They interrogated me for two hours. His partner, Stan Mallory, brought in some Danish and we went till noon. Twice during the questioning Quintana let me phone the hospital, where nothing had changed.
At twelve-fifteen he said, “Let’s get out of here.”
He seemed to be talking to me, so I followed him out to the parking lot, where he shuffled me to the shotgun side of a late-model Ford.
“This is supposed to be my day off,” he said as he drove the wet streets.
I waited a moment, and when he didn’t follow his thought, I said, “There aren’t any days off, Quintana. Don’t you know that yet?”
He knew it. He was just about my age and going through the same brand of burnout that had made my last year on the job so restless.
“I hear you were a good cop,” he said.
“I was okay.”
“A damn good cop. That’s what they all say. I made some calls.”
“I put a few assholes away.”
“I hate to see a cop take a fall. Especially a good cop.”
He was up on the freeway now, heading north. But he dropped off on the John Street ramp. We drove past the
“We need to talk to Eleanor,” he said.
“You’ll never find her. She could be anywhere by now.”
“You remember where you left her car?”
“I think so.”
“Show me.”
We went north, and after a bit of double-tracking I found it. He opened the door and looked under the seat and took out the
“What do you think, maybe she took this out to compare it with the other one?” he said.
“I think that’s part of it. And some of it’s just what she said. She just loved having them.”
He touched the book with his fingertips. “Isn’t that a lovely goddamn thing.”
“Rigby was no slouch. They say Grayson was good, but there ain’t no flies on this.”
We drove back downtown. A voice came through his radio, telling us Miss Aandahl was out of surgery. Her condition was guarded.
“I got a guy at the hospital keeping tabs,” Quintana said. “We’ll know what he knows as soon as he knows it. If I were you, I’d get some sleep. Where’ve you been holed up?”
I looked at him deadpan. “At the Hilton.”
“You son of a bitch,” he said with a dry laugh.
Surprisingly, I did sleep. Six hard hours after a hard shower.
I came awake to a pounding on the door. It was Quintana.
“I didn’t say die, Janeway, I said sleep. Get your ass dressed.”
I asked what he’d heard from the hospital.
“She’s been upgraded to serious. No visitors for at least three days, and she won’t be climbing Mount Rainier for a while after that. But it’s starting to look like she’ll live to fight another day.”
He took me to dinner in a seafood place on the waterfront. It was superb. He paid with a card.
We didn’t talk about the case. We talked about him and me, two pretty good cops. He was going through burnout, all right, it was written all over him. At thirty-eight he was having serious second thoughts about decisions he had made in his twenties. He had been a boxer, a pretzel baker, a welder, a bodyguard, a bartender, and, finally, at twenty-three, cop. He was solidly Roman Catholic, a believer but unfortunately a sinner. In his youth he had studied for the priesthood, but he had repeatedly failed the test of celibacy. A guy could go crazy trying to do a job like that. Now, after spending a few hours with me, he was charmed by something he’d never given a moment’s thought. Quintana was the world’s next killer bookscout.
“This stuff is
