“The suspect list.”
“There is no suspect list,” I said. “I wasn’t implying anything, Cantrell. About you or anybody else.”
“Just asking questions to pass the time of day.”
“More or less.”
“Okay, here’s my answer. No, I didn’t know the old man except to say hello to. Didn’t exchange more than fifty words with him, most of those the day I got here. He was active and I’m lazy as hell — no common ground.” The grin had become a smirk by this time. “Sure you won’t have a beer?”
“I’m sure.” I pushed away from the railing. “I’d better be moving along.”
“Come back any time.”
“Maybe I’ll do that.”
“Meantime, good luck with your fishing,” he said as I stepped down off the porch, and when I glanced back at him, he winked again. Broadly. To let me know he hadn’t meant the sport.
Nobody was home at the cottage Jacob Strayhorn had rented, a bungalow-style A-frame crowded by dogwood bushes on its west side and fronted by a stubby platform porch. Out in a boat somewhere. I thought. Nosed in between the bushes and the porch was his ten-year-old Chrysler, its low-slung tan body disfigured by dings, dents, and paint scrapes. I noted the license plate number before I drove on.
At the Zaleski cabin I keyed open the door, took half a dozen steps along the hallway — and froze in place with the skin bunching and rippling along the saddle of my back. It was not anything I saw or heard, it was something in the air: emanations, vibes, whatever you want to call it. You get feelings like that when you’ve been a cop of one kind or another as long as I have and you learn to accept them without question.
Somebody’d been in the cabin since Chuck and I had left this morning. Not the boy and not his mother — somebody who didn’t belong.
Still here? It didn’t feel that way, but I went straight to the fireplace and caught up a chunk of firewood. The irony in that stayed with me, a bitter taste, as I made a quick search through the rooms.
Long gone. And nothing disturbed or missing that I could spot on a second, more careful check. My fly case was where I’d left it, my underwear and socks and shirts were as I’d arranged them in the dresser. I’d neglected to lock the closet door, but when I looked inside I found that the gun cabinet was still secure, the rifle and shotgun untouched.
Well? A daylight B&E just for a look around?
Except that it hadn’t quite been a B&E. There were no signs of forcible entry on the front door lock, on any of the window latches or on the sliding-glass door to the deck. Had I forgotten to lock something besides the closet and he’d just walked in and then secured the place before leaving? Not much sense in that. Let himself in with a key? That was more likely; Nils Ostergaard may have had one and it could’ve been lifted off him sometime after he was dead. But that still didn’t explain the intruder’s motivation.
I slid the deck door open all the way, opened a couple of the windows for cross-ventilation, and switched on the ceiling fan — mostly to get rid of trapped heat, partly to banish the bad air the intruder had left behind. Then I washed up, made a sandwich I didn’t much want, popped a beer I did want, and put in a collect call to Tamara at my office.
“Yo, chief,” she said. “Checking up on me, huh?”
“No way.”
“How’s Deep Mountain Lake?”
“Peaceful,” I said, which was not quite a lie.
“How many trout you murdered so far?”
“Only one. The reason I called—”
“Not much happening here,” she said. “I finished the Dalway skip-trace, no problem. Oh, yeah, Bill Gates called, wanted us to handle security for Microsoft at three mil per year. I told him we were too busy and besides, you think computers’re tools of the debbil.”
“Soul-stealers, right, so you better watch out. Listen, I need you to do something for me.”
“Sure, what?”
“Background checks on three men. ASAP.”
“Hey, what’s this? You working up there?”
“No. Doing a favor for a friend.”
“Uh-huh. Heard that one before.”
“Tamara—”
“How extensive? The checks, I mean.”
“Depends. What I’m looking for is anything out of the ordinary, anything crooked or shady or even antisocial. Criminal records or ties. Mental problems. Like that.”
“How come? Who are these three guys?”
“Two of them are probably average citizens. The third one… well, he may be mixed up in a felony.”
“And you don’t know which of ‘em it is.”
“That’s it.”
“Why not let the local fuzz handle it?”
“It’s not an official case. Not yet.”
“Okay. Names, addresses?”
“No street addresses; all I’ve got are cities.” I gave her the information I’d gathered on Dyce, Strayhorn, and Cantrell.
“Not much to work with,” she said.
“It ought to be enough. Anything you find out, call me right away,” and I added the phone number.
“I’m on it right now. You want me to keep working after five? Double-time if I do, remember.”
“You won’t let me forget. You mind?”
“Money’s one thing I never mind.” She paused and then said, “Tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Man, you work too hard, you know what I’m saying? One of these days you really ought to take a vacation.”
10
Dull, static afternoon. I sweated my way through a restless nap, debated going for a swim, decided the icy water would probably do more harm than good, and settled for a shower instead. Then I packed up my fishing gear, locked it away in the trunk of the car. Funny, but I had no second thoughts, no sense of nostalgia: I simply was not a fisherman any longer. It was as if the sport had given me up, rather than the other way around. I remembered a woman saying to me once that she hadn’t quit smoking, smoking had quit her; she’d awakened one morning and reached for her cigarettes, as was her habit, and suddenly the thought of lighting one made her physically ill. She’d never lit up again, she told me. I hadn’t quite believed her, but I believed her now, fifteen years later. It can happen that way, all right. Vices, hobbies, other pursuits. Relationships, too. One day there’s interest, desire, some degree of passionate involvement, the next it’s gone with no real sense of decline or transition, as if it had never existed in the first place.
I wondered briefly if it could happen that way with Kerry and me, one or the other of us. But it was not anything that worried me, really. You don’t love the way she and I loved and have it end all of a sudden, overnight. There’s too much at stake on both sides. The ardor cools a little, the relationship changes and goes through its crises big and small, but there is no abrupt termination. If we ever split up — and I was as sure we wouldn’t as I could ever be of anything in this life — we would both see it coming long before it reached critical mass.
Around five I went over to the Dixons’. No answer to my knock, so I took myself down to the dock. It and the deck above were deserted, but I heard sounds from the storeroom and saw that its door stood open. As I started up there, Chuck emerged carrying his father’s heavy tackle box and an armload of fishing poles and a wicker creel.
“Oh, hi,” he said when he saw me. Not much enthusiasm; there was a listlessness in the way he looked and moved.
“Hi. What’re you up to?”
“Not much. Just moving Dad’s stuff inside, so it’ll be ready when he gets here.”
“He call since your mom talked to him?”
“No. Jeez, I hope he comes up tomorrow.”
“He will if he can possibly get away.”
“Yeah, I know.”