She stared out the window.
“He wants me to get an abortion.”
“How many months along are you?” She wasn’t showing.
“Six weeks.”
“And it’s his baby?”
Again, her silence, and the clock tormenting him. He had to be an asshole cop. “Jill! Talk to me, right here, right now, or downtown and as long as it takes. I don’t care. You’ll only mean more overtime pay for me. Maybe your bike will be here when we get back, probably not. I guarantee you one thing: we’ll take as much time as we need to find out why you were screwing a big-time lawyer.”
“It’s his son, okay? His son and I had sex. One time. I got pregnant. How insane is that? One time and I’m pregnant. Now he wants me to go away.”
If it was the same son, Will thought of the foul-mouthed young man in the ball cap he had encountered at Music Hall.
“You didn’t ask for money?”
“No! I want to have this baby!” she yelled. “I won’t kill it.”
“Sounds like a case of blackmail to me. That’s against the law. You won’t look so pretty after ten years in prison, Jill.”
“His dad gave the money to me! I didn’t ask for anything! I didn’t want anything. I’m sorry I ever told Mike I was pregnant. After he found out, he never took my calls again. Then I started getting calls from his father. He threatened to sue me and take my house. He said I’d taken advantage of his son. As if! I was afraid.”
Yes, he was an asshole cop. He had never seen a human being look more helpless. And here was Kenneth Buchanan cleaning up his son’s casual disaster. He thought about John and his own cleaning up, the knife that he had stashed in his dresser drawer.
“How much did he pay you?”
She stared into her small lap. “Ten thousand dollars.”
He let her get the bike and ride off, then lit up his unmarked cruiser, turned east on Eighth, and accelerated to sixty, the big twin-turbocharged Interceptor engine sounding like a fighter jet closing in on its target.
Melissa spent three hours with Dodds and a police artist. More overtime for Fassbinder to bitch about. She kept protesting that she hadn’t gotten a great look at the suspect, that the bar had been too dim, but a sketch was produced. At five p.m., Will called all the television and radio stations, as well as the city desk at the Enquirer: a press conference would be held in an hour regarding the Gruber murder. That would be enough to draw a crowd. It was agreed that Will would conduct the briefing, the chief overruling Fassbinder’s objections. Will was the one the killer knew, the one he had threatened.