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“Sure. Well, hell, I thought that was a little strange. This wasn’t even serious. Not even like DUI. This was peeping. We catch peepers every couple of weeks. The judge fines them two hundred dollars and court costs, and threatens them with having to register as a sex offender if they get caught again. I can’t recall any peeper ever going to jail.”
“I understand.”
“Then the chief tried to identify this guy through the car, and got nowhere. That made him a little more suspicious, so he charged him with leaving the scene of an accident, which is either, depending on the circumstances, either a first-class misdemeanor-thirty days in our jail, max- or a felony.
“Anyway, they just left him in a cell to think things over. I guess he did, because in the morning-just before you called-when the chief got him a lawyer, he’d changed his tune. Now he was all remorse. He was ashamed, and was going to be embarrassed when all this came out, and all he wanted to do was take his punishment.”
“Had you identified him by then?”
“He gave us his name, and said he was from Las Vegas, and that he’d borrowed the car from Fats Gambino in Mobile, said he was doing business with Gambino, told us Gambino would confirm that, and practically begged us not to tell Gambino why he’d been arrested.”
“And then you had to wait for Gambino to come to work?”
“Yeah. And while we were waiting for that, you called. And asked about the knife.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, Fats confirmed what he had told us, and said he’d loaned him the car to go to Biloxi to play blackjack. And offered to get his bail.”
“And?”
“We told him bail hadn’t been set, that he hadn’t been arraigned. And then, an hour after that, Fats called back, said he’d just got the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune. It had the picture of old Mr. Galloway standing over him in it.
And Fats wanted to know if the guy on the ground was the one who was driving his car, and the chief said yes, it was, and Fats threw a fit. He wasn’t going to make bail for a pervert, et cetera, et cetera, and asked was there any way he could get his car back without his name being connected with it. The chief told him he’d see what he could do, but couldn’t make no promises.”
Sergeant Kenny let this sink in for a moment, then went on.
“By this time, the chief-who’s a nice man-is starting to feel sorry for this guy. And the mayor says that enough people have been laughing at Daphne and Jabberwocky, and that if he had his druthers the municipal judge would set bail high enough to hurt him when he jumped it, but not too high that he couldn’t afford to make it or jump it-something on the order of a thousand dollars, maybe less-and that would be the end of it.
“The chief was willing to go along. There was your phone call, but you told the chief you were going to send a telex saying who you were, and you didn’t, so he thought it was likely you were some wiseass reporter…”
“I completely forgot about that,” Matt said. “When I showed my lieutenant the newspaper, the next thing I knew Olivia and I were on the way to the airport. I’m sorry.”
“And then you showed up here,” Sergeant Kenny said. “And that changed things.”
“We’re really anxious to bag our doer, Sergeant,” Olivia said. “Dr. P… the psychiatrist who did a profile said that the doer was going to be really frightened when he realized he had killed someone, and do one of two things-go underground for a long time, or keep doing this sort of thing, knowing that he could only be executed once. If this is our doer, he obviously wasn’t frightened into going underground. ”
Sergeant Kenny considered that for a moment.
“Can I ask how you got involved in this, ma’am? Just curious. ”
“I was next up on the wheel at Northwest Detectives when the brother found the victim,” Olivia said. “So I got involved that way.”
“You know what she means, Sergeant?”
“No, but I’m guessing she was the first detective on the scene, and then you got involved because it was a homicide.”
“Right.”
“So why do you two think this guy is your man? Because of the knife?”
“That would be incriminating if it’s the same one in the pictures we have,” Olivia said. “But we have more.”
“Well, let’s see if it is,” Kenny said. He got up, walked to a steel door, and unlocked two locks. He came out with a Jim Bowie replica knife wrapped in plastic film.
“We got the Mobile police lab to take prints off it this afternoon,” he said, “they’re better equipped to do that than we are. They’re also having their expert see if there’s a match between Mr. Daniels’s prints and the ones they took off this.”
He unwrapped the Jim Bowie replica as Matt opened his laptop and turned it on.
