Storm Prey

He is the most uncooperative, insubordinate—”
    “What’d you want him to do? Say he was looking for a swarthy doctor?” Lucas asked.
    “Shut up,” she said.
    “So we got the doc ...”
    “And another problem,” Marcy said.
    Lucas nodded: “Who killed the doc?”
    She said, “It’s pretty clear to me that it’s a gang thing. Somebody else in the Seed got wind of the robbery and hijacked it.”
    Lucas nodded and said, “Let me take a look.”
     
     
    NOT MUCH TO SEE—a dead man with a broken head and a small puddle of blood beneath it, lying on his back, arms beside his body, palms up, in what Yoga people called “the corpse pose,” for good enough reason. Lucas watched the processing for a few minutes, then asked, “Who found him?”
    “Neighbor. Another guy who works downtown, they carpool into work. He knocked a couple times, and Shaheen didn’t answer, and Shaheen’s car was still in the parking lot. He peeked in at a corner of the blinds, and he could see him on the floor. Like we did with Lyle Mack.”
    “Gives me an ice cream headache,” Lucas said. “Listen, I’m gonna go put a damp cloth on my eyeballs.”
    “You do that,” she said. “If you think of anything, let me know.”
    “I already thought of one thing. The doc was friendly enough with the killer that he let the guy hit him from behind.”
     
     
    LUCAS WENT OUT and sat in his truck for a while, then put it in gear and headed over to University Hospitals.
    Virgil was lounging in the cafeteria, again, waiting. “Am I gonna get some shit?” he asked.
    “Nah,” Lucas said. “We were looking for an Arab. So what? Turned out we were right.”
     
     
    LUCAS GOT a doughnut and a Diet Coke and came back to Virgil’s table and said, “When I think about a gang holding up the pharmacy, I think of a tight group of people: Joe Mack, who was seen by Weather, and Chapman and Haines, with Haines confirmed through DNA. Lyle Mack was involved, probably as the brains behind the operation. Ike Mack was probably in charge of selling the drugs downstream. And the doc, who probably set up the robbery, including the theft of a key.”
    No one else would be needed for the job, he said, and there’d be no reason to tell anyone else about it. Telling somebody else would just be an unnecessary risk.
    “First, I thought it was somebody in the group,” Lucas said. “They’d committed a murder, inadvertently, and I thought the killer was probably wiping out anyone who could pin the murder on him. And I thought it had to be the doc. Everybody else we know about were friends, and knew each other forever, and now they’re all dead. So the doc must be the killer.
    “But then the doc was killed. And the doc ... I don’t see him as a longtime friend of this bunch. The Macks don’t have medical friends.”
    “You’re making a logical case for the existence of at least one more guy,” Virgil said, “which we already know, unless the doc beat himself to death.”
    “But one more guy wouldn’t have any function in the holdup. And that guy didn’t know what happened to the drugs, because he had to torture Lyle Mack to get the information. So he’s a total outsider. Then, the way Lyle Mack was tortured, I thought it had to be two guys, one guy sitting in the chair, pinning Mack to the floor, the other guy cutting on him. And that powder on him ... I thought the other guy was the doc. The guy who did the cutting.”
    Virgil said, “Logically, if there could be one outsider, there could be ten outsiders. All the Macks had to do was tell one guy, and the outsider gets his gang together and hijacks the robbery. You don’t need the doctor and ...” Virgil paused, mid-screed, and then said, “No, that’s not right, is it?”
    “I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “Did the Macks tell everybody they knew what they were doing? Why would they do that? And why would the outsiders kill everybody in the gang, if they weren’t involved in the pharmacy murder? If all they wanted was the drugs, if they were outsiders, they could have tortured Lyle Mack and killed Ike, and nobody would have known who they were. So why did they kill the doc? How’d they even know about the doc? Why did they make a run at Weather?”
    “That could have been Joe Mack or Haines or Chapman, right?”
    “No. Haines and Chapman were already dead. The autopsy suggests they were killed the day of the robbery. At least twenty-four hours before Weather was attacked.