"You won't have to worry about those things if you're in jail," Rick said. "If you do get charged, and I can get bail, will your parents be able to cough up the money?"
"Call my parents and I fire you," Crow said firmly. "I don't want them bailing me out of anything, literally or figuratively. Besides, if you're right, there's not going to be any bail."
Rick glanced at his watch. "I have to call the cops. Better I call them before they call on us."
Crow smiled, a bitter, downturned smile. "I'll brush my teeth so my breath will be kissing-fresh for the interrogation."
Rick picked up the phone, which sat in a curved niche in the wall. "Detective Guzman," he said into the receiver. Then, to Tess, as he waited to be put through. "You should have called me from there. It looks bad, the way you handled it. As if you assumed he was guilty."
He made her feel like a child, and she answered in a child's whiney tone. "I'm tired of talking to cops. I'm tired of finding dead bodies. Let A. J. give them the blow-by-blow. He saw everything. Besides, as long as Crow surrenders, what's the big deal? There's no reason we should assume he's involved in this."
"I just hope Guzman sees things your way," he said. "If he ever picks up. I hate to think of how many minutes of my life I've spent on goddamn hold. I want those minutes back. When death comes for me, I want back every minute I was on hold, in traffic jams, and behind people with eleven items in the ten-items-or-less line."
For all its windows, the living room was fairly dark, perhaps because it faced north. Crow's neighborhood was quiet in the late afternoon, and Tess became aware of the sounds around her-Rick's tuneless humming, the wind moving through the trees, a car moving slowly down the block, bushes rustling, a burst of barking from what sounded like an entire kennel of dogs a block or two away. The steady, muffled sounds of traffic from the nearby highway.
Then she became aware of the sounds she wasn't hearing-running water from the bathroom, Crow's footsteps as he moved about the rear of the house, gathering his things.
"Rick-"
But he was hearing, or not-hearing, the same thing. He dropped the phone, even as Guzman's voice came on the line. They ran down the narrow hall to the bathroom, a large old-fashioned room with a vanity flanked by high built-in cabinets and small square windows bracketing the vanity's mirror. The window closest to the door was up, and the screen had been pushed out on the ground below.
"The car's still there," Tess said, pointing to the Volvo with Maryland tags.
"Only because his key ring is in the front door. And with the park nearby, he can get a good head start on foot," Rick said. "I just wish I'd known he was going to do ‘Norwegian Wood' for his encore."
"Norwegian Wood?"
"Sure. This Crow had flown." And he laughed mirthlessly at his own bad joke, while Tess just stared at the empty space where a screen had once been, where Crow's body had been only minutes ago. It was such a small space, even for someone as slender as Crow. It couldn't have been easy to slide through it without making too much noise, to drop to the ground without a thump that would draw their attention.
Such a small space, yet it reminded her just how big trouble can be.
Chapter 22
"Obstruction of justice," Al Guzman said, as if reading from a mental grocery list. "Accessory after the fact. Criminal trespassing. What else? There's gotta be more. Maybe I'll have your car towed down to a garage, make sure it meets our safety standards, check your dog's license, impound it if you don't have your rabies certificate number. Then again, if there was a felony charge for being estupida, I'd have you on a dozen counts of that."
Tess regretted not following Crow out the window. She was persona non grata at SAPD, the city's most unwelcome visitor since Santa Anna, to hear Guzman tell it. Rick was sulking, convinced that she had put him at risk for possible disbarment. A. J. Sheppard, who had sat a long, lonely vigil at Espejo Verde, only to be picked up by the cops, no longer wanted to be her new best friend. As for Steve Villanueve, who glimpsed her in the hallway, he just shook his head sadly.
"So what do you think?" Guzman demanded. "Would your boyfriend come back for you if I lock you up? Or is he running toward the border with Emmie Sterne? I guess what I'm really asking is if you were a willing accomplice or a dupe."
"C'mon, Guzman," Rick said, rousing himself from his funk. "She was trying to help. She kept the story out of the media for the short term, no easy trick when one of the most aggressive reporters in town is on the scene. By calling me and asking me to meet her at Ed Ransome's apartment, she was trying to ensure he turned himself in. I was on the line with you when he went out the back window. What do you think, I was calling you to chat? Besides, how far could he get? He left his car and, according to him, he was low on funds."
"Low on funds? I think not. He's got his trust fund money, if my hunch is right. If not, then maybe he's got fifty thousand dollars that he took from Tom Darden and Laylan Weeks. Which makes their deaths capital crimes, by the way. Death penalty crimes, which isn't something we take lightly here in Texas, Miss Monaghan. We put more prisoners to death last year than any other state in the union. Year before last, half of the death row prisoners executed in the United States were executed right here in Texas."
"You must be very proud," Tess said.
"Go back to the fifty thousand dollars," Rick said, giving her a will-you-shut-up look.
Guzman had a chair, but he preferred to sit on the edge of the table, well into Tess's personal space. He was astute, he had figured out that such closeness made Tess feel nervous. And when she felt nervous, Tess was inclined to blurt out whatever occurred to her, as she had just demonstrated.
"We've had Darden and Weeks under surveillance since they got out of prison two months ago," Guzman began.
"Not very close surveillance, apparently," Tess said. She really couldn't stop herself. If only Guzman would move even an inch away from her, she might be able to have an unexpressed thought.
"I'm not talking day in, day out. They weren't the smartest two ex-felons around, but they'd know if we were on their ass, and they'd have gotten some slick little defense attorney to come after us for messing with their constitutional rights. After all, they paid their debt to society. Ran up a bigger debt while they did it, but that's how it works."
"As a professional devil's advocate, I have to point out that they did their time-twenty years," Rick put in. "If you ask me, the person who represented them ought to be in prison."
"Hey, I got no problem locking up lawyers," Guzman said meaningfully. "Anyway, they were always talking over at Huntsville how they had this money coming to them. The usual brag. Someone owes us fifty thousand dollars for this thing we pulled, we'll get paid when we get out, going to buy us some new motorcycles. But, lo and behold, they come out, and pretty soon they're flashing money all over this town, paying cash for all sorts of things. New Harleys, hundred-dollar tabs at Hector's."
Tess and Rick exchanged a look.
"Yeah, Hector's," Guzman said. "Biker bar south of the city, where a girl named Emmie Sterne and a guy named Ed Ransome happen to play in an after-hours band."
"If they were making a big show of how much money they had, anyone could have killed them for it," Tess offered. "They probably didn't have the sweetest friends in the world."