Lester looked doubtful. "I'll give it a shot, Joe, but it may be slim pickings. You know that."
"Yeah, Barrows already warned me. But until we can either locate Rocky's computer or find whoever he was talking to in that chat room, we're reduced to grabbing whatever straws float by. Which includes John Leppman, by the way," he added as an afterthought. "If you can pull him on board sooner than later, he might be able to help you profile this guy, even with the little we get off the hard drive. Not to mention," he suddenly added, "that he might have a file with N. Rockwell already on it-this is his line of work, after all, and my guess is that a name like that is a whole lot rarer than Ready Freddy or all the other playful crap out there."
"Roger that," Lester acknowledged.
There was a momentary lull in the conversation, after which Willy asked, "Who do you want me to chew on?"
Joe pressed his lips together. "I haven't forgotten you," he finally admitted, adding, "but I'm of two minds about using you for what I'm after."
"Don't tell me," Willy said with a pitying smile. "It's the car thing up north, right? Your big family drama?"
Joe barely heard the tone in his voice, being so used to the man's unrelenting style. "It may not be only about me anymore, as the Rocky reference just made clear. Still, I won't deny I'd love to get to the bottom of what happened to Mom and Leo."
"Want me to torture Dan?"
Joe shook his head, not doubting for a moment that Willy could and would do it if properly encouraged. "Tempting, but no. Dan's too hot right now. Go after the old man-E. T. Cozy up to him somehow, get under his tent flaps. In his prime, there was nothing that moved in that whole township without his knowledge, and he ran his family like a full-bird colonel. That's changed. I need to find out what happened, and I'm too involved and too well known to do the kind of job you might. And I'm not just after the car crash-think more generally than that. Barrows could benefit from this, too, if you get lucky."
Willy's response was eloquent in its brevity. "Sure."
Volunteering to do the unorthodox was an easy response. What Joe sensed here, however-never to be publicly recognized-was Willy's implicit personal loyalty to him. That was a trickier trait for an avowed hard case to acknowledge.
Joe honored the message with a single nod of the head. "Thanks," he added quietly before addressing them all. "Okay, let's break it down into pieces, so nobody's stepping on anyone else's toes."
Joe parked his car on Oak Street, appreciating that the plows had kept the curbs clear, and got out into the still falling snow. This had turned into an old-fashioned snowstorm. Forecasters were calling for six inches by morning.
He paused by his car, looking up the street, noticing a few forlorn electric candles in windows, and the odd wreath or two on a door, left over from Christmas. This was familiar territory. Not only was it a major backstreet thoroughfare in a town he'd known since his days as a rookie, decades earlier, but he'd once lived a hundred yards to the south, on the corner of Oak and High, before he and Gail even met, when she'd been merely a successful local Realtor and he'd been a lieutenant on the detective squad.
The coincidence was ironic, since he had parked opposite Lyn Silva's address-a two-story, two-apartment Victorian rental. There was an argument in times like this, he thought, for a small world being just a little too tight for comfort.
He glanced up at the upper apartment, its lights blazing behind the soundless, shifting veil of falling snow. She'd given him her phone number, but he hadn't called ahead. For reasons he didn't ponder, he'd merely used the number to cross-index her address on the office computer and driven the one block from the municipal building.
Joe walked up the central path, already softened by the new snow, and climbed the broad porch steps to the front door. That led to a heated, well-lighted lobby with a carpeted staircase, which he climbed to the second-floor landing and an age-darkened oak door.
He pushed the doorbell near the knob and waited, a small part of him hoping no one would be home.
His reaction to hearing her footsteps approaching was hardly disappointment, however. As the knob turned and the door opened, he felt his heart beating as fast as a teenager's.
She smiled up at his slightly reddened face. "There's a sight for sore eyes."
His color darkened further. "Same for me."
She leaned in and brushed his lips fleetingly with her own, a gesture combining friendship with intimacy while overstating neither. "Would you like to come in?"
"Is that okay? I know I should've called."
She took his hand and tugged at it. "It's a pleasure. Plus," she added, looking at him over her shoulder as she led the way through what might once have served as a dining room, "I need a break. I've been spending so much time at the bar, getting ready, that I'm still living out of boxes here. It's a drag to be unpacking no matter where I am."
She wasn't exaggerating. The room looked like a shipping depot, with cardboard boxes alternating with loose bundles of crinkled newspaper and bubble wrap, piled up in almost every nook and cranny.
"Impressive," he said softly, half to himself.
But she heard him. She laughed, still walking toward the front of the large apartment. "It is bad, but you'll find out why in a second. There's method to my madness-at least, I hope so."
They reached the far wall of the cluttered room, and Lyn slid open a pair of double pocket doors to what turned out to be a spacious living room.
"This is why I took the place, even though the rent was more than I wanted."
It was a beautiful room, with hardwood floors and detailed window frames, a coffered ceiling, elaborate moldings, and gleaming antique fixtures. Along the narrow wall, under an intricate mantel, was a built-in wood stove with glass doors, currently alive with a robust fire. The warmth of it all, both physical and psychological, surrounded them both in an embrace.
"Holy smokes," he said, looking around, reaching out to stroke the hardwood door frame beside him. "It's like a museum."
She groaned good-naturedly. "Yeah-of the wrong century, since all my junk is a museum to the eighties."
He saw her point. The setting was deserving of antique knickknacks, overstuffed English furniture, and framed oil paintings. Her belongings, though attractive and comfortable-looking, clearly harkened to a different era.
"Maybe," he didn't argue, "but it's not like you have beanbags and cinder-block shelves."
In fact, she'd done wonders. With all packing materials banished to the room they'd just left, the furniture and rugs had been more or less permanently placed, over half the hangings were already on the walls, and even a few stand-arounds had been distributed along windowsills and shelves.
"You've made it feel like a home," he told her honestly.
Her smile broadened. "Yeah. That's what I was thinking. It kind of works." She waved with a flourish at an oversize armchair near the fire. "Have a seat. Would you like something to drink? Or maybe some tea?"
He hesitated, embarrassed that he'd come by unannounced and caused a commotion, but he yielded to her obvious good mood. "Sure. Tea would be great."
"Deal," she said. "Sit there. The kitchen's still a wreck, so it's better I go there alone. Be back in a sec."
He watched her vanish through a side door leading to a hallway. Suddenly alone, he eyed the armchair momentarily but yielded to taking a small tour of the photographs newly on the walls and lining the baseboards, still awaiting hanging.
Some were family pictures in which he thought he could see, in the freckled face of a laughing child, the woman he was beginning to know, surrounded by a tired-looking mother, two older brothers, and a dark-complected father with a thick mustache, rough hands, and a steady, unsmiling look to his eyes. The pictures, taken at picnics, a restaurant, and-one-on a small, weather-beaten fishing boat, were snapshots only, slightly blurry, the color fading, and, despite their careful mounting and framing, eloquent of an economically marginal existence.