Mission road - By Rick Riordan Page 0,24
him a few times. Dark hair? Pain in the ass?”
“That’s him.”
“He did some work for a friend of mine who was down on his luck. Got the loan sharks off his back. He wouldn’t accept any payment.”
“That’s him, too.”
The old man found his golf ball, gazed across the green toward the tenth hole flag. “Thirty years of autopsies, Miss Lee, they all tend to run together. But the Franklin White case . . . like I told the lady cop, that’s one you remember.”
“You spoke with Sergeant DeLeon?”
Santos studied his putting angle, didn’t seem to like it. He nudged the ball a little closer to the hole with his foot. “Seven blows to the head. Six of those to the face. Don’t see pure rage like that very often. Mind you, plenty of people were mad at him. That young man made his father look like a gentleman.”
“How do you mean?”
Santos gave her a raised eyebrow. “You don’t know?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
Santos gripped his club, faced the ball. “I hate golf. Blood pressure. Had to do something.”
“Jaime, about Franklin White?”
Santos sighed. “Back in ’87 there was a string of rape-murders on the South Side. Half a dozen young women picked up in bars, driven to secluded spots, raped and strangled. These women, all nineteen, twenty years old. All of them bright college girls, sweet kids. The kind of young women families pin their hopes on. You look at their photos . . .” The old man shook his head sadly, as if he could still see the victims’ faces. “Nobody was ever arrested, but they got a sketch of a man seen talking to one of the victims shortly before she disappeared. Young Anglo guy, blond and stocky, looked a lot like Guy White’s son.”
Maia felt her nausea coming back.
“You all right, Miss Lee?”
“I’m fine.”
Santos studied her more carefully. “Let me see your hands.”
“Why?”
“Come on now.”
Reluctantly, she extended her hands. The old man pressed at her fingers, felt her pulse.
“I’m fine,” she said again, pulling away. “Sergeant DeLeon thought you knew something about the Franklin White case. Something important, maybe about the blood under Franklin’s fingernails?”
For another moment, the old man stared at her. Then he turned his attention back to the golf ball. “Guy White isn’t what he used to be, Miss Lee, but he’s still vicious. Maybe more so now that he doesn’t have much time.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “You can’t be evil as long as Guy White’s been evil without it catching up with you. Rots you from the inside. That’s my medical opinion.” He tapped the ball. “If I were you, I wouldn’t stir up the Whites. I see a lot of directions this might go. I don’t like any of them, after what happened to the sergeant.”
“DeLeon wrote something about the timing being wrong.”
“I don’t know about that. The timing . . . I told Ana she should ask Mike Flume out at the Pig Stand. He could probably tell you about that, if the old bastard is still alive. Mike vouched for Lucia and Etch Hernandez that night. They had to have a clean alibi, see. All the cops involved did.”
“Why?”
Santos pulled back his nine-iron. He hit the ball much too hard and watched it roll past the hole.
“Hell with it,” he murmured. “Seemed so important at the time. That’s the problem with getting old—you stop caring about secrets. The weapon marks—”
“Detective Kelsey said the murder weapon was a tire iron.”
Santos’ mouth twitched. “Kelsey knows better. But, yeah. That’s the story we decided to go with.”
“You lied in the report?”
“I was . . . vague. Had to be, or we would’ve had a war on our hands. Those marks were consistent with a very specific type of bludgeoning device. Murder weapon was never recovered, mind you, but the match was pretty damn exact. Police nightstick. The type most patrolmen carried back then.”
Maia felt as if the rain and the cold were soaking into her bones, turning her to ice water. “Did Kelsey work the scene, too?”
Santos shook his head. “As I recall, he was still on medical leave, but you better believe he scrambled to get an alibi.”
“Medical leave.”
“Few months before the murder, Kelsey had had a run-in with Frankie White. Frankie was brandishing a knife in a bar on the Riverwalk. Kelsey was a rookie, straight out of the academy. He made the mistake of trying to take Frankie’s knife away.”
“The scars on Kelsey’s hands.”
“Almost lost several fingers. Afterward,