“She’s out now,” Emily said desperately. “It was what Charlotte wanted. That’s what she always wanted. Whatever you did, it got Victoria out. The job is finished. You’re done. Go home. Go home, and leave me alone.”
Kate regarded her in silence for a moment. “You’re terrified of something,” she said. “What? Or should I say, Whom?”
Emily cast a hunted look over Kate’s shoulder. “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t understand.”
“Make me understand.”
“Go home,” Emily whispered. “Go home now. Go home before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what? Emily? Emily!”
Emily closed the door, and this time Kate let her.
Kate manhandled the Subaru into the garage and slammed into the house.
Jim looked up from the couch in the living room, marking his place in the book he was reading. “You got up early.”
“I know.” She looked more closely. “Are you wearing glasses?”
He whipped them off and tucked them out of sight. “No. Well, yes. They’re just reading glasses. Listen, Kate. My case is done. I don’t have to go back to court. I could have gone with you this morning. Where did you go, by the way?”
She walked toward him, shedding her jacket and starting to unbuckle her belt.
He gaped at her. “Kate?”
“Put the glasses back on,” she said.
Half an hour later, he flopped back, gasping for breath. “Jesus,” he said, wheezing a little. “I think you broke something.”
Kate rolled off him and waited for the ceiling to come back into focus. She was suffused with a warm glow, trembling in every limb, covered in a fine mist of perspiration. Also, her knees were smarting from carpet burn. She definitely felt better. Maybe even leaning toward immortal. Who knew glasses could be such a turn-on?
They hadn’t made it out of the living room. One end of the sofa was jammed into a corner, the coffee table was tipped over, and the magazines on it lay splashed across the floor, along with the pillows from the couch and their clothes.
Jim wheezed some more. “Maybe even everything.” He mustered enough energy, barely, to raise his head and look at her. “Mind telling me what that was all about?”
“I saw, I wanted, I took,” she said, stretching lazily. “Oh yeah.”
“It’s not that I’m objecting.”
She grinned at the ceiling. “Shower?”
He groaned a little, getting to his feet, but he followed her upstairs.
She had an epiphany in the shower, and she told Jim.
“For God’s sake, I’m not a rabbit,” Jim said, but his body seemed willing to give it the old college try.
“Not that kind of epiphany,” she said, shoving him away and drawing back the curtain to reach for a towel. “Can you get me into the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility?”
“Who do you want to talk to?”
“The hit-and-run driver who killed Charlotte.”
Jim had to make a phone call before she’d let him get his pants on, and they arrived at the facility damp but determined.
A stocky corrections officer with a round face and a dimpled smile was waiting for them. “Sam,” Jim said. Jim.
“Thanks for setting this up.”
“I was never here, I saw nothing, and I’m about to go off shift anyway.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Feel kind of sorry for the little bastard,” Sam said as he buzzed them inside and escorted them down the hall.
“Why is that?”
“His wife was just here. They’ve got a kid with cystic fibrosis. She’s a waitress, and he drives a cab. They don’t have any kind of insurance. She was bawling her eyes out when she left.”
Jim’s eyes met Kate’s for a significant moment. “Really,” was all Kate said.
The interrogation room at CIPTF had been more recently painted than the one at Hiland Mountain. Otherwise, it looked exactly the same. A man in prison blues was already seated at the table, with a corrections officer standing against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. Sam nodded at him. “Thanks, Al.”
“No problem.” Al left, Sam crossed his arms over his chest and leaned up against the wall, Jim began a slow pace around the room, which took him in back of the man in the blues, and Kate pulled out a chair opposite him. “Ralph Patton?”
“Who wants to know?” It was a pitiful attempt at pugnacity from a skinny white guy with bad teeth, lank hair, and a skimpy attempt at the unshaven look so popular nowadays with male Hollywood starlets. He was twenty-three but looked seventeen.
“I’m Kate Shugak, and this is Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Alaska State Troopers. We’re here to ask you a few questions about the hit-and-run.”
“I was drunk,” Patton said immediately, as if that was some kind of excuse.
Kate opened the file she had carried in. “So you said in your statement, but your blood-alcohol level was point-oh-four, well below the legal limit.”
He hunched his shoulders. “I have a low tolerance for booze.”
Kate looked back at the file. “Along with a low tolerance for booze, you’ve got a wife, as well as a year-old child diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.”
Patton started to get out of his chair, but Jim slammed him back into it.
“Who paid you to kill Charlotte Muravieff, Ralph?”
“I want you to leave now,” Ralph said, his face contorting.
“And who helped you do it?”
“I want to talk to my lawyer. You can’t talk to me without my lawyer present.”
“Because the thing is, we went up to O’Malley to look at the crash site, Ralph, and we found the driveway where you waited until your lookout told you Charlotte was coming up the road. You pulled out on the road and accelerated at just the right time, with just enough speed to cause maximum damage. That took some planning.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You got a bank account, Ralph? Because I’m guessing that when we take a look at it, we’re going to find a large and recent deposit.”
“That money is mine,” Patton said, his voice rising.
“Nobody’s saying it isn’t,” Kate said soothingly. “If it’s in your bank account, of course it’s your money. So long as you can explain where it came from, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“It’s mine,” Patton said, “it’s my money, and it’s going to pay the doctors for my little girl. You can’t touch it!”
“Of course I can’t. It’s your money, just like you said. So long as the Internal Revenue Service gets their share, they don’t really care. Have you reported this money as income yet, Ralph?”
“It’s my money!” Patton shouted, spraying Kate with spittle. “You can’t touch it. I earned that for our baby!”
Jim slammed him back into his seat again and Kate pounced. “Who paid you, Ralph? Who paid you to crash your pickup into Charlotte’s car as she was coming home Tuesday night?”
“What the hell is going on here?” a voice said from the doorway.
Kate and Jim looked up, to see a man in a three-piece suit that screamed attorney standing in the doorway.
“Mr. Dial,” Patton said, shoving his chair over in his hurry to get to his feet, “I didn’t say anything, sir, I promise!”
“You don’t have to talk to these people, Ralph,” Dial said. He looked first at Kate and then at Jim. “I’m Joseph Dial, Mr. Pat-ton’s attorney. And you are leaving. Now.” He looked at Sam. “I understand you’re responsible for this meeting. I’ll be lodging a complaint with the governor’s office in the morning.”
Five minutes later, they were outside the front door. “I’m sorry as hell, Sam,” Jim said.
Sam didn’t appear to be upset. “The worst they can do is force me into early retirement, and I’ve already got my thirty in. Don’t sweat it, Jim. I owed you more than one.”
“Thanks,” Jim said, and they shook hands.
“Where now?” Jim said as he and Kate got into the Subaru.
“Max,” Kate said, and started the engine.