He laughed. He couldn’t help it. The phone call to the chief about him was coming anyway. “The First Amendment is beyond my control, Ms. Buchanan. Don’t get up. I’ll find my way out.”
The wren in the short skirt was gone, so he wandered through the hallways for a moment. He had actually heard Jeremy Snowden play several times with the whole orchestra, once as a soloist on Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 1. Snowden was indeed very gifted and now the gift was dead, murdered. But he, not Kathryn S. Buchanan or the CSO, was the vic.
A custodian recognized him from the television and offered to give him a tour backstage, even take him into the attics “where the ghosts hang out.” Will regretfully turned him down.
He was back in the car when his phone rang: Dodds.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at Music Hall trying to do damage control because of your winning personality.”
“Ah, fuck ‘em. I got an arrest.”
“Do tell.”
“Black male, twenty-five, tried to rob a motorist with a knife this morning two blocks from where the cello player was killed. Motorist maces him and drives away, dragging the suspect two blocks until he falls off, thanks to the intervention of a mail box.” Dodds was laughing the entire time. “So he’s in custody. And the sweetest little thing of all? We’ve got his fingerprint on the door of the cello player’s Lexus. Case clearance, my brother. So you, PIO, need to put out the news.”
“You get to do that, Dodds. The chief has given me leave while I work Gruber.”
“So I heard.” His voice changed. “I hate talking to the media.”
“Welcome to my world.”
“I can do it, though. Give a handsome African-American face to the department.”
“I’ll tweet it,” Will volunteered.
“Fuck you. Let me give you some friendly intel, partner. Not all the brass was happy when the chief let you come back, and they’re sure as hell not happy now that you’re the lead on Gruber. They don’t know why you didn’t take disability and go away.”
Will had suspected as much, but his stomach churned anyway.
“Fair enough,” he said. “And if I were you, I’d show around some photos of that expensive letter opener. In case your suspect isn’t really a…ghetto youth.”
Dodds was cursing him when the connection ended.