Spiral

Cascadden interviewed her.”
    Pintana dipped to take another—but now very casual — sip of her drink. ”What?”
    ”That someone calling herself ‘Wendy’ lured Dujong away from attending the Helides birthday party.”
    A look of genuine interest this time. ”Lured her how?”
    I went through it.
    ”So,” said Pintana, ”we add this mystery woman Wendy, and we still don’t have anything that authorizes me to violate the privacy of a maybe-missing citizen’s tape messages.”
    ”So maybe we do it without authorization.”
    Her eyes went toward the front entrance. ”Let me find a pay phone first.”
    I watched Pintana as she did a ninety-degree turn away from me. Sliding the strap of her totebag over a shoulder, she went back toward the rest room signs. Just as I lost her in the crowd, I felt that tingle of not remembering something important. Then I felt something else.
    The weight of hands substantially heavier than Pintana’s landing on each of my shoulders.

NINETEEN

    Sitting in the backseat of a Ford Crown Vic cruiser with the bigger of two patrol officers, I remembered what the tingle had been trying to tell me.
    I said, ”You have a cell phone.”
    Sergeant Lourdes Pintana turned around in the front passenger’s seat, speaking through cage wire at the edge of a Plexiglas divider. ”What?”
    ”You have a cellular, so you didn’t have to look for a pay phone.”
    From behind the wheel, the smaller patrol officer laughed. ”You sure this guy’s smart enough to—”
    ”Not another word,” said Pintana to him, and the four of us rode mute the rest of the way to 1300 West Broward Boulevard.

    ”Glad to see you back, Beantown.”
    ”Glad to be back.”
    Standing against the wall of Pintana’s office in the Homicide Unit, Detective Kyle Cascadden probably would have rubbed his hands together with glee but for the light-brown folder swaddled against his chest. ”You won’t be glad for long, especially once—”
    ”Kyle?” said Pintana, sinking into the chair behind her desk.
    ”All right, all right.”
    I took the seat across from her again, the two uniforms having left us at the reception counter on the second floor.
    She said to me, ”You have any idea why you’re here?”
    Figuring that nobody from the trailer park would be likely to contact the Lauderdale police, I shook my head.
    ”Kyle?” said Pintana again, but with a different inflection.
    Cascadden came toward my chair, brandishing the file like a blackjack. Instead of hitting me with it, he slipped out an eight-by-ten photo, slapping the glossy on the desk in front of me the way an aggressive kid might play the game of ”Go Fish.”
    I looked down at the photo, a head and shoulders shot of a man bare from the breastplate upward. You didn’t need to see the tattoo of a spider to know it was Ford Walton, and you didn’t need to have seen many dead bodies to know this was another one.
    I looked back up at Cascadden.
    ”Well?” he said.
    ”I’ll take a dozen wallet-sized.”
    He raised the Semper Fi forearm as though he was going to backhand me.
    ”Kyle!” from Pintana, and Cascadden dropped the pose before stepping back stiffly to his place at the wall.
    I said, ”Where was Walton killed?”
    Pintana put a forefinger to her gleaming, even teeth. ”Found him in an alley, warehouse district off Andrews Avenue. But, from postmortem lividity, the M.E. figures he was just dumped there.”
    Cascadden clearly didn’t like the way his commander was sharing information with his prime suspect.
    ”How about cause of death?” I said.
    ”Another knife, back of the neck this time.”
    ”You mean through the spinal cord?”
    Cascadden said, ”Just like they teach you in the Corps.”
    I looked at him. ”I was Army.”
    ”Don’t matter, Beantown. That’s where you could’ve learnt it.”
    Back to Pintana. ”You wouldn’t be telling me all this if you seriously liked me as the killer.”
    She tapped the forefinger’s nail against her teeth. ”We think it’s kind of odd that a man supposedly attacks you with a knife after his girlfriend dies by one and then he ends up dead from one himself.”
    ”But three different methods.”
    ”Huh?” said Cascadden.
    ”Of using a knife. You told me Sundy Moran was slashed.”
    Pintana barely moved her lips. ”Repeatedly.”
    ”Well, when Walton came after me at the hotel pool, he used the slash move only as a feint. The rest of it was pure street fighter, up from