“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said to the retreating Lincoln.
Chapter 123
I CRUISED BY THE idling patrol car at the end of Sea View Avenue, lifting my hand in greeting as I passed. Then I hooked a right into Cat’s driveway and parked the Explorer next to the Bonneville. Apparently, Keith had returned the old girl while I was away.
I let Martha into the house and gave her a biscuit. Then I turned my attention to the blinking answering machine. I pressed “play” and started making notes on a scratch pad.
Joe, Claire, and Cindy had all phoned in with worried requests for me to call back. Message number four was from Carolee Brown inviting me to dinner at the school that night.
Then, a message from Chief Stark, his voice weary as it came through the speaker.
“Boxer, we got the labs back on that belt. Call me.”
Chief Stark and I had been playing phone tag all day. I swore as I flipped through the scratch pad looking for his number. Then I dialed.
“Hang on, Lieutenant,” said the duty officer. “I’ll page him.”
I heard the sound of the police band sputtering in the background. I tapped my nails on the kitchen counter and counted to seventy-nine before the chief got on the line.
“Boxer.”
“That was a fast return on the lab report,” I said. “What have we got?”
“It was fast for a reason. There were no prints, not that that surprises me. But unless you count bovine DNA, there was nothing else, either. Lindsay, the bastards dripped a little beef blood on the buckle.”
“Aw, give me a break!”
“I know. Shit. Look, I gotta go. Our mayor wants a few words with me.”
The chief hung up, and, by God, I felt sorry for him.
I walked out to the deck, took a seat in a plastic chair, and hung my ankles over the railing as Claire had advised me to do. I stared out beyond my sandals and the neighbors’ backyards to the aqua blue line of the bay.
I thought again about that belt lying on the lawn this morning, and the bloodstain that had turned out to be nothing.
One thing was clear.
The killers hadn’t tried to kill me.
The belt was a warning meant to scare me away.
I wondered why they’d bothered.
I hadn’t solved John Doe’s murder and ten years later I was still sucking swamp water here.
Meanwhile, the killers were out there, and all the white hats had was a tantalizing handful of “what ifs” and “how comes” that went nowhere.
We didn’t know why.
We didn’t know who.
And we didn’t know where they would strike again.
Other than that, everything was the cat’s meow.
Chapter 124
FAMILIES, THE BANE OF modern civilization, where the scum of the past was kept alive, cultivated, and refined. At least that was the Watcher’s perspective tonight.