“Okay, lady. I’m steppin’.”
“Stop right where you are and turn around,” said Merci. He started his turn. When his back was to her she stopped him with a strong take of his right wrist, a firm twist to bring his arm out with the elbow down. She stepped up behind him and braced the back of his shoulder with her left hand so it was easy to see down the extended arm or to break the elbow. She felt him comply because he’d complied a thousand times before.
“Staying off the meth, Lee?”
She ran her fingers over the veins in his forearm, snapped her nails against them, then angled his elbow into the weak light for a view down the muscles.
“I never did shoot it,” he said slowly.
“Just smoked it by the ton.”
“Yeah.”
“I can tell. It kills brain cells.”
LaLonde stood back. He was shorter and thinner than she’d expected. Speed freaks tend to stay skinny in life and LaLonde looked the part. His long blond hair hung over his forehead. His face was narrow and all of its features seemed crowded down into the lower half. Big mouth, goofy teeth.
“Lead the way.” She let ten feet open up behind him, then followed. The shop was big — sixty feet deep and thirty wide, she guessed. It was lit by fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling by chains.
There were workbenches along each of the two side walls. Vices. Spools of wire. Indeterminate projects in indeterminate stages of completion or repair. Bench vices, an electric grinder and polisher, a benchtop drill press. Toolboxes. More tools were neatly hung on the Peg-Boarded wall behind the benches.
Merci walked and studied. In the right back corner was a sleeping area, and behind that a bathroom. There was a counter, a two-burner stove and a small refrigerator. LaLonde stood beside a dilapidated plaid couch and gestured for Merci to sit.
“I’ll stand. You’ll sit. Tim, make yourself comfortable.”
Hess waited for LaLonde to take one end of the couch, then he sat in the middle. Merci crossed her arms and stared down at LaLonde without comment. LaLonde looked at his hands. She let a long moment pass.
“Lee, look at me,” she said. He did. She thought he looked like a parrot fish. She remained standing a few feet away from him, leaving some slack to take up if she needed to.
“Janet Kane was murdered week before last. We know you knew her. We got your prints out of the back of the BMW. Those are facts. Now, we can talk about her here or we can take you back to Orange County with us. If we talk here and you lie to me I’ll have you cuffed and stuffed in about thirty seconds.”
He looked at Merci, then at Hess, then at Merci again. She watched his face hard because that first denial was sometimes the hardest one a creep would make. Half the fuckers couldn’t even lie right. They giggled or blushed or started crying. The better ones broke a sweat or their faces twitched and if you saw it you had them. The rest could tell you a lie you might believe the rest of your life if you didn’t know better. She saw no trace of guilt or dishonesty in LaLonde’s face yet.
“I got no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Get one.”
“If I knew a woman who’d let me in her BMW, I’d marry her, not kill her.”
He grinned, lips spreading tight, teeth amok.
“What were you doing in her car?” she asked.
“I don’t even know her.”
“I don’t care if you knew her. I care if you killed her.”
“I didn’t.”
“Where were you last Tuesday night? Don’t think, just tell me.”
“My girlfriend was here.”
“What did you do?”
“Watched TV. Ate. She drank some beers.”
“Name and address.”
LaLonde gave her name; didn’t know her address.
“Then what about the fuse — the little 20-amp auto fuse that had your thumb and index prints on it? The one we found in Janet Kane’s car.”
He looked at her with deep suspicion and his eyes gave him away. Something wrong. Scrolling back. A hit He looked away with a nonchalant shrug and she knew she had him. Hess glanced up at her with a questioning expression on his face. He missed it, she thought — but I didn’t.
“I’ve worked with fuses in my life, Sergeant. I use them in my inventions sometimes. I used to do some electrical stuff down at the marina here. Yeah, I’ve worked with 20-amp fuses, but I never killed anybody.”
“When’s the last time you touched one?”
“The last time? I wouldn’t know the last time exactly.”
“When? When’s the last time you personally touched an automobile fuse, that you can remember, Lee?”
“That would have been about... maybe... three months ago.”
He was ad-libbing now, and she knew it.
“You’re shittin’ me, Lee. You sit there and think about what lockup’s going to feel like again. All the boyfriends you can make. Maybe think of a way to stay out of it. I’m going to take a tour of this shitheap you call a shop.”
She looked over the kitchen and little bathroom, checking the magazine rack by the head because she’d found an automatic in a rack once before, hidden between the curling covers of nudie magazines. Hobby Magazine. Arts & Crafts. American Inventor. No automatic. LaLonde didn’t strike her as violent and his sheet wasn’t violent, but that didn’t mean a thing to Rayborn because there was a first time for everything and a creep was a creep pure and simple.
She toured the workbenches. The closer she studied what she found on them, the less sense they made. For instance: umbrellas with inverted domes and hollow tubing that led to detachable plastic bags. A collection of mouthpieces with rubber teeth protruding. And an odd contraption involving a small gyroscope and a large outdoor patio lamp. A set of large concave plastic circles, like giant contact lenses, connected with what looked like a headband. And a collection of wooden cigar boxes with metal antenna protruding from their backs. She opened one and looked at the bird’s nest of batteries and chips and solder and circuitry inside. No fuses that she could see.
“What are these for?” She waved one of the cigar boxes.
“Those are for jamming eavesdroppers on a cell phone.”
She turned and studied him. From a distance he looked less like a fish and more like a regular guy with a not-very- good face.
“You can buy ’em new for a hundred bucks,” she said.
“Mine go for twenty-five. I do okay with them.”
“Where is it that you do okay with them?”
“Swap meet out here. Sundays, at the Marina Park.”
“Where did you learn electronics?”
“High school. My dad was an engineer. I’ve got a knack.”
“Got a knack for stealing cars?”
“Cars are easy.”
“What about the alarm systems?”
She turned and looked at him again. LaLonde shrugged.
“I didn’t mess with those. If you work with a partner you can pry and clip pretty quick, or use a code cutter.”
“Well, did you or did you not work with a goddamned partner?”
“Right. No. I worked alone, used a slapper.”
She set the cigar box down.
“What do these upside-down umbrellas do?”
“Collect rainwater. It runs down the line into the bag. You clip the bag on your belt or pants.”
Merci picked up an inverted umbrella and looked at the way Lee LaLonde had reconfigured the ribs and nylon. She looked back at him again. “What, because we live in a desert or something?”
“Yeah,” said LaLonde. “We’re supposed to get less water from the Colorado River soon.”
“They say that same goddamned thing every year.”
He shrugged.
She picked up a tooth-studded mouthpiece. The gums were soft and the teeth were firm. “What’s with the mouthpieces?”