When it does, it’s going to be about means, not motive.”
“I wouldn’t be looking too closely at Vince Wynn for this,” she cautioned.
He didn’t want to hear any more. He wanted to disconnect the call.
She volunteered, “Of all the people, Gale’s agent would have known better than anyone the degree of threat Martel Gale represented. The kind of trouble he could make. He saw him through the assault trial. The conviction. He saw him on the playing field. All the trouble in the locker room.” She’d done her homework. “Gale had forty pounds and several inches on Vince Wynn. Wynn showed his weapon of choice in his backyard: you don’t hunt a lion with a BB gun. You don’t take on Gale with a baseball bat. More like a double-barreled shotgun. I went over this with the sergeant. It took some convincing. I realize the evidence—circumstantial and maybe otherwise—points you in a certain direction, and far be it from me to contest evidence. But if I had to describe his killer, premeditated or not, I would classify him as . . . reluctant. I realize that implies contradiction, but the other way to explain that single blow is as a crime of passion—a final, life-ending, flash of anger and rage, so intense that it required but a single strike. It happened in a single strike, a blow perhaps never intended to kill.”
“That is contradictory,” he said.
“Maybe I’m just trying to cover myself.” She laughed, somehow finding it amusing.
Walt felt uncomfortable. He was thinking maybe a woman could deliver a blow like that—an incredibly angry woman—angry at men like Martel Gale who had a record of violence against women. Never mind that it had been a single blow—the human being was capable of extraordinary acts of violence.
He wondered if Kira Tulivich had played high school softball, or if her family home was heated by wood, as so many homes in the valley still were. And if so, who in her family wielded the ax.
34
After putting in a call to Royal McClure, and summoning his nephew, Kevin, to his offices, Walt returned to the Incident Command Center at Fiona’s request.
“It’s done,” she said.
Walt sat down next to her and trained his eyes on the room’s central, flat panel display.
“It’s better up there on the wall,” she explained, “because of the viewing distance. I didn’t have time to make everything perfect. The stop action helps—it being all jerky.”
She clicked the play button and Walt watched the three seconds of choppy video.
“Amazing,” he said.
“You think so?”
“Is that even Ketchum?”
“A Seattle street. But I cut and pasted the signs in and they make it familiar enough to trick the eye, I think.”
“Thank you.”
“It was fun. A different kind of challenge.”
“Do you mind showing me how to run it?”
“I can do it for you.”
“Better if I do it,” he said. “There’s a psychology involved.”
“Whatever you want,” she said. She walked him through the operation of the video software, which turned out to be straightforward, and in turn caused him to wonder why she’d offered to stay and help out. The only thing he could think of was that she wanted to eavesdrop, to stay as current on the investigation as possible, and it troubled him.
“Where’d you go?” she said.
He grimaced. “Right here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“A lot on my mind.”
“You went cold all of a sudden.”
He hated being so easily read. “Did I? It wasn’t intentional.”
Nancy saved him by knocking, and opening the ICC’s door. “Kevin’s on his way. I heard back from McClure and he’s e-mailed your request. And Brandon told me to tell you he’s here—the person you wanted.” She knew better than to name names.
Fiona stood, looking down onto Walt, and said, “Good luck. I guess. It being my laptop, I’ll need it back, so I’ll wait in the break room.” She was fishing for his invitation to remain in the room with him.
“Thank you,” he said, irritating her. To Nancy he said, “Okay. Have Brandon send him in. I want him one-on-one.”
Gilly Menquez entered the ICC sheepish and confused, clearly overwhelmed by the room’s size and the abundance of high-tech audio/visual equipment. He joined Walt at the front table where Fiona had set up her laptop. The video window on the overhead screen was black.
“What’s this about, Walt?”
“I was hoping maybe you could tell me.”
Gilly sat down in the chair Fiona had been occupying, alongside Walt. He kept his hands clenched tightly in his lap.