Syd, for crying out loud, just call home.
I needed help with this. I couldn’t do it all alone.
I was going to have to call Kip Jennings.
Detective Marjorie had it in for me. But maybe, just maybe, there was a part of Kip Jennings that still believed in me, that still believed my daughter was still alive, and genuinely in danger.
I had to put some trust in her now. I had to tell her what I’d found out.
I pulled the car off Route 1 into a plaza parking lot. I felt too on edge to attempt driving and talking on the cell at the same time. I got out the phone and keyed in the number I’d used to get in touch with Jennings before.
I got her voice mail.
“Listen, Detective Jennings, this is Tim Blake. Something’s happened, and I think I know what’s going on. I need to talk to you. Not that asshole Marjorie. I don’t honestly think you believe I’ve done what he thinks I’ve done. It’s you I want to talk to, because I think you’ll believe me and I think you’ll do something about it. I’m this close to finding Syd. I really think I am. You have to call me when you get this message. Please.”
I flipped my phone shut, gripped the top of the steering wheel and rested my head on my hands.
I still wanted to talk to Carol Swain about Patty. It was easy to forget, with all that was happening, that Patty was missing, too. I couldn’t help but feel that Patty’s disappearance was linked to Sydney’s, and I hoped that talking to Patty’s mother might offer up some new clue about what might have happened to both of them.
But first, I was going to go home, find that picture in my emails of Sydney walking past that fire extinguisher. I’d print it out, show it to Jennings, take her to the hotel, show her the worn “I” on the glass door. She’d come around.
“Oh no,” I said as I turned onto Hill Street.
Up ahead, out front of my house parked next to the curb, was Kate Wood’s silver Focus.
“Perfect,” I said under my breath.
As I pulled into the drive, I noticed that Kate’s car was empty. She wasn’t sitting in it waiting for me. I’d never given her a key to the house. Maybe she was sitting around back in one of the lawn chairs, waiting for me to come home and let her in.
I turned off the Beetle. Instead of walking in through the front door, I walked down the side of the house to the backyard.
I spotted the brown bag of Chinese food first. It lay on the grass, on its side, the top ripped open. It looked as though someone had reached in and helped themselves to a couple of things and left the rest.
The sliding glass door that leads from the living room to the backyard patio had been broken. There was glass on the carpet inside the house. Someone had smashed the glass so they could reach in and unlock the door.
I slid the door open and stepped in.
I called out, “Kate?”
There was no reply.
Broken glass crunched under my shoes. I moved through the living room and into the kitchen.
She was on the floor, on her back, her arms stretched out above her head, her legs twisted awkwardly. Blood was pooled around her.
I was guessing it must have come from the hole in the middle of her forehead.
THIRTY-FIVE
SUDDENLY OVERWHELMED, I BOLTED FROM THE HOUSE through the open back door. I put a hand up against the siding to support myself and threw up. Seeing Kate that way had done more than fuck with my head. My stomach was doing somersaults. When I was sure I was done, I stepped away from the house. But wooziness swept in, and I had to put my hands on my knees and hold my head down for the better part of half a minute.
This was not happening.
Except, of course, it was. There was a dead woman in my kitchen. A woman I had, at least at one point, cared about, been intimate with, shared some small part of my life with.
And now she’d been shot through the head.
I was stunned, horrified. I felt strangely cold, almost shivery, and noticed a tremor in my hands. I was so shaken, it took a few moments before I was able to focus enough to figure out what had happened. Not that it took a rocket scientist to put it together. They-or, more likely, the man known as Eric or Gary-had been here, waiting for me, but Kate had shown up instead.
Maybe the noise of the shot made him panic, think the police might turn up, so he took off, decided he could always try again later.
I stood outside, not knowing what to do. I couldn’t go back in there. I was-and there’s no sense soft-pedaling this-too goddamn scared to enter my home. I couldn’t look at Kate Wood again, see her that way.
When my cell rang, it might as well have been wired directly to my heart, it gave me such a start.
I fished the phone out of my pocket, but my hand was shaking so badly it landed on the grass. I retrieved it, flipped it open, and put it to my ear without looking to see who it was.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice so quiet I could barely hear it myself.
“Mr. Blake?”
Kip Jennings.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m returning your call,” she said. “You have some new information for me or something?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So, what is it?”
I’d been in shock only seconds before, but now my mind was suddenly focused. Think this through very carefully.
There had been several developments in the past few hours:
Syd had been at the hotel, and it now seemed likely everyone who worked there had been lying to me. And to the police, too. Veronica Harp and everyone else had been covering up from the beginning.
Randall Tripe was involved in some kind of human-trafficking scheme, and the fact that his blood-and Syd’s-was on her car connected them.
Andy Hertz was beating the bushes trying to get a lead on this Gary character, who’d not only tried to kill me, but might be the one who’d given Syd the lead on the hotel job.
I’d felt, up until the moment I’d discovered Kate, I was getting close, that I was getting somewhere. It was why I felt the need to finally talk, face-to-face, with Patty’s mother, Carol Swain. Maybe she’d know some small detail about her daughter, or mine, that could end up tipping things in my favor.
What I couldn’t afford was losing time answering questions from the police about how Kate Wood ended up dead in my kitchen.
“Mr. Blake?” Jennings said. “Are you there?”
I had a pretty good idea how Jennings and Marjorie would put this together.
Kate Wood is found dead in my house a very short time after I learn she’s tipped police to what she thinks is suspicious behavior on my part. I’ve told the police she’s a nut. I’m angry, can’t believe she’d point the police in my direction. Kate drops by my house, wanting to patch things up. I’m not interested in an apology. I flip out. After all, look how I reacted when Detective Marjorie suggested I’d killed my own daughter.
They wouldn’t be bringing me in for questioning. They’d be arresting me.
And no one would be looking for Syd. They’d be more than happy to find a way to conclude I’d killed her.
“Mr. Blake?” Jennings said again.
“I’ll have to get back to you,” I said, and flipped the phone shut.
WHEN THE PHONE RANG AGAIN A FEW MINUTES LATER, I checked the ID before answering.
“Yeah,” I said, starting up the Beetle and driving away from my house as quickly as that shitbox would take me.
“Hey, Tim. It’s Andy.”
“Yeah, Andy.”
“You okay? You sound weird.”
“What’s going on?”
“Okay, so, I’m at that place? And I don’t see Gary around. I asked a couple of people who might know him, but they haven’t seen him lately.”
“They know how to find him?” I hung a right, then a left, putting my neighborhood behind me.
“No. But what I thought I’d do is, I’ll hang in long enough to have a couple beers and eat some wings. What I was wondering is, would you pay me back for that?”