffing dogs.” He shook his head. “No, they have no idea. Everything except the bones can stay here. They are all photocopies the lab-made for you. The old guy Johnson said it was the least they could do for you.” He drew his lips tight against his teeth and scratched the last of the reddish hair in the gray. “They’re making copies as anything comes through, but I have to take the bones back. The new guys are going to start learning soon.”
Manny knew what kind of limb his old partner was out on. “Thanks, Paul. I appreciate everything you’re doing here.”
The man got up to leave before the deputy arrived. He put the bones in one of the boxes and put it under his arm. “Oh, and I noticed you had finally pulled the permit for the barn you busted my balls on a few years back. I look forward to finally seeing it raised.”
Hooker chortled. “Heck, Paul, you can come out and swing a hammer with the rest of us.”
He looked at the young man with elevated eyes. “I just might take you up on your offer. I hear there is some good food around here for an old bachelor.”
Manny laughed and shook his hand. “We’ll lay in some supplies.”