The Perfect Crime by Les Edgerton Page A

yard at Angola State Prison and Bobby was saying he wished he could get the material to build a remote-controlled model plane. He’d build one big enough to carry a man and fly that over the wall. With him in it, of course.
    What else can you do with a remote-control transmitter, Reader wanted to know. An idea was forming itself.
    Why, anything that requires energy you want to control from a distance, was Bobby’s reply.
    A bomb? Reader asked, grabbing Bobby by the front of his blue denim prison issue shirt.
    Well, yeah, sure. You could set off a bomb by remote control. Terrorists do shit like that all the time.
    That’s when the plan got legs. Little by little, Reader worked through the rest of it, always looking for a flaw, until he’d eliminated all the weak spots he could think of. Then, just when he had it all figured out, a thought came to him. An even better plan. A plan within a plan. And now it was time. He was ready to attach a bomb to a man who had access to a large sum of money and force the man to bring it to him. That was the first plan. The visible one. The plan within that one was even better. It was so good it was all he could do to keep from grinning all the time. Now, Reader Kincaid truly had the perfect crime.
    And he had the perfect situation in which to use it. A situation in which he could settle an old score. That was the best part.

CHAPTER 10
     
    THE COP WHO ANSWERED Grady’s call was another new one with a name like Smithers or something. Christ! Three years out to pasture and they’d replaced the whole damned department! Every time he ran into somebody or called down there he was talking to people he’d never heard of. Grady couldn’t remember any mass retirement exodus three years ago, but there sure as shit seemed to be a whole new bunch there now and they all seemed to have button-down names. Where the hell were all the micks and eyetalians? What kind of police department was it becoming what with all these kids’ names, like Ivy League MBAs?
    Come to think of it, he didn’t recall seeing any of the “noses,” that day at Jack’s. That’s what they called the Macedonians he’d served with. Dayton’s Macedonian population was substantial. He’d gone through the academy with a Macedonian who was a cousin of Dayton’s most famous native son, Jamie Farr, the guy who dressed in drag on M*A*S*H* . He’d met Mr. Farr at a smoker one time. Nice guy, although his cousin said Farr always claimed to be Lebanese because nobody knew where Macedonia was. Grady got the idea this pissed off his cousin, one of the countless Bojrabs in the Dayton phone book.
    “Lemme speak to Detective Sprague,” he said.
    “...see if he’s available, said the voice on the other end, softly, the speaker sounding like he was all of thirteen years old and taking a call for his dad, the insurance big shot. “Sir.”
    “He’s available, hotshot. Tell him it’s Fogarty.”
    Marty must have been standing a foot away, his raspy voice on the phone in less than two seconds.
    “Fogarty! How goes it ol’ bud!”
    “You tell me, Marty. They get the inventory done?”
    “Yeah. Last night.”
    “I thought you were gonna call me.”
    “I was getting ready to. It was late when they finished. I got in about two minutes ago. Look, I got a note on my calendar to give you a holler.”
    Grady waited. He lighted a Marlboro medium and stared at his shoes. He told himself to remember to pick up a can of shine.
    “Hey, it turns out your brother keeps good records. I think we got a pretty accurate list of what he sold last week after his inventory. They woulda got it done sooner ‘cept they had to put all the shit back on the shelves and count it. You wouldn’t believe all the little knickknacks there were!”
    Yes, I would, Grady thought. I helped him do that inventory last week.
    “All I need is what’s missing,” Grady said. “Don’t worry about what he sold. I don’t think whoever hit him bought