The Angel Singers by Dorien Grey

neither could I. But the fact remained that somebody had killed Grant for reasons that probably went deeper than the guy’s being an asshole.
    I figured I’d gotten about as much from Tony as I was likely to get for the moment, so I thanked him for his time, we exchanged good-byes, and hung up.
    I immediately tried calling the number he had given me, but there was no answer and no machine. I folded the paper with the number and put it in my billfold for the next day.
    *
    The first thing I did Tuesday morning, before even starting the coffee, was to put in a call to Marty Gresham. Since I knew he spent most of his time out of the office, I wanted to try to catch him before he left. Luck was with me when his extension was picked up and I heard the familiar voice.
    “Detective Gresham.”
    “Marty, it’s Dick. Glad I caught you.”
    “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to return your call yesterday,” he said. “So, you’re working on the Jefferson case.”
    I hadn’t mentioned that in my message to him, but it wasn’t surprising that he’d figured it out.
    “Can I assume you and Dan…” Dan Carpenter was Marty’s work partner. “…have the case?”
    “Yeah. Dan says we get all the gay cases because I know you. Dan’s brother is always ribbing him about it.”
    Dan’s brother Earl was also a homicide detective, a nice guy whose partner was an old-school homophobe with whom I’d had some nasty run-ins on past cases. Earl, however, seemed to have inherited the Homo sapiens genes his Neanderthal partner so clearly lacked, and we got along fine.
    “When can we get together to talk about it?” Marty asked.
    “You name it.”
    “How about your office. One o’clock, one fifteen?”
    “It’s a date,” I said.
    “Don’t you wish,” he teased.
    Though Marty was hopelessly straight, with a wife and daughter and a second child on the way, he and Dan Carpenter were, unlike Carpenter’s brother’s partner and many others on the police force, totally comfortable with my being gay. Not that it would have mattered if he wasn’t, but it did make it a lot easier this way.
    “Oh, and one more thing while we’re on the phone,” I said. “Is there any way you can look into someone’s juvenile records? They might have been sealed.”
    “Well, that could be a problem, but not impossible,” he said. “What’s the name?”
    “Barry Legget,” I said, spelling the last name for him. “He’s in his mid-twenties now, and I don’t have any exact dates.”
    “I’ll see what I can do.”
    The number Booth had given me for Bernie Niles got me no further than his answering machine, and I left both my numbers in hopes he’d get back to me, though, especially if he were still pissed at Booth, there was no particular reason to think he would once he recognized the area code.
    *
    I decided to hold off trying to reach Jerry Granville until that night, when there’d be a better chance of finding him in.
    At exactly one fifteen, shortly after I’d finished the downstairs diner’s Meatloaf Special and taken the trash to the disposal room on my floor, the shadows of Detectives Gresham and Carpenter appeared on the opaque-glass half of my door, followed by a crisp knock.
    “Open,” I called. “Coffee?” I asked as they took seats on the two chairs facing my desk.
    “No, thanks,” Carpenter said. “We just finished lunch.”
    “So,” I said, knowing they were busy and probably wanted to get right to the point, “what can you tell me about the Jefferson case?”
    Marty grinned. “Odd, we were going to ask you the same thing.”
    “You first.”
    They exchanged glances before Marty said, “Well, whoever did it wanted to make damned sure they got their message across. They used not one but two pipe bombs under the driver’s seat and jointly wired them to the ignition. The bombs themselves were almost high-school stuff, literally. Anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry and wiring could have done it. Trying to