“You’re a liar, Crandell! Kincannon wouldn’t let you kill his girlfriend!”
Crandell’s hand fell over my mouth. His smile was a mockery of humor, a twisted sneer, poisonous. He put his lips to my ear, whispered, “It was Buck’s idea, Ryder. Buck’s got a dark side like you wouldn’t believe. It’ll make Mama think old Luke’s taken a turn for the worst.”
Crandell removed his hand from my mouth.
“Turn for the worst?” I said. “Maylene thinks Lucas killed two women. That’s not bad enough?”
Crandell chuckled, a hollow sound. “A spinster schoolteacher and a black junior reporter? To Maylene, that’s deer on the highway. By this time tomorrow, Lucas will appear to have killed Buck’s high-profile girlfriend in Buck’s house, way too up close and personal for Maylene. She’ll beg for that Mex doctor, get Lucas’s head roto-rooted so this nastiness never happens again.”
“When is this supposed to happen?”
“Tonight, Ryder. Lucas strikes again.”
The door closed and I fought my restraints to no avail. I cursed myself aloud and repeatedly. I remembered Rudolnick’s hidden records describing a madman, a concealed sociopath on a downward spiral.
It is like walking beside a normal and respected person who has decided to become a suicide bomber, never knowing when he will grasp the plunger.
I’d figured Rudolnick was surreptitiously observing Lucas.
He was observing Buck.
“You want what, Harry?” Claypool said. He was wearing a tie-dyed ball cap, purple jeans, tire-tread sandals, and a black shirt with bold white lettering: ELECTRONS GIVE ME A CHARGE.
“That doesn’t take any thinking,” Claypool said, “but it sounds like fun. Lemme grab a soldering iron.”
“Maybe some of the bubble-wrapper stuff, too,” Nautilus added, “like it just came out of a box. You folks got any of that?”
Claypool looked about to swoon with delight and promised to send the package over within an hour. Nautilus made his office by nine. He wrote a few lines on a scrap of paper, then called Glen James from Tech Services.
“That’s strange, Harry,” James said, studying the lines. “But I’ll be glad to help.”
Nautilus went to the windowed conference room off the detectives’ room and unhooked the monitor and pushed it to the side, like it was being replaced. He saw an intern from Forensics wandering the floor with a brown package in his hand, waved him over. He set the package from Claypool on the table, then dialed Shuttles at his desk.
“Hey, Tyree, this is Harry. I’m in Conference room A. Got a minute?”
“Sure, Har,” Shuttles said, excitement in his voice. “Be right there.”
Har, Nautilus thought. He recalled the movie All That Jazz, Roy Scheider popping a couple pills to kick off his day, smiling in the mirror, saying, “It’s show time.”
“Show time,” Nautilus whispered.
Shuttles bounced in the door and took a seat. Nautilus figured Shuttles had to be thinking the two would be paired as a team. It’s a terrible thing about Carson, Tyree, but I need a new partner, and I think we’d work well together …
“What’s up, Har?” Shuttles was trying hard to hold in the grin.
Nautilus kept the smile. But shifted his eyes to the ones he used for interrogations. Black rockets, someone once called them. Nautilus aimed the rockets through Tyree Shuttles’s pupils and into his brain.
“Did you really think you’d get away with it, Tyree?”
“Uh, what are you talking about, Harry?”
Nautilus picked up the package prepared by Claypool. He pulled out an object protected by bubble wrap.
“What’s that, Harry?” Shuttles asked.
“You’ll know when you see it.”
Nautilus removed the tape securing the wrap. A small slip of paper fell out, INSPECTED BY NUMBER 57, underscored by a line of bar code.
Beautiful, Nautilus thought. He owed the multitalented Claypool a big dinner. Nautilus revealed a small assemblage of metal, plastic, and circuitry surrounding a tube like the front barrel of a rifle sight, a large optic glinting from the center. There was a mounting bracket. A cigarette-pack-sized control panel with buttons and LEDs. The ad hoc contraption looked like a sidearm from a Star Wars movie.
“Now do you understand, Tyree?”
“I don’t know what that thing is, Harry.” Shuttles couldn’t keep the scared out of his voice.
“One of the new cameras for the detective cars.”
“What cameras?”
“Like the ones in the patrol cars, but the next generation. Pace never told you?”
“Told me what?”
“Pace and me met with the chief a few weeks back. We discussed who’d get the first one, the test camera. Brand-new super-high-resolution cameras, fifteen grand per. It was scheduled for your car, Pace having the most seniority. But Pace didn’t want the camera. So Carson and me got it installed in our car.”
Sweat beaded on Shuttles’s forehead. He had the dry-mouth swallow.
“Pace doesn’t tell me anything. He probably forgot. The asshole doesn’t care about this kind of stuff. He won’t even use a computer.”
Nautilus went to the door, opened it, yelled, “Where the hell’s the monitor I asked for?”
Glen James was standing across the room talking to Lieutenant Tom Mason, the head of the department. James glanced down at his cupped palm, reading from the script Nautilus had prepared.
“On its way, Harry. Settle down. We can’t use a regular TV, it’s got to have the special screen. Like HDTV, where you see the pores on people’s faces. They’ll have it here in a few minutes.”
“Hurry the fuck up.”
“You gonna watch a porn flick, Harry? You’ll be able to count twat hairs, that much I can tell you.”
Glen James, improvising.
Nautilus slammed the door, sat back down. He rarely swore or slammed doors, making it that much more effective.
“I don’t give a fuck about cameras, Tyree. What would I want with a picture of Taneesha Franklin’s car as we pull in? No one even looked at the tape until this morning. Hell, I didn’t even want to test the camera that night, all the damn rain, but you know Carson. He was playing with the thing like a toy.”
“Franklin?” A tinder-dry whisper.
“I want you to explain something to me, Tyree. Something that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. The camera’s on, it’s switched to extreme night vision, something to do with lux rating or whatever. A regular camera wouldn’t show jackshit, all that rain, distance. But this new camera is taking in everything.”
Nautilus glared through the window into the detectives’ room, like he was angry the monitor wasn’t there yet.
“It’s maybe fifty feet from our cruiser to you in the shadows behind the Mazda. What does supercamera show when we slow the playback, Tyree?”
The kid was too scared to speak.
Roll the dice, Nautilus thought, about to make the jump suggested by Logan’s observation. Here’s where I win or lose …
“It shows you pulling a plastic bag from under your rain gear, Tyree. You open it, take out a knife, drop the bag into the gutter. Then you start yelling, ‘Knife.’”
Shuttles’s mouth made shapes, but no words came out. Nautilus said, “Why’d you bring the murder weapon to the scene in a plastic bag, Tyree?”
“It wasn’t my idea, I swear …”
“You never cruised more than eight blocks from the murder scene. How long were you supposed to wait for the Franklin car to be found? All night?”
Shuttles pressed his hands to his eyes, as if blotting out reality. Tears fell from beneath his fingers.
“Harry, I …”
“Then you tried to convince Carson that Logan was messing up the Carole Ann Hibney investigation. But it was really you throwing wrenches into the works. That idea come from Crandell? Or setting Logan up as paranoid, so if he voiced suspicions about you, it’d seem part of his paranoia. Right, Tyree? Have I got your sorry ass nailed?”
Shuttles pitched forward on the table, buried his face in his arms.
“They gave me so much, Harry, but they wanted so much back.”