Tess looked back at Carl, but he was as baffled as she was by Drey Windsor’s sobbing confession.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re DNR, aren’t you? Not real police, but the damn DNR. Well, I’ve never talked to you folks before and I’m not going to start now. You get out of here unless you have a warrant or a reason to take me in. And I don’t think you do.”
“Why do you think we’re from the Department of Natural Resources, Mrs. Windsor?”
Something shifted. Tess had betrayed some ignorance and Drey Windsor had regained control of herself. She knew something they didn’t, and that gave her power. Her tears slowed. She drew herself up, proud and closed off.
“We may very well come back with a warrant,” Tess said, knowing they could never come back, that they had pushed this lie too far already. “For you and your son, because you clearly knew all this time what happened to Becca Harrison and that makes you an accessory. But remember what I told you, Mrs. Windsor. Billy is dead to you now. Your only hope of seeing him again is turning him in to the police. At least that way you’ll be able to visit him in prison.”
“Billy won’t go to prison,” his mother said. “He could never live so confined. He’ll kill himself before he lets you take him.”
“He’ll probably pretend to kill himself. But I don’t think he’s brave enough to die, more’s the pity.”
CHAPTER 35
“You went too far back there.”
Carl had beaten Tess to her own accusation.
“I went too far? Pretending to be a cop is stupid. It’s something you can get arrested for.”
“I was a cop.”
“Was being the operative word. I noticed you didn’t say you were a Toll Facilities cop.”
“A cop is a cop.”
“If you are a cop. But you’re not, not anymore. We agreed to pretend to be social workers from the hospital. Which would have allowed us to be warm and friendly, gain her confidence. The moment you said police she was on alert, looking for traps. She may not know everything her son has done, but she knows something.”
“She knows a lot more than she did, thanks to you. Billy Windsor’s going to run now, because of you. He’s out of here, we’ll never find him. When you’re in an investigation, you play your cards close to your vest.”
“From what movie did you pluck that cliché?”
Carl ignored the taunt. “All we had to do was wait, and he would have come back.”
“Do you seriously believe the two of us were going to pull off surveillance in a gated retirement village with a private security force? They would have thrown us out in the first fifteen minutes. True, Billy Windsor won’t be able to go near his mother, may not even dare to call her at home. That will make him more desperate to accelerate his plan, whatever it is. And speeding up might make Billy sloppy.”
Carl was driving for the first time since Mickey Pechter took batting practice on his knee four days earlier. He suddenly wrenched the steering wheel to the right and pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned restaurant.
“Let me ask you something. When did we decide you were the boss? I thought we were partners on this, but you’re always calling the shots, the one who’s always right. Is it because I didn’t tell you about what happened to me, or because I didn’t tell the cops about Mary Ann Melcher? Well, I’ll remind you that I was right-he isn’t dead. I’ll also remind you that I saved your life.”
“Saved my life?”
“When that creep broke into your house.”
“You saved me from the hellish inconvenience of killing him, but he wasn’t going to hurt me.”
“Still, I was there for you. I had your back. And yet you talk to me in that-that mommy voice, as if I’m your little boy and I have to do what you say. Well, I’m not your little boyfriend, okay? I’m not pussy-whipped like that dust-mopping, dog-walking sissy you keep around to service you. I’m a real man. A real man!”
Tess felt the conversation getting out of control, saw it heading toward a place where horrible things would be said, things that could not be forgiven or forgotten. She wanted to fling herself out of the car and run away. She wanted to hit Carl in the stomach or hurl insults at him that would cut even deeper than his rude comments about Crow. She wanted to plug her ears and chant so she could no longer hear his voice.
Count, Dr. Armistead had told her once. It really works. She counted to ten. Then twenty. Then thirty. Halfway to forty, it was as if the needle on a blood-pressure gauge had started to fall, and she said, “I’m sorry.”
Carl, with the look of a man who has been dangling on a cliff ‘s edge, beat his own hasty retreat. “I’m sorry too. It’s just that I want you-I want everyone-to listen to me, to realize I have something to say, something to contribute.”
“I know. I want the same thing. I want people to-” What did she want, anyway? What button had Carl just pushed? Mickey Pechter and Major Shields had found it too, almost without trying, provoking the same odd mix of rage and shame. Now Billy Windsor was playing her, taunting her. He wanted to be found. He wanted to escape.
“I’m tired of people underestimating me,” she told Carl, who nodded. “And condescending to me. When I get stuff wrong, I’m stupid. When I get it right, I’m just lucky. If we find this guy, people are going to say it was all luck, that we wouldn’t have stumbled on his name if it weren’t for your gimpy leg and your knowledge of the disability system. If we screw up, we’ll be the fall guys.”
Carl looked out his window, so she couldn’t see his face. “Do you want to go to the state police, tell them what we’ve found?”
“No. Because they’ll take it away from us.”
“Take it away from me, you mean. I’m the one with no standing here.”
“We’re a team on this. If they don’t want to work with you, I don’t want to work with them.”
He turned back, his smile so broad that his eyes almost disappeared in his freckled face.
“They say it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart,” Carl said. “Frankly, I’ve never been accused of being either.”
“It’s one of my favorite sayings. But, truthfully, here’s the real luck, the only luck. You get born to two nice people who can provide a comfortable life for you, who don’t abuse you-” She broke off, embarrassed.
“That’s okay. Keep talking.”
“Who are kind to you and to each other. Your DNA doesn’t carry any time bombs. You do all the dumb shit that teenagers do, and you come out unscathed. Then you’re a grown-up and you make your own luck. You know what word I really hate?”
“What?”
“Overachiever.”
Carl looked puzzled. “I thought that was a good thing.”
“It’s the most subtle insult in the English language, because it implies predestined boundaries and limits. You’re supposed to stay in this little box, only you’re too stupid to realize it. When people tell you you’re an overachiever, they’re really saying they could do so much better than you if they ever lowered themselves to giving a shit.”
She felt her anger rising again, at some nameless faceless enemy, and she wondered what Dr. Armistead would think about this diatribe. Dr. Armistead-she glanced at the dashboard clock. “Shit. I have thirty minutes to make it to therapy, or I lose a hundred and fifty bucks.”
“Physical therapy?”
Funny how Carl, who knew both kinds, who knew she was in anger management, still assumed a doctor’s visit had to be for a physical ailment.
“No, you know, it’s the guy the judge ordered me to see at Sheppard Pratt. Because of what I did to that guy who broke into my house.”
“You told me you had been accused of assaulting him, but I never got the particulars.”