Ray said, “We’d better figure out what to do next.”
Emily said, “I already have. I’m going to search this house completely. I’d like you to help me, if you’re willing.” She looked at the others. “I would like both of you to go and talk to April and ask her to help you search the office.”
Dewey and Bill looked at each other uneasily. Emily said, “I know about it. She told me. I don’t think she’ll feel comfortable if I talk to her right now, but I can’t let that get in the way because we need her help. She’ll want to find out who killed Phil, so please ask her.”
“Say we do get her to help,” Bill said. “What are we doing? What are we looking for?”
“You’re looking at everything. You and April and Dewey go to the office and check each piece of paper and then set it aside. When you have a pile, put it in a cardboard file box. I’m going to rent a selfstorage bay, and at the end of each day, we’ll take the boxes you’ve filled and move them there.”
He frowned. “But how do we know which things to put in which boxes?”
She tried to be patient with Bill because he was young and brave and had just had a hard night. “April knows the filing system, so she’ll help. But we’ll keep it simple, and use the three categories we already have. There are current cases, alphabetized by the last name of the client. That’s the smallest group. There are old cases arranged the same way, and internal business files, like phone bills and payrolls and leases.”
“Are you closing down Kramer Investigations?”
Emily looked at Dewey Burns. His expression was attentive, but she couldn’t tell whether he cared what the answer was. She said, “I’m just making the next move to fight off this guy. I’m trying to beat him to this piece of evidence he wants. I don’t know what happens when we have it. I suppose it depends on what it is.”
Dewey nodded. “Okay. But tell us again. What, as close as you can figure, is it going to look like?”
“I’m sorry, but I just don’t know. It’s something Phil had. I thought I knew him better than I did, so I can’t tell what form it’s in. It’s a piece of paper, a photograph, an audiotape, a videotape, a computer disk, or maybe a piece of film, or the memory card from a digital camera. All I know is that it would make some powerful man uncomfortable. That’s what the man who broke in said. He implied that it was what got Phil murdered, but that it’s still around, and he wants it.”
“Did the guy say it’s something Phil made, or something he just happened to get his hands on?” Bill asked.
“It could be either. It could be he got it in one form and put it into a different form, or even more than one form. Anything is possible. You knew Phil. He was clever, secretive.”
Dewey Burns was staring into Emily’s eyes with a fresh intensity, reminding her of Phil. She realized it had stopped being their secret now: Phil’s and Dewey’s. Now it was Dewey’s and hers, and it felt as though she had known it for a long time. He said, “We should go over there and get started, and get as far as we can right away.”
The two men began to move toward the door, and Emily followed them. “Thank you, guys. But you know, you could get some sleep first. The security company has men watching the office tonight, so you could start tomorrow.”
“No,” Dewey said. “The sooner we find it, the sooner this will be over.”
He and Bill went out, and Ray closed the door.
Emily said, “You can get some sleep. I’m going to get started here.”
“No. I’m up, so I might as well help. How do you want to search the house?”
“The same way I told them to search the office. We’ll start by moving everything out of the bedroom upstairs, and search the bare room. We’ll search each piece of furniture, too, and then move it down here. When we’re done with that room, we’ll go to the nextmost-likely place, which is that little den off the hallway over there.”
“All the furniture is going to end up in the living room?”
“For a while. It will be going into storage, too.”
“You’re selling the house.”
“When this is over.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t know it until a few minutes ago. I just realized I’m never going to live here again.” She moved to the staircase and climbed to the second floor. After a moment, he heard a drawer slide shut with a bang, and another one slide open.
He climbed after her.
22
Jerry Hobart showered and changed his clothes to be sure there were no glass fragments sticking to him and to remove the gunpowder residue from his hands, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep. He sat on the bed in his hotel room and looked out over the lights in the San Fernando Valley. It was a clear night, and from his window on the tenth floor he could see the long rows of street lamps stretching off to the west, where they seemed to lose their definition and fade to become only an impression that the valley was lighter than the ridge of mountains to the north or the sky above.
Hobart was frustrated and angry that he could not go back out and find Emily Kramer right away. Now that he had gone to her house a second time, she would be hiding, staying with someone probably, and maybe with an armed guard. Phil Kramer’s office was out of reach now, too. Hobart was not going to be able to go back there.
But he had planted a suggestion in Emily Kramer’s skull, and now he had to hope that the suggestion had stuck with her and started to irritate and intrigue her until she couldn’t keep from acting on it. He still wasn’t sure whether she had known all along everything her husband knew about Theodore Forrest, or had known nothing. If Hobart had to take a guess, he would now bet that Phil Kramer hadn’t told her anything. She had seemed genuinely hurt and disappointed when he’d told her that her husband had been holding valuable secret information about a rich man. Hobart had also noticed that she did not doubt it was true.
Hobart brought back the sight of her standing there beside her bed saying she had just learned that her husband was cheating on her. The way she had blurted it out had surprised her as much as it surprised Hobart. It was as though the interrogation he was conducting was, to her, only a part of a much larger, unpleasant conversation she was having with herself. Saying he was cheating on her had made sense to her for an instant. It had seemed to her to be proof that her husband was in the habit of lying to her. Hobart supposed a detective who blackmailed people might also be somebody who wouldn’t tell his wife what he was doing. That wasn’t a stretch of the imagination. He wondered what Phil had planned to tell Emily when he had his million dollars, or whatever price he had set.
Suddenly Hobart realized he had made a false assumption. Phil Kramer had been cheating on her, and he had not told her where he was going the night Whitley had shot him. Kramer had not been planning to walk in the house with a sack of money and say, “Honey, I’m home. Look what I’ve got.” He had been planning to divorce her without letting her know the money existed, or maybe not come home that night at all. What she had learned about her marriage was why she had looked so defeated. Her hurt had been a bigger feeling than her fear of Hobart. She had known-maybe really just learned that day-that when Kramer died, her marriage had already been over for a while. She had already figured out that if Phil Kramer had been paid off that night, he would have been on his way to the airport.
Hobart couldn’t help including in his memory the fact that she had been naked. He had made her strip because it was a quick way to make progress in an interrogation. A person who was naked among enemies started to feel scared and vulnerable and powerless. For a woman it was worse, because it conformed exactly to a nightmare she’d been having since she was a child. When he met her, he had judged her to be someone who would fall apart and hand over everything Phil Kramer had on Forrest. Now he wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have held out, but he was almost sure she didn’t have what he wanted, at least that night.