Which is how Parker got to meet the wheelman and one of the midgets on the liquor-store holdups.
There were a lot of things bothering Brown about the Sebastiani case.
The three most important things were the head and the hands. He kept wondering why they hadn't turned up yet. He kept wondering where Jimmy Brayne had dropped them.
He also wondered where Brayne was right now.
The blues from the Two-Three, armed with the BOLO that had gone out all over the city, had located the blue Citation in the parking lot of an A&P not far from the River Dix. The techs had crawled over the car like ants, lifting latent prints, collecting stain samples, vacuuming for hairs and fibers. Anything they'd got had already been bagged and sent to the lab for comparison with whatever had been recovered from the Econoline van. Brown had no illusions about the lab getting back to them before sometime Monday. Meanwhile, both cars had been dumped—which left Brayne without wheels. His last location had been in the Twenty-Third, where he'd dropped the Citation, way over on the south side of the city. Was he now holed up somewhere in that precinct? Had he crabbed east, west, or north to a hotel someplace else? Or was he already on an airplane, bus, or train heading for parts unknown?
All of this bothered Brown.
He also wondered why Brayne had killed his mentor and employer.
"You think they're making it?" he asked Hawes.
"Who?"
"Brayne and the woman."
"Marie?"
The possibility had never occurred to Hawes. She had seemed so honestly grieved by her husband's disappearance and death. But now that Brown had mentioned it—
"I mean, what I'm looking for is some motive here," Brown said.
"The guy could've just gone beserk, you know. Threw those tricks all over the driveway, ran off in the Citation…"
"Yeah, I'm curious about that, too," Brown said. "Let's try to dope out a timetable, okay? They come into the city together, Brayne in the van, Marie and her husband in the Citation…"
"Got to the school around a quarter past three."
"Unloaded the car and the van…"
"Right."
"And then Brayne went off God knows where, said he'd be back at five, five-thirty to pick up the big stuff."
"Uh-huh."
"Okay, they finish the act around five-fifteen. Sebastiani changes into his street clothes, goes out back to load the car while Marie's getting out of her costume. She comes out later, finds the stuff all over the driveway and the Citation gone."
"Right."
"So we got to figure Brayne dumped the van on Rachel Street sometime between three-thirty and five-fifteen, grabbed a taxi back to the school, and cold-cocked Sebastiani while he was loading the car."
"That's what it looks like," Hawes said.
"Then he chops up the body—where'd he do that, Cotton? Blood stains in the Citation's trunk, you know, but nowhere else in the car."
"Coulda done it anywhere in the city. Found himself a deserted street, an abandoned building…"
"Yeah, you could do that in this city. So he chops up the corpse, loads the pieces in the trunk, and starts dropping them all around town. When he gets rid of the last one, he leaves the car behind that A&P and takes off."
"Yeah."
"So where's the motive?"
"I don't know."
"She's an attractive woman," Brown said.
Hawes had noticed that.
"If she was playing house with Brayne in that apartment over the garage…"
"Well, you've got no reason to believe that, Artie."
"I'm snowballing it, Cotton. Let's say they had a thing going. Brayne and the woman."
"Okay."
"And let's say hubby tipped to it."
"You're thinking movies or television."
"I'm thinking real-life, too. Hubby tells Brayne to lay off, Brayne's still hungry for her. He chops up hubby, and him and the woman ride off into the sunset."
"Except Brayne's the only one who rode off," Hawes said. "The woman's…"
"You think she's home yet?" Brown asked, and looked up at the clock.
Ten minutes past eleven.
"Half hour or so to Collinsworth," Hawes said. "She was catching the ten forty-five."
"Whyn't we take a ride out there?" Brown said.
"What for?"
"Toss that apartment over the garage, see we can't find something."
"Like what?"
"Like maybe where Brayne's heading. Or better yet, something that links him to the woman."
"We'll need a warrant to toss that garage."
"We haven't even got jurisdiction across the river," Brown said. "Let's play it by ear, okay? If the lady's clean, she won't ask for a warrant."
"You want to call her first?"
"What for?" Brown said. "I love surprises."
Kling waved so long to them as they headed out of the squad. He looked up at the clock. The graveyard shift should be here in half an hour or so—O'Brien, Delgado, Fujiwara and Willis Fill them in on what had gone down on the four-to-midnight grab one of the sedans, and head for Calm's Point. Make himself invisible in the Zone, just another John looking for a little Friday-night sport. But keep an eye out for Eileen.
He thought she was dead wrong about this one.
His being there in the Zone could only help an undercover situation that had been hastily planned and recklessly undermanned.
