7
He came out of Kroger with three bags of groceries, stowed them in the trunk, then looked at his phone. Two messages from Yune Sablo. He opened the one with the photo attachment first. In his mug shot, Claude Bolton looked much younger than the man Ralph had interviewed prior to the Maitland arrest. He also looked stoned to the gills: thousand-yard stare, scraped cheek, and something on his chin that might have been egg or puke. Ralph remembered Bolton saying he went to Narcotics Anonymous these days, and that he’d been clean for five or six years. Maybe so, maybe not.
The attachment on Yune’s second email was the arrest record. There were plenty of busts, mostly minor, and plenty of identifying marks. They included a scar on his back, one on his left side below the rib cage, one on his right temple, and about two dozen tattoos. There was an eagle, a knife with a bloody tip, a mermaid, a skull with candles in the eyesockets, and a good many others that didn’t interest Ralph. What did were the words on his fingers: CANT on the right hand, MUST on the left.
The burned man at the courthouse had had tattoos on his fingers, but had they been CANT and MUST? Ralph closed his eyes and tried to see, but got nothing. He knew from experience that finger tattoos weren’t uncommon among men who had spent time in jail; they probably saw it in the movies. LOVE and HATE were popular; so were GOOD and EVIL. He remembered Jack Hoskins telling him about a rat-faced little burglar who’d been sporting FUCK and SUCK on his digits, Jack saying it probably wasn’t the kind of thing that would get the guy girlfriends.
The one thing Ralph was sure of was there hadn’t been any tats on the burned man’s arms. There were plenty of them on Claude Bolton’s, but of course the fire that had wrecked the burned guy’s face might have erased them. Only—
“Only no way was that man at the courthouse Bolton,” he said, opening his eyes and staring at the people going in and out of the supermarket. “Impossible. Bolton wasn’t burned.”
How weird can this get? he had asked the Gibney woman on the phone last night. Weirder, she had replied, and how right she had been.
8
He and Jeannie put the groceries away together. When the chore was done, he told her he wanted her to look at something on his phone.
“Why?”
“Just take a look, okay? And remember that the person in the photo is quite a bit older now.”
He handed her his phone. She stared at the mug shot for ten seconds, then handed it back. Her cheeks had lost all their color.
“It’s him. His hair is shorter now, and he’s got a full goatee instead of that little mustache, but that’s the man who was in our house last night. The one who said he’d kill you if you didn’t stop. What’s his name?”
“Claude Bolton.”
“Are you going to arrest him?”
“Not yet. Not sure I could, even if I wanted to, being on administrative leave and all.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“Right now? Find out where he is.”
His first thought was to call Yune back, but Yune was digging away on the Dayton killer, Holmes. His second idea, quickly rejected, was Jack Hoskins. The man was a drunk and a blabbermouth. But there was a third choice.
He called the hospital, was informed that Betsy Riggins had gone home with her little bundle of joy, and reached her there. After asking how the new baby was doing （thus provoking a ten-minute rundown on everything from breast feeding to the high cost of Pampers）， he asked her if she would mind helping a brother out by making a call or maybe two in her official capacity. He told her what he wanted.
“Is this about Maitland?” she asked.
“Well, Betsy, considering my current situation, that’s sort of a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of deal.”
“If it is, you could get in trouble. And I could get in trouble for helping you.”
“If it’s Chief Geller you’re worried about, he won’t hear it from me.”
There was a long pause. He waited her out. Finally she said, “I felt bad for Maitland’s wife, you know. Really bad. She made me think of those TV news stories about the aftermath of suicide bombings, survivors walking around with blood in their hair and no idea of what just happened. Could this maybe help her out?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “I don’t want to go any further than that.”
“Let me see what I can do. John Zellman isn’t a total asshole, and that town line titty-bar of his needs a new license to operate every year. That might incline him to be helpful. I’ll call you back if I strike out. If it goes the way I think it will, he’ll call you.”