BERNHARDT SAW THE CAR parked at the curb: a blue Buick Skylark, Kane’s car. The car was parked in front of the two-story frame house on Sycamore Street used by members of Daniels’s staff. Since yesterday, Bernhardt had called three times at the Sycamore Street house. Twice the house had been deserted. Once a weary, resigned, middle-aged woman had told him that he’d just missed Kane, who had probably gone to the airport.
Paula had described Kane as “a man in his middle forties who looked like a middleweight.” Amused, he’d asked her how many middleweights she’d ever seen in action. They’d been in bed, and her reply had been a forefinger dug into his short ribs.
A vicious man, a man who’d murdered once, and tried to murder again. How would the conversation go? “Hello. My name is Alan Bernhardt. I’m looking for evidence that’ll send you to prison, maybe the death house.”
Or, “Hello. I’m Alan Bernhardt. If you’ll just be kind enough to confess, therefore incriminate your boss, I’ll use my influence to get you off with a slap on the wrist.”
He leaned across the seat, unlocked the glove compartment, withdrew the .357 Ruger in its soft leather holster, shut the glove compartment. The revolver was stainless steel, Ruger’s top-of-the-line Magnum. Herbert Dancer, his former employer and all-around amoral son of a bitch, had given him the automatic as a token of his esteem. Translation: of all Dancer’s investigators, Bernhardt had been the only one who’d consistently questioned Dancer’s motives. Most megalomaniacs, he’d discovered, need one honest man close to them. And Dancer had chosen him.
He swung out the Ruger’s cylinder, checked the load, carefully returned the cylinder with the hammer and the one chamber left empty. He holstered the gun, slipped the holster inside his trousers on the left side, clipped the flat steel spring over his belt. It had taken him more than an hour at Airport Security in San Francisco, filling out forms and submitting to a long, petty interrogation, before they’d taken the gun, emptied it, packaged it, tagged it, and consigned it to the cockpit crew for the trip to Boston.
He drew a long, deep breath, swung open the Escort’s door, and began walking across Sycamore Street.