The kid’s gaze flicked to the one-way glass at the far end of the interview room. “That phone wasn’t mine, remember?”
“Yeah, so you said.” Joe stared at him, letting the silence stretch and grow tense. Most people, especially people under stress, didn’t like silence. There was a human compulsion to fill it, to maybe blurt out things they didn’t mean to say, and later regretted.
But Graywolf slanted another glance at the one-way glass and clamped his lips, folding his hands on the table like a choirboy in prayer. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“I don’t know. Is there?”
“Nope. Sorry.” The chair scraped the floor as the kid pushed away from the table, stood. He picked up his jacket, which he’d hung carefully on the back of the chair. Like the rest of him, it looked expensive and useless. Shrugging into it, he gave Joe a nasty grin. “Heard you killed that guy. Quintero. How’d that feel?”
Joe stared at him, not responding. Their gazes did battle for a moment before the kid lifted a hand and sauntered to the door. Joe let him get halfway through it before saying, “Oh, Brant? I’ll be in touch.”
There was a hesitation in the kid’s stride, just for a moment. Then without a backward glance he walked away.
Leaning forward, Joe reached for the tape recorder on the table and pressed the stop button. He was allowing it to rewind when Captain Tapahe came into the room. “What’d you think?” The captain had watched the entire interview from behind the one-way glass.
“I think if the kid’s daddy had gotten wind that we were talking to him, he’d have been lawyered up before coming in here.”
“His choice. I’m guessing he doesn’t want his father involved unless absolutely necessary.” Joe would be willing to place bets on it. Even a father’s patience would be stretched to the breaking point with the scrapes the kid had been in the last few years. No, Brant Graywolf would try to handle this on his own as long as possible. “He won’t alert the old man unless we get too close.”
“Won’t get anything from him then, either.”
“No. So if the need arises, we’ll play him another way.” Brant Graywolf was a smug little SOB with a royalty’s sense of entitlement. As long as he thought he was outsmarting the police, outsmarting Joe, he’d consider this all a game. Joe was perfectly willing to play. But he’d make the rules.
“Who’s up next?”
“Mary Barlow. She was Quintero’s main squeeze, so chances are she won’t be feeling too cooperative, either.”
The captain nodded. “Well, keep working through the list of his acquaintances. We should have the retrieved phone log by tomorrow, the next day at the latest.”
Joe nodded and rose. “I didn’t get any answer to the messages I left for Barlow so I’m going to her place.”
“Want me to assign someone to ride along?”
He shook his head. If he knew Arnie, he’d be back before the ink dried on the doctor’s release orders. It’d take him that long to bring someone new up to speed on the case. “I can handle it.”
Tapahe waved him off. “Keep me posted.”
Joe promised to do so, and the two men parted. But three hours later he was beginning to wonder if there’d be anything to report. Barlow was proving elusive. No one had answered at the run-down motel where she rented a room by the month. Nor had there been any sign of her at her sister’s house across town. He’d checked out all the spots Barlow frequented, the list supplied grudgingly by her sibling, to no avail.
Although the sister denied it, he began to consider in earnest that the woman might have skipped town. Her sheet wasn’t as long as Quintero’s, but she had priors. A couple solicitation charges and a misdemeanor for possession. There was no outstanding warrant for her, however, so there’d be no urgent need for her to leave. Unless she knew something.
Rather than chase after her any further, Joe drove back to the motel, parked his unmarked black Jeep a few doors down from Barlow’s room and prepared to wait. Investigations were all about waiting. Arnie had once accused him of having the patience of a sphinx. Recently, though, thanks to his ex, even his patience was strained to the limit.
An hour and forty minutes later, a battered white Grand Am pulled into the slot in front of the nearby motel door. Even with her hair pulled up and wearing sunglasses, he recognized Mary Barlow from her mug shot. He let her get several feet from her car and start fumbling in her purse for her keys before he got out of the Jeep and approached her.
“Ms. Barlow?”
The woman whirled, her movement jerky and fraught with tension. “What? Who are you? What do you want?”
She was jittery with nerves, or something chemical. Joe forced his voice low and soothing. “Tribal police investigator Joseph Youngblood, ma’am.” He drew out his ID and flipped it open as he stopped before her. “I have a few questions for you.”
“I ain’t talking to no cop. Especially after one of you killed Oree. You can all burn in hell. You hear me?” Her voice had gone shrill.
The sentiment was unsurprisingly similar to the one Quintero had verbalized yesterday. Joe tucked away his ID. “I thought it’d be easier for you to talk to me here. But we can go downtown if you’d prefer.”
A bitter laugh escaped her. “What I’d prefer is for Oree to still be alive. He never hurt no one and the cops shot him in cold blood.”
“Were you there?” His question seemed to catch her off guard. “How do you know how things went down?”
Her fingers clenched around her purse. “Didn’t have to be there. I hear things. And I know how cops operate.”
“And I have some questions about how Oree operated. Do you want to answer them here or inside?”
Barlow looked at the key in her hand, then shook her head, dropped it back in her purse. “I ain’t letting you in my place. Don’t have to, either. You don’t got a warrant.”
“No problem,” he said mildly, surveying her. “We can talk out here. Tell me about your relationship with Oree.”
When her thin lips tightened mutinously, he shrugged. “Or I can take you back to the station and we’ll talk there. Makes no difference to me, if you’ve got the time.”
He watched her struggle with that for several seconds before she folded her arms across the surgically enhanced chest straining against her skimpy belly shirt. “What do you wanna know?”
“You were his girlfriend?”
She sniffed. “Girlfriend. Mother. Sister. Priest. I was everything to Oree. He was a needy kind of guy, you know?”
“How much time did you spend together? Did you see him every day? Every night?” If she’d been around as much as Joe suspected, there was no way she could have avoided knowing about his drug involvement.
The same fact seemed to have occurred to her, as well. “I was around. But I had my own life, okay? I can’t tell you much about what he did when I wasn’t there. What time we had together we didn’t spend talking.”
He reached out, took the sunglasses off her face. She tried to swat his hand away, but he dodged the action, let the glasses dangle from his fingers. “I like to see who I’m speaking to.” And he wanted to be able to tell if she was lying to him. “You knew he was involved in drugs.”
She shook her head hard at his statement. “Uh-uh, no sir. I didn’t know nothing about that, and you can’t prove differently.”
“No.” He waited, saw the relief flicker across her face, then added, “Not yet, anyway. But we’re rounding up all his clients and we’ll be asking them about Oree. About you. Funny thing, when people think they’re going down on a drug charge, they get real conversational. If you were there during any of the transactions, we’re going to hear about it sooner or later.”
She lifted a shoulder, the gesture as bored as her expression. He took a notebook out of his pocket, flipped it open. “You know any of these people?” He began reading off the names of Quintero’s known acquaintances. Each name was punctuated with a short, “Nope,” until he got to the name he’d purposefully left for last. Gaze on her face, he said, “How about Brant Graywolf. You know him?”