Page 102 of Fire and Bones
“The man gunned down this morning.” Doyle paused to collect all the patience she could take in. “His name is Lloyd Emmitt Warring. Was.”
When the significance of her statement penetrated my brain space, “Warring may be a common surname, but Emmitt is not a common first name.”
“Damn straight,” Doyle said.
“Which gives legs to the theory that one of the Warrings is being targeted.”
“Big muscular ones.”
“Two W-C properties are torched. Then a family member is shot.” Recapping for myself, not Doyle.
“Assuming Lew Warring is related to the Foggy Bottom brothers.”
“Assuming that.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why else? Someone holds a grudge against Emmitt. Maybe against the family.”
“We both agreed that would be one long-standing grudge.”
“The Hatfields and McCoys plugged holes in each other for almost three decades.” Even as I said it, I knew the comparison was a stretch. “Of course, that happened in West Virginia and Kentucky in the eighteen hundreds.”
“Fine,” Doyle said. “Maybe the perp is someone’s kid. Grandkid.”
“Whose?”
“The Warring brothers ran with a rough crowd. They must have made enemies.”
“Everything I’ve read says that’s true.”
“You plowed through those articles I photocopied. Float some candidates.”
I reached for my notes.
“Okay. Here’s a possibility. In 1934, Allen Wilson was shot dead by gunmen hired to kill some Warring-associated gangster whose name I forget. Wilson was an innocent newspaper carrier caught in the crossfire. He left behind three young kids.”
“Their names?”
“I didn’t write that down.”
“That’s good. Another?”
“Doris Gardner was the girlfriend of a Warring accomplice named Amon ‘Alarm’ Clock. Gardner was killed when Clock got into a fight with some rival bootlegger. She was the mother of two young girls.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t like to speculate.”
“Do it anyway.”
I dug deep.
“For years, Rags Warring—”
“Charles.”
“Yes. For years he was in a relationship with Mary Healy, a woman who worked at the National Archives. Because of Warring’s unsavory reputation, Healy was given an ultimatum: find another boyfriend or find another job. She dropped Warring cold.”