“But it could be big money for somebody.”
“Yes. If you asked around Dallas, you could find somebody to kill your wife for a couple thousand dollars. For a million? You could probably find somebody willing to take a shot at the president.”
“I don’t have a wife,” Tanner said. “Or even a girlfriend, anymore.”
“Really. I hope it wasn’t a difficult breakup,” Letty said.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I haven’t mentioned it to her.”
Letty had to process the joke, and when she had, she didn’t laugh. Instead: “That’s a mean thing to say if you really have a girlfriend,” Letty said. “That line really sucks. I’ve heard better lines from guys who were lying on the barroom floor, dead drunk.”
“Easy, there,” Tanner said. “I’m more sensitive than I seem.”
“Yeah, well, right now you’re giving me an ice-cream headache, right in the middle of my forehead,” Letty said.
“Whatever. I’ve got to get to my crime scene,” Tanner said.
“Good, you should do that,” Letty said. A friendship no longer looked likely. “Can we go back into town? John and I? I need to call in to my boss. I need to get on my computer. I need a quiet place to think.”
Tanner considered that. “We have to talk some more, all of us. I’m sure you’re not lying about your stories, they’re too easy to check, though we will check. Where are you staying?”
“Homewood Suites,” Letty said. “We’re there for two nights, but I think it might go longer, now.”
“Okay. You can take off,” Tanner said. “Don’t be running back to Washington without telling me.”
Tanner went off to the house to talk with the crime scene crew, and Letty walked over to Kaiser, who was talking with Grimes.
Grimes said, “This is the worst thing that ever happened out here.”
Letty nodded and said, “They’ll be lifting the beds out to get access to the bodies, then you’ll do the ID. John and I are headed back to the hotel, to start calling people at DHS.”
* * *
On the way to the hotel, Kaiser, who was driving, said, “I don’t know a damn thing about crime and murder scenes and all that. All I wanted to do when I was a kid was get in the Army and jump out of airplanes—I only went to the community college to make my old man happy. He thought I ought to have a trade. Two weeks after I graduated, I was on my way to basic training. After that . . . I mean, I don’t know what you know, from growing up with a high-powered cop. I don’t even know what most civilians know, watching cops on TV for twenty-five years. I’ve been out of it. I don’t even know the music that other people my age know. I missed all that.”
“You’ve killed people . . .”
“Not the way you have,” Kaiser said. “We were all technical. When we killed people, it was technical. You do this, I’ll do that, we’ll put a guy up on the roof with an M203, and we smoke them and we move on.”
“It’s gotta be more than that.”
“Of course it is, but . . . most of us never got too personally involved with the people on the other side. Shit, sometimes we didn’t even know who was on the other side. It was a job. It’s not like with cops, all up close and personal. If you wanted me to knock down the Blackburns’ house and kill everyone in it, I could do that, no sweat, given the personnel and the tools. To sneak in there with enough people to move the cars, to tape them up and kill them with plastic bags, to lower the air temperature, figuring all that out ahead of time . . . man, that’s not what we did, to plan that kind of thing. We were killing, but we weren’t murdering, if you know what I mean.”