“Maggie brought me cookies the day she found out you’d been arrested. There was a plate of them for you, too.”
I said nothing. Melinda unwound from her pensive position and leaned back against the railing of the deck.
“So, sign the papers, Naughton. I’ll let you say good-bye to Penny sometime, but I don’t want to make too big a thing out of us leaving. I’m putting a happy face on it. And I’m determined to look happy if it kills me, which it might. I’m talking to Wade and the personnel people tomorrow. Thought I’d give you the scoop. Is that what Donna Mason called it, when she sat you down for that interview?”
She actually waited for an answer. “They call it an ‘exclusive,’ I think.”
“Well Terry, you’d just had sexual intercourse with her, a few minutes before, so you must have felt pretty exclusive, yourself. It was written all over your pathetic little face.”
“Mel.”
“Mel fucking what?”
“Enough.”
“Yeah, enough. Take a hike, old friend, but sign the papers first. See you in the next life.”
I signed the papers.
On my way back to the apartment all hell suddenly broke loose. Very quietly, but it broke loose just the same.
First was a call from Loren Runnels:
“Terry, they’ve got Tim Monaghan from the FBI here to talk about those photographs. Will’s flying in from Boise, should be landing in an hour. I can’t get a read on Zant, but he wants to see us at three, up at County with Wade and the photo boys.”
“Holy, holy, shit.”
“Don’t get your hopes up.”
Next was a call from the second-to-last person on earth I expected to hear from:
“Terry, this is Jim... Jim Wade. I’ve got some people we need to talk to at three today. You’ll be here, won’t you?”
“You know I will.”
“How are you?”
“I was worse the day my son died.”
“We’ve got some things to talk about. I’ll see you then.”
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel my chest knocking against the shoulder restraint. The luck was back, man: the stinking Irish luck was coming back to me. I felt it. I knew it. I was it.
So I called Johnny and got him at the Gayley crime scene.
“Anything good there?”
“Skin and blood under her nails, hair all over the place, fingerprints galore — who knows whose. He’s made at this end, Terry. All we need now is a suspect. We could use your eyes, boss. It was bad, what he did to her.”
“The Bureau’s here to pow-wow with me and Wade. I’m smelling the finish line.”
“I’ll say a prayer for you.”
Then I called Vinson Clay at PlaNet and wouldn’t stop talking to his secretary until she put me through.
“I need Shroud,” I said.
“Naughton. Look... we’re considering. I took it to committee. It’s the only way to cover our own asses around here.”
In committee. Lawyers, lawyers, lawyers.
I went back to the metro apartment to shower and shave before my meeting with the FBI and the sheriff. And there was part three of all hell breaking loose, a user-group posting from I. R. Shroud:
Mal — Sorry for delay. Been busy as a bee. If you’re going live, call Chet for the feed. He’ll direct. It’ll be worth every penny you donated. Tee-hee-hee.
And that’s when I realized who the girl in the photographs was.
Of course.
I could feel the heat of eyeballs on me as I walked into Sheriff Jim Wade’s office at 2:58 P.M. that day: Ishmael from the hallway; Woolton and Vega from their desks; Burns from his chat with Jim’s secretary; and Frances, who stopped her conversation with a deputy I didn’t recognize to stare at me rather blankly as I made the long march to Wade’s door.
When that door closed behind me there was Jim and Rick Zant, my lawyer Loren Runnels, Will Fortune and a large, athletic man who could only be Tim Monaghan. Monaghan was with the Special Photographic Unit. I shook his hand and we sat around Wade’s desk.
“They’re fake,” Monaghan said. “They’re the best I’ve ever seen, but they’re still fake. They’re digitized mockups, reshot with a film recorder. Several ways we can tell this, but I don’t think I need to go into detail right now. Basically we knocked them on three points — physical anomalies, replicated edge marks and contradictory patterns in the grain matrix. I can testify in court if you want, but one of the reasons I’m here is to keep it from coming down to that. I think we all might have better things to do. We want to talk to the guy who made them. I know you do. We’ll give you our help if you want it. Will, you have anything to add?”
“Not one word.”
Talk about a golden silence.
Two hours later I was sitting in a conference room, uncharged, reinstated, apologized to, put back in control of CAY and gathered with my unit — plus Wade, Woolton and Burns, the six deputies temporarily assigned to us, plus six more brand spanking new ones that Johnny said were a welcome-back present. Monaghan left us with two FBI agents he must have been storing in his briefcase. Our only task was to accelerate our search for The Horridus. We had to light a fire under his ass so hot he’d jump right out of his skillet and into our pot.
Oh yes, Ishmael was there, too. He was the only deputy on the whole floor who wasn’t lingering around Jim Wade’s office when we came out, the only guy who wasn’t standing there clapping and smiling when Wade said he’d just had the rare experience of being able to help correct one of the biggest mistakes of his life.
Ish just stood there in the room acting like he had business with a telephone, staring at me with his green cat eyes and a look of spiritless revulsion on his face. Then he turned his back to me and kept on talking.
Twenty-Nine
“I’m looking for a puppy for my daughter,” Hypok said to the animal control officer. “She’s four.”
The officer — a dour hag of perhaps thirty — told him where the puppy run was, and if he didn’t find one he liked there, he could try the kennels out back for a slightly older dog. Hypok knew the drill here, but he asked all the standard questions anyway. It had been six months or so since he’d hit them up for Moloch chow. The officer on duty today was one he’d never seen before, but it paid to be careful when your face — former face — was on a freeway billboard not two miles away. It was really kind of a thrill to glide through the world with a new look, but you didn’t want to press it.
Hypok thanked her and walked back to the puppy run. He tilted a little on his way in — all that cactus juice flowing — but it was a good tilt, kind of a personal slant on things. Part of the new look. He was fresh from a shower and change of clothes — khaki pants with pleats, an almost matching cotton long-sleeved shirt with plenty of outdoorsy, all-American looking pockets and epaulets on it, manly gray socks and a pair of work boots. He’d put a pen in the pocket of the shirt. He felt trustworthy and animal friendly, the kind of guy who ate granola and would be happy to let you touch the cute little pup he was walking. But his psoriasis was flaring up — it always did when he got close to a predation — and even the cool, clean cotton was a torment against his skin. He’d gotten a fresh tube of Lidex goop delivered by the pharmacy, though the new delivery bimbo was too dumb to just drop it in his mail slot as usual. But the Lidex helped. And the tequila helped, too.
The puppy room was small and square. It had cages on three levels, and it echoed with the whines and yelps of puppies and the cacophony of the big dogs outside, and the occasional metallic slamming of doors. It was surprisingly loud. It smelled of dog shit and piss. There were other puppy lookers there with him: a family of five with a chubby but rather sexy daughter who looked to be about three; and an elderly couple made up of a man who probably weighed a hundred and a fat woman who weighed at least twice that.