فصل 08 - بخش 07

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.