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Of course, he was a white man, and blond, so he had that going for him. Made him smile when the thought passed through his head.
So. There was a risk in killing her, and a risk in not killing her. He weighed those things, without making a final decision.
—
Two days later,before work, Cooper had gotten up early and had driven to an informal gun range in Wisconsin, a borrow pit, where she and Alex had taken lessons with their revolver.
This time, she was shooting the Glock she’d gotten from Carter. She’d watched video instruction with the gun, had unscrewed the suppressor and was shooting without it.
At the borrow pit, she pinned a target to the dirt wall, walked ten feet away, took a breath, and began shooting. She shot carefully, remembering the instruction she’d taken with the revolver, and the recommendation on YouTube. She did well, she thought, grouping her shots, after the first wilder ones, in a hand-sized pattern.
The gun was much easier to shoot than the .357, with a lighter trigger pull and far less recoil. She worked through twenty-two rounds. Nobody else had shown up to shoot, so she walked back to her car, screwed the suppressor on the gun barrel, and fired three more shots. The suppressor made the gun a little more awkward to handle but did cut the noise.
Still, it was loud. Carter had warned her of that, and he was right.
Done with the shooting, she packed up the gun, and drove to work.
—
That same day,Hess parked his Subaru two blocks from Cooper’s classroom building and walked over, lingering until Cooper left class, followed her to her office, watched until he was sure she was heading for the parking garage, ran to his car and waited.
When she drove past him, he let three cars get between them, and then followed south across Minneapolis. She drove to a house in Edina, parked in front of a two-car garage, and used a key to get in the house. Now he knew where she was. He would have to think about that.
He went home.
—
Cooper used herkey to open the front door and was met by Melton, carrying the baby.
“You look annoyed,” Cooper said, looking at Melton’s tightened face. “Very annoyed.”
“Mary didn’t show up,” Melton said. She was patting the baby on the back. “I called her and she said she thought she might have the virus again. This would be like the third time. I’ve been here all day.”
“Ah, jeez, I’m sorry,” Cooper said. “You should have called, I could have run home between eleven and two. Are you okay at work?”
“I got most of it done by Zoom. The hard part is the paper,” Melton said. “I have the paper couriered over. This idiot I’m dealingwith right now doesn’t like the Internet... If I’m going to keep doing this we need to get an office printer in here.”
“We’ll hit Office Depot tomorrow morning and I’ll call Mary tonight. This is unacceptable.”
“Yes, it is. We need to find somebody else. So: how did the shooting go?”
—
As they exchangedreports of their days, Cooper took the baby and carried her around the kitchen; she remembered that Virgil Flowers had identified the exact Gerber’s baby food that Chelsea had eaten that day. She couldn’t do that yet, but the baby smelled like something dark and root-vegetable-like. She asked, “Anything on the BCA? Or Flowers and Davenport?”
“Yeah. I tapped into the system an hour ago. They interviewed a woman up north... I can’t remember the exact town, two hours away. Anyway, she was the girlfriend of a man Alex sentenced to prison. She’s violent, but they cleared her. Turns out she plays canasta in a bar that keeps a video record. She was playing cards when Alex and the boys were killed.”
They now used the phrase “Alex and the boys were killed” without flinching.
“We hadn’t heard anything about that woman from the B-team, I wonder how they found her,” Cooper said. She jiggled the baby and added, “I need some coffee. That goddamned Mary. We pay her a lot.”
“She gets sick too much,” Melton said. “I wondered if it was drugs or alcohol, but I don’t think so. I think she just gets sick. Or maybe, she doesn’t like the work.”
“Thank God it’s not drugs or alcohol and we’re leaving Chelsea with her,” Cooper said. “Anyway, Davenport and Flowers found somebody we hadn’t heard about, this woman, and took it seriously enough to go interview her. I feel like... they’re out there operating.We’reoperating.”
“Yes. Flowers wrote the report for the BCA and added that they’d be talking to Tom Burston. That would have been today. They haven’t filed a report on that yet, so I don’t know what happened.”
Cooper looked at her Rolex. “Tom might still be working... I wonder... Take the baby, will you? I’ll give him a call.”
