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“No, I want to hear it,” Cooper said.
“She has to hear it,” Lucas told Virgil. “It explains why the killercame after her. Because she knows him. She could figure out who he is. She probably would, sooner or later.”
“What!” Cooper demanded.
Lucas: “When we were talking to Lundgren, and suggested that she might have been the one who shot at the marshals, she said something like, ‘Larry is the criminal. He’s the dope-dealer, child-fucker, cop-shooter.”
Virgil: “Yeah? So what? I do remember that...”
“What if it wasn’t Noah Heath, or anything to do with Noah Heath? What if it didn’t have anything to do with Alex Sand? What if it was all about the kids? About a child-fucker?”
Cooper frowned. “The boys?”
Virgil: “Oh, shit.” He lurched out of his chair, took a turn around the living room. “Man, that could be it.”
Cooper looked from Lucas to Virgil and back to Lucas. “Please,” she said.
“If you’re looking for a motive, something that could get someone sent to prison for a very long time... maybe forever... sexually messing with a child, or dealing with child porn, that would do it,” Lucas said.
Cooper turned pale, touched her fingertips to her mouth: “Oh, no.”
“We’ve got to look at it,” Virgil said. “It would explain a lot. It would explain why the whole family was murdered, because somebody in the family might be able to identify the predator. Why he killed Alex and both boys, and then came back after you.”
“Oh, no,” she said again.
Lucas leaned forward, reached across the space between them,and touched her on the knee. “Think of somebody who would have access to the boys. A tall male, size-eleven feet, which is about all we know. But if it’s a sexual crime, he would have to have been in a place where he’s seen the boys... unclothed.”
“Unclothed? Oh, my God.”
Virgil was staring at her, moved up, and said, “I saw it in your face, like you saw it in Lucas’s. You have an idea.”
She stumbled: “No, I, I don’t. I really don’t. Maybe a gym teacher at school? But they don’t take their clothes off. They took swimming lessons...”
They pushed, but she gave them nothing but the swimming lessons. They were still pushing when Durey called.
“We don’t have DNA yet, we’re working on it,” Durey said, “but the blood type is Hinton’s.”
“He’s dead and Noah Heath did it,” Lucas said.
“Probably,” Durey said.
“You gonna pick him up?”
“I’m meeting Russo at Heath’s house in twenty minutes. You want to be there?”
“We’re on the way,” Lucas said. He clicked off and said to Cooper: “You have to tell us.”
“I don’t know anything,” she wailed. “I don’t, oh my God, what, what...”
Lucas watched her perform and finally said, “I don’t believe you. I don’t know why you’re covering for the guy, but Virgil and I will be back to talk about it.”
“I don’t know...”
Lucas to Virgil: “C’mon. We gotta go.”
As they stood and walked toward the door, Cooper cried, “Wait!Wait! They took basketball lessons, too. At the Greenway Rec Center.”
“Greenway,” Lucas said. “Got it. And the swimming lessons.”
