‘I wish it was a slam dunk for the Tucker kid,’ Mike said. ‘He’s obviously been set up — unless he did it, of course — but that may not be easy to prove.’
‘You say things like that just so you can charge more, don’t you?’
The big bear smile. ‘You’re not half as dumb as you look.’
‘Hard to believe that Cory would buy a rifle. He’s pretty anti-gun. That part of Showalter’s story doesn’t work at all.’
‘I’m working on that angle. But I can hear Showalter’s version. Here you have a young man who’s anti-gun, who tells me he’s never even fired a gun of any kind before and you think that would be good for our case but, when you think about it, it can be argued very well the other way. He gets his hands on this rifle in some as yet undetermined way and does enough reading and enough practicing to know how to handle the rifle — he doesn’t need to be a marksman. Jess isn’t going to be shot, anyway. All he has to do is fire a few wild shots at her and it’s mission accomplished.’
‘So now Showalter will say that Jess was behind this directly? This wasn’t just some staffer acting on his or her own?’
‘That’s where this is heading, Dev. And if you’ve heard the news in the last half hour, so is the press.’
As yet, Edelstein didn’t know any of the background about Cindy or Grimes or the anti-government group. I spent the next fifteen minutes going through what I knew.
‘We need to get Grimes on tape.’
‘Easier said than done. But I’ll give it a try.’
‘How about Cindy? Can we get her on tape?’
‘I’m pretty sure we can. But she’s really scared.’
‘I don’t blame her.’
The door was closed. Impossible as it seemed, Abby’s hand had a distinctive sound — knuckles against wood.
‘Come in.’
Abby appeared.
‘You remember Abby, Mike.’
‘Of course. Hi, Abby.’
‘Hi, Mike.’
‘Abby, we’re going over everything we know up to date. How about sitting in with us for a while? You live here and know the ground a lot better than we do.’
‘And you’re a hell of a lot better looking than Dev, too.’
‘You sure he’s your friend, Dev?’
‘Yeah. If I pay him enough.’
Abby took a seat and it was back to work.
Twenty-Four
Grimes didn’t answer his front door. He didn’t answer his side door. He didn’t answer his back door, either.
But his Ford was parked at the curb, which meant he was probably inside unless Cindy had taken him somewhere.
The back door was locked but the large window opening on the kitchen was not. A bad oversight for somebody as paranoid as Grimes.
I climbed through it, the dusty sheer curtains almost making me sneeze as they rubbed against my face. I remembered my first day of training for being an army investigator. The brisk colonel teaching the course said that when trying to sneak into a building of any kind, try not to sneeze. It sounded reasonable at the time and it still sounded reasonable.
The appliances were a couple of decades old. The refrigerator made so much noise it probably kept the neighbors awake at night. A week’s worth of dirty dishes was piled in the sink. A linoleum floor was scuffed into oblivion. A clock radio sat on the counter, along with a spice rack. A calendar with a sweet painting of Jesus on it hung from a tiny nail on one of the ancient wooden cupboards. The year was 2001. I wondered if his wife had hung it there. It was hard to imagine Grimes doing it.
The place smelled of the dirty dishes, beer and cigarette smoke.
I was just starting to move into the front of the house when Grimes appeared, pointing one of those old Savage carbines my dad and uncle used to carry when they went out and had a good time blasting away at deer, something they could never convince me to do.
‘What the hell do you want?’
‘You lied to me last night. You know who came to see you. He wanted the recorder. He thought you had it.’
‘You better not say anything like that to poor Cindy. She’s out of her mind already. Dave, he told me about the recorder the night the Bradshaw woman got shot at. Told me how scared he was. He said he just wanted out of his little group. Said he made the recording for his own protection. I thought of goin’ to the police but I knew if I did he’d be in trouble.’ Right there before me he went from tired to wasted. ‘He didn’t say so, but he likes to hide shit. He’s like a little kid. He tells me about stuff he’s got hidden but he never tells me where it is. But I got a pretty good idea.’
‘Yeah?’
‘He’s got this trailer. I bet if you went through it carefully you’d be surprised what you’d find.’
I explained that I’d been out there but hadn’t gone through the place thoroughly. ‘Go back, then. Look it over real carefully.’ Then, ‘Shit. I need t’sit down.’
I followed him into the living room. He set the Savage down carefully on the couch and sat next to it. I took the armchair where you could sink to the vanishing point.
‘All I give a damn about is Cindy.’
‘I know that.’
‘Dave’s a good kid except he got mixed up with that group. All that crazy crap they talk. Revolution and all that. They’re just the other side of what those hippies were like. Afghanistan was what fucked him up.’
‘I’m sorry, Grimes. But now I want to hide Cindy somewhere.’
‘I already arranged that. She’s at this old friend of hers.’
‘I’d like the phone number.’
He made the kind of sounds lungers make.
‘I told her to stay away from the cops. I made her promise. I told her that if she loved me she wouldn’t go to the police.’
He was right. Why the hell not? All over the western United States there were law enforcement officers signing on to anti-government groups. But no section of the country was exempt from the hysteria these people generated. Why not the Midwest?
‘That’s why they want the recorder. Dave probably named the cops in the group.’
‘The son of a bitch who busted me up, I’d like a crack at him.’
‘You should hide out someplace else, too, until this is over.’
‘If the cops’re involved in this, when do you think it’ll be over? They won’t rest till they get that recorder. And by the way, I ain’t goin’ anywhere. This is my place. I worked half my life payin’ for it and I ain’t about to run away.’
He was right. He wasn’t running anywhere. He wouldn’t even be walking anywhere. His years and his life had all caught up with him. Only one thing mattered to him now and that was Cindy’s safety. But the responsibility of that had completely depleted him. He still had it in him to give out with raspy curses but there wasn’t jack shit he could do about defending himself, let alone Cindy.
He yawned and then his head teetered to the right side of his shoulder. Just yesterday he’d been strong enough and tough enough to run away to his car when his two friends from the Skylight had confronted me. Now he could barely stay awake. He needed to go back to bed. I kept thinking of his heart problems.
‘Where’s your bedroom?’
He yawned again. ‘Why?’
‘You need to go back to bed.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because you can barely stay awake. This whole thing has worn you out.’
‘The hell it has.’
‘I’m sick of arguing with you, Grimes. You need to sleep. Cindy’s as worried about you as you are about her.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She say that?’