“You can stay home and baby-sit with Billy.”
“Ouch.”
They were ready to leave.
Crane opened the door for her. “There’s a coffee shop down by the motel office. You want some breakfast?”
“Sure. Walk down or drive?”
“Drive. Why not be lazy?”
They got in the car.
The camera was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
“Shit!” Boone said.
They had searched the car thoroughly, looked all around it, underneath it, checked with the motel manager, everything. The camera was gone. Now they stood next to the car, one on either side of it, its doors standing open. Stood and stared at the car as if it might speak to them. It didn’t.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said.
“Boone,” Crane said.
“Cocksuckers. The cocksuckers!”
A man a few doors down from their room was coming out of his; he looked at them with wide eyes, having heard what Boone just said, then walked quickly past them toward the coffee shop, looking at the ground as he did.
“Boone,” Crane said. “Please settle down.”
“Settle down my ass!”
He closed the car doors.
She was pacing. Then she stopped and pointed a finger at him.
“Now what do you think, skeptic? Now what do you think?”
“I think we ought to have some breakfast.”
“You think we ought to have some breakfast. You’re unbelievable.”
“Let’s have some breakfast and talk about this before we head back.”
She paced some more.
Then she said, “Okay. All right.”
She walked ahead of him. She walked fast, propelled by anger. He followed her into the small coffee shop and they took a booth by a window overlooking the highway. Trucks were rolling by, normally an innocuous enough sight; not today.
He ordered coffee and some biscuits; she asked for tea, in a tone of voice that scared the waitress.
“Take it easy, Boone.”
“Jesus you’re a wimp.”
“Boone. Just settle down.”
“Aren’t you mad, Crane? Aren’t you the slightest bit pissed off?”
“Of course I am. It’s just at the moment, you seem to have the hysteria market cornered.”
She let go a wry little smile at that; couldn’t help herself.
“You’ve made your point,” she conceded. “But do you realize what this means?”
“What does it mean.”
“Somebody knows what we’re up to. It means somebody’s trying to stop us.”
He took one of her hands in two of his. He smiled at her in such a way as to remind her, he hoped, that they’d been in bed together not too long ago.
“Boone,” he said, “I admit it’s possible we were seen by those truckers last night. That they followed us and stole the camera.”
She pulled her hand away. “Possible? What else could it have been?”
“Maybe your ex is on to your Kemco investigation. Maybe we were seen in your Datsun staking out the place.”
She thought about that.
“You think it might have been somebody from Patrick’s end of it who took the camera? Not the truckers.”
“Possibly,” he shrugged. “We were following the truck. Maybe somebody was following us.”
She thought about that, too.
The coffee and biscuits came; the tea, too.
“And,” Crane said, quietly, carefully, “there’s another possibility.”
“Which is?”
“Somebody walked by and saw a camera in the car and stole it.”
“What?”
“Back in Iowa, when you leave a camera in an unlocked car overnight, you aren’t shocked when it’s gone the next morning. Is it different in New Jersey?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Well, that makes all the difference.”
“Somebody happened along and just stole it, you mean. Just coincidentally stole it.”
“Boone, there’s nothing coincidental about a hundred-and-fifty-buck camera getting stolen out of an unlocked car.”
She slammed a small but china-rattling fist against the tabletop between them. People were looking at them.
“You just won’t believe it, will you, Crane? You just aren’t capable of accepting what’s really happening here.”
He sipped his coffee. Waited for some of the eyes to stop staring. Then he smiled at her. Calmly. “It’s not that. I’m frightened, if that’s what you want to hear. I personally agree with you that somebody, those truckers or your ex-husband or somebody related to Mary Beth’s ‘suicide,’ took that camera out of your Datsun while we slept a few feet away, and it further frightens me, it frightens fuck out of me in fact, to think that we might never’ve stopped sleeping, if whoever it was had come those few feet closer.”
“I’m glad you’re finally looking at this rationally.”
“Rationally? I’m telling you my emotional reaction, Boone. Gut feelings. My mind tells me, rationally tells me, that the camera was probably stolen by some doper looking for something to hock.”
“Shit!” she said.
People were looking at them again. Crane glared at them and they stopped looking.
She was leaning against the tabletop, her hands on her forehead.
“You know I’m right, don’t you?” he said.
“You’re not right. Somebody wanted that film destroyed. That’s why the camera was stolen.”
“Maybe. I’ll go as far as probably. But we can’t prove it. That’s the point I’m trying to make. We have nothing, Boone. Not a goddamn thing.”
They sat in silence for a while. He finished his coffee and biscuits. She drank two cups of tea. Then without a word she rose, picking up the check and paying for it, and walked out to her car. He followed her. She acted as if he weren’t there.
They were well into New Jersey before she acknowledged his presence again.
“I’m still going to Princeton this afternoon,” she said, driving.
“I don’t know that it’ll do any good.”
“I want to tell the Strike Force what happened. What we saw. That we took pictures and our camera was stolen.”
“Okay.”
“It might be enough to make them go out and check the landfill. See what sort of shit is in those drums.”
“Boone, if the truckers did see us leaving the site, and followed us, don’t you think they’d have gone back and dug the drums up and hauled them away?”
“Maybe. But I have to try, Crane. Do you understand that?”
“Of course. I’m on your side, you know.”
She smiled over at him. Reached over and touched his face. “I know. I don’t mean to treat you like the enemy.”
“Assuming there is an enemy,” Crane said.
“Are you starting up again?”
“No. I’m not going to Princeton with you, though.”
“I know. You’re going to look after Billy for me, and talk to a few people.”
“Right.”
“I should be back by midnight.”
“Good. Uh, Boone.”
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
He took the gun out of his jacket pocket and put it back in her glove compartment.
Chapter Sixteen
Mrs. Paul Meyer lived in a pale yellow house in the same housing development as Mary Beth’s family. Just a block down, in fact. The major difference between the two houses, other than color, was the For Sale sign in the Meyer lawn.
Mrs. Meyer had told Crane on the phone that he was free to drop by any time after lunch and before her children got home from school. It was now two in the afternoon.
He knocked on the door.