string, the guy had screwed up on his surveillance. Which meant he was slipping.
“So the killer comes in, thinking she’s all alone and gets surprised?” I said.
“Ms. Thompson says George was very discreet,” Richards said, but her eyes were past me, caught by something out past the front window.
Outside one of the cops was having an arms-crossed discussion with two black women on the curb. One already had her hands up on her hips, not a good sign. The other was trying to see past him, as if just a glimpse of her friend inside might change the mask of worry on her face. I turned back to Richards.
“So, have you got anyone on the paper trail? The insurance?”
“That’s why you’re here, Freeman,” she said. “You and Billy already have an inside track on that. You could find out a hell of a lot faster than we could. If it fits with your theory, it’s a whole different case. But I’m not going to bring this whole idea to Hammonds without a more solid connection.”
She was a good detective, willing to look at the long odds if there was a possibility, but smart enough to play the game by the book. It was something I had never learned.
“Give me Ms. Thompson’s date of birth and social security number and we’ll work it,” I said.
She was already tearing a slip from her pad, and looking back outside.
“Thanks, Max,” she said, moving now to the front door.
When she left I wandered back through the house. It had the same feeling as Ms. Jackson’s, a place caught in the past. High school graduation pictures of the grandkids, propped up to form a small altar on the console TV. A threadbare runner over the worn carpet in the hall. Hand towels, faded with age, snapped around the handles of drawers. I kept my hands in my pockets and went into the utility room. The scene techs had dusted the door casings and all of the jalousie panes. They’d left smears of black powder on the white enamel of the washer and dryer. But there was something in the air, an odor that wasn’t an old person’s. It wasn’t a detergent or bleach smell. It wasn’t the sweat of men gathered here to do their technical work. There was one small window in the room, sealed and barred and facing the backyard and the alley behind. I stood staring and closed my eyes and took a full, deep breath into my nostrils. It was the smell of the streets, the subway passage deep below Philly’s City Hall, the heating grate after midnight at Eleventh and Moravian, the pile of stained and oily blankets piled around the homeless guy a block from the bus terminal on Thirteenth, and the acrid odor at the brick shack only a couple of miles from here.
I could feel it in my nose and it was a smell that did not belong here.
On my way out I passed Richards, who was escorting the two black women from the curb to the back patio where Ms. Thompson still sat. She pointed them in a direction they already knew and turned.
“You alright?” she said looking into my face.
“Yeah. I’ll call you when I get something,” I said. “Your guys check the alley?”
“Of course.”
“Nothing?
“Trash. Why? You expect anything?”
“No. Not with this guy,” I said and walked away.
Back in my truck I called Billy at his office. I gave him a rundown on the overnight killing and the information on Ms. Thompson.
“I’ll start as much of a paper chase as I can,” Billy said. “But you’re going to have to get this over to McCane.”
“Yeah. I’ll page him next,” I said. “I already owe him a call.”
Billy, as usual, was right. McCane’s resources would be better and faster than even he could get out of public records, though it wasn’t a collaboration I relished. Billy listened to my silence.
“Are you turning into a believer yet?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
“And now we’ve got a survivor.”
“But she didn’t see a damn thing, Billy,” I said in frustration. “There was a pillow over her face the whole time.”
“Max. Max,” he said, waiting for my attention. “I didn’t say witness, Max. I said survivor. Survivor is a good thing.”
16
I beeped McCane. Punched in my cell number and waited. My truck cab was hot, the glare of the sun snapping off the hood and windshield. Out in front of me the trio of men I’d seen earlier had taken up a position