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“That’s not right,” Virgil said. “That can’t be right.”
Drummin: “It’s right. You recognize the guy?”
The man who got out of the van was tall, wearing what appearedto be a dark University of Minnesota waterproof hoodie, a black Covid mask, and glasses. His hands were unnaturally pale, as if he were wearing plastic gloves.
Lucas: “Not exactly. Can we see where he goes?”
They tracked him to the cab stand and lost him. “We need the cab driver,” Lucas told Drummin.
“We can give you his tags...”
“We’ll take them,” Lucas said. And to Virgil: “Call Durey and fill him in. California collects DNA from all felons, so we need to get DNA on the blood. As quick as we can.”
“If we can jump the line, it’ll still be a day or two,” Virgil said. “But I’ve had stuff take months, because of the line.”
“The line can be jumped,” Lucas said. “A rich federal judge murdered with his two sons and the TV stations are hovering like flying weasels, talking about a law enforcement clusterfuck; we can jump the line.”
“You had me at weasels,” Virgil said. “I’ll call Durey. You call about the taxi driver.”
—
Lucas called thecab company and was told the driver was in his car working what was probably an illegal daily 12-to-12 shift. His dispatcher got him on the radio, and he agreed to drive to the airport to meet with Lucas and Virgil at the operations center.
—
A thin, tall,gray-haired Ethiopian man named Oromo Belay, the cabbie spoke a soft Minnesota English with a school-teacherishprecision. He remembered the passenger because of the black Covid mask.
“I don’t know what he looked like, he was wearing his Covid mask. Black mask,” Belay said. “He was taller than me. I’m one meter eighty-two... almost six feet.”
“Did you talk to him?” Virgil asked.
“Not much. I didn’t want him breathing on me. I thought maybe he wore the mask because he had Covid. I asked him if he did, and he said no. He said he wore the mask so he didn’t get it. He asked me if I was vaccinated, and I said, ‘Of course.’ I still didn’t trust him.”
“When you did talk, did he sound like he was from here?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, yeah. He sounded like a Minnesota man.”
Belay had dropped the masked man at a small shopping center on Ford Parkway, which he thought odd, because it was late, and the shopping center was closed.
“He told me he was meeting a friend who worked late at Target,” Belay said.
When they’d wrung him out, and had gotten his personal information, including his cell phone number, they told Belay that another investigator might want to talk. With Belay back in his cab, Virgil got his iPad and called up a map program.
“It’s about three-point-three miles from Target to Heath’s place. An hour’s walk.”
“Long walk,” Lucas said.
“Suppose you weren’t trying to prove you were innocent—you were smart enough to try to build a case intended to defeat prosecution,” Virgil said. “Suppose you’d seen the tape of the Sand killeron TV like everybody else, and knew where you could get a U hoodie...”
Lucas nodded. “You think Heath is that smart?”
“He didn’t strike me as a wizard, but he’s probably smart enough. He’s a Dartmouth grad, for whatever that’s worth. He set up those phony charities and ran them for years, we know he’s a con man, and most con men have at least some brains. He killed Pollard silently, so not even a snoopy neighbor heard it.”
“So Hinton’s in the river, or a hole somewhere, Pollard’s got no skull, and Heath is a psychotic killer who didn’t kill Sand,” Luca said. “We’ve got two murderous psychos and no proof of anything.”
Virgil nodded: “That’s the way I see it.”
15
