The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 72

"Without letting you know," Marino confirms.

She nods again. "And I was out doing my thing, too. It's not like I was here every minute waiting for him. I was working in the office at Overland. Part-time, anyway. So we didn't always know what the other was up to every hour of every day."

"I'll tell you this much," Marino decides. "Mitch stumbled onto something. And I'm just wondering if he wasn't out at the motel around the time Matos showed up, and maybe whatever Matos was into, Mitch had the misfortune of being spotted in the area. Maybe it's just that simple. Somebody thinks he saw something, knew something, and next thing, he gets picked up and gets the treatment."

No one argues, Marino's theory, actually, is the only one so far that makes any sense.

"Which brings us back to what Matos was doing here to begin with," Pruett comments.

I look at Stanfield. He has wandered out of the conversation. His face is wan. He is a nervous wreck. His eyes drift to me and quickly move away. He wets his lips and coughs several times.

"Detective Stanfield," I feel compelled to say to him in front of everyone. "For God's sake, don't tell any of this to your brother-in-law." Anger sparks in his eyes. I have humiliated him and don't care. "Please," I add.

"You want to know the truth?" he angrily retorts. "I don't want nothing to do with any of this." He slowly draws himself to his feet and looks around the room, blinking, his eyes glazing over. "I don't know what this is all about, but I don't want no part_I mean, no part of it. You feds are in it already, up to your eyeballs, so you can just have it. I quit." He nods. "You heard me right, I quit."

Detective Stanfield, to our amazement, collapses. He falls so hard the room shakes. I spring up. Thank God, he is breathing. His pulse is running wild, but he is not in the grips of a cardiac arrest or anything life-threatening. He simply has fainted. I check his head to make sure he hasn't injured himself. He is all right He comes to. Marino and I help him to his feet and get him on the couch. I make him lie down and prop several pillows under his neck. Most of all, he is embarrassed, acutely so.

"Detective Stanfield, are you diabetic?" I ask. "Do you have a heart condition?"

"If you just got a Coke or something, that would be good," he says, weakly.

I get up and head into the kitchen. "Let me see what I can do," I say as if I live here. Inside the refrigerator, I get out orange juice. I find peanut butter in a cabinet and scoop out a big spoonful. It is while I am looking for paper towels that I notice a prescription bottle by the toaster oven. Mitch Barbosa's name is on the label. He was taking the antidepressant Prozac. When I return to the living room, I say something about this to Mclntyre and she tells us that Barbosa went on Prozac several months ago because he was suffering from anxiety and depression, which he blamed on the undercover assignment, on stress, she adds.

"That's interesting," is all Marino has to say about it.

"You said you're going back to the motel when you leave here?" Jay asks Marino.

"Yeah, Vander's going to see if we might have any luck with prints."

"Prints?" Stanfield murmurs from his sickbed.

"Jesus, Stanfield," Marino blurts out in exasperation. "They teach you anything in detective school? Or did you get sent ahead several grades because of your goddamn brother-in-law?"

"He is a goddamn brother-in-law, you want to know the truth." He says this so pitifully and with such candor that everybody laughs. Stanfield perks up a little bit. He sits higher against the pillows. "And you're right." He meets my eyes. "I shouldn't have told him one peep about this case. And 1 won't tell him nothing else, not a word, because it's all politicking to that one. It wasn't me who dragged in this whole Jamestown thing, just so you know."

Pruett frowns. "What Jamestown thing?"

"Oh, you know, the dig out there and the big celebration the state's planning. Well, thing is, if the truth be known, Din-widdie got no more Indian blood in him than I do. All this horse crap about him being a descendent of Chief Powhatan. Pshaw!" Stanfield's eyes dance with resentment that I doubt he rarely touches. He probably hates his brother-in-law.

"Mitch has Indian blood," Mclntyre says somberly. "He's half Native American."

"Well, for Christ's sake, let's hope the newspapers don't find that out," Marino mutters to Stanfield, not buying for one second that Stanfield is going to keep his mouth shut. "We got a gay guy and now an Indian. Oh boy, oh boy." Marino shakes his head. "We got to keep this out of politics, out of circulation and I mean it." He stares right at Stanfield, then at Jay. "Because guess what? We can't talk about what we think is really going on, now can we'? About the big undercover operation. About Mitch being undercover FBI. And that maybe in some fruitloop way, Chandonne is all wrapped around what- ever the shit's going on out here. So if people get all caught up in this hate crime shit, how do we turn that around when we can't tell the truth?"

"I don't agree," Jay says to him. "I'm not ready to say what these murders are about. I'm not prepared to accept, for example, that Mates and now Barbosa aren't related to gun smuggling. I do think without a doubt their murders are connected."

No one disagrees. The modi operandi are too similar for the deaths not to be related, and in fact, committed by the same person or persons.

"I'm also not prepared to totally ignore the idea that they're hate crimes," Jay goes on. "A gay male. A Native American." He shrugs. "Torture's pretty damn hateful. Any injuries to their genitalia?" He turns to me.

"No." I hold his gaze. It is odd to think we were intimate, to look at his full lips and graceful hands and to remember their touch. When we walked the streets of Paris, people turned to stare at him.

"Hmmm," he says. "I find that interesting and maybe important. I'm not a forensic psychiatrist, of course, but it does seem in hate crimes the perpetrators rarely injure the victims' genitals."

Marino gives him an incredible look, his mouth parting in blatant disdain.

"Because you get some redneck homophobic sort, and the last thing he's going to go near is the guy's genitals," Jay adds.

"Well, if you really want to go around this mulberry bush," Marino acidly says to him, "then let's just connect it to Chan-donne. He never went near his victims' genitals either. Shit, he didn't even take their fucking pants off, just beat and bit the shit out of their faces and breasts. Only lower body thing he did at all was to take off their shoes and socks and bite their feet. And why? The guy's afraid of female genitalia because his own's as deformed as the rest of him." Marino surveys the faces around him. "One good thing about the bastard being locked up is we got to find out what the rest of him looks like. Right? And guess what? He ain't got a dick. Or let's just say that what he's got I wouldn't call a dick."

Stanfield is sitting straight up on the couch now, his eyes wide in amazement.

"I'll go with you to the motel," Jay says to Marino.

Marino gets up and looks out the window. "Wonder where the hell Vander is," he says.

He gets Vander on the cell phone and we head out minutes later to meet in the parking lot. Jay walks with me. I feel the energy of his desire to talk to me, to somehow come to a consensus. In this way, he is like the stereotype of a woman. He wants to talk, to settle matters, to have closure or to rekindle our connection so he can then play hard to get again. I, on the other hand, want none of it.

"Kay, can I have a minute?" he says in the parking lot.

I stop and look at him as I button my coat. I notice Marino glancing our way as he gets the trash bags and baby carriage out of the back of his truck and loads them into Vander's car.