Blood Ties by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online Page A

eyes seemed to look straight through you.

 
    4
    The next morning Ellen brought the disk with her to Homicide and, when Sam came in, played it for him.
    â€œTell me if I’m crazy.…”
    â€œYou’re crazy.”
    â€œRight. But does anything strike you about any of these guys?”
    Sam watched the disk through again and then shrugged.
    â€œDid I miss something? Does one of them have a sign around his neck, ‘Stop Me Before I Kill Again’? What are you getting at, Ellie?”
    Ellen clicked the disk back to the beginning and then played it over, hitting the freeze frame button in the middle of the second pass over the crowd.
    â€œHim,” she said. “The one in the middle, in the tan jacket.” She tapped on the TV screen with her fingernail to show the person she meant. “See the way he looks into the camera?”
    â€œSo what? Maybe he’s got a letch for the cameraman. Girl, this is San Francisco.”
    â€œHe knows he’s being photographed.”
    â€œAll right—he knows. Maybe he’s just smarter than the rest of the innocent bystanders. That doesn’t make him guilty of anything.”
    â€œI’ve seen him before. The car trunk in North Beach, remember?”
    â€œMaybe he’s a homicide groupie. Anyway, the car trunk thing wasn’t our case.”
    â€œSo? I heard it on my police band and thought I’d drop by.”
    â€œIt was your day off. Are you nuts?”
    â€œIf he’s a groupie, you must have seen him before—you never forget a face, Sam. Is this guy somebody you know?
    Sam reached over and, with an impatient stab of his finger, hit the power button on the TV set. The image of the young man in the tan Windbreaker imploded into a tiny dot of light, and then flickered out.
    â€œOur Boy is turning into an obsession, Ellie. Get a life. Go out and find yourself a new boyfriend or something. You’ve got to stop this shit.”
    â€œHave you ever seen this guy?” Ellen answered, ignoring the advice.
    â€œNo, never.”
    â€œAnd how many murders have we worked since then? How long has it been? Six weeks? And you’ve never seen this particular specimen behind the barricades?”
    â€œYou need a vacation, Ellie. Come home to Daly City with me tonight and let Millie feed you some of her lasagna. Afterwards we’ll have a little three-handed canasta and play with the dogs.”
    â€œLet’s find out who he is, Sam.”
    It was not very difficult. Murderers loved to admire their own handiwork so, as a matter of routine at every homicide that attracted a crowd, one of the uniformed officers would be assigned to walk around and write down the license plate numbers of all the cars in the immediate area. If a suspect turned up, his car plates were checked against the lists, and if the numbers matched, it at least established his presence at the scene. Also it provided the sort of corroborating evidence that made an interrogator’s life so much easier: What were you doing at Van Ness and Stockton at three o’clock in the afternoon on the twenty-sixth? You think we don’t know you had your car parked around the corner from where David Thomas got his head blown off? More than one man had been put on death row that way.
    And so, to cut down on computer time, they compared the plate numbers from the Sally Wilkes scene with those from the North Beach killing. They found three matches. They would start with those. They ran the numbers over the hookup with the DMV, checking the photographs on the driver’s licenses. Two of them Sam recognized at once as well established members of the Fan Club. The third was the man in the tan Windbreaker.
    â€œStephen Tregear, six twenty-one North Point Street.”
    â€œSo the guy isn’t broke.” Sam lit his tenth cigarette of the morning and exhaled a cloud of smoke that seemed to stand as a comment on life’s many injustices.