“This conversation is over!” Aanestad announced.
“Doug!” Cutter chided. “If you can’t keep quiet, I’m going to ask you to leave the room.”
Aanestad’s face went scarlet, his eyes flashed darkly, and he sat back in his chair.
Patrick continued. “I had Dick share the security footage because if Danny did something…if he hurt her in any way…then God damn it, for once he’s going to pay.”
“I’ll need you to account for your whereabouts last night, from nine P.M. to past midnight.”
Without pause, Cutter replied, “I was hosting a dinner at the lodge dining room followed immediately by a dessert function out at Trail Creek Cabin. The commissioner of the FCC. Believe me, Walt, every second of my time can be accounted for, by me, my people, and probably several dozen, if not a hundred or more, witnesses. Do the legwork.”
“The same for Danny?”
Patrick answered only with a saddened face.
“We’re done here,” Aanestad repeated. This time, he won Patrick’s support.
Walt had what he wanted: Patrick had admitted involvement with Ailia Holms, just as O’Brien had inferred. The man could have easily hired her murder.
All three men stood.
Walt asked for Cutter’s passport, winning another shocked expression. “Have one of your people run it down to my office before five.”
“That’s less than an hour.”
“That’s your problem.”
“You are way off, if you think I had anything do to with Ailia’s death.”
“Physical evidence was found in the back of your Land Cruiser possibly connected to the victim. Doug was prohibited from saying anything about that-the only condition of his attendance here.”
“What evidence? That’s ridiculous. Allie and I used that car all the time. We’ve even-” Cutter stopped himself.
Walt said nothing. He felt sordid and tired.
“We cared for each other,” Cutter repeated, as if issuing his defense.
“That’s enough, Patrick,” Aanestad said, taking Cutter by the arm and leading him from the room.
Twenty-one
A few minutes before 5 P.M., Walt parked in his designated space in front of the Sheriff’s Office. The officer on duty told him Myra was waiting in his office. He found her reading the Idaho Sheriffs’ Association magazine.
“What’s up?” he asked, hurrying over to give her a kiss. “Is Kev all right?”
“Better,” she said. “They may release him tomorrow.”
He sat down behind his desk and checked his e-mail. Too many to deal with. A stack of phone messages. And yet it felt uncommonly good to be back in the office.
“You look like hell.”
“I’m okay,” he told her.
“Are you eating?” With Myra it was always food.
“I’m good.” He looked up, and she looked down, avoiding eye contact. “ Myra?”
“Kev lied to you.”
“I know.”
She seemed both relieved and surprised. Her face brightened.
“He’s in with a bad kid,” he said. “This isn’t like him… We both know that.”
“How much trouble is he in?”
“Enough,” he answered honestly.
“I gave him the what-for. Told him we can’t keep using his father’s death as an excuse for our screwups. I’ve done it as much as him, Walt.”
“We’re all guilty of that,” Walt said. “Why is it we’re so willing to lean back, instead of press forward?”
“Fear. Of the unknown. Of the known. Of tomorrow. Of failure.” She worked herself up toward a cry, broken by Walt’s tossing her a box of tissues, which brought a laugh.
“So that’s a good thing,” he said. “To get through that, I mean. I hope it’s contagious.”
“We had a good cry, the two of us. That hasn’t really happened since Bobby.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“He wants to talk to you.” The way she said it, her eyes unflinching, he knew this was the real reason she’d come. She closed the magazine and set it aside.
“Okay.”
“No, I mean now, Walt. You need to hear this.”
“It can wait. If he’s getting out tomorrow-”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Exasperated, he held himself back from saying something stupid, something he’d regret. But his face belied him.
“I probably should have called you,” she said. “Caught you on the way down valley. I know how busy you must be. But I wanted to look you in the eye. I want you to understand how important this is. Not for Kevin-I don’t mean that. For you. Your job. He wouldn’t tell me what it is, but a mother knows. Right? Something happened in that laundry-that’s all I got out of him. Something he won’t talk to me about.”
“I’ll be heading up valley later on. The conference is in full swing.”
“You’ve got to go now, Walt.”
“ Myra…” he pleaded.
“He won’t tell me, only you. Please. Please do this. He’s your nephew.”
He had some choice words on the tip of his tongue. He looked at her and nodded. He said, “But we’re stopping by your place on the way and you’re making me a banana and mayonnaise sandwich.”
“Deal,” she said brightly. And with that, tears rolled from her tired eyes.
Twenty-two
K evin didn’t look as if he’d be going home the next day. If anything he looked worse than earlier in the day: the bruising around his shattered eye socket had spread beyond the bandages and was a horrid orange. His one supposedly “good” eye was pooled with blood beneath the cornea, the iris barely discernible.
“You look like shit,” Walt said, taking the seat by the side of the bed.
Kevin winced as he stretched the stitches at the edge of his lips into a grin. “Yeah,” he said.
“Your mom said-”
“Yeah,” he interrupted. “I’m sorry for what happened.”
“Me, too. I hear you want to change your story.”
“If I can.”
“Of course you can, Kev. The truth is always a good place to start. You might want to remember that.”
“There was a guy,” Kevin said.
“A guy,” Walt repeated after a protracted silence.
“In the laundry. When we got there. Up there by the register dressed like a ninja. Scared the hell out of us.”
“A ninja?”
“You know, a ski mask. Black clothes. Over in the bags of laundry.”
“A worker? A ski mask? Didn’t you say the alarm went off when you kicked in the door?”
“It beeped and went off. Yeah.”
There’d been no report of a manager or employee being inside the laundry at the time. “What was the guy doing?”
“Scaring the shit out of us.”
Walt suppressed a grin, then sobered to what he was hearing. “Eric went for the window because of this guy.”
“Yeah.” Kevin sounded regretful.
“You were, or were not, trying to steal clothes?” Walt pressed.
“Dry cleaners use a solvent…,” Kevin said softly.
“Meth,” Walt said, closing his eyes tightly. “For cooking meth.”
Kevin let out a slow, ragged breath. “Yeah.”
“Who?”
“Crab.”
“Taylor Crabtree. He put you up to this?”
“Yeah. Said if we were caught, on account we don’t have records, criminal records, we’d get off a lot easier than him.”
Walt fought valiantly to control his temper. “And this other guy-your age, or what?”
“Didn’t seem like it.”
Walt found himself hung up on the alarm having sounded with someone else already inside. “Give me a minute.”
He stepped into the hall to use his cell phone and called Trident Security, the valley’s only security firm. He identified himself and asked to pull up the entry log for the Suds Tub on the previous night, marveling at how quickly he was provided the information.
“There was a log-on at six-forty P.M.,” he was told. “Log-out at one-oh-seven A.M. Another log-on, one-oh-eight. We received an alarm at one-nineteen; called the establishment at one-nineteen, and passed it on to KPD at one-twenty-one A.M.”