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“You pissed off, Captain?” Crawford said.

“Me? Why should I be? We run down a phone trace for you and collar a fucking news reporter. Then you’ve got no charges against him. You have got some deal with him, gets him cooked in front of this scandal sheet. Now the other papers adopt him like he was their own.

“Now we’ve got our own Tooth Fairy murder right here in Chicago. That’s great. ‘Tooth Fairy in Chicago,’ boy. Before midnight we’ll have six accidental domestic shootings, guy trying to sneak in his own house drunk, wife hears him, bang. The Tooth Fairy may like Chicago, decide to stick around, have some fun.”

“We can do like this,” Crawford said. “Butt heads, get the police commissioner and the U.S. attorney all stirred up, get all the assholes stirred up, yours and mine. Or we can settle down and try to catch the bastard. This was my operation and it went to shit, I know that. You ever have that happen right here in Chicago? I don’t want to fight you, Captain. We want to catch him and go home. What do you want?”

Osborne moved a couple of items on his desk, a pen-holder, a picture of a fox-faced child in band uniform. He leaned back in his chair, pursed his lips and blew out some air.

“Right now I want some coffee. You guys want some?”

“I’d like some,” Crawford said.

“So would I,” Graham said.

Osborne passed around the foam cups. He pointed to some chairs.

“The Tooth Fairy had to have a van or a panel truck to move Lounds around in that wheelchair,” Graham said.

Osborne nodded. “The license plate Lounds saw was stolen off a TV repair truck in Oak Park. He took a commercial plate, so he was getting it for a truck or a van. He replaced the plate on the TV truck with another stolen plate so it wouldn’t be noticed so fast. Very sly, this boy. One thing we do know—he got the plate off the TV truck sometime after eight-thirty yesterday morning. The TV repair guy bought gas first thing yesterday and he used a credit card. The attendant copied the correct license number on the slip, so the plate was stolen after that.”

“Nobody saw any kind of truck or van?” Crawford said.

“Nothing. The guard at the Tattler saw zip. He could referee wrestling he sees so little. The fire department responded first to the Tattler. They were just looking for fire. We’re canvassing the overnight workers in the Tattler neighborhood and the neighborhoods where the TV guy worked Tuesday morning. We hope somebody saw him cop the plate.”

“I’d like to see the chair again,” Graham said.

“It’s in our lab. I’ll call them for you.” Osborne paused. “Lounds was a ballsy little guy, you have to give him that. Remembering the license number and spitting it out, the shape he was in. You listened to what Lounds said at the hospital?”

Graham nodded.

“I don’t mean to rub this in, but I want to know if we heard it the same way. What does it sound like to you?”

Graham quoted in a monotone: “ ‘Tooth Fairy. Graham set me up. The cunt knew it. Graham set me up. Cunt put his hand on me in the picture like a fucking pet.’”

Osborne could not tell how Graham felt about it. He asked another question.

“He was talking about the picture of you and him in the Tattler?”

“Had to be.”

“Where would he get that idea?”

“Lounds and I had a few run-ins.”

“But you looked friendly toward Lounds in the picture. The Tooth Fairy kills the pet first, is that it?”

“That’s it.” The stone fox was pretty fast, Graham thought.

“Too bad you didn’t stake him out.”

Graham said nothing.

“Lounds was supposed to be with us by the time the Tooth Fairy saw the Tattler,” Crawford said.

“Does what he said mean anything else to you, anything we can use?”

Graham came back from somewhere and had to repeat Osborne’s question in his mind before he answered. “We know from what Lounds said that the Tooth Fairy saw the Tattler before he hit Lounds, right?”