I was the man who’d helped Randy find her. If I was going to blame anybody, I would start with myself.
“Maria, I’ll talk to my partner. Maybe he’ll have some ideas. He’s good at this stuff.”
“And what are you good at?” she said.
“Well, the police can’t make that PI tell them who his client is, or where he is. But maybe I can. That’s the advantage of not being a police officer anymore. I don’t always have to follow the rules.”
“Do you think you can catch him?”
“I may not have to,” I said. “I’ll try calling him, see if he’ll meet me. One private eye to another.”
“Does that mean you’re on the case?”
“If I can help you, I will,” I said. “But you should know that I’m not really a private eye. It just sort of happened. I was a cop once, but-”
“Does that mean you’re on the case, Alex?”
I looked at her. I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no.
We went back inside the house, our faces red from the cold air. She told me more about Harwood, about the ways he had tried to find her in the past. After her husband’s death, she had moved to Florida, had her baby there. She’d spent four years in Tampa, without the slightest contact from him. She let herself believe that he had given up, until the day she went home and stopped to talk to her neighbor before going inside. The neighbor told her that two men had come that day to repair her refrigerator. The landlord had given them the key, or so they said. Maria knew better. She called her brother, Leopold, who was living in Seattle with their mother, and then drove right to the airport. She left everything behind.
She spent three years in Seattle with Leopold and their mother. Leopold was married. His son, Anthony, was a couple years older than Delilah. Harwood found them. They moved to Cincinnati. Leopold’s wife left him, moved back to Seattle. She couldn’t take it anymore. Harwood found them in Cincinnati, so they all went back to Seattle. Leopold tried to reunite with his ex-wife. It didn’t work. Harwood found them again. They finally moved back here to Michigan, where it had all started. As Leopold put it, they were making their stand, once and for all.
It was late afternoon by the time I left. I told her I needed to make some calls. She offered me her phone, but I told her I wanted to check for messages back at the motel in Whitehall, and that I had left my list of numbers there anyway. The truth was, I wanted to be by myself for a while, to think about what I was doing and why I was doing it. I gave her the number for my cell phone and made her promise to call me if she saw the white Cadillac.
“You’re on the case,” I said out loud, just to hear how it sounded. “You are on the case.” I shook my head and kept driving.
As soon as I made my right turn onto the main road, I saw the flashers in my rearview mirror. I pulled over to the side of the road, closed my eyes, and waited for Chief Rudiger to stick his face in my window.
The door opened. “Out of the truck,” he said.
I looked at him.
“I said out of the truck, McKnight.”
As soon as my feet hit the ground, he spun me around and pushed me against the side of the truck.
“Chief, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Hands on the top of the vehicle,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Hands on top, McKnight.”
I put my hands up. He kicked my legs apart and patted me down. Then he pulled my arms behind me and put the handcuffs on.
“Rudiger, are you going to tell me what the hell is going on here?”
He pushed me toward his patrol car. When he opened the back door, he tried to push my head down. It was an old cop trick. You push the perp’s head down like you’re trying to help him clear the top edge of the door. Accidents will happen, though, and if you happen to misjudge the clearance, you end up bashing his face right against the door frame. Which is a damned shame, especially if the man whose nose you just broke happens to be a rapist or child molester.
I thought about kicking him right in the cojones, then thought better of it. No sense making the situation any worse. I just sat there in the back of the patrol car and counted to ten. I had been doing a lot of counting to ten in the last few days, not to mention all the time I had spent in handcuffs. Along with the number of shotgun barrels I had looked into, it had been quite a week.
“You need to tell me what’s going on, Chief,” I said as he got in and closed the door. “You can’t cuff me without telling me why.”
He swung the car around, did a U-turn, and headed north.
“We’re going to the station,” I said. “Am I under arrest?”
He didn’t say anything.
I sat back, getting as comfortable as I could on the hard plastic seat. There was nothing I could do except play out the hand.
Two minutes later, he pulled in behind the town hall. He got out, his boots crunching on the gravel in the parking lot, and opened my door. “Out,” he said.
I got out. He pushed me toward the building. I walked. He opened the door and held it for me, then followed me into the office. “Sit,” he said.
“I’m not sitting down until you take off these cuffs,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “You can keep standing. I’m gonna sit down.” He pulled out the chair behind his desk.
“Chief Rudiger, you are way over the line here. Do you want me to start naming all the rights violations?”
“Ms. Zambelli filed a complaint,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I just brought you in for questioning. You are handcuffed because we are alone in this office and because in the brief time I have known you, you have proven yourself to be hostile and uncooperative.”
“What complaint? What are you talking about?”
“For the past few days, Ms. Zambelli has been aware that she is being followed by an unknown party. Today, one of my part-time officers observed you waiting for her in the parking lot, then following her to her residence.”
“The man who has been following her drives a white Cadillac,” I said. “I’ve already given you that license number. If you bother to run it, you’ll see that it belongs to a private investigator out of Detroit. His name is Whitley.”
“Ah, so she’s got two investigators following her? I don’t suppose the two of you are working together.”
“I’ve never met him,” I said. “I presume he’s working for Charles Harwood, the man who’s been trying to find Maria for the last eighteen years.”
“You seem to know a lot about the situation,” he said. “I mean, for a man who supposedly has no involvement.”
“You know my story, Chief. I came here to see Maria because my friend was looking for her.”
“Your friend the con man.”
“So it turns out.”
“And today, you were following her because…”
I hesitated.
“You waited in the parking lot for twenty minutes,” he said. “After she told you in the company of my officer that she had no recollection of this friend of yours, the friend who was supposedly looking for her.”
“She did say that, yes. I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to ask her some more questions.”
“So you waited in the parking lot. For twenty minutes.”
“Thereabouts.”
“And then you followed her home.”
I felt stuck. I couldn’t tell him that she wanted to know about Randy. More than anything, I couldn’t tell him about what she had confessed to me.
It was time to play my trump card.
“I can’t tell you anything more,” I said. “It’s between me and my client.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Well now,” he finally said. “Your client.”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that convenient.”
“It was her idea,” I said. “She asked me to help her.”
“You don’t say.”
“You can call her and ask her.”