“You seem to be a caring person, Sergeant. I’m telling you this so you understand. I let those hooligans into my house because they said they had information about Michael — and I had to know what it was.
“Now I think they killed him, don’t you? And tonight they were going to rob us. But why? Why?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
I told Campion that as soon as we knew anything, we’d let him know. That was all I had for him. But I got it now, why Conklin had given me that look when I’d walked in the door. My mind was running with it.
I signaled to my partner and we went outside.
Chapter 103
CONKLIN AND I leaned against the side of my car, facing the Campion house, staring at the lights glowing softly through a million little windowpanes. Campion and his wife didn’t know what kind of death Hawk and Pidge had planned for them tonight, but we knew — and thinking about that near miss was giving me the horrors.
If Connor Campion hadn’t fired his gun, Hawk and Pidge would have roasted him and his wife alive.
Rich pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one — and this time I took him up on it.
“Might be some prints on that foil around the bottle of booze,” he said.
I nodded, thinking we’d be lucky if those kids had records, if their prints were in AFIS, but I wasn’t counting on it.
“Hawk. Pidge. Crazy names,” Conklin said.
“I got a pretty good look at Hawk,” I said. “He matches Molly Chu’s description of the so-called angel who carried her out of the fire.”
Conklin exhaled a long stream of smoke into the night. He said, “And the governor’s description of Pidge sounds like the kid who pawned Patty Malone’s necklace.”
“And of course there’s the fishing line. So . . . what are we thinking?” I said to Conklin. “That Hawk and Pidge also killed Michael Campion? Because I don’t see two guys killing a kid when their MO is to tie up rich couples, leave a few words in Latin inside a book, and then burn the house down.”
Conklin said, “Nope. That doesn’t work for me, either. So why do you think these birds targeted the Campions?”
“Because the Campions are in the news. Big house. Big fire. Big headlines. Big score.”
Conklin smiled, said, “Only they screwed up.”
I smiled back, said, “Yeah.”
We were both starting to feel it, the kind of incomparable exhilaration that comes when after nothing but dead ends, A leads to B leads to C. I was sure that Hawk and Pidge were the sadists who did the arson killings, but not only couldn’t we prove that, we didn’t kno
w who Hawk and Pidge were.
I stamped out my cigarette on the street, said to Conklin, “That Hawk bastard had better live.”
“At least long enough to talk,” said my partner.
Chapter 104
HAWK’S SURGEON, Dr. Dave Hammond, was a compact man with rusty hair and the tight manner of a perfectionist who’d spent the night stitching his patient’s guts back together. Conklin and I had spent the same eight hours in a small, dull waiting room at St. Francis Hospital, waiting for Hammond’s report.
When the doctor entered the waiting room at 6:15 a.m., I shot to my feet, asked, “Is he awake?”
Hammond said, “Right now, the patient’s condition defines touch-and-go. He was bleeding like a son of a bitch when he came in. One slug punctured his lung and nicked his aorta. The other damn near pulverized his liver.”
Conklin said, “So, Doctor, when can we talk to him?”
“Inspector, you understand what I just said? We had to inflate the kid’s lungs, transfuse him, and remove a chunk of his liver. This is what we like to call major surgery.”
Conklin smiled winningly. “Okay. I hear you. Is he awake?”