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Officer Virginia Risely is there, standing by her squadrol, wearing her uniform jacket, hands on her hips, when he pulls up. “Sorry to bother you, Sarge, but you had a flag on any incident involving the Bowers —”
“Yeah, I did, Ginny. Glad you called.”
“You go back with Mr. Bowers?” she asks.
“I grew up with Marcie Bowers,” he says. “Hardly know David.”
He leaves out the part about Marcie dumping him because, she claimed, she didn’t want to settle down in HG — only to later do that very thing, settle down in HG with another man.
“Well, Mr. Bowers had to leave for work. Mrs. Bowers’s daughter has to get up now for music before school. So we’re pretty much done. We told her we’d increase the patrols around her house.”
“That’s fine,” says Kyle. “I don’t need to talk to them. Just tell me what I need to know.”
Ginny exhales, frosty air leaving her mouth as she gives him the brief rundown.
“Okay, so let’s look at the ALPRs for the northeast quad,” says Kyle. “Call Ramona over at town services and tell her I want them ASAP. Kind of time window we’re looking at, around three thirty in the morning, can’t be too much data.”
“Okay, boss.” Ginny gives him a look. “Something concerning you here?”
“Oh, they’ve had some strange stuff happen,” he says. “She’s a lawyer, and he owns Hemingway’s Pub — maybe someone has a grudge or something. Who knows these days?” He puts his hand on Ginny’s shoulder. “Get the information right away and let me see it the minute you do.”
“Sure thing, Sarge. Hey, you’re up and in uniform pretty early.”
Kyle nods. “Got an out-of-town meeting this morning,” he says.
“Where you headed?”
“Chatsworth,” he says.
“Chatsworth? What, did someone steal a cow or something?”
Kyle obligingly smiles. He wishes his meeting were that frivolous. It may be his best chance to figure out what the hell is going on with the Bowers family.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“SERGEANT JANOWSKI, IS IT?” Oliver Grafton raises a hand to Kyle.
“It’s Kyle, Agent Grafton. Thanks for seeing me.”
“Call me Ollie. Everyone always did. Never had much time for the formality myself. Everyone else at the Bureau, they — well, they sort of got off on it, if you know what I mean; the whole ‘special agent’ crap. I always preferred plain old Ollie. Or Graf if not.”
Grafton is more than ten years removed from the FBI now, retired at age sixty-nine and living alone in a house around fifty miles from Hemingway Grove in a town called Chatsworth. Kyle’s great-uncle lived out here; Kyle tries out the name to Grafton, who says it rings a bell.
“You grew up here, then,” says Kyle, sitting at the kitchen table across from Grafton.
Grafton nods. “Born and raised in this house. Never thought I’d come back. Joined up with the Bureau, the central district — y’know, Springfield — after law school andtransferred to Chicago in the late nineties. After I retired and then my wife passed, and the house was just sitting here, I figured, why not? It’s not a bad place to retire, actually.” He looks at Kyle. “But you didn’t come out here to hear about my life. You wanna hear about Mikey the Knife.”
Kyle smiles at the nickname, one of many he’s heard.
“Or Mickey Two Guns.” Grafton chuckles. “Michael Cagnina. You probably heard he got out not long ago. Heard he’s down in Tampa– St. Pete.”
“You worked that case,” says Kyle.
“Back in the day, yeah, I did. Don’t remind me, the way everything went south. The bitch of it was, it wasn’t the Bureau’s fault, those witnesses getting killed. That was on the marshals’ office. But we all knew when the case against him went in the sewer that it would be us front and center in the shitstorm.” He waves a hand. “Well, we got him anyway, even if it was on a tax charge.”
“I’m looking at something going on in my town,” says Kyle. “One of the people in my town was a defense attorney for Silas Renfrow in that case.”
Grafton purses his lips, nods for a long time, almost as if showing respect. “Silent Silas,” he says. “He was a ghost. We looked for him for months until he surrendered to us. One of the most cold-blooded, ruthless killers ever born. As much as we hated to lose him as a witness against Cagnina, it seemed like there was some rough justice in seeing him get lit on fire and burned to a crisp.”
