In fairness, he had a far guiltier conscience about putting Courtney in danger than I would have, had our positions been reversed. “One thing I don’t understand. If you got close enough to plant the tracker, why not interrogate her then? Why wave a gun at me so unsuccessfully at the motel?”
He didn’t rise to the bait, only let a frustrated breath hiss out through his teeth. “Didn’t get close enough. Got the opportunity to slip one into her food when the drug runners had her.”
And he’d figured a GPS would cover all bases in case he had to follow Courtney back to…well, to her masters, if Tresting was to be believed.
“Your turn,” Tresting said. “Who are you?”
I’d forgotten I hadn’t introduced myself. “Tell me more about Pithica.”
“Hey, I told you about the GPS.”
“You didn’t tell me; I guessed. And considering you were using it to track me, I think it was about time I knew.”
“Whatever,” he muttered. “In for a penny, I guess. Pithica’s some government project or other.”
“I know that. What else?”
He cut his eyes at me suspiciously.
“I did some digging after you mentioned it while pointing a gun barrel at my face,” I explained impatiently. “What else?”
“It’s buried deep. I got a tech guy. He can only find bits and pieces. But it’s far-reaching. My client’s husband, he was a journalist. Started digging into some things. Political decisions, that sort of stuff, ones that didn’t make sense. Nutso crime spikes. Chances are they could’ve left him alive; I don’t think he ever saw the connection.”
“What connection?”
“Pithica. Just the word. Buried deep. Didn’t find it linked up to all the things he been looking at, but it was enough to be, uh, a ‘statistically significant correlation.’ Or so say my tech guy.”
His tech guy must be good. Anton had been able to find almost nothing. “And you think Pithica killed him. The journalist.”
“Sounds crazy, but yeah. Some of what we found, it was a pattern—it’s too similar, the MO of his murder. Can’t prove it, not yet, but his death’s got Pithica all over it.”
“So Courtney Polk is, what, some sort of secret government agent?”
“Always the ones you least suspect, right? She’s the only one who could have done it. We managed to figure out she saw my guy day-of.”
“Wait. So you don’t have any hard evidence?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you can prove Polk committed cold-blooded murder, why aren’t the cops investigating her for it?” I’d seen her police record. Nothing about being a person of interest in a prior crime.
Tresting kept his eyes on the empty highway. “There was a suicide note.”
I almost laughed. Or screamed. One of the two. “Great. Just great. You’ve got quite the case there. You ever hear of something called Occam’s Razor?”
“He didn’t kill himself,” Tresting ground out. “His wife—”
“Is probably in denial,” I interrupted. “It sounds to me like you’ve invented a conspiracy—”
“He didn’t kill himself,” Tresting repeated, louder. “And Polk’s the only one who could have. Besides, why was she there otherwise? The kid was a trailer park migrant who ended up smuggling coke. Why was she there?”
“Maybe your guy was interviewing her for some other story,” I pointed out sarcastically. “Since he was, you know, a journalist.”
“Yeah, you spend the few hours before you dose yourself to death trying to meet a deadline. That makes sense.”
“Murder’s still a stretch. Like, a bungee-level stretch. I’m not buying it.”
“’Cause I’m giving you the short version. Lot of other details didn’t add up. The whole scene was fishy. Best part is, I don’t think this is the first time Polk’s done it.”
This was too unbelievable. “Wait, so now you think she’s a serial killer?” Jesus. I knew some serial killers. Courtney wasn’t one of them.
“Maybe,” said Tresting doggedly. “Or maybe she’s someone’s patsy. I’m telling you, I spent months building up this case. Didn’t start out trying to make it nutso, I promise you.”
“You just happened to see the bright light in the sky and realized your client had been abducted by aliens.”
“You don’t gotta believe me,” he said. “Whatever, sweetheart. But that’s the lowdown of what I got.”
“Mysterious crimes you say form a pattern.”
“Yeah.”
“Does this phantom Pithica group have a motive? Or do they just go around convincing biker gangs and driftless twenty-three-year-olds to kill random people?”
“Right now they’re protecting themselves, obviously,” Tresting said. “And I got no idea what they’re trying to do. All I know is there’s too much evidence, spread over the last dozen years or so. This is real.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Like I said, sister. You don’t gotta believe me.” He ground the truck’s gears as we jounced around a curve. The pickup bitch-slapped him with a hard jolt in response. “Your turn.”
I debated. Tresting’s summary was far too outlandish to be useful, but he did have one thing I didn’t: data, and a lot of it, though right now he was using it to wallpaper his fantasy with completely fallacious “patterns.” Humans, we like to see patterns. We see them all the time, even when they don’t exist. I wasn’t sure whether I was repeating what someone had told me once, or if it was an observation.
I couldn’t work from Tresting’s fanciful conclusions; I needed the raw data. I tried to come up with an angle from which a minimal dialogue with a loony PI might endanger either my case or my client, and decided a few cautious words were safe enough. Besides, the underground had a gossip chain with the efficacy of the Internet. He could probably ask around about a brown-skinned, curly-haired, angry-looking chick who could kick his ass, and he would find out who I was soon enough.
I sighed internally. I don’t like giving up information. Ever. “My name is Cas Russell.”
“Hey,” said Tresting. “Heard of you. You do retrieval stuff.”
Oh. I had a reputation?
“And good at it,” he acknowledged. “Word is you get things done.”
Well, that was nice to know.
“Nobody mentioned putting up with the sass, though. That new?”
I stared at him incredulously. “Sass? You want to see sass? I’m still armed, you know!” I sputtered to a stop. Tresting was laughing.
“Ain’t expect you to be so young, neither.”
“I’m older than I look,” I bit out. I hate being patronized.
“So how’d you get shanghaied into bodyguarding, then? Ain’t your usual shtick, is it?”
“I was hired to get Polk back from the cartel,” I explained stiffly. “I admit it was a guess, but I figured ‘alive and unharmed’ was implied in the contract.”
“See? Sass.” When I shot him a look that could have splintered his skull, he took one hand off the steering wheel and raised it in mock surrender. “Sorry, girl, sorry! I mock because I, uh, because I have respect. For your badass retrieval skills. Happy?”
“Only because from here I could kill you in less than half a second.”
Okay, maybe it wasn’t the smartest boast to make. But it was worth it to see that glib look in his eyes stutter into discomfort, and for the truck to fall into blessed silence. When Tresting spoke again, his tone was back to businesslike. “So, who hired you?”
I wasn’t in the mood to cooperate. “Client privilege.”
Anger clouded his features. “Hey, I told you—”