him in half an hour.
“Hey,” Paul said, pulling up next to him in the parking lot of the Starlake Building.
“Hey.” Wish climbed in beside him. “Where to?”
“Ever heard of this outfit?” He handed Wish a piece of paper Nina had written for him.
“Big Lake Sport Fishing,” he read. “Sure. They’ve got an office at the Keys.”
Turning right onto Lake Tahoe Boulevard, Paul glanced over at him. “You look sleek.”
“I do?” Wish wore a brown leather jacket over his jeans.
“So you had lunch in the city.”
“Yeah, after walking up to Chinatown and playing around for a couple of hours. I found a couple of Japanese animes I’ve been looking for.”
“Didn’t you drop Nina off this morning at nine? Strikes me as funny, you being in the same vicinity several hours later. So I surmise a special reason for hanging around. Hmm.” He tapped his chin. “Whatever could it be?”
Wish grunted.
“Lunch with a lady.”
“You caught me red-handed, Copper.”
“How was the food?”
“Good, like I told you already.”
“Brandy after?”
“Huh?” said Wish.
“A joke. You had lunch with Brandy Taylor, didn’t you?”
“She asked me.”
Paul turned toward the Keys.
“She just needs a friend.”
Paul turned the radio on.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what we talked about?”
“No.”
“She told me something.”
“She did?”
“Yeah,” Wish said, unaware of the sensation he had caused. “You remember the sex-problem thing with Bruce? She told me what was going on. I guess she told her sister, too, and her mom, and maybe other people, but she just can’t bring herself to tell Bruce.”
Paul sighed and put the car back where it belonged on the road. “Okay, so what did she tell you?”
“It’s a secret. I do have a question, Paul. If you know something about a guy, and if you told him you could maybe help mend a relationship, but it means you’ll ace yourself right out of the love picture, plus it isn’t the kind of thing you ever want to talk to another guy about, especially not a stranger, what do you do?”
“Hmm.”
“Plus there’s this added issue, which is, um, I, um. Aack. I have the same problem.”
Johnny quick draw? Johnny no comeback? Johnny shoot blanks? What in the world had Wish in such a tizzy?
“I like her, but I’d have to love her a whole lot,” Wish went on glumly. “A whole, whole lot.”
“Do the noble thing.” She wanted Bruce, not Wish, that much Paul knew. Poor Wish.
“Is that like, your personal wisdom, how you live your life?”
“What have I ever done to make you think a thing like that?”
Up ahead, lights illuminated the white-lettered sign for the sports-fishing business. They parked and walked up some outside stairs toward a second-story office that overlooked the marina. Paul had been told John Kelly often worked a late shift, doing paperwork and accounts in the office. Sure enough, the windows shone with lamplight. Wish raised his hand to knock.
Paul pulled it back. “Shh.” He looked around the side of the building into the window. “He’s in there, all right.” He led Wish back to the car. “Now we wait.”
Wish settled back against the car seat. “Who is this guy?”
“Cody Stinson’s best friend.”
“And we’re following him, why?”
“I checked with a guy I know at the Tahoe jail. Late this afternoon, Cody gave his old pal John Kelly a call. Nina was hoping he just might lead us straight to Carol Ames, and I think it’s a definite possibility.”
“Cody’s alibi? Why would he lead us to her?”
“Nina thought Cody might call on him to track Carol down tonight. John Kelly knows Carol and Cody both. He used to pal around with them back in the days when they were together.”
“Sounds like a stretch.”
“Well, maybe it is. But you know, Wish, in this business we feed on unsubstantiated rumors, innuendo, and gossip. Why not plain old hope now and then?”
A few minutes later, Kelly came out, locked the door behind him, and hopped on a motorcycle.
“Well, look at that.”
Paul followed at a discreet distance as Kelly wound his way around the parking lot and back out to the boulevard. He rode on for a little more than two miles to Ski Run, turned left again, toward the lake, and parked in a lot by the marina.
Kelly walked out toward one of the docks, stopped at the locked gate, and let himself in. A dozen boats floated in the black water, creaking as they bobbed on the crests. Kelly walked past several large cabin cruisers and stopped at a sailboat on the right side. He looked from side to side. Presumably satisfied no one else was taking an interest, he stepped aboard.
