Standing on the front porch, Aaron pretended to check his notes, then pretended to check the house number on the doorjamb, giving himself some time to concoct a plausible explanation. The best defense is a good offense.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Sometimes we duplicate efforts, can’t be avoided. What did they say?”
The girl shrugged, yanking down her thin white T-shirt, crossed one flip-flop over the other. Even through the mesh of the screen, he could see her cutoffs were impossibly short. Aaron tried not to look.
“Not much,” she said. “Asked for my name, I think. And where we were sending the rent? Something like that.”
“Which is what again? Your name?” Aaron asked. Might as well keep track of who he was dealing with.
“Maddie. Kate. Maddie Kate Wendell,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
Aaron wrote her name on his clipboarded notepad. People always fell for clipboards, they were so official, a perfect disguise. If a stranger came to his front door? Stood on the porch asking questions? He’d never give his name, or anything else. But when the bank asked, people talked. Luckily for him.
“We definitely paid, I wrote the check myself.” The girl, Maddie, was frowning now. She stood on one foot, then the other, then put the sole of one foot against her leg, like a gawky stork. “Maybe it’s like, held up at the post office. You all have never been here before. Now, there’s like two people in one day. Listen, sir, we paid. Are we still gonna be able to live here when-?”
“And then? The bank person?” Aaron interrupted, needing to get to the bottom of this. Had Ackerman tried to get these tenants to pay him? Directly? Why? That’d be a bitch. If Ackerman was trying to screw him? What an asshole. Good thing he’d come to get the scoop. What an asshole. “I mean, did you give him the check?”
“Him?” the girl said.
“The other bank guy,” Aaron said. Was this Maddie an idiot? Or maybe… in on it? Somehow skimming off the rent money, or sharing it with Ackerman, in some under-the-table way?
“It wasn’t a guy,” the girl said. “It was a woman.”
26
Peter glanced at Jane as he heard the voice on the other end of his phone call. She was deep into her message retrieval, her hair coming loose from that ponytail, fluttering in the breeze from her opened car window. If she was trying to overhear his conversation, she was doing a good job of hiding it.
“Yes, I remember you,” Peter answered, keeping his voice low. “What can I do for-”
He stopped as the detective interrupted him.
“No,” Peter replied. “As I told your colleague. No idea.”
Pretty interesting, Peter thought as the cop went on, that this was the same detective who’d been at the Sandoval house when Peter arrived. Now he was asking about Thorley. Why was he involved in the Thorley case? As far as Peter knew, the primary was Branford Sherrey.
Huh. He’d suspected something going on between this cop and his sarcastic partner. Some undercurrent of agenda Peter couldn’t comprehend. Did they know something about Sandoval they weren’t telling? Or about Thorley?
Jane had worked on Sandoval, too, come to think of it. She’d been there when the body was found, according to her story in the paper.
Was there a connection between Thorley and Sandoval?
Nothing that Peter knew of. What did this detective know? Or Jane? She’d been pretty interested when he’d talked about a confession.
“No,” Peter answered the detective’s question. “I haven’t heard from him since-” The traffic was miraculously thinning out, and Peter managed to ease the Jeep out from behind a Sam Adams truck. He could use a beer about now. “Well, I haven’t heard from him.”
He glanced across the seat. Jane still seemed involved with her voice mail.
“And you say his parole officer has no idea?” Peter needed to be firm, but didn’t want to raise his voice. He’d tried to use only vague and ambiguous words, but “parole” and “officer” certainly weren’t ambiguous. Especially not together. “Detective? Is there anything you need to tell me?”
But the detective gave him only the predictable “call us if you find him” and “we’ll call you if we find him first” routine, then hung up.
Peter clicked off, trying to plan. What would he tell Jane? And what did she already know?
“Bunch of nothing on my messages.” Jane yanked out her earbuds as she saw Peter end his phone call. She’d wanted to give him some privacy, let him know she was trustworthy, even though she desperately wanted to know what was going on. Was there a connection between the confession Peter was talking about, and the one Jake was talking about? Had to be. She was annoyed, and disappointed, that Jake hadn’t called from D.C. “So much for that.”
With traffic easing a bit, Peter careened the Jeep around a diesel-puffing hulk of a beer truck. She could use a beer about now. Jane thought calming thoughts, pushed her hair out of her face. Might as well be August. And she still didn’t know where they were headed. A metaphor for her whole life.
“So, Peter?” she began. “You were about to tell me about the confession. Or-the false confession?”
She mentally crossed her fingers. Maybe she’d get some answers.
Peter kept his eyes on the road.
“Jane?” he finally said.
Yeesh. “Still here,” she said.
“Do you know a Detective Jake Brogan?”
Three paper coffee cups, the crumpled waxed paper from a turkey sandwich, and the remnants of a double-sized Snickers wrapper littered the airport floor next to Jake’s rocking chair. Jake never wanted to see that chair again. The sky had only gotten darker. The rain had only rained harder. Every baby in Reagan National Airport was crying, and even the gate agents, now snarling as passengers lined up to whine, had abandoned their smiley-face optimism. Just when Jake predicted it was meteorologically impossible for it to rain any longer, another torrent gushed across the tarmac, blasting water at the window from all directions.
He should have stayed at Frasca’s.
What’s more, his cell phone was down to one bar, but if he moved to a place where there were plugs, he’d have to give up his squatter’s rights to the rocking chair, and be relegated to one of those not-made-for-humans molded plastic seats. He turned his phone off-off, figuring that’d save the battery.
That lasted about four seconds. He turned it back on. What if they found Thorley? He had to know, even though he was more than powerless-ha-ha-to do anything about it. Or what if Thorley called him, and his phone was off?
This whole thing sucked, big time. His hot idea to come to Washington. But he’d really figured-hoped-there was something in those files, something in history, that would clue him in to Gordon Thorley’s motives.
He’d been wrong.
Jake leaned back in the rocker, contemplating the extent of the disaster. Now he was left with a disappointed girlfriend, no relevant information about his case, and a verging-on-dead phone. At least Diva was at Mother’s house, so “hungry golden retriever” was not on his list of woes.
All he could imagine was turquoise water and pink sand and Jane in that “very small” bathing suit she’d described. Three things he was not gonna see.
A bolt of lightning illuminated the sooty sky, followed almost instantly by the crack of thunder. The babies cried harder. Jake’s phone rang, the trill barely audible. One bar, Jake saw. Caller unknown.
Jane, maybe? Wouldn’t be the first time she’d called just as he was thinking about her. But then, he was often thinking about her.
“This is Jake Bro-,” he began.
“Got him, Harvard,” the voice said. DeLuca? But he was-“Kat got a call from her lab. The two-by-four from Waverly Road has Sandoval’s DNA.”