“Rusty Ingraham.” Glitsky grimaced. “I’m sounding like Hardy, but Maxine Weir…”

“Yeah? We got the perp on that, don’t we?”

“An arrest has been made, right.”

“But?”

“Tying things up. Different angles keep popping out.”

He told Batiste about his talk with Johnny LaGuardia, the fact that it looked like a professional had done the hit on Maxine, which could include Medina or LaGuardia himself, but seemed to rule out the husband.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Batiste raised a hand. “This is all very interesting, but what about the alleged perp, what’s his name?”

“Baker.”

“Baker. What about Baker? He’d pick up the Armor All trick in the joint, don’t you think?”

Glitsky thought on it. “Maybe so. But the problem is also in my guts. The problem is Rusty Ingraham’s missing body, the husband’s lousy alibi, except why would he know about Armor All? And today-am I wrong-we find our own Hector Medina going pro-active on another violent crime. What’s going on?”

Batiste moved the candy around, making a sucking noise.

“You want my take, it really sounds to me like you got the right guy. Shit, Abe, there’s always some loose ends.”

“This is not just loose ends, Frank,” Abe said. “This is a hair ball.”

Louis Baker wasn’t going back in.

They had him now. He’d thought he could pull it off, but then with the shooting, there was no way. That alone, forget the other, the stuff Ingraham and Hardy were talking about, would put him back. He wasn’t going.

He wasn’t putting up with the game of another trial. Everything stacked against him anyway from day one. And this time, what Hardy had said, going for the gas chamber.

No way.

The hospital room was dark. There was dim light out through the open door into the hallway, where he knew the guard sat.

He was quietly working the sheet back and forth over a jutting bit of metal that protruded from the bars at the side of the bed. A nurse walked by, exchanged a few words with the guard. He saw her silhouette in the doorway and lay still.

Then she was gone. He waited a minute, listening. The chair in the hall creaked, the guard probably settling back.

He got a tear in the top of the sheet and, trying not to move anything but his hands, began ripping a strip down to the bottom.

He only needed three strips. He wanted to get each one started at the top-that was the hardest part, the first tear -so he went back to the little bit of metal, working the old hospital sheet over it again and again, until, again, he got it to tear.

He pulled the new strip down a ways, using only the strength of his hands, showing no movement outside the covers, got maybe ten inches, then started over again at the top.

You only needed three strips to braid.

You braided the three eight-foot strips of sheet into a rope maybe seven feet long. You made a noose in that rope and tied one end to the same metal bar you were using to make the tear. You put the noose around your neck and rolled off the other side of the bed.

He wasn’t going back in.

Chapter Twenty

Kevin Driscoll was forty-two years old. His marriage to May was going through the readjustment of having two children, ages one and two. He hadn’t been laid in three weeks, resented it strongly and this morning had been awakened at 4:45 by Jason’s apparently random screaming. Kevin Driscoll had a sore throat. Perpetually, but this morning particularly.

As branch manager, he was out on the floor at Wells Fargo Bank and wondered, taking in the customers and tellers and various assistant vice-presidents (everybody above a teller was an a.v.p.), if the world had always been like this or whether he was only seeing it clearly for the first time. The conventional wisdom was that hardship showed you your true colors-maybe it was true of everything else. When you were having a hard time, you saw everything else in its true colors.

And what he saw depressed him further.

There were seven people waiting in the service line. He would never have thought of it before, but now he wondered how many of them were parents. At least three, maybe four. Had any of them slept in months? No wonder people were crabby at the windows all the time.

And at the windows-only two open. Four more tellers congregated conspicuously at chief teller Marianne’s desk catching up on the gossip.

Another man came in. Eight people in the service line now. Tuesday-morning rush and not one teller even considering heading to a window. Let ’em wait, right. The teller mentality.

Kevin coughed and cleared his throat, hoping Marianne or someone would catch the hint. He hated to have to step into this most basic operations procedure, but getting these people to move sometimes took direct action. The problem was, in his mood he’d likely appear as angry as he was, and that was to be avoided. Bank managers didn’t have personalities. They were unflappable.

But he stood up. He’d caught the looks of the customers-rolled eyes or helpless gestures. Shuffling back and forth. Cattle in the pen.

“Hey! Somebody want to open another window? What are you people doing back there?”

Kevin swore to himself. He held a restraining hand up to the security guard who was moving in. He didn’t blame the customer who yelled. He felt like yelling himself.

He walked to the bullpen. “Marianne,” he said quietly.

She looked up, forever sedentary, endlessly serene, a chief teller for seven years. A hundred and eighty pounds of essence of bovine. But sweet. So fucking sweet he wanted to kill her. She smiled. “Yes, Kevin?”

He gestured to the line, forcing a patient smile that he thought threatened to cramp every muscle in his face.

Sighing, Marianne dispatched one of her minions. One. And the girl didn’t hurry. She was carefully counting her drawer when the customer who’d yelled said, “Fuck this!” and turned out of the line.

Another satisfied customer.

“Marianne,” he repeated.

She gave him a little wave and mouthed, “They’ll wait,” then sent another soldier moseying off to the front.

“Are you the manager?”

It was only 10:15. Kevin turned, steeling himself. No matter what, he told himself, don’t swing at the customer.

“Yes?” Definitely the smile muscles were cramping up. “How can I help you?”

The man had not bothered waiting in the line. Maybe he wanted to open an account and Kevin could deal him off to one of his employees currently having coffee around the a.v.p. gossip desk. He did not feel like he could trust himself talking to anyone. Perhaps he should say he was sick, check into a motel and sleep about sixteen hours.

The customer was clearly trying to cut a certain type of figure, but Kevin wasn’t sure he pulled it off. Was he trying to look like a businessman? Or a pastiche of one with perhaps some artistic statement-mismatched pants and coat, a green tie that was too wide over a pale blue shirt, hiking boots. His longish hair was either heavily moussed or simply greasy. In any event, he was upset, saying something about eighty-five thousand dollars.

The number drove off a little of Kevin’s fatigue. He stopped the man in mid-sentence. “Yes, sir. Would you like to sit down, please? Come in where we can talk quietly? Perhaps, some coffee?”

The floor had already seen enough vocal disturbance for one day. The thing to do was to get him into one of the conference rooms.

Kevin was walking and the customer had no other option if he wanted to keep talking with him. It also gave Kevin another minute to get himself under control again, to put his own thoughts together.

Of course he remembered Maxine Weir. Who wouldn’t remember her? Ignoring even the eighty-five thousand dollars (which, of course, he wasn’t likely to do), a man who had not been laid in three weeks did not forget those black tights and high heels. If you’d gotten it in the last five minutes, you’d still perk up at the sight of those nipples peeking out through the holes of the loosely knit skin-colored sweater.