Or was he getting ahead of himself here? He didnt know it was the Glock, didnt know that theyd recovered the gun. For all he knew the shooter had taken it away with him, in which case it hardly mattered whose prints were on it. He couldnt be sure that wasnt how it had happened.
Except somehow he did know, just as hed somehow known all along that this was a setup. And maybe that was why hed been so ginchy in Albuquerque, all those months ago. There had been something off about Call-Me-Al from the jump. Paying in advance for unspecified services, calling Dot from out of the blue and telling her money was on its way, then calling again to confirm it had arrived and assure her hed be in touch. And, months later, making contact once more and sending Keller on his way to New Mexico.
It was, he had to admit, not a bad way to hire a hit man. Nobody, not Dot and not the person who did the work, had any idea who Call-Me-Al might be, or where he lived, or anything else about him. So if things went wrong and Keller wound up in a cell, he couldnt get himself a deal by giving up his employer. He could give up Dot, but thats as far back as it would reach, because there was nobody for Dot to give up. Al was out of anybodys reach.
Say you were planning an extremely high-profile assassination. You wanted a patsy, a fall guy, to give some latter-day Warren Commission a plausible explanation of what had taken place.
Keller had never spent a lot of time on conspiracy theories, and was by no means convinced that the official explanations were wrong; it seemed entirely possible to him that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had shot down John F. Kennedy, and that James Earl Ray had done the same for Martin Luther King. He wasnt going to bet the rent money that it happened like that, but he wouldnt bet the other way, either. Both subjects seemed unlikely assassins, but was either one of them as wildly improbable as Sirhan Sirhan, the killer so witless they had to name him twice? And there was no question that hed shot Bobby Kennedy, because theyd caught him in the act.
But never mind what actually happened. If you were orchestrating something like that, a fall guy was a handy thing to have. And the best sort of fall guy would be someone who did this sort of thing for a living. If you wanted to frame someone for murder, why not pick a murderer? Hire him to kill some nonentity, and time it so hes in the right place at the right time, and then frame him for the real killing, the important killing. But dont let him actually do it, because then he might wind up in a position to rat you out. This way, when the cops picked him up, he couldnt say anything because he wouldnt know anything, and the closest he could come to giving a good account of himself would be to start yammering about how hed come here to Des Moines to kill someone else. Some poor schlump with no criminal ties and no one looking to kill him, some guy whose sole offense was overzealous lawn care.
Wonderful. The cops would love that one. Jesus, if they did pick him up, hed know better than to try to sell that story. Or, for that matter, any other story he could come up with just now.
He was sitting in front of the television set, his eyes on the screen, but he was too caught up in his own train of thought for his mind to pay any real attention to what his eyes were seeing. None of it registered, until something about the image on the screen forced its way into his consciousness.
It was a picture of a man, though why they were showing it was unclear, as the sound was still muted. Keller didnt recognize the guy, and yet it seemed to him that there was something familiar about him. He was middle-aged, with a full head of dark hair and something furtive about him. Not the face of someone youd be inclined to trust, and
He shot out a hand, groped for the remote. By the time hed triggered the Mute button it was too late, the picture was gone, and the news itself gone with it. They played a commercial, one Keller especially hated, the one with the moth coming in to assure the sleeping woman of eight hours of restful sleep. Any woman hed ever known, a moth came in and settled on her face, what shed do was leap up and start screaming, then pick up a broom and chase the thing all over the house.
He looked for a button to push to back the thing up, but this was TiVo-less
TV, and you had to watch everything in real time. And hed missed it, but who said CNN was the only game in town? He began switching channels, getting half-second glimpses of everything from a lacrosse match to a Texas Hold-Em tournament, from a rerun of The Match Game to a hair replacement infomercial, and before he knew it hed run the table and was back at CNN, staring once again at his own picture on the screen.
Furtive? Is that how hed seen himself? No he just looked a little tentative, as if he was trying to work out what he was doing there, with his face on national TV for all the world to see.
The sound was on now, and somebody was saying something, but he couldnt take it in; it was all he could do to look at his own unfortunate face and the caption under it. THE FACE OF A KILLER, it said.