They spoke for two minutes, Tanner gesturing toward the house, then he and the chief walked back over to Letty, Kaiser, and Grimes. The chief said, “I’m Randall Short, I’m the chief here. I’m terribly sorry about this. I can promise you that we’ll be all over it. We will find the people who did it.”
He must have caught a shadow on Letty’s face, and he cocked his head and said, “You don’t believe me, young lady?”
“I think it’s unlikely,” Letty said. “They were killed by professionals, or at least semi-pros. Professional enough that they turned the air-conditioning down to sixty degrees to delay decomposition of the bodies, so nobody would notice an odor, at least, not right away. How many amateurs or impulse killers would think of that? And the way they were killed and the fact that both cars are gone . . . The killings were carefully planned and carried out, and both of the Blackburns’ cars were taken so that a routine check would lead the police to think they’d left voluntarily. With both cars gone, that would mean three killers, if they arrived in one car. I wouldn’t be surprised if the two stolen cars are now down in Mexico, where you’ll never find them.”
He stared at her, nonplussed, then said, “Do tell.”
“Yes. I do.”
“You think Mexicans did it?”
Letty shrugged. “I don’t know who did it. You could get American professionals to do it, and I’m sure they have competent killers across the border. It’s the cars I was thinking about. Getting rid of them permanently, and maybe at a profit, outside normal American police communications systems. If they were in Albuquerque, you’d find them in an hour. In Juárez, not so much. Besides, Americans, Mexicans, everybody likes money.”
The chief raised his eyebrows, creating a half-dozen wrinkles across his forehead, and asked, “Do you read a lot of mystery novels?”
“My father is a U.S. Marshal and was a lead homicide investigator for the city of Minneapolis and for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’ve talked with him about his cases since I was twelve years old and I was involved in a couple of them. I am now an investigator, a researcher, for the U.S. Senate and the Department of Homeland Security.”
Short, the chief, looked at Tanner and then back at Letty. “Involved in your father’s cases how?”
Letty said, “He broke up a drug-smuggling ring that had killed some people in the Twin Cities. Two of them got crazy and crashed into our house, trying to kill our family as revenge. I shot and killed both of them. And I once shot a crooked cop. On two different occasions.”
The chief leaned away from her and then said, “That’s not a story you hear every day.”
“It’s all true,” Kaiser said. “I looked it up. You ought to read about her old man. He’s a piece of work.”
“Why would you tell us that?” the chief asked Letty.
Letty said, “Because Tanner said he’d need my fingerprints and I told him they were available through the FBI. He wanted to know why, but we put off talking about that—but me shooting those people, that’s why. It was going to come out, so I thought I might as well be up front about it.”
The chief rubbed his nose and said, “Okay.”
Tanner: “We need to talk to Ms. Davenport and Mr. Kaiser separately, and Mr. Grimes here will do the identification . . .”
He explained Grimes’s relationship to the Blackburns, and he added, “There may be a problem with some missing oil.”
The chief again took Tanner by the elbow, and led him away, and they talked for a while, then the chief waved at Letty, Kaiser, and Grimes and marched back down the driveway to his car. Tanner came over and said, “The chief was explaining how if I didn’t solve this, and right quick, I’ll be doing the Midland County peyote cactus inventory for the next several years. So we better get after it. Mr. Kaiser, I’d like to talk to you first. Ms. Davenport, if you’d like to wait in your Explorer . . .”