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“You got something?”
“Maybe, but not somebody breaking in,” Virgil said.
“Then what?”
“Remember that Russo and Durey were planning to check gyms where the boys might have been taking basketball lessons?”
“And swimming. Yeah. They came up dry. Read the reports...”
“I have,” Virgil said. “I’m up in one of the boys’ rooms. There are photographs of the boys playing basketball, but one of their rooms has a picture of the two of them facing off, wearing helmets and boxing gloves. It looks like they’re in a boxing gym. I can see a heavy bag in the background. Then I looked in a closet, and I found a gym bag with a tee-shirt, shorts, a boxing helmet, mouth guard, and a cup.”
“Maggie didn’t say anything at all about a boxing gym,” Lucas said.
“Which you think she might have, since these pictures are so recent,” Virgil said.
“Sonofagun.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll get on that tomorrow,” Lucas said. “We gotta stay here, though, until midnight, anyway. You can start turning off the lights at ten.”
“I’ll poke around a little and see if I can find out which gym, and who might work there.”
“Do that. Ms. Muller thought you might be searching the place, but I told her that was ridiculous, and man, if you’re tempted to, just don’t do it.Just don’t do it.After the fiasco with the search warrant, we’ve got to play this absolutely straight.”
“She’s sitting right next to you.”
“Yes. But take care: this guy is a gunslinger and I don’t want my partner re-shot,” Lucas said.
Lucas rang off and Muller, sipping at a cup of tea, said, “Yes, I am sitting right next to you.”
Lucas hadn’t been using the speaker on the phone. Muller was either clairvoyant, he decided, or had exceptionally good hearing.
—
Nobody showed up.Virgil turned off the lights at ten o’clock, and at midnight locked the door and Lucas picked him up.
“I got the gym,” Virgil said. “The Silver Star over on West Seventh.”
“Tomorrow morning, we’ll be on it like a hot sweat,” Lucas said. “It’s like Sherlock Holmes: Cooper is the dog who didn’t bark. This is something.”
—
They would havehad Hess that night except for the intervention of a woman named Megan Ryan.
Hess had worked out a plan: he’d go to the Silver Star but instead of hanging around as he usually did, he’d leave early and run straight to Cooper’s house. This time, he’d go in: he’d climb the bluff, go around to the back door, kick it if he had to. He’d try to take her alive, if he could, to find out where she’d put the flash drives; then he’d kill her. He didn’t need the computers, but he had to have the drives.
He had the gun in the car. He’d gotten rid of the Covid mask and replaced it with a ski mask. Had to be done.
If he could move fast enough, he’d go back to the gym and hang out until the last of the boys were gone. Nobody tracked him there, but he’d make a point of staying late, maybe going over to the adult side to work out with the kettle bells. The place closed at ten, and if he was there to close it, it’d be all the alibi he’d need.
As a gig worker, Hess had three jobs. The first was in the morning with the pre-work crew; his second job caught the lunch crowd. He went home at midafternoon, ate, took a nap, and a little before six o’clock, headed for the Silver Star.
He’d noticed driving home that he was low on gas, so on the way out to the Silver Star, he pulled into a BP gas station. He paid with a credit card at the pump, pumped ten gallons, got back in his car and pulled away from the pump just as Megan Ryan in her Jeep cut across the parking lot, moving fast, toward the BP convenience store.
Hess hit her. Nothing more than a fender bender, his left front fender with the left rear fender on her Jeep, but Ryan tumbled out ofher vehicle as though she’d been hit by a meteor and began screaming at him. “I love my Jeep! I do! I’ve had my Jeep for six years, and now you’ve wrecked it...”
Hess kept backing away from her. He would have smacked her in the face if there hadn’t been so many witnesses around, but there were a lot of witnesses, and most of them were on his side, because of the way she’d rocketed into the BP lot.