“Is she there?”
“Let’s find out,” Paul said. Moving quietly, they tried the gate, which Kelly had kindly left open, and walked up the dock toward the sailboat. A cold March wind winnowed its way inside Paul’s light windbreaker, and the marina lights danced like fairies over the water under a pale yellow moon.
A window cracked in the sailboat cabin made the two voices intimately accessible to Paul and Wish, who were crouched, as if that position might make them less visible.
“How’d you find me, John?” a woman asked, her voice nervous, but warm and mellow on the cold air.
Kelly said, “I called the apartment all day. Your roommate told me you weren’t expected, but I remembered your dad’s boat. Carol, Cody’s concerned.”
“You talked to him?”
“He called me from San Francisco today. He’s at that hearing about the attorney who’s caused so much trouble. What’s strange is, your name keeps popping up.”
“You shouldn’t have come.”
“Don’t tell me you’re scared of me, Carol. That would hurt my feelings. I just want to pass along the word. Cody wants you to stay hidden, in fact, he’s gonna insist.”
“I have work, you know-”
“I know all about that. Take it with you. This is just for a couple of days, ’til things die down. He’s worried they’ll try to call you and ask you about that night at the campground.”
“He was with me that night! Those girls were wrong, saying they saw him there.”
“Yeah, sure. So I heard. So everybody heard. But at this hearing today, he admitted he was there that night. He now says you were asleep and didn’t hear him go.”
“You’re kidding!”
“You’ve been out of the loop.”
“He told me to lay low and not to contact him. Oh, he’s such an idiot. Shit. We had him covered. If he had just stuck to that we could have gotten him off!”
“Oh, well. At least the police believe that you sleep heavy and had no idea what he was up to that night. Cody’s not so sure about these lawyers. He says they’re thinking too hard, digging too deep.”
“Tell me Cody didn’t admit to killing Phoebe.”
“No. He’s an idiot but even he’s not that stupid.”
“Why’d he cave in like that? Those women can identify him in court. He could go to jail for life, John! He had a good alibi. If he had just kept his mouth shut-now these silly girls are going to get up in court and get him put away-”
“Look, that can’t be fixed. But we can prevent them from dragging you into this any further. Now, since it was so easy for me to find your dad’s boat, maybe we can come up with someplace a little harder, at least until this hearing is over. I thought, maybe my sister’s place.”
“I’m fine here.”
John Kelly convinced her otherwise, and since his persuasion involved no physical urging, Paul let him. When Paul and Wish understood the two would be leaving the boat soon, they slipped back up the dock to the car and got in. After a few minutes, Kelly climbed on his bike and Carol Ames, small, dark-haired, and skinny, took the wheel of a Saturn. Kelly followed her as she pulled out, and Paul followed him. Ten minutes later, the bike and the Saturn pulled up to a house off the Kingsbury Grade. Kelly escorted Carol to the door, rang the bell, and saw her inside. After a few more minutes, he left.
“Well, now we know where she is. What are we going to do about it?” Wish asked.
“Wait,” Paul said.
Wish closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the Mustang’s headrest, where a dent that fit perfectly was forming.
By midnight, most of the lights in the houses on the street were dimmed. Even the crickets seemed to be sleeping.
“It’s quiet,” Wish said, startling awake. “Too quiet.”
“Very funny,” Paul said.
Moments later, the door to the house opened. Out came Carol Ames, dressed all in black, thin as a fork. She unlocked her car door quietly, got inside, and released the parking brake, rolling down the street in neutral until she was well past the house.
“Did you know she would leave again?” Wish said. “Who are you really, Mr. Psychic Hotline?”
“I didn’t know.” Paul started up his car and flipped it into gear. “I just didn’t know how we were going to get her alone. I thought we might have to wait until she left for somewhere in the morning.” They drove down the hill, well behind the blue Saturn. “This is good. I like the darkness.”
“Now you’re really scaring me,” Wish said. “Okay, I give up. Where is she going in the middle of the night? Only place I can think of is the casinos, but here we are going the other way,
