‘But this wasn’t your average wire thief; this was Ed Lacey.’ Delaney reminded Banjo about the shocking two-year-old case, the role-model officer turned suddenly into a hapless screw-up who wrecked his squad car and got fired from the TPD. ‘The Sig’s a popular weapon amongst expert shooters like Lacey used to be. He probably kept one for his personal use after he left the police.’
Probably the only thing he saved out of all that wreckage, Sarah thought but didn’t say. She wasn’t going to admit to knowing what she knew about the Angela-keeps-all divorce, unless she had to. If Delaney found out she’d done Cifuentes’ interview for him, he’d be pissed. And really, why did he need to know? They’d brought back the info, shouldn’t that be good enough?
‘An ex-cop, I’ll be damned.’ Banjo curled his mustache ends, thinking. ‘That makes the other thing I wondered about seem even harder to explain.’ He curled into a smaller ball and twisted the end of his long braid.
Watching Banjo turning himself into a sofa cushion, Delaney lifted his eyebrows to Sarah, shrugged, turned back to Banjo and said, ‘What?’
‘Well, see … the angle …’ He drew them a diagram on a piece of scratch paper. ‘All the reports say he fell straight down from where he was shooting, here beside the pickup. But if that’s where he fired from, and he’s such a crack shot, how come the bullet ends up way out here in the mended pothole?’ He drew a dotted line across the driveway to the edge of the street. ‘I mean, not even close.’
Delaney did some hemming and scratching and finally stated the obvious. ‘He was in a hurry, of course.’
‘Not as much as the guy he was shooting at. He had the advantage of knowing what he was going to do.’
‘He’s right, boss,’ Sarah said. ‘Spurling thought he was making a routine arrest until his suspect pulled a gun out of a most unlikely place.’
‘Yet he still put three bullets in the kill zone,’ Banjo said. ‘Very impressive. Even granted Spurling’s better than average—’
‘Which he sure as hell is,’ Delaney said.
‘But even so, how come the man who used to teach kids like Spurling how to do that can’t come even close to that level now?’
Delaney tortured his ear a while longer before he said, ‘Meth takes you down fast.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Banjo said. ‘Well, think about it.’ He unwound himself and got up. ‘I’ll add this report to the case file before close of business today.’
‘Very good,’ Delaney said, and as Banjo walked out, he said, ‘Sarah, how are you doing with the background checks? You got enough evidence yet to support a claim of PTSD, or some such reason why Lacey went nuts?’
‘I’ve done several interesting interviews that all seem to contradict each other in some ways. If it’s OK with you, I still know some of the trainers at the academy, and I’d like to run down there and see what they say. It won’t take long and I’ve got time right now.’
‘Fine. Go ahead.’ Was he cool? Did he watch her curiously as she went out? Now don’t start getting paranoid over this one little thing. She hurried to her own cubicle, feeling slightly wired. A few yoga stretches to chill out and I’ll be ready to go.
Her email dinged with a new message. Checking, she found Oscar’s account of ‘his’ interview with Angela. Except for substituting his name for hers at the beginning of most questions, it was accurate, but awkwardly worded in spots and with a couple of mistakes in punctuation. She fixed those places and sent it back.
Two minutes later, he walked in on the last of her stretches and stood by her desk like a good schoolboy waiting for teacher. Sarah unwound and said, ‘What?’
Oscar moved her pencil mug nearer the lamp and lined up the stapler precisely with the edge of her desk. ‘I saw you in Delaney’s office. You haven’t told him we did that interview together, have you?’
‘No, of course not. Will you leave my desk alone and quit looking guilty? It’s not a crime for detectives to co-operate!’
He went away looking worried, but at least he went away. Sarah tucked her fresh notebook into her belt and trotted out of the building, past detectives tapping at keyboards. They still called it ‘catching up on paperwork,’ although every word of it was out in the ether and with luck would stay there and never cause ink to soil paper.
Sarah had trained at the old academy on West Silverbell, which at that time (before the recent now-busted housing boom) had seemed ‘way out in the boonies.’ The new school wasn’t just around the corner, either; it had co-opted a nice big site on South Wilmot to share with the fire department. Handsomely appointed and proud of its stature as a training facility for smaller towns statewide, it boasted views of two big prisons and the miles of open desert many inmates probably dreamed of escaping to – but electronic surveillance and razor wire had relegated prison escapes to the stuff of dreams and old Elmore Leonard novels.