A Fountain Filled With Blood

He hung up the phone and spun around. “Yes!” He pumped one arm like a hockey fan witnessing a beautiful slap shot. “Looks like your Elliott McKinley may be one of our boys. A few years back, he hung around with a bad guy named Arnie Rider. Arnie had some wrong strong views about racial purity in the United States, which he expressed by getting into fights with Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees in the area. Eventually, he got carried away and stabbed a young man named Chhouk.” The name made him think of the kid’s mother, a tiny woman who knew maybe ten words of English and who had keened incessantly, a high-pitched, barely audible wail, when she identified her son’s body. He shook his head. “They put him away for manslaughter, but I thought it should have been murder one. Who picks a fight while carrying a bowie knife in his jacket unless he’s itching to use it?”

Clare pulled her legs up so she was sitting tailor-style in the chair. “Are you saying McKinley is attracted to extremists? He’s a kind of hate-crime groupie?”

“Well, we don’t know enough yet to take it that far. But it certainly drops a few more pieces in place.” He strode to the bookcase-covered wall opposite her desk, then to the sagging love seat, then back to the desk, too charged up to sit. “You say the foreman at the spa site told you McKinley has problems with his boss being gay. Maybe he gets together with some of his buddies who were left behind when Rider took the long trip out of town. They piss and moan about gays, just like they used to about Asians, until somebody gets the great idea to go out cruising and get themselves a homosexual.”

“Emil Dvorak.”

“And they take McKinley’s truck.” He paused at the bookcase, standing in front of a clock shaped like an Apache helicopter. Its rotors were ticking the seconds away. “Okay, we don’t have confirmation yet that it was McKinley’s truck. I’m just speculating.”

“No, no, I see what you’re driving at.” She leaned forward in her chair, her cheeks slightly flushed. “You’re thinking they were working themselves up to attack Bill Ingraham.”

“Maybe. Emil’s attack seems the most like sheer opportunism. Maybe they were driving by the Stuyvesant Inn, hoping to catch Ingraham himself, not knowing he was at the town meeting.”

“But then they succeed at that one. They don’t get caught. That eggs them on to the next attack.”

“MacPherson. Which strikes me as being more carefully planned out than when they went after Emil. Like they had set on a definite target.”

“So what about Bill Ingraham? Was he targeted? Was he what they were working up to with the other two assaults? Or did one of them just get…carried away?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’re way out in cloud cuckooland here. Once we bring in McKinley, I expect the missing information will fall into place extremely quickly. These sons of scumbuckets fall apart under questioning. I’ve seen it before. He’ll give up his own mother to knock a few years off his sentence. It’ll just be a matter of rounding ’em up.” He threw himself backward onto the lumpy love seat. “And thank God for it, too. Between this case and my own mother disturbing the peace in the park, I’m about tapped out. And then there’re the news stories. If I don’t have ten messages from the mayor and the Board of Aldermen waiting for me on my answering machine, I’ll eat my hat.”

She pulled a long strand of hair between her fingers and fiddled with it. “Look, I need to apologize for running my mouth off last night in the park. Sometimes I have this tendency to speak before I’ve had a chance to think everything out.”

He laughed. “No kidding? I never would have guessed that about you!”

“Cut it out! I’m trying to say I’m sorry here.”

He waved a hand, erasing her words from the air. “Don’t beat yourself up. We were both tired and had had too much to do on a very long day. I should have thought about what you had just been through before I snapped your head off. You weren’t saying anything I wasn’t already telling myself.” He was surprised, as he said it, to find it was true.

“That’s part of why I feel so bad,” she said, leaning forward again, her elbows on her knees. “I know how personally you take your responsibilities to this town. For me to accuse you of lying down on the job was just…jabbing you in your weak spot.”