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CHAPTER 87
THE VOICE AT the apartment end of the intercom said, “What can I do for you?”
“This is Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, SFPD. We need you to look at some pictures,” I said. “Take two, three minutes.”
“Can you come back later? I’m in the middle of something,” Reynolds said.
I tried to listen to the rhythm and tone of his voice. There was classical music playing in the background. The voice itself was distorted through the intercom.
“Mr. Reynolds,” Rich said. “We’re going building to building, knocking on doors. Let’s do this quick and we’ll get out of your life.”
The buzzer sounded. Rich pushed on the lobby door. I notified Joe that we were in, then Rich and I headed down the corridor until we stood in front of Reynolds’s door.
I pressed the doorbell. I heard footfalls coming closer, then the peephole cover sliding open, the chain moving along a track and the hard click of a lock opening. At last, the dooropened and I was staring at the face of a white male in his twenties, under six feet, dark haired, wearing black-rimmed glasses.
This was Blackout.
I clamped down on my startle reflex. He looked at me seemingly without recognition, then shifted his eyes to Richie and stepped aside.
“Come in, I guess,” said the man with the glasses.
We stepped inside and Reynolds closed the door behind us. Bryan Catton was a strangler. I lifted my shoulders an inch or two, retracting my neck out of pure instinct as Rich and I entered his long, narrow living room.
It was a straight shot from the door, past an eat-in kitchen and a number of closed doors along the left-hand wall. The right-hand wall was all bookshelves and movie posters fromCasablancatoAvengers. The room ended at a pair of sliding doors fronting a terrace.
I walked down to the sliders, opened them, and Joe and Mike vaulted over the terrace railing and walked in. They were big men, armed, wearing FBI windbreakers.
“Who are you?” Reynolds asked. “What is this?”
I made introductions and took a seat at the round dining table. We all did, including a reluctant Austin Reynolds. I looked into our subject’s face and thought,It’s happened.
We’ve got him. We’ve got Blackout.
But at the same time, I thought,Down, girl. Play this right. I didn’t dare look at Richie.
Reynolds said, “Why do I think there’s more to this than looking at pictures?”
“We’re investigating a series of crimes,” I said. “You may be able to help us.”
Reynolds’s voice sounded the same as when I spoke to him on the phone, but I couldn’t be sure. I was expecting him to bolt, and at the same time, thinking he was going to say, “Nice to meet you, Sergeant Boxer,” in the sassy, nasty way he’d been dealing with me since Hammer’s murder tape arrived in my inbox. But Blackout was reputed to be a brainiac. If so, he would want to know what we knew. He’d play us, just like Burke.
“Reynolds” said, “What kind of crime? And why do you think I can help?”
Joe said, “Mr. Reynolds. Is anyone else here?”
“No. No one at all.”
“Okay,” Joe said. “We’re permitted by law to do a walk-through of your rooms and the building’s basement to make sure no one’s in hiding.”
This was true. We were not allowed to open any space too small to enclose a body, so furniture was out, but closets and rooms were fair game.
Mike said, “I’ll take the basement.”
He left by the apartment’s front door, while Joe opened interior doors with gun drawn and checked the rooms.
He came back to the table and said, “All clear.”
When Mike also rejoined us, I said to Reynolds, “Are you familiar with the name Bryan Catton?”
