Wolf Hour

35 Target, October 2016

Kay Myers’s desk was located almost exactly in the middle of the open office landscape of the Homicide Department. Maybe that’s why she sometimes felt herself surrounded on all sides. And longed for her own office. She looked at the paper target they had found in the bubble wrap left behind in the shopping mall. Studied the bullet holes.

She felt Hanson’s presence before she heard him.

‘We’ve had over two hundred calls from people who think they saw Gomez.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she said.

‘Springer acts cool, but JTTF have called up half the police in the city for the opening tomorrow.’

Kay read the text on the target.

Hanson coughed. ‘Hope you’re not pissed that Springer put me in charge at this end?’

‘Not at all,’ said Kay. ‘You have seniority.’

‘Good. Because here’s a list I want you to check.’ He handed her a sheet of paper. ‘I want you to check out first the ones I’ve ticked. Here...’

Kay looked at the sheet of paper. Skimmed through it. ‘It says here the caller thinks they saw Gomez three weeks ago?’

‘Yes, but if you read on, you’ll see she thinks she saw him again yesterday. If that’s true, then she’s the only person we know of — apart from the neighbours in Jordan — who’s seen Gomez more than once in the same place. If there’s anything in it, then it means we have a place we know he visits regularly.’

Kay glanced through the notes. Aged eighty-three, address Cedar Creek. North of the city centre, more or less wilderness country. There was a separate column for the person taking the call to assess the caller’s credibility.

‘Credibility rating under half, it says here.’

‘Yes, he wasn’t sure if the old lady was all there.’

Kay looked up at Hanson. ‘Even among calls we get that sound serious, eighty per cent turn out to be fantasies. And this is from a senile old lady living somewhere out in the sticks, in wolf country?’

‘I hear you, Myers, but I think it’s worth following up.’

‘If I say I don’t agree?’

Hanson smiled and lifted his coffee cup as though to make a toast. ‘I recall someone telling me to shut up and call Walker because he’d put her in charge of the case. Well, Myers, you can call Springer. OK?’

Hanson turned and walked off whistling. Kay closed her eyes. Hoped the slight twinges of pain in her lower back weren’t going to be the start of something.

‘Excuse me.’

Kay opened her eyes and looked up. Her heart gave a little jump. It was the dark-eyed painter. He hadn’t taken off his mask, not even the protective white cap and gloves.

‘I promised you an invitation,’ he said. He put a card down on her desk, turned and walked away. She watched him go. The cheek of it. He must have been warned he couldn’t just wander round inside the Homicide Department where there was so much sensitive information lying about. But he’d taken the chance anyway, risked getting a dressing-down just to deliver this card to her. She looked at it. It was the kind of invitation you buy in a store and fill out your own details on. Here it said that the invite was to Minnehaha Park, in front of the waterfalls. Sunday at one o’clock. There was no indication of what would happen there, nor was the card signed. She slipped it into a drawer. If they’d got Gomez by then, well, maybe. If not, then she’d still be sitting here.

She picked up the paper target again. Ran her fingertips over the bullet holes.

Because sometimes the only thing that is going to make you feel better is shooting a machine gun.

Kay was reading the poster behind the counter when the assistant appeared in front of her.

‘Hi, I’m Jim, how can I help you today?’

‘Kay Myers, MPD.’ She showed him her ID and put the target down on the counter. ‘Is this from here?’

The man in the TOTAL DEFENSE T-shirt scratched his chest and studied the target.

‘This is a Krüger target, so it’s from here all right — we’re the only people round here who do Krüger targets. I always try to get our customers to take the target they used back home with them.’

‘Why is that?’

Jim shrugged. ‘When they see the target maybe it inspires them to come back and try to shoot better next time.’

‘I see. Does that make it likely that it was you who gave the person concerned this target?’

‘We have another shooting instructor — Barbara. But as a rule, yes, it’s me.’

‘OK. Have you seen this man here before?’

Kay held up the screen of her phone to Jim. It showed a frozen moment from a video of Tomás Gomez outside the Rialto, the porn movie theatre.

Jim studied the image while Kay looked around. When she came in there had been only the Donald Duck figure, now there were three people in line behind her.

‘I see hundreds of new faces every day, I can’t remember them all,’ said Jim, still peering in concentration at the screen. ‘But sure, we mostly get whites in here, not too many Latinos, so I ought to remember the face if he was in here recently. But to be honest I have trouble seeing differences in the faces of people of a different ethnicity from me. Hope you don’t find that offensive, Detective, I heard it’s a simple biological fact of life.’

He looked up at her, and she couldn’t work out whether his look was challenging or not. It didn’t make much difference to her either way.

‘How about the way he walked, and his body language?’ asked Kay. She touched the Play arrow on the video, and they watched Tomás Gomez walk across the street. She thought she saw Jim hesitate. But when Gomez had disappeared inside the Rialto he handed the phone back to her.

‘Sorry.’

There was a cough in the line behind Kay. She put her card down on the counter.

‘Call me on this number if you think of anything.’

‘Will do. By the way, where did you find this target?’

‘In a restroom. In the bubble wrap his rifle was packed in.’

‘Hey, Jim,’ someone in the line called out, ‘can you get Barbara to come and help out here?’

‘I’m done,’ said Kay, and with a nod to Jim left the store.

It had started to cloud over on her trip out and now the sky was covered in a sullen, lead-blue sheet.

She got into her car and drove along minor roads toward 35W and the centre of town. She came to a T-junction in front of a small lake and stopped. The sign facing her said the 35W was a left turn, but it also showed that a right would take her to the 65, a road that ran in a straight line northward to Cedar Creek. Kay had decided she would ring the old lady who had called in the tip-off and try to assess its importance that way, but now she was only twenty, at the most thirty minutes’ drive from where she lived. Kay hesitated. Had rush-hour traffic started? And then it was as though the heavens made the decision for her as the sky opened in torrential rain. She could no longer see the sign through the water flooding down her windshield. She set the wipers going. Then she made a left turn signal and headed west, toward city hall.