Point Blank

“He must be the smoothest talker around,” Sherlock said. “I hope all those other girls are all right.”

“Yes,” Dix said, “we wondered that, too. We already located two of them, and they’re fine. As soon as we get the rest of the list, we’ll track them all down.”

Ruth said, “We asked Helen not to speak to anyone about our conversation, particularly Dr. Holcombe. We asked her for Dr. Holcombe’s schedule on Friday, and when she last saw Erin. At that point her eyes nearly bugged out of her head—she realized that we might be thinking he killed Erin Bushnell. She started babbling, saying over and over he didn’t have that kind of illness. Dear Dr. Holcombe wouldn’t even bang down hard on a piano key, there was no way he’d hurt anyone, particularly a Stanislaus student. She was sure of that, only told us all this because she didn’t want to lie to the police, and it was probably better for Dr. Holcombe that it come out right away. She knew he didn’t tell us when we talked to him on Monday, and assumed he hadn’t even thought of it because he was so distraught. Then she went on with this sappy spiel about how Dr. Holcombe’s precious students play all over the world, and inspire beauty and understanding, maybe even world peace.”

Sherlock said, “Is she nuts?”

Dix said, “I think she’s got a big blind spot when it comes to Uncle Gordon. She said he hasn’t eaten since he found out about Erin, stopped composing and playing his instruments, is silent, unable to deal with the world or his job. She felt terrible for him. As to what he did on Friday, Helen claimed he was closeted in student meetings all afternoon and he never left the campus. Then she gave us a look of triumph because she’d given him an alibi. Is she telling the truth?” Dix shrugged.

“What did Dr. Holcombe say when you asked him about his whereabouts?” Sherlock asked.

“We haven’t talked to the man today,” Dix said. “Helen had convinced him to attend a rehearsal he had scheduled. We’ll talk to him, and Helen again, in the morning.” Dix turned to Ruth and said suddenly, “Ruth, how are you feeling? Do you have a headache?”

She blinked at him, smiled. “A tad of pounding behind my left ear. It’s nothing, Dix.”

“Let me get you some aspirin. Better to cut it off before it digs in.” He walked quickly from the living room.

The phone rang, but only once. Dix must have grabbed it. Savich looked at Ruth, an eyebrow raised.

To his surprise, Special Agent Ruth Warnecki, tough, seasoned, and sharp as a tack, blushed.

Life was sometimes unutterably cool, Sherlock thought as she took Dillon’s hand and rose. “It’s getting late and we’re both pretty tired. We can get an early start in the morning.”

Dix came back into the room, handed Ruth two aspirin and a glass of water, and stood over her while she swallowed them. Then he turned to Savich and Sherlock. “You’ll want to hear this before you go. I just this minute got a call from a Detective Morales in the Richmond PD. He told me that two known lowlifes didn’t turn up where they were supposed to. No one’s heard a thing from them. One of them, Jackie Slater, is wanted on suspicion of auto theft. The other one, Tommy Dempsey, has a girlfriend who’s been badgering the police since Sunday morning, claiming he’s missing, that someone must have hurt him.

“Detective Morales heard what happened here Saturday night—about the stolen Tacoma exploding, and the two guys who were killed, and wondered if it could be them. My deputies faxed him the descriptions and a picture of a ring one of the men was wearing, and the girlfriend identified it. It was Tommy Dempsey.”

Savich said, “Detective Morales said they were lowlifes? Does that mean incompetent, or cheap to acquire?”

“Slater got out of the Red Onion State Prison four months ago, was probably trying to build up his business again. Dempsey was a wannabe. They think he might have been involved in some local burglaries, but can’t be sure.”

Ruth asked, “What was Slater in for?”

“Felony assault on a police officer and resisting arrest on a grand theft auto charge. About ten years ago he was arrested for felony homicide in the course of a robbery, but the evidence wasn’t there and they had to drop the charges. So Detective Morales thought Slater was fully capable of planning what happened here and drafting Dempsey to help him. Both were violent and reckless. I asked him to see if he could find out who they worked for recently.

“When I told him they tried to kill an FBI agent, he nearly fell off his chair. He told me, ‘I never thought the two of them were that stupid.’ ”