"Yeah?" Dave said. "You can prove that? I mean, conclusively, Sergeant? You're sure it didn't just dry fast? I mean, it wasn't a humid night last night."
"We can prove it," Whitey said, but Sean could hear the doubt in his voice, so he was pretty sure Dave could hear it, too.
Whitey got up off the table and turned his back to Dave. He put his fingers over his mouth and drummed them against his upper lip as he walked the length of the table down toward Sean's end, his eyes on the floor.
"Things looking any better on that Sprite?" Dave said.
* * *
"WE'RE BRINGING DOWN the kid Souza talked to, the one who saw the car. Tommy, ah? "
"Moldanado," Sean said.
"Yeah." Whitey nodded, his voice a little thin, his face a fist of distraction, the look of a guy who'd had a chair pulled out from under him, found his ass hitting the floor, wondering how he got there. "We'll, ah, put Boyle in a lineup, see if this Moldanado picks him out."
"It's something," Sean said.
Whitey leaned against the corridor wall as a secretary passed them, her perfume the same kind Lauren used, Sean thinking maybe he'd call her on her cell, see how she was doing today, see if she'd talk now that he'd made the first move.
Whitey said, "He's too cool in there. Guy's first time in the box and he's not even sweating?"
Sean said, "Sarge, it's not looking good, you know?"
"No shit."
"No, I mean, even if we didn't get blown out on the car, it's not the Marcus girl's blood. There's nothing to tie him to this."
Whitey looked back at the door to the interrogation room. "I can break him."
"He kicked our asses in there," Sean said.
"I'm not even warmed up."
Sean could see it in his face, though, the doubt, the first crumbling of the primary hunch. Whitey was stubborn and mean, too, if he thought he was right, but the man was too smart to ever flame out on a hunch that kept running into substantiation problems.
"Look," Sean said, "let's let him sweat a bit in there."
"He ain't sweating."
"He might start, we leave him alone to think."
Whitey looked back at the door like he wanted to burn it down. "Maybe."
"I think it's the gun," Sean said. "We bust this open on that gun."
Whitey chewed the inside of his mouth and eventually nodded. "It'd be nice to know more about the gun. You want to take that?"
"Same guy still own the liquor store?"
Whitey said, "I don't know. The case file was from 'eighty-two, but the owner then was a Lowell Looney."
Sean smiled at the name. "Has a ring to it, don't it?"
Whitey said, "Why don't you take a ride over? I'll watch fuckhead in there through the glass, see if he starts singing songs about dead girls in the park."
* * *
LOWELL LOONEY was about eighty years old and looked like he could beat Sean in a hundred-yard dash. He wore an orange T-shirt from Porter's Gym over blue sweats with white piping and spanking-new Reeboks, and he moved around like he'd jump for the highest bottle behind the counter if you asked him to.
"Right there," he said to Sean, pointing at a row of half-pint bottles behind the counter. "Went in through a bottle and stuck right in that wall there."
Sean said, "Scary, huh?"
The old man shrugged. "Scarier than a glass of milk, maybe. Not as scary as some nights around here, though. Some wacko kid put a shotgun in my face ten years ago, had that crazed-dog look in his eyes, kept blinking at the sweat? That was scary, son. The guys who put the bullet in the wall, though, they were pros. Pros I can deal with. They just want the money, they ain't pissed at the world."
"So these two guys??"
"Come in the back," Lowell Looney said, zipping down to the other end of the counter where a black curtain hung over the storeroom. "There's a door back there leads to the loading dock. I had a kid working part-time for me back then who'd dump the trash, smoke himself a little weed while he was out there. Half the time he'd forget to lock the door when he come back in. Either he was in on it or they watched him enough times to know he was brain-dead. That night, they came in through the unlocked door, fired off the warning round to keep me from reaching for my own gun, and took what they came for."
"How much they hit you for?"
"Six grand."
Sean said, "That's a chunk of change."
"Thursdays," Lowell said, "I used to cash checks. I don't anymore, but back then I was stupid. 'Course, if the thieves had been a little brighter, they would have hit me in the morning before a lot of those checks were cashed." He shrugged. "I said they were pros, just not the smartest pros around, I guess."
"This kid who left the door open," Sean said.
"Marvin Ellis," Lowell said. "Hell, maybe he was involved. I fired him the next day. Thing is, the only reason they would have fired that shot was because they knew I kept a piece under the counter. And it wasn't like that was common knowledge, so it was either Marvin who told 'em, or one of them two used to work here."
"And you told the police that at the time?"
"Oh, sure." The old guy waved his hand at the memory. "They went through my old records, questioned everyone who used to work for me. So they said, anyway. They never arrested no one. You say the same gun was used in another crime?"
"Yeah," Sean said. "Mr. Looney? "
"Lowell, for Christ's sake, please."
"Lowell," Sean said, "you still got those employment records?"
* * *
DAVE STARED at the mirrored glass in the interrogation room knowing that Sean's partner, and maybe Sean, too, stared back at him.
Good.
How's it going? I'm enjoying this Sprite myself. What's it they put in the stuff? Limon. That's right. I'm enjoying my limon, Sergeant. Mmm-mmm good. Yes siree. Can't wait to get me another can of this.
Dave stared straight into the center of the mirror from the other side of the long table and he felt great. True, he didn't know where Celeste had gone with Michael, and a dread came with the ignorance that polluted his brain far more than the fifteen or so beers he'd downed last night. But she'd come back. He seemed to remember he might have scared her last night. He definitely hadn't made much sense, going on about vampires and things that went in you not being able to come back out, so maybe she'd gotten a little spooked.
Couldn't say he blamed her. It was really his fault allowing the Boy to take over like that and show his ugly, feral face.