“I’m here,” she said loudly, bolting upright.
“Take it easy. You’re not asleep on duty.” The light from the house reached the interior of the car dimly, but even in the shadows, he could see she hadn’t exaggerated. She looked like she’d been dragged through the bushes backward.
“No, of course not, I was just—” She blinked several times. “Russ! What are you doing here? No, wait, I remember. Are you going to arrest Malcolm?”
He squinted past her into the tiny sports car. “I don’t think I can fit inside this tin can. Why don’t we get into my truck? We can talk there. Grab your purse and keys.”
She nodded, and a moment later they were crossing the gravel drive to his pickup, Clare muttering quiet “Ouch” noises as she, barefooted, picked her way across the stones.
As soon as they were both inside, he fired up the ignition and shifted into gear.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
“Taking you home,” he said, craning over his shoulder to see as he backed up. “Fasten your seat belt.”
“You’re supposed to be searching Malcolm’s room! Didn’t you hear anything I said on the phone?”
“Yep.” He threw his pickup into first and headed down the drive to the road.
“You can’t just drive away! There are illegal drugs in that house. And persons with knowledge of a murder!”
“You been watching Law & Order again, haven’t you?” He grinned at her. “Listen. I’ll give you a free tutorial on the way the criminal-justice system works in our country. I am a law-enforcement agent. Before I go into anyone’s house and search it, I have to get permission from a judge, called a warrant. I convince the judge to issue me a warrant based on evidence I can show or information I can give that will persuade him that there’s a reasonable chance I can find some evidence of a crime. Now, while it’s true that there are some jurisdictions where an honest cop can get a warrant based on his say-so, here in Washington County I have to deal with Judge Ryswick. And Judge Ryswick likes solid evidence before issuing a warrant. Especially when he’s asked to issue warrants against well-heeled businessmen. Judge Ryswick would be very unhappy with me if I woke him up and asked for a warrant to search Peggy Landry’s home based on a drunken woman’s statement that she overheard what she thinks was a drug deal while going to the bathroom. Although I admit that the fact you’re a priest is good. The DA always likes to tell juries that priests and bishops don’t normally witness crimes. To explain the scumball witnesses he has to put on the stand, you see?”
“I wasn’t going to the bathroom! I was hiding there. And I’m not drunk. I only had four drinks. Or five. I’m just a tad…tipsy.”
He laughed.
“Don’t patronize me!”
“I’m practically old enough to be your father. That gives me the right to patronize you. Plus, I’m sober and you’re not.”
She clicked her seat-belt buckle into place. He gunned the truck and turned onto the Seven Mile Road as she opened her mouth several times, inhaling sharply, as if she were about to light into him but couldn’t make up her mind where to start. Finally, she said, “You are not old enough to be my father.”
“I’ll be forty-nine in November.”
“Well, there you are. My father is fifty-eight.” She crossed her arms.
The fact that he was a lot closer to her father’s age than to hers was not a comfortable thought. “What the hell were you thinking of, leaping out a window onto a porch roof? You could have broken both your legs.”
“Believe me, it wasn’t my first choice. I was planning—” She stopped and thought for a minute. “Actually, I have to confess that I didn’t go into Malcolm’s room with any plan for getting back out again. I wasn’t thinking very far ahead.”
“There’s a surprise,” he said under his breath.
She twisted in her seat. “Mal Wintour is selling drugs,” she said. “He’s got a stash in a suitcase under his bed. The man who was in the room with him said it must be worth a million.” She jabbed her hands reflexively at her French twist and whatever had been holding it in place slid and a quarter of her hair tumbled down. “Darn it.” She fumbled with a clip. “Just because I wasn’t in the same room with them doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear them.”
“Okay. I believe you thought you heard what you did. I’ll even accept that you may be right that he is holding. I’m still not going to get anywhere based on your say-so.”
“Russ—”
He held up a hand. “Let me finish. I’ll put Mark on him, do some background checking, see if we can connect him to any known dealers or buyers.”
“But it’s more than that. I think he’s connected to the murder.”
“Which one?”
“What do you mean, which one? Bill Ingraham’s, of course. Why? There hasn’t been—has there been another murder?”
“Maybe. We found Chris Dessaint’s body. He’s the guy I told you about—the one McKinley fingered as the ring-leader of those punks. Looks like he OD’d. Scheeler’s doing an autopsy to see what he can find out.”
“Wasn’t he the one who was supposedly giving the others drugs and money?”
“That’s him.”
“It makes perfect sense!” She smacked her hands together. “Malcolm gave him drugs and money, and he did the dirty work. Mal said something to the other guy in his bedroom—‘I know what you were told.’ Doesn’t that sound as if there was someone else involved?”
“Huh.” He glanced away from the mountain road to look at her for a moment. “Did you hear the other guy’s name?”
“No.” She bit her lip and dropped her eyelids, as if she were concentrating intently on remembering. “He said, ‘I didn’t sign up for anything like this.’ He told Mal he wasn’t in it for the money, and Mal laughed at him. Then Mal gave him the…well, whatever it was and told him it was worth ten thousand dollars, and he—Malcolm, that is—would arrange a sale for the other guy. So he could take the money and leave the state. ‘Until this business about Bill blows over’—that’s what he said.” She opened her eyes and looked at Russ. “What do you think? Do you have an idea of who it might be?”
He returned his attention to the road. “Dunno if it’s an idea. A possibility, maybe.” He tapped the steering wheel with two fingers. “According to Elliott McKinley, there was a third man involved in the beatings. Jason Colvin. No priors on him, although we know he used to hang in the fringes of our little local hate-mongering group. We’ve tracked him to his girlfriend’s house, but the last time she saw him was Monday morning.”
“The morning after Bill Ingraham was killed.”
“Yep. Noble’s checked his work, hangouts, family—no one’s seen him since then. He’s disappeared off the face of the earth. Since we found Dessaint, I’ve been wondering if he took a camping trip, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dessaint. He was camped out in a remote location in the woods. If he hadn’t died and attracted a flock of carrion birds, we wouldn’t have found him on a bet.”
Clare wrinkled her nose. “That’s awful. And he died of an overdose? Accidentally?”
“Don’t know. It’s mighty convenient that the only person who knew who was passing out drugs and money in exchange for the assaults happened to OD a couple days after Ingraham’s death.”
“But if you think it might have been this Jason Colvin guy who was talking to Malcolm, then Chris Dessaint couldn’t have been the only one to know.” She brought one leg up and tucked her foot under her other leg. “If Malcolm Wintour’s been pulling the strings, maybe he’s trying to tie off all the loose ends. Maybe he adulterated whatever it was that he gave to Dessaint. And now Jason Colvin’s come to him. Maybe the package he gave to him wasn’t a payoff. Maybe it was meant for personal use.”
“If Colvin is a regular user, it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to think he’d dip into the goods. Even if he did plan on selling most of it.” He slowed the truck down as they approached a T-junction, then turned left and headed back into town. “The problem I have is seeing Malcolm Wintour as the bad guy. Why? What’s in it for him? Even granted the spurned-lover scenario, this is way too complicated. People who are enraged that their lover left grab the nearest gun and blow the person away. They don’t hire a bunch of guys and arrange incidents to cover their tracks. Besides, McKinley said the guy who was bankrolling them felt like they did about queers. Wanted to teach ’em a lesson. Wintour’s gay. He’s not going to beat up on his own kind.”